The Screengrab

The studio system is long dead, but for over 30 years, David Geffen has been proving that the old-time movie mogul is still a going concern.  One of the richest men in Hollywood history, Geffen is a true multimedia tycoon who's made money in film and music hand over fist and whose personal worth is estimated at close to $6 billion.  Indisputably one of the biggest power players in the industry, he's had a huge impact on almost every studio you can name:  Universal, Paramount, Disney, and the DreamWorks studio he founded with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg.  But, having hit 65 -- the age at which most people look forward to a respectable retirement -- is Geffen ready to walk away from it all?

Just weeks after engineering a break from Paramount -- which had recently purchased DreamWorks for over a billion and a half dollars -- Geffen continued to wheel and deal like a mogul of old.  He formed a new company with Spielberg and Stacey Snider, backed by money from one of the biggest players in the emergent Bollywood system, and then -- shockingly -- seemed to indicate that he was backing off from production, and perhaps leaving the entertainment industry altogether.  According to an article in the New York Times, even Spielberg is stunned at the possibility:  "I cannot imagine not having David in my professional life.  If that's true, I'm going to have to figure out what to do about it." 

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How can you keep Disney sincere after they’ve seen Shrek?

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Brad Grey is a TV guy.  (You know him, if for no other reason, because he is one of the men behind The Sopranos.)  TV guys are not supposed to know anything about movies. 

And yet, Brad Grey is running one of the oldest and most respected movie studios in America -- Paramount Pictures, an outfit which, according to one of Grey's collegues, is "on our way to making money", quite an accomplishment in today's Hollywood -- and this weekend will see the release of Cloverfield, a huge gamble that Grey greenlighted at significant personal risk (and which is the product of J.J. Abrams, another TV guy).  

In an interesting interview with the New York Times, Grey discusses his trial by fire as the head of Paramount, the management shuffles that accompanied his rise to the top, and his conception of Abrams as the Spielberg to his Lew Wasserman.  It's fascinating not only because of what Grey has to say -- a typical producer's mix of cautiousness and braggadocio, but without the guarded defensiveness that usually comes with habitiual ass-covering -- but because of the insight it has into the business of running a studio at a time when business is shakier than ever and very little gets produced at the top end without a guarantee of making money.  It's in light of situations like this that whether or not Cloverfield succeeds will mean a lot more than the failure of a single movie.

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