CHAPTER 18
It all began for me in the late 1980s with a small company based south of Seattle: SkyPix, the world’s first direct digital broadcast satellite system. According to its business plan, a one-time customer fee of $699 would buy pay-per-view Hollywood releases with none of the ghosting or snow that plagued analog cable TV reception of the day. Less than two feet in diameter, the SkyPix dish was much smaller and cheaper than the C-Band (known colloquially as BUD, for “big ugly dish”) that I’d been using on Mercer Island. And I was impressed by satellite’s potential. With a signal that could be beamed nationally from day one, SkyPix wouldn’t be burdened by cable’s capital-intensive, dig-a-trench-to-the-home infrastructure.
In 1991, three years before the launch of DirecTV, I took a flier and invested $10 million. A year later, amid an SEC investigation alleging securities fraud, SkyPix collapsed into bankruptcy without selling a single dish. It was a bloodbath, but it opened my eyes to the potential of new digital delivery technologies. If my experience with computers had taught me anything, it was never to underestimate how quickly a new platform could bring a wave of change. How would a fire hose of digital bits, blasted into the home, affect our consumption of video, or data, or music? What were the opportunities?
By November 1992, months before the first graphical Web browser, I was telling BusinessWeek that we were on the cusp of a “Wired World” with vast ramifications. “At some point,” I said, “everybody in the industrialized world will have access to computers, and they’ll all be wired together.” My vision dated back to the earliest days of Microsoft, when I’d talk Bill’s ear off about a connected future in which services and information would be accessible—anytime, anywhere. In my 1977 interview with Microcomputer Interface, I predicted that the personal computer would far outstrip the social impact of the pocket calculator.
… the computer—and I’m talking about the home information retrieval system—I think that’s a much more powerful concept than a machine that just adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides. Definitely. If you take [the computer to] its limit, perhaps you could have groceries delivered, take care of all your bills and, if you’re a programmer, you could do your work at home, never leaving the house. That’s a dramatic change.
As of the early 1990s, social applications were just beginning to take root. Our human drive for connectivity had spurred the recent development of CompuServe and America Online, and it wouldn’t stop there. Like the personal computer, the Wired World fit my criterion for a big idea, the marriage of two powerful elements. On March 31, 1992, I told the New York Times:
If you look down the road, what you see is the pervasiveness of high-bandwidth data communications and completely inexpensive computing power. If you combine those two things, there are many interesting things you can do.
At the time, digital fiber-optic technology and new compression techniques held the promise of lightning-fast, two-way multimedia networks, a global platform for new families of products and applications. High-speed data delivery—the so-called information superhighway—would redefine how we talked and learned and experienced entertainment. The computer would evolve from a tool for work into a medium for content of all sorts.
These developments weren’t speculative, in my view. A high-bandwidth network would be built, and people would use it—I was sure of that. Less easy to foresee was who would do the connecting. Satellite or cable? Telecom or wireless, or something yet unimagined? But regardless of how the delivery system played out, I was determined to be part of it. I invested in more than a hundred Internet, media, and communications companies, expecting some to pan out and some not. It seemed wise to spread out my bets as the Wired World took shape.
I FIRST NOTICED America Online in the late eighties, when there was no Internet consumer presence to speak of. Entrée to the embryonic online network required special software for access to a rudimentary bulletin board system—or, for a friendlier graphical user interface, one of the new network service providers. The genius of America Online (in its pre-acronym days) was its accessible online experience for computer novices. Simple to install, it was the Internet with training wheels: one-stop shopping for proprietary content (news, weather, games, stock quotes), plus embedded links to other companies’ “storefronts” before the dawn of modern Web sites. As the engine for the public’s early embrace of e-mail, America Online also helped introduce chat rooms and instant messaging. A budding powerhouse of interactivity, it was a natural partner for my Wired World, and in 1992 I bought fifty thousand shares. Convinced that the stock market had underestimated the value of connecting tens of millions of users, I began building my position in earnest that summer. Ten months later, I owned 15 percent of the company.
My hope was for America Online to move from a low-bandwidth, dial-up network to the inevitable high-speed future. In the spring of 1993, I traveled to Virginia to meet with CEO and chairman Steve Case and his team. As I laid out my ideas for a broadband network, I could feel the chill in the air. Case and I were oil and water. He was wedded to his dial-up walled garden, even if it meant limiting content to what an analog network could handle, and found my ideas about broadband too far ahead of his game plan. It probably didn’t help that I was still Microsoft’s second biggest stockholder and a member of its board. Though Microsoft had yet to do much of anything online, Case perceived it as his greatest threat.
