WSJ. MAGAZINE 89O
N A SUN-SOAKED L.A. morning, Scott
Stuber has a few calls to make. In the pas-
senger seat of a black Chevy Suburban,
Netflix’s head of original films pops in a
set of earbuds and digs in. Forty-five minutes later,
after traveling from his home in Pacific Palisades
to Netflix’s Hollywood headquarters, Stuber has
powered through a list that, for most people, would
constitute an entire workday. “The longer commute
is good for getting a bit of housekeeping out of the
way,” he says. “That way I can enter the office with
some semblance of context.”
For Stuber, 50, that context includes a fusillade of
meetings, screenings, lunches, calls, deal-brokering
and set visits, all to keep Netflix’s original film divi-
sion humming. It’s a job he took on in 2017, after
being lured from Universal, where he spent nearly
two decades. “I wanted to either build something
from scratch or rebuild something that was broken,”
he says. With Netflix, he got the former. And since
taking the reins, Stuber has guided the company into
an ambitious new era of original movie content.
Stuber had a typically suburban upbringing in
Granada Hills, California, and it wasn’t until he
attended the University of Arizona that he began
to consider film as a potential career. “I had classes
on the history of film and screenwriting,” he says.
“And I just caught the bug for it.” Unfortunately, this
newfound enthusiasm was not reciprocated. “[The
industry] was very hard to break into. I had one suit
and a car with no air conditioning, and I drove around
L.A. in the summer and went to every studio.”
But eventually he broke through, first as a PR and
marketing assistant at Universal Pictures and then
as a creative assistant for producer Lauren Shuler
Donner. That job put him on the film-production
track, which five years later led him back to Universal
as a senior vice president and then as vice chairman
of worldwide production.
By 2017, when Netflix’s chief content officer, Ted
Sarandos, came calling, Stuber was ready for a chal-
lenge. “What was appealing about this opportunity
was Ted saying, ‘Go build a movie studio,’” he says. It
was also terrifying. “You walk into a meeting about
how an algorithm is changing, and you’re like, OK, I
have to go home and study,” he says. He credits his
wife, actor Molly Sims, for steadying his nerves. “She
said, ‘Remember, that’s why you took the job. To get
uncomfortable. To learn and get better.’”
At Netflix, Stuber is in the position to greenlight
both big-budget extravaganzas and the types of
movies being ignored by the studios. He can have
potential Oscar contenders like the upcoming The
Irishman and The King; quieter, more cerebral pic-
tures like Noah Baumbach’s dramedy Marriage
Story; and, of course, action spectacles like Michael
Bay’s 6 Underground. For Stuber, it all suggests a
possible golden age of cinema. “I think the movie
business will go through a renaissance like it did in
the ’70s,” he says. “Interesting, provocative films will
get made because this business model supports it.”BY SCOTT CHRISTIAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY JUSTIN CHUNG
Netflix’s head of original films is reshaping the way we watch movies.
SCOTT STUBER
TRACKED
MORNING GLORY
Scott Stuber and Molly Sims
at home with their kids, from
left, Brooks, Scarlett and
Grey, and their dog, Ruby.>
the exchange.
NOVEMBER 2019