Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (15 page)

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I went to see Vinny Bruzzese again. I wanted to know what to make of all the concentration on marketing. Was it a good thing or a bad thing?

He referred me back to the questions raised by philosopher Theodor Adorno. This was unexpected, but I always forget that Vinny is a lapsed academic. Fortunately, I remembered Adorno a bit from my undergraduate days: Frankfort School, 1930s, a critic of the culture industry.

“What
about
Adorno?” I asked.

“Does industry
gauge
what the consumer wants?” Vinny asked. “Or does the industry
tell
the consumer what it wants?”

“You tell me,” I said. I figure he had insight from spending weekends on the phone with panicked or elated studio heads.

“I think the industry tells the audience what it wants,” he said. “The good thing about market research is that it’s an opportunity for the audience to tell the industry what it wants back.”

“I love that,” I said. “That is
audience
power.”

He smiled and added, “And Adorno said there would be a breaking point of formulaic production.”

“Have we reached that? Did Adorno predict sequel fatigue? Is that what you mean? Sequels tend to be very formulaic.”

He nodded affirmatively and said, “Adorno also talked about commodity fetishism: being delighted with something because of how much it costs.”

“Like a wildly expensive Kelly bag!” I said. “Women wait in lines to get them! Will people go see it just because it’s so big? Like size determines value?”

Vinny was on a roll. “These products, Adorno said, these commodity fetishes, are characterized by standardization.”

I remembered some Frankfort School too. “Commodity fetishes” are supposed to give us a good cry and let us feel restored, keeping us politically apathetic. Adorno, the neo-Marxist, was criticizing all entertainment as a distraction from the political—anything that gave us a good cry, such as a great movie like
Casablanca
or
Jules and Jim.
These movies could temporarily make us forget our oppression and lift us up. I want this, thank you. But
these days, our entertainment diversions rarely even give us a good cry. They are momentary diversions, like the proverbial Chinese meal after which you are still hungry. You can’t remember them by the time you get home.

The smartest studio people are beginning to recognize this sequel fatigue—this
“confounding craving for something different
.
”
But in order to select “something different” and have the guts to make it in the Great Contraction, the studios need to have some confidence that this kind of movie will open. They need talented marketers to create campaigns as thrilling as the movies themselves “to make you think you want to see the movie before you know you do.” The audience needs to want to see it enough to get out of their bedrooms, off the Net, off of Facebook, Words With Friends, fantasy baseball, four-player video games and off their butts and into the theater in droves with their besties. Otherwise, it’s too scary to green-light it, and the industry will cater to the only reliable markets that they have in the wake of the collapse of the DVD market: the ones outside our borders. The international market craves our tentpoles and 3D and does not suffer any fatigue. They are eating up our product with “preawareness.” The rest of the world likes things just the way they are.

This is why we depend on these new marketing stars who are the keys to breaking out movies that thrill with pure delight, not in how big they are, but in where they take us emotionally. Original movies are now an endangered species, under the marketing wizards’ protection. If they make them, we must come.

Well before all of these critical trends became clear to me, I had the temerity to leave behind my comfortable home at Fox, where I had been for six years. Most of us who were lucky enough to be making movies inside the system thought that things were just abnormal in the way they had been forever in this land of outsized personalities and ambitions. I left Jim Gianopulos, my guru for international, and Fox’s chairman Peter Chernin, the man I so
admired and who at our semiregular lunches could break it all down for me, and set off for new horizons with a bigger deal at the studio around the corner from my house. I couldn’t have guessed that the movie world—as well as the real world—was about to change drastically. Only a few bean counters could foretell a problem at that point. Another thing that I could never have anticipated was that my new studio, famous for its stable leadership, was about to undergo an eight-year upheaval that would make working there akin to working in a MASH unit. And those were the good years, when we knew who was who and what was what.

1
The first weekend is the studios’ most profitable because of the financial split with the theaters. From then on out, the exhibitors make more.

