Exec Musical Chairs: 37 Interesting Names 🧐Executives/producers/eminence grises and wild cards to grab the next throne
With the doldrums of summer officially upon us — a torpid pause before the next mad round of musical chairs or re-org-ing or disruption at the point of a gun — it's a good moment to take a deep breath and engage in a little bit of reckless, wanton speculation at how things will play out in the months ahead. Last week, we looked at the playing field and saw that just about every studio out there that hasn't just had a top-to-bottom shake-up is about two inches away from one. Or five inches at most, depending on how the wind blows this fall. So, having looked at where the seats might open up and how the terrain might change, let us take a peek at the names that will be mentioned. Think of this as a permanent, standing, The Contenders for X Job, when X job comes open. Just take your favorites from below and mix and match. But before we get to some names, let's talk a bit about what they'll be looking for in these positions. So when you think about any job that might come open — whether it be running Disney or production at a new super studio that arises from the sea, and you think about who might run it and the qualities that person would need, the first thing you realize is: it's impossible. The modern entertainment conglomerate has become such a beast of contradiction and confusion that no living creature could be the ideal candidate, could ever be the ideal candidate. Save for masochists who enjoy high-paying suffering. Let's break down what you need to have in your background if you're going to take on one of these Leviathans: First of all, you need to have great relationships with talent. Above all else. Of late, we've seen the problems you have when you hand a studio over to people who don't respect talent. So you can't have that again. (I mean, we will, repeatedly, but I thought it worth mentioning.)
But the modern entertainment Leviathan is not just a lunch table at Cafe Gratitude; it's a complicated corporate labyrinth, data-driven and benchmark-guided, with more legal, rights and EBITA conundrums than you can shake a lightsaber at. You're not going to just hand over one of those to someone just because they are friends with a couple actors. You need someone who speaks PowerPoint and Excel fluently, who can assure Wall Street, with deep experience in business and speaking at conferences with other people just like him (and yes, they’re almost all hims). So off the bat, get that MBA with strong, iron relationships with talent. So you've winnowed the pool down to zero people right there. Then, modern studios being what they are, you need someone with TV experience first and foremost, much more than film. Problem is, there aren't a lot of execs who have spent their lives in TV who look ready to rise up to take over the whole company and take command of the film side as well. (Iger remains the lone success story here.) Also, the time has passed when you could just put one of the club in charge, another Hollywood made-man Baby Boom time-server. These days, these war times, require aggressive leadership. But neither are you going to turn the studio over to some teenybopper who hasn't been working there since the beginning of time. You need someone who can run the company but also be its public face, representing it and steering it through not only balance sheet difficulties but the cultural crisis of the hour before the company gets sunk into a hot war with an entire state. One of those! If you meet those qualifications, the line forms at the right. You can see why, after talking to everyone in town, David Zaslav determined that the only possible candidate for the job was… himself! So take it as a given, that finding the perfect person, even the half-perfect person, is more or less impossible. In any job search, the company is going to have to decide which of the above they are willing to compromise on, and those decisions will say much about the company's priorities. Let's go through some groups then and see how they might fare when a fabled seat comes open. This list, it should be said, does not include the currently employed, whose fates first depend on what happens with their current employers. (And how they ultimately leave) And before you shoot off your “but what about….” email, know this list is just a sampler, a far from complete little bite of the full master list in the sky. The Lions 🦁Including, but not limited to:
This is to say, the group who have had this job — or worked at this level before, who have been recently active and remain highly regarded and in good standing in the community. To varying degrees. None have gone up in smoke like Mike Ovitz or sailed off to sea like David Geffen, or live under a cloud, having been brought low by a scandal.
Five years ago — even three years ago — this would have been the list. You had a big job, what you needed was someone who has done a very similar big job. But the business has changed so much, the whole orientation has shifted (or spun off its axis, depending on your point of view) that it’s hard to imagine a Leviathan being turned over to one of the giants of the past, mostly film people that they are. One could see if Disney were looking to make a change, Kathleen Kennedy would be on the now very, very short list of internal candidates. But beyond this, it may not be a young man's game quite yet, but it's a very different game. That said, given the headaches and challenges, and corporate nonsense associated with running a modern Leviathan, it’s hard to imagine many of the list above wanting to take that on in these times. Peter Chernin, for example, has much better fish to fry (and money to make) in his own company. Amy Pascal can currently guide the most important films in the Sony slate — and share in their success — without having the burden of figuring out what to do with this lost studio on her shoulders every day and night, or calling Tokyo on Sunday night at 6:30 p.m.
