UP IN THE AIR

When Kevin Prince's drone-marketing startup, Heads in the Sky, landed Apple as a client, he was thrilled. But there were storm clouds on the horizon.

- Mickey Rapkin Kevin Prince

Kevin Prince built his reputation by dominating the skies. But on this unseasonably wet evening in Los Angeles, his biggest worry is here on the ground. Or more specifically, in the mud. Prince is hours away from producing a dramatic drone show on behalf of a first-time client—namely, Apple TV—featuring 3,000 fliers in the heavens over Hollywood. The budget? “High six figures,” Prince later tells me in an interview.

Now, heavy February rain has turned the grass I am standing on at the staging area in the Hollywood Forever cemetery to mush. Around me, Prince’s team has carefully placed the rented drones. With each one valued at around $1,500, that means Prince is responsible tonight for roughly $4.5 million in equipment.

Meanwhile, producers, studio execs, and actor Kurt Russell—the star of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which the drones are here to promote—are on hand to enjoy the show. If tonight’s event goes according to plan—and that’s a big if—a 457-foot-tall King Kong will join forces with an equally huge Godzilla in the sky. And if it doesn’t? Well, Prince will have to explain to Apple exactly what went wrong.

“When you spend four months working with one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world, going through all the meetings and planning, it all builds toward one moment,” Prince said later.

That Prince, 40, would spend a stressful Friday night sitting in a cemetery wasn’t exactly his career plan. He’d been quite happy working as a corporate drone (so to speak) at MSNBC, CBS News, and Netflix, enjoying the comforts of direct deposit and health insurance, not to mention offices with free snacks. (He’s a gummy-worm addict.) But in the wake of the pandemic, as consolidation swept Hollywood, Prince was laid off from his full-time marketing gig. Like Godzilla himself—or maybe the Jurassic Park dinosaurs—he had a choice: Adapt or die.