Finding out what sparked China's entertainment business success with Peter Loehr

Peter Loehr is a famous American film producer and executive who worked in China for most of his career. He also produced "The Great Wall," which earned a record-breaking $334,900,000 at the box office.

In this episode, Peter recounts how he stumbled into a career in the entertainment business in Japan, Taiwan, and China when he should have been studying law. He also talks about the great films he produced.

Key Takeaways:
• In 1997, the entertainment industry in China was not yet booming.
• IMAR which stands for "I Am A Rock" was the first founded independent film production company in China.
• Spicy Love Soup was the first film in China that targets the younger audiences
• CAA has done amazing work with Chinese entertainment.
• Legendary Entertainment was acquired by Wanda Group.

Best Moments:
- Peter Loehr was sent to Taiwan to manage Amuse in Taiwan.
o Well, again, after working in a music, I think for four years in Tokyo, where I sort of worked across different sections of the company, so I was in the international section and I worked on music and I got to work on films and I got to work on television, and after four years of sort of jack of all tradings things, I said to Mr. Osato, "I would love to work in film production." And he said, he would put a think on that. And he said, "No, actually, we're going to send you to Taiwan because the future of this company is Asian and we want you to open an office there and you should learn about another culture. Another language is going to make you ultimately a better executive. And that's what you're going to do." And at the beginning, it wasn't really what I wanted. And I went to Taiwan. We opened up a tiny office, and luckily the market there was booming in music and television, and we were able to do a lot of licensing work of Japanese TV shows into Taiwan and make the small office quite profitable pretty quickly.
o (00:07:47.50-00:08:40.00)

- Peter shares how they approached actors to be a part of their film.
o And  that got complicated, so there was a lot of discussions, and the film was so low-budget. And we were not shy about approaching really major actors and saying, "Please read our script, and we'd love to have you in the movie. And by the way, we have no money." And one actress said to me, "I think you guys were adorable. The fact that you would even say that number I should be insulted, but I think the fact that you'd even say it out loud. Sure."
o (00:16:02.50-00:16:26.00)

- Peter shares that his father brought 20 friends to fill up the theatre because he thought no one is going to watch the film
o And on Shower, that film got invited to the "New Directors Section" of the New York Film Festival, which is a huge honor because the New York Film Festival sort of selects films some other festivals around the world that they feel need to be curated and shown to a New York audience. So it's sort of like the best of the best get invited, and it was this amazing thing, and I told my dad and he thought, "Oh my God, my son's Chinese film is going to come to New York." Nobody's going to watch it. So he tried to bring like 20 friends to fill up the theater and when he got there, he realized it was sold out and they were going to have to leave a later showing. And it was this sort of shock that my son maybe is actually doing something semi-meaningful.
o (00:23:06.50-00:23:41.50)


XCD: Post-production, transcript & show notes

Transcript

1:39

​Rich Robinson: Peter Loehr, ladies Awesome to see you, my old friend. Looking well.

Peter Loehr: 1:46

Hi everybody.

Rich Robinson: 1:47

Yeah. Thanks so much for joining the pod. I've been threatening you for years that I'm going to chase you down like TMZ style and extract all of your amazing anecdotes in sort of "Loehr and Journey." And it's so great to see you.

Peter Loehr: 2:02

Great to be here, Rich. Thanks for having me.

Rich Robinson: 2:04

Oh yeah, it's great. So, we got to know each other in Beijing. And you're a legendary legend of legends in the film, music, entertainment industry all around Asia, around the world. I'd heard about you for so long and so many years, and I finally got to know you socially, and then you came and spoke at my MBA class, and I just loved your journey. And take us back to yesteryear, when you were bitten by a radioactive gramophone or one of those old moving picture machines, back growing up and your path to China or to Asia.

Peter Loehr: 2:37

Yeah, so, I studied international politics in school. I was always very interested in film and music and graduated from university with a huge student debt burden. I ended up going to work in a law firm as a paralegal, a firm called "Skadden, Arps." And I studied Japanese in school, graduated, had a rotary scholarship to go study in Japan as in my year abroad, and graduated school fluent in Japanese, and had the opportunity to go in the late'80s to work at this law firm and really be focused on Japanese deals, which was an amazing and a great learning experience. And I think it's where I met what I would consider the first of several really key mentors in my life. The guy who ran the Skadden office in Tokyo, where I ended up working for a year. Tony Slow was this sort of legendary to use your word "lawyer," who was one of the first foreign-registered lawyers in Japan. He spoke fluent Japanese, fluent Chinese. He was this statesmanlike figure and was amazing mentor to me and taught me a lot. And I think my experience to that firm over time, really was a strong base for the career. We ended up in entertainment, which is litigious and covered by contracts. And I learned a ton. One of the first deals I worked on was the Sony Columbia deal. And I got some insight into the entertainment business through that and through the workings of a major studio that was being sold to international entity. It was great experience. And, in so doing, I got even more excited by the prospect of being in the entertainment industry and decided that instead of going to law school, which was the original plan, I would defer that for a year and go see if I could do something that I really aspired to, that was really exciting for me. So I ended up deferring law school, going to work for a Japanese entertainment company called "Amuse Inc." And at Amuse, I sort of really met the second mentor of my life and of my career actually, dad and a lot of other great people are mentored as well but career-wise, the chairman of Amuse, the gentleman called Mr. Osato, or Chairman Osato as we called him. Was a fantastic mentor, taught me the ins and outs of the business in very high level situations, and forced me to find my own footing, sort of trial by fire every day. And I worked at Amuse for about six years. Five in Tokyo and one in Taiwan.

