The Keys to the Kingdom (16 page)

Eisner also chafed because he wanted greater control over marketing and distribution, which was headquartered in New York even though in theory it reported to him. The head of that operation, Frank Mancuso, persistently kept open his own line of communications with Bluhdorn, calling to deliver box-office results. Bluhdorn was happy to needle his lieutenants by playing them off against each other. And Mancuso had a strong ally in Martin Davis, a powerful Bluhdorn lieutenant who had risen to executive vice-president.

One day in 1981, Eisner called executives Ricardo Mestres and David Kirkpatrick to his office and asked them to tape him as he gave a stream-of-consciousness analysis of the film business—what kind of movies to make, what kind of directors to hire. It was the foundation for a memo that Eisner wanted to write on the state of the business. The subtext of the memo, in the view of one of Eisner's staff, was that marketing and distribution should be moved to Los Angeles. Indeed, Eisner made that proposal in his memo, but if expanding his empire was Eisner's purpose, he didn't succeed.

The memo, however, reveals Eisner's constant anxiety about complacency leading to failure. A January 1982 draft reads, “Decisions are often made for the wrong reasons when things are going well. Success tends to make you forget what made you successful. Just when you least suspect it, the fatal turnover shifts the game, and the other team scores the winning
point.” Eisner warned that Paramount, which had been the number-one or-two studio over the preceding five years, should consider itself in last place. “We should never become bogged down in the vulnerable stagnation of success.”

It wasn't so much a fear of failure itself; Eisner wrote “failure is necessary” and “fear of failure will always stifle bold steps and leave the executive only mediocre.” It was not so much a fear of failure that worried him but the failure to fear. Failure teaches important lessons, he added. For example, Paramount passed on
Private Benjamin
because of problems with the story. “What we did not see was the larger conceptual picture of ‘Goldie Hawn Meets the Army,' which was key to the success of the movie. From this experience, we had the insight to look beyond the seemingly unworkable deal on
Raiders of the Lost Ark
and understand the potential of a larger creative concept.” With this somewhat self-promoting example, Eisner concluded that failure is “central to education.” In essence, gambling was necessary, but constant vigilance also was essential.

Nonetheless, Eisner warned, it was imperative to “avoid the big mistake.” The big mistake came when “a substantial, unprotected investment is made for the wrong reasons in a movie that does not have a reason for being” and it could be “the downfall of a company.” Paramount avoided disaster with
Reds,
he said, because it had a strong concept, a commercially proven director, and an acclaimed cast. Finally, and perhaps most important, “these inherent strengths were coupled with some financial protections that limited our risk.” Still, Eisner said, “In the case of
Reds,
the extremely high production budget may prove to make the project not worthy of the risk.”

Eisner argued that it was also important to have an eclectic mix of movies. “[We] believe the American public is almost by nature promiscuous,” Eisner wrote. “A man's head will turn at a woman strutting down the street, even if she is less attractive than his steady partner.” Accordingly, management must include people with diverse tastes.

The perfect executive, Eisner continued, is “a ‘golden retriever' with good taste.” That combination is rare, he continued, so a creative team needs to have a mix of people who search out material and those who can evaluate its commercial potential. Top management could assess the material if the “retrievers” in middle management sought out ideas for movies from books, magazine articles, and other sources.

And commercial potential, in Eisner's view, was all that mattered. He
stated his own goal in succinct terms. “We have no obligation to make history,” he wrote. “We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.”

If a film happened to win an Oscar, so much the better. “To make money,” Eisner said, “it might be important to win the Academy Award, for it might mean another ten million dollars at the box office.” Of course, since Eisner was an executive in a public company, his views in this regard were proper and hardly unique. But the attack on
Reds
and other Academy Award hopefuls could clearly be seen as a swipe at Diller. It was plain that unlike some other executives, Eisner had never been the wide-eyed kid who fell in love with the movies. To him, the bottom line was the bottom line.

