Media Moguls on an Elevated Pay Scale

LA Times

 

When an executive runs a company whose success depends on stars — whether they are richly rewarded TV news anchors or generously compensated movie idols — it is only fitting that the boss is paid, well, like a star.

Call it the Katie Couric Syndrome.

That's one take-away from a Los Angeles Times survey of compensation packages of media and entertainment company executives. While the nation's CEOs in general typically saw their earnings slip in 2009, the men — and they're all men — at the top of the conglomerates that operate the TV networks, movie studios, cable systems and other outposts of the media world continued to command pay packages on par with, and in some cases far higher than, A-list actors.

Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger collected a package worth nearly $24 million for 2009. Philippe Dauman, who manages Viacom Inc., which includes the MTV networks, Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures, got an almost 22% raise to $34 million. CBS Corp. chief Leslie Moonves' pay more than doubled to $43.2 million. News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch topped $22 million, and Time Warner Inc.'s Jeffrey Bewkes received nearly $20 million.

"The explanation you hear for entertainment company CEOs is that they have a lot of people in their company — like Katie Couric — who get paid these high salaries, and the CEO thinks, 'I run the company, why should I get paid less?' " said Paul Hodgson, senior research associate at the Corporate Library. (CBS pays Couric about $15 million a year.)

That might have been OK a decade ago during the gravy-train years of the entertainment industry, when it seemed there could never be enough movies or TV shows to feed the "content" pipeline.

But for the last two years the content business has been under assault.

Media companies have laid off thousands of employees, cut TV and movie production budgets and crunched news divisions as the economic moorings of their businesses were eroded by declining DVD sales, a slowdown in advertising and the migration of viewers to the Internet and other forms of entertainment.

Median compensation in 2009 for CEOs of 342 companies in the S&P 500 fell 8% from the previous year to $7.5 million, according to a survey by the Northern California executive compensation research firm Equilar. It was the second year in a row that overall compensation dropped.

By comparison, full-year median compensation for executives managing the companies included in the Times survey was $15.9 million in 2009 — substantially higher than the median of, for example, healthcare company CEOs, which Equilar estimates was $10.5 million last year.

Media companies that are still run like family businesses hand out some of the biggest paychecks.

Murdoch, for example, received the highest base salary among the media chiefs — $8.1 million — which means the 79-year-old mogul is guaranteed at least that much even if his company has a terrible year. Corporate governance experts frown on such arrangements, preferring to see executive pay tied more closely to a company's performance.

"The base salaries at News Corp. are quite obscene, really," said Hodgson. He noted the average base salary for S&P 500 chiefs was "just over $1 million" annually.

Comcast Corp. CEO Brian Roberts collected $27.2 million in 2009 and his No. 2, Steve Burke, hauled in $34 million, which included a handsome bonus and stock awards for renewing his contract and a raise to reflect his expanding responsibilities. Burke is expected to soon be managing NBC Universal after the pending merger with Comcast receives federal approval.

Moonves earned the distinction of collecting the largest pay of media CEOs, when calculating cash and stock awards, even though CBS is considerably smaller than Disney, News Corp., Time Warner Inc. and Comcast.

At the very top of the survey was Greg Maffei, chief executive of Liberty Media, which includes the QVC shopping channel and the premium movie channel Stars. Maffei's package was valued $87.5 million, including $79 million in stock options that vest after four years. Because of a Securities and Exchange Commission rule change, companies must record the present value of the stock option awards during the year they were made.

DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg's compensation also soared because of the accounting change. His package was worth $23.4 million, almost entirely in stock and options that vest in several years. Meanwhile, Katzenberg collected an annual paycheck of $1.

For several companies, including CBS and Viacom, a dramatic rebound in stock value pumped up pay. "These companies have been doing quite well in the market during the last year, so it is not surprising to see the pay go up," said Aaron Boyd, research analyst with Equilar.

Doing quite well, yes, but that's in comparison to quite dismal lows. CBS stock is trading at about $16 a share, quadruple its recessionary nadir last year but well off its peak in 2007 of above $30 a share.

There also is the benefit of longevity.

"A lot of these guys have been around for years and they helped establish their companies, like Moonves, Murdoch and Barry Diller," said Boyd. "For them, it is probably easier to make the case that they should have a certain pay because they have played such an important role."

