Howard Tullman, our New Yorker of the Month for May 2012

Ask a New Yorker: I’m with Howard Tullman at the Greenwich Hotel. I first heard about Howard after reading an interview in Inc. Magazine - “The Most Accomplished Best Connected Entrepreneur You’ve Never Heard Of”

Ask a New Yorker: This is a beautiful hotel. I was sitting in the back room which is exquisite, heavenly. I felt like Robert De Niro himself might just waltz through.

Howard: He won’t be waltzing through. When we’re done I’ll show you what is probably the center piece of the whole hotel, which is actually down in the basement. There’s a pool and across the top of the pool is this enormous Japanese wood work that was assembled by craftsman, with no nails. It’s amazing. A very peaceful place, and next to it is a little yoga area and that is decorated with string that is tied in seven trillion knots or something. And in the back outside is a little court yard.

Ask a New Yorker: What brings you to New York?

Howard: Well, tonight is the opening of the Tribeca Film festival and we’re doing The Five Year Engagement. Then there’s a party afterwards at the MoMA. Then the next ten days is a blur. There are a zillion events. It ends with the Disruptive Innovation Festival. That will be really interesting. We are honoring a bunch of different people, like Jack Dorsey who created both Four Square and Twitter.

Ask a New Yorker: What is your connection to The Tribeca Film Festival?

Howard: The connection is basically that we have a school in Chicago which is a digital media arts and film school, animation visual effects, and film broadcast, and it’s called Tribeca Flashpoint. A couple of years ago Bob(Robert De Niro) Jane( Jane Rosenthal) and Craig (Craig Hatkoff), the founders of the film festival, became our partners and investors in the school. Since then we’ve worked together on the school and film festival. We have about a dozen of our students here from Chicago supporting the festival filming various events. Also we have been involved in the Doha Film Festival which is something Tribeca started about three years ago in Doha. There’s a tremendous Arab film culture growing and expanding.. We also have another connection here. This past Monday night was the Tribeca Ball. The Tribeca Ball is an annual gala from another school that I’ve been connected with for a long time, The New York Academy of Arts, right over on Franklin Street. Of all things, this year the guest of honor was Bob De Niro. It couldn’t have been more synergistic if we tried.

Ask a New Yorker: How does collaboration improve the creative process?

Howard: In Chicago our principal focus is to have built a place where we have about 600 students. It really is as much about innovation and new technology and all the changes in social media and other kinds of communication as it is in specifically learning the technology associated with specifically animation or film. The importance of collaboration is that we really think nobody does anything successfully by themselves today. And you need to put together a bunch of different skill sets to really get the highest and best examples of what you’re doing. We have done a lot of work with Ed Burns, who is sort of a quintessential New Yorker. His wife Christy (Christy Turlington) was in Chicago showing her film. She did a film on Maternal Mortality which is a problem in a lot of foreign countries and in the United Sates as well. She came over to the school and spent some time with our female film students and talked about some new projects that we will perhaps be doing with her in support of her charity. A lot of collaborative efforts involve different charities. Christy’s is just one. We are working very closely with Bono and his charity called RED relating to essentially ending mother-daughter transmission of AIDS by 2015. That’s another example where the students get a chance to use their skills, communication and storytelling capabilities to really promote causes and charities that we’re equally supportive of and interested in.

Ask a New Yorker: What’s up with your Pez collection?

Howard: The Pez project really arose when I was collecting Pez as a kid and I didn’t really stop. It has a lot to do with eBay. It’s been said eBay grew up around the desire for the founder Pierre Omidyar to help assist his wife in trading Pez dispensers , when it became clear that you could trade with people all over the world and discover these things that you just couldn’t otherwise access. That made it possible for me to fill out the Pez collection. It’s interesting, there’s a pretty robust Pez community. I don’t have a lot of time for it. But I do think we are going to see more collectibles. As the world becomes more digital in a lot of ways people are going to become increasingly more fetishistic. As things become more and more digital people are going to become more fixated with objects. As you look around this hotel you see that all the rooms have collections of old books. It’s intended to be sort of grounding in that it’s not all slick and all plastic, not all newly constructed.

Ask a New Yorker: From Pez dispensers to rock n roll. How many times have you seen The Rolling Stones in concert?

Howard: I think that I’ve probably seen the Stones 30 times. I would say only perhaps Springsteen and maybe when I actually spent a bunch of time touring with The Eagles did I see any band more.

