Ben Winston Revisits ‘Elton John Live: Farewell From Dodger Stadium,’ The Disney CEO Surprise & Adele Sunsets [Interview]

Sometimes you meet someone in this business and within minutes you immediately understand why they are so successful. Ben Winston, a producer, director and co-founder of the production entity Fulwell 73 is absolutely one of those people. Over the span of 12 years he’s gone from producing the Brit Awards in his native England to moving to America to guide the “The Late Late Show with James Corden” to tackling the Tony Awards, the Grammy Awards, two Adele concert tapings and music specials for One Direction, Kasey Musgrave and Bruno Mars. Winston knows how to tell stories. In fact, he’s full of them.

READ MORE: Emmy Nominee Reactions: Jessica Chastain, Pedro Pascal, Evan Peters, Elton John and more

Last week, Winston jumped on a zoom to talk about his Emmy nomination for “Elton John Live: Farewell From Dodger Stadium” which was Disney+’s first live streaming event last November. It’s his 33rd nomination in just eight years. And he already has 12 trophies, mostly thanks to the success of “Carpool Karoke,” a spin-off of “The Late Late Show” which will be a pop culture touchstone for the 10’s decade for years to come. But the “Elton John” special was like nothing he nor his team had done before. And he has a ton of stories about it.

Oh, and he’s also just a talker. So much so that it was difficult to edit our conversation for clarity without, well, diminishing said clarity. So, perhaps indulge us as he waxes about the difficulties of a terrible dress rehearsal or the craziness of the streaming services’ CEO being fired right before you produce their first live event or asking Adele to perform a day early due to thunderstorms (in LA of all places). Because not only can Winston work a room (or a zoom) he’s been in the middle of Hollywood history the past few years like almost no one else.

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The Playlist: Congratulations on another Emmy nomination.

Ben Winston: Thank you very much.

Does this one mean any more because this event was Elton’s last concert in the U.S.?

Well, it would mean a huge amount if we were to win it because it would mean that one of my heroes and an icon of the industry and Brit, who I was so starstruck to be making this show with would finally be an EGOT off a show that we made together. So, I feel like to be involved in the thing that gets Elton John and EGOT would be definitely my proudest or one of my proudest achievements for sure. So for that reason, it means a huge amount, but it also means a huge amount because I think there was massive historical relevance to this one for multiple reasons. Firstly, his most iconic show was at Dodger Stadium in 1975, and we’ve seen that image everywhere. I don’t know if there’s a more famous Elton John image than him standing on stage in the Dodger’s outfit in 1975. So, to recreate that moment, to go back to a place that meant so much to Elton John’s story was historical for us. Second of all, it’s the first time Disney did a live stream globally, and so therefore, that’s pretty exciting as a television producer to think that you’ve made the first Disney “Live” show. That’s pretty cool. And then finally to film Elton’s last ever show in America, knowing he’s never going on tour again and this is it. This is his farewell to a country he loves, that also gave it added meaning. Those three reasons have really made that one of the most exciting things we’ve ever been part of truthfully.

I don’t know if you guys approached him or if he approached you or how that process even happened, but when you sat down and started having meetings, was there anything that was most important to Elton in terms of how the show was produced?

No, he was really trusting. I mean, truthfully, they called us after they’d already spoken with Disney. Obviously we knew about the tour. I was just thinking how do I get tickets for the last ever show of Elton John at Dodger Stadium? That’s what I was mainly thinking when I heard it got announced and then Disney called and said, “You should meet with David Furnish.” And Gabe Turner and Sally Wood who were my co-EPs on this show, the three of us went and we met with [Elton’s partner] David Furnish and he said, “Look, we are really interested in shooting this and Disney as a partner” And Disney is like we’re thinking we’re going to do this live and do our first ever live event live from Dodger Stadium as Elton John says, farewell. And then you are a bit like, “Well this is a real significant moment in television really.” And so we were really excited and it happened really fast. I think they called us maybe 10 weeks before the show. Maybe the conversation, actually maybe it was confirmed 10 weeks before, but those conversations probably happened 12 to 13 weeks before, but it was a really quick turnaround for something as mega as this and as technically complicated. So it was a real all-hands-on-deck moment. I mean, I was over the moon when we got a call about it. I was like, “Oh my God, this has to happen. How can we put a budget together that makes this epic, but also doesn’t make everybody say we can’t do this?”

