Chuck Salter - Hacking Hollywood: The Creative Geniuses Behind Homeland, Girls, Mad Men, The Sopranos, Lost, and More

ITS QUITE A SCENE: Phil and Travis Knight sitting side by side on the set of their first film. Father and son; the founder of Nike and a young animator with no interest in Nike; a new studio owner and a CEO in waiting. For the first time, they talk publicly about their unlikely path to becoming Hollywood executives at what they hope is the next Pixar. I probably have pushed him to take more of a management role than hes wanted to take, Phil says. Thats kind of the way fathers are, right?

Cut to the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California. In mid-rehearsal, a few hours before airtime, Conan OBrien picks up his electric guitar. It calms him, focuses his nervous energy. With sketches still in the works and a monologue in need of jokes, the late-night comedian walks around the stage, noodling chords and riffs while offering one-liners that kill that night.

One more: A public pool in Santa Monica. Jason Kilar, then head of Hulu, is waiting for his daughter after a late-afternoon swim lesson. Its a small window of downtime between meetings, and he seizes it to scroll through Twitter to see if customers are having any problems with the online video service.

These are the sorts of revealing moments that fill Fast Companys first anthology focusing on the entertainment industry. If you cover ingenuity in business, as we do, Hollywood is an irresistible paradox. Its the source of astounding creativity that shapes our popular culture, and yet its also notoriously resistant to change. As one tech executive turned Hollywood disrupter scoffs in these pages, Its not inherent in the industry to be entrepreneurial. Its a culture of cover your ass.

That tension, however, has drawn Fast Company time and again. In Hollywood, the plotlines are especially riveting, the characters naturally compelling.

Some of the people sharing their creative process in this collection are well known. Judd Apatow and Lena Dunham let us eavesdrop on the sort of funny and personal conversation that fuels their hit show, Girls. Martin Scorsese discusses his strategies for taking creative risks throughout an extraordinarily prolific career.

Others featured are unknown outside the industry, like Franklin Leonard, a midlevel development executive who came up with a brilliant way of identifying undiscovered quality scripts and overlooked writers. More than 200 screenplays featured on Leonards Black List have become feature films so far, earning more than $16 billion at the box office.

The creative problem solvers here are not bound by job title. The executives sound like artists; the artists sound like executives. Where creativity is encouraged and allowed to run a bit wild, where it truly flourishes, inside companies such as Hulu and HBO and on the sets of Mad Men and Homeland, we find new ideas, new thinking.

Looking back at these stories, we like to think we have something in common with Mel Brooks. We just relied on the human condition, he says of the source of his best ideas in How I Got My EGOT. Leave it to the 2,000-Year-Old Man to sum up our approach to storytelling. We couldnt have said it better.

Chuck Salter, senior writer, Fast Company