How Agnes Chu and Helen Estabrook are breaking Condé Nast Entertainment further into Hollywood

“We’re creating new systems of working so that we can work with them in the ways that they have all individual systems for how they work, for how they find stories or how they tell those stories,” said Estabrook. “It is one great production company, but in some ways, it’s several different production companies because it’s GQ Studios and The New Yorker Studios and Vanity Fair Studios.”

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

Aligning timelines between publications and projects

Chu: Before our timelines were a little bit separate and sometimes not particularly aligned. And with the partnership and the collaboration that we’re building with our editors and the publications, it is actually about aligning our timelines so that we’re very early on in identifying great IP that could be made into a great film or a great television show. Helen and the team, through these bespoke processes, are just really able to identify things early and therefore package things early and bring them out to the marketplace in a way that we weren’t able to before.

Announcing projects at time of publication

Estabrook: We’ve done this with our “Hillsong” project, and we also just recently did this with “A People’s History of Black Twitter” out of Wired where we’re actually announcing the adaptation on the same day that the article is being published.

Communicating project plans

Estabrook: Sometimes the film and TV industry likes to be opaque because it likes to keep itself sort of strangely special. But I think that that’s such an outdated mode. It’s a complicated time in the business on a number of levels, and the only way through is to be very clear about the plan. That’s really what my team and I are focused on. Making sure that everyone understands: Here’s what our plan is. We’re hoping that [plan] XYZ will happen. If it doesn’t, we’re going to go to [plan] ABC, and this is how we move forward.

Deal-making with ‘alacrity’

Chu: There’s no surefire way to delay a project or take the air out of a project [like there is] by endless negotiations and year-long deal-making processes. What the business affairs team has done for film and television — I think we did more deals this past year than we did in the last two years alone — speaks to a lot of our alacrity in approaching what is a very fast-moving industry. We’re being very nimble here and really wanting to get great work done.