When you compare this to the work you’ve done, say to a similar live show like the Grammys, is that the same amount of time? Do you usually have more time to prep the Grammys?

Well, actually the answer is yes and no. So, you have much more time to prep the technical side of it. You have much more time to prep what the set’s going to look like, what your satellite trucks are going to be, and where the dressing rooms are going to be. The logistics of the Grammy’s event you can plan for a year. The actual performances are much less [time] because you get the nominations end of November and the show is at the end of January, or early February, and you’re talking about 20 performers. So you’ve got to go round and say, “Right, what do you want to do? What do you want to do?” So actually that is probably less time, but this technically was a lot more difficult because of the fact that you are live from an outdoor venue and it’s a show that’s already happening with however many hundred thousand people in the room. And so you’re very aware of not getting in the way of the tour that already exists, but adding to it to make it more television-friendly and even bigger.

This is an in the trenches sort of question, but is the fact that the Dodger broadcasts have cables everywhere and have it all set up, did that help at all?

I mean not really. We used our own systems. We bought our own trucks and our own systems in. It was a very specific satellite that we had to use for the global broadcast on a live stream. That was a very complicated process that was overseen by our incredible production team. I think look, any venue you go to that has had, whether it be Staples or what you call it these days? Crypto. For the Grammys you use a certain amount of their infrastructure, but you also have to bring in a heck of a lot more to help what you are doing specifically because you have your own needs and requirements in a venue like that.

What were you most nervous about on the night of the event?

I think I love live television and I hate live television probably in equal amounts. I think that I was so aware of the complications that could come up from doing a live music show for three hours from Dodgers on Disney live streaming globally that I think you don’t really sleep much before it. There was so much that you have to handle and think about. Paul Dugdale, our director did such an incredible job, but there’s always that nervousness of going live. We had 28 cameras plus two drones and a helicopter. So, that is a lot of technical requirements that you need. Actually, Elton was in there for three nights. He was in there Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. So, on Thursday night, I just went to watch. I sat in the audience, of course, we’d already seen the show, we’d done our research, we’d been to other venues around the country. We didn’t have the money to obviously have our cameras up by then, but we just sat in there and experienced it and that was a very useful moment to just take it in. Then the second night we did a dress rehearsal, so we pretended it was live and we went for it and we did it and it was terrible. And that Saturday night, he was amazing. His performance doesn’t change. He was great, but our cameras weren’t good. Our angles were wrong. We missed stuff. Stuff was out of focus. I remember watching it back and it sounded terrible. His voice was amazing, but it sounded like he was singing in an empty room because of course, when you are micing a television studio, it’s really easy. Or even an arena. You hang microphones from the roof, but when you’re in Dodger Stadium, there’s nowhere to hang microphones. And if you put a microphone somewhere, you hear 10 people around that microphone. How do you hear 100,000 people? It’s a really hard thing to record in an open-air stadium. It’s really, really hard. And it sounded empty. And I remember It was like three in the morning on Saturday night, and we were meeting with the sound team, Mike Abbott and all his guys, and we were literally working out about how do we make this sound like it actually sounds and working that through, because being in the bowl on Thursday, it felt like this cacophony of noise, but yet we hadn’t got that right. So, the dress run really panicked me. As we were going towards the Sunday, there was just so much involved in going, “How do we make each song feel different? How do we make sure we capture those fireworks? How do we make sure that we capture the audience that were there?” Because there was a huge celebrity audience and all the fan base, tell the stories as well, which I’ll get onto in a minute, but also how do we make it sound epic? And so doing it that Saturday and watching it back afterward that night in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium at one in the morning, it was like, “Wow, we are so lucky that we’ve had this opportunity to watch it and then work out how we get it right the next night.” And however much went wrong on Saturday night, everything went right on that Sunday night. It was one of those nights where just like something’s smiling down on you and it sounded great, it looked great. We hit every note of the fireworks. We found every celebrity we wanted to. It was just one of those nights where technically everything went great. It allowed Paul Dugdale and the team to creatively really excel. And being in that truck was a really exhilarating thing to be part of as you’re cutting a show live for global viewers all over the world.