Rich Robinson: 4:48

Wow. And you were there, like, during peak Japan too, right? Set against that backdrop of super intense Japan.

Peter Loehr: 4:53

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's 30% talent, 30% hard work, and 40% luck. And one of the things in my career that I've been incredibly lucky about was being in that Malcolm Gladwell, "right place at the right time" kind of thing, where I was lucky enough to be in Japan, really at the height of the Japanese economic boom, where people were taking chances and doing amazingly interesting things. And so, from '91 to '95, I was in Japan and Taiwan, as those economies were booming. And then, in '95, I moved to China and was in China throughout. And I guess we'll talk about that more later, throughout the opening up and booming of China, especially in the entertainment industry. When I got to China in 1997 when I released my first movie, the entire box office was a hundred million dollars. I think last year was 9.6 billion. So, you're looking at absolutely blind luck. When I went to Japan and started the entertainment business, people thought that was sort of funny, and interesting, and quirky. And when I moved to China to do what people thought it was crazy because there really was no entertainment business.

Rich Robinson: 5:51

But crazy like a fox though. Because I think you probably could take some agency in that. You could smell it, right?

Peter Loehr: 5:57

To be really honest, at the time I couldn't.

Rich Robinson: 5:59

I just threw you a soft-ball.

Peter Loehr: 6:01

I appreciate it. But I really can't take that 2020 hindsight credit. At the time, there were a lot of Chinese filmmakers I really wanted to work with. And I was fascinated by Chinese film and the stuff that was going on. And there was no such thing as a producer. And I thought that there might be a role for me in the amazing things that were happening. And so it was really creative more than it was.

Rich Robinson: 6:22

Yeah. So speaking of creative, I love this story that you shared with the MBA class, if you feel comfortable about it, talking about some of the music stuff that you did in Japan and some of the creative ways. You shook some stuff up there.

Peter Loehr: 6:34

Yeah, we worked in big teams, and there was amazingly creative things happening in the Japanese business, and I was fortunate enough to work with great Japanese bands like the Southern All Stars or Bakufu Slump. And I think at the time in Japan the music industry was, the second largest in the world. It was a CD-driven market. And it was a crowded marketplace, and people were doing amazingly creative things to market bands, subway advertisements, and just sort of across the board. And we worked in teams that did amazing stuff. I remember things like on the subway, not having enough budget to do the kind of subway that we wanted to do in hiring kids to sit on the subway, holding up the band's poster. There were things like that, that we did in the space of, "Hey, there's not enough money to do this, but we need to do something interesting, stand out from a crowd." And that is something that really, I think, served what I did in China later, because we started out really on a shoestring with no budget for anything, where almost all the marketing we had to do was going to be sponsor-driven. And we were going to have to be creative and gorilla-like, and the stuff that we did in Japan really informed that later process in China.

Rich Robinson: 7:38

Yeah. And then also, the fact that you had access to the chairman. I always think of Japan as very hierarchical — one of the most hierarchical places where you really have to kind of pay your dues. But you had sort of this intense, I guess almost like a chief of staff or right-hand man, turbo-charged mentoring through that.

Peter Loehr: 7:56

Yeah. I think Amuse was a really unique place, and we've got to lump that in with the 40% luck in my career. When I think of when I joined the company, there were about 150 staff. And we all sat in one big, giant room, and the chairman was sort of in the best spot in the room, but there were no walls. And over the years, the company expanded a lot, and now it's a listed company, and there are hundreds of staff in a beautiful office. But when I was there, it was sort of the beat, the company had, was very ascendant and certainly becoming dominant in the space. But it was early in the overall arc of the company. And Mr. Osato was a very unique guy. I mean, he saw the world, black and white, things, either interesting or stupid. You were either smart or stupid. And if you were aggressive enough and did some smart things, he would take you seriously. And I think I was lucky from the very beginning, I was the first international staff the company ever had. I was the first, I think, bilingual person that ever worked there. It was me and 150 Japanese entertainment people. And that is either a recipe for disaster or a recipe for really interesting things to happen. And luckily it turned into the latter, but it was very much a sink or swim place, and you just got thrown into situations and you dealt with them, and I think the company had, for a Japanese company, relatively high turnover, but also a group of incredibly talented people that I became very close with to this day. I'm still in touch with a lot of them. My time there was really special.

Rich Robinson: 9:10

Wow. Love it. And then, speaking of sink or swim, you also got thrown into the deep end, willingly, so into Taiwan from there? Which was a little bit of a zig in a way, but one that was, again, pretty prescient, and you kind of rode the music entertainment wave there, right?

