The career of Seamus Blackley took another interesting turn last month after the demise of boutique game funding agency, Capital Entertainment Group, which he had co-founded. News of his signing on with Creative Artists Agency, one of Hollywood's most powerful talent brokers, took the game industry by surprise--and elicited many an e-mail debating one of the industry's best-known player's latest career move.

　　The mainstream game press treated Blackley's transition with a collective shrug of indifference. Although CAA issued a press release on November 10 announcing his hire (to collaborate with CAA's Larry Shapiro), the sole write-up outside the Tinseltown trades was in the San Jose Mercury News, penned by Xbox chronicler Dean Takahashi. To industry insiders, however. Blackley's new gig is a clear sign that the rapidly evolving relationship between the game and movie industries is still chugging ahead, into uncharted territory of collaboration.

　　To sort out the possibilities, GameSpot put a call into Blackley, who talked to us from his temporary digs not far from CAA's Beverly Hills offices.

　　GameSpot: So what can CAA do for the game industry?

　　Seamus Blackley: Larry Shapiro has already done an extraordinary job of making things happen for game companies in terms of getting licenses, working with Hollywood talent, moving IP back and forth, and doing the kinds of things that you would imagine Hollywood and the games industry doing--of sharing the IP and sharing writers and creative ideas.

　　GS: What about your agenda?

　　SB: You’ve heard this from me a million times, but obviously, the best thing for games is going to be when we can put the creative people in charge in our business and we can start consistently making those products that really hit the audience hard. That's fundamentally how I explain it to people who have some understanding of the Seamus agenda. It's about putting artists in control. That’s what CAA does. And of course that’s also what the motion picture industry learned is the best way to do business.

　　GS: Can you drill down a bit…?

　　SB: I’m going to be concentrating on creating new opportunities for games to get built. Larry’s done a great job of making sure that licenses are working out on behalf of the studios--and doing it in a very credible way. Now, the next step, and a strong corollary to what Larry has done is to now look at different guys in the game industry, such as our clients Lorne Lanning and Will Wright, and look at not only the opportunities for them to do things in other media, but look at opportunities for them to build games in a new way.

　　GS: Can you expand on the Will Wright reference?

　　SB: It took Will four and a half years to get The Sims approved, right? Well, a similar guy, as a client of CAA, could be set up as part of a package to build a game in a much shorter period of time. And so we’re really going to be looking at pushing those new ideas and new ways of connecting people together to do production to get those exciting new products started.

　　GS: Connecting equals packaging, something CAA is known for, yes?

　　SB: In point of fact, if you understand what packaging is, it is exactly packaging, but for games. The opportunity at CAA for doing this well doesn’t so much come from any sort of quote unquote, “muscle” you might imagine is easy to think about. The thing about CAA that caused me to decide that it was an okay place to be is the idea of the teamwork present at CAA.

　　GS: I thought teamwork was illegal in Hollywood…

　　SB: People in Hollywood know that CAA is very different from the other agencies in that it’s not a bunch of guys trying to score a quick deal. It’s a team-oriented place in that people are sharing all sorts of information, just trying to look for these awesome opportunities for the clients to do amazing products. And so being able to draw, for instance, from the knowledge of packaging business, from television and film, and knowing what kinds of deals work and don’t, already has been incredibly instructive to me.

　　GS: Sounds slightly reminiscent of CEG…

　　SB: I’ve been thinking about it in the games space for a year and a half with CEG, trying to find, for example, how to make the right business opportunity for this designer to work with this other developer on this concept that came from a third guy. This is a natural way for things to work in film and television…but it’s totally bizarre in the game space.

　　GS: Bizarre for a reason maybe.

　　SB: The unfortunate truth--for the game industry--is that this is a much more natural, creative way to work.

　　GS: You are referring to a style of collaboration, yes?

　　SB: You don’t want to have the same team and the same designer on every single product. Different teams have different strengths. You might have a platform game with one development team, and a designer and a writer, and the designer comes up, then, with a first–person shooter. You don’t want to use the platform team to do the first-person shooter. And today, what happens is that idea just gets scrapped.

　　GS: I surmise that when you implement this production scheme at CAA, you connect only those people who are clients of CAA.

　　SB: No. It’s not a 100 percent given. The way that people become clients is by working in deals like this.

　　GS: So you might leverage your existing client base, and someone's skill set, and a certain opportunity, to maybe bring someone who is not with CAA in on a particular project. True?

