Interview with Trisha Ananiades, Senior Vice President of Business & Legal Affairs at BBC Studios

By Shayna Toh

Trisha Ananiades is a Senior Vice President of Business & Legal Affairs for BBC Studios, where she negotiates deals and drafts agreements for scripted and unscripted programming produced by the studio and intended for exhibition on linear television and streaming services. She routinely counsels creative, casting, and production executives on deal structure and business strategy and collaborates with colleagues in production and finance to solve production or contractual issues. In her role, Trisha frequently collaborates with studio colleagues in the UK to negotiate IP rights for previously exploited BBC formats. Prior to her time at BBC Studios, Trisha worked in business and/or legal affairs at NBC Universal, The Walt Disney Company, and DreamWorks Animation. She began her legal career as a corporate transactions associate at the Los Angeles office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP.

Shayna Toh sat down with Ms. Ananiades to talk about her time at HLS (and JSEL!), how she transitioned from corporate law to working in production studios, and a few career highlights along the way.

Shayna Toh: Thank you for speaking with us! To start us off – I’d love to hear about what JSEL was like during your time. It’s so exciting to speak to someone who was on this journal.

Trisha Ananiades: I think JSEL was pretty nascent in my day because it had just started when I was at HLS in Fall 2009. It was a great way to get involved in sports and entertainment right off the bat because there was a lot of opportunity, with it being so new.

Even then, JSEL got a lot of very interesting submissions. One of the first articles I worked on in 2009 was co-written by Ken Basin, who is an HLS-alumnus and is a big name in studio business affairs in Los Angeles. Fast forward to the summer of 2021, I was interviewing for a position on Ken’s team, and I got to tell him how I worked on his article through JSEL way back. It was a fun moment of connection and I give JSEL credit for providing opportunities to me that I could leverage in the future.

Toh: Did you know from the get-go you were interested in sports and entertainment?

Ananiades: I went to law school with the intention of working in sports and entertainment. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a sports agent. I talked to a lot of people before starting law school so that by the time I started, I knew that I wanted to be a transactional lawyer and go to a big firm for 3-5 years, before going in-house to a studio. That ended up being pretty much exactly what happened with my career.

Toh: Within corporate, how did you know what practice areas you wanted to work in?

Ananiades: I knew that as a corporate associate, I would work on M&A, capital markets, corporate governance and the whole works, which I wanted to experience. During my summer associate roles, I found that I liked M&A: I liked digging into the contracts, looking at wording, and thinking about how to better protect the business given its particular considerations.

At the same time, I found that working at a junior level only exposed you to a small part of the whole picture of the business, which I didn’t love. How do you make better decisions for the business if you don’t understand what the business is trying to do? I knew that I wanted to know the business side more, which cemented my plan to work in-house.

Toh: How did you move out of big law into the entertainment world?

Ananiades: As I was reaching about three years of my practice, I knew that I wanted to do entertainment work. Initially it was hard because I kept hearing that entertainment companies and firms wanted people with entertainment experience. The industry is conservative in that way – they don’t always like taking a chance on people and like it when people are “pre-vetted.”

Toh: Isn’t that the conventional wisdom, though? To do big law for a couple of years then move in-house?

Ananiades: It’s weirdly both: have big firm experience and entertainment experience. They want someone who has big firm training, but in big-law, you don’t really get experience in entertainment as a junior associate. I reached out to a friend who heard his client was hiring in house counsel, he gave them my resume, and that’s how I got my foot in the door at Magical Elves, which is also an example of how important networking is—my friend is someone I met when I was a summer associate years back.

It can be harder as a more junior person coming from Harvard because there are so many people on the West Coast who have gone to local law schools and have done in-house internships when they were students. However, once my foot was in the door, I found that the Harvard name and my Gibson experience really gave me the leg-up.

Toh: What’s the difference between business affairs and legal affairs?

Ananiades: There can be overlap, but there’s a clear divide in responsibility. The analog to what a Business Affairs (BA) executive does at a studio is a talent agent – historically, they weren’t  necessarily lawyers. You’re normally only looking at top-line items like money, credit, and exclusivity. Legal is the one that negotiates long form contractual language. Over the past 25-30 years, BA executives increasingly became lawyers, because as you’re structuring a deal, you need a legal understanding to avoid future legal headaches. While there are some long-term studio BA executives who aren’t lawyers, they’re very few and far between anymore.

Toh: I imagine contracts for different kinds of shows, such as reality TV or children’s TV, requires very specific legal considerations and protections. What are some similarities and differences among the different shows that you’ve worked with?

Ananiades: Actor, writer, and director negotiations are somewhat similar because they’re all governed by guild agreements. However, there are different governing provisions that cover different types of agreements. For example, the agreement you’d see for talent on a Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu show would likely be very different from an agreement for talent on a Disney Channel show because of the respective show budgets. Even if you had a SAG-AFTRA member in an unscripted show, exclusivity and minimum requirements would be different.

With child actors, if you’re working in a place like Disney Channel, you’re advantaged in some respects because they’re brand-new actors. Even if they get paid more in a Netflix show, a Disney Channel show would likely provide a bigger role where they are the star, giving them more time on screen and experience (whereas general audience programming that has children give them less on-screen time and a lower episodic guarantee). But because of the regulations related to how kids work and how long they could work for, set time is tight and non-negotiable. The universe of options is definitely smaller than with adult actors, but it made me a better negotiator and more attuned to picking up what people’s interests are—if I can’t get you the episodic viewership you want, what else can I give you?

