After getting his start at United Artists, he helped found multiple studios that went bellyup, usually a few years after firing him. Might recognize these: Orion, TriStar, and Phoenix Pictures (which is still around). He goes through the pictures he green-lit at each of these and goes into some detail about why they worked or didn't. He also walks the reader through how the business changed while goiing through his work, using these films as examples of something larger that was going on in Hollywood or the world. It's all pretty eye-opening.
Some of the films he brought to the screen include: Amadeus, Annie Hall, Apocalypse Now, Dances with Wolves, Hook, Legends of the Fall, Network, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Philadelphia, Raging Bull, Rocky, The Silence of the Lambs, Sleepless in Seattle, The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and The Thin Red Line.
He doesn't shy away from his duds either. He details why they didn't work and ultimately bombed in usually hilarious fashion. Take1984's The Cotton Club, my personal favorite annecdote from the book. This film got started when legendary producer Robert Evans more or less got fired from Paramount for cocaine trafficing. He called up Medavoy saying that he had a movie he wanted to get made and he could sell it with three words: gangsters, music, and pussy.
With a pitch like that, of course this movie got made. Almost immediately, predictably, everything went to shit. Evans originally was going to direct but had no idea what he was doing. Orion (i.e. Medavoy) and Evans eventually brought in Francis Ford Coppola who was deeply in debt and despirate for money. He accepted though he and Evans had hated each other since The Godfather. The film ultimately took five years to make and went way over budget before losing money at the box office. Both Coppola and Evans blamed each other for the shitshow. Medavoy clearly sides with Coppola as Evans appears to be completely unhinged during this period.
With all the budget woes, Evans went to shadier and shadier backers as more respectable types started to cut ties. Eventually, Evans was taking money from Arab arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and a guy named Roy Radin that Evans met through his former drug dealer, Karen Greenberger, who was dating Radin. Radin was murdered about a year before the film was released. This became known as "The Cotton Club Murder."
It gets weirder. In 1989 a contract killer and three others were sentenced for shooting Radin in the head and blowing up his body with dynamite to make identification by authorities more challenging. Among them was Greenberger who was angry about being cut out of a producer's role. Evans was considered a person of interest when two of the killers said that Evans and Greenberger hired them to take the guy out. At the trial, Evans pled the Fifth and refused to testify, though Greenberger later testified that Evans had no involvement in the crime. You can read more about in "The Cotton Club: A Scandal in Two Acts."
Anyway, those are the kinds of stories I loved the most, though that one was especially scandalous. In the book you'll get more of Evans behaving badly as well as famously poorly behaved John Milius and Jon Peters. Milius is mostly known for his work as a screenwriter for such films as Apocalypse Now, and for being the inspiration for the character Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski. Peters, on the otherhand, is known for being the inspiration for the film Shampoo and for the insane stories Kevin Smith tells about him in An Evening with Kevin Smith. His fuckery has since been put to screen in one of my faves from the last few years, Licorice Pizza, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Peters is portrayed by Bradley Cooper in the 2021 film and is completely unhinged. This period was during Peters's long domestic partnership with Barbra Streisand. He has since been married to Pamela Anderson, this in 2020, though Anderson said she was "never legally married" to the guy because the paperwork wasn't filed.
It's the stuff like this that I find super interesting. Hollywood, however, doesn't give us that juicy goss. Instead, we get bullshit stories that are only half true. Rarely is much of Hollywood star mythmaking accurate. Get discovered off the street or what have you. Lot of nepo babies out there.
Book ends Medavoy's early days with Pheonix. He mostly details his work on The Thin Red Line in 1998. This epic war film written and directed by Terrence Malick after a 20-year absense despite his reputation as a genius was a very big deal at the time. The movie rags I read at the time, Premiere and Flicks, and the message boards were losing their minds over it. It ended up being fine but somewhat disappointing. So it was nice to get some of the inside scoup on what all went down.
The final movie he details is The 6th Day which he talks about like it was Andrei Tarkovsky or something. I saw this in the theater with a couple dudes from my high school basketball team. It was an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle where he plays a family man in the future who gets accidentally illegally cloned as part of a vast conspiracy. A billionaire's goons come for him, but come on, it's Arnold. We thought it was unintentially hilarious.
He then ends the book discussing the causes of the steady decline in theater attendance when he was writing the book, which has only gotten worse, esqecially with the pandemic and all. He says it mostly comes down to the economy, technology, and the bullshit Hollywood was putting out which they saw as more marketable as opposed to riskier films that might offer better rewards in the long run. According to Medavoy, the cost of marketing and producing now requires outside partners for high cost films which lowers the upside. Thus making all the choices of which pictures to make more difficult. The decision to rely on remakes and sequels at higher costs either makes people feel that they have seen a movie and can either wait and see it on the after-market or miss it all together. Obviously, this has only got worse.
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