Is there a similarity between starting a new business and starting a movie or TV series?
I like to entertain people. I like to be the best time of their day. Movies and TV and food are times we celebrate, times we're happy, times we're entertaining ourselves. In a movie, you have to take an idea and have a writer. And then you go through multiple drafts of scripts, and you have to get a director. In terms of the restaurant concepts I do, it's like a movie. The director is the chef maybe. The writer maybe is the idea and the way we play with refining it.
Then you have to get it financed. Studios finance all my movies—and the networks. In the restaurants, I have a group of investors who have been with me from deal to deal over the years, as we've gone from Wetzel's Pretzels to Blaze Pizza to Dave's Hot Chicken to PopUp Bagels. My investors are like the studio.
Then you need to figure out how to advertise it. You've got to make something that nobody really knows desirable and interesting and connecting. It's really hard to connect unless you do it in an authentic way that tells a story that's interesting. I put movie stars in my movies, and I put movie stars into my restaurant companies. And then I wait to see if people show up. And maybe they do and maybe they don't.
What happens when they don't?
It's upsetting and difficult. But you learn to be resilient. I just did a movie that I love, Song Sung Blue, and I thought we would get nominations that we didn't. Kate [Hudson] got nominated. And the movie did well at the box office, but it didn't entertain the Academy voters the way it entertained me.
But it's what I teach my children. Resilience is the best trait you can have. The difference between people who fail and succeed is your frustration and your tolerance level. If you never get frustrated, you're going to be successful. You just have to pick up and feel your feelings and lick your wounds and move on. But if you're not failing from time to time, you're not taking enough risk. You're staying within a conservative range that's keeping you from exploring your potential.
I don't think a lot of people fully understand what a producer does. Can you walk me through what do you do?
Everybody does it differently. And there are a lot of different definitions of what a producer is. Sometimes they're the people who bring the financing. For me, I want to initiate the idea from scratch and follow it through. Sometimes we come up with ideas sitting around the table. Sometimes it's a book. Sometimes it's a famous piece of IP [intellectual property]. Sometimes somebody we know will come and pitch an idea.
But it's taking that beginning seed and setting it up at a studio so they'll pay the writer, and it's spending sometimes years getting a script right. And then it's doing what you do with a restaurant. I've got to convince the studio to make it. I've got to convince the director to come on board. I've got to get movie stars in it. I took a course at Bowdoin with Barbara Kaster: The History of Film Criticism. We made a movie at the end, and we had the Bowdoin Academy Awards. That really inspired me to think about making this a career. My family also owned a movie theater in the neighborhood I grew up in, so I got to see 300 movies a year. The combination of those things made me think about what I want to do in life. In business school I thought I either wanted to do movies or sports. I wanted to do something that was fun.
How do you think you developed that sense that you could just choose something that was fun?
It's just a choice. In my last year of business school, we could go out to dinner every single night with a different company that came to recruit. As I went through that process, I just started thinking, you should pick something that's fun.
How did you get into the movie business?
There's no direct way into this business. It's an apprentice business. I was fortunate. I had worked to learn all about the business by talking to everyone I could, and one of the people I got to know was Arnold Schwartzenegger. I started Predator in 1987, and I was really intimidated and overwhelmed, because I was still a kid from Colorado. This was Hollywood. I took finance and marketing courses in business school, and my only knowledge of the business was watching movies. But I was fortunate enough to be in nonstop production from there for the rest of my life.
I'm 110, 115 movies into my career now. I've never been out of production. I just got lucky. I just hit one after another after another. And I'm 13 TV series in.
Do you have some favorites?
I love Grumpy Old Men. I loved Walter and Jack and watched them in the theater as a kid growing up. The Firm. Tom Cruise was just becoming a star. The Eddie Murphy movies. Eddie and I have become really good friends. We've done eight movies over the years. I loved the Garfield movies. I did all the family movies when my kids were young—Popper's Penguins with Jim Carrey or Dr. Doolittle or Garfield. And then, when my kids got older, things like Chronicle or Courage Under Fire, which I did with Denzel Washington. Those became some of my favorite movies.
How do you choose what to make?
What I want to see. If I want to see it, I want to make it. And if I don't want to see it, I don't want to make it.
