In world without moguls, who pulls strings?

WHEN Michael Eisner finally tiptoed out of alt Disney Co. a couple of weeks ago, Hollywood lost its last mogul.

The purposely low-key departure, barely noted in the press, wraps up an era that started in the early part of the last century with names like Warner, Mayer, Cohn and Goldwyn, only to fade in the last 15 years with the departures of Diller, Sheinberg, Ross, Semel and now Eisner.

If you have any doubts, just search Vanity Fair's annual list of corporate powerbrokers for the names of executives who have a primary role in running a studio and green-lighting a movie. Yes, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg are still around (placing 20th and 21st), as are Miramax's Harvey and Bob Weinstein (35th). But these guys cannot distribute and market a film on their own. For that, the major studios are required--and major studios have their own bosses to report to.

It's been that way for a while, of course--really going back to 1966 when a struggling Paramount Pictures was picked up by Charles Bluhdorn's Gulf and Western Industries. Then Coca-Cola Co. bought Columbia Pictures in 1982, and MCA Inc., home of Universal, was purchased by the Japanese conglomerate Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. in 1990.

Through these and many other deals, the moguls have ultimately lost out. Eisner was really the last one standing--the only guy in town who still determined (sometimes demanded) which movies would go and which didn't.

It's tempting in retrospect to romanticize this legion of fire-eaters--and indeed, many of them had an innate sense of what the movie-going public wanted to see. But in our new-fangled world of iPods, ringtones, DVDs and memory sticks, seat-of-the-pants decision-making looks quaint. It was easy for Sam Goldwyn to quip a half-century ago that "a wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad," but these days the metrics for movie-making go well beyond how large the theater screen happens to be.

That's why the folks who now head the movie studios have lower profiles (and likely smaller egos) than their predecessors. Quick, who is the current CEO of Warner Bros.? What about the chairman of Universal Pictures, or Sony Pictures? Barry Meyer, Stacey Snider and Michael Lynton are still pretty powerful people around town, but they are, in effect, only senior executives--not the folks who own the show.

So who exactly is that? Good question. The media conglomerates that were determined to control all distribution channels a decade ago are now discovering that the digital world has undone many of the business models. Suddenly, you have Disney's new chief executive, Robert Iger, cutting a deal in which Disney-owned ABC would make available "Desperate Housewives," "Lost" and other top shows for downloading onto Apple's new video iPod for $1.99 a show. That's the same Iger who several months ago upset theater owners by suggesting that it might make sense to release a movie at the multiplex and on DVD at the same time.

Meanwhile, there's Rupert Murdoch buying the company that operates MySpace.com, the social Web site aimed at teens and young adults. And everyone, it seems, is determined to offer any kind of entertainment--movies, TV shows, music videos and video games--on cell phones and other portable devices. "You are seeing a kind of dot-com madness," Jonathan Sacks, chief executive of Mforma Group Inc., told the Wall Street Journal.

Wherever all of this leads--and nobody has the first clue--it's going to require considerable participation from Hollywood, of course. That's the good news. But the demand for entertainment products goes well beyond 120-minute movies and 30-minute sitcoms. It will mean 9-minute downloadable quiz shows and 18-minute mysteries that can be accessed through the Internet into someone's cell phone. It will offer the means for creativity, but also the commercial demands for mass-market synergy. It's a world that Mayer and Warner and perhaps even Eisner could barely imagine. But it's happening--and it will change all our lives.

Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal. He can be heard every Tuesday morning at 6:55 and 9:55 on KPCC-FM (89.3).