by Brad Stone
Over the next few weeks, Bezos would be ubiquitous in Hollywood. He was the target of a joke in Jimmy Fallon’s opening monologue at the Golden Globes (“He actually arrived yesterday, but there was no one around to sign for him”). That night, he hosted one of the buzziest after-parties of the evening in the Stardust Ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hilton. Casey Affleck collected the Golden Globe for best actor in a dramatic film; the following month, he won the equivalent award at the Oscars, despite a gathering storm of controversy involving past allegations of sexual harassment levied against him by former colleagues.
Amazon was now mentioned in the same breath as Netflix, another Hollywood upstart composing a radical future for the entertainment business. But inside Amazon Studios, far away from the glamour, tensions were rising. Independent movies like Manchester by the Sea and niche TV hits like Transparent, about a Jewish family in L.A. navigating issues of gender identity, garnered acclaim and accolades. But they were not the kind of mainstream entertainment that could attract large audiences around the world and nurture other parts of Bezos’s e-commerce empire.
So Bezos issued an edict to Roy Price and the already embattled executives at Amazon Studios. It would hover above them like the sword of Damocles and contribute to an unlikely chain of events that would remove the luster from Amazon’s Hollywood effort and temporarily embroil it in controversy: “I want my Game of Thrones.”
* * *
It had all started, as these things usually do at Amazon, with a counterintuitive decision by Bezos that confounded his colleagues and looked smart only with the passage of time. In late 2010, Amazon was one of several companies selling online access to an identical catalog of movies and TV shows. Customers could spend a few dollars to stream a title once over the internet or they could pay more to “own” it and access it repeatedly.
Meanwhile, Netflix had introduced an $8-a-month service totally independent from its original DVD-by-mail program; it allowed subscribers to stream the older TV shows and films in the company’s digital catalog at any time. Even though Netflix’s library generally did not include new releases and the company was not yet producing its own content, its customers, as well as investors, were responding favorably to its push for a less restrictive and more customer-friendly future for home entertainment.
Amazon executives had periodically considered acquiring Netflix over the years but always considered the price too high and so never seriously pursued it. Now it seemed like they had missed their chance—the Los Gatos, California, company was evolving into a serious competitor. Characteristically, Bezos was unwilling to cede a significant opportunity to a rival. He asked Bill Carr, the vice president in charge of digital music and video, to come up with a way to compete in the emerging business of subscription video on demand, or SVOD. They met frequently over the course of the next few months, and then one day Bezos presented the answer himself: they would offer a subscription video service for free—to members of Amazon Prime.
To Carr and other execs, the idea was perplexing. Prime, originally $79 a year, guaranteed Amazon customers that their purchases would show up in two days without an extra shipping charge. Bezos now wanted to define Prime as something different and less transactional: an all-access entry pass to a library of digital content. “I didn’t get it at first,” Bill Carr said. “But what I had learned at that point of my career is that when Jeff comes up with a novel idea, you listen carefully, ask a lot of questions to get clarification of how to think about it, and then come back to him later with details.”
In retrospect, the solution was ingenious. Amazon customers would have balked at paying extra for a service that was inferior to Netflix’s more established offering. Introducing streaming as a “free” benefit—people do tend to gravitate toward free things—could tip some Prime members into rationalizing their annual membership fee, even if they only ordered from the site a few times a year. (Amazon would then raise the price of Prime twice: to $99 in 2014 and $119 in 2018.)
These were still lean times for Amazon, so Carr was given what he felt was a considerable budget, of around $30 million, to launch the service, called Prime Video. He had no idea that four years later, Amazon executives would be gathering to consider paying $240 million to license a library of programming from 20th Century Fox, including hit shows like 24. During the meeting, they debated whether Amazon had ever spent that much on anything in its twenty-year history, including the new headquarters they were building a few blocks away from South Lake Union in Seattle’s Denny Triangle neighborhood.
