The Keys to the Kingdom (15 page)

But when Reitman was making his next deal for a film called
Stripes,
Paramount drove a hard bargain. Michael Ovitz, the up-and-coming agent who represented Reitman and Murray, stepped out of the office when Diller and Eisner started playing hardball and placed a call on a pay phone to Frank Price, then head of Columbia Pictures. Price snapped up the deal, which brought him
Stripes
and Reitman's next project, the blockbusting
Ghostbusters
.

From the start, the Diller regime at Paramount tried to keep things cheap, spending only when absolutely necessary, as with
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. Thrift and control were two watchwords at the studio. The studio's game was “to break the agents' hold on Hollywood,” as Steel said later. Diller and Eisner didn't want to take packages of scripts, actors, and direc
tors from agencies like Ovitz's up-and-coming Creative Artists Agency. Eisner would circumvent an agent to go directly to talent whenever he could. “Michael was enormously effective in dealing with talent,” remembers Zimbert. “He had an ability to talk directly to talent—ignoring the agents or the lawyers—and make them feel they wanted to do a project.”

Cheapness came naturally to Eisner. “It becomes almost a challenge for me not to pay the ridiculous prices that get paid in this town,” he said at the time.

Eisner was often accused of stifling creativity with his cheapness, but those who offered such criticism simply failed to appreciate what he was about. To Eisner, the film business was a business. It wasn't about making
Reds
—that was Diller's province. Sure, every so often Eisner would deviate from relentless commercialism to pursue a more literary passion. He talked forever about making a film adaptation of his favorite Edith Wharton novel,
Ethan Frome,
with Robert Redford. But normally, Eisner was more interested in popcorn than Oscars.

Eisner's fascination with
Ethan Frome
became clarified for one colleague years later at a seminar at a Disney corporate retreat. Participants were asked to write down a moment or book or movie that had shaped their lives. Eisner wrote
Ethan Frome,
and when his colleague asked why, he replied, “It's like my relationship with my mother.” Those who knew Eisner only as a child of privilege might have been surprised by this comment, because Wharton paints a relentlessly grim portrait of a repressed New England man whose dreams are stymied by an embittered older woman.

In the novel, it is Frome's wife, rather than his mother, whose only pleasure “was to inflict pain” on her husband. (Given the Oedipal issues raised in Eisner's college play—in which a character sleeps with his would-be lover's mother—Eisner's identification with Ethan Frome might make interesting fodder for Freudian analysis.) Eisner's former secretary, Lee Wedemeyer, doesn't find Eisner's comment about the novel to be surprising. She says Eisner's staff used to refer to his mother as “the barracuda.”

“You could see that she was a very tough woman and he was cowed by her,” Wedemeyer recalls. “Whatever she wanted, Michael saw to it that she got.” Often, Jane Eisner told Wedemeyer that Michael's father was an influence, but Wedemeyer felt certain that his mother counted much more. Either way, Eisner's parents still held considerable sway in his life. “I said
to Jane one night, ‘Michael needs a business manager,'” Wedemeyer says. “And she said, ‘His father would never approve of that.' You took care of those things yourself.”

 

EVEN AT ABC
, Eisner had always liked easily grasped ideas with strong marketing hooks. “He's an absolute genius about what the public is going to be interested in,” says producer Craig Baumgarten, then a production executive at Paramount.

So when his old friend Susan Baerwald, by then a script reader at United Artists, told him about a project called
Airplane!,
Eisner got ahold of it and agreed that the writers—who had no experience behind a camera—could direct it. Jim Abrahams and the two Zucker brothers, Jim and Jerry, had been members of an improv troupe from Milwaukee. Simpson, Katzenberg, and Baumgarten thought Eisner was out of his mind. But Eisner protected his downside; the directors had to work for scale and the budget was a mere $6 million. Eisner also went along with the writers' desire to assemble an off-center cast that included Robert Stack and Lloyd Bridges, but he vetoed their idea to use a prop plane instead of a jet. When Eisner's executive team went to a screening on the lot, they agreed that perhaps the picture wasn't an outright disaster. But Eisner was enthralled. “This is the greatest! This is a hit!” Rolling their eyes, the three junior executives took bets on how much the picture would gross. The high guess was $16 million. This time, Eisner's faith in talent was justified. The film grossed $84 million. All the more profit considering that it cost $6 million. A perfect Eisner slam dunk.

