The Keys to the Kingdom (10 page)

 

EVEN BEFORE EISNER
came to the studio, it was clear that Diller was dissatisfied with production executive David Picker. Casual in jeans and open shirts, Picker didn't fit in with Diller at all. “David Picker's philosophy was to pick filmmakers and leave them alone,” Diller says. “My philosophy, coming from television, was you never leave anyone alone.” Picker was eighteen months into a two-year contract when Diller had told him that Eisner had been hired. And Eisner made it painfully apparent that he was not interested in sharing power. Picker was quickly cut out of the loop as Eisner borrowed a technique from his boss that Diller called “firing by process”—simply setting up a structure that excluded the unwanted employee. When Picker's contract expired, he moved on.

To Richard Sylbert, art had gone out the window as commerce strolled through the door in the person of Michael Eisner. Sylbert had been the production designer on such classic films as
The Manchurian Candidate, The Pawnbroker, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,
and
The Graduate
. He saw little prospect of making great movies on Eisner's watch. “Michael Eisner is a machine,” he says years later. “He's a sausage-making machine. He invents something to go between commercials. What it is, he doesn't care…. There is no such thing as a Michael Eisner idea. It's an oxymoron.”

Sylbert attended a series of meetings with Eisner that left him altogether dispirited. “I remember him sitting at the head of the table insisting that people manufacture something,” he says. Finally Sylbert went to Eisner's office for yet another meeting. “I'd already been bad-mouthing him anyway,” Sylbert says. “He pitched [an idea]. He said, ‘It's a space movie—
Romeo and Juliet
in space.' Some strange, stupid idea. And I said, ‘You're making the knockwurst
Tristan and Isolde
?' He said, ‘Why do you say things like that?' I said, ‘Because I think it.'” Very soon, Sylbert was also excised from the ranks.

Despite the hard luck that Diller had been having at the box office, Eisner did not find the studio's cupboards bare. Instead, as Eisner devoted himself to reading his own projects, Paramount's fortunes took a stunning turn. October 1977 brought a glimmer of light in the form of
Looking for Mr. Goodbar,
a dark story about a seemingly straitlaced schoolteacher (Diane Keaton) seeking thrills in New York singles bars. Sylbert had been the one who had proposed buying the rights to Judith Rossner's best-selling novel. “It wasn't a huge success,” Diller remembers, “but it was a real movie.
It was different from movies that were being offered then and that kind of said, ‘We're not total imbeciles.'”

In December, Paramount opened a big holiday gift. Before he had left, Picker had forged a relationship with producer Robert Stigwood, who had shown him a
New York
magazine article called “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” a story about a young man from Brooklyn who got his release every weekend in the local disco. (It became known later that the story was partly fiction.) Picker had immediately bought the rights.

Eisner had arrived at the studio just as shooting was about to begin. The picture got off to a rough start when director John Avildsen, red-hot off
Rocky,
was fired after clashing with the producers. One of the issues, according to Avildsen, was his inability to cast the female lead. “I didn't see any sense hiring someone I didn't think was terrific, but they thought I was dragging my feet,” Avildsen says. “I remember Michael calling me before I got fired, sort of reassuring me that everything was going to be okay…. Shortly after that, I got fired.” He was replaced by John Badham, a director who had primarily worked in television.

The female lead went to a little-remembered actress named Karen Lynn Gorney. The main character would be portrayed by the kid from
Welcome Back, Kotter
whom Eisner had cast by default in ABC's
Boy in the Plastic Bubble
movie. Now John Travolta strutted across the floor with his open-collared shirt and tight pants and launched himself as a megastar. When it opened in December 1977,
Saturday Night Fever
spawned Travolta look-a like contests and dance competitions across the country. The soundtrack, packed with Bee Gees tunes, racked up record-breaking sales and won five Grammys.