Peter Loehr: 9:26

Well, again, after working in a music, I think for four years in Tokyo, where I sort of worked across different sections of the company, so I was in the international section and I worked on music and I got to work on films and I got to work on television, and after four years of sort of jack of all tradings things, I said to Mr. Osato, "I would love to work in film production." And he said, he would put a think on that. And he said, "No, actually, we're going to send you to Taiwan because the future of this company is Asian and we want you to open an office there and you should learn about another culture. Another language is going to make you ultimately a better executive. And that's what you're going to do." And at the beginning, it wasn't really what I wanted. And I went to Taiwan. We opened up a tiny office, and luckily the market there was booming in music and television, and we were able to do a lot of licensing work of Japanese TV shows into Taiwan and make the small office quite profitable pretty quickly. But at the same time, he had sort of left me in charge of the whole Asian region, and I was traveling pretty constantly. And I had the opportunity to go back and forth to China a lot. I was looking at Chinese films, I was meeting Chinese filmmakers, and I was traveling back and forth to China, and I realized there was no such thing as a producer. And that maybe this was time to go out on my own finally. So Chairman Osato I've mentioned many times already. He had gone out on his own at age 28 and formed the company Amuse after working at one of the biggest Japanese production companies and had been incredibly successful. And I was 28, I felt like this was my time. And that's where I sort of came across the second big mentor— well, third actually— in my career, which was the head of Rock Records, a gentleman named Chung Tuan. And when Sam heard I was leaving Amuse, he called me in and said, "Hey, if you're leaving, what are you going to do?" And I said, "I'm going to China and make an independent film company." And he said, "Well, how are you going to do that?" And I said, "I really don't know yet." But one thing I do know is I need to speak Chinese a lot better than I do now, which was not very well. And then I was going to have to read scripts and argue with directors about dialogue and nuances in Chinese, which was going to require a super high level. And so I said, "I'm going to sort of find my way here." And he said, "Well, why don't you take a year off, do the Chinese thing, come back in a year with a business plan?" So that's what I did. I went to Beijing Normal University and Beijing Film Academy at the same time. I went to Middlebury in the US first an intensive program. And then I went to China and took classes at two universities at once, Beijing Film Academy in the morning, Beijing Normal University in the afternoon. And for the first six months I really worked hard on the Chinese and started putting together a business plan, and I ended up putting together a 90-page business plan and showing up in Taiwan a year later with the plan, which ultimately Sam, Rock, and another great friend there named Lan Di Chang, who was running their sort of alternative music label called Magic Stone. They decided to back my crazy idea. I think, with the assumption on their part, they would fail after one film, and I'd come back and I'd work in music again, and it'd be an interesting experiment just to see. And ultimately, it worked. And that became IMAR, which stands for "I Am A Rock" for Rock Records, and that became first founded company.

Rich Robinson: 12:31

I did not know that. I did not know that Interesting. Yeah. Wow. Fascinating. And your first movie that you produced?

Peter Loehr: 12:37

So in 1996, we made a movie that came in 1997 called Spicy Love Soup.

Rich Robinson: 12:43

And my friends are like, "Di da laoai pangyo dai shur shur tad yeng." Like, you created something that's like, "zeitgeist," a classic for that time, my friend. Like, and it's like Chinese people can't believe they're like,"There's a foreigner behind that." And of course, you're gonna say it's a team effort. Yes. But it was like you got up to bat and you were like, "It's pretty amazing."

Peter Loehr: 13:06

Well, it was very early, right? And there was very few movies being made, then I think there was, 60 to 70 movies a year being made in the entire industry. And now there's 7-, 800 being made. Most of the films were made by state-run studios. In fact, not most all in order to make a film, then you had to have a license from a state-run studio. So our first company was a joint venture with the Xi'an Film Studio, which was run by a super-enlightened guy. Welcome became the Vice Minister of Sarft later on, but he sort of saw what we wanted to do, and he decided to support us, and we made a joint venture, and he got behind that first film. I'd had a year to think about what I wanted to do and what kind of movies I wanted to make and what kind of movies maybe the marketplace would embrace. And the decision we sort of came to was that there were enough propaganda movies out there, that there were enough period movies out there, and that the film market should be for young people, and nobody was making movies that sort of spoke to young people."So let's try to do something that's urban. Let's try to do something that isn't period, no palanquins in the movie. And let's try to focus on a younger market, and let's use a young director, preferably a first-time director, to make a movie for a young audience." So that young directors for young audience making something totally that wasn't being done. And I came up with the idea, if you've seen the movie, the opening of the movie, where a guy is going to meet his wife's parents for the first time, or his fiance's parents for the first time, and he gets a horrible bout of stomach illness. That was actually my story, and I thought it was such a fun story that, would there be a way to base an entire movie around a series of sort of short vignettes rather than doing one big story. I came up with that idea. I had met Zhang Yang, who became the director who was a music video director at the time. This was his first film. I liked him a lot, and he said, "Hey, wait a minute. Instead of doing five young people's stories, let's mix up the ages. And let's do young people's story, and an old people's story and they, post-marriage stress syndrome, story and a divorce story." And I thought that was great. And so we started to develop those five different stories. We used five different writers each to write a story. It took us, we thought it would take just a few months because the stories were short. It ended up taking almost a year to finish the screenplay. And now all those director, all those writers actually are all award-winning directors, so all of those guys was their first movie screenplay. And you know, Cai Shangjun, who's one of the writers is won in Venice. And Diao Yi'nan, who is one of the writers, is won in Berlin. And, Liu Fendou, who's one of the writers that had films in Cannes. So we had a really talented group of people trying to do something that seemed easy and that ended up being very hard. And then we made this film, and we sort of did everything different than everybody else. In addition to the overall thematic differences and the style of shooting, what the movie was we sort of budgeted it differently, shot it differently, marketed it differently. And the film really performed super well at the time. So, it was one of the first films in China to do, 30 million RMB Box Office. There were two films that year, it was Spicy Love Soup, and there was Jafa Party A, Party B, which is the Feng Zheng album movie. And those are the two movies that sort of suddenly defined modern commercial filmmaking in China.