Actually, he had it backward. I wanted to use my stake in America Online as a hedge against my holdings in Microsoft and other Wired World investments. As I kept snapping up shares, Case’s board adopted a poison-pill threshold, first at 20 percent (which I’d already passed) and then at 25 percent. Once triggered, the provision would dilute my ownership percentage and make it next to impossible to mount a hostile takeover. That was never my intent, since takeovers rarely work in tech companies. But I took the hint that my active collaboration wasn’t welcome.
I held on to my piece of the company until the summer of 1994, when Bert Kolde attended an open house at Bill Gates’s home on Lake Washington. Microsoft had recently targeted the network services business with an initiative called Blackbird, a precursor to the Microsoft Network. Bill approached Bert in a buffet line on the lawn, and the conversation turned to my interest in America Online. Bill said, “Why would Paul want to compete with us? I’m just going to tell Russ Siegelman [the Microsoft Network leader] to keep losing money every year until we have the number-one market share in online. How does it make sense to compete with that?”
When Bert relayed Bill’s remarks to me, they had the intended effect. A year earlier, I’d attended a meeting at Microsoft where Bill had told Case that he was thinking about buying all or part of America Online—or, à la Khrushchev, that he might decide to “bury” the smaller company. Now it sounded like Bill had settled on a burial. I could see Steve Case trapped in a two-front war, besieged on one flank by Microsoft and on the other by the emerging World Wide Web. Suddenly my stake seemed less attractive, especially without any synergy between America Online and my other ventures. I dumped my stock and took a $75 million profit.
Within a year, as online traffic exploded, Bill realized that the threat wasn’t America Online, after all. It was Netscape Navigator, the newly hatched Web browser that became the centerpiece of the Internet. Blackbird was aborted. In May 1995, Bill issued his famous memo, “The Internet Tidal Wave,” and fast-tracked the release of Internet Explorer. The browser wars were on.
Out of Bill’s crosshairs, AOL thrived through the go-go years of the late nineties. The company had obvious points of vulnerability, from its slow adoption of broadband to the growing migration of content to the Web. But the tech boom masked AOL’s weaknesses, and sometimes scale alone carries the day, at least until something a lot better comes along. In January 2000, five years after I’d sold my stock, AOL announced the acquisition of Time Warner. When I first heard the rumors, I thought that AOL’s market cap (an outlandish $163 billion) was wildly overvalued. Just three years later, the New York Times would call the merger “the greatest enduring monument to the folly of the Internet boom.”
Still, one hard fact remains. Had I held on to my 24.9 percent of America Online, I would have been sitting on a $40 billion bonanza, more than all the money I’d make from my stake in Microsoft.
AS I LOOKED for more commercial opportunities in the Wired World, the ticket business seemed like a natural fit. It had a mass clientele, and I could add value with a range of interactive features: search functions, preorders, seat location graphics. In November 1993, after Microsoft backed off from a last-minute bid, I paid over $300 million for 80 percent of Ticketmaster. Thrown into the deal were the services of the company’s tough-talking president and CEO, Fred Rosen. Since joining Ticketmaster in 1982, Fred had built it from a group of straggling regional ticketing services into a billion-dollar behemoth that dominated the industry. He cut deals with venues and paid preemptive fees for exclusive rights. Nobody dared cross him.
I thought that Fred and I should get to know each other, so I flew to Los Angeles to join him for dinner and then Steely Dan’s reunion tour at the Hollywood Bowl. We got great Ticketmaster seats, tenth row center, and Fred slept through most of the concert. He wasn’t much of a music fan.
Ticketmaster had built its dominance via two modes of customer service. Say you wanted to go to a U2 concert. You could: (a) stand in line at one of Fred’s retail outlets at a record store or (b) call a Ticketmaster phone bank and hope you wouldn’t be on hold for too long. My solution was to move the operation online. We could create a Web site and link our service to sites in the sports and entertainment fields, from the Super Bowl to the Rolling Stones’ next U.S. tour. These were fresh ideas; Amazon.com was two years away, and e-commerce still in its infancy. A few people made airline and hotel reservations online with AOL or Prodigy, but the Web had yet to catch on as a way of selling entertainment.