Diller had been certain the picture would be a hit and opening night in New York justified his confidence. “There were lines around the block and the pressure in front of the theater was exciting and crazy and that was the first experience I had with that,” he remembers. The picture, which grossed $94 million in the U.S., ranked right behind
The Godfather
on the list of Paramount's all-time moneymakers. It was the industry's third biggest hit of 1977 behind the twin killers,
Star Wars
and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. After the picture sat in the number-one spot for several weeks, Bluhdorn had Tiffany's make up a copy of
Variety
's box-office listings in silver as a gift for Diller. Across the bottom, inscribed in Bluhdorn's scrawl, it read, “We're on the way. Your friend, Charlie.” Such praise was touching
to Diller, who twenty years later still has the plaque on his wall, albeit in the bathroom.

After
Saturday Night Fever,
Paramount spit out a couple more commercial losers, including the controversial but flaccid
Pretty Baby,
with Brooke Shields as a child prostitute. There was also one of Eisner's first choices as studio chief:
American Hot Wax,
a nostalgic look back at fifties disc jockey Alan Freed. It included appearances by Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis (as well as early sightings of Fran Drescher and Jay Leno). Eisner loved the film so much that he said he watched it a dozen times, but the
American Graffiti
crowd didn't show up. Nonetheless, producer Art Linson remembers that Eisner never wavered. “When he liked something, he liked it regardless of what anyone else thought,” Linson says. “He certainly wasn't afraid of his convictions.”

Eisner had inherited many more projects from David Picker and there was one in particular that Diller and Eisner anticipated with dread. The film was based on the long-running Broadway show
Grease,
set in a high school during the fifties. Picker had hated it so much that he walked out in the first act. But Allan Carr, a portly and flamboyant producer, convinced him that a movie based on this featherweight musical would work. John Travolta was cast as the male lead.

“Barry Diller never liked the movie, bad-mouthed the movie, and I think would have canceled it,” Carr remembered in an interview some months before his death in 1999. “But
Saturday Night Fever
was such a hit and John Travolta was so hot that he went along.” Eisner didn't seem particularly interested in the project, either. “We had pleasant dealings with Michael Eisner but very little [contact],” Carr said.

In fact, Diller was appalled. “One night, Michael Eisner and I screened the rough cut of
Grease
and went, ‘Oh, my God, they are going to murder us. We are going to have success in launching a superstar and then drowning one.' It was just horrendous,” he says.

But aside from that, Diller's and Carr's accounts diverge. Carr said he faced an uphill battle to get the film respectably launched. His only ally was Frank Mancuso, the distribution chief, who promised Carr that he would look after the picture, making sure it was booked in decent theaters and that it had a good advertising campaign. Meanwhile, Carr said, Diller and Eisner were afraid to let theater owners preview the movie for fear they wouldn't book it. The same concern led them to do a test screening for a
recruited audience in Hawaii just a few weeks before
Grease
was to open, hoping they could keep the results quiet. The studio even put fake labels on the film cans before they put them on the plane so no one would know that the film was being screened.
Grease
was spirited to Hawaii under the name
Goin' South,
a bawdy western starring and directed by Jack Nicholson that Paramount was to release in October.

According to Diller, the response in Honolulu was only fair, but Carr said the Honolulu audience adored the film. “It just swept the island,” Carr said. He maintained that the positive reaction woke up Diller and Eisner, who summoned Carr to hear suggestions for improvements in the film over brunch at the Royal Hawaiian. By then, Carr said, he was no longer interested in hearing opinions from the Paramount suits. “I said to myself, ‘This is all silliness. There's nothing to do.' I excused myself and went looking for a house. I thought, ‘I'm going to be very, very rich.'…I put a hold on a mansion, and in June, the picture opened and I bought it.”

But Diller says the studio reworked the film over Carr's objections. “We spent a good deal of money reshooting, agonizing, driving ourselves crazy,” he says. “But [Carr] was more right than we were.” Director Randal Kleiser confirms that. Eisner insisted on adding a scene to explain a confrontation between two of the key characters. “I did my best to make it work but it was like a sore thumb,” Kleiser says. “He agreed.” The scene disappeared.