Rich Robinson: 16:19

Yeah. Defined it indeed. Yeah. And tell us about some of the screenplay, that took 12 months instead of three or four, like, first-time producer. I mean, like as a producer, you're the guy that's got to make sure there's gas on the bus, where the bus is going, and you got to get people on the bus. But then there's 50,000 other problems behind the scenes and on the scenes. Tell us some of the trials, and tribulations, and triumphs of that first time around for you.

Peter Loehr: 16:43

Yeah, I mean, it was a very small budget movie, so they were talking about a 3 million RMB movie. So at the time, that equated to about 350,000 US dollars, right? And we thought we were very clever because, by shooting shorter stories, we would need the actors for very short periods of time. So instead of saying to an actor,"We have no money to pay you, but please come make our movie." We could say, "We have no money to pay you, but we only need you for a week," because each story, basically the whole movie, was shot over about 33 days, and if you divide that by six, you're looking at five to seven days per story depending on the story. Some were faster, some were slower. But the trick was that, that was very clever, and that did work. And we were able to get amazing talent for not a lot of money because we didn't have a lot. But a lot of that was sort of our earnestness and sincerity in the way we approached everybody and how passionate were about what we were trying to do. But what we ended up with was a lot of actors. So, instead of having two or three main actors, you end up with 12. And that got complicated, so there was a lot of discussions, and the film was so low-budget. And we were not shy about approaching really major actors and saying,"Please read our script, and we'd love to have you in the movie. And by the way, we have no money." And one actress said to me, "I think you guys were adorable. The fact that you would even say that number I should be insulted, but I think the fact that you'd even say it out loud. Sure."

Rich Robinson: 18:05

Hǎo kǎ ya.

Peter Loehr: 18:06

So it was sort of amazing. And there was another actress that we met, and we sat down, and she, at the time, there were no agents and no managers. And you literally sat down directly with the actor, had coffee, or sat down in a hotel lobby and talked about the screenplay. There wasn't really a process, and I just remember one actor saying,"Hey, meet me in such a hotel coffee shop," and thinking like, "How are we going to pay for this coffee? Can't we please go somewhere else?"

Rich Robinson: 18:31

Five-star hotel coffee it's ridiculously overpriced. Yes.

Peter Loehr: 18:35

It was. So I was thinking, "How do I get her to go somewhere else?" And then, the director looked at me and said, "We just got to go there. We can't do that." Like, that's not something, the optics of that are going to be very bad if we change the venue because we can't afford the coffee. So, for those of you who know Chinese cinema, well, we had a lot of people in that movie, so Lu Luping is an amazing actress who, award-winning Pu Cunxin was amazing stage actor who went on to run the People's Theater in Beijing, and Xu Jinglei, who became a star director and actress in her own right. This was her first movie. And Guo Tao, who had been in "Zhang Yi Wants to Live" was in the movie. Xu Fan, who became a huge star, and Feng Zhang Dan was in the movie. So we had just stars, sort of across the board. Wen Xingyu, who was in a hugely successful TV series called "Wo Ai Wo Jia," was one of the older people in the older story. And we had this amazing cast, who went on to become a backbone of the industry for years to come, all in one movie. And at the time to be honest, we were just going for the best person for each role and being unabashed about it. And there was really no one who said no. A lot of people we approached also had the fortunate backing of Rock Records who allowed us to cameo some very major music stars into the movie. So Joe Hajen was in the movie, and Lee Tsung-Sheng, Jonathan Lee and Cunzhuang was in the movie all for seconds. I mean, they cameod in because all we could afford was their flights. We couldn't even really — I think Sam said to me at the time, like, "Don't bother paying them. It'll be embarrassing. We're just going to say, "No pay," because it's better." And luckily, he had the face to invite them, and they agreed, and they came in, shot for an afternoon, and went back home to Taipei.

Rich Robinson: 20:10

And everybody won. That's great. Wow. Fascinating. I never really peeled back. There's many reasons why that film has become so iconic, and thanks for sharing. That's grace. I love it. So then, said, "How do you follow that?" Like, what's next? But wait, there's more. It wasn't you weren't a one-hit wonder or some sort of first-time author who crushes it and then has no ability to write a follow-on book. You kept going.

Peter Loehr: 20:32

Yeah, a movie next called"A Beautiful New World," which is by another young director named Shi Runjiu, is also his first movie with Tao Hong and Jiang Wu, who became sort of a mainstay of a lot of our movies after that. And that went really well. And then we made a movie called Shower, which was the first movie that really performed internationally. So we were sort of hoping to capture magic in a bottle and have a film that worked in China in a film that worked outside of China. And the first two did very well in China. And Jiang Wu's the first one that performed everywhere.