When you’re working with big budget shows and bigger name actors, the considerations are completely different. I worked on this show called “Fight Night” that’s on Peacock and has some very A+ level stars. Negotiating those deals includes provisions well above and beyond customary perks: you may have to give approvals over personnel, engage specific hair and makeup artists, provide for private plane travel, and much nicer and more elaborate relocation money or accommodations.

Toh: There’s been a lot of news about actors in the last year about what’s been lacking from the industry (e.g. the SAG-AFTRA strike, discussions around the “Quiet on Set” documentary). What best practices are there, and how do you respond to issues like these when they crop up?

Ananiades: We’ve been having a lot of conversations in the wake of “Quiet on Set.” My current studio produces unscripted content that sometimes involves kids. We have a robust code of conduct here because we’re a British company and they have a lot of safeguards in place. As a company, we have kick-offs with the production team where we go through expectations and obligations, as well as consequences for those who don’t uphold them.

During the time I worked at Disney Channel, I was more exposed to the safeguards in place required by California law to protect minors: you have to have teachers on set and allow parents and guardians to be present, all to ensure kids are never put into uncomfortable positions. Disney Channel was very protective of their child actors. I’ve been fortunate to work in studio environments where we’re constantly working towards an environment on set where bad behavior isn’t tolerated toward anyone, be it kids or adults.

Toh: Producers love drama. They know that messiness, fights, and love triangles bring ratings. On Dancing With the Stars, the chemistry between an instructor and the celebrity is going to generate buzz. How do producers decide how to tap into that to an extent, while avoiding legal trouble or the threat of a lawsuit?

Ananiades: We definitely want to be able to tap into those things. When I worked at Magical Elves, there was a pilot we shot where a story line revolved around a teen girl whose scenes made her very emotionally sensitive. You could see that when we were shooting; she was crying, she was shaky. On set, we provided her doctors and psychologists and then linked her to continued care with a psychologist after our shoot. Although we wanted to elicit some of her raw emotions, we have to put someone back at least in as good a shape as we found them, if not better. In my opinion, that has to be the underpinning of how we treat participants in reality TV.

I’ve also done a competition, Survivor-type show with Netflix, where people get physically ill. We provided them with holistic care even after the show is done because we have a responsibility to these people who do our show. Yes, they sign very expansive agreements where they agree to everything and release us from a lot of liability, but it’s a moral responsibility. We’re here to make TV, not to ruin people’s lives. It would also just be bad for business and bad for PR if we didn’t.

Toh: I’m a huge fan of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. Tell me more.

Ananiades: That was the first show at Disney Channel produced for initial exhibition on Disney Plus, and I was lucky to be on the ground floor for that one. Disney Channel would traditionally take a 360 view on performers: they’ll not only star in a show, but Disney wants to cross-promote the talent by putting them in Disney Channel Original Movies, they’ll ask for a first look for a music recording contract, etc… For Disney Plus performer agreements, we were trying to figure out how much of that structure would stay the same and how much would change. My personal claim to fame on that show is doing Olivia Rodrigo’s deal, but I was truly involved in a lot of parts of that show from cast deals to writers and more. The cast and crew were all so lovely, and all the kids are so talented.

When COVID hit, I had to help figure out how we would navigate the shutdown from a business and contractual perspective as this was such a force majeure event. Through it all, it was one of the most rewarding moments of my career to figure out how this show, which was so intertwined with pre-existing IP, yet was slightly re-imagined, should be run. It was IP, talent management, and franchise all in one, and being able to see across all those pieces was amazing.

Toh: The show also used a lot of Disney musicals (e.g. Beauty and the Beast, Frozen) to drive their later seasons. What was the process of getting rights for those shows?

Ananiades: Disney is very big on cross promotion – if there’s a chance to use one vehicle to promote another, they’ll take that opportunity—for example, Dancing with the Stars has a Disney night every year. Disney’s ownership of that IP made the process much easier!

With respect to the series creation, obviously it was based on the pre-existing High School Musical movies so we had to look at underlying agreements with the original High School Musical creators. What was their attachment to the series? What would their fees be? How would we manage talent relation here to get their buy-in, while still respecting the creative oversight of Tim Federle (creator and showrunner of HSMTMTS)? Some parts were contractual, but some weren’t, and that was the most interesting piece for me and why I love business affairs. It’s not just about knowing, understanding, and applying the law. It’s also about knowing people and what makes them tick and using that to craft the best possible deal for the studio.

Toh: Lastly, what’s one piece of advice you have for HLS students?

Ananiades: Be the most jealous guardian of your professional reputation. While people are focused on winning negotiations, this is an industry of repeat players. I negotiate against the same agents and lawyers all the time for all different talent. If you become known as a studio executive or talent lawyer who lies and misrepresents, your word will mean nothing, and your deals will be so much harder to close. I’ve closed so many deals on my word because I have a reputation for honesty. Your internal studio executives may encourage you to lie or misrepresent in order to close a deal, but your reputation will follow you everywhere—even beyond that workplace. Don’t let the terms of an individual negotiation supersede your reputation in priority.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.