Brian Graden's Interview with Joseph Gordon-Levitt Part 6
This interview with Brian Graden and Joseph Gordon-Levitt was conducted at the 2015 ProMax Conference. Content has been edited for clarity. See part five here.
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There’s a Walt Disney quote that I know you reference a lot.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Yeah and I don’t really know if Walt Disney ever really said it. I like the idea that he did, but I like the quote regardless and the quote is “We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies,” and that’s kind of how we’ve always approached HitRecord being a for-profit company. We have all these goals and we have all these aspirations. Those aspirations will cost money, so we have to make money but let’s be lucrative.
Speaking of money, I know after ProMax every year when I was at MTV, the team would usually return and they would say, “The theme this year was that brands went deeper and deeper integration into your content.” Miraculously, that seemed to be the theme every year from ProMax for about 15 years. I would sometimes have mixed thoughts about that, where you blur the lines between art and commerce, and I know HitRecord has taken sponsorships -- Levi’s, Sony, etc. -- but have also been very selective. I wondered how you think about what sponsorships are appropriate for a community of artists, and which ones would you pass on completely?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Well, we kind of immediately passed on oil companies and things like that. The ones we chose felt like it made sense. Sony made a ton of sense because I use Sony cameras. We did one with Samsung, and they showed us their camera and I was like, “Man, this is really good. I’m excited to send these cameras out to our community.” That’s great if they’re going to support us. With Levi’s, they had a history of supporting artists and wanting to associate their brand name with you know Shepard Fairey or LCD Soundsystem. I often wear Levi’s anyway, why the hell not?
Did that actually create opportunities for some of the artists to get paid, as well as a part of these projects and sponsorships?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Oh that’s been a very important part of how we’ve been able to keep our door open and pay the community, for sure.
Here’s another thing that we experienced together. I was speaking to the head of one of the networks in advance of today, and she said extra content is marketing gold and I can’t do anything if I don’t have extra content. I was wondering if you’re in the final stages of editing Don Jon, which I know is intense? Or if you’re about to deliver eight episodes of HitRecord? And then you get a phone call that says “I need 37 pieces of extra content by next Wednesday to market this show,” how do you think about that?
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Please see part seven of the interview here.