Interviewer (2:42)

Well, I started with that because you go to college at UC Berkeley, right? In the classic late 60s when UC Berkeley was UC Berkeley, the UC Berkeley that we think of. So coming from that background to the height of Summer of love hippies, UC Berkeley was there.

Susan Lyon (3:05)

I actually went out there in 1970. But you are 100% right. It was transformational for me because my parents were maybe the only Irish Catholic Republicans in the city of Boston. So I came from a really conservative background. And one of the reasons that going out to California really appealed to me was that I always felt in Boston that I had some member of the line clan was going to be there and that there were expectations of me to be X. So going out to Berkeley was.

Interviewer (3:52)

A.

Susan Lyon (3:52)

Way to define or at least explore who and what I wanted to be. And.it was an amazing time. It was the height of the anti war movement, was the beginnings of the women's movement. Sprawl Plaza, you would see the Palestinian students union, you would see the Iranian students Union, you would see religious groups, you would see. I mean, it was just as extraordinary. I won't even call it a melting pot because it was more. It was like a marketplace, right? Lots of people who were competing for your interest and your alliance.

Interviewer (4:37)

So I correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that you left before graduating to pursue a newsroom job. And so many people in the last few weeks that I've been interviewing got their start as journalists and have said that that sort of trained them to be sort of omni interested. And so then they could do several different career fields, like do anything. What do you think before we get into the paper itself, like training as a journalist, what did that do for you and your career?

Susan Lyon (5:12)

Well, the first thing I will say is I never trained as a journalist, but I did freelance as a fact checker and a copy editor when I was in school. And I wrote for the Berkeley Tribe, which was the underground newspaper. And I knew that I wanted to go into journalism. I actually wanted to go into magazines because this is pre Internet, right? So if you wanted to impact the way people thought about something or be part of the conversation, that's where you went, right there. There was no better place to go if you wanted to both be a lifelong learner and also be part of the conversation.

Interviewer (6:04)

And you worked. I did not know this, but Francis Ford Coppola had a weekly called the City or City. And what was that like? I get the impression that it was sort of like understaffed and like, hey, just make it up as you go along or whatever. But what was Francis Ford Copeland paper like?

Susan Lyon (6:27)

So he had this idea that there should be a West coast version of New York magazine, right? That New York was kind of the representative entity of that side of the world and that San Francisco was so different that we really needed to represent. It was a Rolling Stone format in that, you know, it was oversized, it was funky paper that actually cost A lot of money. But the idea was to look informal and to look more like alternative publications than a Time Inc. Magazine might. And he had. This was after Godfather 2 and before Apocalypse Now. So he was probably 30, 31, 32, and he had bought a block in Cannery Row in San Francisco, all these great old buildings. And he put Zoetrope, which was his production company, into each one had its own purpose. And then he had City magazine, which, as you said, there were not enough people for the number of jobs there. I actually talked my way into a job as the assistant to the editor in chief, who was a guy named Warren Hinkle, who was a well known magazine editor who had done Ramparts and then a magazine called Scanlan's. But he was a force in the city. Great rock on tour, great drinker. I mean, part of my job was to find him in one of six north beach bars and take down his letter to the editor every week. But he was a beautiful writer and he had a good instinct for stories and he created, you know, a culture there that allowed someone like me to throw out ideas and to ultimately become, I think I was an associate editor before they actually shut the magazine down. And it was shut down literally an hour after his plane took off to go to Asia to shoot Apocalypse Now. And his business manner, I think, had been counting down the days till he could actually shutter it because it was losing a lot of money. But it was really fun and it was, it was reinforcement to me that being at a magazine was exactly what I wanted to do. I liked the way that magazines are put together. I liked the, the collegiality of it. I liked the fact that, you know, you would get into a room together and you would brainstorm ideas and then you would brainstorm who the great writer was who would perfect to do this. It was just a great. It was much more interesting to me than, I mean, certainly going to finance or to some of the other arenas that some of my friends decided to go to.

Interviewer (9:51)

Now you move back to the east coast and come to New York. Is this the late 70s?