They did the deal and didn’t stop there. Amazon licensed the hour-long drama Justified from Sony Pictures, Downton Abbey from PBS, Orphan Black from BBC America, and countless other popular shows. Netflix struck a wide-ranging deal with Disney for its Marvel and Pixar films and animated classics, as well as with ABC for shows like Scandal and The CW for Gossip Girl. In 2014, Amazon had forty thousand titles in its video catalog; Netflix had sixty thousand. Reed Hastings and Netflix stayed ahead of Amazon at every turn. “Netflix drove our strategy a lot,” Carr said. “I’m not ashamed to say we learned from them.”
By then, Jeff Wilke had handed over the supervision of digital video to his more artistically inclined peer on the S-team, Jeff Blackburn, the former jock who was now the company’s cerebral and soft-spoken M&A and business development chief. In addition to overseeing the content licensing spree, Blackburn supervised the effort to get the Amazon Prime Video app onto as many set-top boxes, video game consoles, and smart TVs as possible. In late 2015, his team started negotiating with cable giant Comcast to preinstall the service on the new Xfinity X1 cable box, which would end up in tens of millions of U.S. households. But according to several executives who worked on that long-gestating deal, one of Blackburn’s underlings, a temperamental manager named Jim Freeman, became uncomfortable with the look of Prime Video on the Comcast home screen and declared, “Netflix would never do this deal!”
The talks died. A few weeks later, Comcast did the deal with Netflix instead, even though Reed Hastings hadn’t made many friends there by calling its proposed 2014 merger with Time Warner Cable anticompetitive. Comcast would end up promoting Netflix in all of its marketing. Amazon had to tuck its tail between its legs, and a few years later reached its own agreement with the cable company.
Such duels with Netflix to acquire premium programming and distribution were expensive, exhausting, and in the end, did little to change the competitive balance of power. Both companies had learned a valuable lesson, gleaned a generation ago by premium TV channels like HBO and Showtime: by competing to pay top dollar to license various films and shows, they had enriched the Hollywood studios and other entertainment industry incumbents but ended up with cash-draining services that were difficult to distinguish from each other.
If they wanted to attract viewers with truly unique video offerings, it made much more sense to try to create hit TV shows and films themselves.
* * *
The companies reached this conclusion early in their race to develop streaming video services. At Amazon, Bill Carr dispatched one of his deputies, Roy Price, to set up an outpost in Los Angeles and explore the idea of original programming.
Having grown up in Beverly Hills, Price was literally descended from Hollywood royalty. His maternal grandfather, Roy Huggins, was a well-known film and TV writer who in the 1950s was branded a Communist, blacklisted, and forced to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He later created hit shows such as The Fugitive and The Rockford Files. Price’s father, Frank Price, was a Tinseltown giant: he ran Columbia Pictures in the late seventies and early eighties and released classics like Gandhi and Ghostbusters in addition to Universal Pictures and overseeing The Breakfast Club, Back to the Future, and the infamous Howard the Duck. The younger Price grew up among celebrities—vacationing in the Bahamas with Sidney Poitier and learning to swim from Lee Majors, star of The Six Million Dollar Man.
Price had worked at
Disney and McKinsey & Company before joining Amazon in 2004 to create the company’s digital video strategy. For years he advocated for creating shows and films to distinguish Amazon’s video offering. He was, in company parlance, strong on the “think big” leadership principle, capable of elucidating his ideas persuasively in six-page documents. Bezos was also attracted to the idea, but typically, he wanted to rethink the entire Hollywood development process. He looked askew at the “gatekeepers” who used their subjective judgments to decide what people could read or watch—with only a marginal success rate, as evidenced by the many shows with weak concepts that flopped.
Bezos proposed an entirely new approach, which he dubbed “the scientific studio.” Anyone would be able to send in a script, not just the L.A. and New York elite; customers and independent judges could evaluate them and their accompanying storyboard illustrations. Their feedback would then produce objective data that Amazon could use to decide what it should actually make. “It was very much a Jeff idea,” Price later said of the original thesis for Amazon Studios. “Instead of a 10 percent hit rate, we would have enough data where we could move it up to 40 percent.”
