Well thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for that brilliant introduction. And when I found out that you dedicated your book to me, I was very, very moved. I truly was very moved.

I did.

That's nice.

We did. And sitting on stairs was so not uncommon to me. Having grown up in Brooklyn, what's the difference between a stoop or stairs? Right.

Yes.

Well, my grandparents lived across the street when my Aunt Grace did for a while too. We were a very typical Italian family, extended Italian family. And three girls, my sisters and I, we went to Catholic school. We went to St. Jerome's and I went to high school at Bishop at McDonald and I started Brooklyn College in 19, oh God, 68. But I was very, I was, I was protege. I was like 10 <laugh>. So I don't want anybody to think I'm old or

But it was great. I mean, it was very different.

Yes, I can. My mother was a very, very bright woman and a bright girl, but she was impoverished. So when she was in ninth grade, the war was on and she was yanked out of school and she didn't wanna leave school. And my father came to America in 1932 from Italy. He was 10 and he had not been in school. He grew up in southern Italy in a very agrarian society. When he came to America, Brooklyn, he went to school. He went to first grade and he was 10. So it was an unhappy situation. He was bullied and all the typical things that kids do. But unlike my mother, he didn't like school when World War II started, he went into the Army. He was 18 and just out of grade school. And my mother, her mantra to the three of us, you know, Gracie, Angela, and I had always been, I can hear it today, I can even see where I was sitting when she would say, get educated better yourselves. Get educated better yourselves. If she said it once, she said it 5 million times.

No, no opportunity at all.

Yes. I got a job at Lewis Harris and Associates, the Harris Poll. Lou Harris was a very prominent political pollster at the time. In fact, he had been Kennedy's pollster and that's where I met Joe Farrell.

Joe, basically after a while he ran the Harrisburg, but the first thing he did there, he started a little subsidiary, national Research Center of the Arts. And

No, I think it was a passion project because you know, Joe went to, I think you know this, Joe went to Harvard Law School and passed the bar and went to work for Milbank Tweed. He worked with the Rockefellers. So he combined what he knew from a legal point of view with being an arts lobbyist, to engaging in research to secure more funding for arts. So by that I mean he was very influential in aiding in growing the funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Yeah. And there are all kinds of art studies that we did for museums and

I'm very flattered by that. One of the things I knew from the time that I was a little girl, and I think almost laughing at it now, when you think about the programming in the fifties and sixties, when I watched TV and I would see shows like Father Knows Best or my three sons or whatever. And they seemed very fancy to me. They had very fancy houses. We didn't have the fancy houses.

<laugh>, leave it to Beaver the

Right. I aspired to that. I thought, oh, I wanna split level house with a pool in the backyard. But when I was a senior in high school, I went to work for a company called Donaldson Walkin and Gen Red. And they were a maverick brokerage house. This was in 1967. And I worked there for five years or more, actually all the time while I was in school. But it showed me how other people lived. And I was a go. I couldn't believe it. I had no sense of it, but I knew that I wanted a piece of it. And we, when I say we, my friends and I who worked there from Bishop McDonald, they only hired girls from Bishop McDonald to work there.

Good Catholic girls. And Bishop McDonald was a certain kind of school. It was a school for bright girls. And I was very lucky to be able to go there. I got a great education and when I saw how they all lived, I felt that I had to learn this.

And I observed, I listened and I worked hard. And I came to be known by Bill Donaldson and Dick Jen Rat, I mean Dick Jen Rett. And I didn't do it just because the time was so different. He wanted me to go to Harvard Business School and come back and work at DLJ. But I don't know, I just, I don't think I felt comfortable going to Harvard Business School. I just, it just didn't feel right for me.

Yes.

No, no. His father was a New York City policeman.

Yes.

Well, what happened is we were still working for Lou Harris, actually. DLJ owned Harris. And that's how I got to Harris. So I wanted to work at the Harris Poll because it was Vietnam War and it was all kinds of craziness about working on Wall Street. It's just different world

Yes. All that. So I went and I worked at Harris and when I saw Lou, he said, what are you doing here? And I said, well, I have a two week job with Joe Ferrell in the arts department. And he looked at me, 'cause I knew him from DLJ, he used to do all of his personal accounting. And I was a kid. And he said to me, oh dear, you can stay as long as you like <laugh>. So

Anyway, so Joe and I went in 1977 to LA with Harris. 'cause Lou wanted to have an office in the Sunbelt. And then we looked around and there wasn't really much going on at the time, businesswise, except in the entertainment industry. And when Joe went to New York and proposed it to Lou, he said, no, I don't wanna work with those people. They're crazy. When Joe came back and said, do you wanna start our own company? And I wasn't so excited about living in la, I was lonely. So I said, okay, I'd give it another year. 'cause I love the idea of being entrepreneurial. So we started NRG, the day of Incorporation was December 15th, 1977. And our first day of operation was right after New Year in 1978. Wow.

