Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Jane Rosenthal, a founder of the Tribeca Film Festival and executive chairwoman of Tribeca Enterprises. To read the complete interview, check out other articles, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times
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Tell me about your early years.
I always wanted to be in government and politics. When I was 16, I got a job as a page in the Rhode Island House of Representatives, and I was the youngest woman there and the first high school page. They actually paid the pages more than the representatives were getting, too.
But I wanted to help change the world, and I decided that if I was going to have an impact, I could do that through documentary films instead of being part of the political process. I was obsessed with how you change the world through telling stories.
What about your parents?
My mother’s family had a company called ACS Industries, and they made pot cleaners. I spent many Saturdays going to the factory with my father. When they were extruding polypropylene, it was all different colors, and these pinks and oranges and greens would come out of the machines like hair. I had a very active imagination. Everything to me was a toy.
One of my earliest memories of my mother in the early 1960s was her working for the N.A.A.C.P., and she would go into middle-income housing and sign apartment leases that black families could then use to move in. The civil rights issues were very real in our house, and my mother was quite passionate about discrimination and segregation. She was out there doing what she could do.
And whenever there was a big historical moment on TV, like the “I have a dream” speech, she would say, “You have to sit and watch this. You’re not going to know what this is, but you’ll always remember that I made you watch it.” She also always said to me that you can absolutely do whatever you want. It never occurred to me that “no” was an option.
And where did your interest in filmmaking come from?
My mother was also an amateur actress. I’d go with her to rehearsals, and she might have only one line, but I’d have to sit through the whole thing. I was fascinated by makeup and hair and a person transforming themselves into a character and then getting up on stage, and how a show would change from a run-through to a dress rehearsal to a final performance.
I wanted to major in acting and my parents said no. You can always go into acting, they said, but have a skill that you can fall back on. I thought, O.K., I’ll trick them. I’ll major in film and television, and then I can act in the films. And I very quickly realized that I was a lousy actress and that I was much better at producing.
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To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times’ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews of hundreds of business leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.