The Keys to the Kingdom (9 page)

Happy Days
was going along well and Eisner tried to emphasize the positive about the new spinoff,
Laverne & Shirley
. Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams were getting a good grip on their characters. “The one problem we have—and I've had calls from Cindy's agent—is that she's very unhappy that Penny has all the jokes and all the scenes and all the relatives and that she's sitting there as the straight man and it's the Penny Marshall show,” Eisner said. This had been a scenario that Williams had feared from the start, since Garry Marshall—Penny's brother—was producing the show. At the time, Eisner noted, Williams was in the hospital suffering from pneumonia—an illness that may have been “emotionally caused” in part because she was so upset after filming the first episode. Eisner said he would try to get Marshall to beef up Williams's role. It was a dispute he could not settle.

 

BY THE TIME
Eisner recorded that memo in the summer of 1976, his relationship with Silverman had started to deteriorate. Eisner knew that Silverman would get all the credit for turning ABC around and he knew that he wasn't going to advance as long as Silverman was in place. Network
president Fred Pierce, who had been trying to make these two strong personalities complement each other for the previous year, found that he couldn't keep Eisner happy. “Fred [Silverman] was a pretty tough taskmaster and would call at all hours,” Pierce says. “At that point Eisner had begun to say, ‘I think I've had enough.'”

“Once in a while Michael wanted to get home earlier, wanted not to go over the same thing eight times,” Carsey remembers. “Michael had a style that was very efficient, brisk, and energetic. Fred [Silverman] was more obsessive about time spent at work, the details—every aspect of every show. Michael was always the first to want to say, ‘Fred, it's all going to be here tomorrow morning. I have a wife and kids at home.'” Once, she remembers, Eisner abruptly stood during a meeting and declared, “Fred, I can't do this anymore. I have to go.”

In a similar vein, Eisner's assistant, Lee Wedemeyer, recalls: “Fred needed no sleep, so he would call people at two in the morning because he was up and he was working.” When Silverman wanted Eisner to linger at the office, she remembers, Eisner said, “I'm going home or I'm going to have a divorce.”

Silverman doesn't remember any friction with Eisner. “We agreed about almost everything,” he says. “If we were wrong, we were really wrong together. We put a show on the air called
Mr. T and Tina
with Pat Morita—it was a really bad show. We both went in thinking it was going to be terrific. At least we were wrong together. I can't think of something he wanted to do that I said no to.”

Carsey says Eisner wasn't just annoyed by Silverman's compulsive attention to detail. He also felt that Pierce never appreciated his successes. “Pierce never appreciated any of us,” she says. “Pierce operated out of a fatal flaw in his thinking. He believed it was all luck.”

Feeling harassed and undervalued, Eisner was ready to move on. And there was more. He was being courted by David Geffen, who was then briefly vice-chairman of the Warner studio, to run Warner's television division. At the time Geffen was close to Marlo Thomas, Diller's childhood friend. According to Geffen, Thomas let Diller know that Geffen was courting his old rival. Diller moved aggressively to hire Eisner to head television at Paramount.

Geffen and Diller were longtime friends but deeply competitive. “Barry didn't want Michael [but] he couldn't stand the idea of Michael coming to work for me,” Geffen says. Diller disputes this, though he acknowledges
that he knew Geffen had talked with Eisner. “I knew he would never take the job,” Diller says. “He wouldn't want to be head of a television division.”

Diller called Eisner, who had scarcely heard from his former boss except when Diller wanted a favor. “I hear you've really matured as an executive,” Diller said now. “You even return your calls.” With such honeyed words, Diller began to woo Eisner.

But Eisner hesitated. A friend urged him not to take the Paramount job if it were just to run television. “You want to be in the movie business,” the friend urged. “You don't like working for Barry anyway.” Diller had to sweeten the pot: instead of just television, Diller offered Eisner the title of president and chief operating officer of the whole studio.

Naturally, Eisner was now all but desperate to get out of his contract at ABC. Pierce refused. “He kept
schreiing
to Silverman, who kept coming to me. Fred wanted to let him out,” Pierce remembers wryly. Silverman recalls that he pleaded with Pierce to release Eisner because he realized that it was hopeless to try to keep him. And Silverman says that when Eisner told him, “Barry offered me this job,” he looked at Eisner and replied, “I knew I should have had him killed.” He tried to convince Eisner to stay, without success. “It was endless,” Silverman says. “It was just every day. He wouldn't take no for an answer. Finally we weren't getting any work done.”

