Tufts Alumni Bio
Write about your journey since graduation or your plans for the future. Share family milestones or update the class about your career path. Write about anything, it's entirely up to you.
After graduation I spent the summer running a mimeograph machine at minimum wage in the English Dept office so I could hang around campus a little longer.
Then I drove cross-country to grad school in Geology at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Loved the city. Disliked some key professors.
Got a summer job as a research assistant working on earthquake and volcanic hazard studies in the Aleutian Islands at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geologic Observatory and stayed there. No tan for two years. Lived in a converted barn with six other employees and grad students. We had some amazing parties and I did far more than my share of washing dishes.
After the second winter I decided it was time to do something besides gathering data for other people. I aced the Geology GRE (790 out of 800!), applied to the Stanford Earth Science graduate program, and got rejected. With nothing to lose I wrote the Dean of the school a “who the fuck do you think you are?” letter (literally, not figuratively). He called me and said that I was right, come on out. I said I am not coming if I had to pay for it, so he found me a full fellowship and I got paid to earn an MS in Applied Geophysics.
In 1979 the world was still coming off the energy crisis. Being a staunch and strident environmentalist, I didn’t really want to work for an oil company. But I didn’t see any viable alternatives. So I had 10 job interviews and 9 job offers (Go Stanford!). I went with Arco Int’l because it was the most environmentally conscious of the energy companies; it had solar and geothermal divisions. Plus I wanted to see the world.
After new-hire training in west Texas and the swamps of Louisiana, they let me trial the technology I developed for my Master’s Thesis. I had helped develop a technique for using animal trails and other wandering paths for seismic exploration of oil deposits instead of cutting a clear straight path thru the forest. I spent two months in Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia trialing it, and was able to help preserve a piece of orangutan habitat. (Sidenote; about 15 years later the indigenous people clearcut a large chunk of the habitat and established an unsustainable palm oil plantation.) I spent 10 years at Arco International; mostly at Los Angeles headquarters but with amazing trips to wild places in Chile, Turkey, China, Indonesia, Australia, Fiji, the North Sea, and elsewhere. I also made many trips to Arco’s Plano, TX research facility.
In 1989 Arco International moved headquarters from downtown Los Angeles to Plano. I tried it for 6 months, sort of. I kept my house near the beach in Los Angeles. But after 6 months of heat, no-see-um bug bites, and truly annoying ‘Yankee’ jokes, I threw out most of my furniture and drove back to Los Angeles where I enrolled in the full-time MBA program at UCLA. The decision process went something like; I can either sit at a coffee shop reading all the books I said I would read someday for 2 years, or I can go to UCLA at $1,500/yr. (it is much more expensive now) and finish the two years with a degree.
While at UCLA Anderson I founded the Business and the Environment program with the US ambassador to the UN on environmental issues. The program included an MBA-credit class and a student club that involved 180 MBA students in various environmental business projects. Being a ‘non-traditional’ student in my mid-30s with over a decade of work experience, it was hard for me to take the program seriously. My life experience didn’t always match the academic theory. My favorite subversive act was a market research class presentation where I labeled the red-colored lines ‘blue’ and the blue-colored lines ‘red.’ I am very glad I got the MBA, but after the intensity of Stanford Geophysics it was like getting a degree in School – bits of everything but very little depth. If you are going to go to business school, get a degree in finance or accounting or marketing or something specific rather than a generalist MBA. But I digress.
When I was accepted into UCLA the MBA program was ranked #7 nationally. When I graduated it was #18. Add on that the job market in 1991 was pretty dire and no one was hiring non-traditional MBA graduates. I had a wonderful interview with the Chief Entertainment Technology Officer at Disney, but it went nowhere. So I spent a few years doing business strategy consulting to the environmental industry.
The 1990s saw the birth of interactive media, and west Los Angeles was a hotbed of creativity and innovation in that space. I became very active in the community. In 1997 I produced a New Media Marketing event at Loyola Marymount in LA. A headhunter asked one of my panelists if she’d be interested in working for a studio. She said no, but go ask Phil. After some back-and-forth the headhunter arranged an interview with the hiring Studio executive. It was the Chief Entertainment Technology Officer at Disney! I was not going to mention that we met 6 years earlier. But when I walked into his office the first thing he said was ‘if I had hired you 6 years ago I could have saved the finder’s fee.’
I spent 10 years in the Corp. New Tech and New Media Group within Corp Strategic Planning as the VP Digital Industry Relations. I helped lead the transition from film to digital production, and helped Disney standardize and futureproof technical contract language worldwide. I provided technical support to the lawyer-negotiators at multi-Studio, multi-Industry, and government meetings. One of my favorite memories; I was at a meeting of Studio CTOs at Universal. Jerry Pierce, who was Universal CTO at the time, said ‘welcome to the war room. I don’t know why they named this room that.’ I looked around at the movie posters on the wall and said ‘because we’re surrounded by bombs?’ My boss, who was sitting next to me, laughed quietly to himself.
After 10 years I was just burned out. The company was downsizing, so I took a package and consulted to the Broad Foundation on the future of museums. But that didn’t last long.
I got a call from the head of the ETC@USC asking if I’d like to come run a project around 3D. The Entertainment Technology Center at USC is part of the School of Cinematic Arts but it is entirely funded by the major Studios and supporting entertainment industry companies (ex. Dolby, Technicolor) to advise them on the future of entertainment technology. Put another way, we are chartered to always be looking for the next next new thing. We study something until it emerges as a useful tech, then instead of monetizing our knowledge we move on and start over from scratch. Put another way, for a small membership fee we help other people make lots of money, find strategic alliances, learn from the next generation of creators, and find promising student hire prospects.
I joined in 2009 and rode the hype cycles for 3D (movies, TV, audio, printing), display tech (2K, 4K), and most recently immersive technology (virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality and everything associated with it (spatial audio, haptics, scent, …)). Like everyone else on the planet, we are now exploring ways to bring artificial intelligence into the entertainment / engagement / immersion mix. Aside from working on aspects of “your digital friend who’s fun to be with” (quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), I’ve been trying to find a structured way of dealing with the ethics issues around AI. I also run student competitions at USC to learn from the next generation of creators and consumers. The one I am running now, which will be finished by the time you read this, is a self-serving one focused on bridging the generation gap in the creative industries. In a nutshell; How can we forge alliances between the legacy community who have a deep knowledge of the storytelling arts and the rising filmmakers/creators helping shape the new tools and resources? What would they like the organizations and institutions around them to do to support their idea? I hope to learn from them where I can fit in as the world rapidly changes… and I move on.
I plan to leave the ETC@USC this January. I am calling it retirement for the administrative paperwork, but actually I want to 1) help start-ups with strategy and bus dev, 2) help investors select start-ups to fund, and 3) do more public speaking – the kind where they cover my travel and expenses.