A Jeopardy! champ and USC Dornsife alumnus makes his mark on Hollywood

In Los Angeles, Hollywood is always just around the corner. You can paddle a swan boat across Echo Park Lake, the same waters navigated by Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. Quesadillas and margaritas are still served at El Coyote, where actress Sharon Tate had her last meal, an event reenacted in Quentin Tarantino’s recent Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Walking across the USC campus takes you past buildings that have appeared in The Graduate, Forrest Gump and Legally Blonde.

But when it comes to the inside world of Hollywood, where contracts are signed, scripts optioned and budgets formed, Hollywood can seem remote. Who are the Hollywood dealmakers, the mysterious ones who make the magic happen on paper? If you’re envisioning a pushy guy sliding into a red Naugahyde booth, phone in one hand and cigar in the other, you might be surprised to meet Ken Basin at the negotiating table instead. 

The good-natured, thoughtful USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences alumnus, a self-professed Star Wars geek who does yoga to unwind, is Head of Business Affairs for Paramount Television Studios. This means that everything from actor contracts to budgets to script negotiations land on his desk.

His job makes him part doula and part diplomat. He guides projects from conception to fruition.

“A creative executive will point at something they want, like an actor they want to cast or a book they want to adapt, and business affairs is responsible for going out and getting that person or thing for them on terms that work for the company,” Basin said. He’s also responsible for juggling the needs of departments that often have competing interests.

“This job involves so much diplomacy. It’s about convincing people they want to do what you want them to do,” he said. “The creative side wants the highest quality show. The production department wants everything on time and on budget. Marketing wants access to people to support promotional efforts. Legal manages risk.”

This is when his undergraduate degree in international relations from USC Dornsife comes in handy. To Basin, Paramount is a bit like a miniature United Nations, where countries with disparate objectives attempt to reach consensus.

“Business affairs speaks the language of all these departments and helps chart a course forward.”

Hollywood under study

Basin wasn’t initially destined for Hollywood. Growing up in California’s Orange County, the son of Soviet–born Jewish immigrants with engineering degrees, medical school was his parents’ expectation. Generous scholarships to UCLA and the University of California, Berkeley beckoned, but a weekend at USC convinced him this was home.

“I really felt like USC was a place where if you wanted to, you could be an individual — that people would be individually interested in me and my path to success, which I did not feel on the larger campuses where I was just a number,” he explained.

A dutiful son, Basin enrolled as pre-med. Then, an inspiring class taught by Steve Lamy, professor of international relations, spatial sciences and environmental studies, launched a trajectory shift into an international relations degree. He graduated in 2005 and headed to Harvard Law School.

When asked why, Basin laughed. “I decided to go to law school for all the wrong reasons. I didn’t have a grand or specific vision of what a legal career would look like.”

That didn’t stop him from winning a Sears Prize, which honors the four highest achieving Harvard law students annually, and from graduating magna cum laude at age 23. 

Throughout his time on the East Coast, he always felt a pull back to the golden state. Contemplating a career path after the bar exam, he felt that entertainment law was the correct course. He could find work in the city he loved, and it also seemed more fulfilling than practice areas that drew on his international interests, which he found alternatively depressing or dull. So he returned to Southern California to work in the entertainment practice of law firm Greenberg Glusker, then moved to roles at Amazon and Sony before landing at PTVS. 

Are his parents disappointed they didn’t end up with a doctor for a son?

“I married a doctor, so they got what they wanted in the end,” Basin quips.

Who wants to be a millionaire?

As Basin was plowing through academic milestones, he was also leading a bit of a double life. In high school he participated in clubs like Quiz Bowl, which combined his whiz kid talent for fact retention with a budding flair for the stage.

While a sophomore at USC Dornsife, he was cast on the Jeopardy! College Championship. Clad in a cardinal USC sweatshirt, Basin tackled categories like “Ballet,” “Shakespeare’s Women” and “African-Americana” alongside competitors from Harvard and Yale. He got to the semi-finals and walked away with a cool $5,000.

Six years later, Basin was again on primetime, in the hot seat of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. He’d landed the gig after missing the first phone call for casting (he was traveling in Croatia) and made it all the way to the million-dollar question — where he was thwarted by a soft drink. When asked what beverage Lyndon B. Johnson had installed on tap in the Oval Office, Basin guessed Yoo-Hoo. The answer? Fresca.

These days, strict rules around casting industry employees have made it harder for Basin to get onto quiz shows. 

“I was actually cast on two more game shows, but then the lawyers at the network disapproved me as a contestant,” he said. 

He now gets his fix by playing in a regular trivia night at O’Brien’s Irish Pub in Santa Monica, California, the same night frequented by numerous Jeopardy! champions.

No business like show business

Stage lights may forever beckon, but Basin remains content in his current role behind the scenes. He’s on the front line of a rapidly evolving medium that lets him get creative and push boundaries.

“TV has changed more in the last five years than in the previous 25 years; what you’ve always done doesn’t matter anymore,” he said. 

Plus, it’s never a dull day on the lot. “When things go wrong, say an actor refuses to show up to work, oftentimes it falls to business affairs to solve the problem,” he noted. Add emergency responder to the list of job responsibilities. 

It might be a stressful business (renegotiating actor contracts for 13 Reasons Why “basically killed my summer,” he reveals), but that doesn’t stop him from pursuing fun off the clock. One recent Thursday night, while his colleagues were heading home after a charity gala, Basin was just getting started, heading out at 9:30 p.m. for a performance by Bloc Party.

“My coworkers thought I was crazy,” he said.

His enthusiasm for music started at an early age, when his older sister insisted he listen to bands like The Cure and Depeche Mode rather than the ’70s-era Eastern European tunes their parents favored. Basin now attends at least 40 live music shows a year. 

What’s next for Basin in La La Land? He prefers to remain open.

“I have an answer to that, but the most interesting things come up unexpectedly,” he stated.

Don’t be surprised if you see him back in the public eye in the future, though, this time on the airwaves. If he could choose an alternative career, it would be that of radio storyteller, à la public radio’s Ira Glass. The show business bug dies hard.