R
ATHER THAN ADDRESSING
the tensions at Paramount, Bluhdorn did what he could to exacerbate them. Eisner would later maintain that he and Diller were too smart to allow Bluhdorn to manipulate them into going after each other, but in reality, relationships at the studio were fraught with tension. One underling who was bucking for a promotion to the head of a department remembers telling Eisner, “I want a number-one job.” Eisner replied, “So do I.”

In this environment, there was also bickering over credit—not just between Eisner and Diller but among all the upper-level executives at the studio. The jockeying to lay claim to the studio's hits became so pronounced that a joke took hold among employees that Paramount needed an “executive credit arbitration committee,” modeled on the Writers Guild committee that assigns credit for screenwriting.

Diller also had Eisner carry out some unpleasant tasks that might seem to fall more into his province. For example, Diller had forced Eisner to drop the hatchet when Beatty was running behind schedule and over budget on
Reds
. “I remember Barry just saying to Michael, ‘You tell Warren that
Reds
is finished. They come home Friday. He can put it together with what he's got,'” says a former Paramount executive.

Naturally this type of confrontation was unpleasant to Eisner; like many high-ranking Hollywood executives, he was far more inclined to say yes when he meant no. It was not uncommon for Eisner to respond to a pitch with wild enthusiasm and apparently to approve it. Then he'd call Zimbert or Simpson or some other lieutenant and bark, “You make a deal with those people, I'll kill you.” Simpson used to call this ploy “the elastic go.”

Eisner fancied himself as protecting his staff from Diller's tirades, playing “something of a mother's role…protecting the children from a brilliant and powerful but difficult and demanding father—much as my mother had
done in our family.” But apparently the “children” didn't feel as if they were cloaked by a mother's love.

Once, Eisner approved a project called
Thief
that was to be directed by Michael Mann and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Both Simpson and Katzenberg badly wanted to make the film, but the next day, Eisner said it was off. Katzenberg was deeply humiliated when he had to tell the filmmakers that the project was canceled. (United Artists eventually made the movie.) Generally, Eisner transmitted bad news through Dick Zimbert, the business-affairs executive. Eisner seemed to cultivate the view that he was impulsive, and Zimbert capitalized on that when he called to deliver bad news. “I know it's stupid, but you know, Michael is crazy,” he'd say.

Leonard Nimoy was to get a taste of Eisner's technique in 1983 when he wanted to direct
The Search for Spock,
the third installment of the
Star Trek
series. He was extremely nervous when he met with Eisner to propose the idea—after all, this was now a valuable franchise, the picture had a $15 million budget, and Nimoy had never directed a film before. To his vast relief, Eisner seemed overjoyed. “Great idea!” he said. “Mancuso will love it. Marketing with love it!” To Nimoy, he seemed sincere. “It all came in a nice selling package,” he says. “It was being made on the basis of potential promotion sizzle.”

Nimoy left the meeting and heard nothing for six weeks. Expecting to make a deal, he found that the business-affairs staff wouldn't even return his agent's calls. Finally he called Eisner. “What's going on?” he asked. “Weeks ago, we had this great meeting and now I can't even get anyone to answer the phone.”

“There's a problem,” Eisner said. “I just don't feel comfortable hiring a guy to direct a
Star Trek
feature when that guy hates
Star Trek
so much he insisted on being killed off just to get out. It really bothers me that you insisted they put that in your contract.”

Nimoy was astonished. There was no such provision in his contract. He suspected that Gene Roddenberry, still lurking unhappily in the wings, had tried to poison the deal for him. “My contract is in a file in the building you're in,” he told Eisner. “Why don't you have someone bring it to you?”

The next day, Nimoy and Eisner met and Nimoy made an impassioned presentation. The gist of his argument was that Eisner had two problems—he needed Spock and he needed a director—and Nimoy could solve both. Finally he closed in for the kill. “You and I are having a very important meeting here,” he told Eisner. “This might be the last time we ever speak
to each other. We're either going to start working together on something fresh or we're literally down to the final moments of our relationship.” Nimoy was wise to play rough. He got his way.