Susan Lyon (10:01)

Yeah, 1978 was when I moved back, when cities shut down. I was doing a story for New Times, which was a bi weekly feature news magazine. Great writers. It was just a great publication that was too short lived at a certain point. The editor in chief, John Larson, asked me if I would come back to be managing editor. And I said, I don't know how to be a managing editor. And he said, it's going to be fine. I know you can do this. So two weeks, I packed everything up. I got into a car, I drove across country. I had multiple friends who had moved back to New York a year earlier because Rolling Stone moved from San Francisco to New York.

Interviewer (11:04)

Oh, that's right.

Susan Lyon (11:05)

I called them, asked them if they knew about any sublets, and I ended up subletting an amazing half a townhouse from Tom Powers, who was a New York Times reporter, who. He and his wife and kids lived in this crate. Two floors of a townhouse at 25 West 10th street, which is now probably worth $20 million. But at the time, he was moving up to Vermont for a year to write a book about the Weather Underground. And I got to live there for $400 a month. So it was a great entry into New York City. New Times folded about a year later, and I went to the Village Voice. When Rupert had bought the Voice as part of his acquisition of New York Magazine, he hated the Voice. He brought a new editor in chief in, and when the announcement that New Times was folding came out, that new editor called me and said, hey, I hear you don't have a job anymore. Do you want to come and be my managing editor? So I went down to the Village Voice, and I was there for four years as the managing editor.

Interviewer (12:39)

I again, I'm talking about eras. I feel like that is one of the golden eras of the Village Voice. The CBGB era, the New York and the blackout era. Give me a sense of what it was like to do media or even just live in New York City at that time.

Susan Lyon (12:59)

I had two sisters living here already, so I been been back to the city to visit multiple times. When you're in your mid-20s and you're in a city as exciting as New York, you don't really think a whole lot about, wow, the garbage isn't being collected as often as it should be, or. Or there's crime. It was a very affordable city at that point. You know, I think about what the challenges are now. For someone who was my age, coming into New York was the capital of the world, and yet I could get a sublet for $400 a month. And I was living on, I think my salary at the village voice was $27 or $27,000 a year. And that was big money for me. That was after having been paid, I think, $18,000 a year when I was at New Times, so, you know, you could live on the salary you were making at an alternative newspaper. The Voice was extraordinary. Some of the best writers I've ever met. In my life were at the paper at that point. And not just young writers, you know, these were people, Nat Hentoff and Jack Newfield and a lot of the. The back of the book editors who were extraordinary. Bob Kriskow, I mean, I could go on about people who were extraordinary writers and were kind of leading figures in some part of the New York City scene, who I got to see every day and fight with every day.

Interviewer (14:52)

You get into sort of the Hollywood side of media shortly after this with, what is it? IPC Film Films. What was IPC Films?

Susan Lyon (15:02)

It's a part of my resume that I don't highlight often. I admire Jane Fonda more than almost anyone. Jane Fonda and someone I had gone to school with, Bruce Gilbert, had started what was called IPC Films. This was after she came back from France. She had done Klute. She had done Coming Home. That was, I think, the first movie that IPC Films produced. So it was Coming Home and then china syndrome, then 9 to 5. And we were selling a fair number of Village Voice stories to Hollywood. There were a lot of good writers who were doing features reporting and lots of incredible storytelling. In fact, Teresa Carpenter won us the Pulitzer Prize for feature reporting with a story about the murder of Dorothy Stratton, who was the playmate killed by a very jealous boyfriend. But I thought, okay, this is applicable, what I've been doing. I. I understand storytelling. And they asked me if I wanted to come and be a development person, so come up with stories and see if we could develop them into scripts. And I spent a couple of years doing it and I really disliked it. So. Love her. Love Bruce, too. I mean, they were. They were great people to work with. But the, the process of making movies is. It's not just a lot of no's. It's a lot of hurry up and wait. And I was used to being able to put together a magazine or a newspaper in a week and to get it out there and get feedback on it and have people send me new ideas. And I love that relationship between an editor and a reader. It's what fueled me for a lot of years in journalism. And you don't get that in the movie industry. You're really developing something for a long time and then you make it and it gets put out there and either they like it or they don't. But there isn't that relationship between the, the creator and the. The viewer that I was used to. So I decided to go back to magazines and I pitched a magazine about the movies. I had spent enough time in that world that I thought there's actually an interesting magazine to be done here because it is kind of a small town, right? So the idea was could we do Rolling Stone for the movies, right? Could we. Could we make these characters not just actors, but the people who are producing movies, directing movies, making movies, and the people who were paying for them? Could we tell those stories and could we give people a sense of how they all interacted with each other?