Rich Robinson: 21:01

That's how I saw that be. That was the first thing I saw before I met you. Yeah, not many people really watch that much Chinese cinema, and I think a lot of people, unless you saw like "Raise the Red Lantern" or something like that. But that was something that I think gave people insight. You know what's actually happening in China? I think people will, even till today, still have no idea about what's going on in, China, right? So,

Peter Loehr: 21:22

Yeah, it's funny, because a lot of times when you're approaching something, it was the same director of Spice Love Soup. And we started out thinking about doing something similar and trying, doing a series of vignettes about the importance of water and bathing in different countries. And we were originally going to do something into bad, and something in Beijing, and maybe something in Eastern Europe. And we had this idea to do that. And then we thought, "No, we did that once already. Let's try to make one story. Let's try to focus on one story." And ultimately, we came up with this story, and everybody we talked to said pretty much the worst idea we ever heard. So, here's a movie with no love story with no action, with very few, almost no female characters. It takes place in a bath house with a lot of older, semi-naked men, and why would the bath house is not a lovely bath house. It's a very real sort of, Beijing at the time, bathhouse. So it's sort of down on its luck and run down, and why is anybody going to watch this? And we just felt like the story was compelling enough and had something to say. And what we were trying to say is that, there's a lot of magic in old Beijing that's disappearing, and everything's being torn down, and these old great hue tones and lanes and sort of customs and traditions are going away, and these great skyscrapers going up, and everyone has indoor plumbing, and that's all fantastic, necessary and inevitable. But there's some great stuff that's being thrown away with the bathwater. Oh wow. I can't believe I just said that. I didn't do that on purpose. It just happened. So we made this movie, and we had been working with a company called Participant Films a lot, who was helping us sell international rights on our films. And they looked, and they said, "This is the movie. This is amazing. It's magical. We love this." Yeah, so Michael Werner and Walter Baron Direct, who were there at the time, I took the film, and it ended up going to festivals all around the world and winning. So, the film, I think, won 11 awards at 13 festivals and so many classic sports in the US, and suddenly, we had a movie that did really well in China and did really well everywhere else. I mean, at the time, of the big news story in China was the import of Western films were coming in. And the big tagline we sort of used to market the movie in China is, China used to only have import films, but now it has export films, and that we were taking this film to the world and it was being embraced. And China should also embrace its own and that we were lucky that did happen. So the film also, for a film that was quite, I want to say, "Artie," but less obviously commercial, and no pop soundtrack, like Spicy Love Soup and Beautiful in the World, had no cameos, music stars, it had no love stories, it had nothing like that. Still, actually outperformed both of those at the Chinese box office. So we're very fortunate.

Rich Robinson: 23:58

Yeah. Resonated. Yeah, resonated with me. And I would even ask people, kind of baffled, some people in my family, like, "Why are you even in China?" And I remember like, "Yeah, just check this out." And like, there's a soulfulness, and like, it's the thing, I just love Chinese people. And I love Beijing. And there's something that's part of this whole podcast and book. That China and adversary in some areas, militarily or ideologically. But do we compete? Yeah. We definitely compete, but also cooperate as well too, right? And I think we need to engage. And I think the more people can understand and exchange ideas, and unfortunately, it's probably becoming somehow less easy to do that these days.

Peter Loehr: 24:36

Yeah, I think that movie for me, I think my parents, and especially, my father thought I was sort of this quirky child who had run away to Asia and was doing something that nobody really understood. And on Shower, that film got invited to the "New Directors Section" of the New York Film Festival, which is a huge honor because the New York Film Festival sort of selects films some other festivals around the world that they feel need to be curated and shown to a New York audience. So it's sort of like the best of the best get invited, and it was this amazing thing, and I told my dad and he thought, "Oh my God, my son's Chinese film is going to come to New York." Nobody's going to watch it. So he tried to bring like 20 friends to fill up the theater and when he got there, he realized it was sold out and they were going to have to leave a later showing. And it was this sort of shock that my son maybe is actually doing something semi-meaningful.

Rich Robinson: 25:20

Quirky like a fox. Yeah, that's great.

Peter Loehr: 25:24

A personal level, that was also a big moment.

Rich Robinson: 25:26

Yeah, huge. I love it. And then, let's continue on the hero's journey, like, out of the cave, and what's next?

Peter Loehr: 25:34

So after producing about five or six films. In 2001, I made a new company called Ming Productions. And that company was invested by Mr. Osato from my old Japanese company. And he supported the formation of that new company and we started to produce more international movies and movies that we thought would speak to a Chinese or national audience. That there was a moment happening and I decided that I needed to have a real team instead of being sort of a guy chain smoking cigarettes and doing everything about myself. I needed to have a real lawyer, I needed to have an agent, and I needed to have an international team in addition to four, but like, sort of a team around me helping me take it to the next level. And so I was fortunate to sign to CAA as a producer. So I became a client of CAA's a producer, and I worked a lot with a guy named John Pratap, who was sort of their original Legendary international finance guy. And Rand Holston, who was an agent who worked with great talent like Wolfgang Peterson, Stephen King, and Ed Swick and just great filmmakers. Started to sort of build out my footprint a little bit that way. And in 2005, that led to a moment where I suddenly went to work for CAA and Richard Lovett, the head of the agency, asked me to help them behold and start an office in China. And from 2005 to 2012, I did that with a colleague. You also know Jonah Greenberg, who had been working with me.

