Gerry Byrne, a Marine in the movie business

When Gerry Byrne leaves New York, he is accustomed to heading east, to his home in Quogue, or west, to Los Angeles where much of the entertainment industry is centered. But earlier this year he traveled south for what became a sort of sentimental journey.

The vice-president and top gun at the Entertainment Group of Nielsen Business Media had been invited to an advance screening of “Taking Chance,” an HBO film based on the true story of a Marine Corps colonel and Desert Storm veteran (played by Kevin Bacon) who accompanied the casket of a 19-year-old Marine killed in Iraq to his home in Wyoming. The screening was at the Marine Corps headquarters in Quantico, Virginia.

“Suddenly the years melted away, seeing those buildings and all the young men and women in training,” recalled Mr. Byrne, who served as an officer in the Marine Corps. “As I walked around, a lot of memories came flooding back.”

“Taking Chance,” then, was more that just another movie for an executive who watches a lot of them and who monitors the box office pulse. If “Nielsen” sounds familiar, it is indeed the company that tabulates the ratings of television shows. The company goes well beyond that, though, with fingers in film and publishing pies too. One would think that this isn’t a happy time to be in the entertainment business—the worst recession since the 1930s—but Mr. Byrne is bullish, especially about motion pictures.

“People will go to the movies as much if not more in a poor economy,” he stated. “But it still all depends on the storytelling. People will go to see movies in any economy. The challenge right now is that economically it is as difficult as it has been ever to finance movies, so that is more of an issue than whether people will still buy a movie ticket. But based on past experience, the studios will get through it and the independent film companies as well. I would never say that the American film industry is recession-proof, but it remains a big exporter to the world. It’s not insulated, and that is a major strength.”

So far, so good. During the Depression of the 1930s, audiences flocked to the silver screen to “Follow the Fleet” with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and get “Gone” with Clark Gable; today, people are once again going to the movies to forget their financial woes. According to the box office tracking company Media by Numbers, as of the beginning of March, $1.7 billion worth of tickets had been bought, a 17.5 percent increase over 2008. Attendance is up 16 percent over last year, so higher ticket prices can’t be credited for the leap in box office bucks.

Of special interest to Mr. Byrne is the global economy and its impact on the American entertainment industries. Here too there are positive signs.

“Foreign distribution as well as investment has, thankfully, been present for quite a few years now,” he pointed out. “As the planet shrinks distribution-wise, we’re seeing new markets opening up. There are more countries becoming available as importers of American films as opposed to having previously had only their own small filmmaking industries or no industry at all.

“And we’re more open now to films from new markets,” Mr. Byrne continued, citing the financial and critical success of “Slumdog Millionaire,” which won the Oscar for Best Picture in February, as an example. “India has had a very active film industry for years, the one more recently nicknamed Bollywood,” he said. “But we didn’t see all that much of what it was producing. The time was right for ‘Slumdog’ to not only find a good-size audience here but to win our industry’s most coveted award.”

All of this is exciting stuff for Mr. Byrne, who in a way is back in the thick of things in Hollywood for his second go-round. He was born in New York City and graduated from Fordham University. College graduates rarely enlisted in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, but that is exactly what Mr. Byrne did. He saw action in battles in Vietnam in 1968 and ’69, and was awarded the Combat Action Ribbon and the Navy Achievement Medal with Combat V.

An enthusiasm for all things media prompted Mr. Byrne to get into the business side of publishing, movies and television, and, eventually, the emerging internet. He began in 1969 at the New York Daily News, then went on to work for Crain’s New York Business, Advertising Age, and Act III publishing, owned by the TV producer Norman Lear, whose biggest hits were “All In the Family” and “The Jeffersons.”

Mr. Byrne neared the top of the media food chain when he was appointed group vice president and publisher of the high profile publications Variety and Daily Variety, a position he held for more than a decade.

Somehow along the way he found time to be part of foundations and community work in the New York area. He is on the boards of the Creative Coalition, Intrepid Museum Foundation, and the New York City Police Museum, among others. Among the awards he has received for his community involvement, a particularly meaningful one was the “Semper Fi” Award, bestowed in 2002 by the NYPD Marine Corps Association.

It was about this time that Mr. Byrne thought of cutting back a bit. Maybe he didn’t have to put on a tie and show up at an office every day. And maybe he could work for himself. So he founded Gerry Byrne Media Partners, a media and marketing consulting firm, in 2003. There was certainly no lack of clients signing on. They included Tribeca Enterprises, Parade Magazine, Reed Business Information, and the Nielsen Company. As Mr. Byrne’s work for the latter company grew and he became more involved in its operations, the head honchos there realized they wanted him aboard full time and in a critical position.

“I was flattered, no doubt about that,” Mr. Byrne said. “That by itself would not have been enough to get me back in that kind of saddle. There had to be real opportunity. It intrigues me that so much is happening so fast, and this was a very good way for me to be in the middle of it.”

The offer to be senior vice president of the Entertainment Group of Nielsen Business Media in March 2008 proved irresistible, and Mr. Byrne resumed showing up at an office every day. The Entertainment Group includes the influential publications Back Stage, Billboard, The Bookseller, Film Journal International, Adweek, Editor & Publisher, Kirkus Reviews, and The Hollywood Reporter.

Mr. Byrne’s responsibilities also involve running Show East and Show West, two film industry expos, as well as Cinema Expo International and CineAsia Exposition. And he is head of the recently formed Entertainment Council, an invitation-only organization of senior executives from the TV and film industries, digital media, and Wall Street.

“The people on the council are CEOs of companies that range the gamut of film, television, and Madison Avenue,” explained Mr. Byrne. “But basically, it’s a group of people who I know very well who provide me inside views of what they feel are the directions that they’re headed. For me, it allows me to have a direction for all the publications that I oversee. It helps me anticipate more than react to the market and to be more intelligent about what we do.”

Information and the gathering of it, as well as how it can be put to use, is what fascinates Mr. Byrne. “Everything is changing because of the emergence of the digital world,” he said. “All content is coming through a digital funnel. The comfort zone that we have is that Nielsen is the largest company in the world that measures what the consumer does, whether it’s buying a six-pack of beer in Beijing or a bunch of cigars in Soho in New York. We have this gigantic wealth of data. Let’s figure out how best to make it work for all of us on a global scale.”

A very nice perk to Mr. Byrne’s position is that while he spends a good amount of time in Tinseltown, he is essentially based in New York City. This allows for time spent with family (he is married with two children) in Quogue, especially now, in spring and summer when the area is at its most appealing.

Of course, thanks to today’s various means of communication, including high speed internet, there really is no distance from the work environment. And the entertainment industry has always had the reputation of being an especially tough one, right?

Mr. Byrne doesn’t find it the least bit daunting. “I was an officer in a Marine Corps rifle platoon in Vietnam,” he said with a chuckle. “I learned from that experience that everything else in life is manageable.”