Paramount Sees Its Future in the Stars (Big Ones)
NYT.com
By SHARON WAXMAN
AS VEGAS — There seemed no end to the parade of star power on display at the Paramount Pictures event at the movie industry’s annual ShoWest convention here.
Jim Carrey, Nicole Kidman, Denzel Washington, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Nicolas Cage, Bette Midler, Samuel L. Jackson, Meryl Streep: one after another they marched out from behind a curtain at the Paris Hotel on March 24, like some menagerie of old-time Hollywood glamour.
The message, for those not inclined to subtlety, was clear: Paramount Pictures is back in the business of big, glitzy movies and is pulling out all the stops.
It is a message the studio has been pushing tirelessly in Hollywood for the past two months in meetings with producers and agents and by courting the stars themselves. After many years of putting out formulaic, B-grade thrillers fueled by a philosophy of sticking to mid-range budgets and lesser-known stars, Paramount is on a mission to turn things around.
“My model had to change,” explained Sherry Lansing, Paramount’s chairwoman, who runs the studio with Jonathan Dolgen, chairman of the Viacom Entertainment Group, the studio’s parent company.
“I had to change the mix of pictures, the profile of the pictures,” she said. “We want to send a message to the creative community that we will pay $125 million for a movie. We’re not afraid of it. We’re starting to change the image of the studio, which was always thought of as playing it safe.”
For ShoWest the studio chartered a 737 to fly in some two dozen stars from its coming line-up of movies, the sort of grand Hollywood gesture that Paramount had not undertaken for eight years. But it suited the studio’s message perfectly. Movie exhibitors from Omaha to Tuscaloosa lined the perimeter of the dias to take pictures. The stars took a few of their questions, and Mr. Carrey ended the session crouched on his haunches on the table, bellowing, “Look at me.”
Then Paramount screened a 40-minute preview of this year’s releases, which include remakes of “Alfie,” “The Stepford Wives” and “The Manchurian Candidate.”
In Hollywood Ms. Lansing pressed her studio’s case in recent days over lunch with Jennifer Aniston on the lot and by flying to Texas to convince the director Robert Rodriguez (“Spy Kids”) that he was the man to create “Princess of Mars,” a new science-fiction franchise for the studio. (He accepted.)
Over the last decade Paramount has churned out clunkers like “Timeline” and “Paycheck” and Pauline-in-peril retreads starring Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman. Producers and agents tell of Ms. Lansing’s promising an actor a fee, then calling a few days later to renegotiate. Or of agreeing to a particular budget for a film, then reducing the figure shortly before production.
“I won’t say we didn’t have a problem of perception,” Ms. Lansing said of these reports without acknowledging their accuracy. “If there was that perception, we have to change it, and I think we have been.”
There are signs of transformation. When Paramount began to develop the popular Lemony Snicket children’s book series with a sister division, Nick Movies, the studio balked at continuing until the veteran producer Scott Rudin became involved in 2001. Then, with sound stages reserved and locations scouted in Wilmington, N.C., the producers found themselves at budget loggerheads with the studio, according to published reports.
The budget had already been brought down to $96 million from $110 million, but Ms. Lansing was insisting on $85 million, said an executive who worked on the project, speaking on condition of anonymity. Mr. Rudin bowed out, as did the director Barry Sonnenfeld, and the production lost millions in shut-down costs in 2002.
The movie is now back on track, with Mr. Carrey starring, Brad Silberling directing and a budget of $140 million. “New-think Paramount is agreeing to a budget that makes sense for the film,” Julia Pistor, senior vice president of Nick Movies, said in an interview. “Doing it on location would have compromised the artistic integrity of the movie.”
Sean Daniels, a producer based on the Paramount lot, described a new excitement even over movies made before the shift in attitude. One, “The Prince and Me,” will open on Friday. Market research has shown interest in the film, mainly among teenage girls, but probably not enough for a major hit. “There are high hopes that `The Prince and Me’ marks the start of a newly profitable year,” Mr. Daniels said. “That’s the feeling inside the studio.”
In the 1970’s Paramount was the epitome of cutting-edge moviemaking, releasing era-defining classics like “Chinatown” and “The Godfather.” In the 1990’s the studio made the quirky hit “Forrest Gump” and co-produced “Titanic,” the biggest box office hit of all time.
But as the decade wore on, executives who worked for Ms. Lansing, who as the creative head of a studio has the rare authority to green-light a project, said she ran her movie production slate like an actuary chart. One Paramount executive who asked not to be identified to protect his job said, “We went from getting notes from Sherry on the script, to sitting in a room with her saying to the producer, `This is a great financial model for us.’ ”
The mantra on the lot was to “protect the downside,” executives say, by sharing production costs with other studios or foreign financiers.
By last fall it was clear that that strategy was not working, even financially. The studio had had two years of mostly flops, though Ms. Lansing insists that it was still profitable. In the first three quarters of 2003 operating income at the entertainment unit of Viacom, which is dominated by Paramount, had fallen 32 percent, and revenue had risen by a scant 2 percent, to $2.8 billion.
“I wasn’t happy,” Ms. Lansing acknowledged.
The new Paramount has been on the launch pad since January. John Goldwyn, the president of Paramount Pictures, became a producer for the studio, as did Arthur Cohen, Paramount’s president of worldwide marketing.
The producer Donald De Line, a Disney veteran, succeeded Mr. Goldwyn in January, and Gerry Rich was recently hired to direct marketing. “Since I’ve been here,” Mr. De Line said, “there hasn’t been a moment when I felt excited about a movie where I met with resistance or a no, from the deal side or the subject side. We’re walking the walk.”
The producer Lynda Obst, based at Paramount, also praised the change in strategy. “The kind of material we’re encouraged to buy is passion material, the kind of stuff we went into the business to make,” she said. “The questions we’re asked are: `Do you love it? Would you die to make it?’ And the agents know it, and the writers know it.”
But some say in its eagerness to change, Paramount has been overpaying for projects. Hollywood was recently buzzing with news that the studio had paid Charlize Theron $10 million to star in the new science fiction adaptation “Aeon Flux.” Studio officials said the correct figure was $8 million. Ms. Lansing wooed Ms. Theron over lunch a couple of days before Ms. Theron won the Oscar for best actress; she had previously earned about $3 million a role.
Ms. Lansing also agreed to pay Mr. Law, not yet a proven box office star, $10 million to play the lead in “Dexterity,” a project still in development. And the studio paid Adam Sandler $25 million in acting and producing fees for a remake of “The Longest Yard.”
“When you go through a difficult time, you either pull together, or it pulls you apart,” Ms. Lansing said. “I want to go back to being the studio that made `Forrest Gump,’ `Braveheart,’ `The Truman Show.’ I’m excited about the future.”
