BUSINESS : Air Courier Takes Hollywood to the World
Eleven years ago, Christine Jerry-Storey started an air courier service with a small Venice office, a pickup truck and a $10,000 loan.
Today, her business, Midnite Express, is an $18 million-a-year, 24-hour-a-day enterprise with offices in New York, London, Paris, Sydney and--by the end of the year--Hong Kong. It ranks as the 11th largest female-owned business in Los Angeles County, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal. And Jerry-Storey is a nominee for one of Inc. magazine’s annual Entrepreneur of the Year awards.
The secret?
Making deliveries for movie studios and record companies--anytime, anywhere.
“We never say never; we never say no,” says Jerry-Storey, who is president and majority shareholder of Midnite Express. Her husband, Keith Storey, is chief executive officer.
Midnite Express has about 150 employees working out of its headquarters, now in Inglewood, but getting the job done sometimes means that the Storeys must take to the air themselves.
Linda Corbett, manager of traffic and shipping for the Motion Picture Marketing Division of Paramount Studios, remembers one such occasion. With only a couple of hours notice, Keith Storey traveled from Los Angeles to Australia, hand-carrying T-shirts promoting “Crocodile Dundee II.”
“I met Keith and Christine at the airport, we stuffed the T-shirts into empty suitcases . . . and he jumped onto the plane at the last minute,” Corbett says.
Making domestic and international business deliveries for all of the Hollywood studios and major record labels is Midnite Express’ bread and butter. But the company also serves as a personal delivery service for some of the industry’s celebrities.
Sweat socks, a jogging suit and pizza are among the specially requested items that the company has rushed to celebrities in locations around the world.
“One time we delivered a bottle of perfume to Paris, which I thought was a little odd. . . . I think it was Giorgio of Beverly Hills,” Keith Storey says. (Storey declined to say who has placed such orders, saying he is concerned that it might damage the company’s relations with its clients.)
On another occasion, a Midnite Express courier spent New Year’s Eve in Chile after hand-delivering a prescreened copy of “Alive” to the real-life survivors of the plane crash depicted in the movie.
More typical deliveries for Midnite Express are movie “standees,” which are cardboard advertising cutouts, and posters that decorate the lobbies of movie theaters around the world. These days, the loading docks at Midnite Express are piled high with cardboard cartons filled with stuffed animals and marked “Flintstones,”while other long, flat boxes carry “Lassie” standees.
“You can’t open a movie without these,” says Nadia Bronson, vice president of international marketing for Universal Studios. “Every week we coordinate shipments through Midnite Express to more than 60 countries.”
For the recent Cannes Film Festival, Midnite Express carried 40 delivery bags a day to France, each filled with promotional material and every shipment accompanied by a personal courier. One of these deliveries was 400 pounds of suntan lotion that Columbia Records needed in Cannes the next day for a promotional give-away.
Helping Midnite Express accommodate last-minute and odd-hour requests are agreements with domestic and international airlines that give the company preferential treatment in placing cargo aboard aircraft.
As long as a plane is flying and there is space on board, packages are on their way any time of the day or night. Despite airline employee strikes that have disrupted air service in recent years, Midnite Express has never missed getting a package on a plane, according to the company’s top executives.
Federal Express and other delivery companies that fly their own airplanes control costs by scheduling a limited number of flights through hub cities in their courier network.
“The plane has got to go and, when it goes, the day is over,” confirms a spokesman for Federal Express, who asked not to be named. He adds that Federal Express has a “significant amount of clients in Hollywood,” but that the delivery giant probably will never offer that is more customized than that of Midnite Express.
For delivery services, however, planes may soon become passe. Satellite transmission is the courier of the future, and it is a service that Midnite Express--along with other companies--recently started to offer. Such services have made it easier and cheaper for film production crews in remote locations to send “dailies,” or raw footage, to their studios in analog form via satellite.
Dailies normally are couriered from a location shoot to the studio, which can delay a production for three or four days, says Nicholas Vincent, Midnite Express’ chief operating officer.
Using some of Midnite Express’ competitors, Steven Spielberg satellite-fed daily footage from “Jurassic Park” to his location in Poland, where he was working on “Schindler’s List.”