It definitely hadn’t caught on with Fred Rosen. Though his business had been computerized for years, he fought me tooth and nail over taking it online. Every so often, I’d ask him how development of the new ticketing system was going, and Fred would metamorphose into a high-decibel, old-school promoter. “I’m not selling tickets online,” he’d roar, “because the banks won’t take the credit cards and the customers won’t trust the security! You have to go with me on this, Paul!”
I’d hold the phone three feet from my ear as I tried to get a word in: “But Fred …”
“You don’t understand this business, Paul! I’ve been doing this forever, and people aren’t going to print out their tickets at home—it ain’t gonna work, Paul! I’m not going to do it! And the tickets can be forged or stolen, and then what do we do?”
“But Fred …”
“My customer isn’t the guy who buys the ticket. My customer is the venue, and they’re not going to go for this! It’s just not gonna fly!” Finally, after twenty minutes of bluster, he’d run down and mutter, “It’s OK, we’re making progress. It’s coming along.”
Two years later, Fred grudgingly gave his blessing to our ticketing Web site. It was a complex piece of software engineering that tackled credit-card clearance, user authentication, and real-time database updates. At last all was at the ready. When customer number one had completed the first transaction, our Web people called him and said, “Congratulations, you just bought the first concert ticket in the history of the Internet! Can you tell us why you decided to buy online?”
The man said, “Because I don’t like talking to people, and I don’t like talking to you.” And he hung up.
Rosen fatigue took its toll. In 1997 I sold my stake in Ticketmaster to Barry Diller’s Home Shopping Network, receiving equity in return in Diller’s USA Networks, Inc. I sold that stock in 2002 and doubled my original investment. Barry parted company with Fred, and before long Ticketmaster was conducting 90 percent of its business online.
AROUND THE TIME I bought Ticketmaster, I was addressing a central question for the Wired World: What kind of content would people want most from a broadband network? To find an answer, I founded a start-up called Starwave as a new-medium software publishing company and hired an ambitious president, a former Microsoft executive named Mike Slade. We brainstormed as a test market of two. We were both obsessive sports fans, and our first idea was probably our best: to develop the world’s most comprehensive sports information source.
Sports is intrinsically data driven, the natural raw material for computer software. A fair portion of the population tracks it on a daily basis. Mike and I wanted more in-depth coverage than we could get in the Seattle Times, whose sports section could barely hold all of the box scores. We wanted to keep up with games inning by inning, even pitch by pitch. Most of all, we wanted stats, lots of stats, that people could sort as they pleased.
Existing Internet services were simply dumping the Associated Press sports wire online, which meant their products wouldn’t be hard to beat. After flirting with a pair of AOL competitors, who quickly went belly up, our new plan was to partner with a recognized sports brand and publish directly to the Internet. The Web was sparsely populated, and page downloads slower than slow; Mike’s staff was building a Web site for an infrastructure that didn’t yet exist. But our strategy turned out to be correct. An independent site, with hyperlinks to many others, could deliver richer, more imaginative content than any walled garden. And, as we’d discover, it could make a lot more money.
Sports Illustrated passed, but we found a warmer reception at ESPN, the young TV network then owned by Cap Cities. After making a splash with a half-hour national broadcast called SportsCenter, ESPN was eager to expand online. Under a five-year licensing deal we signed in 1995, Starwave would generate original content and operate the Web site. ESPN would lend its on-air muscle to promote the site with twice-hourly address crawls. Revenues would be divided.
We turned on the site that spring, and SportsZone reinvented sports coverage on the fly. It combined the local focus of newspapers with the depth of magazines, the immediacy of TV, and the real-time power of the Internet. The site debuted during the NCAA’s Final Four weekend, which happened to be held in Seattle that year, and we seized the opportunity to post the first online sports video clip: Bryant “Big Country” Reeves shattering a backboard at a Kingdome practice session. Though the clip was the size of a postage stamp and wouldn’t work without a high-speed connection, it caused a sensation.
SportsZone pioneered real-time game stats. (Our NBA scores were updated three times a quarter, which was unheard of.) We were the first to organize wire-service copy into interactive hierarchies (sports/baseball/clubhouse/Giants/Barry Bonds), the first to offer an interactive database of statistics. We had the original sports fantasy games, online polling, and live sports chats. By Labor Day, we were supplementing SportsZone’s free “front porch” with a paid premium area, which demonstrated that strong online content could sell ads and win subscribers.
