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Entertainment Partners used AWS cloud services to bring the Hollywood’s back office infrastructure into the digital age STUDIO SYSTEMS
he most powerful thing in Hollywood isn’t technology or talent. It’s payroll. “I know there’s a joke that
Studios loved the idea. In the production of a film there are many different fee structures, union regulations and specially negotiated contracts involved that processing payroll on a production by production basis is an accountancy nightmare. A TV series didn’t want to have to hire an actor, then terminate her, then hire her again, then terminate her and so on… they were happy to let Entertainment Partners deal with the entire headache. The company grew, continuing to acquire production management resources, including Central Casting and the industry standard budgeting and scheduling software, Movie Magic, and it became 100% employee owned. When the founders retired in around 2002, Entertainment Partners was in a position to be the go-to solution for a host of behind-the-scenes processes, including developing a private insurance product which took a load off the studios who were concerned about the bureaucratic challenges posed by President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
“It was then we realised that the studios are looking to us to keep them compliant and, in fact, to modernise them,” says Cogan. “As much as technology has revolutionised the film industry, it is all contributing to what appears on screen. There are no development dollars going into revolutionising those back office processes that haven’t changed since the days of Cecil B. DeMille.” CALLSHEETS IN THE CLOUD Entertainment Partners decided to take up the task of digitising the operation of the industry’s back office systems, from time cards that crew can fill out on their smartphones to calculating carbon offsets for productions. The need for flexibility, scalability and universal access meant a speedy adoption of cloud-based infrastructure. Initially these were built on Entertainment Partners’ own on-premises servers. “In our private cloud, we had full control of everything. But as we scaled, it became more and more challenging,” says Darren Ehlers, Entertainment Partners’ SVP of Product Management. “To have the security and other requirements in place became more challenging to manage, and so we made the decision to migrate everything to AWS.” Entertainment Partners’ migration of its entire business to AWS cloud services took about nine months from start to finish. “It went flawlessly. Our users saw no impact whatsoever,” continues Ehlers. “They left on a Sunday morning and came back on a Monday morning and off they
there are no rocket scientists in Hollywood, but one of our co-founders was, in fact, a NASA rocket scientist,” says Ron Cogan, VP of Communications at industry payroll giant Entertainment Partners. “His brother was in casting and said ‘If you want to apply your software skills to our industry, you should know that there is no standard cost reporting tool that the industry uses. If you can crack that, you’d be set.’ So he came out to Hollywood and created the standard industry cost report and quickly realised wisely that the largest spend in production is labour. He thought, ‘If we can hook up some payroll component to this, that might be really synergistic.”
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