Desperation breeds inspiration
In all cases the newly anointed are being called on to stretch beyond their comfort zone, taking charge of areas they've never directly dealt with (and in a couple of cases know little about).
Howard Stringer is the new boss of Sony, Brad Grey has gone to Paramount to run film, Bob Iger finally got the greenlight at Disney, Gail Berman is ankling Fox to work with Grey at Paramount and Bob Berney is leaving the indie film trenches to head a specialty unit for Time Warner's HBO and New Line.
In just a few short weeks, four studios have seen comings and goings that will ricochet throughout town, calling into question a number of traditional practices and putting a number of mid-level execs, who thought they knew to whom they reported and what was expected of them, on the qui vive.
What's refreshing is that these changes are on the people front. It is in fact a long way from the heady '90s, when the biggest news stories were about mergers and the big questions were about stock swaps, structural overlap and synergistic possibilities.
Idea now apparently is that these congloms need innovative managers to run them, not just dealmakers to put them together -- or break them up.
The only recent news in that latter area was Sumner Redstone's announcement that he'd like to deconsolidate Paramount and CBS after five years in which he incessantly sang the praises of synergy and leverage. Go figure.
That decision essentially gives Redstone's two chief lieutenants, Tom Freston and Leslie Moonves, each his own sandbox to play in. Freston's first move was to mix it up on the film front by bringing in TV people; Moonves is countering with a radical rethink of CBS' primetime newscast. At least there's some originality going into these moves.
Part of the discomfiture that led to all these appointments is the need for new skills and approaches in a business whose economic underpinnings keep slipping. So desperate are those in charge to make their congloms more competitive (and their stocks more appealing) that in most cases they've gone out on a limb for their personnel choices.
At least now we'll have new folks to blame when things go wrong.
'Wing,' and a prayer
It's hard to appreciate or prefer real-life politicos of any stripe after watching the Republican and Democratic contenders go after their respective noms on "The West Wing."
Would that the real DNC could find a candidate as indie-spirited as the Texas Hispanic Matt Santos (played by Jimmy Smits), or that the GOP would field an articulate centrist as wily as the Republican challenger Arnie Vinnick (Alan Alda).
No matter your political bent, the dramatization of the Dems convention, which was the season closer for the John Wells series, captured the horsetrading and backbiting that underlie these quadrennial rituals. It did so more persuasively than the real nets did in their haphazard, distracted coverage of the real thing last fall.
As a comment on all that -- the major newsies' decision to limit their coverage and the Dems' continuing disarray -- Wells' has the John Spencer character Leo McGarry tell his DNC operatives: "One night of (surprises and disarray) is entertaining; two nights and we look like idiots."
When it's all done, and Santos seemingly secures the Dem nom with a Barak Obama-type rouser that galvanizes the faithful, Wells adroitly cuts to the opposition. There's Vinnick watching the results and concluding: "OK. Let's go out and win this thing."
Karl Rove could have been in the room.
