Jon Gilbert may be the president of Warner Bros. Studio Facilities in Burbank but that doesn’t mean he isn’t above a little clean up now and then. Walking between soundstages on the studio lot, Gilbert stops to pick up a scrap of paper. It is a habit he picked up, Gilbert said, when working years ago at Universal Studios. He started out as a sweeper. As head of studio facilities, Gilbert’s responsibilities range from building maintenance to supporting film and television production. Those responsibilities even extend across the pond to Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, located outside of London, where all the “Harry Potter” films were shot. The Burbank studio lot, Gilbert said, is always evolving to meet the needs of production trends and to find the best use of the space available. “If you have a limited footprint, you try to think of the non-critical functions that can be moved to warehouses or storage lots so you can put in more revenue generating activities and jobs,” Gilbert said. Gilbert’s job isn’t just all about soundstages, back lots and supports services, like the commissary, fire department and mailroom. He has been known to join the VIP Studio Tour and meets each new group of tour guides. The Warner Bros. tour allows for more celebrity sightings than at the other studios. The tour gets incorporated into the “Ellen” talk show and it’s not uncommon for actors to talk with the tour visitors, Gilbert said. “I love those instances,” Gilbert added. “It’s nice for people to see that.” Question: How do you juggle all of your job responsibilities? Answer: We are one of the biggest divisions by personnel at Warner Bros. because we have so many responsibilities to not only maintain and rebuild and renovate the studio lot, but also work all the production operations for our production division. We payroll all the employees for Warner Bros. TV, we have a transportation department that supplies their vehicles. We have a large property department that supplies the props for all the TV shows, and a costume department. We have over 50 departments about half of which service production and the other half serve the studio population and the buildings and maintenance. How do we juggle that? We have a lot of very talented people that are more qualified than I am in their specific areas. Q: What part does the studio play in the overall operations of Time Warner? A: I am sure I am biased but I feel like the Warner Bros. studio lot is the most iconic physical asset that this company has. It is the oldest home of the company having been established in the ‘20s. We all feel a special obligation to take care and renovate this historic place, but also continue to make it vital. It is not a museum. It is a working factory where we continue to manufacture TV shows and movies. For example, we do a lot more television here on the studio lot than we did originally when it was a feature environment because runaway production features are being done in foreign countries and other states. So as we remodel we say, ‘What do our television production clients need?’ Even the television world is evolving. There is more reality television on the air than there used to be. Within the last few years we have stepped out front by adapting our facilities for talk shows and reality shows. For example, about three years ago we moved the Ellen DeGeneres show here from NBC. We had to build a specialized facility for them. Moving a talk show like that to a traditional film lot is a big change. The year after Ellen came we were able to attract the Conan O’Brien Show here which was a real coup for us. I was very excited about that. We have ‘The Voice’ coming back, an NBC reality show. They have chosen Stage 16 (the biggest stage on the lot) to make it bigger and better. These days with reality television, bigger sets, bigger audiences is what they are going for. Q: Are all the soundstages being used? A: We have 30 studios on the main lot and five stages at the Ranch, our satellite facility up on Hollywood Way. I am happy to say they are fully booked. And not just with Warner Bros. shows. We have the Conan show; we have a few other third party shows. About 80 percent of our business is internal. Q: Are you doing new construction or just renovating and modifying existing structures? A: We are building. Production crews are growing. It takes anywhere from 100 to 150 people to create one television show, more if you’re a talk show like Ellen (DeGeneres) or Conan (O’Brien). When we finish the project we are working on right now, we will have added about 60,000 square feet of new office space for production. The lot is more crowded than it used to be. Right before the holidays, between here and the Ranch, we had 18 shows in production at the same time. That’s a record for us. Q: What do you attribute that to? A: What’s really exciting and what has pumped up our business is what’s happening with basic cable. Warner’s has a relatively new division called Warner Horizon that produces for basic cable. We’ve got “Southland.” ABC Family Channel is producing two shows. “Secret Life of the American Teenager” is being done for Disney at the Ranch, and Warner Horizon is producing a show called “Pretty Little Liars” right across the street at stages 7 and 8. Basic cable has really increased the number of jobs and production work in Hollywood. That has helped to fill up the lot. Q: What more can you do here with the space you have? A: We have 110 acres on the main lot and 35 (acres) on the Ranch. We have some expansion