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From ‘Seinfeld’ to the Sphinx

Dick Roberts, SLHS Class of '85 and former Sony Entertainment executive, reinvents his career in the Middle East

Loon Lake native Dick Roberts rides a camel in Giza, Egypt last month while gathering footage for a documentary series he’s working on. (Photo provided)

SARANAC LAKE — For 15 years, Dick Roberts was the guardian of the “Seinfeld” brand. As a top executive with Sony Pictures Entertainment, the 1985 Saranac Lake High School graduate was in charge of marketing one of the greatest television programs of all time.

Now, Roberts wants to protect and promote something he says is far more important than what some have called “a show about nothing.”

The 49-year-old has been working with government officials in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries on ways to preserve and showcase their rich cultural history by producing digital documentary films for their museums and cultural centers.

“I’ve kind of reinvented my whole world in the last five years,” Roberts said. “After nearly 30 years in the entertainment business, I’m kind of parlaying all that experience — my production skills, my writing skills, my marketing skills, my communication skills, my people skills — into doing things for more altruistic causes.

“We need that now more than ever,” he added. “Positive cultural exchange is the most important thing in this world today, I think.”

Saranac Lake High School Class of 1985 alumna Dick Roberts addresses graduates of the class of 2011 in the Saranac Lake Civic Center. (Enterprise photo — Chris Knight)

Beginnings

Roberts, who grew up in Loon Lake, said he’s had a lifelong interest in the Middle East. His father would often tell stories about his time serving in North Africa during World War II. His older brother, who worked in the Middle Eastern oil industry in the 1970s, would send him postcards, letters and foreign currency in the mail.

Roberts’ fascination with ancient Egypt, however, really sparked in the mid 1970s when treasures from King Tutankhamun’s second reign were brought to the U.S. as part of a wildly popular multi-city exhibition. Roberts was 8 years old at the time.

“When King Tut came in 1975, I was enthralled with that,” Roberts said. “My mother would tell me about the little boy king, and she got out the National Geographic magazines that showed all this stuff. My whole life, I’ve studied Egyptology and been enthralled with ancient Egyptian culture.”

Loon Lake native Dick Roberts, a former Sony Entertainment executive, stands in front of the Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt last month. Roberts has been developing a plan to make digital documentary films about the cultural history of Egypt and other Middle Eastern nations. (Photo provided)

Attending Saranac Lake schools in the ’70s and early ’80s, Roberts said he got an education that fostered his interest in the world beyond the Adirondacks.

“The teachers I had were great teachers, every one,” he said. “They made you think about things other than what you were learning from the book. One of my sixth-grade teachers went to Egypt a lot. I was already interested, and she inspired me.”

As a junior in high school in 1984, Roberts got his start in the world of television with the help of the family’s next-door neighbor in Loon Lake, former WPTZ-TV anchorman Neil Drew. Drew had just launched his own production company and hired Roberts, a stand-out art student, as his apprentice.

“I went to work for him, and then he introduced me to the guys at Channel 5,” Roberts said. “I took my final exams at Saranac Lake High School (in 1985), and I drove that afternoon to Plattsburgh for a job interview, and I got the job that day. I started working at Channel 5 two weeks after graduation in 1985.”

Roberts worked for WPTZ for 10 years as a cameraman and news producer. He got to travel frequently, including working as a commercial producer during the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway.

Hollywood calls

It was during his time at WPTZ that Roberts said he first started thinking about what he’s doing now. In 1993, through a professor at Plattsburgh State, Roberts pitched an idea to officials in the Egyptology program at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute.

“I said. ‘I want to make documentaries for you, and it will be something you own,'” Roberts said. “They loved the idea, but they said, ‘Now we have to raise money to do it.'”

Before that project could move forward, however, Roberts got a job offer. King World Productions in Los Angeles was looking for a writer and producer for the game shows “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune.”

“I really wanted to work for National Geographic or the University of Chicago, but it couldn’t happen fast enough, so I chose Hollywood,” Roberts said. “I thought I’d be at it for a few years. It turned into this incredibly fortunate career.”

After a year with King World Productions, Roberts moved to NewWorld Entertainment and was part of the original team that started the show “Access Hollywood.” In 1997, he joined Columbia Pictures Television, which became Sony Pictures Entertainment, where he was in charge of marketing shows like “News Radio,” “Rescue Me,” “Just Shoot Me” and “The Larry Sanders Show.”