Eventually, Silverman went to Pierce. “You've got to let him out of his contract,” he said. “Life is too short to have to go through this. He's miserable and we're getting 10 percent of what we should out of him.” Pierce gave in and Eisner departed to work alongside his old rival at Paramount.

B
ARRY DILLER HAD
not been having an easy time of it. When he had arrived at Paramount Pictures in October 1974, in fact, Diller was widely viewed as a joke—little more than Charlie Bluhdorn's revenge on Frank Yablans. “Two or three months after I arrived at Paramount, there was a story in
People
magazine about me failing upward based upon the ABC season to date,” Diller says. “That was just the beginning of my baptism for the next couple of years of pain.”

It takes time to effect change at a studio—at least eighteen months before a new chief can pack his projects into the pipeline. And Diller had no background in film; he was looked down upon in the studio world as a television guy. He acknowledges that getting his bearings in the film world “took longer than I expected.” A colleague still remembers Diller sighing, “Every day I come to work and I am humbled by the chaos of the previous day.”

When he left ABC, Diller hired business-affairs executive Richard Zimbert as well as Dick Sylbert, a distinguished production designer who had never worked as an executive. After a few months Diller added David Picker, a veteran of United Artists who had made a mark by launching the James Bond franchise. Diller had hoped that Picker would supply the kind of film-business seasoning that he lacked. But the studio was cold as ice. In 1976, Paramount had the lowest earnings of any of the six major film companies.

Diller remembers that the other executives at the studio were “more than skeptical” about him (although anyone who displayed that attitude openly didn't work there long). “The first two years were a nightmare,” Diller says. “More than the first two years—but the first two years were very, very difficult. We were changing the nature of how these companies worked and we certainly failed before we succeeded.”

Though Diller's background in television was considered a handicap in the film community, he thinks it ultimately helped him succeed. “My history was in television. I was not nailed down to the movie business…. I could not be corrupted by its history,” Diller says. And if the movie world regarded him with disdain, he returned the sentiment in full. “I was so scorned,” he remembers. “I had nobody paying much attention or arguing very much from wisdom or knowledge against me that I had very much respect for.” There were a few whose talent impressed Diller sufficiently that he paid attention to them: Francis Coppola, Warren Beatty, Katharine Hepburn. And, he adds with uncharacteristic vulnerability, “They were the only people who were really nice to me.”

The film industry had been in a severe slump. Most of the major studios had moved away from their campuslike lots, and Paramount's management was comfortably ensconced in offices on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills—walking distance from the restaurants where they liked to eat their lunch. The Paramount lot, a few miles to the east on then-unfashionable Melrose Avenue, was virtually shut down and half of it was owned by an Italian firm. With
Godfather II
poised for release shortly after his arrival at Paramount, Diller found himself musing to director Francis Coppola that he had finally gotten to the movie business in a top-level job but didn't really feel the part. “Here I am in the middle of Beverly Hills,” he said.

“Why don't you revive the lot?” Coppola asked.

Diller was immediately struck by the idea. “Could we do it?” he said. “Would people come here? Could we make an environment out of it?” After mulling it over, Diller presented the idea to his staff: “I came in and I said, ‘Guess what? We're going home. We're going back to Paramount. We're getting out of this building.' And they all thought I was nuts.” But Diller began to push the Italian owners off the lot. “I made their lives miserable for a year or two,” he says. He also asked production chief Sylbert, the former art director, for advice on what colors to paint the buildings and gates. Eventually, Paramount became green and campuslike—the “environment” that Diller had envisioned.

 

AS DILLER STRUGGLED
to find his footing, there was one dominant influence on his life: the charming, rapacious, manipulative, and infuriating Charlie Bluhdorn. “It was this pressure cooker of Bluhdorn that made me much stronger, because my relationship with Charlie was a constant battle,”
Diller says. “It was excellent for me because it forced me to be strong when I didn't feel like it. It forced me to defend my world and do the things I wanted to do.”