We quickly built a massive content base of 60,000 text pages, 6,000 photos, 2,500 audio clips, 1,000 video clips. SportsZone became the world’s biggest sports section, hands down. But only 7 percent of American households were online in 1995, almost all of them on dial-up modems. Low bandwidth rendered much of our site too slow to be practical. We had the best product of its kind, but how would it reach the public?
Fortunately, we hadn’t reckoned with the size of the “goof off at work” market. People might not feel comfortable cracking open a newspaper at their desk, but they could steal two minutes to check on a fantasy team on their computer screen. SportsZone traffic spiked highest on Monday mornings, when young men used Ethernet hookups at their offices to peruse the weekend scores and recaps. We had another surge at noon, as people headed out to lunch and the West Coast folks were sitting down, and another at five, as people prepared to head home. By mid-1996, the site was recording 7.5 million hits a day, up to 12 million during the summer Olympics in Atlanta. Our core demographic, affluent males under thirty-five, would maximize dollars per click. SportsZone didn’t merely change the pattern of sports news consumption. It set the standard for commercial, content-based Web sites.
Encouraged, Starwave developed sponsored sites for the NBA, the NFL, and NASCAR, and also branched into entertainment. Another Starwave site, Outside Online, broke the Mount Everest story by Jon Krakauer that later became the bestselling book Into Thin Air. The New York Times rewrote our posts and credited Outside Online, one of the first uses of the Internet as a real-time news medium.
In 1998, shortly before our licensing contract was set to expire, I sold my interest in Starwave for $350 million to Disney, ESPN’s new owner. SportsZone’s legacy survives today as ESPN.com, still the leading sports content Web site.
I NEVER FORGOT my sneak peek into the future at Xerox PARC, one of a long line of seminal think tanks that dreamed up the electric light, the phonograph, and the transistor. By the early 1990s, it seemed to me that we needed a similar wellspring for digital technology and media. Most R & D in the field was skewed to short-term development, with an eye to that year’s profits. Who would take a longer view and bring home the next wave of breakthroughs?
In 1992 I founded Interval Research in Palo Alto, California, just a short walk from PARC. To direct it, I hired David Liddle, a former PARC scientist who’d led the development team for the Xerox Star, the commercialized version of the Alto. In announcing Interval, I said:
There are a number of interesting technologies just over the horizon, but they aren’t ready for a typical two-year product cycle. … David and I have a vision of future computing that is far from anything we see today. We intend Interval to pursue that vision.
Interval was designed as a for-profit venture with an exploratory approach, what Wired would call “an unusual hybrid between an industrial research lab and a venture capital fund.” Or as Liddle put it, “a PARC without a Xerox.” Like PARC, Interval had a mandate to incubate next-generation applications. Unlike PARC, it aimed to turn those innovations into licensed products or spin them off as new companies. The plan was for it to become self-sustaining within ten years.
At full strength, Interval employed more than a hundred scientists and researchers, recruited from top institutions like Stanford, MIT, and Bell Labs. We had stars like Lee Felsenstein, designer of the Osborne 1, the first portable computer; Jim Boyden, a father of the inkjet printer; and David Reed, inventor of the communications protocols that made the Internet possible. The staff was nothing if not eclectic. Liddle hired journalists and virtual-reality artists, anthropologists and musicians, even a parapsychologist. Artists were essential, as Liddle told Fortune, to push new technology “to the edge of what’s possible. … You need unreasonable people doing things for reasons they can’t verbalize.”
On paper, Interval had it all: talent, resources, and the time to pursue the frontiers of technology. Its leader was ferociously smart, articulate, and unafraid of risk. In the end, though, the lab was a case study of good intentions gone wrong. My heart sank when David told me that he relied on the researchers to decide when to discontinue their own projects, a prescription for what I call the running-man syndrome. Picture a man running uphill toward a goal. He gets tired and thirsty, but he’ll keep running until management applies a fitness test and winnows out ideas without promise. “When Interval began, we just did cool things,” one of our video artists told Wired. “It was 100 percent research, 0 percent development.” Lacking focus on the marketplace, Interval got sidetracked into paranormal phenomena, interactive robots, and alternative art installations—or “sidelines and weirdness,” as one of the scientists put it. In our effort to buffer people from bottom-line pressures, we went too far the other way.
