Hollywood executive switched careers to pursue another love. Now, he returns to Columbus

Thirty years after leaving Columbus to pursue his Hollywood dream, former Rock 103 DJ Jim Gallagher will return to the Fountain City in his third career.

Gallagher retired in 2020 at age 52 after 25 years in the film industry as a marketing executive with Disney, DreamWorks Animation and Warner Bros. Now, he’s touring the country as a stand-up comedian. He’ll perform Feb. 9 at The Loft in downtown Columbus.

Gallagher took a class to hone his stand-up comedy skills while living in California. When clubs started reopening as the COVID-19 pandemic waned, “I jumped in with both feet,” he told the Ledger-Enquirer. “… It’s fascinating to start your professional life over again in your 50s. I have so much to learn.”

He has performed more than 50 shows since the autumn of 2020. Last year, he spent 15 or so weeks on the road, mostly for weekend gigs. Overall, he has been pleased with the audience reaction.

“I’ve done my fair share of bombing,” he said. “There ain’t no quiet like a comedy-club quiet, but not much heckling.”

When hecklers do get out of control, Gallagher tells them, “I’ve got the talking stick now, and you don’t.”

His favorite moment on stage came last year at McCurdy’s Comedy Theatre in Sarasota, Florida, where his jokes were on a roll, the packed crowd responded with lots of laughs and applause, and he reveled in the exhilaration.

“It’s a mixture of pure love and happiness from a group of strangers connecting at the same time,” he said. “There’s a commonality that’s formed. … That’s a real magic trick, and it really creates an emotional bond I haven’t found in any other line of work.”

As a stand-up comedian, Gallagher noted, he finally has a career where he can’t get fired. And instead of having to wait a month for radio ratings or a week for box office reports, he gets instant feedback each night.

“I love to perform, and I really enjoying traveling,” he said. “There’s not a lot of money in it, and the people who make it a career are few and far between, but, lucky for me, it’s a great post-retirement job. I get to make people laugh — or try to figure out how to make them laugh — every day, and that’s a pretty good day.”

Falling in love with morning radio

Growing up in Claymont, Delaware, Gallagher graduated high school from Archmere Academy, where President Joe Biden attended.

Gallagher majored in broadcast journalism and policy studies at Syracuse University. He fell in love with morning radio after a friend in his freshman geology class told him he was funny enough to join his show at college station Z89.

“It was an amazing training ground,” he said.

His original career goal was to become a TV game show host, but when he thought about job prospects, he realized the world has many more radio stations than TV game shows. He didn’t care for waking up before sunrise to host a morning radio show, but he relished the chance to make people laugh.

After graduating from Syracuse in 1989, Gallagher started his first media job in February 1990 at an Augusta, Maine, radio station called 92 Moose. He was fired nine months later when the station manager couldn’t tolerate his mediocre ratings anymore.

“I was terrible at what they wanted me to do,” he said.

They wanted him to entertain the station’s major demographic, which was women ages 35 and older — but Gallagher was a 21-year-old male.

“I didn’t know anything about them — and I still don’t, by the way,” he said. “… Comedy is a very subjective thing. My comedy was pretty edgy, and it was just not particularly family-friendly.”

Arriving in Columbus

It took about six months of mailing demo tapes to more than 100 radio stations for Gallagher to complete his next job search. Jimbo Martin, whose illustrious career owning and managing radio stations included Rock 103 in Columbus at the time, took a chance on Gallagher and hired him for the morning show.

During that stint from May 1991 through September 1993, Gallagher was paired mostly with Andy Woods, who now works at a station in Columbia, South Carolina.

“We did some ridiculous stuff on the air, all kinds of stunts,” Gallagher said.

They once did their show from atop the Days Inn sign towering over the intersection of I-185 and Macon Road.

“Must have been 25 stories up,” he said.

One morning, in the parking lot of the Columbus Square Mall, they erected an inflatable felt wall, where visitors could put on a Velcro suit, jump into the wall and stick. The Macon Road shopping center closed in 2001 and was demolished to make room for the Muscogee County Public Education Center, the Columbus Public Library, the City Services Center, the Columbus Aquatic Center and Rainey-McCullers School of the Arts.

Career epiphany

In early 1993, Gallagher had an epiphany about his career while watching a trailer for the movie “Dave,” the political comedy starring Kevin Kline.

Gallagher heard the narrator intone, “In a country where anybody can become president, anybody just did.”

And he thought, “It’s some guy’s job to come up with sh-t like that! What a great gig that must be!”

