Amazon Unbound

by Brad Stone

  Outside the Uber, Price insisted that Hackett take a selfie with him, explaining that if people believed they were dating, it would help promote the show. Hackett was dismayed. Inside the party, she encountered Price again, and he allegedly continued to blurt out graphic sexual remarks.

  Clueless, Price didn’t realize he had offended Hackett and the next day tried to add her as a friend on Facebook. But she was infuriated. She reported the incident to an executive at Amazon Studios, who referred the matter to Amazon’s legal department. Amazon then contracted with an L.A. firm specializing in workplace misconduct to get to the bottom of the incident. One of its senior investigators started to interview Amazon’s Hollywood employees about their boss. They also talked to Hackett, who told them that she hoped the deplorable incident was a catalyst for significant changes at the studio.

  The overall picture that emerged was unflattering. Several of Price’s female employees in particular were disapproving, saying he had a pattern of making inappropriate jokes in the workplace. They described some of his off-putting habits—for example, squatting in meetings with his feet tucked underneath him, as well as closing his eyes and rocking back and forth. They also criticized him as a poor manager who delegated most of his responsibilities and seemed to prefer going to meals with celebrities and chronicling them for his Instagram feed.

  Amazon had an opportunity to quietly remove Price from his position of leadership and avoid a future calamity. But it did not. He had helped conceive and build the studio, which was showing signs of promise. Bezos’s weak-kneed fondness for builders appeared to be shared by others at Amazon, including Jeff Blackburn. Price was also remorseful and wanted to apologize to Hackett, though Amazon’s lawyers asked that he have no further contact with her. They told him to stop drinking at company parties and to get additional training on workplace conduct and how to be a better manager. The company later said in a statement that it “acted appropriately in responding to the incident, including by hiring an outside investigator.”

  When a female Amazon Studios employee asked a friend in the legal department what had become of the investigation, and why it hadn’t resulted in any obvious disciplinary action, he told her that the company had concluded of the allegations: “That’s not the Roy we know.”

  * * *

  Roy Price had kept his job but now faced a more ominous threat: Jeff Bezos was fully attuned to the opportunities and challenges of building a successful film and TV business. And when Amazon’s CEO paid close attention, he generally wanted everything to be bigger, bolder, and more ambitious. The company spent an estimated $3.2 billion on Prime Video in 2016 and nearly $4.5 billion in 2017. Even its usually agreeable board of directors was apprehensive over the growing expenditure and asked pointed questions about it. “Jeff was ahead of us in thinking about the relationship between content and Prime” is how former board member and venture capitalist Bing Gordon put it.

  Bezos contended that the media business enhanced the appeal and “stickiness” of Amazon Prime, which in turn motivated people to spend more on Amazon. “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes,” he said on stage at a technology conference in 2016. At least some of his Hollywood employees were dubious of that characterization. They did not consider themselves to be shoe salespeople, although everyone appreciated having the backing of a profitable e-commerce company subsidizing their creative risks. They tracked each show and analyzed how many people watched and then converted from free Prime trial periods or extended their current membership. But there was little evidence of a connection between viewing and purchasing behavior—especially one that justified the enormous outlay on video. Any correlation was also obfuscated by the fact that Prime was growing rapidly on its own.

  The truth was this: Bezos wanted Amazon to make TV shows and films. He could see that the decades-old way that TV shows and movies were produced and distributed was changing and sought a principal role for Amazon in that future. As in the early days of Alexa, the Go store, and Amazon India, the economic justification might be flimsy today, but opportunities for making money would always present themselves tomorrow.

  At the time, the company was preparing to introduce Prime Video in 242 countries and to charge for it separately; the project, code-named Magellan, would be Amazon’s introduction to many parts of the world where it didn’t yet operate an online retail business. Video was the introductory product for new markets, as books had once been. But the third season of Transparent, which revolved around the main character’s exploration of gender confirmation surgery, wasn’t the greeting that Bezos had in mind for countries like Kuwait, Nepal, and Belarus.

