Innholdsfortegnelse for Hollywood Power 2015 i Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair is widely considered the pop-culture bible for gauging power and personality in Hollywood. No magazine has told more compelling—and definitive—tales about the big-studio players, the back-lot intrigues, and the indie upstarts, as well as the behind-the-scenes stories of the rise and fall of the movie industry’s greatest showmen. Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Power—a Special Edition available on newsstands and digital devices—showcases 10 classic Vanity Fair articles about the titans of the film colony, along with timeless portraits of the men and women who have ruled the motion-picture business. Many of the great face-offs are here: Joe Kennedy (who was once the town’s most influential studio head) versus the Hollywood establishment; the knock-down, drag-out fight for Paramount Communications; and the saga of agent Sue Mengers, who battled the studio stiffs.…

Sue Mengers is dead!” The voice on the phone is deep, sandpaperrough, too many cigarettes, too many deals. It is immediately recognizable, if you’ve heard it even once, as the voice of Sue Mengers, very much alive but not feeling all that well, in a worse humor even than usual. This is how it’s been since 1996, when her husband of 23 years, Jean-Claude Tramont, died of cancer and she entered a tunnel that led to radiation therapy for cancer of her own on top of quadruple-bypass surgery and then her mother’s death—a tunnel from which she has yet to emerge. [Mengers would die in 2011 from pneumonia.] She’s definitely not up to talking, certainly not about herself in the 1970s, when she was famous throughout the Western world as…

The real way the rich are different from you and me,” says Fran Lebowitz, “is that they have more options. Take David. Everything about him is unlikely. Everything.” Says Cher, “Everything about Dave is a duality.” David Geffen is the man who last year bought Jack Warner’s estate—the last great Beverly Hills house with grounds—and this year is talking about selling it. Before he moves in. And yet, he’s overseeing construction of the outdoor marble kitchen that will separate the pool from the tennis courts. He’s the rabbi who’s also the fixer. Marlo Thomas went to him for advice about whether to marry Phil Donahue. Michael Jackson, on the other hand, went to him for advice when he wanted to replace his lawyer, his manager, and his record-company president. “David…

When high winds start whipping down Central Park West, the top floors of Paramount Communications’ Manhattan headquarters can be an unnerving place to work. Structurally flawed, the 43-story black glass skyscraper sways so badly that the elevators bang against their shaft walls. File drawers glide open by themselves. Doors swing shut as if tended by ghostly butlers. Sometimes a window or a chunk of aluminum frame even pops out, spiraling down toward the crowds in Columbus Circle. At its worst, the building has to be evacuated. Fuming as he’s forced to walk down 42 flights of steps, Paramount’s irascible C.E.O., Martin S. Davis, is always the last to leave. [Initially erected as the Gulf & Western Building, the structure was purchased by Donald Trump in 1994 and later renamed Trump…

GRAYDON CARTER is the Editor of Vanity Fair. DAVID FRIEND is Vanity Fair’s Editor of Creative Development. LENORA JANE ESTES is Vanity Fair’s Articles Editor. PAT CRAVEN, Vanity Fair’s Production Director, oversaw this issue’s assembly. HILARY FITZGIBBONS is Vanity Fair’s Art Director. HO-MUI WONG contributed to the design of this issue. JEANNIE RHODES is Vanity Fair’s Photography Research Director. MARK JACOBSON was responsible for the photographic research in this issue. CAT BUCKLEY is an Editorial Associate at Vanity Fair. JONATHAN KELLY is a Contributing Editor at Vanity Fair. JAIME LALINDE is an Assistant Editor at Vanity Fair. MARY ALICE MILLER is an Editorial Associate at Vanity Fair. ROBERT SAM ANSON is a V.F. Contributing Editor and a former Editor of Los Angeles magazine. CARI BEAUCHAMP is a historian, filmmaker, and…

POWER LUNCH There was a time when Lew Wasserman’s name was not uttered or printed without his full title in tow: the most powerful man in Hollywood. The long-reigning agent and executive is often credited with being the pioneer of the back-end deal, which began to shift authority and profits from the moguls to the stars. Wasserman also helped dismantle the old studio system during his 60-year career—33 of them as C.E.O. and chairman of MCA. From entertainment to media to politics, Wasserman held sway over power brokers of every stripe. (Though a prolific contributor to the Democratic Party, he shared a friendship with Ronald Reagan, which began when Wasserman was the young Gipper’s agent.) As Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne would decree: “Of all the legends of the industry—Louis B.…

Among the many rapidly shifting tensions of today’s Hollywood— a place which has meaning as metaphor more than geography—the question of original authorship is one of very few that have existed without interruption and are likely to continue to exist for the rest of film history. Invented art versus derivative art. Of course, great work— and dreadful work as well—has emanated from both approaches, but there is a special pride in originality. I seem to have stumbled into a vested personal interest in this perennial battle as the result of a paradox: the one claim I can lay to cinematic uniqueness is that I have recently become the only filmmaker, to my knowledge, who has had both of his first two movies— The Gambler and Fingers—remade. Fingers, which I wrote…