His biggest project at Sony was his work on “Seinfeld,” where he served as lead creative brand marketing executive. The show set record syndication sales, in excess of $4 billion, during his tenure.

“‘Seinfeld’ became my bread and butter,” Roberts said. “For 15 years I was the head of marketing for the Seinfeld brand. Anything you saw for ‘Seinfeld’ during that time, I wrote it, I produced it.”

Breaking out

In the fall of 2012, however, Roberts decided it was time to break out on his own. He left Sony and formed Roberts & Company, Marketing Inc., a content production and marketing agency specializing in branding, advertising and digital marketing.

It was during this time that he was first exposed to the Middle East while working for CABSAT, the Middle Eastern equivalent of the National Association of Broadcasters. Roberts now has clients in the U.S., the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.

He said his experiences working in the Middle East have so far been very positive, something he said is important to highlight given the rise in anti-Muslim sentiment here in the U.S.

“What I’ve learned is there’s a whole wonderful world there and we just see one tiny part of it, which is not very flattering,” he said. “We see the conflict but we don’t see the human part of it. The people are just regular people. They are so interested in America, and they look up to us, and they’re so optimistic and so welcoming.”

Work-wise, Roberts has kept a busy schedule of trips to the Middle East. Most recently, he’s been invited to co-produce a 10-part series on Egypt. He’s also talked to organizers of Expo 2020 in Dubai about doing some consulting and design and production work for the world exposition.

“What I’m doing with my personal life and my business is I’m now taking all my connections in Hollywood, London, Miami, New York — producers, writers, graphic designers,” Roberts said. “I’ve got a relationship with all these companies and all of these people, and now what I do is offer that to my clients. I basically say to them, ‘I’m going to do for you what I did for Seinfeld,’ only I’m going to do it for you at a fraction of the cost because today, technology has caught up to us. We can do it ourselves digitally and publish it online.”

Online museum

It’s this strategy that Roberts offered to cultural officials in Egypt, whom he met with last month.

“My pitch is to help them video document their works of art and their cultural heritage and create an online virtual museum,” he said. “Speaking to the museum over there, they’re just starting to think about digital work now. That’s really important because it opens up those artifacts and that history to children of the world who will never have a chance to go to Egypt.”

Roberts said his proposal would also be profitable for the museums and cultural institutions involved. He said the short documentaries could be sold on the Egyptian Antiquities Department website as 99-cent downloads.

“I told them, ‘If you get a million people to buy that for 99 cents, you’ve now made $1 million,'” Roberts said. “They’ll be able to make money, which will help in conservation and preservation of these artifacts.”

After making his pitch, Roberts said this week that the Egyptian officials he spoke with love the idea, but their government is still forming and they might not have the money yet for this kind of digital strategy. If that’s the case, Roberts said he may do it on his own with a wide range of cultural institutions and clients at home and abroad, not just those in Egypt.

He said it’s the same idea he brought to the University of Chicago more than two decades ago.

“I pitched it back then, and now technology has caught up to us,” he said. “And now I have the savvy and ability that I didn’t have then. Now, I can do it. I want my kids to be able to look at a museum and say ‘My daddy worked on that.’ That means a lot more to me than them saying ‘My daddy worked on a show called Seinfeld,’ which was amazing and I’m extremely proud of.”

Giving back

Roberts lives in Los Angeles but he still has a home in Loon Lake, which he and his wife and two young kids visit as often as they can.

“I keep my kids grounded,” he said. “I keep them going back there. They write little book reports about Loon Lake. They love the Adirondacks. We go to Whiteface and go skiing. We go to The Cottage (in Lake Placid). It’s part of their world. It’s important to do that.”

Connecting local kids to the world beyond the Adirondacks is just as important to Roberts. He brought Saranac Lake High School art students to Hollywood several times while he was working for Sony, and he’s visited his alma mater to speak a number of times. In 2011, he was the graduation speaker at the high school.

“Never forget that you come from the Adirondack Mountains,” Roberts said at the time. “You come from Saranac Lake. Who cares if people can’t pronounce those names. Get out there and make us proud.”

When he was a sophomore in high school in the early 1980s, Roberts recalled a speaker from the entertainment industry coming to talk to students.

“He really made an impression on me,” Roberts said. “I remember how important that was to me, and I want to be able to do that for kids today. I want to be able to inspire them. That’s why I go back.”

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