However, Corporate Library, an independent corporate governance research firm based in Portland, Maine, pointed out that company founders and other "executive chairmen" can take advantage of their influence. "Many executive chairs have no operational role within their companies but are paid like high-level executives," a recent report by the firm found. It said Sumner Redstone, who is executive chairman of both CBS and Viacom Inc., was one of the highest paid.

Last year, Redstone, who turns 87 this month, received $33.1 million as chairman of his two companies. He spends much of his time at his estate perched above Beverly Hills with his long-haired dachshunds.

But where are the watchdogs?

"It ultimately comes down to the board of directors. Should these directors 'just say no' to the CEOs?" asked Charles Elson, a professor at the University of Delaware who specializes in corporate governance. "How independent are they from the management of the company? These boards should be negotiating in the best interests of shareholders."

Standing up to a strong CEO can backfire. If a board cuts a CEO's salary, the executive could become bitter and leave. That could destabilize the company and cost it much more than what was saved by paring the salary, said James F. Reda, a New York-based executive compensation consultant.

Still, Reda predicts that in five years entertainment chiefs won't rake in such hefty rewards. He compared media moguls to the steel barons and railroad titans of the 1930s. Captains of those industries are now much further down the corporate pay scale.

"The whole move to digital doesn't bode well for entertainment companies," he said. "These big compensation packages are something of a holdover, and the profit margins do not support them. There is going to be a tipping point and then you will see this begin to trend down. But for now, there is a lot of inertia."

Short Films can be a Shortcut to Hollywood

LA Times

When Barbara and Andres Muschietti, two television-commercial veterans with little movie-making experience, decided on a lark to make a short horror film last year, they didn't exactly have a larger plan in mind. "We didn't even have an outline," says Barbara Muschietti. "We just wanted to do something scary."

But a few months later, the Muschiettis, who work mainly in their native Spain, had done a lot more than that. With their short film "Mama," a sparkplug of a tale about two children in a Gothic haunted house, the Muschiettis secured a deal from Universal Pictures to turn their short into a feature. And they won the admiration of a Hollywood A-lister who has just a bit of name-recognition: Guillermo del Toro, the director of "Hellboy" and upcoming epic " The Hobbit," who liked "Mama" so much he decided to join the project as a producer and even write a draft of the script.

To many movie fans, the mention of short films conjures some dusty notions. If the form registers at all, it's as a film-festival afterthought or a quaint anachronism, a reminder of the moviegoing era of a half-century ago when the main theatrical event was sandwiched between cartoons, newsreels and other filler.

But to contemporary Hollywood, shorts are serious business — or at least a serious fad. The massive success last year of the shorts-derived "District 9" — and the power of YouTube to spread word quickly — has transformed how Hollywood views these mini-movies. "Studios and financiers have always said they'd like to see as much of the movie as they can, figuratively, before they develop it," says the veteran Hollywood producer Douglas Wick, who has been behind mega-hits such as "Gladiator." "With shorts, they literally can."


In recent months, shorts from filmmaking neophytes have seized the imagination of some of the town's biggest names, who see them not just a calling card for new talent, as they previously did, but the basis for hot, multiplex-worthy material.

Sam Raimi's production company was the envy of many in Hollywood last year when it outmaneuvered several players to acquire the feature rights to "Panic Attack," an apocalyptic tale evoking "The War of the Worlds" from a Uruguayan unknown named Fede Alvarez. Leonardo DiCaprio's production company optioned a science-fiction short from a Dutch physics student named Tim Smit called "What's in the Box?"

Top producers have expressed interest in turning "Alma" — a dark, impeccably executed short with Tim Burton overtones from an in-the-trenches Pixar employee named Rodrigo Blaas — into a big-budget animated feature. Patrick Jean's "Pixels," a playful ode to classic video games, is also attracting attention from industry players who want to turn it into a theatrical film.

And over the last few weeks, heat has swirled around Ricardo de Montreuil's "The Raven," a story about a man pursued across a dystopian downtown Los Angeles, where the film was shot over one weekend. "The Raven" is the most current example of a short gaining buzz in real time, as stars, producers and agents send links to one another with an air of conspiracy and discovery. It's basically Hollywood's version of pursuing unassuming bar bands in the hope of turning one of them into the Rolling Stones.

"It was a little insane. I don't know how it became viral so fast," says "Raven" director de Montreuil, who previously directed dramas that played the likes of Sundance but never before gotten a fraction of the attention. "I'm still trying to figure out what happened."

