Meet Jay Heiskell, Disney’s Local Boots-on-the-Ground

By Carol Badaracco Padgett

Unknowingly, he was prepping for his current role as global team leader of Disney Studio Productions for about 10 years while working as director of entertainment sales for Loews Atlanta Hotels.

The Magic Kingdom was watching and eventually came knocking. Here’s how Heiskell’s story with the entertainment giant unfolded.

Tell us about your segue from Loews Atlanta Hotels to Disney. How did the career transition come about?

Heiskell: I was part of the opening team for Loews Atlanta Hotel. My market was the entertainment vertical. So, I was in that market for 10 years and basically had a variety of studios that I supported in that vertical, [including] Disney Studio Productions. This was really before streaming took off.

With Disney’s studio productions, it literally was a franchise of back-to-back filming. When I would finish one production, a franchise, it would literally lead into others of various titles. But it kept the business flowing through the [Loews Atlanta] hotel. We were a brand new hotel at the epicenter of Atlanta and Midtown, and we were equipped to all the studios, and I had a team that supported the Disney account.

To be honest, I really had no intention of leaving [Loews]. It was a long-term career, and I was going to keep my tenure at Loews. And then the pandemic happened, and that just really disrupted everybody in the hospitality industry and in the entertainment industry. So, everyone was furloughed. And during that time of furlough, the entertainment industry, out of all the verticals — whether it was healthcare, pharmaceutical, or any other vertical besides entertainment — were still shut down. And entertainment was the first one to come back because [it] created this bubble [that worked], where they could continue filming.

As we [society, in general] were all in lockdown, the only thing that really kept us sane was the entertainment industry — with the streaming and the television and the movies that we could stay home and watch.

[As] the furlough continued, it significantly affected the hotel industry as a whole. So, different markets were kind of blended, where somebody that maybe was handling healthcare before, [or] pharmaceutical, also equally handled the entertainment industry. So, I was not brought back [right away], and I didn’t see it happening in the near future. I had to start thinking, what am I going to do? And then [in 2021] I get a call … and my ears perked. In a nutshell, all of those connections and all of those shoulders I rubbed with the executives and the leaders of Disney across the board [during my time at Loews] kind of made me a standout for them because they had a specific criteria in mind for [my current] role.

They told me when they called that there were over 250 applicants, and nobody checked the boxes of what they were looking for. They wanted somebody with hotel experience on the supplier side. They wanted somebody with entertainment industry experience. Specifically, they wanted their wish list [and] to have someone who knew the Disney account.

The other criteria is you had to be located in Atlanta, boots on the ground. So I checked all of the boxes, apparently. And it was really quick. The transition happened from me going from the supplier side to the agency side in a way that was really easy for me because of the furlough. So, I was brought on as senior manager of events and production [and today my role is] global team leader of Disney Studio Productions.

Disney owns a tremendous number of studios and networks. How did you adjust to that scale of production and associated events, coming from the hotel side?

Heiskell: It was easy for me to swap the hats because even though I am on the agency side, you’re still using the tools and your instinct of how to navigate in this industry. I know how to speak to hotels. I can speak their language, and that helped me onboard quickly.

On the studio side, Disney was acquiring so many studios so fast — 26-plus studios –that we couldn’t even onboard [the team] quick enough, with Nat Geo and Searchlight and FX and all of these different networks and studios that were coming into the Disney mix … then [streaming with] Hulu, Disney Plus was introduced, and it didn’t even exist before the pandemic. So all of that created a very specific niche for my team to focus only on studio productions, and then the other part of the team conquers and divides on the Disney events.

Tell us about the events, hotels and transportation for productions, and how your team handles the sheer enormity of it all.

Heiskell: So, that could be anything from internal corporate events to press junkets, anything that is high-touch, high-level, that side of the industry outside of studio productions. We just continued to grow our footprint because Disney is a global company. And so with us being based in North America, all of my team was scattered from the Eastern seaboard all the way to the West coast, and we were just conquering and dividing to support the time zones around the world.

We quickly realized that we were going to have to grow our team internationally and acquire more talent that could support the studio productions in Europe and Asia. And so that’s where the team and the base of the foundation really started.

In a nutshell, our role is dictated by the projects that we are onboarding. So Disney drives the actual projects, [and] they come to us. They tell us what has been greenlit. They tell us when the launch dates are, when the onboarding is happening, what areas of the world they’re going to be filming in. We have an overall view of the schedule. We know exactly where they’re going to be and how many people and how many travelers, because not only does our team specifically handle hotel and housing, our other team that is also part of the Disney Global Travel team supports the air, the car, and [the] on-the-ground services.

So, anytime that something is initiated on a flight, even if we don’t necessarily have visibility of the project, we know that something is starting to brew with a project, [and] that’s really how our day-to-day is driven. It’s based off the projects that come through from Disney and what is actively starting to scout. They might start scouting all over the world. And so that is our beginning stage of it, [to] find the locations. Then once the scouting happens, they’re going to get more focused and drive down on [specific] areas. And then that’s where we really start laying our footprints and conversations with the suppliers in the area, sourcing the hotels and getting an overall need of what they’re going to be looking at, as far as how long-term are they going to be in the hotel. [We look at things like] are they going to go from the hotel into more of a long-term housing [scenario] or apartments, or is it a variance? It’s not so black and white as it used to be before the pandemic. Before, it would be more like, OK, they’re going to be at the hotel this amount of time. Then you may start seeing them trickle into housing and maybe apartments. But now it’s such a mix of suppliers, [we] are starting to acquire these long-term housing [arrangements] where you’re able to book apartment-style living on a specific brand’s website.

And that was a game-changer because we still are in tune and hands-on in those kinds of conversations. Before, it was you would take it from the supplier and you would turn that project loose to whoever handled the long-term housing, which, if it was an apartment, we couldn’t support that. That was a different team within the Disney account that would support that. So now, the waters kind of interchange, and the lines are blurred a lot more, and it gives us a greater amount of visibility. It allows us to keep our finger on the pulse of knowing where people are at all given times.

[Then], if we have to step in for whatever reason, whether it be a service issue or maybe the location is just too far for transportation to take [people] to the site for filming or to the studio, the sound stage, then we’re able to step in quickly and pivot.

What developments are you seeing in Georgia’s film and television industry, as it continues to move forward?

Heiskell: We’ve had a shift. Marvel was a powerhouse here in Atlanta, with Pinewood which then [became] Trilith, as well as other various sound stages, and then the pandemic happened. I think people had to get more creative with where they were scouting and [the] locations.

And then you fast-forward into the strikes, where everybody was going after the same locations, the same sound stages, or [where] just because you had a sound stage booked in 2023, that didn’t mean that you’re going to have that space available in 2025 … and then you had to reconsider your locations.

[This applies to] a lot of different areas, whether it’s in North America or internationally. They are rolling out tax incentives so that, at the end of the day, it is really the bottom line that drives those locations.