I was the only person at Univision who had complete creative control of my own show, by contract. They didn't like that. I was the executive producer; I owned the studio where we taped. I decided who went on my show and who didn't.
Earlier in my career, I needed to be the writer, casting director, set designer, leading man, and producer. I've been eliminating a lot of those jobs. I'm an executive producer right now. I still get to pick the best screenplays.
Chemistry is not anything an executive producer or writer can orchestrate or plan; you just hope for it.
Jerry Bruckheimer really is an executive producer, who obviously is the most successful producer in the history of film and television.
There's an inherent idea that if a Black executive producer and a Black director are going to do a movie based on a Black writer's book that everybody is going to be Black.
Part of the fun of working on 'Beverly Hills, 90210,' for me, was that I got a lot of freedom from our executive producer, Chuck Rosen, to add things, change things. I got a lot of freedom to be creative.
I was an artist, I was executive producer on my first album, so I've always had to manage both. I couldn't get a record deal. It wasn't by choice - I couldn't get a record deal, so I had to figure it out.
My media career came about by accident. In 2006 I was introduced to Roger Ailes, the President of Fox News Channel, by a friend of mine who was an executive producer. Ailes put me on the air one day, and one week later, I was offered a contract.
If a thing is going to represent you, your vision, you should be involved in every aspect of that thing. I like my role as executive producer on anything probably as much as performer.
As an executive producer, I feel really lucky.
