"Other people didn't hear it," she recalls. "The act was doingpoorly in the U.K., and the record wasn't getting air play. It wastotally out of left field. But we fought through and took it to thelabel. We signed it, put out the record and it went platinum,"meaning the record sold more than a million copies. Today, with hitsingles such as "Sultans of Swing" and "Money for Nothing," DireStraits is one of the more successful bands in the world. And Bergis the director of the East Coast A&R department.
So what did she hear that others didn't? "All A&R people say thesame thing," Berg explains. "They're all looking for good material,with potential for growth. But after that what you're doing isinstinctual - a feeling that will push you one way or another. Youhave nothing else to go on, because the industry is so unpredictable.It's amazing how everything can be in place, everybody agrees, youput your money behind it - and nothing happens. Or you can do verylittle for the record, and it takes off and becomes a hit. That'swhat makes it more interesting than selling mayonnaise. It has to dowith the nation's psyche, which is quite unpredictable."
Call it instinct, call it intuition, call it gut feeling.Whatever it is, it's a guiding force behind the decision-makingprocess in the entertainment industry. But while most producers,editors and executives rely on intuition, they also admit that theyreally never know what will fly. Their successes are trumpeted as evidence of theirgenius; their failures are hushed up, until a string of flops getsthem fired.
Even cognitive scientists who have studied the decision-makingprocesses of all kinds of experts are baffled by how entertainmentexperts fathom the tastes of a nation. "Our work doesn't explain muchabout creativity," admits Paul Johnson, a cognitive psychologist atthe University of Minnesota who teaches in the departments ofmanagement sciences and computer sciences. "Expertise is something weacquire; taste is something you just have. You might call it taste,you might call it creativity, you might call it genius. These arethe things computer science can't explain right now. Maybe it neverwill."
Most entertainment experts can't explain even their owndecision-making processes. As editor, president and publisher of G.P. Putnam's Sons, Phyllis Grann has personally edited more than 30best-sellers since 1980, but she confesses, "I don't know what I doand I'm afraid to analyze it because maybe I'll wake up some morningand it will be gone." Despite this, she insists that "we are not hugegamblers. It's easier to go with your own taste if you're nottalking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. I just hope that ifI can't put a book down, there are thousands of other people whocan't put it down either. I'm my own best customer."
Grann's reliance on personal taste is echoed by Bob Asahina, asenior editor and vice president of Simon & Schuster's trade bookdivision. Two years ago, Asahina was one of the first editors to seea book manuscript by an unknown teenage writer named Brett EastonEllis. "From the first paragraph of the book," he recalls, "I wasstunned. I knew from the first paragraph of the first page that Iwas in for something. Obviously I had to read the rest of the bookto see what happened. But I knew that he had talent, I knew thestory was going to develop, I knew the characters were interesting.I knew the sensibility was intriguing. That was all evident rightaway. No hesitation at all."
The book, Less Than Zero, went on to become a major best-seller."It got to the point where nobody could believe it was the success itwas," Asahina says. "It astonished everyone. I would love to tellyou I had a magic formula by which I recognized this book would be abest-seller. But I had no idea. I was as surprised as anyone else."
Asahina's success is all the more surprising because although hehad been a managing editor, he was new to book publishing when hediscovered Less Than Zero. Like Berg, he had no specialized trainingor experience in the field in which he so obviously excelled.Clearly, Asahina says, the intuitive ability to pick the hits "is notsomething you can teach in business school." Some experts disagree. Weston H. Agor, for instance, is presidentof ENFP Enterprises, a management consulting firm specializing in theuse of intuition in decision-making. He also is professor anddirector of the master's degree in public administration program atthe University of Texas at El Paso and has written two books onintuition, including the forthcoming The Logic of IntuitiveDecision-Making: A Research-Based Approach for Top Management.
"I see intuition as a very logical skill," Agor says. "It's aproduct of real-life experience, of working with one's own self, ofgood training and education - all divided by insecurity and the fearof being replaced. The question is, are you comfortable enough with yourself to take the steps your intuition is telling youto take? You have to be open to the cues, even if they don't fitwith the way you think things are supposed to be."
Agor bases his views on two studies. In the first, completed in1982, he tested the intuitive skills of more than 2,000 managers in across section of organizational settings. He found that top managersused intuition significantly more often than middle- or lower-levelmanagers to make decisions.
