“Me di cuenta de que tenÃamos que cambiar la programación y la gente. HabÃa mucha resistencia, pero finalmente logramos cambiar y mejorar las cosas”, recuerda Vinciquerra.
Estos mismos principios de cambio y mejora los aplicó en Sony Pictures Entertainment, tomando decisiones difÃciles pero necesarias para posicionar a la empresa en un lugar de fortaleza y crecimiento sostenido. Su legado como CEO será recordado por su valentÃa, visión estratégica y liderazgo en tiempos de gran cambio en la industria del entretenimiento.
El premio Variety Vanguard es un reconocimiento más que merecido para Tony Vinciquerra, cuyo impacto en Sony Pictures Entertainment seguirá siendo relevante mucho después de su partida.
It was just when the parent company cut costs and reduced the station’s staff to 200 employees, instead of 350.
“You need to have a critical mass of employees to understand what the problem is, how to solve it, and what to do to get to where we want to be,” he says. “Once you get a critical mass of people to believe in it, the detractors go underground.”
Vinciquerra stayed in broadcasting, working as a senior leader for CBS television stations and for Hearst in the 1990s, when that company began buying stations. He credits Peter Chernin, the respected media investor and former head of 20th Century Fox and president of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., for bringing him into the big leagues of show business. Chernin pushed Vinciquerra to oversee the Fox broadcast network as well as its cable properties.
It was a goal that really paid off, especially because Vinciquerra remembers trying to convince Chernin not to give him the job at first. Years later, he is grateful that Chernin didn’t listen.
“Logically, it made no sense to hire me to run the Fox network because I had never had experience in networks,” Vinciquerra recalls. “I ran television stations. It’s a very different business.”
Among his accomplishments at Sony, Vinciquerra cites overcoming two very different challenges. When he took over in 2017, Vinciquerra told corporate leaders that the studio was missing out on opportunities by not working more closely with talent and content franchises owned by Sony Corp.’s PlayStation division and Sony Music division. The executives at Sony in Tokyo supported us. But from his experience at Fox, he also knew that such collaborations could not be dictated from the top.
“It doesn’t work if you say, ‘Do this.’ You have to get the [creative] groups to work together and let their creativity flow,” he says.
Sony convened about 40 key creative executives from the gaming and imaging sector, installed them in a large conference room, and provided them with a whiteboard. The directive to both teams from Tokyo was to find ways to work together “without worrying too much about who will pay for what,” Vinciquerra recalls.
“They spent two days together and came up with 12 or 14 different projects to work on together. We’ve already done seven or eight,” he says. The list includes the acclaimed adaptation of HBO’s drama series “The Last of Us,” heading into its delayed second season due to the strike, “Uncharted” in 2022, and “Gran Turismo” and “Twisted Metal” in 2023.
Pedro Pascal in the HBO series “The Last of Us,” from Sony Pictures TV
Liane Hentscher/HBO
In the music side, Bruce Springsteen is working on an unscripted project with Sony’s TV division. Bad Bunny, the best-selling reggaeton star, had a small role in Brad Pitt’s 2022 film “Bullet Train” and will appear again in an upcoming Sony film.
Another noteworthy milestone during his tenure was the extensive renovation and remodeling of the massive SPE lot in Culver City, once the sacred ground of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Some of the studio’s soundstages had not received proper maintenance for decades. The wooden planks between the walls were warping, creating a fire hazard, among other issues, not to mention the other aging infrastructure inside. A strong earthquake could easily have brought one or more down.
At the beginning of his career, Vinciquerra’s team developed a five-year plan to make improvements and upgrades to the infrastructure. And then COVID happened. With the lot empty of staff and production activity for months, most of the heavy construction work was completed in 18 months.
“We pretty much redid all the walls and every stage during the rest of the pandemic,” he says. “Even now, we’re not done.”
The Culver City lot is such a historic part of Hollywood history that one of its structures, known as the Scenic Arts Building, has been designated as a historic landmark that cannot be radically altered. The only problem: the structure itself was on the verge of collapsing due to age and decay.
SPE’s solution was to erect a new multi-story building that abuts the Scenic Arts, supporting the construction from the 1920s. The Scenic Arts facilities were built with an ingenious pulley system that allowed directors to shoot scenes against large-scale painted backdrops that offered everything from New York City street scenes.
The historic elements of the Scenic Arts were preserved, but the interior was redesigned to function as meeting spaces, which are now available for rent by external entities.
Meanwhile, the new building was specifically built to serve as a waiting area for the audience members of “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune,” who regularly come to the lot to watch the tapings of SPE’s venerable game shows. It is conveniently located near the “Jeopardy” and “Wheel” stages. Of course, it comes complete with a gift shop.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. That has been a guiding principle for Vinciquerra throughout his career.
Los últimos siete años en Sony han sido una experiencia estimulante que le exigió reunir todas las habilidades que ha desarrollado a lo largo de décadas, y más.
“Siempre me ha encantado el desafío intelectual de establecer una estrategia para abordar un problema”, dice Vinciquerra. “En cada trabajo que he tenido se ha producido un cambio enorme. Transformar organizaciones es algo natural para mí ahora”.
Cada situación tiene sus propios desafíos, pero Vinciquerra se encuentra apoyándose en algunas reglas simples de las que depende.
“Mantienes tu ego fuera de esto. Contratas a buena gente y les dejas recibir el reconocimiento por el buen trabajo”, dice. “Me satisface ver cómo les va bien a las personas con las que trabajo. Y hay muchas personas en la industria con las que trabajé lo han hecho muy bien. Estoy realmente orgulloso y feliz por eso”.