The first movie we worked on was Lassie Come Home or something. <laugh>.

Yes.

He was. He was an early adopter of the process. Yes, very much so.

The process was not so dissimilar from what it is now. The only big difference was in the very early days, we didn't do recruited audience screenings. The studios were doing sneak previews and we were handing out questionnaires at sneak previews. And in the case of Apocalypse Now, there were three round the clock screenings in Westwood, I think they were at the Bruin. And people just lined up and waited in line for hours. And we handed out questionnaires and Francis was trying to determine what to do about the ending. So memory serves, there were three different endings that Rochelle, so once one screening stopped, we let the other people in and the last reel would go on. And so that went on for the whole night. And then I went back to the office where I started doing the hand counts and the coding. And you know, in those days we did everything. So

Yes, we were 7 0 4 6 Hollywood Boulevard,

Well, there was a brothel across the hall from us. Yeah. <laugh> in our first <laugh>. And there was that sex shop downstairs.

But we were still in that.

Building. Yeah, I still in that crazy building.

God, I don't.

Oh my goodness. <laugh>. Oh my goodness. I don't

No, we did advertising testing before we did recruited audience screenings.

The, it wasn't recruited audience screenings

Was sneak previews. And we,

That's correct.

That's right.

That's right.

He started doing ad testing, first testing in those days, of course you tested print ads, you tested trailers and you tested TV commercials.

We worked for RCA Select division and we worked for the Rather corporation. Those are the first two I remember. And then we also worked for, uh, universal. Richard Del Belsen was at Universal then with GT Klausner

Perry Katz. I think Perry came a late

He might've come a year or so later.

Yeah. I don't remember exactly.

Right. And Dana too. Dana as well.

Yeah.

But at first what happened was studios wanted to do tracking. I don't even remember to be honest, how the whole notion of tracking came up. But keep in mind that Joe and I worked at Harris, and Harris was a political pollster. And the similarities between political polling and polling for movies are apparent when you think about it from this point of view. If your candidate doesn't win on a Tuesday, you can't go back and rethink your campaign. If your movie doesn't open on a Friday, you can't go back and rethink your campaign. So everything leads to that opening weekend or that election. So there were a lot of similarities between the two. And we, maybe it came about because you know, tracking is such a big part of political polling even then. But I don't really remember. But,

No, it's true. When TV ads became so much a part of the campaign, the biggest part of the expense, certainly of the campaign, then the advertising testing became more important. And then tracking, as you point out, became important. But there were three different trackings going on. Several different studios were doing their own tracking. And somebody, it might've been Richard, it might've been Perry said, why don't we all get together and do an industrywide tracking?

That's right.

And people don't understand still, I mean, even more so to this day. But Peter Sealey was a marketing executive at Koch. And Koch bought Columbia, I think it was in the mid eighties or late eighties. And he insisted that we give predictions and

He tried to explain that movies don't have a shelf life and all the things that it could impact the opening of a movie. And even more so now. But no, he insisted. And then it just was like lending the horse out of the corral. And everybody wanted to know what their movies were going to do. And this was a horror story.

That's correct. I would say directionally it's 99% correct.

That out. Even the language, I mean, tracking overestimated, underestimated tracking got it wrong. And you know, there were days when I just wanted to poke my eyes out, <laugh>.

Mass? This is, uh, briefly a history of it. When Jill and I started NRJ, these studios were still in a distribution model. You know, put the movie out there and they come, well that stopped happening. And therefore the studios had to change to a marketing model. But not everyone thought of it in those terms. And not every studio was prepared to think about going from a distribution model, put it in the theaters and they will come to a marketing model. There was pr, you know, PR was marketing. That's what happened. But the, the baby boomers were such a huge population, not unlike when you combine the millennials and you know, the Gen Z. And now we've got the alpha generation coming out. But you know, when you think about the huge numbers of baby boomers, they needed to be marketed too,

And convinced it's persuasion and awareness. So it didn't happen overnight. Little by little by little, the studios began to realize they needed to advertise. They needed to market. And Richard Del Belzo and Sandy Zenbeck at Warner Brothers. Right. Richard had already been at Universal. He came from Gray advertising and then Sandy Zenbeck and Joel Wayne came from Gray Advertising and they all went to work. Harry Katz also worked at Gray. So they went to work at Warner Brothers with Bob Daley and Terry saml, who were very much into the marketing. And that's when things really began to change.