Ask a New Yorker: Why were you touring with The Eagles?

Howard: Many, many years ago one of my jobs was to represent the labels and particularly to, the right word is probably “pry” albums out of the studio that had found a home in the studio and that were on the verge of never getting done. So in particular The Eagles had an album called The Long Run, no pun intended, the guys were camped out in Coconut Grove. We were all in a hotel called The Mutiny. It seemed like it was never going to end. My job was actually to encourage the whole production to get completed and I ended up spending three months on the road on and off with the guys on the first legs of the Long Run Tour. Soon I’ll be going down to the Jazz Fest in New Orleans. Bruce will be there too. The Beach Boys are actually the opening night act and The Eagles will be there as well. The Beach Boys is another interesting story. We are doing some work with The Beach Boys in connection with the 50th reunion tour which will be undoubtedly the last tour. Some of the stuff that has come up has been, for example, newly discovered studio footage of the guys doing Good Vibrations and some of the early pieces. It’s really interesting to see the band come together.

Ask a New Yorker: On your website you have a section called Words of Wisdom. What’s the meaning of “Eggs have no business dancing with stones?”

Howard: That’s an old Hungarian proverb. Basically it has to do with playing in your own weight class and dealing with people that are sort of your peers. The idea is if you’re too fragile, if you are not up to the competition you shouldn’t be in the room with those kinds of players. A lot of the words of wisdom are in fact taken from writings, taken from readings. A lot of them are things I have written. Some are things I have made up. Some are really explicit song lyrics that just jump out at you. Not so long ago I was writing an ad for the school about the fact that we want to encourage parents, especially parents that don’t know where their kids are headed, to send them to a school like Tribeca Flashpoint where they can really be successful. So I was trying to put that in the most succinct fashion that I could. I decided that I would make up a quote. Then it came to be a question of who it should be attributed to. No one is going to complain if I make up a quote from Roy Rogers. I figured that Roy is long gone. His horse won’t complain. So the quote that I made up was, “It’s so much easier to ride the horse in the direction he’s headed”. And what that really was about is these parent’s kids really only want to do certain things. They want to deal with digital media. They don’t want to learn Philosophy. They don’t want to go to a traditional school. So you discover when you get out of the kids ways and let them do what they’re excited about with their peers that they can be remarkably successful. So the idea is if you let people go in the direction of their natural inclination that’s the most likely way for them to become very successful and happy with what they’re doing.

Ask a New Yorker: What are you reading these days?

Howard: In the next 24 hours I’ll read the new book where Stone Barrington is the hero in a group of books all based here in New York and take place at Elaine’s. I’ll read the new David Baldacci book on the plane going back to Chicago which just came out today. Tuesdays are important days in terms of the book market. A lot of the new books are announced in the Sunday New York Times book section but aren’t available till Tuesday. Matter of fact I was just at the bookstore. I’m reading the new Rin Tin Tin book which is a bizarre sort of amazing story about Hollywood. It’s really just as much about Hollywood and movie making as it is about anything else. On my Ipad I have the Tom Clancy Against All Enemies book. I usually read 3-4 books a week.

Ask a New Yorker: Sleep is not a priority?

Howard: I don’t sleep much, mostly 3-4 hours a night would be a lot. I’m on planes all the time and reading is a really important thing that I do. It’s partially recreational and I do a lot of business reading.

Ask a New Yorker: What’s your take on Facebook buying Instagram?

Howard: I think that was probably a pretty smart acquisition for Facebook. I think they honestly haven’t been super successful in terms of photo management and photo manipulation. But the big thing was that in the first ten days of the android release of Instagram they added about ten million users. I honestly think Zuckenberg thought it was going to run away from him and become more expensive. The next one that is sort of on the block is Pinterest. That even seems to be growing even faster than Facebook ever grew. Pinterest has a real interesting connection to commerce which I’m not sure that pure photos of your friends does. I think today Zynga announced that they expect to do a few hundred million in acquisitions in the next few months too. So Zynga will be a player in the space. I don’t know what we will see next from Facebook. One of the issues with the Facebook IPO is just how much revenue you need to support a 100 billion dollar evaluation. So it will be interesting to see what they do in order to address this significant issue that they have being that they really aren’t serving ads on mobile. And about 50% of Facebook usage is now mobile.

Ask a New Yorker: Howard thank you for your time. It was a pleasure meeting you.

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