The profit motive and creative template for nearly all these efforts stems from the short "Alive in Joburg." Several years ago, no one had heard of the modest nine-minute science-fiction film or its rookie director, Neill Blomkamp. But under the tutelage of "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson, the short was honed and chiseled into "District 9." The rest is film lore. Backed by the muscle of a studio marketing campaign, the film became one of the biggest hits of last summer, an Oscar nominee for best picture and one of the best-received films of 2009.

"A good short tells you that a filmmaker can handle a story, that he has vision and that he has the ability to convey emotion, which are all things we saw with Neill," says Sony president of worldwide affairs Peter Schlessel, who helped spearhead "District 9." "You can never take something like that and build a business plan around it. But if it worked once, it could work again."

Yet it's more than just a lone hit that has so many Hollywood power players going shorts-mad. If graphic novels became the rage a few years ago because they offered nervous studio executives a tangible representation of a story idea, shorts do graphic novels one better: They show how a finished film might actually look. And with traffic so easily measured, it can reassure focus group-minded studio executive of an audience for a filmmaker's work (at least a nonpaying one).

Meanwhile, for the creators, the low barrier to making a short has democratized the medium of cinema. "Animation is a producers' medium. This is a way to take the reins back," says Blaas, who should know about the difficulties of imprinting one's vision on a film – he holds a day job at Pixar, where hundreds of animators sometimes work just to create a single frame. (Blaas took a five-month leave from the Disney-owned company to work on "Alma," which he financed himself.)

Or, put another way, it means everyday Joes, with little more than a handheld camera and software they picked up at Best Buy, can win the lottery, landing six-figure development deals and going almost overnight from their basements to the corridors of Hollywood power in the manner of an "American Idol" winner. "Panic Attack," for instance, generated more than 6 million YouTube hits and secured Alvarez representation at CAA and Anonymous Content, in addition to the Raimi deal.

Packed with homemade videos showing teenage karaoke and silly pet tricks, Web video has long had little relevance to serious filmmaking. But these days, it's being seen as a shortcut through the Hollywood system; where outsiders to the movie business would once have to work their way through the torturous world of music videos or commercials, inexpensive cameras and Web exposure now drastically cut down on the time it takes for newcomers to get noticed.

It's also no accident that many of the hot shorts directors come from outside the U.S. as filmmakers use the Web to shorten the distance between themselves, fans and executives. (Plus, insiders say, foreign sensibilities often seem fresh to jaded Hollywood eyes.)

But as the trend has caught fire, some point out there are limits to what even a good short can prove. A five-minute movie, after all, is shorthand. It's a far cry from a well-paced, three-act story that even the most rudimentary screenwriters turn out. And even when it's done well, only certain film categories lend themselves to shorts. One could hardly begin to lay out the building blocks of an emotional drama in a few minutes. "With a genre movie, it's about feeling and sensation," admits Andres Muschietti. "I don't know if a short works well for other types of movies."

The shorts wave has also grown intense enough that it has provoked a backlash — in many ways before it even has had time to prove itself. The Hollywood Reporter ran a story last week proclaiming that the trend had already passed. "Hollywood feeling shorts fatigue," the headline announced, even though no film from this new crop of shorts has gotten close to becoming a finished feature.

Like other Hollywood trends, this one will probably mint a few more overnight stars before it's all over, as well as churn out a number of cut-rate copycats. "Shorts remind me of how Esquire used to put the image of a monkey typing on its cover to show how easy everyone thought it was to write a screenplay," Wick says. "But it of course wasn't that easy." He pauses. "The idea of creating a good short is much easier than the actuality."

Suggestive GOP ad Attacks Ohio Senate Dem Hopeful

Associated Press

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A national Senate Republican campaign committee's website is featuring a sexually suggestive political attack ad against an Ohio Democrat running for U.S. Senate, showing him shirtless in a provocative pose.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee's ad has drawn a barrage of decency and copyright complaints since its release this week.

It features an image of Ohio Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher bare-chested with one hand on his belly and the other out of camera range. The image oscillates as steamy saxophone music plays and a title reads: "He was more concerned about his job than yours."

Ohio newspapers dubbed the ad racy, tasteless and suggestive of masturbation.

YouTube pulled the spot from its website Thursday at the request of the Buckeye State Blog, an Ohio political blog that claimed rights to other pieces of video used in the ad. The ad drew 40,000 hits before it was pulled from the site, and Fisher campaign spokesman John Collins said the campaign saw an outpouring of online donations in an apparent backlash.

