Andy Garcia a master story teller

By Patricia Simms

Andy Garcia is president and co-owner of Andy Garcia Productions Inc.

Q. What does your company do?

A. Some people call it business theater. A lot of corporations have business meetings where they bring in the sales force or a dealer network or a distributor network to one location. It’s sort of a state of the union for their company, talking about how business is, about new products. It’s a way to get everybody together and deliver one central message.

Our entire team goes on site to do these shows. It’s about a seven-day on-site process, with a three-month lead-up. We are doing all the video creation from shooting it to editing it to designing it. It’s a way for a company to get in front of their constituents and convey their business message. It involves a combination of live and tape — there’s the theatrical live part and the special effects, but there is also the video component where you need to convey information that you can’t do live.

Business theater is our No. 1 sales product. The nice thing is that as part of the business theater, we have the responsibility to coordinate the event. If, in that event, there is video, then we produce that video. if in that event, there are slides, we produce that. We do other video-only business, but the staging business is what pays for everything.

Q. How many customers do you have?

A. We work with maybe 10 different clients, but there really are two: Harley-Davidson and Sub-Zero.

Q. How did you start out?

A. I started in my basement as a producer to produce whatever needed producing. My skill set was as a producer, then I hired everything else out. If I was producing a video for somebody, I would hire a camera person, go into an editing facility and edit there. That’s really how it started out.

Q. Did you have a business plan?

A. No. I had a desire to control my own destiny. For me personally, and for Sue, it was all about control. I had worked for a lot of people for a long time and had great experiences, but moving forward, I wanted to make sure that I was compensated for however hard I was willing to work. If I really wanted to work hard, then I expected to be compensated more. If I wanted to slough off, then I would take reponsibility and make less. I thought the only way to do that was to go on my own. We were married at the time and had our two kids. Sue was working full time at CUNA Mutual, so that was a help.

Q. Tell me about where you grew up.

A. I grew up in the Belmont and Broadway neighborhood of Chicago; now it’s called New Town. A low-income family. I lived on the second floor of a two-flat house next door to our cousins, who filled up three flats of the house they lived in. Lots of family. Very blessed. My parents worked hard to make sure we got the best they could offer, and three of their six kids ended up getting into a private school in Chicago, Francis W. Parker School, based on a scholarship. That was huge because it gave us a very good, grounded education. I was there through eighth grade.

Q. Was your school experience very different from your neighborhood experience?

A. Absolutely. By then, we were in low-income housing on North Avenue, about two miles from Cabrini-Green. The housing was brand new, it was very nice. But in sixth, seventh, eighth grade, it was sort of an eye-opener that “the kids I go to school with live on Lake Shore Drive,” the wealthiest of the wealthy.

Q. How did that affect you?

A. I think probably — the No. 1 character instilled in me was the ability to live in two worlds, the ability to adapt, to have very little drama in things. I think sometimes when you’re faced with a challenge or a problem, you can look at it a lot of different ways. You can look at it as something exciting, or you can look at it as if it is the end of the world.

Part of my growth was there, but a bigger part of my growth was at Channel 3 (WISC-TV), by far. I was, in my mind, a sponge at Channel 3. I listened to everybody. I took it all in. I learned that being a really good live TV director meant having the calm, that calmness in your voice. I learned that you have to think through every possible situation that might happen. What if, what if, what if? So when it happened, you were ready.

Q. How did you get to Madison?

A. I went to Parker through eighth grade, then my mom decided to move to Madison. It was just me and my younger sister at that point. I would have gone to East High School ... but the consensus was that I might fit better at (then) City High School, where there were 200 students. It might be a better fit than East where there would be 1,000 or 2,000 students. Then they combined City High School and Shabazz. I graduated from Shabazz in 1981.

I learned a ton about theater and lighting through a lighting student at UW-Madison (who was involved at Shabazz.) I spent four years tailing him, shadowing him, getting to know as much as I could about theater lighting. At the same time, I interned with Bonnie Gruber, who was an alderperson at the time. I noticed the video setup at the City Council meeting. It was the Citicable people, (who led me to volunteer) at the Madison Community Access Center. They got me onto a work experience program, a federally funded program for low-income kids. At the end of my junior year in high school, the counselor got me an interview at Channel 3. I worked there part time from February to June. In June, they offered me a full-time job. I worked my way up.

Q. In the last 10 years, technical changes in your business have been huge. What has been the most difficult transition?

A. From day one, the business side, the accounting side was the most difficult, the thing I knew the least about. It was nothing I anticipated. I hired freelance a woman who had done some work for John Roach (Projects). She basically set up the entire beginning of how I would handle the business.

Q. And you are a certified minority business?

A. Yes, we are. I am Mexican-American. My parents were born in Chicago, their parents were born in Mexico.

Q. How has being on your own worked out for you?

A. I think it delivered everything I expected. As hard as I worked, I got the rewards. And I’ve had the flexibility to work with people I want to work with. I love story telling, and a big part of the job that we do here is story telling. 

Andy Garcia

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