IP phones help ‘Top Gun’ mogul get to ‘Action!’

If you can’t get anyone in Hollywood to take your calls anymore, maybe it’s just that their phones aren’t working. That’s possible, isn’t it?

Not to burst your bubble, but according to Jerry Bruckheimer, it’s not likely, at least at his company. The producer, whose name has led the credits on a string of blockbusters from “Top Gun” to “Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl,” says the new Cisco Systems Inc. IP (Internet Protocol) communications system at his company works just fine, thank you.

Bruckheimer is as mega as moguls get. His Jerry Bruckheimer Films, which operates out of a converted warehouse in sunny Santa Monica, California, produces the multiple “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” series on TV, as well as the reality show “The Amazing Race,” and has eight big-screen movies at some stage of development now, according to the Internet Movie Database.

Working with big-name talent like director Tony Scott and actors Nicolas Cage and Cate Blanchett, Bruckheimer needs every call to work.

“Our business is done, I’d say, 80 percent on the phone,” said Bruckheimer, sitting in a hotel in San Jose, California, where he accepted a special award last month at the Cisco Growing With Technology Awards, which the networking company uses to recognize innovative small and medium-sized businesses. Organizing big film and TV projects requires lots of conference calls, which typically take up an hour or more of his day. The day before the awards ceremony, an executive at Bruckheimer Films was on the phone with a lawyer, an agent and a studio executive, talking about buying the movie rights to a book, he said. “We’re always saying, ‘Add so-and-so, get hold of so-and-so, put ’em on,'” Bruckheimer said.

That made it especially annoying when the company’s last phone system, a traditional PBX (private branch exchange) with circuit-switched phones that was a few years old, would fade to black before all the participants could join in.

“Once you’d gotten three or four people on a conference call, it locked up [and] everyone had to hang up, which sounds ridiculous, but it crippled us,” said David Leener, promotions executive at Bruckheimer Films.

Also, it was difficult and time-consuming to add or drop users from the system, which was a big problem for a company of about 30 full-time employees that routinely brings in as many as 20 more staffers to work on a particular production, Leener said. The company always had to call in an outside technician to manage the system.

The new Cisco IP phone system that Bruckheimer Films started using in February is managed by the company’s office manager, who needed just two days of training, Leener said. Unlike the traditional system it replaced, the Cisco setup breaks voice calls up into data packets and sends them over an Ethernet network using VoIP (voice over IP).

The network is built around the Cisco 2800 Series ISR (Integrated Services Routers) platform, which is designed for multimedia and security capabilities in small and medium-sized businesses, as well as other Cisco routers and switches. Users get Cisco 7960G and 7970G IP Phones with big menu screens, some of them in living color. Cisco CallManager software handles call processing and conferencing. The company is also using Cisco Unity software, integrated with its existing Microsoft Corp. Exchange platform, for unified voice mail and e-mail messaging. It uses the Cisco Network Assistant GUI (graphical user interface) to manage the system.

The new setup makes it easier to reassign the company’s roughly 90 phones (some employees have more than one) and raises the curtain on new capabilities. For example, a phone from the LAN will also work over an Ethernet cable in a hotel room. While working at home and on the road, Leener uses a Cisco IP desk phone and the Cisco VPN (virtual private network) 3002 Hardware Client in order to make VoIP calls securely using IPSec (IP Security) encryption. It’s just like being in the office.

“When I was in New York for 10 days, when we started [“The Amazing Race”], I took that setup with me. They dial my three-digit extension, and it rings in my hotel. Nobody ever knows,” Leener said.

Bruckheimer himself estimated he spends half his time working away from the office, but at the moment, he isn’t using this setup. In fact, he doesn’t receive any calls directly, whether in the office or on his cell phone. Neither do the Cages and Blanchetts of the world, apparently.

“One thing that’s unique about Hollywood is that almost everybody has an assistant who manages their calls, and nobody answers their own phone calls,” Leener said.

When a call comes in for Bruckheimer, his assistant answers it and transfers it to him.

“I just pick it up and say hello,” Bruckheimer said.