The shirtless image is taken from a few seconds from an on-camera conversation Fisher had with son, Jason, during the filming of a documentary on Ohio's 2006 gubernatorial campaign. Fisher already endured an earlier round of embarrassment over the scene when it was first posted online.

Collins said of the ad, "We invite the hundreds of thousands of Ohioans who have not only lost their shirts but also their jobs, their homes and their hopes in the Bush-Portman recession to join our campaign."

A committee spokeswoman says the group stands by the ad.

Super Bowl Ads: Time for a Change

ESPN

Neither the ads nor the people who produced them reflect the nation's diversity

When the New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts took the field in Miami on Feb. 7, their Super Bowl wasn't the only game being played. There was a championship at stake for Madison Avenue advertising agencies that evening, too. As the players on the field were fighting for yards and points, corporate America was fighting for consumer dollars. An editorial titled "Bowl Marketers: You Need to Go Big or Go Home," (Advertising Age, Feb. 15, 2010) explained that, "The Super Bowl, despite its cost, provides the rarest of opportunities for marketers -- an environment where the ads are also programming." Companies were willing to put up an average of $2.7 million per ad because of the huge viewership the Super Bowl draws. According to Nielsen ratings, the game was the most-watched program in television history, with an approximate 106.5 million viewers. Obviously, the ads shown during the game can have enormous influence on the viewing audience.

As I watched this year with my wife, Ann, we both remarked how many ads seemed to go way over the line with stereotypical images that could be considered offensive. In the months since they aired, I've looked further into the content of those ads and the people who produced them; and it became apparent that both areas reflected a stunning lack of cultural diversity and sensitivity.

For example:

• Only four of the 67 ads shown during the Super Bowl had an African-American male as a main character; and of those four, only two (Bud Light's "Light House" and Doritos' "House Rules") involved an actor who is not a well-known celebrity. Other minorities, including minority women, did not have a leading role in any of the commercials. (Beyoncé was on the screen for less than 10 percent of her Vizio commercial, so that was not considered a leading role.) The minority actors who were present in the ads had limited speaking roles or received just a few seconds of camera time.

• There was also a lack of depictions of black middle-class families in the ads. The Doritos "House Rules" ad showed an African-American single mom ready to go on a date, reinforcing a stereotypical image of African-American women as single mothers caring for their young children with no father figure present. In the commercials set in professional or office environments, white males always had the dominant role with one exception: Telefora.com's "Rude Flowers" ad, in which white females were the main characters. The only commercial in a professional/office setting that included diverse characters was Intel's "Lunchroom" ad, which depicted a number of Intel employees as Indians and other Asians.

• Madison Avenue, which has never shied away from using sex to sell products, followed that form in a number of Super Bowl ads this year. Go Daddy's "News" tried to make a sale with the line, "Some say the commercial is too hot for TV" -- to which Go Daddy Girl Danica Patrick replied, "How hot is too hot?" "News" and Go Daddy's other Super Bowl ad, "Spa," both employed attractive women talking in sexual innuendos to promote the company. Actress Megan Fox's celebrity and appearance were put to use in Motorola's spot, which featured Fox in a bubble bath.

• Other commercials featured scantily clad women as nothing more than props in a male-focused advertisement. Monster.com's "Beavers" starred a uniquely talented beaver and his beautiful blond "groupie." Continuing with the trend, Kia Sorento passed on including humans as main characters in its "Joy Ride" commercial in favor of stuffed animals, yet the popular theme of a bikini-clad woman in a hot tub was not missing.

• Then there were ads such as Flo TV's "Injury Report" in which women challenged the manhood of their partners. "Injury Report" portrayed a man whose "spine was removed by his girlfriend" as he shopped for lavender candles instead of watching the game. If he would simply purchase Flo TV's personal television, he could "change out of that skirt," as the narrator (Jim Nantz) passionately bemoaned.

• Bud Light's commercials were the most diverse, with African-American, Middle Eastern, Hispanic and Asian actors and actresses in speaking roles and with considerable camera time.

A few months ago, Cyrus Mehri, a civil rights attorney and a friend, told me he was working with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to take action against the Madison Avenue agencies he felt were discriminating in the areas of race and gender. We talked about how ads bearing negative images can reinforce stereotypes and damage race and gender relations. We agreed that neither of us knew the race and gender of the people creating the ads. That conversation started what became, in effect, a Racial and Gender Report Card for Madison Avenue, which I wrote with five of my graduate assistants (Devan J. Dignan, Brian Hoff, Jamile M. Kitnurse, Austin Moss II and Naomi Robinson) at The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida.

