Can This Man Save Paramount?

By RICHARD CORLISS

Is it news if a man stands up to applaud at the end of a movie? It shouldn't be, not when virtually all the other audience members have already leaped to their feet. Yet Tom Freston's leg-stretch after last month's Sundance Film Festival screening of Hustle & Flow was hot dish to an avid press corps. You would have thought he was Brad and Jen, together again.

He got the headlines as much for who he was as for who he is. Freston, the new co-president of media giant Viacom, had been chairman and CEO of MTV Networks, whose MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central channels make it the lifeline to the youth market. One of Freston's missions from Viacom boss Sumner Redstone is to freshen the image and, more important, goose the profits of Paramount Pictures, the most geriatric of the Hollywood studios. So when the company's new Mr. Big showed up at the iconic indie-film festival, media types saw it as a signal of revolutionary change.

Then Freston's people paid a hefty $9 million, plus an extra $7 million for a two-picture production deal, for MTV Films to purchase the rights to Hustle & Flow, the inspiring tale of a Memphis street dude with rap-star dreams (think Rocky, except that he's a pimp). Industry savants saw that buy as a clue to the new direction. Freston was the face of triumphant youth culture--the kid whose stuffy parents have handed him not just the keys to the car but their credit cards and the deed to their home.

The object of this attention smiles at all the inferences--not least because, at 59, Freston is old enough to be the granddad of his target ticket buyer. He was in Park City, Utah, he says, at the invitation of Robert Redford, whose Sundance Channel is owned by Viacom. When at a film festival, see a film. Hence his presence at Hustle & Flow. "I couldn't believe the articles--'God, he stood up when the movie was finished!' There were 1,000 people standing up in the room. I was one of the last guys to stand," Freston says. "And I played no part in the negotiations other than to know that they were going on. It's not my job to be green-lighting movies. I really had to laugh."

But Redstone and Viacom's stockholders won't be laughing if Freston and Brad Grey--the former agent (for Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, among others) and packager (The Sopranos) who was recently chosen to run Paramount--don't rejuvenate the moribund movie division. Sherry Lansing, Grey's predecessor, had a nice run of Oscar-winning blockbusters: Forrest Gump, Braveheart and a sea story called Titanic. But the past few years have been strewn with pricey duds, mostly aimed at adults. In a business where about 40% of the audience is under 25, you don't make movies for your friends; you make them for your friends' kids and your gardener's kids. Freston clearly has that market in his middle-aged bones. He also has something that his predecessor, Mel Karmazin, couldn't claim: a close relationship with demanding boss Redstone.

Freston has been shaping kids' tastes for a quarter-century. In 1980, this former clothing entrepreneur with an M.B.A. from New York University read about the start-up MTV network (then co-owned by Warner Communications, which was later acquired by Time Inc., this magazine's publisher), applied for a job and became one of the founding executives. He oversaw properties like VH1 and Nick at Nite and, friends say, has remained true to MTV values, both personally, as a U2 fan, and as a businessman, believing that interesting content can make money. "Audiences want variety--in their television, in their video games and in their movies," says MTV Films senior vice president David Gale. "By making lower-budget movies that target different tastes, you can be successful with a younger audience. And they are the ones who go to the movies."

Kids consume the product, then sound off to the manufacturer. "If they don't like something, they e-mail us to say, 'What the hell were you thinking?'" notes Van Toffler, president of MTV Networks. "If they love it, they say, 'We want more.' Unless we're in a constant state of reinvention, we're irrelevant."

But can a cottage outfit like MTV Films be a relevant business model for a major studio? In some ways, it already is. MTV Films has been hot of late, co-releasing with Fox Searchlight Pictures cult fave Napoleon Dynamite (made for a minuscule $400,000 and earning 100 times that at the domestic box office) and backing a mainstream hit in Coach Carter ($63 million gross). MTV Films' kid sister, Nickelodeon Films, had an $85 million hit with The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. Comedy Central is another cool brand, though its Team America: World Police belly-flopped last year. Paramount has already made some youth-oriented hits. It has a long-term deal with Saturday Night Live's Lorne Michaels, whose Mean Girls earned $86 million. Best news: each of these films cost $30 million or less to produce. The studio also has an indie shingle, Paramount Classics, and has been angling to buy Newmarket Films, which distributed the surprise smashes My Big Fat Greek Wedding and The Passion of the Christ.

Freston's idea is to ride the Zeitgeist, keep his stable of semi-indie divisions productive and use the allure of his hip brands to attract fresh, young (and, pssst, cheap) talent. "I want us to be a place where you build relationships with up-and-coming people," he says, "give them a comfortable home so they can be in your solar system." And then, the dream goes, Paramount can roll out the occasional megamovie, like this summer's War of the Worlds, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise (who also has a production deal with Paramount).

"A studio is always in the business of big," says Newmarket boss Bob Berney. "But Paramount can use all the divisions it owns to bolster one another." That's Paramount's other secret ingredient: cross-marketing. The networks feed ideas to the studio, which produces the movies, which are promoted on the networks. That puts the energy in synergy. "This is not to say that under my management Paramount is going to become the MTV Films studio," says Freston. "But they will play a big cornerstone in what Paramount is going to be."

And why not create a community of boutique studios open to innovation? From its inception, the MTV channel has nurtured new movie talent, showcasing short, often experimental films (music videos) by young directors like Michael Bay, Spike Jonze and David Fincher. Their success in features has made MTV, in a way, the true Sundance of mainstream Hollywood.

If Freston can bring the MTV notion of entertainment with edges and quirks, sass and style, to a movie system that is short on artistic and marketing innovation, then risky business might turn out to be smart business. It could also produce some good films. If that happens, then even a skeptic may want to stand up and applaud. --Reported by Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles