Exex shove aside stars in the gossip mill
Now, I wasn't in any particular hurry that day, and I have long since resigned myself to the fact that making eye contact with a parking attendant in Beverly Hills is like signaling a waiter in Paris, but I couldn't help but wonder exactly why this young man was so eager to overhear this litany of names. Was he planning to sell them to Liz Smith? Was he hoping his own name would magically turn up?
The incident underscored the degree to which the executive chess game being played out in the upper reaches of showbiz has gripped the community. When I first got to Hollywood I remember waiting for my car outside the old Polo Lounge and overhearing producers and agents gossip about Paul Newman dropping out of a picture or why Billy Wilder had just committed to a new project. The executive name game, however, was never "hot news." Executives were guys who made the deals; stars and filmmakers made the news.
This week, however, you couldn't walk down the street without someone assaulting you with the latest effusions from the executive hot line:
Sid Sheinberg has negotiated a deal to establish his new unit at MCA that would encompass movies and TV, thus removing himself from the Black Tower.
Michael Schulhof and Jeff Sagansky were talking to a short list of three top candidates to take over the stewardship of Sony Entertainment and were ready to make formal offers.
The real reason Rich Frank, formerly of Disney, had disappeared into the bowels of Africa for a month was to gain a frame of reference to help him decide whether to return to the wildlife at Sony or MCA.
Bob Daly and Terry Semel, indignant that longtime rival Michael Fuchs had annexed the lucrative music division to add to his HBO franchise at Time Warner, were demanding substantial additions to their responsibilities from the besieged Gerald Levin.
Levin, meanwhile, who had once been especially close to the now-departed Robert Morgado, was trying to cool tempers on the music front by wooing backonetime record chief Mo Ostin.
Semel is studying anew his year-end "escape clause" from his year-old Time Warner contract and may start serious conversations at MCA.
And Mike Ovitz? Well, he's naturally a candidate for every job in town and is surely, among other things, coaching his friend, Edgar Bronfman Jr., as to the ultimate disposition of all those Time Warner shares.
A REASONABLE PERSON MIGHT well ask, how much of this bears any relationship to reality? The answer, of course, is that no one seems to know and, more important , no one seems to care. Indeed, the way to master the rules of the game is not to demand a reality check, but rather to keep pitching new names into the melee, thus distracting the other contenders.
All of which raises several intriguing questions: Like, who cares? Why does even the car valet at the Peninsula want in on the action?
Clearly, at some point during the dreaded mid-1980s, when all the magazines began to spin their stories about the mythical "power players," and when agents suddenly became "superagents," an entire subculture of previously anonymous "suits" suddenly metamorphosed into semi-celebrities. The "biz" part of showbiz became the mantra, with some awkward results. Talk to someone like Semel and you get the feeling he'd be positively thrilled never again to see his name in the paper -- but there it is, out there, his name bandied about for a succession of jobs as though a veritable army of headhunters were on his trail.
And we in the press are exacerbating the problem by overplaying every executive rumor and exaggerating every nuance.
Take MCA, for example. Despite the breathless stories that developments of great import will imminently be announced, in point of fact the opposite is probably the case. The new proprietors from Seagram have another month to complete their due diligence and to figure out exactly what constitutes MCA. The negotiations with the DreamWorks troika also seem to have bogged down in lawyerly negotiation.
The most intriguing melodrama being played out at MCA, surely, is in the editing room of "Waterworld," not the board room in the Black Tower. Will the most expensive picture ever made be finished in time to meet its release dates? Will Kevin Costner convert it into another of his three-hour epics? These questions will affect the short-term economics of MCA far more than any executive appointments.
WHAT, THEN, CAN BE DONE to curb the executive chess game? Perhaps two steps should be urgently considered:
Step 1: Herbert Allen, the ubiquitous investment banker, clearly is doing a disservice by holding his annual in-gathering in Sun Valley only once a year. Given the increasingly incestuous nature of the entertainment industry, and the constant need for everyone to be importuning everyone else, Allen's conference should convert to a monthly affair, with one day being assigned exclusively to executive job-swapping.
Step 2: Given the volatility of these top positions, the language of the new appointments should be drastically altered. When Peter Guber ran Sony Entertainment, he regularly reminded visitors, "I don't own this place, I just rent space here." Guber, a savvy industry veteran, had the right perspective on things. Hence, if Edgar Bronfman decides to appoint, say, Sue Mengers to head MCA, the announcement should make it clear that Mengers has taken a short-term rental on the presidency of MCA. Then it would be clear that, the minute she starts her job, she will start talking to other companies about moving on to yet another position.
These two steps would accommodate what clearly are two urgent needs of the community: They would continue to provide new topics about which to gossip. And they would also keep the car attendants from getting bored.
