Entertainment Partners Marks 50 Years Powering Hollywood's Back Office
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- Entertainment Partners marks 50 years, founded in 1976 by NASA engineer Bob Draney and musician Jack Peterson as Draney Information Services Corporation (DISC), with "Little House on the Prairie" as its first client to adopt automated payroll and accounting.
- Mark Goldstein, EP's CEO since 2002, says the company supports productions in roughly 180 countries on series and films including "The Pitt," "F1," "Abbott Elementary," "Sinners," "Weapons," "Pluribus" and "Disclosure Day."
- Goldstein estimates about 90% of productions worldwide use EP's Movie Magic Budgeting system, with the company's tools — Scenechronize, Sync on Set and Movie Magic Scheduling — managing budgets, costumes, scheduling and asset tracking.
- COVID-19 triggered a rapid shift to EP's digital platform, with Goldstein saying productions "jumped in right away," moving from "millions of pieces of paper" to mobile-device workflows and giving every studio real-time access to production documents.
- EP launched the industry's first production-incentives unit in 2004, according to Goldstein, as U.S. states offering film tax credits grew from about 7 to 40 over seven years; he says California's recent doubling of its credit is just starting to pull production back to the state.
- EP has expanded through acquisitions of Central Casting and Cashét (a global electronic-payments firm) and is building AI on aggregated production data through a product it calls Insight Solutions.
Why it matters: EP's 50-year arc shows how a single back-office infrastructure play — payroll, residuals, incentives, now AI — became indispensable at every production tier. Goldstein pegs roughly 90% of global productions on its budgeting tools, and California's recent credit doubling gives the company fresh leverage to win back shoots fleeing the state.