room left at the Ranch to potentially add up to four more stages. Here on the main lot we’ve pretty much used all the land we have so it’s a question of how we can repurpose it. Over the years we have had to move storage activities to less valuable real estate. A piece of land where set lighting was is now a soundstage. So it’s bringing in revenue and we can bring the lights in from the warehouse. The studio lot has become prime real estate and everybody wants to be here. It is not the best use of this property to devote it to storage. Q: What is the oldest building on the lot? A: The studio was built in 1927 and Warner Bros. acquired it two years later. It was built for a company called First National Pictures. The central core, including some of the stages and the main administration buildings, were built in the mid-‘20s. The central core is part of the original studio and then it started to be built out. Q: What is your role and responsibilities as president of the studio facilities? A: We have over 50 departments ranging from risk management, to food service, the commissary, the security department, the tour and transportation. You cannot be an expert in all those things, so you’ve got to hire good people. One surprise to some people is that the studio operates as a P&L (profit and loss) business; we are expected to turn a profit. So everything we have here — whether it’s space or equipment — is rented. We don’t give anything to Warner Bros. productions for free. Every show has its budget. Every show can shop to get the best deals to make their budget. They are not required to be here at the lot. We have to be attractive to them. We have to price ourselves competitively. When we need to make investments in new buildings or new stages we’re expected to show a return on those investments. Q: Has the studio been profitable? A: Yes. Because we are full and we’re lucky enough to have the support of the internal production groups, we’ve been doing well. One of the things that is most gratifying to me is that the studio facilities are not Warner Bros.’ core business. Warner Bros.’ core business is making movies and television shows. But they have been good at giving us a capital budget that takes the money we earn and puts it back. They have been generous about that. They have allowed us to reinvest. Q: What are some of the biggest surprises you’ve learned? A: Food and parking are very important to people. I’m a lawyer by training. I was a labor lawyer for ABC and Lorimar before I got the facilities job. I started getting complaints about the food and complaints about parking spaces. Over the years I’ve used my legal training to become an expert in food and parking. Title: President, Warner Bros. Studios Facilities AGE: 58 EDUCATION: BA, UCLA, 1975; JD, Pepperdine University School of Law, 1979 Career Turning Point: Lorimar Productions being merged into Warner Bros. Q: How else has your legal background helped you? A: Studio lots, by their nature, are heavily unionized. There are over 25 unions. It is good knowledge base to have when you come into a studio environment, particularly when you are trying to make changes or do things in a different way. When you are migrating a show like Ellen DeGeneres’s from NBC to the Burbank lot, there are a lot of union issues that come up like which union is going to have jurisdiction. The people who handled her crew at NBC want to come here and the unions that have been here for 80 years aren’t crazy about that idea. Somehow you have to make sense of all that. It helps that I have the background. Q: Warner Bros. offers one of the most popular tours in the area. Why give the public a chance to see behind the scenes at a working studio? A: It has really developed into a nice business that I couldn’t foresee. When I moved to Los Angeles to go to UCLA, I got a job on the Universal (Studios) tour and worked there for nine and a half years. I was a tour guide; I went to law school while working at the amphitheater. When I came to Warner Bros. they had a little tour that took about 12 people a day and my boss at the time, Gary Credle, said go see what you can do with it. I said that at a minimum we ought to make it something we could be proud of. We are never going to be Universal. We can be a niche business and show people what it’s like to be on a working studio. Instead of having Teamsters driving 100-person trams like they do at Universal, (I decided to) get golf carts that hold 12 people and have a tour guide take people around. Last year they broke a record and had over 160,000 people here. When we started this we had 6,000 people. They’ve made a real business out of it. I know Sony has a tour and Paramount has a walking tour, but the reviews I’ve read online show that Warner Bros. is the best of them, and I’m really proud of that. Q: What is your favorite part of the tour? A: My favorite part is being able to get off the cart and stand and touch back lot sets, take your picture in the doorways and go onto a soundstage. All the years that I was a tour guide at Universal and had 100 people, I could never let anyone do that. When we started they wouldn’t let anybody take pictures here. I had to go to the general counsel and really push to get an exception at least when we’re on the back lot. It’s not going to do any harm if people take pictures on Brownstone Street or New York Street. The stopping, getting off the cart, walking up and taking a photo of your family is not something you can do at other places. That is my favorite part.
The Studio Master