Is that the same with the food?
The skill that I have, if I have any, is I have the average American taste. If I like it, the mass of Americans are going to like it. And a lot of times the mass of the world. Same thing with movies. I have average person taste. I'm not Eleven Madison Park. I'm not The French Laundry. It's got to be comfort food and it's got to be truly craveable. It's got to be the best of what it is in terms of taste. And if it's that, then I can figure out how to make it work usually.
You have talked about the power of endings. What does that mean to how you make a movie?
The thing that has the biggest impact on your experience in a movie are the last twenty minutes. I's got to be emotional. It's got to have made the journey worthwhile. You've got to have seen that these flawed characters that you fell in love with were able to change. When I first got in the business I sought out Frank Capra. I got him to let me go fishing with him. And the inspiring thing Frank Capra said to me is "You have a responsibility, because you can affect a lot of people. They'll listen to you for an hour and a half, so you have their attention for a long time. Make movies that elevate humanity. Make movies about the common man doing uncommon things. That's your responsibility. And that's good storytelling."
You've been in this business for a long time. What is different from when you started?
When I started, corporations didn't really own the studios. It wasn't as much a business. It was more of a lifestyle, and a lot more risk was taken, and a lot of great movies came out of that period. Over time, the business has consolidated. Studios have gone out of business. We've got the advent of streaming, so you can see a movie at home. So a movie that goes into theaters has to be compelling in an unusual way to get you to go out. The bar has been raised. I do some streaming movies and we put as much work into those streaming movies as we do theatrical. But I like a movie that's seen in movie theaters. We've got to work really hard now to get that done.
And this town has changed. Hollywood has lost 25 percent of its employment since I've been in the business—it's moved to New Jersey and to Atlanta. It's moved to New York City. They all have tax credits that make it lucrative to film there. I used to make all my movies in Hollywood and now I make all my movies in New York.
Will AI change things more?
Well, the good part of AI is if it can make the cost of a movie go down, then maybe we can make more movies than we did. So, I'm not rejecting the technology, but AI has yet to be creative. Right now, AI is like having a thousand assistants working for you instantaneously giving you information, but it's not creative. Maybe it will be. But it isn't yet. It can't tell a good story.
What still excites you?
Telling stories. I consider my family a family of storytellers. My wife is a producer and a great storyteller. My daughter is a producer and a great storyteller. My son is an entrepreneur but sometimes makes movies and is a storyteller. And my youngest is a writer and magazine editor and tells different kinds of stories. I think storytelling is a great profession.
In all your years, what has surprised you about the business, about yourself, about about any of this?
Well, I've been surprised that the movie business got clobbered the way it did between the pandemic and then a bad strike that came afterwards, and that streaming would really change the kind of movies we made. That was a surprise, but you've got to roll with it. I've been surprised you can reinvent the bagel. And I guess I've been surprised by some of the turns this country has taken.
You talked about having a sense of the masses and what they like. Does that also apply to what they care about?
I really believe that this country in its soul is good and that people care about the right thing. And they'll go to see movies that reflect those values. They want people that are good people and they want them to do good things. And they want those movies to have a level of morality. And in food they want something fresh and different. They want you to take whatever's there and just do it differently. They want to be entertained and they want to be excited.
What's the next thing you're trying to get made?
Sometimes we go from the sublime to the ridiculous. Song Sung Blue was to me a great true story, a great emotional story. I have a movie coming out this summer with Kevin Hart that is an R-rated comedy. I still love doing those. And then, I'm working on some movies with my daughter and I'm working on some movies with my son and working on some movies with my wife. My son came to me and said, "I want to make a father and son movie." And so, we're working on that. And it's a great story. It's about Doc Rivers and his son Austin—a father and son whose relationship had fallen apart, and they ended up on the same team together, coach and player. And my wife and I are working on a movie called Blood Runs Coal, which is about the murder of the United Mine Workers and a son who avenged his father's death. I think that's a great story too.
Nobody could accuse you of having a cookie cutter approach. How would you like to be remembered?
"He told great stories. Stories we're still watching."
This story first appeared in the Fall 2026 issue of Bowdoin Magazine. Manage your subscription and see other stories from the magazine on the Bowdoin Magazine website.