Where does God live? In the desert, on top of a mountain. What does God do? He thunders and threatens and punishes and casts out and redeems. Is Jerry Weintraub God, or is he just a movie producer? Jerry is old like God [70, in 2008—77 today] and he too lives on a mountain in the desert, the Sinatra wilderness around Palm Springs, which is an oasis, just like the wells of Midian. He too communicates from afar, mostly by phone, but also travels swiftly through the air on his jet. In the cool of the morning, he walks in his garden, or moves over the surface of the earth in one of his many cars. Before he wades into his swimming pool, his face, for a moment, is reflected…

Down on the beach along side the Santa Monica Pier, amid the crowds of toned young skaters and wandering tourists, you can sometimes see an elderly man walking his dog. He is 83 years old, lean and tanned, with a tangle of white hair and rheumy blue eyes. While he scuffles along in worn jeans and sneakers, no one has a clue who he is, much less who he was. He lives in a building just steps off the sand, in a tiny apartment, barely 500 square feet of space in all, with a kitchenette and a battered white futon. What none of his neighbors realize is that the old man once had walk-in closets the size of this apartment. In fact, he was one of the richest and most…

FALSE COMPLIMENTS “You’re a genius!” “You’ve done it again!” “It’s all up there on the screen.” “I swear, you look 10 years younger.” LONG-TERM MEMORY Slights. Snubs. Rejections. Revenge. IMPONDERABLES Republicans. Flyover states. Reality TV. REPRESSED MEMORY Why I got in the business. ENVY Steven Spielberg’s power. Brian Grazer’s credits. Clint Eastwood’s longevity. Scott Rudin’s taste. Marty Scorsese’s talent. David Geffen’s money. An invitation to the Vanity Fair Oscar party. CREATIVITY Sequels. Remakes. Plots of old television shows. Expense reports. What can I steal from the hit movie that opened last weekend? GLIBNESS Authoritative 10-second criticisms of movies I haven’t seen, books I haven’t read, and TV shows I haven’t watched. GOSSIP Dirt on co-workers, clients, agents, producers, directors, actors, writers, studio executives. Actual production costs of films. Who’s broke,…

BOSTON FINANCIER PURCHASES CONTROL OF F.B.O. STUDIOS, ran the headline in a Hollywood trade paper in February of 1926, and the news sent shock waves through the business end of the film industry. Hollywood studio chiefs in the mid-20s were almost all immigrants, men such as Carl Laemm le of Universal, Louis B. Mayer and Marcus Loew of MGM, and Adolph Zukor of Paramount, men who had started with arcades, nickelodeons, or small theaters and grown up with the business. Before Joseph P. Kennedy, no one had come from Wall Street and simply bought himself the presidency of a studio. “A banker?” said Marcus Loew, summing up their surprise. “I thought this business was for furriers.” The tall, sandy-haired, 37-year-old Kennedy also presented a sharp physical contrast to the other…

On February 20, 1983, an otherwise uneventful day in Hollywood, a small wire-service story appeared in the Los Angeles Times announcing the death, at age 56, of the founder and chief executive officer of the Gulf & Western Corporation. According to the report, which was tucked away near the bottom of page 19 of the sports section, cause of death was a heart attack, suffered aboard a corporate jet as it approached New York on a flight from the Dominican Republic, a country renowned for sugar and major-league ballplayers. The account noted that the deceased was an Austrian wartime immigrant who’d done well since the purchase of a small automobile-parts manufacturer in the mid-50s. No mention was made of a local Gulf & Western holding, an entity on Melrose Avenue…

’Ijust ruined your life,” one of Hollywood’s more sadistic producers exulted into his iPhone. “I gave your number to Jon Peters. He wants you to write his book.” Thus began, in February 2009, my starstuddedly surreal odyssey into entertainment’s heart of darkness—the quasi-literary subgenre known as the celebrity memoir, or tell-all. My first reaction to the producer’s call was to beg off. The last thing the recessionhobbled book trade wanted was someone whom heat-seeking editors might dismiss as another showbiz has-been. Cruelty, thy name is Hollywood. The descent from mogul to footnote doesn’t take long. Peters’s last producer credit was in 2006, for Superman Returns. Despite its worldwide gross of nearly $400 million, somehow that film—which cost $200 million— was considered a disappointment, just like his penultimate effort, Ali, back…

Orson Welles once said, “The two men who ruined the movies were Irving Thalberg and Charlie Feldman.” Irving Thalberg, O.K.—the legendary MGM wunder kind had directors picking up his laundry during his reign as the studio’s head of production in the 1920s and 30s. But Charlie Feldman? Unless you’re James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, dying prematurely is a bad career move in Hollywood. Feldman died at 63 in 1968, still in his prime, and today if you drop his name all you get is a blank dead-fish look. Except with people of a certain age, who remember him vividly as one of those bigger-than-life Hollywood characters verging on mythical, the man Louis B. Mayer, the industry’s boss of bosses, tried to destroy and couldn’t. As an agent, Feldman ruled the…