It’s impossible to start today’s column on any story other than the passing of Lew Wasserman.   People keep on writing about him as the last of the old time moguls, but that is a false notion.  He was the architect, not always knowingly, of the modern film business.  He was the man who turned the real old time moguls into dinosaurs.  He was, in the end, the Forrest Gump of the last half-century of the film business, albeit a very, very, very smart Forrest Gump. 

There are some excellent looks at Wasserman’s life out there.  The best is probably from the L.A. Times’ James Bates for analysis and the scariest versions of Charlie’s Angels ever, Bob Welkos, Anita Busch and Claudia Eller (billed as they are in the paper) for analysis.  But back to Gump…

It was 52 years ago that Wasserman, then an agent, made a deal that effectively ended the studio system as it had been operating for decades.  And no, I’m not exaggerating.  Wasserman’s deal for Jimmy Stewart on Winchester 73, for the first time, gave an actor profit participation and talent approval.  Up until then – and for some time after that – the studio system was a factory business.  Ninety-nine percent of the “staff,” actors included, were paid weekly, whether they were working or not, whether the films were good or not, whether they were happy or not.  And so, everyone worked a lot.  People made a lot of movies.  Talent was “loaned” from one to studio to the other for specific movies.  And if you pissed off the boss, you suffered his wrath.

Oh those good old days…

It drives me nuts when people crave those good old days, thinking that they could have the autocratic system that existed back then with the modern benefits of big salaries and strong unions and the freedom to choose projects. BZZT!!!  Wrong.  On that day in 1952, the film industry started its conversion - with a whimper, not a bang. From a factory business where the company owned the whole thing and sold the product to an independent contracting business, in which the short-term cost effectiveness of hiring out for individual jobs overwhelmed in-house production… loyalty, consistency, apprenticeship and, to some degree, quality, have all suffered as a result.

Remember, Wasserman was still an agent when he made this deal happen.  It was the right deal for the talent.  It still is the best thing for the talent… the talent that is on top of the industry.  But year by year, every part of this business  changed.  Within a decade of the Stewart deal, the only contract players were the kids coming in off the streets (from acting classes… but you get my point.)  Within 20 years, the contract system was dead.  

And the idea of studios contracting actors would still be good for movies today.  There is too much second-act Hamlet in this business and not enough third-act.  But even if you were to try to do it, it would never happen today, as the evolution of the deal in 1952 has reached what we can only hope is its apex. 

If a studio, for instance, looked at Vin Diesel in Pitch Black and said, “We’ll give him $35 million for his next five pictures,” a real studio contract, his agents would probably pass.  Why?  First, the offer would suggest that they thought they’d be getting a bargain.  Agents hate giving bargains.  Second, even if his next picture was only going to give him $3 million, they see the potential for a guy like that to pull down a $15 - $20 million payday… not a decade later, but within three pictures.  Again, a loss for the agent.  Third, in this market, the idea of Diesel “suffering” through five films at one studio where they decide what he does… unbearable. 

Hindsight is 20/20.  Diesel has made three films since Pitch Black and will soon start a fourth.  His take is still under $20 million for the first three films (one is the near-unreleasable Knockaround Guys at New Line), but he is likely to end up with more than $50 million for five.  He was also dumped out of The Fast & The Furious 2 for which Universal was, apparently, willing to go to $15 million, but not $20 million or more. 

But what Vin Diessl does affects a lot of other people.  Rob Cohen, for instance, decided not to do TF&TF2 without Diesel.  (They are both, it seems, pretty high on the fumes of XXX.)  And XXX itself is at Columbia, not at Universal, where Cohen has had a long relationship.  Essentially, Columbia grabbed the Cohen/Diesel franchise for themselves for this summer.  And the duo, together or separate, will go wherever the best script/deal/opportunity is for the next picture. 

But it’s more than that… the studios are so busy trying to get the next Vin Diesel franchise picture – or what they hope will be a franchise picture – that they are willing to look past the details. Like the script isn’t really ready, or they have to rush production and post-production to get to a summer or winter holiday date in order to generate the massive dollars that are necessary to take advantage of the assumed blockbuster. 

Of course, yours truly was less than generous to John Calley & Co. when Sony became the primary outlet for teen flicks for a year or two.  That was a profitable choice… far more profitable than the two years of product that followed.  They were making glossy, but inexpensive pictures that all made profit and all did well on video.  But it was not a good image choice.  So they moved on to bigger risk/bigger reward movies.  This year, the studio is doing great.  The last two years were disastrous.

Back to Wasserman…

The next massive move by Wasserman & Co. was to take their talent agency and to start producing movies.  They bought Carl Laemmle’s Universal Studios and Decca Records with it.  Three years later, in 1962, MCA was forced to give up their position in the talent business by the federal government, which left Universal/MCA as a major force in film and music. 