Two years later Agor retested the executives who had scored inthe top 10 percent on intuition and found that most saw intuition asa way of drawing on past experiences and hard data - a way ofintegrating information and pointing the executives to a conclusion.Intuition was especially useful when uncertainty was high or whenconcrete facts were limited, precisely the situation entertainmentexecutives find themselves in on a daily basis.
Agor's belief that intuition is a logical skill based mainly onexperience is shared by B. Donald Grant, president of CBSEntertainment and one of the most powerful men in television. "Afteryou've been in the business for some time, you learn to avoid some ofthe big mistakes," Grant says. "The key to success is to avoid thedisasters as much as to pick the hits. That's experience."
To Grant, his success in launching "Dallas" is "very simple. Ithas to do with my background. At one point in my career, I was withdaytime TV, and the serial is a staple there. We had tried oncebefore to put on a nighttime serial, `Executive Suite,' but theaudience didn't watch that. Then `Dallas' came along. The idea was interesting, the story was interesting, the characters wereinteresting. But I never knew or felt it would be one of the biggestTV hits of all time, which it turned out to be. But nobody knows.Some people question whether the television business is an art, butit's clearly not a science."
Figuring out what makes a hit is so difficult that someexecutives concentrate instead on impressing colleagues and lookinggood. "Some studio executives have gone with their instincts so manytimes and failed, or they have ignored their instincts so many timesand been rewarded, that they no longer know what their gut feelingsare," says independent producer David Bombyk, who coproduced last year's hit movie "Witness" and isnow under contract to Disney. Instead Bombyk says, they spend theirtime seeking a director, star or screenwriter with that certainHollywood something - "heat."
"There's a mysterious aura that comes over certain projects orwriters," says Bombyk, whose most recent project was his role asproducer of "The Hitcher." "There's a buzz that gets out thatsomething's hot. An executive will grab a director's project andthen gloat about how he snapped up the hot item of the moment. Itmakes you look like you know all the answers so you can get lured toa better job somewhere else. I think it's unfortunate anddestructive."
But there's another approach to making decisions, an approachthat eliminates the politics, the fuzziness, the egotism, the mystery- and the art. "I look at the publishing industry as a factory whoseproducts are books," says Robert L. Durkin, project director ofRemington Books Inc., whose current project is the marketing of abook by Remington's president, Victor Kiam. The book, Going For It!How to Succeed as an Entrepreneur, came out this spring, but thepublic already knew Kiam as the man who said in a TV ad that he likedthe Remington shaver so much that "I bought the company."
Now Kiam is trying to buy his way onto the best-seller lists byspending an unprecedented $4 million on TV commercials in the firstyear and placing the book in nontraditional outlets, such asdrugstores and discount chains. As director of the project, Durkinhas test marketed the book in three cities, a step unprecedented inpublishing.
Market testing is already common, however, for Harlequin Booksand other genre publishers. Harlequin believes that its readers'specialized tastes and willingness to buy the same kind of book overand over justified its spending more than $3.5 million in the pastfive years on researching everything from how much sex to how old theheroine and hero should be, what kind of jobs they should have, whatthe blurb on the back should say and what kind of cover artwork ismost appealing. As Cheryl Stewart, product manager of HarlequinBooks North America, puts it, "If you have to judge a book by itscover, we make sure ours will do the job." Television networks do their best to increase predictability byusing staggering amounts of market research. Since its earliestdays, CBS has tested every single show with the CBS Progam Analyzer.About 88,000 people a year are recruited off the streets of New Yorkand Los Angeles, shown a program and asked to express their like ordislike for each part by pressing a red or green button. They thenfill out a long questionnaire about how they liked the show over all,how they felt about particular characters, whether they'd recommendthe show to friends and so on.
Based on all the information gathered over all those years, thenetwork can predict the success of any show accurately 90 percent ofthe time, according to Dave Poltrack, CBS's vice president forresearch. But, he says, it's that last 10 percent that accounts forsuch surprise hits as "All In the Family."
In sum, entertainment decision-makers have three places to lookfor information on which to base their choices: their own taste,their colleagues' taste and the public's taste. But since there isstill no explaining taste, the decision will always be a judgmentcall or just a blind guess, and the outcome always remains uncertain.
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