Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (18 page)

This strategy guaranteed that few pictures lost money in the green-light game that was the upshot of the intimate wrangling between Sherry and Dolgen. They were equals and partners. He believed in her gut to pick pictures; she knew he could squeeze every dime out of every territory and ancillary market to pay for each film. She would tell him what she wanted to make, he would give her an impossible budget number, she would cast the top players and pass on the impossible number (a bit lower now) to the production team. It was designed to work financially, but it didn’t always benefit the picture creatively. But Sherry could often “save it in post.” It was the most conservative model possible, and it successfully minimized losses.

As long as he could report profits to his board, Dolgen didn’t care what the outside world thought. Critically, however, this conservative philosophy did not allow them to be competitive for the
best new material or remain in tune with the market as it began to drastically change.

Perhaps Dolgen could have competed in the studio box office derby and made it to the New Abnormal if he had been strong enough to buck financial pressures and make the bigger special-effects-driven movies that were coming into vogue. But he wasn’t competing against the other studios. He was competing inside Viacom.

As Goldwyn and others saw it, Dolgen took pleasure in making his anemic financial projections work. He was brilliant at selling off rights, and had been doing it throughout his career. As a former business affairs executive, it was one of the things he knew how to do best. He was comfortable with the formula, and to be fair, it was still bringing in profits, if not market share; but the latter is what almost everyone considers to be the true measure of studio success.

THE BATTLESHIP IS MISSING THE DOCK

But if you remember, 2001 was the year of the first big new special-effects movies, those using next-generation CGI like
Harry Potter,
the first
Shrek
and the first
Fast and the Furious.
Moviegoers were falling in love with the amazing animation and special effects that the new technology was providing, and they wanted more. This was the moment when everything was coming up tentpole. The audience was saying yes, please, we want more and bigger. Paramount couldn’t afford it, comprehend its importance or accommodate it.

The vaunted philosophy of fiscal restraint at Paramount was becoming obsolete. The one-off business struggle for each picture was keeping Paramount unable to compete with the rising costs of production, of actors and their entourages, of big special effects or
of the blockbuster/sequel/marketing–driven sensibility that was now ruling Hollywood. The studio was unwilling or unable to play the game. It did not have the mindset, and Dolgen’s eyes were elsewhere.

Goldwyn described the transition that took place when Para-mount’s old model ran up against the tidal wave of change:

“When Viacom bought the company in 1993, it was right before the period when there was a shift in what movies Hollywood was making. We went from pictures that were
crafted
to pictures that were marketing juggernauts. The craftsmanship of the pictures was secondary to the marketability of the
intellectual property,
the ‘idea.’ And that was not what Stanley Jaffe and the Paramount tradition dictated.”

In using the word “crafted,” Goldwyn is describing pictures that were made during the Old Abnormal, when Paramount and much of the rest of the industry made movies “because they were good” (not to say that Nolan’s, Spielberg’s and Cameron’s movies aren’t crafted, but plenty of tentpoles put craft after marketability). These movies were not made because they were based on a big intellectual property like
Harry Potter
or
The Hunger Games
or
Twilight
or a Marvel property—a big identifiable idea that could be promoted all around the world at once.

Sherry Lansing made movies she loved and believed in, and at the lowest possible cost. But no one who watched the transition to the New Abnormal at the time knew what on earth was going on. We only knew that technology now allowed for some very cool new effects that the audience wanted to see. The boundaries of what was technologically possible were expanding every day. And it was expensive.

Goldwyn said, “If Stanley Jaffe had stayed at the company, I’m sure there would have been a serious discussion about where this was going.”

But there was not, apparently, any such conversation under Dolgen. Paramount couldn’t compete in the marketplace for the hot scripts that utilized this new technology, for which all the other studios were clamoring. All this was garnering Paramount terrible press. They were under relentless pressure, from inside and out.

Goldwyn concluded, “I just think after a while the financial pressures became absolutely terrible. And the creative community at large was intensely aware of that. The big material started to go elsewhere.”

Paramount was not keeping up with the Joneses. A change was gonna come, as the bluesman sings. And someone was going to pay the piper.

THE HIPSTER AND THE BLOCKER

Of course, there are many more people I had to work with other than Sherry and Goldwyn. There were the execs. At first for me, there were the Hipster and the Blocker. The Blocker didn’t look like a blocker. She was always helping me, sending me writers lists to develop my new ideas, sharing her incredibly up-to-the-minute inside info with me, sending me anywhere I wanted to go to visit fancy writers. She was a seductress of development, with the coziest office full of candy and pillows.

•  •  •

I bought a book called
Can You Keep a Secret?
by Sophie Kinsella (
Confessions of a Shopaholic
), attached Kate Hudson and sent it to Nora Ephron. She loved it. I called the Blocker ecstatically, and she said something like, “I’m not sure we will hire Nora to write this.” I almost fell off my chair. Then I started to boil. I began breathing exercises. “May I come over and discuss this with you in person?” I asked.

I had given this to Nora, the best writer I knew and also my dearest friend, and hadn’t cleared it with the studio. I hadn’t cleared it because never in a thousand years would it have occurred to me that the studio would be anything but overjoyed. The weirdness factor I’d been warned about at Paramount was rearing its head. I would go to John. I would go to Sherry. I would use up my discretionary fund to get Nora. I walked across the lot to hear what the Blocker had to say.

“Hi, Lyn. Don’t be upset. You know we love you. Let’s talk this out.” I started laying out my argument, as though there were rational underpinnings for her decision. When I finished, she said, “Yes, you know we have great faith in you, and we love Nora, of course, but she just made
Lucky Numbers
for us, and it didn’t work.”

