Diller’s Hollywood nostalgia

Barry Diller thinks Hollywood is becoming irrelevant, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. The former boss of Paramount and Fox Broadcasting Co. says movie studios are losing the creative and financial battle to online streaming giants making original content. Netflix simply “cannot be outbid,” he says. “No one can compete with them.” Diller, 76, is disdainful of this year’s Academy Award nominated films—“Essentially, no one went to see them”—and sees today’s studio executives as poor imitations of their colorful predecessors in the 1950s and ’60s. The old studio heads “were real characters—overblown, exuberant, nasty, but in their own way they were genuinely interesting people,” he says. “These people operated completely out of instinct. As against today, when people operate out of research and marketing.” One studio head he did not admire, however, was Harvey Weinstein. After Weinstein berated one of Diller’s female executives at Universal, Diller says, he confronted the bully on a hotel terrace and told him never to do it again. “Harvey, about 6 feet away, said, ‘I’m going to throw you off the terrace.’ And this gorilla, because he looks like a gorilla, starts walking toward me. And truly, I was scared.” Diller pulled himself into a menacing stance, consciously imitating an enraged bear. “It so surprised him that he stopped and I got out with a small amount of honor.”