Hollywood's power grabbers.

Success measured by the deal making

Making movies is a lot like playing poker in the Wild West, according to United Talent Agency President Martin Bauer.

Only with movies, there are hundreds of millions of dollars on the table, and a few wrong bets can lead to economic disaster. So executives tend to get kind of emotional, and when things go wrong, the guns start blazing.

"People in the film business are sort of in a hyper-reality space," Bauer said. "They have less brakes on their behavior. In other businesses, there is more social pressure not to act out your human frailties. Here, people just react."

Power in Hollywood is perhaps headier than it is in any other industry. Not only is the money better, there is often the added bonus of fame and the universal glamour that comes from working in the Dream Factory.

But there is one unfortunate characteristic of power in showbiz: It tends to be fleeting.

The average job tenure of a studio executive is estimated at three years. There is only one major studio, Warner Bros., that has not undergone a major upper-level management shift since 1991.

The reason? According to Bauer, it's because the people who own entertainment companies all walk around with metaphorical guns on their hips, and they have hair triggers.

There aren't enough tombstones at Boot Hill to mark all the upper-level casualties in Hollywood. Some of the bigger guns include Peter Guber and Jon Peters, former co-chairs of Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Frank Price, who ran two studios - Universal Pictures and Columbia Pictures - before setting up his own production company after his second big firing.

Frank Biondi Jr. apparently crossed Viacom Inc. Sheriff Sumner Redstone the wrong way... Boom, he was fired as chairman and CEO in January.

Even industry legend Lew Wasserman, former chairman of MCA, was not immune to the studio shuffle, being quietly relieved of his duties after the company was acquired by Seagram Co. Ltd.

But while studio heads come and go, they usually don't stay away for long. Top executives have a way of resurfacing at other companies.

Biondi is now chairman and CEO of MCA. Guber's severance package from Sony has become notorious - a reported $275 million to build a new production company, Mandalay Entertainment, on Sony's Culver City lot.

"In the entertainment industry, they reward people who don't succeed," said entertainment publicist Michael Levine, president of Beverly Hills-based Levine Communications Inc.

The reason a few elite figures are able to retain their grasp on power can be summed up in a single word: relationships.

The maxim, "It's not what you know, it's who you know" is nowhere more true than in Hollywood, where an executive's access to and ability to control key talent figures pretty much determines his or her ability to rise within the industry.

According to attorney Philip Davis, head of the motion picture and television division of West L.A.-based law firm Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp, there is a small group of elite people - actors like Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise, directors like Steven Spielberg or Adrian Lyne, producers like Jerry Bruckheimer, writers like John Grisham - whose presence in a film project all but guarantees success.

Virtually every studio wants to work with these artists, but only a few executives have strong working relationships with them.

Talent agents can make good studio heads because of their relationships with important clients. That's one reason why Ron Meyer, a founding partner of Creative Artists Agency, was tapped as the new president of MCA, and his former boss, Michael Ovitz, was named president of Disney.

"Whenever there's a studio head job available, you'll always see somebody like (agent) Jack Rapke at CAA on the short list, because he has an incredible client roster," said Davis. "Your power base is really dependent on the strength of your clients."

What is it that constitutes power in Hollywood? Is it the ability to get a good table at Morton's, or access to the corporate jet?

According to Bauer, there is only one true measure of influence: the ability to decide what projects will be pursued and what projects will be dumped, known in the industry as "green light" power.

Only the very top studio executives can green light a movie. Even presidents of production seldom have green light power, bringing promising projects to the company president or head of the motion picture group for approval. And, as analysts point out, the real green light power in Hollywood lies not with the big studios, but with the stars they rely on.

"Today's stars are as rich as the studios they work for," said Peter Bart, vice president and editor-in-chief of the Hollywood trade publication Variety. "They and their coteries decide what will be made and how, and for how much."

Bart notes that there are only about 20 actors, directors and producers who can command first-dollar gross contracts, meaning they get a percentage of a motion picture's gross proceeds. When this elite group pitches a project, studios line up to back it, Bart said.

The influence enjoyed by actors, in particular, has grown immensely in the past decade. This parallels the growing importance of overseas sales to Hollywood.

Today, experts estimate that only about 22 percent of a movie's gross earnings come from its domestic theatrical run. The biggest chunk of the rest now comes from international box office, with home video and television revenues next in importance. And the handful of American movie stars who are popular overseas can generate huge profits for the studios, Bauer said.

"In the past, a lot of films could be successful," said Davis. "Now, they've pretty much decided they've got to have major stars in major vehicles."