  Thus the stage was set for a series of tense meetings between Bezos and the Amazon Studios team during the latter half of 2016 and throughout 2017. It was now utterly pressing that they find a big show akin to HBO’s blockbuster Game of Thrones. But Price was still putting out middling fare like One Mississippi, Good Girls Revolt, and Mad Dogs. He had overseen the acquisition of Manchester by the Sea, which led to awards and the memorable party at Bezos’s L.A. house, but that had also associated Amazon with the accusations of sexual harassment against star Casey Affleck. Price also laid out an astonishing $80 million for Woody Allen’s first TV series, the poorly received Crisis in Six Scenes. (Price was a big Allen fan and had a long-standing relationship with Allen’s longtime agent, John Burnham; colleagues said the series was Price’s “dream project.”) Not only was Price doing business with a filmmaker whose work would later be enveloped in controversy, he was still making prestige American content for awards consideration at precisely the time that Bezos wanted to abruptly change direction and turn Prime Video into a broadly appealing global business.

  Price understood Bezos’s directive but argued that those kinds of shows took years to develop. In January 2017, he hired an Israel-born TV exec, Sharon Tal Yguado, who had helped distribute the popular zombie series The Walking Dead around the world. The hire, which Price didn’t properly alert colleagues about before it was publicly announced, created another set of internal frictions inside Amazon Studios. Nevertheless, Tal Yguado bonded with Bezos over their love for literary sci-fi sagas like The Culture and Ringworld. Later that year, Tal Yguado would help Amazon secure a reported $250 million deal to acquire the global rights to undeveloped material in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books.

  For Bezos though, the changes were not happening fast enough. In combative meetings, he impatiently demanded his Game of Thrones. Price tried to reason with him. There was not going to be another breakout hit like it—the next one would be something that felt as fresh and daring as HBO’s fantasy blockbuster had. He asked for more time and argued there were promising candidates on the way, like a series based on Tom Clancy’s character Jack Ryan.

  Bezos also quizzed Price on whether he was sufficiently testing titles and concepts with an online focus group of early viewers that Amazon had built, called the preview tool. Among other things, the tool had helped steer a Billy Bob Thornton show, originally called Trial of the Century, to a winning new title, Goliath. But Price reported that the tool was unreliable—you can’t use the same crowd-sourcing principles to gauge the virtues of story ideas as you can to appraise the value of kitchen appliances on the aisles of an endless virtual store. The development executives often had to move fast to close competitive deals with in-demand TV producers and filmmakers; sometimes they had to bypass the data and just go with their instincts. Price also felt that crowd-sourcing creative concepts was suspect: shows like Seinfeld and Breaking Bad were unpopular at first, after all. Do you trust storytellers, or do you trust data; the ingenuity of artists or the wisdom of the crowd?

  Bezos had encountered the same questions at the Washington Post, where he had pressed for more ways to measure article popularity but ultimately deferred to the judgment of his newsroom experts. At Amazon, which was his own personal canvas for ruthlessly remaking industries with computer science, experimentation, and
copious amounts of data, he was more impatient. He wanted a scientific approach to creative decision-making and to see results quickly. And on that point, Bezos and Roy Price were increasingly not aligned.

  * * *

  By early 2017, Amazon had moved into its new thirty-seven-floor tinted-glass office tower, dubbed Day 1, like its previous headquarters a half mile away. Bezos’s old ideas about corporate anonymity were now impractical for a company of Amazon’s prominence. The building was flanked by the first Amazon Go store and bore a giant yellow light sign with the computer science phrase “Hello World” on it, looking out over the park on its eastern side.

  Bezos’s new office and spread of conference rooms were on the sixth floor—the same as the old building—so he could take the stairs and get in extra exercise. That March, Amazon Studios executives traveled to Seattle to meet him there, amid the busy, clanging construction of another skyscraper across the street and the three interconnected Amazon Spheres—company meeting places that, when finished, would double as nature conservatories.

