Why do so many studio executives turn independent producers, particularly after they've occupied the highest rungs of the corporate ladder?
One reason might because nobody who wants a career in movies starts out wanting to be a business manager, lawyer or any other C-insert-senior-moniker-here-O. Aside from wielding the red and green stamps over both projects and careers, studio heads probably have as much to do with making movies as your neighbourhood butcher shop has to do with killing livestock.
People probably want careers in movies because they tend to love movies. They want to be around them, celebrate them, make them and release them. Maybe they just want to hang around celebrities and go to cool parties. But those who enter Hollywood and rise through the ranks probably never told their parents 'I'm going to be an insurance actuary'.
After just a few years they wake up one day, look at themselves in the mirror and realise how unhappy they are. Their days are full of conference calls with analysts or corporate overlords. While most of us are genuinely interested in what's in a movie, they sweat spinal fluid over just one thing – box office. And because every article about a movie mentions 'studio interference' and we lionise directors with enough smarts/clout/balls to get around it, filmmakers obviously hate them as well.
As former Fox chairman and CEO Bill Mechanic said in an interview when asked what it was like running a studio;
"I would say it's not a lot of fun. What it was, was a lot of challenge. Fox was pretty much in the doldrums, and then we went on a pretty good seven-year run. Two years to kind of get going again, and then by the third year or fourth year, I think we were number one in the world. The last five years [have been the] most profitable years in Fox history. But it was a daily kind of grind. Something would go wrong, somewhere in the world, every day." (That's from a man who allegedly got hung off a high platform by James Cameron, who threatened to drop him, so Mechanic has some cojones).
Anyway, on the heels of the realisation of how unhappy they are, it seems that the idea of being an independent producer is the next natural step.
Just look at the upsides;
- After a couple of years of being very well paid, you have the start-up funds and connections around town to get movies off the ground.
- You've worked with filmmakers and signed their cheques, so no matter how much everybody complains about 'studio interference', some of the biggest and most creative names in town will take your calls. Besides, nobody names names in the press, and the only other thing in every story about studio interference is about how the studio was 'actually great, they gave us real autonomy'.
- Your meetings will be with the coolest directors in Hollywood and 24-year-old starlets instead of elderly Japanese bankers, combative lawyers and an apoplectic parent company CFO.
You'll also be joining very distinguished company. Mechanic now runs Pandemonium Films and shepherded Terrence Malick's The New World, Henry Selick's Coraline and the 2010 Oscars to reality.
Former Warner Bros president of production Lorenzo Di Bonaventura now runs his own shingle, di Bonaventura Pictures (could have put a few more hours into naming it, mind), which was responsible for Salt, GI Joe, Red and a little thing you've heard of called Transformers. At the time of writing he has about nineteen thousand projects in development.
Peter Chernin was Rupert Murdoch's right hand man at News Limited, acting as Fox Filmed Entertainment CEO and then News Ltd president and COO before he jumped ship in 2009 to form The Chernin Group, which has bought Oblivion, The Heat, Rise of the Planet of the Apes to the screen and similarly has about eleventy four dozen hundred films in the works. Just this week HBO announced its president will step down from her position and enjoy a first-look deal with... wait for it... none other than HBO.
Jeff Robinov still doesn't have a new job after his Warner Bros ousting earlier just a few months back, and while most of the other executive teams in Hollywood seem stable at the moment, let's not forget what William Goldman once said.
