Imagine showing up to work at your high-powered Wall Street job and being asked to play Max Headroom, or execute the iconic lift from “Dirty Dancing?”
Blackstone’s latest holiday video dropped on Thursday, celebrating the firm’s 40th anniversary with a slew of 80s references. Three of the Blackstone executives featured in the latest edition of the “cringeworthy” Wall Street tradition spoke to Business Insider about their experience.
As Business Insider has previously reported, the process takes months, usually starting in the summer with a brainstorm between Blackstone President Jon Gray, head of external affairs Christine Anderson, and head of video Jay Gillespie.
This year’s video includes roughly 400 employees, up from just 20 in 2018. Roles range from Gray’s permanent casting as impish instigator to the casting of all of the firm’s global partners for a parody of “We Are the World.”
The three holiday video actors spoke to us about what it was like to be selected and what filming was like. They also told us that their commitment to embarrassing themselves and having some fun is resonating everywhere, from their clients’ boardrooms to their personal lives.
What it’s like to be selected
Zaneta Koplewicz, BREIT director, co-president, and head of shareholder relations, had been a dancer while at Princeton and considered herself “a pretty serious ballet dancer”, a fact she revealed earlier this year while being interviewed for one of the firm’s social media videos. Her dance experience led to her being cast to do the lift from Dirty Dancing at the climax of this year’s musical number.
“After the shoot happened, I asked, ‘Who would have done this if not me?'” Koplewicz said. “They were like no, Zaneta, this scene wouldn’t have happened.”
When Koplewicz was first asked, she said she “braced” herself.
“I reminded them that I danced 20 years ago,” Koplewicz said.
Dan Leiter, head of international for the firm’s credit and insurance arm and global head of liquid credit, was asked to appear in the video in 2024, his first year with the firm since joining from Morgan Stanley. At the time, he said, he could “tell it was a real privilege to be chosen to be part of this video.”
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Mike Forman, Blackstone real estate’s head of digital infrastructure, first found out that he was going to be in this year’s video via a calendar invite that “popped up” on his calendar. Among his first thoughts, he told Business Insider, was:
“I wonder how I’ll be embarrassing myself this year?”
Filming
The video team films most of the video at the end of November and the beginning of December, fitting shooting into busy schedules.
In his scene, Forman is tasked by Gray to fire Ken Burns, who had been hired to create a characteristically slow documentary series.
“Sorry, Ken,” Forman said.
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Forman said the filming operation was quick; he came to Gray’s office, filmed the scene, and Gray was off again to do “other important things.”
“We were trying our best to be actors, which is definitely not our day job,” Forman said.
Because shooting is condensed across a few weeks, scenes can be booked back-to-back. That can lead to an audience of employees dressed in “outrageous” outfits while one is shooting, said Leiter, who played Max Headroom, the “computer-generated” TV presenter from the 1980s
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He recalled one scene that he and a colleague couldn’t help laughing at, even though they weren’t supposed to.
“They had to retake it twice because we laughed so hard,” Leiter said. “The third time, the person filming said that we had to leave the room.”
Koplewicz, held up by a professional dancer, nailed the move in front of an audience of her colleagues last week after researching it on YouTube. She said she had one practice round before the cameras started rolling.
Blackstone declined to share the cost of the holiday video, but last year Business Insider reported that the firm’s video team consisted of more than 20 full-time staffers and produced over 2,200 videos, ranging from social media content to the firm’s increasingly visible advertisements.
The reaction
After Leiter’s school-aged children saw him in 2024’s video, they “insisted” on watching every Blackstone holiday video.
They eventually got “addicted” to singing the songs, he said.
This year’s video is already coming up in client meetings.
“Last week, I was in the Middle East, and I had a couple of clients ask when the video was coming out so they could bookmark the date,” said Leiter.
Koplewicz’s nonspeaking role last year as an “investor” on “The Inve$tor,” a Bachelor send-up, came up in an unexpected place: her son had just started elementary school that year, and one of her “new mom friends” posted the video to their group text shortly after it dropped, she said.