Rich Robinson: 26:59

Jonah Greenberg. Indeed. Yeah.

Peter Loehr: 27:01

Jonah had been working with me in Ming Productions, and we went over to CAA in China, which we started with me and Jonah, one office manager, and one assistant.

Rich Robinson: 27:09

A shingle.

Peter Loehr: 27:10

Yep. Four people.

Rich Robinson: 27:11

Love this. That's a juggernaut now.

Peter Loehr: 27:13

They've done amazingly well. And I've been gone a long time, and Jonah did an amazing job after I was gone. But from 2005 to 2012, we really built a business a lot of that was based on the models that sort of CAA and Richard showed me. They said, "Start with writers, work with writers and directors, and the actors will come." I think. In 2008, we were working with almost all the top directors in China. A lot of which were very close friends of mine. So, of course, I was Ning Hao's Agent, and John Woo's agent and CAA had signed Ong Lee. And Ong Lee was a client.

Rich Robinson: 27:44

Yeah, so it's actually like, you lived in a xiaochu, like a compound in Beijing, that was known for other directors, actors, like film industry people. And I'd been over your house a few times, and you are so deeply ensconced in that universe, right? And there's so few foreigners, really. And they were truly like your close friends, right? It's like when you said,"Oh, I went to work for CAA." It's like CAA had the person who is genetically engineered, best person to like come in and do that bridging between LA, the mothership, and China. And it's pretty, you were able to dominate so quickly because you had such high levels of trust and just like good will.

Peter Loehr: 28:26

Yeah, those guys are obviously... you don't need me to tell you how smart those guys are. And their sense of timing when it was time to actually come into China and open up an office was perfect, as their timing so often is. And Richard, Brian, Kevin, and Ran, and all those guys who decided that we're going to make a China business, even though it may not be profitable at the beginning, we're going to take a run at this. Their timing was spot on. I had been there at that point for almost 10 years. Well, yeah, almost 10 years. And because I had been there when nobody cared about the business and I'm pretty much anybody could call up anybody and go sit down, and have lunch, or dinner, or coffee, because people weren't so super busy. And there weren't so many people who were really trying to make things happen. I was able to make a lot of great relationships, and because the first few films worked so well, that really helped cement those relationships and also make me relevant to people that maybe I wasn't working with yet. And because there's so many people that talk the talk, and so few people who actually did very much. Us being able to not only talk about it and have a vision for what we wanted, but to actually execute.

Rich Robinson: 29:25

Execute so well.

Peter Loehr: 29:26

It was relatively unique at the time. And so, when suddenly we're going to make an agency and represent directors and writers, which nobody had done before, right? Actors were starting to have managers, but nobody ever thought of signing a director as an agent or a writer as an agent because they don't have endorsement income. And because they don't do big appearances that they get paid for and they don't go to Gucci parties that they get paid for. It just seemed like, such a small thing to do. But we thought, this all came from CAA and Richard, that they said, "Look, if you represent those guys and you're helping them make their movies, then you have the opportunity to package things and you have the opportunity to say,"Hey, let's work with our writer, our director, and let's bring our talent into these filmmakers' projects." And if you have the ability to do that, then that talent will want to be with you. And ultimately, that's what happened in 2008, I think CAA was able to, you know, while I was there in our third year, we were able to package eight of the top 10 movies in China that year.

Rich Robinson: 30:19

Wow. Wow.

Peter Loehr: 30:21

Work on co-productions and really build out a business. And when I left in 2012, I think the business was really cooking, and Jonah took it over and took it up to more levels. And now CAA is a big concern that really spread across every element of the Chinese entertainment space and is doing amazing work. So, I'm proud I was there at the beginning.

Rich Robinson: 30:40

Great legacy.

Peter Loehr: 30:40

Yeah. what they've done since.

Rich Robinson: 30:42

But then, another amazing peak back in 2012, when you had another super powerful personality, which the entertainment industry, I guess, is somehow notorious for knocking. And you're still connected with him today. Tell us about that transition.

