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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Museum Magic

Bob Rogers can you tell the color of Abraham Lincoln’s eyes. He can rattle off Lincoln’s height, weight, build and skin texture. If that isn’t enough, Rogers can give all the same information about Lincoln’s wife, sons and all the members of his cabinet. But Rogers isn’t an historian. He runs BRC Imagination Arts, a Burbank firm that designs and builds exhibits and displays for museums, corporate visitor centers and amusement parks around the world. Rogers developed his knowledge of Lincoln when his company created the tableaus and displays at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and Library in Springfield, Ill. Precise and minute details aren’t just for museum exhibits. Take for instance the space shuttle simulator to open in May at the Kennedy Space Center. “We studied this with 27 shuttle astronauts to make sure it was the most accurate thing ever,” Rogers said. Among projects on the drawing boards at BRC include a video game museum, an historical museum for Liverpool, England, a state history museum in Tennessee and a science museum in Arizona. Rogers started the company in a garage in 1981 in Sherman Oaks, sharing space with a late model Toyota and boxes of Christmas decorations. BRC quickly outgrew those quarters and moved to Burbank. When he started BRC, however, Rogers expected the company would fold after nine months “like so many other media companies.” Today, he oversees a core staff of 80 people and adds temporary workers depending on the size and scope of a project. Rogers and his team have the goal of making subject matter relevant to a visitor and inspiring in them a lifetime interest, be it in history or science. “We’re providing a simple fun door into a topic that shows why it’s cool and why it might be a place of the mind where you would want to hang out,” Rogers said. On March 3, Rogers was recognized by the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) with its Thea Lifetime Achievement Award. BRC has been the recipient of past TEA awards for outstanding achievement, including for the Lincoln Museum and two projects in Singapore. Question: Your first job was at a magic shop in Disneyland but what you are doing now is still a form of magic, isn’t it? Answer: We’re doing magic now, except instead of coming out on stage or putting a magic box in front of you that’s going to do something, we build the magic box four stories tall and you are in it. The magic box doing the magic is so big you don’t see it. It’s the entire building. That’s pretty cool. Unlike [Harry] Houdini or [Harry] Blackstone I don’t have to travel from theater to theater. The theater is the magic box and we do all our stuff there. Q: Did you have much experience in creating and running a business? A: The office has more in common with a fraternity house on a Saturday night than with a well-run business enterprise. I didn’t know anything about running a business. I still kind of don’t. I am not interested in all of the traditional financial reporting sheets. I devised my own set of management tools and management principles that we borrowed in bits and pieces from here and there but mostly made it up. Every new person who comes into the accounting department looks at this and says, “This isn’t right,” and wants to go back to the balance sheets. In the end we keep traditional records and management tools but we also keep it my way. My way speaks to me. It’s about making sure we have enough money to keep our promises not only to our own people and our vendors but to our clients. It’s about postponing pleasure to make sure that if we have some cost to face, we want to face it now. If there is a tax deduction, we’ll take it long after we have spent the money. The net result is extremely conservative business practices that make sure we’re always on very solid ground. We have zero debt. We’ve never borrowed against accounts receivable. I’ve never had any debt. We’ve never sued anybody and have never been sued in 25 years. Q: What was the reason for shifting away from the amusement park work? A: The amusement park industry went through a boom decade in the 1990s. It was a fabulous time for our industry. About the beginning of 2001, the industry started to cool off and 9/11 was the icing on that cake. Meanwhile we happened to, at the perfect time through blind, stupid luck wander off from the theme park industry and we’re now doing a lot of things with museums. This has been very good for us the last several years museums and corporate visitor centers like a huge thing we did for Ford Motor Co. Q: What is it that companies are looking for when they come to you to design a visitor center? A: It’s brand immersion. The great brands of the world have profound meaning for those who dedicated their lives to them. To take that brand (and the company history and company culture and the identity of the brand) and do something that allows them to share it with their public, that is what they want to do. The least progressive of those tries to explain the corporate culture. The slightly smarter ones try to immerse the public in the world of the product. The really smart ones immerse the public in the world of the public. They celebrate the world of the guest as expressed by the product. The real secret is to figure out what is in the hearts and minds of the guests and dream their dreams more vividly than they can dream them for themselves. Q: How did you do that for the Ford visitor center? A: One of the many ways we did it there was that we didn’t do it the way that Ford would have done it. The portrait of Henry Ford in the history section tells you things about Henry Ford that makes you say, “This is Ford Motor Co. telling me about this?” The story was told partly from Henry’s point of view, but largely from the union’s point of view. In the end it was the only way you could do it if you wanted to have some credibility; you had to tell the truth. A lot of people walked out admiring Ford Co. all the more for having told the truth. There was another presentation on the making of a car, encompassing everything that happens from the drawing board to the open road. The name of the show is called “The Art of Manufacturing.” If you go through a tour of an automotive assembly plant you need to think about that tour not from the point of view of a car executive or from an expert in the car manufacturing process; you need to go through with the eyes of a child who doesn’t know anything about it. Stuff that looks cool to you is what you want to focus on. That’s what we more or less did. Q: Who are some of your other corporate clients? A: We’ve done major projects for Volkswagen, Ford and, for the longest time, General Motors. You could look upon the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum as a ‘brand land,’ where the brand we are selling is Abraham Lincoln. The differences in approach are not that great. What we are trying to do is get people to fall in love with a subject or image in a meaningful way. The Empire State Building is an interesting hybrid. What we’re doing there is part museum, part brand land and part visitor attraction. It has to be really great because Manhattan is not a forgiving environment when it comes to competition for entertainment. Q: What challenges does BRC face in being historically accurate with museum exhibits yet also staying within budget? A: You give a client good choices. Our clients usually know their world. So when we are working with, say, the history scholars in Tennessee they know the history of their state. What we try to do is explain what we know about our craft. What they’ll never know is how to take these highly technical subjects and make them fascinating to a broad general audience. We listen to their subject enough to get to the point where we get some ideas and then we explain choices to them and make them understand those choices as we understand them. Once we’re sure they understand, then the clients make the decision. At that point they know two things they know their subject and they know what we’re trying to tell them. That makes them smarter than we are. We don’t always love the choices that they make. Sometimes we deeply hate the choices they make. At the same time they always make the right choice. For example, in Tennessee they know their audience better than we ever will. You can’t tell them what the true meaning of Tennessee history is but you can give them options on how to fire the imagination of all the kids and adults going through there. If the client is making informed decisions they are usually making good decisions. That’s the key to the budget, the content and anything else. If you explain the choices to them, they will always make the right one for their project. SPOTLIGHT: Bob Rogers Title: Founder and Chairman, BRC Imagination Arts Age: 57 Most Admired Person: Lots Career Turning Point: Fired by Disney again Personal: After 33 years still happily married to high school sweetheart, Karen. Blessed with a son, daughter and new granddaughter, 6 months old.

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