EMAILS REVEAL UNIQUE LOOK AT TINSELTOWN
MARILYN MONROE once said that Hollywood was a place where they would pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul.
The recent scandal involving the theft by computer hackers
of corporate records and privileged emails from Sony Pictures serves as further proof.
The documents released online show that Hollywood continues to be a town with predictably small regard for people’s feelings or for any sort of manners.
One might race to the conclusion that the business must then be all about money. But oddly, the files made public instead present evidence that the movie business is often motivated by matters other than profit and loss.
Headlines about the hackers’ revelations have focused either on the racial tint to an exchange between Sony President Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin or to the latter’s harsh judgments of the acting ability of Angelina Jolie.
More interesting is the release of detailed in-house data on executive compensation and on the profitability of the films the studio released last year. Sony’s most successful film of 2013? The James Franco-Seth Rogen comedy “This Is The End.” It cleared a $50 million profit. Just behind it was the Adam Sandler-Chris Rock movie “Grown Ups 2.” Those movies were nearly twice as profitable as the studio’s supposed smash and critics’ darling about urban corruption in the 1970s, “American Hustle.”
This raises the question of why Hollywood makes serious films and big-budget dramas with aging stars.
That the responsible executives are motivated more by their fascination with glamour and respect within their business than the bottom line is an inescapable conclusion.
Yet, as the hacking scandal also reveals, these executives are fabulously well-paid. Sony’s Marc Weinstock made $1.5 million in base salary alone last year, but he wasn’t even the head of the company, just head of marketing.
Simply put, the movie business is what it was in Monroe’s day: an industry obsessed with grasping the sensibility of the average man and woman yet run by people whose actual lives bear not the slightest kinship with those of the ticket buyers they seek.