How To Run a Movie Studio

By KURT ANDERSEN

There are guides to the nuts and bolts of making movies, but until now there has been no instructional text for top people in Hollywood -- that is, those dozen or so executives whose job it is to hand out several billion dollars of other people's money (especially Japanese people's money) to extremely good- looking, talented and/or lucky Southern Californians.

1. Don't believe in sure things -- not even Arnold Schwarzenegger. When you hire Arnold for a movie, as Columbia Pictures did for Last Action Hero, the industry's working assumption has been that "you couldn't miss $75 or $80 million at the box office," in the words of one Sony executive. You would make at least that much again from theaters overseas, and a similar amount from video around the world -- and from all of that around $100 million flowed back to the studio, a sum that might just cover Columbia's costs on Last Action Hero. Unfortunately for Columbia, reaching even that minimum threshold looks dicey.

2. Take your time. To make an ordinary film requires a year or more. Last Action Hero -- unusually expensive, technically complicated, conceptually ambitious -- got the go-ahead barely 10 months ago, and production continued into March (with reshoots in May), making the movie even more costly and sodden than it might have been. Last Action Hero, says the head of one studio, is "an advertisement for stupidity. They way overproduced, and they way overspent."

3. If you find yourself in a money pit, try not to brag about it. It's one thing to wave off the corporate bean counters' attempts at cost control, as a studio source says Columbia president Mark Canton did last winter on Last Action Hero, but Canton and his boss, Sony Pictures chairman Peter Guber, were publicly cavalier about the mega-yen budget. A modestly priced Last Action Hero, Guber said at a conference in March, "would wind up being Last starring Arnold Schwarz." At the time, the line seemed funny.

4. In fact, try not to brag at all. "Canton was crowing, 'This is the big one; this is the best thing I've done,' " says an executive who has worked with Canton. "Well, he said that once before." That would be a reference to the disastrous Bonfire of the Vanities in 1990, which at the time Canton called "the best movie we've ever made."

5. If you can't control your hubris, at least control your panic. What did Canton hope to gain by phoning the editor of Variety and ranting about the show-business paper's negative review of Last Action Hero? Columbia executives, crazed with anxiety in their corporate bunker, were peeved when the Los Angeles Times published a free-lance writer's lighthearted, thinly sourced account of a preview screening that the studio plausibly insists never occurred. But did they have to throw an embarrassing, no-win tantrum? Unless the newspaper agreed to keep the reporter from mentioning Columbia Pictures ever again, the studio said it would have nothing to do with anybody from the Times. "It's like Nixon in the last days of Watergate," says a Columbia employee. As Nixon learned, you can't beat the press: last week, after the deadline for accepting the nutty ultimatum passed, Columbia said, Never mind, we didn't mean it. But they still insist it was the newspaper sniping that kept moviegoers away. "We were damned going in," says Columbia's Sid Ganis.

6. Instead of blaming the press, blame your rivals: they really want you to fail. "I got so many calls over the weekend from people gloating," says a studio head, chuckling over his faxed copy of the disappointing Last Action grosses. "I never knew there were so many vicious people." The same executive helpfully pointed out that Last Action Hero is really the "first big picture" developed by Canton at Columbia, thus denying him credit for A Few Good Men and Groundhog Day.

7. Sound philosophical. As Canton says, the movie business is "cycular." * And as his more eloquent boss Guber says, "Failure is not the end game -- it is an almost inevitable cul-de-sac on the road to success."

8. Get back on the road to success immediately. Luckily for Columbia, next week the studio is releasing In the Line of Fire, Clint Eastwood's entertaining, hugely commercial thriller, which will help the bosses forget this bad patch -- Arnold? Arnold who? -- and turn them back into blithe motion-picture geniuses, their jobs safe. "Remember," says an executive who knows Canton and Guber, "Guber is inextricably tied to this guy." Inextricably? "Yes," the bigwig confirms. "For a while, anyway."