(Baerwald, who had told Eisner about the script and was a family friend, had half-jokingly asked for a point—or 1 percent of the profit. For a long time nothing happened. “It rankled me when it was so successful,” she acknowledges. “But eventually, he gave me two tickets around the world.” Baerwald had kids and couldn't afford to pay the taxes on the tickets, so she had to cash them in.)

Sometimes, of course, Eisner's penchant for cheap popular entertainment led him astray. When he saw a production of
Hello, Dolly!
with Pearl Bailey in the lead, he figured Paramount could get a quick, low-cost show by dusting off old scripts from
The Odd Couple
series and reshooting them with an all-black cast. The only problem, in writer-producer Garry Mar
shall's view, was that “the new series was based on greed.” It quickly became apparent that “words written for two square New York Jewish men in their forties just didn't sound right coming out of the mouths of two hip thirty-year-old African-American men.”

The project died, but Eisner's impulse to manufacture entertainment without having to put up with a lot of creative blather didn't. “Barry is filet mignon and Michael is cheeseburger,” Don Simpson used to say. Producer Larry Gordon—Eisner's longtime friend—referred to them as “the shit and the chic.” Eisner seemed self-conscious about these tags, which he thought were too simplistic. He had, after all, been an enthusiastic backer of the well-received 1980 film
The Elephant Man,
the tale of disfigured nineteenth-century Briton John Merrick. Privately blaming Diller for promoting the perception of filet versus cheeseburger, Eisner often invoked his knowledge of literature to offset it. He told a reporter that he became interested in the idea for
Footloose
because of
The Scarlet Letter
and another Nathaniel Hawthorne story called “The Maypole of Merrymount.” While delivering this piece of information, Eisner was shrewd enough to mock himself. “My wife…told me if I ever talked about any connection to Hawthorne, I was a schmuck,” he confided.

Though his commercial instincts often were formidable, Eisner wasn't always on target, as the short-lived
New Odd Couple
series illustrates. When Garry Marshall suggested basing a show on an alien played by the unknown Robin Williams in a
Happy Days
guest appearance, Eisner didn't get it. “That's not a show, it's an actor,” he said. Of course,
Mork & Mindy
turned out to be a runaway hit.

In movies, too, Eisner's judgments were hit-and-miss. One weekend, two scripts came in—
Coast to Coast,
with Dyan Cannon attached to the project, and
Private Benjamin
with Goldie Hawn. Eisner picked
Coast to Coast
—a weak road comedy about a debt-strapped trucker—and
Private Benjamin,
which turned out to be a major hit, wound up at Warner.

When production executive Richard Fischoff pitched a movie called
The Big Chill,
both Eisner and Katzenberg passed on the story of seven college friends who come together after the suicide of one of their classmates. “I don't think the kind of friendship or self-analysis that the movie is about were part of Michael's or Jeffrey's life experience,” Fischoff says. Fischoff took the picture to Columbia, and in 1983, it became a well-received hit, grossing $56 million. Such are the caprices of the film business, of course, that any executive, no matter how successful, has similar stories to tell. For
example, the team at Warner that picked up
Private Benjamin
later let
Home Alone
go to Fox.

 

WITH THEIR CONTRASTING
styles, Diller and Eisner fought like animals. But their differences proved complementary. “Any meeting that Barry and Michael were in, you could sell tickets to,” remembers Rich Frank, former television chief at Paramount. “It was unbelievable how they would scream and yell and fight with each other. And they could walk away and there was no residual negativity from the meeting.” One low-level staffer, who went on to become an extremely successful producer, used to watch from his window on Friday afternoons as the two emerged from the Paramount administration building and invariably started to quarrel. He was so mesmerized by the angry, sweaty gesticulations that he brought a long-lens camera to the office to photograph the spectacle. (He kept the pictures for his private collection.)