Despite his complaints that he was “getting a lot of hovering” from Bennett, who had returned as producer, Nimoy pulled the film together successfully. When he flew to New York for a test screening, he felt confident as he waited with the Paramount executives for the audience to fill out cards giving their reaction. As the group huddled in an office in the Gulf + Western building, Nimoy overheard Eisner talking about him. “Michael was standing right behind me,” Nimoy remembers. “I heard him say, ‘He told me he was going to direct the picture or I could go fuck myself.' Which was not accurate. I said, ‘Michael, that's not true.' He turned back and said, ‘He was a perfect gentleman. But in essence, that's what he told me.'”

Nimoy had won in perhaps the only possible way to win with the Paramount crowd—by playing a very tough game. Not for nothing did the town say that Paramount would green-light a picture and then dare you to make it.
Star Trek III,
which opened in June 1984, grossed $77 million—a great number for the third installment—and Nimoy went on to direct the fourth.

Sue Mengers, the leading talent agent of the day, once commented on the degree of difficulty of doing business with Eisner. “I find Eisner the toughest person I negotiate with, and I don't mean that as a compliment,” she told a reporter. “He simply must win.” But whenever she was reduced to rage, she added, Eisner would disarm her by saying “something funny or charming or self-deprecating.”

Eisner had another weapon in his arsenal. Don Simpson used to say that Eisner had “an optional memory.” One case in point was a movie that Eisner wanted to make based on the harrowing true story of a rugby team that was forced to feed on its dead when their plane crashed in the Andes. Eisner fought hard for the picture but Diller thought it would be too expensive and opposed it. Eisner got his way and the studio set about building a dormitory in Portillo, Chile, to house the crew. But the director, an unknown named Tony Scott, told Eisner that the picture had taken too long to get under way. It was late in the season and the snow would melt before he could finish shooting. When the picture was canceled, Eisner turned on Baumgarten, claiming he had never authorized the expenditure of $400,000 to build the dormitory.

“Michael, I can't get forty cents approved at this company without your signature,” Baumgarten protested. After that Eisner's underlings agreed that no one—not even Simpson—would go into Eisner's office alone. “You always had a chaperon so there would be a witness,” one remembers.

Eisner gave them other reasons to believe that he could be duplicitous. When MGM chief David Begelman wanted to make
Buddy Buddy,
a Jack Lemmon–Walter Matthau picture, Eisner told his troops that Paramount would make sure the project never happened. “We're going to lie,” he said, according to one executive who was present. “We're going to tell them we want it and then we're going to bury it.”

“He didn't want it,” that executive explains. “But he wanted to make sure MGM didn't get it so he wouldn't be embarrassed if it was successful.” In this case, Eisner's plan was thwarted and MGM made the picture. But he won anyway: it bombed.

 

EISNER HAD A
way of saying yes when he meant no. This sometimes put his staffers in embarrassing predicaments. And his trick of bypassing agents to talk directly to talent seemed counterproductive because it alienated a segment of the industry that could be helpful in delivering clients and material. In notes that he scribbled to himself in March 1980, Katzenberg complained, “Agents don't want to come to [Paramount]…. No effort to turn around—disaster level now. Double dealing/indecisive/call clients direct going behind their backs.”

Young executives were under relentless pressure to make contacts and deliver ideas, directors, actors. Meanwhile, Eisner shot down ideas without seeming to consider them. “No team spirit,” Katzenberg wrote. “Atmosphere is too competitive/Everyone tries to position.” Katzenberg did not think his boss, Simpson, was much of an ally: “Don—No longer strong counterbalance/totally capitulated—decide to accept and support. No longer stands up for projects—I've seen Don turn totally around just because he doesn't have energy to take on so many fights.”

But Katzenberg's harshest words were reserved for Eisner. “First instinct is negative/Approach is to confuse + stall,” he wrote. “Deal making is unequivocally a destructive process…. Refuses to take anyone seriously—everyone has an angle and everyone is out to screw him…. His world is the whole universe/there is no room for other opinions/no consideration for other points of view/no other perspective than own…. Totally shoots from
hip and then tries to create his own set of facts to support (Alive)…. We don't romance, hold hands, build relationships—hit © run/No answers, no understanding…. He is out of control—has burned more bridges including best friends.”

