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July 14, 2005
"Rob Friedman... A king without a sword... a country without a king. It's time to either define a role for him in all of this or to get off the pot. No?"
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxTHB, 4/15/05Paramount… Paramount… Paramount…
I guess, as I head down to San Diego for Comicon, I need to address the potential changes to come over there. These are amusing and disturbing times. Rumors abound, claims are being made in every different direction and very few people in the media are willing to put their word processor where their rumormongering is.
What makes all of this so much more complicated is that Rob Friedman had really become the master of many domains, filling gaps on the highest senior level where the Lansing/Dolgen team did not. This was an impressive feat that was a very specific kind of fit at Paramount.
One thing seems to be clear about Tom Freston's management ideology… he's going to be the only ringmaster in this circus. He will let each "ring" be handled by a qualified manager, but he is a post-synergy guy who wants each division to run right and then needs to find a way to get each group to work seamlessly together.
Another thing that is clear is that Freston does not believe that a leader has to come from exactly the same kind of job that he is hiring them for. Brad Grey and Gail Berman made that obvious.
So what's next at Paramount?
In the April 15 piece noted above, I suggested that Gerry Rich was next out the door. But to his credit, since Alfie arrived D.O.A., Rich has opened every movie except the Honeymooners, six of them at or above expectations.
On the other hand, with the exception of Sahara, which got a conceptually enormous boost from the success of the Oren Aviv conceived National Treasure (irony!), he has had movies that were highly sellable. (And if you are really amazed by Coach Carter, you didn't notice Remember The Titans or Save The Last Dance being prior surprises.) One cannot hold this against Mr. Rich… not at all.
But the real heavy lifting of 2005 is about to begin. Bad News Bears, Four Brothers, Aeon Flux, Elizabethtown, Jimmy Neutron 2, and the long delayed The Weatherman. Bears doesn't have a strong footprint yet. Four Brothers has almost none. Flux is a description of the date and Paramount's apparent mood about this film, as well as half a title that has a very niche value. Cameron Crowe is a genius, but he's never gotten past $35 million without Tom Cruise. Jimmy Neutron's $81 million domestic threatens to drop as the title ages out.
Can anyone open these titles? Can Gerry Rich? Does it really matter? Or does Tom Freston see a different kind of business and a different kind of marketing leader… "thanks for the good work and adios."
I don't know.
Miramax, Fox Searchlight, and Newmarket have all had slightly bigger art house successes this year than Paramount Classics has with Mad Hot Ballroom. But MHB will probably pass the highest grossing of those films (Miramax's Bride & Prejudice with $6.6 million) before the summer ends. This is a real success.
What is about to happen with Hustle & Flow? The "urban" tracking is excellent. But black audiences have failed to turn up before. And to get to the $30 million that the film seems to be targeting will require a crossover success.
Will the current team at Paramount Classics survive July? This is another good question.
Thomas Lesinski has been at the helm of Paramount Home Entertainment for two and a half years now. And one of the areas of Paramount's business that was repeatedly called out as a problem area by Tom Freston in the early part of his transition to this job was Home Entertainment. So…
Three areas overseen by Rob Friedman… three areas where change is expected. (Is there any real call for a change in distribution? Doesn't seem so. Strong and steady seems to be the winning hand there.) And now the speculation begins… who's it going to be?
Of course, Freston could go off the board yet again. But I'll spin some speculation anyway.
The only person in town with the kind of experience that Friedman has is really Jeff Blake at Sony. But would Blake even consider making this kind of move, expecting to rebuild three divisions of the studio? Blake is just returning to the studio after dealing with some health issues through the spring. Even if he could get out of Sony, why would he want to?
Mark Shmuger is not without his charms, though he has another two years left on his Universal contract. Like Blake, his range of responsibilities seem to be a match for the role Friedman left behind. But is that what Freston is after?
Oren Aviv's expanding role at Disney (in no small part driven by Paramount's earlier pursuit of him) seems to have settled any speculation about a move for him.
Team Searchlight - Rice/Utley/Gilula - would be the best fit out there for Freston's apparent vision for Paramount. The team has been remarkably successful, Rice seems ready for a new challenge, Utley was Paramount's first marketing choice back in 2004 and remains one of the best at blending grass roots promotion and media, which is a sure fit for Freston's MTV/Nick/BET view of Paramount synergy, and Gilula is a top veteran who brings a lot to the trio. But the chances that Fox would let the group traipse off to another studio and, likewise, that Rice would leave his well coiffed perch is infinitesimal.
Speculation has floated around Terry Press' name, but the DreamWorks diva's experience would likely limit her power base to marketing and a lateral move would probably not stir her interest… unless things at DreamWorks are about to go in some new direction that she sees coming… and her vision is strong.
Geoff Ammer is a name that keeps coming up. Sony is a crowded field with a lot of highly regarded veterans working under Ammer, keeping him from getting the attention you might expect him to have gotten in his gig. On the flip side, he just had a kid, he's happily married, and does he want to turn his life upside down for the next couple of years?
Sony also offers Ben Feingold at the biggest and most successful of the Home Entertainment divisions. Could the opportunity at Paramount, combined with Freston's willingness to let major talent expand their expected reach, be enough to get Feingold to switch teams? It's not that other Home Entertainment leaders are not worthy of consideration, but Feingold seems like the one most likely to get out of the box and also to have the ability to help lead the integration of the various Viacom arms.
Does Tom Freston have the nerve to dance with the Weinsteins? The brothers still don't have financing for their fledgling company and if they are willing, their leadership in a new studio dependent that has strict boundaries, with a major that offers the opportunity of bigger funding for bigger movies seems like a good fit. If you can't get Peter Rice, why wouldn't you want the guys who created Dimension?
It is interesting that both Disney and Paramount seem to be in the market for leadership for their dependents at the same time.
More names will emerge as we go… and, no doubt, Freston is the master of the Hollywood curveball so far. But the falling of the next shoe has a lot of people on edge, including some of the fine members of the various Paramount teams who are under threat. But change will likely be best for everyone.
Or as one insider said yesterday, "They need to have a fire drill and when everyone is outside, lock the doors."
It's not nice, but change rarely is.