With any luck, this will be the only chapter in the book that will get personal, or mushy, like one of my romantic comedies that my son so avidly dislikes. This will be the only part that you will say is not really objective, or where you can hear the sound of axes grinding. But I choose to speak about my almost nine years at Paramount for a few reasons: It’s where I first started to write this book, and it’s where my journey went awry; in the protagonist’s tale, Joseph Campbell and George Lucas tell us, the hero’s journey is the story. It’s also where I went to seek gold: Part of the lure of Paramount was that first-dollar gross points were offered me by its CEO, Sherry Lansing, for the first time in my career. It had been too long that I worked only for up-front fees and the sheer love of making movies and couldn’t make real profits. Sherry’s desire to see me finally get a bigger piece of the pie was very empowering. So I turned down other offers that look far better now. Hindsight is the most worthless of all varieties of vision.

During my almost nine-year tenure, I had eight bosses, saw almost all of them fired, suffered through most of their departures, got in the middle of some of their fights and cared for their junior execs as they wept on my couch (one of whom, now a senior exec, no longer returns my calls). Early in his reign, Brad Grey, the last
of Paramount’s series of chairmen, was under siege from a media and prosecutorial witch hunt. He disentangled himself, Houdini-like, from what looked like a serious mob scandal but morphed into eventual industry-wide amnesia, to the extent that there is now no sense that any scandal existed at all. Someone went to jail somewhere. Nowhere near Melrose Avenue, where Paramount houses its lot.

I pitched the same movies to all of my many bosses, made a flop with a hot director and a hit with a cold one and spent way too much time along the way smoking on Paramount’s beautiful lawn with the execs, trading rumors about who was going to be fired. I lived through the writers’ strike on its lot, waving to my friends on the other side of the picket line as I pretended to go to work.

I began at Paramount under the Jon Dolgen/Sherry Lansing/John Goldwyn regime in 1998. In its early days, this regime was the paradigm of the Old Abnormal at its best. Between Lansing/Jaffe and the producing team of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, Paramount was the home of the Old Abnormal high-concept model. Simpson, who had risen through the ranks to become the head of production, was made a producer by the studio in the eighties to accommodate his, let’s say, nontraditional lifestyle—he would arrive in the office when he woke up, which was often after lunch. He was brilliant at story and was considered by many to have given birth to the whole high-concept-movie idea (i.e., can you describe it in a “log line” no longer than a
TV Guide
description?). The studio packaged him with line producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and the dynamic duo—as they first called themselves—was born. Simpson and Bruckheimer made Eddie Murphy’s breakout hit,
Beverly Hills Cop
(about guess what?), and two Tom Cruise hits, the naval pilot actioner
Top Gun
and the car racing hit
Days of Thunder;
the Michael Douglas bad-husband parable
Fatal Attraction;
and the “what would you do if someone offered you a million dollars to sleep with your wife?”–premised
Indecent Proposal.
All of these one-off
producer-driven movies embodied Paramount and the Old Abnormal at their high-concept zenith. It was what they were good at and what they were known for.

Paramount’s women-centered thrillers are still called “Sherry movies” in the industry, after those she made during her producing career—Jodie Foster’s powerful rape-victim trial movie
The Accused, Fatal Attraction,
and
Indecent Proposal.
Those groundbreaking female “refrigerator movies”—movies you would still be debating when you got home and were reaching for leftovers in your refrigerator—were all about female social issues and empowerment, a hallmark of “Sherry movies.” Often they were, or could be,
Newsweek
cover stories, as they raised issues of social debate. At the end of Lansing’s reign, “Sherry movies” devolved to “women in jeopardy” thrillers like James Patterson’s
Kiss the Girls,
in which pretty girls are kidnapped and forced to be subservient or be killed by a sadomasochistic psychopath. Thrillers like these, devoid of social issues, lost their “refrigerator” value.