That's right. Correct. That's right. UA Highsmith was head of marketing at United Artists. And he wasn't adopter because he was to market

Yeah. Marketing for UIP. And it was a high who hired us for Apocalypse Now.

Right.

Yes.

No, we didn't. We

Market share. <laugh> of the

Yeah, it was great sacrifice. It was working 24 7 for 25 years. But that's it here and there. 'cause I really loved what I did. I mean, I really did. In fact, I do miss parts of it. I don't think it can exist the way it did just because times are so different. But I do miss parts of it. I really do. There are a couple of things. I think Kevin. One is, it began to work when we started to test materials and when we started to open to higher grosses, there was, oh, this stuff really works. And then our interpretation and I think our approach to what we did as individuals, we were modest. We didn't take the credit. We kept our prices so low. It was so hard for anyone from real research to compete with us because we had volume and the prices were ridiculously low for what we provided. Now a lot of people, if they hear this, they'll say, what is she getting? But they were

And they started out at 4,800. And it took a long time to get up.

Right.

I did because I was passionate about it. And also, if we were going to keep the kind of market share that we had, we had to work nonstop because service was key. I mean, you know that.

No,

We do. I mean the timelines are almost inhumane. And certainly I suspect they haven't changed very much.

They had to respond. And you could do that. Then as you know, often we see in tracking absolutely no lift in definite interest. There used to be a lift in definite interest. And part of it is the trailer hangs out online for so long and the materials are online. But back in the day before the internet, you could impact definite interest by changing the TV commercials.

Right?

Mm-hmm <affirmative> still today.

Well, I think that there's some TV advertising that works where if you're looking at sports for example, you can reach a very large audience.

That's right. But if in fact you with today, with all the tools that we can use for micromarketing, you know, there's massive TV buys for movies seem not to make sense,

That's right.

Mm-hmm <affirmative>.

Well, I think in these days they're certainly, social media plays a big role in reaching people.

I think one of the ways you cut through the noise is by having influencers, by having a campaign. Let's say if you have an actor and if they have a large social profile. So you would ask that she or he speak to their fans and send messages that will resonate with the fan base. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Mean the fan base is certainly not enough typically to open a movie. But social media also, we can advertise online with very specific ads

Absolutely. Targeting and micro-targeting. So for example, if in fact I were to do a database with email addresses and I segmented that database by taste and interest. So I would say, okay, this group would be great to send personal ads to and this group we should ignore. They're never gonna go see this movie, but this group might be a group that's on the fence, so let's target them. But with a softer approach. And it really is much more social. It's much more certain sites where you know that a certain group of moviegoers are hanging out. So that's what I see.

Right.

Yes, I agree. Agree.

And you bring up a very important point because one of the things we can easily forget is that messaging is still key.

Messaging, messaging, messaging. And I think that sometimes we lose sight of that. And it's not about throwing something against the wall and it will stick. It's about really being very specific in a message that will work to persuade, persuade, persuade.

That's correct.

I completely agree. And messaging needs to be tested because we don't know. I can't tell you what a male of 25 or 30 would want to see.

That's correct.

I think that's correct.

Thank you <laugh>.

That's right. And that's becoming increasingly important as the audiences become more segmented. And when we think about movies today, we have to think about where we're going to watch them and how are we gonna get people to go to the theater? Because we want people to go to the movie theaters, to watch films. But if they're not going to the movie theater, how do we get them at least to watch them on the streaming services?

I completely agree. I completely agree. Of course.

Yeah, I mean I do always have theories. You know, I mean, I always have my theories.

You know, one of the things that I think will most likely occur is I think there will continue to be a shrinking of the theatrical audience. It's not gonna be a disappearance, but I think it will be a shrinking of the theatrical audience. And I think there are many, many complicated reasons for that. But one of the reasons is I think as the boomers get older, and they're almost the last generation that are completely habituated to go into the movies because we didn't have many other choices. We went to the movies and we read a book because our parents had one little TV and they controlled it. Now, when I think about the opportunity that people have to watch entertainment, if you can save a lot of money and stay home and not pay a babysitter and not pay for parking and not go out to eat as a friend of mine said her millennial daughter, she stays home. She rolls up into her PJ's on a Friday night with her husband. They call DoorDash or whatever Uber Eats and they, you know, they have a great meal sitting at home in front of their a hundred inch TV or whatever the largest TV is that you can get. And I think the bottom line, 'cause I could go on and on and on, is habits have changed. And I think Covid ushered in even more rapidly the change in habits.