  In one of the conference rooms, the frustrated CEO laid into the tepid storytelling of The Man in the High Castle. “The execution is terrible,” he complained. “Why didn’t you guys stop it? Why didn’t you reshoot it?”

  Bezos continued to reproach Price. “You and I are not aligned,” he said. “There must be a way to test these concepts. You are telling me that we are making $100 million decisions and we don’t have time to evaluate whether they are good decisions? There must be a way for us to see what will work and what won’t, so we don’t have to make all these decisions in a vacuum.”

  After more debate, Bezos boiled it down: “Look, I know what it takes to make a great show. This should not be that hard. All of these iconic shows have basic things in common.” And off the top of his head, displaying his characteristic ability to shift disciplines multiple times a day, then reduce complex issues down to their most essential essence, he started to reel off the ingredients of epic storytelling:

  A heroic protagonist who experiences growth and change

  A compelling antagonist

  Wish fulfillment (e.g., the protagonist has hidden abilities, such as superpowers or magic)

  Moral choices

  Diverse worldbuilding (different geographic landscapes)

  Urgency to watch next episode (cliffhangers)

  Civilizational high stakes (a global threat to humanity like an alien invasion—or a devastating pandemic)

  Humor

  Betrayal

  Positive emotions (love, joy, hope)

  Negative emotions (loss, sorrow)

  Violence

  Price helped riff on the list and wrote it all down dutifully. Afterward, Amazon Studios executives had to send Bezos regular updates on the projects in development that included spreadsheets describing how each show had each storytelling element; and if one element was missing, they had to explain why. But Price also told colleagues to keep the checklist from the outside world. Amazon shouldn’t dictate to accomplished auteurs the ingredients of a good story. Good shows should break such rules, not conform to them.

  Price’s risky decisions seemed to be compounding. He authorized a docuseries on Novak Djokovic, the premier men’s tennis player in the world, which shot hundreds of hours of footage before the Serbian star got injured and withdrew from the project. He also struck a deal with Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn for a violent and plodding crime series, Too Old to Die Young; Matthew Weiner’s meandering show The Romanoffs; and a never-titled work by director David O. Russell that was supposed to star Robert De Niro and Julianne Moore, about a family that ran a winery in upstate New York. The first two shows were canceled after their initial seasons; the last, produced by the Weinstein Company, blew up before production started, amid the explosive revelations of producer Harvey Weinstein’s history of grotesque sexual misconduct.

  According to several former employees, Weinstein had an amicable relationship with Bezos, Jeff Blackburn, and Roy Price, and traveled frequently to Seattle to help steer Amazon through its early challenges in Hollywood. It was a relationship that later no one was particularly eager to discuss. But Prime Video employees said that at one point, the notorious producer worked with Amazon to develop a service called Prime Movies, which would have given Prime members a certain number of free tickets to see some films in cinemas. The program, which presaged the doomed startup MoviePass, never got off the ground.

  Price’s deals with Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein would later reflect poorly on his judgment. He displayed other questionable conduct as well. In 2017, Price got engaged to actress and writer Lila Feinberg and tried to persuade his employees to acquire her idea for a TV series, called 12 Parties. Colleagues pointed out that this was a conflict of interest; so instead it was optioned by the Weinstein Company. They also complained that Price was developing his own script, called Shanghai Snow, featuring stereotypical ethnic characterizations and gratuitous sex and violence, that was received poorly by anyone who read it.

  Many female employees at Amazon Studios in 2017 continued to be unhappy with their boss or their work environment. One described a conference room at the Amazon Studios office with walls that were covered in portraits of Jeffrey Tambor, Woody Allen, and Kevin Spacey (star of an Amazon film, Elvis & Nixon). All three would fall in the gathering backlash against sexual misconduct, known as #MeToo. The movement was also about to ensnare Roy Price and entangle Amazon in a scandal that its executives thought they had put behind them.