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Interviewer (20:27)

Let me Can I interrupt to give context here because I'm old enough to remember Premiere magazine. It was not by the way. It launches in like 87. You help launch it, edit it. What Premiere magazine did, it wasn't just okay, this movie is coming out so let's have a a puff piece with the star. It would be in depth articles and reporting about how the movie was developed and also like the through line of, well, you know this director has had a couple of bad movies, and so they need this as a comeback. It was very inside baseball sort of stuff. It was. It was the stuff that I like to do, Like. Like behind the scenes stuff. So I just want to put that in context for people that might not be old enough to know it.

Susan Lyon (21:14)

No, you're 100% right. And that was clearly what excited me, too. And we sort of laid this out as a here's who we are in the first issue. Because we did a couple of stories in that issue that were very different from what you would typically see. So we did one that was about Dragnet, the Kevin Costner movie that we called Shot by Shot. And it was the great Brian De Palma scene.

Interviewer (21:53)

Not Dragnet. Not Dragnet. The one that Sean Connery won the Academy Award for. Right. Not Dragnet.

Susan Lyon (22:00)

You're absolutely right.

Interviewer (22:00)

Yeah, I'll look it up. Keep going.

Susan Lyon (22:02)

Yeah. Okay. But it was about that scene where the baby carriage goes down the stairs, and it's not clear what's gonna happen. And so what we did was create a format called Shot by Shot. That was an interview with the director, really trying to figure out not only how they did it, but why they did it the way they did. And it was very visual, and it was a fun read. And at the time, it was also, we couldn't get movie stars to talk to us for that first issue. So we talked to the other people who were willing to really go deep with us. And in that case, it was Brian De Palma. And we did another story about Beverly Hills Cop 2 that started with the screening of the first Beverly Hills Cop. And at the end of the screening, the studio said, we gotta do a sequel. So it was kind of the blow by blow of creating the second one of these movies. And what I think these really said to people was, first of all, this is beautiful. It's great to look at, but we're going to get, as you said, inside Baseball about this industry.

Interviewer (23:25)

By the way, the movie was the Untouchables. Thank you. The De Palma movie. Yes. Great movie. Okay. But I'm curious about that. Like, your premiere is like, treating Hollywood as a beat. But both you're getting access, but you're also having rigor and you're being critical about it. So, like, how did you balance the relationships with candor? Like, if you're gonna ruffle feathers by.

Susan Lyon (23:51)

Telling the truth, I will say, sorry, no worries. I'll leave you some air so that you can get rid of that. It was always a balancing act. So There was never an issue that came out where I didn't get an angry call from somebody about a story about where they landed on our power list and in not a few cases, real threats that they were going to sue us, they were going to go after Rupert because this was News Corp. That backed it. But we also clearly adored movies and movie making and there was enough in it that was really celebratory that most of the community loved it. So the fact that someone was incredibly pissed off at us because of something that Kim Masters had written or another great reporter, we were still beloved by enough of the industry that, that we continued to have access. And I think that, you know, half, at least half the job of, of an editor in chief was at that time, and hopefully still is, was to protect reporters and writers, to really tell the stories that are going to be meaningful to people and to be cautious enough that you don't do something that gets you sued and put out of business. But your job on a day to day basis is to take the hits on their behalf and, and keep moving forward.

Interviewer (25:59)

So I'm going to a lot of.

Susan Lyon (26:00)

Lunches with people who, who were furious with us and I would say at the end of a call, hey, I'm coming out to California on X date, let's sit down and have breakfast or let's get together. And that actually often was the way that we were able to get through something like that.