Peter Loehr: 31:00

Yeah, so in 2012, I thought, it's time, I had learned so much at CAA, and I had represented so many different types of people into the China market from athletes to writers to novelists to endorsements, to all kinds of things that I had never touched on as a producer. So in terms of my overall career development, that was a really essential seven years. I mean, I learned so much, and I was taken out of my comfort zone so often that it was an amazing experience, and it was also amazingly stressful, and difficult, and hard. Doing 7-, 800 emails a day, and a hundred to 150 phone calls a day, and working across would've become such a large client list. I felt like I needed to get back into making films. It was time to sort of get out of packaging and representation and back to films, and it was a very hard decision to make because I was working with such an amazing group of people. But I decided that's what I was going to do, and I surreptitiously talking to people and trying to figure out where I was going to go. And while I was at CAA I had come across Thomas Tall. Richard had introduced me to Thomas, who was running a company called Legendary. And I got to know Thomas because he was trying to build a China business. And I had been able to give him some advice, some good, some bad. I think somebody appreciated some, that, you know, and when I was getting ready to go, I was talking to one of the major US studios and I was talking to a big Chinese company, and the news sort of leaked out that I was leaving, and Thomas called me up and he said in Thomas' way, because Thomas is a force of nature and if I'm going to do this mentor list, of course he's on it. He's the only one on it that's younger than I am. But Thomas said, "Hey, wait a minute, are you on the market?" And I cut a couple exporters out of that statement and because what had happened is one of the people I was talking to at, leak to the press that I was considering going to work for them, and that has sort of forced the situation a little bit. And that's how Thomas knew about it. And he said, "Here's what we're going to do. You're going to just hold on a second and I'm going to send you an offer tonight, and tomorrow you're going to shake my hand on the phone because it's going to be good enough that you're going to." And I said, "Wow, well, give it your best shot, and I'd love to see what you know, what you have to offer, what you have to say." And the next day, he did that and in Thomas' you inevitable way, while everybody else was sort of doing nothing over the weekend, Thomas was calling me three times and trying everything home and by Monday it was done. And so I had this great opportunity to go work for a company again, Legendary, which was absolutely ascendant at the time, and had an amazing team with Thomas running the whole thing. And John Joseph, running creative and Marty Willhite, who was the CEO and running legal. It was just this amazing team of guys and women too. it was just a great group of people. And, I was sort of tasked with three things. One was effectively distributing the legendary films — the films that made by the US studio in China. So films like, Pacific Rim, Godzilla, and Warcraft. What could we do with those folks in the China market? And second, bringing on partners. So strategic Chinese partners who could help release those films better, who could help market those films better. And who ultimately could become investment partners in films like that? And then also making big Chinese-US co-productions. So there was a sort of a three-tiered approach. And I did that from 2012 to 2017. And it ultimately resulted in us selling the company to a Chinese company named Wanda, who we had worked with very closely. And they ended up buying Legendary's livestock and barrel and taking it off the table.

Rich Robinson: 34:24

Yeah. And that was a multi-billion dollar deal.

Peter Loehr: 34:26

Yeah, it was.

Rich Robinson: 34:28

And that was something that you initiated, that partnership with Wanda, because they're also headquartered in Beijing.

Peter Loehr: 34:33

Yeah, when I was at CAA, we represented Wanda when they were looking to purchase a US theater chain. And I had the opportunity to work with them as they bought AMC, the US chain.

Rich Robinson: 34:42

And you've got to know Won Jen Yang. Is that's his name?

Peter Loehr: 34:44

I got to know Trevor Wong, and I got to know some of the key people there. Jerry Yan and Jeffrey Liu, the CFO and head of the entertainment company, and Lincoln Jung, all through that period of advising on AMC. And Thomas, in 2000 — I want to say 2014, maybe 15 — was going to come to China, and he sort of wanted to meet everybody in the industry, and I said, "Okay, well, you've got to meet these guys." And again, the Chinese industry was taking off, but it hadn't really reached that sort of super critical mess yet. And I still had Jeremy Wong's cell number, and I texted him and I said, "Hey, I'm at a new company now, and my boss is coming in." And Jeff Shell, who was running Universal at the time, was coming in and"Let's set up a lunch for everybody." And we set up a lunch, and everybody really hit it off. And that led to a slowly gestating, several-year process of Wanda's first investing a small amount into Legendary, and then, ultimately, buying the whole company.

Rich Robinson: 35:37

Wow. Excellent. Yeah. Amazing transaction. Life changing transaction. Like, career defining, indeed, right? There's not many multi-billion dollar acquisitions.

Peter Loehr: 35:46

I think it's the only one that US-China cross-border

Rich Robinson: 35:50

Yeah. I mean, in general, right? Like, it's still the whole acquisition by Amazon recently. There still aren't that many deals in general globally and definitely the B1 in China.

Peter Loehr: 36:01

Yeah. Chinese-US entertainment transaction.

Rich Robinson: 36:04

Well, and talking about size, I loved some of the stories you shared of producing "The Great Wall," and the sheer amount of extras and all of the moving parts in trying to get that that wasn't a bunch of CGI — that was a lot of Chinese people on the Great Wall of China that you needed to get. Can you share some stories about trying to make all that sing together in harmony?

Peter Loehr: 36:28

Yeah. I think The Great Wall is... there's a lot of stories on that film, and it's a cautionary tale in certain ways, but it was an amazing experience. When we were going out to try to make this huge Chinese-US co-production, we looked at who's the best possible director for this. And Zhang Yimou, who'd just done the Olympics and was this amazing Chinese filmmaker, we thought he was the perfect director, and we were lucky enough to have him. And looking at US actors Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal, who had just done Game of Thrones, and Willem Dafoe, who you know, just amazing acts we were able to put together. A great US cast. And we had Tony Gilroy writing drafts of the screenplay with Dan Bourne, and we had ILM doing this, the VFX who had done Star Wars, so we put together all these pieces. And ultimately, the film performed very well in China, not as well as we wanted to in other places, but it was this massive scale. You just mentioned the actual wall itself. I mean, we built what we think is probably one of the largest film sets ever built, so a 250-meter-long wall. That was built on a piece of land in Qingdao. That was long enough and low enough to ride horses on and put thousands of extras on. You couldn't shoot on the real Great Wall. But we built this in incredibly huge set. And we had a crew of about 1100 people on the biggest day. There were days we had thousands of extras, Because of the member soldiers that we had to place. So it became a logistical sort of military thing. I mean, literally every day we had to bus people in, put armor on them and feed them, put them on the wall, shoot them, then feed them again and put them back on the wall, and people marching around in formations and carrying spears and shields. And it was quite the experience, and I think everybody worked on it. The scale of it was just massive.