Fast-forward several months later to September 1993. Gallagher still liked being a DJ, “but I realized I wasn’t very good at morning radio,” he said. “. . . I loved Columbus, but to move ahead in morning radio meant moving to bigger markets. And while I actively chased bigger market gigs, they never chased me back.”

So, for the first time in eight years, he wondered what other careers he might want to pursue, and he came up with two answers:

• Move to New York City to perform stand-up comedy.

• Move to Los Angeles to make movie trailers.

While he mulled his options, a postcard from a college buddy arrived to announce his move to LA.

“That sealed it,” Gallagher said.

He did his last Rock 103 show Sept. 2, 1993. By 10 a.m. that Friday morning, he was on the road to the West Coast.

Hollywood success

It took only a month for Gallagher to land his first job in the film industry — sort of. He was a courier, delivering tapes of cuts for movie trailers. Two months later, he became a coordinator in the advertising department at MGM and worked there for 2½ years before joining Disney.

In 14 years with Disney, he climbed the corporate ladder from director of creative advertising to marketing president. Gallagher thinks his work ethic was the key to his success.

“Movie marketing happens to be a part of the entertainment industry that requires an insane amount of work, and that was perfect for me,” he said. “I might not be the smartest person in the room, but nobody can outwork me, and I was surrounded by really good mentors.”

Gallagher worked with famous actors and filmmakers while producing trailers for hundreds of Disney movies, such as “The Rock,” “Con Air,” “Pirates of the Caribbean 1 and 2,” “The Sixth Sense” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” then designing global marketing campaigns for more than 20 Disney movies, including “Ratatouille,” “Wall E,” “Up,” “Pirates of the Caribbean 3,” “The Proposal,” “Narnia: Prince Caspian” and “Alice in Wonderland.”

In 2010, Gallagher was ousted from Disney in a leadership change. He consulted for four years until DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg hired him as head of the company’s theatrical marketing.

Gallagher’s campaigns for DreamWorks comprised movies such as “How to Train Your Dragon 2 and 3,” “Trolls,” “Home,” “Boss Baby,” “Penguins of Madagascar” and “Kung Fu Panda 3.”

In 2016, when NBC Universal bought DreamWorks Animation, the new owners brought in their head of marketing, and Gallagher was laid off again.

Gallagher joined Warner Bros. in 2019 to run their animation marketing. His primary project was the movie “Scoob!”

“It was on track to do exceptionally well at the box office,” he said. “But eight weeks before it was released, the world shut down.”

The film industry was among the hardest-hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. The hiatus gave Gallagher time to reassess his life. He wondered whether he should return to that kind of show business.

“I could tell it was a young man’s game,” he said. “The hours and stress were pretty intense. I wanted to do what I could by the time I was 50 to retire. I lived conservatively and was very lucky to be able to save enough to put me and my family in position to do that.”

He and his wife, Juli, who produced “Larry King Live” on CNN, have been married for 23 years. Their daughter, Katie, is a freshman in college.

So, when he retired in 2020, Gallagher reflected on the career options he had considered in 1993 — and he figured it was time to pursue the other one.

Returning to Columbus

Gallagher is looking forward to his return to Columbus after his grand adventure in Hollywood.

“I loved my time there,” he said of Columbus. “… I can’t imagine the emotions I’ll feel being back. I’ll be revisiting a place that gave me some of the best memories of my life. I’m excited to see how Columbus has changed — at least one of us has definitely gained weight — and I am most looking forward to reconnecting with old friends while eating my weight at Country’s Barbecue.”

If you’re looking for a guy smashing watermelons with the “Sledge-O-Matic” on stage, he isn’t that comedian named Gallagher. Asked to describe his comedy, this Gallagher said, “It’s an aggressive PG-13” with some cursing.

“I don’t really get into graphic sex talk,” he said, “but there might be an F-bomb here and there. … My act is talking about things that frustrate us, but also exploring some of the wisdom you get to collect after 50-some-odd years on the planet. I really hope when folks leave the show, no matter where they are in their life, they feel I’ve pointed things out and told them stories that resonate with them.”

Through his radio and movie careers, including getting fired five times, Gallagher learned this about persevering through adversity:

“Be curious,” he said. “It’s hard to start with a new company, but it’s OK to not be an expert, so ask people questions. People are genuinely kind and love talking about what they do for a living. If you approach it with an open mind and try to learn and be willing to do anything in that job, people are going to want to be around you and have you part of their team.”

IF YOU GO

Who: Stand-up comedia Jim Gallagher

Where: The Loft, 1032 Broadway

When: Feb. 9, part of the 7:30-10 p.m. weekly comedy show.

Tickets: $15 and available at TheLoft.com.