  * * *

  That October 2017, a few hundred or so tastemakers, thought leaders, authors, musicians, actors, producers, and their families were whisked by a fleet of private jets from the Van Nuys Airport in L.A. to Santa Barbara. From there, they were taken by another convoy of black sedans to the nearby Four Seasons Resort. The five-star hotel was closed to the public that weekend, as was the Coral Casino Beach & Cabana Club across the street. Counselors greeted each family, with one for every child. Waiting for the guests in their hotel rooms were thousands of dollars of free swag, including premium luggage to transport it all back home.

  This was Campfire, Amazon’s private retreat for the literati and glitterati. The company started the annual event in 2010 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as a weekend salon for storytellers and their families. In 2016, when the event grew too big for its original venue, Amazon moved it to Santa Barbara. Bezos liked to call it “the highlight of my year” and seemed to love it when others did the same. The shift to Southern California happened to coincide with the evolution of Amazon’s ambitions from the book business to the broader entertainment world.

  The weekend, entirely paid for by Amazon, consisted of talks, lavish meals, intimate conversations, and hikes. Bezos was bringing together some of the world’s most interesting people and relished being in their company. He usually sat in the front row of every talk and was the center of much of the attention, with his arms draped over the shoulders of his wife and four kids, laughing louder than anyone. Guests were asked to sign confidentiality agreements and never to mention or discuss Campfire with the press.

  The guest list that year included Oprah Winfrey, Shonda Rhimes, Bette Midler, Brian Grazer, and Julianne Moore, as well as indie actress and musician Carrie Brownstein, the novelist Michael Cunningham, Post executive editor Marty Baron, and musician Jeff Tweedy. Benjamin Berell Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, gave a talk. Also invited to the festivities were several Amazon Studios executives, including Price, who brought his fiancée, Lila Feinberg.

  As Campfire was set to begin, Price stood on perilous ground in the company. The previous month, Hulu and HBO had collected a host of Primetime Emmys while Amazon was shut out. The Wall Street Journal acknowledged this shortfall in a critical story that reported that Amazon Studios had passed on hits like The Handmaid’s Tale and Big Little Lies. The article quoted David E. Kelley, the creator of Lies as well as Goliath, calling the entire operation “a bi
t of a gong show,” and saying of Amazon, “they are in way over their heads.”

  But that was the least of Price’s problems. For the past few months, enterprising L.A. journalist Kim Masters had been pursuing the story of Price’s inappropriate comments to Isa Hackett after the 2015 Comic-Con and Amazon’s subsequent internal investigation. Numerous outlets, including the New York Times, BuzzFeed, and the Hollywood Reporter, which hadn’t shied away from other #MeToo reporting, passed on the story. Price had personally hired some of the same attorneys who had represented Harvey Weinstein. But in August, the technology online news site The Information printed a short version of Masters’s piece. Hackett declined to comment, other than calling her encounter with Price a “troubling incident.”

  By the start of Campfire weekend, #MeToo momentum was building. Ronan Farrow had just published his damning investigation into Harvey Weinstein’s behavior in the New Yorker. (Weinstein had attended and spoke at previous Campfires but was now persona non grata.) On the afternoon before the first day, actress Rose McGowan, a Weinstein victim, started tweeting at @JeffBezos that she had told Roy Price of Weinstein’s crimes and urged Amazon Studios to “stop funding rapists, alleged pedos and sexual harassers.” Price had told her to report the crime to the police. Still, Amazon had done plenty of business with the Weinstein Company and with many other Hollywood figures accused of sexual harassment and other illicit behavior. That was an impeachable fact in a fraught social climate—and a particularly embarrassing one at the start of Amazon’s big weekend.

  Then the Hollywood Reporter, where Masters was an editor at large, reversed its stance and published her full story. This time, Isa Hackett had gone on the record and confirmed the “shocking and surreal” experience and inappropriate things Price had said to her in the Uber after Comic-Con more than two years before. Amazon Studios executives were required to be at Campfire a day before the event officially started, so Price was in his hotel suite when the story hit; Feinberg, his fiancée, was downstairs with other Amazon Studios execs and started to cry when she read it on her phone.