
Trailer Geeks and Teaser Gods
Opening Weekend: EP-2: "The Mogul" – Alan Horn (Studio President)
Opening Weekend: Selling Hollywood with Jim Fredrick continues on the TG&TG feed. A soap marketer who'd never set foot in Los Angeles became the most successful studio head in movie history. Alan Horn ran Warner Brothers and then Disney, greenlighting Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, and the modern Marvel and Star Wars era. He sits down with Jim Fredrick to trace a 60-year career built on serendipity, and to talk honestly about what selling a movie takes now. Takeaways: Hired because he was perfect. A Procter & Gamble marketer working on Ivory soap, Alan got recruited by Jerry Perenchio precisely because he'd never watched much TV and never been to LA. "You're perfect. You're hired." Norman Lear backed him against a mutiny. Writers walked out of his first All in the Family table read. A month later Lear stood up in front of 40 people and told them to accept it or get out. The Blackwing 602 pencil made it official: "You are now qualified to give notes." Green light or nothing. Alan took the Warner Brothers presidency only with final say on what got made, then built the run that led Bob Iger to call him for Disney. You can't buy an opening weekend anymore. Social media broke the old playbook. Audiences text each other 20 minutes into a Friday screening, and marketing keeps getting treated as low-hanging fruit when studios need to cut. Pull quotes (social-ready): "Every problem that I've ever had in business is a people problem." — Alan Horn "Throw a hundred lines in the water, because all you need to do is catch one fish." — Alan Horn "It's not so easy to buy an opening weekend, because people start texting each other 20 minutes into a movie on a Friday." — Alan Horn "It isn't really pre-COVID anymore to me. It's pre-streaming dominance." — Alan Horn Sponsors: Golden Trailer Awards ( goldentrailer.com ) West One Music and Q Factory by Robert Etoll ( westonemusic.com )



