Entertainment Partners Reflects on 50 Years Powering Hollywood’s Back Office From ‘Little House on the Prairie’ to ‘The Pitt’

As seen in Variety.

Chances are, if you’ve worked in the entertainment industry, Entertainment Partners has handled your paycheck, helped you set up a budget, provided guidance on production incentives, managed your project’s paperwork or even assisted with casting.

For 50 years, EP has been a player behind the scenes, handling payroll, production finance, residuals, compliance paperwork and payments while providing expertise and tools to help productions make the most of incentives around the world. It even provides a health care exchange. EP supports productions in some 180 countries, on series and films including “The Pitt,” “F1,” “Pluribus,” “Abbott Elementary,” “Disclosure Day,” “Weapons,” “Sinners” and many more.

And it all started with “Little House on the Prairie.”

In 1976, NASA engineer Bob Draney and musician Jack Peterson partnered to form a new kind of company, one that used the latest digital tools available at the time to manage payroll and accounting.

Draney Information Services Corporation (DISC) — the company that would become Entertainment Partners — was a production-specific automated payroll and accounting system for film and television.

This was something new in Hollywood. The producers behind “Little House on the Prairie” were the first to embrace it, dumping their manual paperwork for an automated workflow.

"If you were to visualize when we started: You’re in a room, there’re piles of accounting ledgers that are done by hand, you do a budget, and by the time they need it, it’s two weeks later, and it’s already outdated,” says CEO and president Mark Goldstein. “Our founders created this industry where they were able to take computers that were just getting started and automated these functions to get transparency and financial clarity around it.”

Over the last 50 years, he says, EP has innovated tools for payroll, production accounting and more using the latest tech available: “What we’re really proud of is that every time that’s happened, we have been at the forefront of investing on behalf of the industry, to get them to a place where they can focus on their creativity, and rely on us to be a partner to deal with the financial consistency and the compliance and the regulation.”

He emphasizes that EP’s staff and tools are there to free creatives from what can be tedious paperwork and details.

“Residuals was a big issue,” he says, and EP was able to launch a platform with “all the rules dating back to the origins of residuals back in I think it was 1956 and it all built on it,” helping Hollywood keep track of those important payments.

EP really hates paper — especially after COVID. Its tools have evolved to streamline transactions and compliance. “We built an end-to-end platform that is taking the industry from paper to digital, because everything was paper based,” says Goldstein, who began at EP in 2002. “We were building all this technology to no longer have to do that,” he says, noting that the industry was slow to embrace it, but “when COVID hit, they jumped in right away, and because we were always forward thinking on it, we were best positioned to help the industry navigate through that in a very quick time frame.”

He continues, “Just imagine millions and millions of pieces of paper lying around the set, and now everything being done on a mobile device” is stored in EP’s digital repository. “Everyone at the studio now could get access to those documents” immediately, creating new transparency along the production line.“

So that was a milestone moment for us, because we knew we had to lead the industry forward, and we’ve always been there at the right time when the industry needed us,” he says.

EP’s tools include SyncOnSet, Movie Magic Budgeting, Movie Magic Scheduling and Scenechronize, which can help in budgeting but also such tasks as keeping track of costumes and assets, getting the right sides out to the cast and assisting in scheduling, among many other details.

“I think probably 90% of productions around the world use our budgeting system,” Goldstein says. “So, we have a pay master guide that includes every rule for every union across the United States.” Because EP has been doing this for 50 years, there’s a depth of data at its fingertips, from union rules to tax laws to pension rules that feed into its production tools.

And because EP has offices all over the world — especially in shooting hotspots like the U.K. and Australia — they can help a producer pivot to a new location quickly and nail down the numbers.“We have so much information that will give the independent producer, a small production or a major studio that’s doing a tentpole production the ability to facilitate and speed up the efficiency and accuracy of the information that they’re trying to create,” Goldstein says.

The competition to lure productions resembles the arms race of the ‘80s — the incentives are richer and easier to get than ever before. But producers jumping at sexy numbers may find themselves with more work than it’s worth.

Goldstein was a tax partner at Deloitte before coming to EP, so he understood the need for a unit that was focused on the rising business of production incentives. In 2004, he says, they were the first to bring the expertise, because at the time no one really understood how those worked and incentives were growing across the country “from about seven states to 40 states in about a seven-year period of time.”

EP was advising clients on how to use incentives, and making sure its website was up to date with the latest, most useful information from the governments themselves. “We were actually working with the MPA as they wanted to expand the ability to shoot,” he says. “So, we were able to also help support the industry in understanding what could happen if you could create an incentive, and how can we give trust and integrity to a state that if they provide this incentive, that they would create jobs. We were able to support productions and jurisdictions to do that.”

As for California production, Goldstein says, “I think it was super critical that the state of California doubled their credit right a year ago, and that is making a difference, and we are just starting to see the impact of it,” he says.

EP also acquired the iconic Central Casting, adding to its large toolbox for the industry, and bought a company called Cashét, which allows electronic payments around the world. Goldstein says it’s all about building stability for its clients who operate in almost every country around the world.

“I think we’re probably most excited about our Insight Solutions,” he says. The product allows studios to aggregate data from all of their productions digitally. EP is building AI on that data “to unleash all these insights.” He adds, “We’re just getting started with AI, and that’s super, super exciting.”

In the end, “I think what’s been unique is that we’re so connected with our clients, and for so many years they have treated us as that place that has the expertise,” says Goldstein. “We’ve been doing it for so long that we’re constantly learning and hearing about what’s important to them and so we never stop innovating.”