Paramount Pictures chairman and CEO Brad Grey is a funny guy—he actually had a prety tired audience laughing out loud with his tales of business life with Michael, Barry and Summer—but he’s quite serious when it comes to Paramount’s new media future. The subject didn’t come up until the end of the after-dinner conversation with Brent Pulley, Forbes senior editor, but Grey got his message across: “Everybody would be very foolish not to embrace technology,” he said, adding later, “For us not to embrace it would be insanity.” Paramount is approaching it “in a robust way, as aggressive a way as we can. We’re embracing it and really trying to understand the smartest digital distribution future.” Deals have been announced and more are coming. (In fact, we reported on a Paramount deal with Akimbo while Grey was speaking.) 
“We want consumers to enjoy what we produce in every form we can. ... What we can’t do is we can’t afford to lose the revenue from the physical dvd business we now enjoy. ... We want to learn, we want to experiment and we want to be profitable.”
On electronic sell thru, Grey said he’d been hearing for 15 years that easy movie downloads were on the way. Now, he’s finally beginning to believe it.
On other topics: Grey, whose desire to stay at Viacom was questioned in the wake of Tom Freston’s departure, was quite careful to distance himself from Chairman Sumer Redstone’s way of handling both Freston and Tom Cruise—and was equally careful to do respectfully. “Sumer Redstone, in my opinion, is Sumner Redstone .. that’s hios prerogative and that’s his privilege. He owns the candy store.” He quickly corrected himself given Viacom’s status as a public company—“the majority of the candy store.” As for Freston, he said he feels badly and misses him “but this is high-stakes poker.”