Good question, for while Singular convinces us that Ovitz is a uniquely skillful executive, we can never quit thinking: what a dreary story! But typical. Books about today’s Hollywood are as likely to focus on agents and producers as they are on stars or writers or directors, because the big story coming out of the movie industry is who’s got the power and what are they doing with it? As one industry insider told the authors of Hit and Run (Simon & Schuster. $25), a detailed autopsy of Jon Peters and Peter Guber’s five-year misrule at Columbia Pictures, “When I think about Columbia, I think about all those tiny little men in tiny little jeans endlessly highfiving each other.”
Authors Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters are zealous reporters who work hard to interest us in the fates of these two producers, who were hired in 1989 to run Sony’s latest acquisition, Columbia Pictures. Five years later, both men were gone, Sony had spent about $8 billion and Columbia’s market share was almost exactly where it had been when Guber and Peters arrived on the lot. But while these loudmouthed spendthrifts are stylistically the polar opposites of the tightlipped, efficient Ovitz, their story is ultimately just as dull -OK, not dull exactly, but after several hundred pages of watching Ovitz win and win and win and Guber and Peters spend and spend and spend, it does get numbing. Out of “Hit and Run’s” more than 400 pages about cost overruns, a birthday party that cost $100,000 and ridiculous office redecoration, one quote leaps out. Describing the debacle of the $117 million “Last Action Hero,” the legendary Arnold Schwarzenegger bomb, the authors note that “many industry observers felt that the movie was doomed by its cynical origins. ‘Last Action Hero’ was born of studio executives’ greed rather than the passion of a filmmaker wanting to tell a story.”
That passion for filmmaking is precisely what’s missing from these books. To be sure, an obsession with money at the expense of art is nothing new in Hollywood. To grasp that point, one need only spend some time thumbing through movie critic David Thomson’s superb critical biography of Orson Welles, Rosebud (Knopf $30). No filmmaker fought more battles with the suits than Welles. Superficially, they resemble the battles described by Singular or Griffin and Masters, but with one distinctive difference: Welles was fighting for more than the keys to the company jet. Long after Ovitz and Guber and Peters are forgotten, movie lovers will still wonder why, in 1942, RKO whacked 44 minutes out of “The Magnificent Ambersons” and released it as the second feature on a bill with “Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost.”
Ironically, the one man in Hollywood who seems to see most clearly that greatness amounts to more than cutting deals is Ovitz. Why else would you give up being “the most powerful man in Hollywood” to play second fiddle to Michael Eisner? But how would Ovitz handle someone like Welles? Not well, probably. Would an untried director be allowed to make a movie as ambitious as “Citizen Kane” today? In an era when every major studio turned down the chance to make “Pulp Fiction,” it’s unlikely. If Welles came back to life in today’s Hollywood, he’d be even more of an outsider. After all, he never owned a pair of tiny jeans in his life.