The report, titled "WHITE MEN DOMINATE ADVERTISING AGENCIES' CREATIVE DIRECTOR POSITIONS As Exemplified by Ads Aired During the Super Bowl," seeks to depict the current disparity in hiring practices that exists in the advertising industry regarding race and gender. There were 67 advertisements aired during the Super Bowl, 52 of which were produced by major advertising agencies. The other 15 were produced either by the companies themselves or by creative directors who were not professionals. At least one was produced by someone who won a contest. We were able to identify the race and gender of the creative directors for 58 of the 67 commercials that aired during the game.

Here's what we found:

• None of the 52 ads from Madison Avenue agencies was produced with a person of color as the lead creative director -- 100 percent of them were white.

• Furthermore, 94 percent of the creative directors on those ads were white males; only 6 percent were female.

• When looking at all 67 ads, including the 15 produced outside a Madison Avenue agency, a total of 76 creative/co-creative directors worked on these commercials, and only one was a minority: Joelle De Jesus, a Latino man who won a Doritos "Crash the Super Bowl" contest. His ad, Doritos "House Rules," was considered by many to be a "top five" commercial in terms of popularity. This commercial was one of the few that had noncelebrity minorities in a lead role.

• Seventy of the creative directors were white males (92 percent); five were white women.

I have been doing media report cards since 2006, and I have been authoring report cards on the racial and gender hiring practices in the NFL, NBA, MLB and MLS and in college sport for more than two decades. In all those years, we have never reported on an industry group that is less diverse. The Madison Avenue ad agencies we researched are almost all led by white men. The hope in writing this report is that this baseline data will provide a mirror for self-reflection so Madison Avenue can embrace change and move ahead.

The NAACP, the law firm of Mehri & Skalet PLLC and TIDES take the position that the key figures in the Madison Avenue advertising agencies that use the Super Bowl to sell products should mirror the advances made by professional football. These agencies seem to have missed what most of corporate America now understands: Diversity is a business imperative.

You don't have to look any further than the demographics of the Super Bowl viewing audience to figure that out in this context. According to Nielsen data, nearly half of the Super Bowl viewers this year were women, and nearly 20 percent were African-American and Latino; and those numbers are increasing every year. The Nielsen data indicates that 11.2 million African-Americans viewed Super Bowl XLIV, and 48 percent of them were women.

It is ironic that these ads aired during the NFL's biggest event. NFL franchises have worked hard in recent years to become more diverse in their front offices. The Rooney Rule, a provision launched in 2003 that requires NFL teams to interview minority candidates for head-coaching and senior management positions, has been an overwhelming success. Six of the last eight Super Bowl teams have had minority head coaches or general managers. The NFL recently received its highest overall grade ever, a B, in "The 2009 Racial and Gender Report Card" while also achieving its first A for racial hiring practices. Sixty-seven percent of the players in the NFL were African-American in the last statistics available.

The record of Madison Avenue agencies stands in stark contrast to that of the NFL.

The lack of minority employees who work in executive or creative positions for advertising agencies isn't new. It's been an issue in the advertising industry since it was first brought to light in 1963 by the NAACP and the Urban League of Greater New York. In response to the results of our recent study, Laura Blackburne, NAACP general counsel and a former judge, said, "The NAACP and others have tried in past years to address the exclusion of African-Americans and other racial minorities in upper management, and especially the creative departments, of the advertising industry. This study demonstrates that nothing has changed. This 'old boy' network continues to exclude the creative talents of African-Americans, women and other ethnic groups while perpetuating negative racial and gender stereotypes. We are determined to bring this industry out of the past and into the 21st century."

When ads are produced without input from diverse cultural viewpoints, the probability increases that the commercials will show biases on racial and gender issues; and those issues were apparent in many of the commercials shown during the 2010 Super Bowl broadcast.

Mehri, the civil rights attorney, summed it up this way: "The Institute's Report sheds further light on Madison Avenue's woeful employment record. For those on Madison Avenue still in a state of denial, open your eyes. For those denied fair opportunities, have hope. We will not stop until a New Day is created on Madison Avenue."