　　SB: One of the hallmarks of CAA is that sort of openness. If you talk to people--and again, this is something which attracted me to CAA, given the sort of image I had of what Hollywood agents were like versus what the reality was at CAA--if you talk to people about working with Larry Shapiro, for instance, Larry has worked with and connected people and made things happen for a lot of people who are not and will never be clients.

　　GS: So who's it good for?

　　SB: It’s good for everybody. It’s great for the business, and therefore it’s great for your clients. And that viewpoint, making sure that you’re doing stuff to give back to the industry and to make the industry work better, was really--and it sounds a little bit cheesy--but it was the final thing that made me decide that it was going to be great to work at CAA.

　　GS: What about games that don’t tie in to Hollywood product? Do they count?

　　SB: Of course.

　　GS: In what way? Why would a developer who had an IP or idea that didn’t relate to a Hollywood product come to you guys?

　　SB: I can rephrase it this way and say CAA’s television clients are not forced to work on properties which will also work in the movies. The reason that I showed up here is because there was a huge opportunity to do some extraordinary games, to offer some amazing new games to both the publishers, and to the audience, by attaching people together in new ways and doing it in a spirit of good business. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something that’s going to transition to another medium.

　　GS: As you said earlier, you're doing be focused on getting games made. What has Larry's role been?

　　SB: We’ll be covering the games business from two different standpoints and two different complementary focuses. Larry comes from a Hollywood production background. He was a producer. He's done television; he’s done film. And he knows those people. He knows how that process works. In the same way that somebody who’s shipped a lot of games has a level of credibility with people because he’s been there and he’s done the things himself that everybody else is currently doing. Larry also has some experience with games production, which is awesome.

　　GS: His greatest strength?

　　SB: His greatest strength is being genuinely interested in helping people and being only secondarily interested in the business end. That’s how he’s really gained a lot of credibility in the game business, which is a lot more cynical than Hollywood in some ways. And certainly a lot more cautious about believing people, especially people coming from Hollywood and saying they’re going to help.

　　GS: And his track record in the game space is what?

　　SB: Larry has delivered on a lot of things, bringing writers, and bringing talent in, taking properties like Doom to the studios and doing it in a way that makes everybody feel like the right things are happening and that the fans are going to be happy, the developers are going to happy, and the studio thinks is an awesome idea. Everything fits together correctly because he’s very sensitive to the mindset of gamers and the people in the game industry--and he also knows Hollywood well. That’s the beat that he’s covering.

　　GS: And you?

　　SB: And conversely, on my side, you know, I think all of the creative people in the industry--many of whom are my very good friends--who have been struggling to do, and in some cases succeeding to do, new types of products that are successful, can really benefit from the experience of CAA and work that Larry’s done. So we’re going to be covering, to some extent, both the actual game production and then the game production end as it applies to Hollywood.

　　GS: So how excited are you?

　　SB: I’m pretty excited. And I’m a little apprehensive. I think of myself, internally, as the 12-year-old boy idiot.

　　GS: Hey, wasn't that your official job title at Microsoft?

　　SB: You know, I can remember standing onstage with Bill Gates when we did those first Xbox demos, and feeling just unbelievable excitement, but also just incredible fear of failure.

　　GS: In what way fear?

　　SB: You know, here’s the opportunity, and it’s perfect, and I really need to make this happen now. That’s how I feel now. In a lot of ways I’ve got to make sure I don’t let the game industry down or let gamers down, because I think a lot of people are really cynical about Hollywood. And there have been a lot of reasons to be cynical about Hollywood. There have been a lot of people who have come and said, you know, we’re going to revolutionize the game business.

　　GS: Do you think can make a difference Seamus?

　　SB: My M.O. all along has been to be practical, take steps one at a time, only do things that are real, and put things together that work. And that’s really the job here.

　　End of the day, if you’re going to do things well, there’s no flash, there’s no bullsh**, there’s no Hollywood magic. It’s hard work, and getting really good people together to do really exciting stuff, and then just busting your butt on it until it’s actually good.

　　GS: You sound serious.

　　SB: The reason I think it can be done is because I’ve been thinking about it so long, and I know the opportunity is there, and I know the people are there who want to take advantage of it. And frankly, I’ve been successful at enough stuff, and I’ve failed abjectly at enough stuff that I can take it in a very, very practical, one-step-at-a-time way, and make it work well.

　　It’s really a process of just being careful about what’s real and not…not doing things because they’re super flashy or there’s a big license attached to them, but doing things that are really going to kick ass--and being very honest with yourself about it.