Starting in 2010, Amazon invited anyone to submit screenplays and offered hundreds of thousands in cash prizes for the best scripts. It didn’t work, of course. Accomplished writers stayed away and overall the submissions weren’t very good. It took eight years for Amazon to retire the system (which produced one program for kids: Gortimer Gibbons Life on Normal Street and another pilot, Those Who Can’t, which was made into a series by the WarnerMedia network truTV). But Bezos quietly acknowledged that he would need professionals after all to identify and cultivate promising concepts.
In 2012, Price started traveling regularly from Seattle to L.A. and hiring content development executives to oversee development and strategy for comedy and kids’ programs. Back then, Amazon was still avoiding sales tax in California, so the group was set up as an independent subsidiary called the People’s Production Company and forced to carry special business cards and use non-Amazon email addresses. They shared an office with IMDb, the Amazon subsidiary that maintains a popular database of films and TV shows, in Sherman Oaks, above a Fuddruckers restaurant, before later moving to a slightly more upscale but bland office complex in Santa Monica called the Water Garden.
That year, Price and Bezos tweaked their original premise. Amazon Studios executives would meet with agents and writers, review scripts, and identify pilot opportunities. But then they would let viewers vote and help influence their decisions on which shows should be extended into full series. In April 2013, two months after Netflix scored an immediate hit by debuting its first show, from the production company Media Rights Capital—the political drama House of Cards—Amazon unveiled its first so-called “pilot season.”
Customers could sample fourteen pilots. The political comedy Alpha House (operating in the same vein as HBO’s subsequent, funnier Veep) and a dot-com sendup called Betas (ditto for HBO’s Silicon Valley) were among those that made the cut. But when the seasons premiered later that year, they garnered media attention but gained little traction with viewers. Writers on those shows received positive feedback from Amazon, but later expressed disappointment about the absence of Nielsen ratings for online shows, or any significant promotional support.
With deputies overseeing drama, comedy, and kids’ programming, Price honed a unique sensibility for Amazon Studios: it would produce high-quality episodic shows that were more akin to serialized films than stand-alone installments. Taking high-quality indie films as their inspiration, and sensitive to the fact that customers already had lots of TV options, they set out to create TV that was distinctive and sophisticated, and that added to people’s entertainment selection. The programs would offer windows into unfamiliar lifestyles and worlds. They would pursue the kind of programs that the major networks, obsessed with pumping out different versions of mainstream fare like NCIS, would never touch. Amazon “had the brand of a retailer,” Price said. “We had to surprise people and focus on quality.”
The approach paid off quickly. Among the pilots that Prime members could sample in early 2014 were Mozart in the Jungle, about hijinks in the fictional New York Symphony; Bosch, about a hardscrabble LAPD detective; and Transparent, featuring a transgender matriarch named Maura Pfefferman. Bezos brought the Amazon Studios team to Seattle that March to discuss which pilots to pick up. The Transparent pilot had garnered a litany of gushing reviews praising it for its daring subject matter and open-ended final scene, but it wasn’t the most watched of the new shows. Bezos nevertheless started the meeting by walking into the conference room and declaring, “Well, I guess we’re going to pick up Transparent.”
They did, and the show furnished Amazon Studios with a reputation as a backer of visionary creators and historically overlooked material. In January 2015, Transparent became the first streaming series to win a Golden Globe—both for best musical or comedy TV series, and best actor for Jeffrey Tambor.
If Price had entertained the fanciful notion that he would be the public face of this success, it was quickly dashed. Bezos wanted to attend the awards ceremony too. He brought MacKenzie and sat at a table during the Golden Globes with Price; his head of comedy, Joe Lewis; show creator Joey Soloway; and the principal cast.
Later, they attended after-parties hosted by HBO and Netflix. With his wife by his side, Bezos basked in the glow of Hollywood adulation. “She always seemed like she was having a good time,” one Amazon Studios exec recalled of the couple at Hollywood events, “while he seemed like he was having a great time.”
