The Outsiders
NOTE: I’d like to have found something as little less… think-piecey to write about; but the post-Oscar buzz has sucked all the air out of showbiz news. I’ll talk about the Awards tonight on the podcast, teasing out the hidden messages, but today I write about why the movie business isn’t normal.
Art Buchwald is dying. Political satirist, author – neither of these things is as important to this column as is Buchwald the litigant. The Eddie Murphy blockbuster COMING TO AMERICA was based on a short piece Buchwald wrote, which the studio optioned for a small up front sum and a piece of the profits. When the movie had earned $390 million dollars and Paramount claimed it was still in the red, Buchwald took them to court.
The last thing Paramount or any studio wanted was to have someone outside the system looking at the books. The trial exposed a Gucci bag of ugly truths about the way showbiz was run. And somehow showbiz survived intact.
Look, people call it a business but it’s not run like any other. If General Motors had the same accounting practices or HR situations or even press releases, they’d be out of business and spending every day in court until the end of time. In showbiz, management sleeps with talent on a regular basis, often with the explict quid pro quo of a movie part in the deal. Crazy, obviously false claims emenate from the accounting department. It’s not uncommon for writers to make a comfortable living for years selling and reselling the rights to a script which never gets made at all. There is no objective standard to judge success, unless you count staying employed.
And that’s why nobody addresses this. The threat “you’ll never work in this town again” carries serious weight. The thing about General Motors is that you aren’t surrounded by the world’s sexiest people, you can’t get people to listen to you at parties when you say, “I met the head of the passenger door department”, and the chance that you’ll suddenly make hundreds of thousands of dollars for your tossed-off idea are very, very slim. In the movie game, it’s built-in.
And if the vivaciousness of show people seems a little forced and desperate, remember that the moment they slip up younger, hungrier versions of themselves are lined up around the block to get in.
Art Buchwald took Paramount to court because he was already out. He didn’t need his profit points (”monkey points” as Eddie Murphy called them) but he did want to see justice done. I recall that after a nerve-wracking several months in court, Paramount settled. Even if Art lost money, I bet that watching the machine squirm like that was worth every penny.