The news of the moment keeps veering between cutbacks and comebacks. Keep your shrink on hold. Paramount is laying off thousands and closing its TV studio , but Skydance’s David Ellison , its new owner , promises that an important new slate is on its way.
Disney is shedding employees as park attendance sags, but also is investing billions in new theme park attractions and even a solid entertainment slate ( Bob Iger calls it a “turbocharge”). Even battle-scarred United Artists with Scott Stuber as its new savior promises yet another comeback after alternate decades of brilliance and disaster. Given all this, the ongoing drama surrounding Warner Bros Discovery’s David Zaslav seems downright comforting.
I take more than an academic interest in all this since I’ve personally been enmeshed in both ups and downs (the “ups” at ’70s Paramount were more memorable). And it was Tom Cruise who, having just become chief of UA, told me, “This will be a death-defying experience, won’t it?” (He was correct; I had been a predecessor in that problematic job.) Hollywood seems to covet its periods of turbulence, and even encourage them.
In the 1920s the actress-entrepreneur Mary Pickford couldn’t digest the budget overages of her partner at UA, D.W. Griffith.
To “steady” her company, she invited a succession of quixotic showmen including Howard Hughes, Charlie Chaplin and a cowboy star named William S. Hart to join the cause; Hart was the first to quit. Her company fo.