The Wired World was a wide-ranging vision, and Bill Savoy, the point man for my private investment firm, Vulcan Capital, was a compulsive dealmaker. I should have slowed him down. By the midnineties, involved in 140 companies, I wasn’t able to give Interval sufficient direction or keep it focused on the Internet. Over its eight-year life span, Interval spun off seven start-ups. They were generally ill-conceived or premature, and all but one or two foundered in the marketplace. None made real money.
Among the lab’s more tantalizing, ahead-of-its-time ideas was the Mouse of Life, a “magic wand” that could be waved at any barcode for instant product information, from the supermarket price of a can of corn to the ownership history of a used Buick. (This concept is now reemerging as a cell-phone application.) Then there was WebPad, an experimental touch-screen platform—an amalgam of a Web browser, e-mail terminal, GPS mapping display, PDA, and home television remote control. With a 10.7-inch display and a weight of less than two pounds, WebPad was a conceptual forerunner of the iPad. But it would have cost at least a thousand dollars to retail, a major obstacle to consumer acceptance back then.
In 1999, I made a last-ditch stab to redirect Interval toward interactive video and broadband cable television projects. After a foray into three-dimensional cameras, a progenitor of 3-D TV and movies, I conceded defeat. Though Interval developed several potentially groundbreaking ideas and registered about three hundred patents (some of which may turn out to be quite valuable), the lab and its spin-offs had proven ineffective in exploiting them. In April 2000, after investing $300 million, I shut it down. Like others who have tried to walk the same path, I concluded that Xerox PARC was probably unique to its time and place. It would not be easily replicated.
These days, I’m disinclined to invest in completely open-ended research. I’ve learned that creativity needs tangible goals and hard choices to have a chance to flourish.
IN THE EARLY nineties, the Ticketmaster business had me flying to Los Angeles twice a month and into the Hollywood orbit. My higher profile brought an invitation to the Sun Valley summer retreat hosted by Herb Allen, the financier with deep ties to the entertainment industry. I met David Geffen there and found that we had common passions, notably art and music. Geffen was smart, charming, and full of advice on how to run your business and your life.
He was a great persuader. One day he called me with the news that he was starting a new film studio called DreamWorks SKG with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. It was a masterful soft sell. “I don’t know if you’re interested,” he told me, “but you can have your financial guys contact my guys. We’d love to have you be part of our team.”
I didn’t need much coaxing; I was flattered that he’d asked and intrigued by the venture. I’d been a passionate movie buff since growing up with genre triple-features at Seattle’s Colonial Theater. (Sometime later, when Seattle’s classic movie palace, the Cinerama, was about to be torn down, I stepped in to buy it and restored it to its former glory.) I’d already been scouting movie studios as possible investments before Geffen called.
DreamWorks represented something special, the first new major Hollywood studio in decades. It was a chance to get involved with some of the most creative minds in the business: Spielberg, the genius auteur; Katzenberg, the razor-sharp perfectionist; Geffen, the consummate dealmaker. Together they seemed ready to join me in creating a new convergence of entertainment and digital technology. Maybe we’d use content from the studio to enrich the value of the broadband pipe. Or we might form a strategic partnership with Starwave. It was the beginning of the dot-com bubble, and anything seemed possible.
In March 1995, I put up $500 million, the single biggest investment I’d made to that point. In hindsight, it wasn’t such a great deal. While my half-billion dollars bought an 18.5 percent stake, the three principals put up a total of $100 million for two thirds; I paid eighteen times more per point of equity. Worse, I was taking the lion’s share of the risk without equivalent voting rights.
The principals’ pitch was that they’d be putting in valuable sweat equity. But as Tom King wrote in The Operator, the deal was structured according to Geffen’s MO:
In his previous businesses, Geffen had proven to be a risk-averse executive, masterful at limiting overhead. But with such capital intensive plans as building an animation company from the ground up, Geffen realized that staggering overhead would be unavoidable for DreamWorks. Thus, he brilliantly employed another tactic that had worked so well for him in the past: Use other people’s money.
