You're Only as Good as Your Next One: 100 Great Films, 100 Good Films, and 100 for Which I Should Be Shot by Mike Medavoy

Author:Mike Medavoy [Medavoy, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2013-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

11 Hollywood’s Medicis

Most of the time, the bottom line on the personal dynamics within a studio is that when the movies are working, everyone is happy, and when the movies don’t work, everything falls apart because everyone is looking for someone to blame.

When Louis B. Mayer came west in 1918, eight out of ten movies made in the world were shot in Hollywood. The reason Los Angeles became home to the movie business was that the warm and consistent weather allowed you to shoot year round. The early industry pioneers were also mostly Jews, who were largely excluded from the WASPish, eastern social hierarchy. The social structure in Los Angeles in the early years of the century had yet to be formed, so it was relatively easy for the new movie moguls to become prominent society figures. You could enter the entertainment world with a blank slate if you knew others who could get you in, or if you could work your way in. As the prim, East Coast attitudes gave way to the unrestrained, exuberant style associated with the Warners and Zanucks, the door opened wider and wider for young, hungry guys like me to become successful in the movie business.

The day-to-day workings of the movie business have always been governed by a brash (and often changing) aristocracy that is based in Los Angeles. The big bosses may be mythical figures like Steve Ross who live in New York where the conglomerate is based, but most of the people who run the show are on the West Coast.

If you look at where the Orion partners ended up, it’s something of a reflection of how the establishment works in Los Angeles: Arthur essentially retired, Eric formed a short-lived partnership with Barry Spikings and is now working out of Connecticut trying to put together movies with financing from Austria and Holland, and Bill Bernstein became an executive at Paramount. Due in part to the fact that I had become a Hollywood insider, I received an offer from Steve Ross to start a production company at Warner Bros., which I turned down to become chairman of TriStar Pictures.

Arthur, Eric, and Bob Benjamin (who was alive at the time) preferred New York to Los Angeles, so much so that when we made the break from United Artists in 1978, they turned down an offer from Steve Ross for all of us to run Warner Bros. They simply would not move to Los Angeles. At the time, Ted Ashley and Frank Wells were going to step down from the top two jobs at the studio, and the idea was for Arthur, Eric, Bob, Bill Bernstein, and me to step into the Warner’s executive suite. From a purely practical standpoint, since the studio is based in Burbank, all of us would have needed to live in Los Angeles, not just me.

Years later I learned that Steve Ross had asked Arthur to become co-chairman with him of Warner Communications, the parent company of Warner Bros. This would have given Arthur the profile he truly deserved, but Arthur rejected the offer.

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