Diller's deeply conflicted emotions about Bluhdorn suffuse his recollections. “Charlie was a tempestuous, argumentative, emotional, shrewd, out of control—though never really—personality who would use any tactic, fair or unfair, to get his point across,” he says with affection tinged with bitterness. Bluhdorn had hired Diller with the sense that in this young man, he had met as contrary and clever a combatant as he could hope to find, and Diller did not disappoint. Such intense and paternalistic relationships were not uncommon in an industry dominated by patriarchs—especially ones whose own sons do not fulfill their expectations.

“I was Charlie's impossible dream,” Diller says. “Here Charlie Bluhdorn took a thirty-two-year-old person who was a middle executive of ABC and one day made him the chairman and chief executive of a movie company. That was insane and unheard of.” During Diller's bumpy first two years, the dream seemed impossible indeed. Bluhdorn fretted constantly about Paramount's poor performance.

“Out of seven movie companies, we're the last place that anyone wants to come,” Bluhdorn complained. “No one wants to deal with us.”

“I like it that way better,” Diller replied in his usual contrarian manner.

“You're out of your mind,” Bluhdorn retorted. “Why would you like that way better?”

“Because my feeling is that most of the ‘good' stuff, the highly prized [material] that you get first is usually terrible. I'm much better, frankly, not having to waste my time dealing with all these big producers and movie stars. We can develop the material we like.”

“You're going to bankrupt us!” Bluhdorn exclaimed.

In virtually every way, Diller says, the travails of dealing with Bluhdorn sharpened his skills. “He was totally undisciplined—no sense of organization, which made me have a sense of organization,” Diller says. “I was dealing with somebody who would totally disrespect [organization] and that only made me erect the walls higher. He was much more competitive than me and it made me more competitive in response.”

One of Bluhdorn's exasperating traits, Diller recalls, was making up ideas for movies. “Charlie had the worst ideas known to man in the movie business,” Diller remembers with a chuckle. “He liked actually making up stories. We never made any of those things he made up into movies. I would
say, ‘What are you doing making up an idea for a movie? I don't make up ideas for movies. Nobody who does the work we do makes up ideas.'…To Charlie, the only thing that was worth anything was doing the impossible.”

Bluhdorn didn't confine himself to pitching stories. He was deeply involved in the studio's business, for better or worse. “Everyone else failed who tried to talk Francis Coppola into doing
Godfather II,
” Diller says. “Bluhdorn did it. It was impossible. Unfortunately [years later, in 1983]…I watched Bluhdorn talk [John] Travolta into doing the sequel to
Saturday Night Fever,
and really, if his career had not been completely dead, it was buried on the heels of this movie.”

By the summer of 1976, Paramount's performance was still so bad that Diller offered to quit. “I think we're doing good work but the results are so terrible that probably around the first of the year, I think I should leave,” he told Bluhdorn. Paramount had suffered through
Won Ton Ton, The Dog Who Saved Hollywood
—a failed satire of Hollywood before the talkies—and a batch of other barkers like
Lifeguard, Face to Face,
and
Lipstick
. Bluhdorn seemed ready to agree if things didn't turn around.

The summer had brought the studio one sleeper hit based on a script Diller had bought three weeks into his tenure on Sylbert's recommendation.
The Bad News Bears
starred Walter Matthau as a beer-swilling coach of a kids' baseball team and featured Tatum O'Neal, who had stolen America's heart in
Paper Moon
. The movie grossed $32 million. But otherwise, Paramount's results were awful. Into this discouraging environment stepped the thirty-four-year-old Eisner, another upstart from television with no experience in film. “I was desperate for company,” Diller later told a reporter. “I hated everyone in the movie business.”

Hiring Eisner—his former rival—was an emotionally nuanced choice for Diller, who certainly must have appreciated the scope of Eisner's ambition. But he didn't want to let Eisner go to work for Geffen, and he certainly needed help. Even now, decades later, Diller betrays ambivalence about the decision to bring his former colleague at ABC to the studio. Rather than praise Eisner as a gifted executive or a brilliant creative mind, Diller portrays Eisner as a prod to his own talent. Asked why he hired Eisner, Diller replies, “Michael stimulated me.”