Eisner's former secretary, Lee Wedemeyer, says she “didn't see that part” of Eisner but acknowledges that she looked the other way. “I always thought Michael was the smartest man I knew and so quick on his feet,” she says. “Later, people told me he's smart and quick on his feet but his word means nothing…. I didn't want to see it, but that's the rap on him.” And she acknowledges that she saw Katzenberg's struggles. “Jeffrey had to fight so hard—and he didn't win—to get Michael's respect.”

As other Katzenberg memos reveal, he discussed his growing frustrations with Simpson—or tried to. “You let M.D.E. get away with his shit—your job is to deal with him on behalf of your staff,” Katzenberg wrote at one point. “Watch M.D.E. turn you around on story, ideas…you think he's better—bullshit.” With some prescience, perhaps, he also wrote: “Writing on wall—follow M.D.E. and end casualty or start doing what is right…. Fool if you don't see it coming.”

Katzenberg's assertion that Simpson didn't stand up to Eisner must have been particularly galling to Simpson, who always carried himself with a swagger that suggested fearlessness in battle. He was a brilliant, tortured, complicated man who had escaped from what was, by his angry and of ten-embellished accounts, a bleak childhood in a blue-collar enclave of Anchorage, Alaska. He was amusing and offensive, abusive and yet capable of bursts of great generosity.

Simpson, who was burly, almost short, with a look that reminded screenwriter and novelist John Gregory Dunne of “a carved Eskimo totem,” had his first job in marketing at Warner. But he realized that he wanted to work on the movies rather than sell them. Shacking up with his friend Jerry Bruckheimer, whom he had met at a screening of
The Harder They Come,
Simpson set about partying hard while simultaneously educating himself in the movie business. He started hanging out at Schwabs Drugstore and swiping film books from the Larry Edmunds Bookshop, returning them after he read them. “I lived with Truffaut and Hitchcock,” Simpson remembered later. “I had this big bed and there'd be books stacked all over the floor. Bruckheimer used to joke that he only knew when I was going to get laid when there would be a path through my books.”

Eventually, Simpson's friend, aspiring producer Steve Tisch, got him an
interview at Paramount. He borrowed a sport coat and snagged a job working for Dick Sylbert, then briefly Paramount's chief of production. Within two years, Simpson had Sylbert's job. “In my time, he hadn't enough money to buy too much coke,” Sylbert says. “He was an executive.” But as he rose through the ranks at Paramount, Simpson found that drugs became ever more affordable—and irresistible.

When Eisner arrived at the studio, Simpson was quick to adjust. Sylbert and Simpson had been working on a small, sweet, and eventually well-reviewed film called
Citizen's Band
. The picture was an early effort from director Jonathan Demme, who would later direct
The Silence of the Lambs
and
Philadelphia
. Eisner arrived in the midst of the production and Sylbert left the studio soon after. Sometime later, Sylbert ran into Demme, who told him, “Remember how Don used to watch all the dailies and how he loved the picture? The day you left, Michael Eisner looked at that movie and said, ‘What is this piece of shit?' And Don Simpson looked at me as if I had made a nightmare.”

Eisner made Simpson his head of production when a confidant urged him to act quickly before Diller had a chance to install his own man in the job. Simpson became an integral part of Paramount's box-office magic and ascended steadily. “Don was very helpful to Michael,” remembers Wedemeyer. “There were a lot of things about moviemaking that Michael didn't know and Don could fill him in.” He was as hands-on as Eisner and Diller might have wished, with a strong sense of story. “Don was the best at recognizing a movie moment when he saw one,” said producer Larry Mark, then a junior executive. “He knew when a movie needed one, he knew how to get to one.” Simpson had his executives churn out voluminous notes on scripts and wrote some of the most incisive ones himself. In Katzenberg's estimation, “he really was without peer when it came to working with material and being able to pinpoint the things that made a script work.”