Kodak Entertainment's new execs - News - Brian Spruill, Michael J. Morelli - Brief Article

Post, May 1, 2002 by Daniel Restuccio

HOLLYWOOD -- Eric G. Rodli, president of Kodak Entertainment Imaging, (www.kodak.com) reaffirmed the company's commitment to servicing the Hollywood and global entertainment community by naming two new executives to his division.

Brian Spruill was promoted to the new position of vice president and director of strategic planning and business development Michael J. Morelli becomes the new vice president and Hollywood region business manager assuming the responsibilities of Spruill's former position.

"This is an incredibly important time," explains Rodli, "particularly with the issues of the transition to digital and a lot of misinformation about the quality of film versus digital capture methods, particularly 24p."

"We've never had a VP of strategic planning before. What's unique about this job," continues Rodli, "is that Brian is now the person that helps create the vision of our future and that has the responsibility for allocating capitol investment dollars against that. He's the guy who is in charge of budgets for growth, major research and development initiatives, capital budgets, venture and acquisition, all goes through Brian."

Spruill is a 30-year veteran of Kodak He started with the company in 1972 and has held positions such as technical sales representative, district sales manager, and CEO/president of FPC, Inc., a Kodak subsidiary that recycles print film.

Morelli held general manager positions in Hollywood, Australia and New Zealand. He graduated from the State University of New York at Potsdam with a degree in computer science, Earlier in his career at Kodak, Morelli worked as a systems analyst, sales and engineering representative and district sales and marketing manager:

Spruill's mandate is to develop, implement and co-ordinate the strategic planning across Kodak's product groups: film, digital services, digital cinema and other product lines. He wants to make sure all the business groups are communicating with each other so they can deliver a full range of services.

As far as Kodak's overall master plan, Spruill says the company wants them to concentrate on what they call the critical few: enhance the value and benefits of film, make digital easy, drive output in all forms, and develop new and emerging markets.

"Film is going to be around for a long time," he says emphatically. "There's a lot of misinformation about 24p progressive scan capture. People are saying, 'well film is dead. This will replace film. It looks as good as film.' It's not as good as film. It's not even close to what film can do."

At the same time Kodak wants to capitalize on its deep understanding of the way film works in the transition to digital imaging systems. "We want to make it easy to move film into the digital realm, work with it there and make it easy to get back out to film," he explains. Output, he says, now includes digital cinema as well as print film.

As far as emerging markets, Kodak is actively enabling the film production infrastructure in Eastern Europe, China and India "It's really to augment film," notes Spruill. "They want to use film." He says that support could be in the form of theaters, labs or post production.

Morelli feels his experience working in Australia and New Zealand gives him added insight coming back to the states. "In addition to learning how things are done there," remembers Morelli, "it also gave me perspective on how things are done here, How this community is viewed in other parts of the world is quite impressive. When the cinematographers, producers and directors came through you could see there was a sincere amount of interest and respect in who they are and what they do. So a lot of people do look to Hollywood in that sense."

As far as how he plans to tackle his new job Morelli says he will be doing a lot of listening. "What the Hollywood community does is make entertainment. Some of that has to do with creative solutions, some technology solutions and some business solutions, Those three parts have to be looked at with the right balance depending on what the issue is."

Spurill concludes that Kodak's perspective is that as an imaging company they have to offer a wide range of products and services across the value chain of image acquisition, post production and output and distribution.

"Today we have film, tomorrow we may have other things without going any farther than that" He plans on helping the industry make informed decisions about whatever it does.

"It's important to remember, he says, "that technology doesn't create stories and technology doesn't tell stories. The people that tell stories and create those stories are going to pick and choose what they need to use as a tool for whatever vision that are trying to create."