Once Eisner agreed to come to Paramount, he and his assistant, Lee Wedemeyer, walked all over the lot. “We were kids with a new toy,” Wedemeyer says. At one point she explored the upper level of the administration
building—not yet transformed by Diller—and found an “old, dank” series of offices with cobwebs in every corner. But the space had potential. Eisner's wife, Jane, helped him decorate it, again in contemporary style with another glass-topped desk—larger and oblong this time—and chic off-white Jim Hicks carpeting. Eisner also had a device that let him close his door without crossing the room. Here he often worked through lunch, feasting on cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwiches and a mixture of tea with orange and lemon juice that he called “Jewish iced tea.”

Leonard Goldberg, the man who had been Diller's and Eisner's first boss at ABC, saw Eisner a few weeks after he started at Paramount in November 1974 at a meeting about making a sequel to
The Bad News Bears
. As Goldberg arrived in the crowded conference room, Eisner stopped him at the door. “Why did you bring all these people?” he asked.

“They're your people,” Goldberg replied.

“I don't know who they are,” Eisner confessed.

As the meeting progressed, Goldberg could see that Eisner, like Diller, was getting hazed by those who didn't consider television a worthy apprenticeship for a career in film. But none of this seemed to faze Eisner. It was around Christmas and there wasn't even a script for the
Bad News Bears
sequel, which Eisner was determined to see released in the summer. One Paramount executive declared that the picture couldn't possibly be ready in time if there wasn't even a script yet.

“We'll sit here and think of a story,” Eisner said.

“This isn't television,” the Paramount executive responded with a sneer. “We can't legislate creativity.”

“Maybe it ought to be,” Eisner returned. By the time the meeting broke, a story had been outlined. The picture was in the theaters by June 2. And Eisner had taken his first steps down a maverick path in the movie business. Rather than waiting for writers and producers to pitch projects, why not come up with ideas at the studio? That's what Eisner had done at ABC—hadn't he come up with the inspiration for
Happy Days
?—and that's what he would demand of his staff at the studio. Diller and Eisner were going to take control of Paramount's destiny and provide an adrenaline jolt to the entertainment industry. Whether having executives ride herd so closely on the creative process would ultimately lead to better moviemaking, of course, was an entirely different matter.

 

AS EISNER UNPACKED
his boxes at Paramount, he found that one of his festering problems at ABC had followed him to his new job. Cindy Williams, who played Shirley to Penny Marshall's Laverne on the new Paramount-produced hit television series, had grown so unhappy that she had walked off the show. The situation had already degenerated to the point where Williams had asked her manager, Pat McQueeney, to use a stopwatch to time her minutes on-screen and compare them with Marshall's. Each star also began jealously demanding whatever the other was getting: Williams asked for a bathtub in her trailer; Marshall got one, too. Marshall wanted a chauffeur; Williams followed suit. At story conferences, the stars would glance at a script and then one or the other threw it against a wall.

“She has been like a foreign being to me,” Penny Marshall said of her costar in an interview. “We were pushed together.” As far as she was concerned, Williams was “a baby and a pain.”

“I was disappointed,” Williams countered. “And I kept telling them I was disappointed and they didn't hear me. So one day, with my knees knocking, and shaking all over, I slithered off the lot and came home. Honestly, I thought they might arrest me.” After Williams walked off, McQueeney told the
Los Angeles Times
that her client had been guaranteed roughly as much time on-screen as her costar. The day the story appeared in the newspaper, McQueeney's phone rang at 6:30
A.M
. It was Michael Eisner, whose job it was to keep the production going.

“What are you doing to me my first day on the lot?” he asked.

“If you have a script where Cindy has more than three lines, I'll buy you dinner,” McQueeney replied.

To Garry Marshall, the show had already turned into a “nightmare.” His
Happy Days
cast had always gotten along, but the
Laverne & Shirley
group was either “communally depressed” or “cranky, like a kindergarten class that had missed nap time.” He could only conclude that the stars were miserable to deal with because they were unhappy with their lives. Now, according to McQueeney, Penny was so livid at McQueeney's comments that she stormed into Williams's dressing room and threw things around. Rather than take on Marshall—who was, after all, the sister of the show's creator—the producers banned McQueeney from the set. And they finally got Eisner to exile her from the Paramount lot altogether. “Michael did it,” McQueeney remembers. Eisner was not going to tackle Garry Marshall over this one. “He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘You're right. But I'm dealing with an eight-hundred-pound gorilla here.'”