Twenty years later, Mike Ovitz would become the perceived “most powerful man in Hollywood” by emulating Wasserman, translating agency power into production power, even of the agency was not, by rule, allowed to produce.  Ovitz made it work masterfully, but came up against what Wasserman wrought.  The church and state rules of Hollywood meant that no matter how much Ovitz could be paid for brokering deals, including Lew Wasserman’s last big deal (more on that later), he could never be an owner so long as he was at CAA. 

Ovitz would later try to make the move that Wasserman himself had made in 1936.  Wasserman had gone to work for MCA’s Jules Stein, looking forward to taking over when Stein stepped down, which happened.  It didn’t work so well for Ovitz when he went to Disney, looking to step into Michael Eisner’s showbiz shoes when Eisner put on some slippers or some more corporate CEO shoes.  Wasserman was 20 years younger than Stein… Ovitz was only 4 years younger than Eisner.  It seems that it was all too Iago and not enough Prince Eisner. 

After leaving Disney, Ovitz would again try to do what Wasserman had going in the late 50s.  Managers in Hollywood had realized that they could do almost anything… taking a piece of their talent’s income and producing and doing all the stuff that Universal/MCA had to stop doing 40 years before.  The studios did have the added conflict of being distributors, but the tone of things had changed.  The industry had become so single-serving that the U.S. government seemed to decide that monopolies were no longer an issue in the entertainment business.  Disney, Viacom, News Corp and Time-Warner all had major broadcast networks, all kinds of entertainment properties and even movie exhibition investments.  What were a few aggressive managers in light of all that?  But Ovitz was in too late.  One thing that he should have learned from Wasserman… there is such a thing as too ambitious.  Wasserman’s genius was in building success and then adding a little… then building… and adding… then building… Television, the holy grail of the last decade, has been a disaster for everyone who tried to jump in the deep end right away.  People have been wondering why Barry Diller hasn’t been more voracious in recent years.  It’s because he did learn from watching Wasserman.  Build… then grow…

Anyway… Wasserman’s Universal in the 70s and 80s would be an island of sanity in a period of major upheaval in this business.  Steven Spielberg’s Amblin would spark a flurry of producers’ deals at every studio in town… but Amblin was the only one that lasted, staying put on the Universal lot to this day.  Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine settled in as a Universal partner in the late 80s and, after trying their own DreamWorks-like move, went private again and remains a pillar of the Universal business plan to this day. 

Wasserman’s final significant act at Universal was selling Universal.  Unfortunately, the deal was one of Wasserman’s worst… not because he and his MCA shareholders didn’t do quite well for themselves by selling the company to Matsushita.   The failure was in selling “his” company to a buyer that just wasn’t prepared to move Universal forward. 

Wasserman had vision.  He saw the map years into the future.  But the corporate world that finds majors stuck as product-generating divisions of massive multinationals was not his world.  Wasserman was not an old-time mogul.  He was a trailblazer… the bridge between the old factory days and today’s corporate mess.  When Wasserman did the Winchester 73 deal, he was doing what was best for his client.  He wasn’t trying to kill off the studio system.  Likewise, when Mike Ovitz, this era’s wannabe Wasserman, brokered the Sony/Columbia deal and the Universal/Matsushita deal, Wasserman probably didn’t realize that his era was being killed off.   Wasserman complained that Matsushita kept him from building Universal.  He was right.  Then came Seagram’s and Vivendi… who knows if that wheel has stopped turning?

Lew Wasserman was a master of this business.  He was driven by self-interest, but, like the best of monarchs, he was interested in more than that.  He leaves, finally, at a moment when the industry is desperate for just that… someone who is able to focus on the quarterly earnings report, but who can see the bigger picture as well.  Turmoil reigns at every major studio’s corporate office with the exception of Fox and Paramount… but that’s only because Fox is waiting for its satellite future to get settled before moving full steam ahead.  And at Paramount’s parent Viacom, there is a wise old man named Sumner Redstone who knows when to hold them and knows when to fold them… he’s not going to hang himself out of ego, no matter how many time she seems to be pushing that knife to his nose, wanting to spite his face. 

The ground is shaking in Hollywood.  Jack Valenti can’t go on forever.  Unions are getting more militant.  Mini-majors are falling away and one major or two could be history before this decade ends.  There has never been a Hollywood Moses who didn’t have well-lined pockets.  But that would be okay with me.  I am sick to death of all the whining from people in this business that think the solution starts with their interests.  It’s bigger than that. 

Who’s going to step up?  Who is going to wander through our history and do the right thing, even when he/she isn’t sure what he’s/she’s doing?  Hollywood is, after all, like a box of chocolates.

Lew Wasserman is dead.  Long live Lew Wasserman.  He has been missed.  He will be missed. 

READER OF THE DAY is on hold today … fighting over Star Wars won’t cut it today (though The Onion is still funny).  There were a lot of things I was going to write about… they will also wait.  The truth is, I really didn’t want to write about Wasserman very much.  But once I started, I couldn’t stop.  He touched so much of the history of this business.

E ME:  If you were king…