Now, under Brad Grey, the eventual winner of the eight-year Paramount power derby, Paramount has emerged as the consummate New Abnormal studio, with the polar-opposite business strategy it had when I arrived. At the nadir of the Dolgen-Lansing regime, it was last in market share (the percentage of total box office vis-à-vis other studios), and striving for a high mark in profitability through its frugal—one could say risk-averse—business model. By 2001, seven years into his reign, it was number one in market share, with
Mission: Impossible
(started under Lansing and Goldwyn),
Star Trek, Transformers,
and
Iron Man
as its crown-jewel franchises, aimed directly at the emerging international markets (though it was the last studio to make franchises a part of its regular diet), a great triumph. But by 2012, Disney was number one in market share due to the phenomenal success of
The Avengers
—the number-three worldwide hit of all time—and Paramount had gone from number one to number seven, showing how volatile
the market is. It also shows how hard it was to put a slate of tentpoles together for the summer of 2012: Two of its planned summer releases,
G.I. Joe: Retaliation
and
World War Z,
a zombie movie starring Brad Pitt, had to be delayed because they weren’t ready on time. Missing the summer definitely makes a huge difference in your market share.

Despite the heaving and hyperventilating of a topsy-turvy box office race between studios every weekend, Grey’s track record has been strong. His contract was extended to 2015, which will make it a ten-year run, only half of which comprised what the Hindu god Shiva would call “creative destruction.”

When you think of how far Paramount has traveled, perhaps this saga is less a hero’s journey than a close look at a studio undergoing a gigantic transition, a turning of a battleship. Paramount is a studio with a complicated, brilliant octogenarian named Sumner Redstone holding tightly to its helm. Sumner still likes the ladies, and from what I’ve seen and read of his survival skills,
¹
he may be immortal. (He says he is.) Always remember a lesson about Paramount I repeatedly observed: Whoever has Sumner has Paramount. And Brad Grey, having achieved the prize of number-one market share, has Sumner.

Back in the Old Abnormal, the Sherry-Sumner relationship was a wholly personal thing. They were friends. They still are. But then again, the whole town has a personal relationship with Sherry, as do I.

Whenever we have lunch, I have to spend twenty minutes diddling on my iPhone while every single person in the restaurant, male and female, young and ancient, comes to the table to greet
Sherry as the most important person in his or her life. She holds court, like an eighteenth-century French regent (she is actually a twenty-first-century regent of the UC system), with every person in Beverly Hills. It’s not noblesse oblige—she is too down-to-earth for that—but it is definitely regal, as she knows something about everyone’s family. It thrills each of them.

She is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and it has deeply affected her character; she is utterly unostentatious and thrifty. She taught high school math and English right after college, before she began an acting career that she quickly quit because she decided she wasn’t good enough. So she started reading scripts. I first met Sherry when I was an editor at the
New York Times,
doing an article on the new female executives in Hollywood. She was then VP at Fox and clearly the one to watch. A few years later, after a stint at MGM, Fox named her its first female head of production.

Not long after, she left Fox and partnered up with Stanley Jaffe. When Jaffe retired, Paramount recruited Sherry to be the first female studio head, to great hoopla and cover stories everywhere. She made fabulous copy, and was more than ready to do the job.

In 1987, my best friend, Dawn Steel, a charismatic, superalpha kind of female exec—hard-driving, instinctive, hilarious, controversial (she yelled)—was named head of Columbia, so then there were two. It was a heady, thrilling era for women.

I’d gotten close to Sherry when Dawn fell ill with brain cancer in 1996. Sherry is a person you want in your corner when you are sick. Her strength, courage and generosity are like those of no one else I’ve ever known. Though they had only recently become close, Sherry was immediately by Dawn’s side. We took little weekend trips to Palm Springs and went out to dinner. When Dawn eventually died a grueling year and a half later, Sherry and I ended up as part of an all-female pallbearer group, further bonding us.