Lucky Numbers
was a very uncharacteristic Nora movie based on an Adam Resnick script she loved about scamming the lottery, starring two of her favorite actors, John Travolta (from her hit
Michael)
and Lisa Kudrow, who she thought was (and in fact is) a genius.

“This has nothing whatsoever to do with
Lucky Numbers,
” I said. “This is a horse of a different color,” or some such idiotic thing. I added, “I’m going to talk to Sherry.”

Sherry
lived
not to get smoked out at times like this.

“If you like,” the Blocker said in a cold voice.

I walked out of the office knowing that this was going to get complicated and I’d better call Nora ASAP. But if I wanted to fly to London, that would be no problem for the Blocker—just as long as I wasn’t getting any work done. I called Nora and told her the story. She was furious with me, and rightly so. She withdrew.

What would have been a slam dunk at Fox was punched out of the basket by my own teammate at Paramount. And there was no referee to call goaltending.

•  •  •

The Hipster was another proposition altogether. We had the same taste. We had the same frustrations. We got along great, until we didn’t, which was essentially a factor of the crazy politics of Paramount. Nothing was moving forward in the bad winds that were beginning to poison the studio, and one tough day I blamed the Hipster for my frustration. She responded by writing a scathing email about me to the big brass, which got her in trouble with the administration and got leaked to the trades and made us both look bad. Bryan Lourd—one of the controlling partners at CAA—got us to make up. Bryan is thought of by many as “the Lourd in town” because he represents so many of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood
⁴
that a good movie is hard to put together without him. Moreover, his personality is all Zen strategy and common sense. Fights are not Zen-like and follow no common sense, he made clear to both of us.

The tension was growing severe in the halls of the administration building; it was as though the pressure that Dolgen was feeling from New York were landing on Goldwyn, who was distributing it evenly among his execs, who were passing it down to their producers. Call it trickle-down hostility. All teamwork vanished. Craziness multiplied. Paranoia prevailed.

The execs were gathering in clusters outside the administration building, smoking and fuming. John was not getting along with his underlings. Something was brewing in his life and in the careers of his execs (as in, nobody knew who was going to get fired), and Sherry’s reign was being questioned for the first time, as the numbers weren’t good. She was eventually going to have to make a change. The flops of 2002 were numbing.

Source data from
BoxOfficeMojo.com
.

The above are the worst, admittedly, but there were few hits to offset them.

•  •  •

Goldwyn and Lansing were intertwined. Good cop, bad cop. He knew how she thought; she knew how he executed what she wanted done. He loved to say no; she hated it. It would be hard to sever them. But inevitably, after twelve years, Goldwyn’s sometimes acrimonious though wildly successful run of protecting Sherry and bringing her “the fish on a platter from which to choose” (movies to make) was coming to an end.

The job of head of production, Goldwyn’s position at the time, is to put potential pictures together for his boss by directing the development of the scripts the studio buys and shepherds through rewrites. He picks writers from the lists the execs assemble, approves the “take” the writer will attempt on the material, attaches (or tries to attach) “elements” along the way like directors or stars that make the script more of a movie. Then these “potential movies” become “fish on the platter” for his boss, the chairman, who green-lights the movies. Because half of the scripts will “tank” (come in under par), a third will fall apart as they try to become movies by losing their “elements” and the rest his boss will hate, he needs to assemble double the number of movies that the studio needs to release. That’s a lotta sushi.

He does all that while the whole town is either at his feet or at his throat. There is no protection from a constant barrage of selling and yelling. It’s a melee where deals, projects, and executives’ mistakes are constantly blowing up in his face. If the slate of releases he puts together doesn’t work, he goes down.

Goldwyn could be as charming as he chose to be, but he had a temper that occasionally flared. Once he stormed out of his office and drove due north for 350 miles without stopping or answering calls because someone on his staff had made him very angry.

The kitchen got very hot for Goldwyn as the town turned against Paramount and the pictures weren’t working. The pressure got to him. This is how he related that moment to me a few years later:

“The culture I came into was very different than the culture that I left. It was not a fear-based culture at the beginning. It was ‘this is what we stand for, this is what we are going to do, now let’s make it work.’ And then it became very much ‘How the fuck do we do that? How the fuck did that happen? How can we not do this?’

“It went from being proactive and accountable to being at the expense of that accountability,” John recalled. “As much as you want to be accountable, the last thing you want is to be accountable for decisions you feel unsure about. And that’s what happened. That’s when I knew I had to get out. I knew that I would die in that culture, I knew it, I knew it. I knew I was failing, I knew the pictures were failing and I knew that I did not have the stamina or emotional reserves to turn it around. I felt very guilty about the quality of the pictures. Maybe I was feeling a little too much personal responsibility for them. It was much more about the mindset of the place. Because when you are in that job and you’re the head of production, you feel responsible for it. You can’t help it. At some point, you’re saying that it’s your fault.”

On top of it all, or underneath it all, Goldwyn was having a
personal crisis that may have exacerbated the discord. You would have noticed early signs if you had looked closely. He was looking snappier. He had been married to the wildly popular hostess–actress/producer and town doyenne Colleen Camp for years. They had been a team, like one professional unit, throughout his corporate rise—but he took a lover. To complicate matters, his paramour was a man, and Colleen, in her shock and dismay, looked for solace in her friends. John knew he had to tell Sherry first, before she found out somewhere else. This terrified him, as the studio was teetering on the brink of radical instability. (The Goldwyns commenced a divorce amid swirling rumors and fought a grueling custody battle over a daughter they both adored. They are all now good friends, though there was great hysteria at the time.)