I didn’t plan to be a passive investor in DreamWorks. While I wouldn’t have dreamed of intruding on the moviemaking, I was given to believe that I’d have a say in the company’s broad direction. A press release described me as a member of the studio’s board of directors who would “also have input on DreamWorks’ strategy, particularly in the areas of multimedia and interactive development.” The three principals went on to say:
We are excited about our partnership with Paul because his vision and technology expertise complement our interests in film, animation, music and television. Paul Allen was one of the first people in the world to realize technology would bring about a fundamental, positive change in the way people live and work—he’s the perfect partner for a company that is committed to building the digital studio of the 21st century.
I have no way of telling whether their professed enthusiasm was authentic, but one thing is certain. My creative opportunity would fall short of my expectation.
The studio took three years to release its first movie, and the television and record departments lagged as well. In 1999, I took a 50 percent stake in a joint venture by DreamWorks and Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment. It was called Pop.com, a short-film production company for the Internet, what initially seemed like the perfect Wired World application. The problem was that we overestimated both the adoption curve for broadband and the appetite for short-form videos. Millions were entering AOL chat rooms or downloading songs from Napster, but less than one in ten households had high-speed connections. Without one, a six-minute short could take up to an hour to load. Pop.com closed a year after it opened. Like SkyPix, it was hatched before its time.
I had great moments with DreamWorks. When American Beauty won the Academy Award for best picture and I met Kevin Spacey at an after-party, he was over the moon, clutching his Oscar as though he’d never let it go. Then there was the time Spielberg invited me onto the set of The Lost World, the Jurassic Park sequel. For hours I observed a laborious sequence of takes and retakes and camera setups. For someone uninvolved in the process, it was like watching beautiful paint dry.
Katzenberg periodically ushered board members to dog-and-pony shows at the studio, but he seemed resistant when I suggested that he shift completely from cel-based animation to the computer-generated format used in Shrek. (He got there a few years later. Today, all DreamWorks animated films are made in 3-D computer-generated imagery, or CGI.) I did make one aesthetic contribution, however. At a Shrek screening, I had the nagging sense that something was wrong. Then it came to me that the title character’s footsteps weren’t disturbing the ground. I pointed it out to Katzenberg, who told me later that he’d gotten it fixed.
Its thoroughly modern image notwithstanding, DreamWorks treated investors in the Old Hollywood tradition: Give us your money, and we’ll introduce you to some interesting people. But we really don’t want your input. The board’s input was minimal. Katzenberg would outline the company’s plans and tell us that everything was good, and tomorrow would be even better. DreamWorks was 180 degrees from the self-flagellating culture I’d known at Microsoft.
By 2003, with record companies devalued by file sharing, the studio’s music division had been sold. Plans for interactive computer games and other Internet ventures were shelved with the dotcom crash, and the live-action division continued to falter. The studio came back to me periodically for cash, more than $200 million in all, and my stake grew to 24 percent. After a series of bombs, notably Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, my investment was under water. By the terms of our agreement, I could soon exercise my option to start cashing out. It no longer seemed prudent to wait.
In 2004, after hammer-and-tongs negotiations, DreamWorks agreed to spin off its animation division—its one consistent source of profit—in an initial public offering. I divested slowly to avoid destabilizing the stock, and got another chunk of my investment back when the live-action division was sold off to Viacom in 2006. The following year I resigned from the board.
When the smoke cleared, I wound up more or less doubling my money. After a dozen years in the glamorous, high-wire world of film production, I would have done about as well with a certificate of deposit. I just didn’t mesh well with Hollywood. I could never tell how much of what people told me was real.
Even so, DreamWorks failed to sour me on the art of moviemaking. I continued to work with Richard Hutton on my own film company, Vulcan Productions. We followed a distinctly non-Hollywood formula of bare-bones budgets (as little as $1 million or less for live-action releases), creative freedom for directors, and generous revenue-sharing deals. Our documentaries (notably Evolution and Rx for Survival: A Global Health Challenge) won three Peabody awards, as well as an Emmy for Outstanding Informational Programming. The U.S. Defense Department will be distributing 200,000 tool kits with This Emotional Life, our series on human psychology, for returning servicemen and their families.
Among our feature films, Hard Candy and Where God Left His Shoes won outstanding reviews, while Far from Heaven, with Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid, earned four Oscar nominations. Films like those reminded me of the magic of great acting and directing and screenwriting. And how much I enjoy sitting in a dark room, watching a great story unfold.