Interviewer (26:24)

I'm going to straight up say that you were in charge for the golden era of that magazine, of a type of magazine that just, that sort of thing doesn't exist anymore. So it's amazing. But in the mid-90s, Disney recruits you. Now you had said that you didn't like, like the making movies thing a couple minutes ago. So why at that point did, what was the pitch that convinced you to go to a studio?

Susan Lyon (26:57)

Well, I'll say a couple of things. Joe Roth, who ran the Disney studio, had been talking to me for a while about, hey, you should come work here. And I didn't really think much about it until our magazine got sold to Hachette, which at the time was run by David Pecker. And it was really clear to me very fast that we were going to have a very different owner who believed in getting access by giving people the right to sensor X or Y. And I said I wasn't going to work for him. So at that moment I was much more open to doing something new. And I love Disney. I mean I, I truly loved the, the company at that point. And And I thought they had very interesting assets as well. So what I realized pretty quickly was that while I didn't love movies, television was much more like magazines. Right. It was something where you did have a relationship with that viewer. Right. It wasn't something where you put a out something once and it was gone and you went on to the next thing. But there were series, there were, there were ways that you were constantly interacting with that person.

Interviewer (28:42)

You were creating for, like, ratings as feedback, essentially from the audience.

Susan Lyon (28:47)

Absolutely. Yeah. And that's very true because there was still no, you know, there was a nascent social media at that moment. There were chat rooms, but you certainly didn't have the kind of instant feedback that we had soon after. So I jumped. I spent about a year and a half in development, which, you know, again, was not going to ever be my, my dream job. But then Bob Iger, who had come to Disney through the acquisition of abc, said, you should go work at abc. And I, I took a job that I was completely unprepared for, but with a good team doing movies and miniseries. So I, I ran what was called long form at the time when networks were doing 20, 25 movies a year. And it was really fun. It was. There was kind of a. Enough of a variety of things to work on that it didn't feel like that desert that, that happens in feature film development. And I liked a lot of the team there. I certainly weighed in on series as well. And we did a good job with the movies we put out. We got a lot of good ratings and we won a lot of Emmys. And in 2002, according to my notes.

Interviewer (30:42)

2002.

Susan Lyon (30:43)

Yes, 2002, I was given the, the job of running primetime. It's the present entertainment at abc. Yes.

Interviewer (30:56)

I'm going to interrupt you because I believe at the time that you do this, ABC is sort of in like a rating slump.

Susan Lyon (31:03)

And we were the lowest rated network out there.

Interviewer (31:09)

Some of the shows that come out of this period, developmental wise, are shows like Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, you're nurturing, or expanding the Bachelor franchise. I'm going to ask a weird question that'll pay off when we get to your investing. Is working with creators. Is there some sort of similarity to working with founders?

Susan Lyon (31:33)

Yes, absolutely. And I would say there's something similar also to working with good writers and good journalists. Right. Where you're trying to identify talent, first of all, you're trying to identify and assess whether someone has the, not just the skills, but the drive to be very Successful in this. And that's what I've always liked best, right, Is working with a writer, working with an editor who's trying to figure out how to create a new part of the magazine. In this case, writers who were imagining some new piece of storytelling. I will tell you, in the old days when I was at the network, we still had pilot season, right? So it was a three, four month period of time where you met with hundreds of writers. You picked up probably, I don't know, in our case we picked up way more than, than other networks because we had a lot of holes. But you pick up a lot of pilots, right? Written pilots. So that's the first stage and those come in and you all get together and you kind of assess what do we think is really great. And from that you decide which ones you're going to actually make. And you cast them, you get a good director hopefully, and then you screen them. And this all takes place in a very short period of time. So you know the kind of excitement that comes from that cycle of putting out a magazine. Very, very similar. And I loved it.

Interviewer (33:47)

Can you give me your favorite story in terms of one of those pitches like Lost or Desperate Housewives or Grazing? When you know, you're hearing the pitch and you're like, this is gonna work. I like this.