Accelerated it. It absolutely accelerated it because we were going there.

Mm-hmm <affirmative>.

That's exactly correct.

I think one of the things that I would consider a big mistake is in the early days of NRG, I didn't take any time for myself and I just wore myself out. And it's very bad. And I had a friend, some of your listeners might remember her, I don't know if people have short memories, but her name was Marty Morans

And she died in 1990 of brain cancer at 41 years old. Oh. And I went out to lunch with her in July. She died in August. And we went out to eat. I picked her up. She was in terrible shape and she was apologizing 'cause she couldn't hold her floor. I said, please Marty, it's, it's so unnecessary. Just let's have a little chat or whatever. I said, I mean, I was devastated of course. And she said to me, and I have chills telling you this, she said, Catherine, when you're dying, you'll never wish that you had worked one more day. And I have never gotten a greater gift than that. And I started to take vacations. It was

Uhhuh <affirmative>. I was 40 years old and I started to take vacations. Now I didn't take very long vacations back in the day. And I was constantly on the phone. But I did start to take some time for myself. And that serves me well to this day when I think about what Marty said, you will never wish that you had worked one more day when you're dying.

Was your favorite. Wow.

The two of you were great friends and you had so much fun together.

I know

I know it was the best. The

I think one of the things I joke and I say is my good nature <laugh>. Angela says it

She says she knows who the

That she knows who the boss is.

Yes. But I think really what it is at particularly at this point, and you know, after having lost Gracie, which, you know, we, we don't get over. We still haven't gotten over. And uh,

Never will. No. And when you walked into that funeral home, I mean, I was just so moved. I was weeping. So

Yes, it is.

He's so funny. <laugh>,

No, I know. Listen, I know.

Of Yes, I do. You know, I do.

Thank you for asking about what I'm doing now. I mean, I really couldn't bear the thought of retirement. I still can't bear the thought of quote,

No, I'll never retire. I mean, it's

No, it's an ugly word. It really is an ugly word, I think. But I thought, what am I gonna do when I leave la when I leave the business? And one of the things I thought, there are actually two things I thought I would do. One is that I would become a professional coach. And, you know, coaching, I hate the word

Thing? Yeah. Oh two, become a teacher of English as a second language.

Oh, I did that too while I forgot I did that Exactly. In New Jersey. Ay

Ayi. Okay. Yes. I ran as, as a Democrat for Ocean County Commissioner

My, I I nearly lost my life doing it. But that's certain, I mean, people were off me. So I, I did teach English as a second language and, and the school district here has, I've gotten to know some of the people and they want me to come and do it again.

Yes. And I worked, which I really, really,

Oh my God. I worked at a maximum security prison in New York State called Bedford Hills

Women, women.

Yes, yes to

Of course it does. Of course it does. And I decided to become a coach because over the years, so many people have said I've been so helpful to them. And so I took a very serious course. It was four modules and it was over a year. And I got my International Coaching Federation certificate, which is the gold standard for coaching around the world. ICF. Then of course I took continuing education units. I took at Harvard Extension, I took a leadership course, mastery in leadership coaching. I took psychology for coaches and I've just finished neuroscience and coaching and they have all really added to my coaching practice and made me a better coach. I've worked with all kinds of people. I've worked with college students going into the workforce.

Yeah. People recovering from addiction.

I've worked with C-suite executives, I've worked with middle managers who want to either do better or transform in some way or find a new job. So it's great.

Sina coaching, LLC

Yes. And the reason why I did that, because I wanted to harken back to my Italian heritage and Sina to me is, you know, it's art and art. We all art, we're all, we all create our own lives. We all paint our own pictures, so to speak. We are all creative in our own way. Doesn't have to be where, you know, Leonardo da Vinci's, but we are all creative. We create our own lives. So I thought Sina was a way of communicating that.

Oh, Kevin, I'll never forget that. I can see myself, I can see myself.

Answering that.

Well, I wanna say that I am so very proud of you and I think it's wonderful what you've been able to achieve. And I think that it's so glorious, it's so fantastic. And as someone whom I think of sometimes as my little brother or this kid I've hung out with on the steps, <laugh> No kid and a smart man, you did a whole lot with your life and as I say, I am really proud of you.