Wednesday's news conference at which the results of the study were released was held at the NAACP's New York headquarters. In attendance was Nancy Hill, the president and CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA). She is the first woman to have held that influential position in the history of AAAA, which is considered the advertising industry's national trade association. We were very pleased that she was there, and I spoke by phone with her later in the day and agreed to get together to open a dialogue with her association in the future.

The agencies need to use more diverse talent to create ads that can be popular yet also lift up their viewers rather than put them down. I call on these agencies to take immediate action to open up the hiring process. I call on the companies that hire the agencies to advertise their products to demand that the creative talent better represent America. I also call on the ad sponsors to demand change in how women and people of color are portrayed in their commercials.

Surely we can be entertained and drawn in by ads that are not made at someone else's expense.

Richard E. Lapchick is the chair of the DeVos Sport Business Management Graduate Program in the College of Business Administration at the University of Central Florida. The author of 13 books, Lapchick also directs UCF's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, is the author of the annual Racial and Gender Report Card, and is the director of the National Consortium for Academics and Sport. He has joined ESPN.com as a regular commentator on issues of diversity in sport.

FCC Lets Hollywood Turn Off Your Output Jacks

WIRED

Hollywood will soon have the power to remotely disable the analog outputs on your set-top box, under a decision by federal regulators on Friday intended to prevent home recording of new movie releases.

The move by the Federal Communications Commission grants cable and satellite providers the power to block consumers from viewing just-released movies in an analog format through a process known as Selectable Output Control. Hollywood requested SOC powers as a condition of allowing providers for the first time to release movies to their in-home customers while the film is in theaters.

The Motion Picture Association of America said its member studios would not authorize the early movie releases unless it won the ability to deploy Selectable Output Control. The reason: Analog video signals can easily be recorded, while digital video standards include a copy protection scheme that lets providers set a no-copy flag on the signal.

Digital rights group, Public Knowledge, said millions of older televisions, including 11 million HD sets, would be affected, a number the MPAA disputes. Owners of those devices would not have the luxury of being able to view the latest theater blockbuster at home through video on-demand services.

“The FCC is allowing the MPAA to control your television,” John Bergmayer, Public Knowledge staff attorney, said in a telephone interview.

Howard Gantman, a Motion Picture Association of America vice president, said in a telephone interview that, while some consumers may be left out, “It’s not going to stop you from getting what you get now.”

The FCC said it sided with the MPAA in the name of “public interest,” and granted SOC controls for no longer than 90 days per title.

“We believe that providing consumers with the option to view films in their homes shortly after those films are released in theaters will serve the public interest,” the FCC said in its order. It added that permission to deploy Selectable Output Control “is necessary to provide adequate protection against illegal copying of the proposed service.”

Gantman said it’s now about four months between theater debut to home or DVD release. With Friday’s decision, he said, it was not immediately clear how much shorter that span would become.

Agreements between studios, producers and the cable and satellite providers need to be worked out, he said.

“We’re not breaking anybody’s TVs,” he said.

Nashville Flood put Grand Ole Opry Stage 2 Feet Underwater

Associated Press

 

 

A group of 10 to 15 workers moved precious memorabilia safely away from the Grand Ole Opry House even as flood waters rose, officials said Friday.

Opry president Steve Buchanan gave details Friday on how they moved instruments, tapes and other important pieces to higher ground before flood waters swept through the Opry house Sunday night. He did not give specifics, but country music lovers had worried about costumes and set designs.

"The difficult part is we didn't know how high the water would get," Buchanan said.

But he said many items were not moved. Buchanan said restoration companies have been hired to try and restore damaged materials and hopes for no significant losses.

"It breaks your heart, but it's our responsibility to be sure that that building comes back to life, and it will," Buchanan said.

Gaylord Entertainment officials confirmed 2 feet of water covered the stage, which will have to be replaced. But a 6-foot circle of wood brought over from the Opry's longtime former home appears to be salvageable, a hallowed piece from a show where country music stars have performed for decades.

"It is in remarkably good condition," Buchanan said of the circle. "We will ultimately need to replace the stage. But we replaced the stage every few years, but not the circle. The circle will be back center stage very soon."

Gaylord Entertainment officials first shared details about damage to the Opry house during a Friday conference call with investors. For now, The Opry's shows have been moved to other venues.

The Gaylord Opryland Resort, the hotel next to the Opry house, was hit with up to 10 feet of water. Its first floor, power plant and technical hub were flooded. The resort won't be taking bookings from now through October so extensive repairs can be made.

CEO Colin Reed said the damage is likely to exceed the company's $50 million insurance coverage.