A few weeks later, Bezos appeared on CBS This Morning with Tambor and Soloway to accept more kudos for Transparent’s win. He said that Amazon had backed the show because it was a remarkable piece of storytelling. “Every time we do something, we don’t want to do me-too,” he said. “We’d like to do some wrinkle on it, some improvement, something that customers have a chance of responding to. Transparent is a perfect example.”
* * *
Bezos, a film lover, was now excited by the idea of creating original content. It was evolving into another significant long-term bet, alongside Alexa, the Amazon Go stores, the expansions in India and Mexico, and Amazon Web Services. To the surprise of Amazon Studios execs, who often wondered whether the chief of a $100-billion-dollar company didn’t have better things to do, he regularly asked them to come to Seattle to discuss which shows to green-light. “The best part of this pilot is that it’s only a half an hour,” he complained in an early 2015 debate over whether to pick up The New Yorker Presents, a docuseries by the iconic Condé Nast magazine.
Bezos asked trenchant questions but deferred to Price’s judgment even when he disagreed with it. “You can do what you want, but I’d sleep on it if I were you,” he said of the news magazine show. The following week, Price and his head of drama, Morgan Wandell, picked up the dystopian drama The Man in the High Castle, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick, a few other series, as well as the relatively inexpensive The New Yorker Presents. One Amazon Studios executive who was at the meeting said she wondered to herself at the time whether Price was defying a direct order.
By then Price was working full-time in L.A. and ingratiating himself in a new Hollywood lifestyle. He had separated from his wife and moved to an apartment downtown. Amazon Studios employees couldn’t help but notice his transformation. Back in Seattle, he had favored sport coats, khakis, and the occasional bow tie. Now in Los Angeles, he slimmed down, started wearing Valentino shoes and a leather jacket, got the logo of the seminal L.A. punk band Black Flag tattooed on his right shoulder, and bought a Dodge Challenger muscle car. “He presented as someone who was going through a midlife crisis,” one employee said.
But Amazon was on a roll. Mozart in the Jungle was well reviewed and would make Amazon Studios the first network to win consecutive Golden Globes for Best Comedy in years. Bezos and Price’s strategy was validated—and so Price was empowered to tak
e bigger bets and to move faster. He had hired a friend, Conrad Riggs, a former partner of Survivor producer Mark Burnett, to develop reality TV shows for Amazon. On a trip to London in June 2015, Riggs went to a Who concert with Jeremy Clarkson, the former host of BBC’s reality TV show about cars, Top Gear, who had been ousted from the program for verbally and physically attacking a BBC producer. Riggs observed that Clarkson was a bigger star than even the members of the classic rock band. Amazon then outbid Apple and Netflix to sign him and his cohosts to a three-year, $250 million deal to make a similar show, The Grand Tour. It was one of the largest deals in unscripted television history. Riggs recalled that Bezos approved the expenditure via email in “about 15 seconds.”
Roy Price could seemingly do no wrong. The next month, he attended Comic-Con in San Diego, where Amazon was screening the first two episodes of The Man in the High Castle to the annual gathering of sci-fi and fantasy aficionados. For Amazon Studios, the show represented the possibility of tapping the growing audience for big-budget genre fare, and at its first showing at Comic-Con, it got an exuberant reception by fans. Studios executives were exhilarated.
That night, Price enjoyed a celebratory dinner with colleagues and the show’s creators, which included numerous champagne toasts. Afterward, Price shared an Uber to an after-party with Amazon colleague Michael Paull and someone he was meeting for the first time: Isa Hackett, the show’s executive producer and the daughter of legendary science fiction author Philip K. Dick.
There are several versions of what happened in that car and at the party after, which differ on some of the substantive facts. Everyone agrees, though, that Price, who relished casual and occasionally boundary-pushing banter, had had a few drinks and made several off-color jokes and sexual comments to Hackett, whom he knew was gay and married. Hackett found the remarks to be inexplicably vulgar and inappropriate.