Rich Robinson: 38:04

Massive. Indeed. Yeah, when I said they were on the wall, they were actually — it was actually a replica. It reminded me of what the Wachowski brothers did for The Matrix when they built those elevated freeways to do those scenes because they couldn't find anything. But this is even bigger scale. So yeah, just fascinating. Wow. And these days you went and built a beautiful dream boat. Literally, and you've been sailing around the world, but also you're using some movie metaphors. Every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in, and you talk about Thomas Tall being a force of nature, and I've never met him, but you yourself have, the force is strong with this one. You have too much to give to the universe. And the universe has too much to demand of you for you to just continue sailing around the world. So tell us what you're doing these days.

Peter Loehr: 38:51

It's funny, so when the Legendary sale happened and I decided I was going to leave, I had to have a year of gardening leave where I was had to non-compete and I wasn't allowed to work anywhere. And so we sort of had a year to think about what it was that we really wanted to do, and led to a lot of sort of deep thought with my wife over dinner and thinking about what's next. And I think we decided that, there were going to be some parameters that defined the next third to half of our lives in terms of what we did work-wise. And the first was we didn't really want to be CEOs again. I didn't want to be working in an office running a big operation. I wanted to do things I was really passionate about and focus on those. And that I wanted to have a hobby for once in my life, because I had been working 18 hours a day for 25 years and working weekends and never really had any hobby at all. So we wanted to have a hobby, and we wanted to really focus on stuff that we wanted to do and allow for some free time as well. So, now, we're doing sort of three different things, or I'm doing three different things. One is, I'm producing a movie called Gogo 13 that is based on a really iconic piece of Japanese IP. It's actually the longest running manga, the second biggest selling manga ever. So it's been in circulation since 1968, and the same writer is still writing it, and he's amazing. And I used to read this comic when I was studying in Japan in 1987. It was a comic I used to read back then.

Rich Robinson: 40:12

Special.

Peter Loehr: 40:12

Actually amuse. My old boss, Mr. Osato, called me in 2001 and had me develop a screenplay for it for a year, and ended up not being able to get the rights, and it went away. And then a very good friend of mine, Samuel Hadida, did get the rights, and he unfortunately passed away, and now I'm producing it with his brother Victor, who runs Metropolitan, which is a huge company in France and one of the most successful distributors, exhibitors there. That's a movie that I've gotten really excited about, and we have a director attached. We have to finish the screenplay and we just translated into Japanese and it, so that's sort of ongoing, and we're really excited to make that movie next year. I'm also on the board of IMAX China Holdings, which is IMAX China Company. And that IMAX's company, I've had a relationship with them since back in the days of CAA when they were a client. And Rich Gill found the chairman has always been a close friend and somebody I love working with. So, I'm doing board work with IMAX right now, and you just spoke about Thomas. I'm working with Thomas on a company called Genie's, which is in the NFT space, and lucky enough to be with Thomas again as he identifies the next home run. And we've been working on that for about two and a half years now. And the company's really grown from a very small group of people over Taco Stand in Venice to being a company that raised significant money at high, mid-nine figure valuations. So, doing a little bit of everything, trying to learn something every day. Like you mentioned, I've been doing a lot of sailing and traveling. But, for better or worse, the pandemic has made remote work very easy and more normal. So wherever I am, be it on a boat in the Caribbean, or in South America, or Europe, I can actually just jump on and continue to work like nothing happened. So that's what we've been doing, and it's been a great ride and a lot of fun. So, trying to keep the busyness level down, failing a little bit.

Rich Robinson: 41:57

Yeah, when you said that you worked 18 hours, a lot of people say that, but you're actually one of the few people I know that to actually be true. Like, you actually have this ability to sleep less. And Johan or other people like you literally were like one call, another call. Like, I got some sort of Hollywood mogul from the thirties or something like that. Like living that year after year. It's pretty, your staying power is pretty amazing.

Peter Loehr: 42:21

I never, I was never a good sleeper and I always thought that was one of my big advantages. Because I used to sleep four hours a night and just sort of be working the rest of the time. And I did realize ultimately that I was destroying my health by doing that. It took me about 24 years to realize it. But now that I've gotten up to six hours a night and I'm feeling an awful lot better, I realized what I was doing to myself. So I'm going to try to preserve that six hours and, not work the rest of the time and have a couple hours a day that's not work related.

Rich Robinson: 42:46

It's seven, 7.5 for me. Five, one and a half hour sleep cycles. And then, yeah, then I'm good. So, hey, so talking about cycles and we're on the hour. Wow. As advertised, amazing journey so far, but still a very young and promising man. And you have many more a ventures ahead of you that I look very much forward to chronically and watching. And thanks a lot. It was great.

Peter Loehr: 43:11

Well, thanks, Richard. You're as inspiring as ever, and thanks for having me on. I really appreciate the platform and love what you're doing with this thing, and I can't wait to see other guests that you have on because it's amazing stuff you're doing.

Rich Robinson: 43:21

Thanks buddy. That's great.