Susan Lyon (34:01)

So I'll tell you two stories, right, with Lost. And this was my boss at the time, but really my partner too, Lloyd Braun, who I. I can't remember exactly what his title was, but he oversaw both the network and the TV studio. And we had done an off site where we just brainstormed ideas. And Lloyd, when it was his turn, said, I think we should do Castaway with a big plane.

Interviewer (34:44)

Right, because the Tom Hanks movie had just come out. Cast away. Yes.

Susan Lyon (34:49)

Yeah. And he said, you know what's interesting here is what happens to the kind of social norms when the guy from Goldman Sachs is completely useless, but the guy who ran a construction company is actually gold. And it was a cool idea and we told a bunch of agents about it and we got a bunch of pitches in. The script came in for the pilot and it was eh, not very good. So we were going to kill it. And Lloyd said, give me the weekend. I just want to see whether I can get J.J. abrams excited about this. And J.J. came in early the next week. He said, there's no way that I'm going to be able to write a full script in time for you to make a decision. I'll write the first act and I'll write an outline. And it came in and it was great. And we ended up green lighting the pilot based on an outline and a first act. And I will say my biggest input to that pilot was in the first draft. J.J. killed off the doctor at the end of act one. And he did it because he wanted to signal that this was not going to be a series like all the ones you saw where, you know, the handsome, cool lead was always going to be rescued. And in principle, that sounded great. But I said to him, I promise you, 10 million women have just turned off the television. So he lived, and JJ ended up killing off somebody else in that first episode.

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Susan Lyon (37:30)

The other one that I think was a really interesting process was Grey's Anatomy. So Shonda had actually written a pilot script for us the year before that was about war correspondence, female war correspondence. That was a great piece of writing, but it was hard to see how it was going to work as a series because it was four women who were in different parts of the world. But we liked her enough that we wanted to see if we get her to do something else the following year. And the woman who was at the time my head of drama came in and said, okay, she wants to do a, a new medical drama, something that will really feel different. And it came in and it was incredibly well written. And, you know, it had all the elements you would want to see in a pilot script, but it was somewhat traditional. You know, all the beats were there. It was the rookie residents and the tough, tough boss and the, the doctor who she had inadvertently slept with and now was gonna be a. A problem for her going forward. But then we got to casting, and she brought in actors for every single one of these roles that looked completely different than the other actors who were there for that role. So I think colorblind casting has gone way out of style. But she did something different. It was really saying that this is going to be a show where diversity in every sense is so much at the center of it that you don't even think about it. And it was an extraordinary piece of casting across the board, but I think that she's continued to do that. But that was the first Time she got a chance to really show that I can bring something genuinely new to a show that I believe viewers are going to love.

Interviewer (40:20)

How do you protect, and this is almost a question, again, akin to protecting startups and founders. How do you protect, like those weird or ambitious shows through development when there's pressure from executives that are skeptical or it's testing badly or whatever? Like, what tactic did you use to see the vision through that that you believed in?

Susan Lyon (40:45)

I had a really great partner in Lloyd, so he was my titular boss, but we worked in offices across the hall from each other, and he was. We really linked arms and he. If I had to go meet with Michael Eisner about a show that he hated, Lloyd would often actually come along. And I learned a lot from him about not just. Fighting for what you believe is going to work, but additionally not asking permission. So we picked up shows that we believed. At the end of the day, it was our decision what shows we picked up. And Michael would put his input in, Bob would put his input in, but we picked up the shows. And having somebody who I felt would go shoulder to shoulder with me was incredibly valuable. I've always liked having a good partner, and I will say that he made that job not just fun, but also very possible to do in a way that colored outside the lines. Because the other thing that last season where we picked up both Grey's Anatomy and. And Desperate Housewives, I had gone into the season with the idea that we're going to try to find the next great girl show because every network was programming for men. And it was largely because there was some unwritten rule that women would watch a show made for men, but men wouldn't watch a show made for women. So everyone was chasing CSI and Law and Order and, you know, lots of procedural shows that were often good, but none of the Sex and the city and Ally McBeal and all the shows that women used to get together to watch or used to chat about the next day were off the air. So felt like there was a big opportunity there if we could find appointment television for women. And that was not something that was high on Lloyd's list of things he wanted to get done. But he backed me a thousand percent. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that I wouldn't have stayed if I didn't feel like I could pick up the things I thought were right.

