One fateful day in 1997, when Dan Scharf was a young attorney working as a public defender in Northern California, he spotted a job listing he thought might change his life. SAG in L.A. was looking for a lawyer. He typed up a résumé, stuffed it in a mailbox and crossed his fingers.
And he might have even gotten a response had he not written the wrong address on the envelope.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is not going to happen,’ ” he recalls when he saw “return to sender” on the letter. “But then I decided, ‘Screw it.’ I fixed the address and put it back in the mail.”
It was an inauspicious start to what would ultimately become a stellar legal career in Hollywood. Nearly 35 years later, Scharf is now one of the most successful in-house attorneys in town, serving stints not just at SAG — which finally did get his résumé and hired him the same day — but at a range of studios, from Fox to Disney to Amazon, where for the past 11 years he’s been running the legal show, currently as head of global business operations.
“Eleven years is no small feat,” he says, noting that “98.7 percent” of people now working at Amazon Studios “were hired after me.”
Early on, Scharf discovered his training as a public defender was surprisingly useful in the cutthroat world of entertainment law. The only difference was that instead of convincing juries in criminal cases, he had to talk creative executives out of bad decisions and tell agents why they should accept a deal. “I guess I kind of enjoy it,” he says. “There is a pleasure in arguing and convincing someone to your point of view.”
After spending a year at SAG, Scharf moved to Fox TV, then in 2002 to Disney, where two of his first deals were for High School Musical and Hannah Montana. He vividly recalls the day Miley Cyrus came to the office and sang to a group of executives in suits. “We were all like, ‘Who is this girl?’ ” he says. “She was so gutsy.”
In 2006, he made the jump to the Jim Henson Co., working as general counsel and handling everything from film production to negotiating toy licenses. It was there that he first encountered Jeff Bezos’ fledgling Amazon Studios, which at the time was interested in making a kids show with some of Henson’s iconic IP.
“It never got made, but it got me on Amazon’s radar,” Scharf says. “I guess I clicked the right box, because I got a job offer.”
When he joined Amazon Studios, he was just one of 40 employees working out of an office in the Sherman Oaks Galleria. Scharf knew the job was risky because at the time just about every tech and e-commerce retailer was trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to jump into the content-creation business (even Overstock.com had announced its own streamer). Still, Scharf was willing to take the chance. “I just decided I wanted a change, took a shot and did it,” he says.
Today, he’s sharing much tonier offices at Amazon Studios with a staff of more than 2,200. He recently closed the deals with MrBeast’s team for Beast Games and for Scott Stuber to bring his shingle to Amazon to reignite the United Artists film label.
“Any time you get a chance to learn something, grab it with both arms,” he says, summing up his career philosophy. “You just don’t know what’s coming your way.” — C.R.
This story appeared in the April 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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