“All the arguments are the same to me,” remembers Zimbert, an executive who witnessed many. “One of the major difficulties in a studio is the timing problem. You've got to get hundreds of elements together at one time to start the camera rolling. And Barry, with this convince-me attitude, would make Michael crazy. Michael would sweat with an enormous effort to pull these pieces together. And Barry would start: ‘Why does [that writer] get credit? Why does he get gross after breakeven?' Legitimate business questions, but tension would rise and they would yell.”

Once, junior executives David Kirkpatrick and Ricardo Mestres were going to accompany Eisner and Simpson to New York to make a presentation to Bluhdorn about the studio's activities. Both were excited, because this was to be their first big meeting in Bluhdorn's presence. They meticulously put together their materials. But in a meeting that dragged on for more than four hours, their part of the agenda was never discussed. Instead, Diller and Eisner—with Simpson pitching in—shrieked at each other about whether Olivia Newton-John should do a cameo in a planned sequel to
Grease
. “All our good work went by the wayside because of the volatility and their wanting to get into the fray,” Kirkpatrick laments. As for Bluhdorn, he appeared briefly in the middle of the meeting and said, “I think I would like that boy from
Stripes
and that girl from
Private Benjamin
to do a movie together.” With that, he left. The Bill Murray–Goldie Hawn pairing never happened. Neither did the cameo in
Grease 2
.

Dick Sylbert remembers hearing that Eisner and Diller had quarreled after the Oscar ceremony in 1982. Having gotten his fill of life as an executive, Sylbert had returned to production design and had received an Oscar nomination for his work on
Reds
. This project was Diller's baby—complex, sophisticated, and not commercial. It hadn't made any money but it had claimed a Best Director award for Beatty, as well as nods for cinematography and best supporting actress. But Sylbert had lost out in the production-design category to another Paramount film—Eisner's own darling, the wildly commercial
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. Sylbert remembers that Diller asked Eisner how he had voted in the production-design category. “He said he voted for
Raiders
. And Barry said, ‘You asshole! We've made millions on that picture. Don't you realize we could have used some help?'”

Diller claims that his fights with Eisner were simply part of the studio's modus operandi. “It was Michael and me, me and everyone,” he says. “We had a system of advocacy which produced endless argument, almost every day.” It was a Darwinian approach: only the strongest ideas were supposed to survive. When Eisner railroaded through
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
that was supposed to represent the best fruits of Diller's Socratic approach to moviemaking.

In one sense, of course, Diller and Eisner had no argument at all. Both wanted hits, which meant making profitable mass entertainment. But as time went on, studios increasingly favored the safe formula over the gamble. In the contest between
Reds
and
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
commerce prevailed over art. “
Reds
was the end of something,” says the film's director, Warren Beatty. “Whatever [Paramount] was, it was a pretty goddamn good training ground for what the movies became. It became about mass release, which changed the content. Everybody has been on that train ever since. But I don't know if that train has done a lot for movies.”

 

DESPITE ITS INTERNAL
friction, Paramount's golden team continued to make films that succeeded commercially or artistically during the early eighties:
Airplane!, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ordinary People, The Elephant Man,
and
Reds
were among those that would be remembered. But the studio also had some notorious losers, such as the big-budget
Popeye
and
Ragtime
. Other pictures died with less fanfare.
Mommie Dearest,
starring Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford, dropped more than $4 million;
Part
ners,
a Ryan O'Neal vehicle about a cop pretending to be gay in an undercover investigation, lost $6 million; and the ill-fated
Grease 2
lost nearly $9 million.

It was inevitable with this exceptionally ambitious group that everyone would strain to get ahead. Eisner was frustrated, says an executive who worked for him, because it seemed to him that Diller tried—not very successfully—to cut him out of the loop to Bluhdorn. Diller denies that he tried to cut Eisner out. “I was never insecure about my relationship with Bluhdorn,” Diller says. “Almost without exception, I was very happy for Michael Eisner and Charlie Bluhdorn to talk. And Michael was very careful…. Once, when I was in Europe at the Royale Hotel in Deauville, Bluhdorn tried—unsuccessfully—to get Michael to overrule something I had said. It was very painful because I was on a holiday and I had to spend ten hours or so fixing it.” Otherwise, he doesn't remember Eisner attempting to end-run him.