Interviewer (44:05)

You were let go in 2004, before a lot of those shows even premiered and we should point out, changed ABC's fortunes and one could argue, kicked off the sort of golden era of television. Long story short, I'm curious, number one, how you process that moment professionally and personally, but also how did that experience, oh, look at the success we had. But I'm not here anymore to share in the success. How did that change how you lead as a leader?

Susan Lyon (44:46)

It's a really good question. Well, first of all, I was blindsided by it. Lloyd had been fired by Eisner. They got into a real battle over Lost. Eisner hated Lost. It was the most expensive pilot that was ever made, and Lloyd became the fall guy for it. And so when that happened, Bob said to me, you're good. Don't worry. Love what you're doing. I want to give you more. Just give me a couple of weeks to figure out what this is going to look like. And I accepted that, assumed it was all going to work out. And there were a couple of guys who were direct reports of Lloyd's who went to Bob and said, we're not going to report to her. And I knew they were doing some version of that, and I didn't fight back. I think that I had this assumption from past experience that, you know, you do good work, you're going to be protected. And so I should have gone hard and fast at the two of them. One of them ended up taking that press of entertainment job and was ushered out five years later under a major cloud. And there is literally nothing that he put on the air during that period of time except Dancing with the Stars that lasted. But there is still, or there certainly was then, a boys club in television, as there. There is in a lot of industries. He had a lot of good pals in the business who I think helped him to get Bob to. To decide to back him. But it was an. It was horrible. It's the only job I've ever had where I didn't get to finish it. Right. And you. You talked about my not being there when those shows launched. I was let go two weeks before the upfronts, which is when we announced the schedule every year. And, you know, even knowing the upfronts were taking place at Radio City Music hall or wherever they did it that year, and I was a couple of miles away and not part of it was horrible. You know, I think that I've gotten probably more credit for the shows I picked up because I had a lot of friends who were journalists and who thought that I had been treated really badly. So the. The history books do tell the story, but it was. It took time for me to get.

Interviewer (48:09)

Over that Let me end this first conversation with this. I'm going to put this to you, but I believe it deeply. I think that Lost, especially the era of fandom and the way that there's podcasts about every episode, there's subreddits about it. Lost was the first sort of fandom that you couldn't have. Game of Thrones if Lost.

Susan Lyon (48:32)

Yeah.

Interviewer (48:32)

Lost walked. So Game of Thrones could run.

Susan Lyon (48:35)

Yeah.

Interviewer (48:36)

Did you have any sense of that or what was special about that show? Now, in retrospect, that was the thing that sort of trained people to be the sort of fans that they are today.

Susan Lyon (48:45)

Yeah. So I think that's a really great observation. And I will tell you one thing, which is that JJ spent the summer between season one and season two in chat rooms. He went in there, he created conversations, he answered questions. He got people excited about characters and what was happening. He gave them a little bit of hint of what was going to be coming in season two, and he was really a key driver of that excitement. It was a great show, and people loved it, but the kind of buzz around it and as you say, the online fandom piece of it, was really something that he understood very early and he participated in and I would say accelerated. So that when it came back, and you should look up what the ratings were for the first season and then what the ratings were when it came back for season two, it was a big bump, and the network couldn't figure it out. Right. They didn't know why this was happening, but it was all because JJ understood that these platforms, these early social platforms, were going to be key to getting.

Interviewer (50:20)

People to watch well, and allowed a different kind of fandom where the show doesn't just air, the show airs and you dissect it and you talk about it. And that's the metabolism of media today.

Susan Lyon (50:33)

Yeah. And by the way, I would say Shonda took note of all of that, and she went hard and fast at the same thing. Creating viewing parties, doing. Doing a lot of fan Q and A between episodes. Yeah. I mean, they were. They were early practitioners, and I think really helped to drive that shift.