Grease
was a plotless bit of piffle, but between Olivia Newton-John's warbling and Travolta's shimmy, it became a phenomenon. It eclipsed not only
Saturday Night Fever
but
The Godfather
to become Paramount's all-time box-office champ, grossing $96.3 million.
Saturday Night Fever
had hip, urban appeal but
Grease
had the earning power of a film that plays to the heartland. The soundtrack sold twenty-five million copies. If the Paramount brass didn't get its appeal before, they got it now. (Or did they? A few years later they attempted
Grease 2,
without Travolta or costar Olivia Newton-John, hoping that the title alone would draw the crowds. It didn't. The picture grossed a paltry $6.5 million, and the studio wound up $9 million in the hole.)

Carr enjoyed his mansion in Hawaii for years to come, but he never felt that the studio showed much gratitude for the dog that turned out to be such a box-office champion. From Diller and Eisner, he said, he got “no thank-you, no acknowledgment.”

Carr wasn't the only one feeling neglected. David Picker had put
Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Saturday Night Fever,
and
Grease
into production and
yet Michael Eisner acted as if he'd invented them. That feeling intensified as Paramount continued to rack up hits that had been developed while Eisner was still at ABC. In June 1978, the studio followed
Grease
with another winner,
Heaven Can Wait
. The film, a remake of the delightful 1941 film
Here Comes Mr. Jordan,
originated at Warner Brothers. But its star, Warren Beatty, had quarreled with Warner over a number of issues, including his insistence that the studio pay Cary Grant $2 million for a supporting role. Finally Beatty and top Warner executive Frank Wells got to a point of mutual antagonism. The discussion descended to pettiness: As Beatty recalls, Wells refused to foot the bill for a watercooler in Beatty's office. “He said, ‘We don't pay for watercoolers,'” Beatty recalls. “I said, ‘Give me a day to take this picture somewhere else, and if I can't, I'll do whatever you want.'”

Beatty took the film to Paramount, where his friend Diller allowed him to make a soup-to-nuts Warren Beatty creation. The star produced it, acted in it, shared screenwriting credit with Elaine May, and split the directing chores with Buck Henry. A charming remake,
Heaven Can Wait
had Beatty as a good-hearted football hero who dies before his time and must return to earth in the body of a hard-hearted financier. The picture went on to be nominated for nine Academy Awards and won one.
Heaven Can Wait
was the perfect blend of box-office success and prestige, grossing $82 million.

But Paramount's summer wasn't over yet. It still had
Up in Smoke,
a raunchy homage to illegal substances starring Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong in their big-screen debut. This, too, was a Picker project; he had tried to get this film made for nearly ten years, convinced that comics Cheech and Chong were “the Abbott and Costello of the dope generation.” Picker felt that the script was almost irrelevant, that Cheech and Chong would draw a following. Once again, Diller and Eisner weren't convinced. Before the film opened, distribution chief Frank Mancuso called Picker to ask for his ideas on selling it. “Nobody here thinks this picture can do any business,” he said. Picker suggested that he find a market where Cheech and Chong records had been hits and start there. Mancuso's plan was to open the film in Texas, where Cheech and Chong were popular, and then broaden it to a national run. The strategy worked and the picture, which cost a couple of million to make, grossed $44 million.

Picker, like so many deposed Hollywood executives before and after, watched in dismay as the slate he had assembled—
Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Saturday Night Fever, Grease, Heaven Can Wait,
and
Up in Smoke
—
propelled Paramount to the number-one spot in Hollywood, with no acknowledgment of his contribution. Michael Eisner seemed to be taking the victory lap that belonged to Picker. In the middle of the summer, the
Los Angeles Times
published an article about the studio's “astonishing success story” without a mention of Picker's name. Instead, it featured Eisner ruminating about the fickle nature of success. As if he wished to keep away the evil eye, Eisner declared, “If you have a successful movie, the wisest thing you can do is think of it as a failure, forget it and move on.” It was the type of disclaimer that would become characteristic of Eisner, but at the same time his pride was manifest. “We didn't have a failure,” he proclaimed.