Signs of Success

In a close to 30-year professional journey from movie house to mouse house, Buena Vista Pictures Distribution president Chuck Viane, this year's ShowEast Show 'E' Award recipient, knows both sides of the box-office coin. Prior to embarking on his successful association with Buena Vista in 1986, the De Paul University grad, armed with a B.S. degree in marketing, rose to VP and head buyer for General Cinemas.Viane's nearly 14 years in exhibition provided additional 'degrees' of education. 'What I learned,' he explains, 'is that there is never a bad week in the business if there's a good picture out there. And this allowed me to think outside the holiday periods, to believe there's no bad release date unless the competition makes it so. So it's about the kind of product you're bringing into the market and the timing of that. For instance, the public can never get enough of comedies at the right time. But to be the third comedy in a period of two or three weeks doesn't make a lot of sense. On the other hand, in the family market, we do all gravitate to three or four-day holiday weekends and summertime, because that's just when the audiences are more available. But for most films, the availability is 52 weeks a year.'Arriving at Buena Vista in the mid-'80s, Viane took on the stripes of VP and assistant general sales manager. In 1995, he was subsequently promoted to senior VP and general sales manager. Since 1999, he has been Buena Vista Pictures Distribution president, with responsibility for overseeing sales and distribution operations throughout the United States and Canada for all motion pictures released under the Walt Disney, Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures banners.Looking back at his nearly three decades in the business, Viane names the development of the megaplex as the biggest shift for distribution. He notes, 'The multi-screen venues had long been around, but when the true megaplex came along?say, those 17 or more screens per location?it opened a dynamic in the business that heretofore had not been seen and it's been truly remarkable. What it did for distributors was give us the ability to deliver to the audience a show without waiting.'With the megaplexes showing as many as four or five prints of the same film in one location on opening or the first couple of weekends, with shows every 15 or 25 minutes, the public doesn't have to wait. It's almost an open seating policy. So whereas in the past there was significant hesitation on the part of audiences about being able to see a big film early, now this available seating has brought in a greater public and pushed the numbers to unprecedented openings.'During Viane's 16-year tenure, Buena Vista has broken numerous industry records. The distribution arm was number one in market share for the decade of 1990-1999, with a total gross of $9.5 billion. Buena Vista is also the only distributor to hit the billion-dollar plateau six times and the first distributor in industry history to ever have two films