When you think about how wrong this list would be for what the Leviathans want, and how wrong the jobs would be for them, it's pretty stark how much the industry has changed so very quickly. All that said, if one of the streamers wanted to — needed to — change course, and needed above all else to send a message of respect and strength to the community, they'd probably start by going to this list and writing them a bank account-breaking check to come. But that would require a tech CEO admitting they needed to be guided by olde time Hollywood, and you're probably better off betting on them leading a mission to Jupiter before that happens. The Dauphins 👑The ones once one step away from the throne:
After the Lions, this is the traditional next go-to list — the next-in-lines who, at one time or another, were this close to the throne, but for various reasons fell off the corporate ladder. The first thing you notice about this list is that it's got a shelf life. Peter Rice's name carries with it a lot more heat than Jeff Robinov's, although their studio experience may be comparable. Even Kevin Mayer and Tommy Staggs, who were infinitely plausible chieftains just five minutes ago, and have gone on to Big Things like collecting possibly overvalued production companies, are almost from another world... Almost. That said, should the Disney board decide to make a change, lacking an internal heir apparent, the replacement list likely starts at the top of Candle Media. (Which would be a stunning repudiation of the Iger succession, but you can't have everything.) The other thing about this list is for all of them, at this point it's probably got to be the top job or nothing. No Chieftain could afford to have one of these people below them. Or more to the point, it would take a supremely confident CEO to tolerate an imminently plausible replacement sitting just a heartbeat away. We see how much Bob Iger himself enjoyed that when he was in the chair. And on their part, these folks by and large, particularly the ones of more recent vintage, aren't going to go back into the maelstrom to sit under yet another boss's thumb. Witness the difficulties Amazon has had getting a top drawer head for MGM, with the requirement that they live under heavy supervision from Jen Salke. That said, with their broad, deep experience, and solid to sterling reputations, the names above come as close to checking all the boxes as you can get. And when a company is in desperate need of turnaround, these are the people who are most likely to get you there. So for a company like say, Netflix, a time may come when you've got little choice but to turn to this list. The Tech Geniuses 📱Notice how short this list is:
To us here in Hollywood, the Kilar regime may have looked like a rolling tragicomedy, but that's not necessarily how it looks up north. To the tech world, the Kilar experiment seems like a study in boldness, in defying moth-eaten, musty Hollywood conventions to drag the industry where it needed to go. In their eyes, it is thanks to Kilar's moves that there was a company worth buying for David Zaslav. If Reed decides it’s time to change horses at the top, a meeting with the Natural Born Kilar is likely where the discussion would start. Question is though — has his tech reputation now inflated beyond the confines of any mere entertainment job? Is his own start-up the only path forward for NBK?
And in Sheryl Sandberg, despite the manifold debacles under her regime, she's an industrial giant who built a real company, and whatever your drawbacks, if she could do that with Facebook, think what she could do if put in charge of one of these clown shows down here. It's hard to see one of the streamers wanting someone from Facebook, but you can absolutely see the board of one of the legacy studios wanting someone from Facebook. Especially since advertising — her specialty — is the new streaming! And they would gladly devote six assistants for her wedding too, entertainment-style! At the bottom, the tech overlords respect tech experience above any other quality in the universe. (And starry-eyed Wall Street is inclined to agree with them.) So while they hold the keys to the studio, there will always be the danger of someone from that world being imposed upon Hollywood. Thus the day will absolutely come when the head of a tech company, looking for a new chief for his streaming division, remembers old Oswald from Systems Development, and what an incredible job he did last year realigning the software drivers F-Prompt server protocols, in a way that has already saved the company 15 trillion worker hours since it was installed. And you know, Oswald loooooves movies. Remember how he got up at the All Hands Talent show and did a one man reenactment of the Mike Tyson scene from The Hangover? Wouldn't it be great to see what Oswald could do with these people? The day will come! And we'll all long for John Stankey. Mark my words. Eminence Grises 👴Old-guard business-builders who bring the talent:
The wise men whispering in the ears of any newly installed studio owner, guiding them through the labyrinth. And any newly installed mogul quickly realizes they need a guide badly. The whispered advice might include some deals for their clients, or they might even end up whispering their own names for an open chair.
In the end, the hellscape of running a modern Leviathan is more than any from this list really want to take on — the pitfalls these days too great. But if say, Netflix need a change at the top, a hire at this level (almost ceremonial, because it seems dubious how operational any of them actually are) might just make some sense. Another thing about this list — it doesn't come cheap. The Producers 🎬For starters:
After The Dauphins, this list is probably the natural place to turn. Producers are the most accomplished people working in the system. They have all actually made movies, and moved mountains in the corporate world to do so. They make a practice of studying the system and knowing everything that happens in it. Producers are the fixers and the barons of the Hollywood landscape. Some — starting with Jason Blum — have actually willed into being entirely new models that have changed the face of studios.
Downside: after long careers as stop-at-nothing independent operators, how will such animals survive on the inside, with days consumed with bureaucracy and the mundane game of inches a studio head has to play every day, balancing 100 different constituencies. The history of how they fare is as wildly different as the varying fates of Jon Peters and Peter Guber once they went on the inside. If it's ultimately a leap of faith to move a producer into a corporate leadership role, it's a leap with very high potential. Big risk, potentially big reward. Easier to see this happening at a Sony, Paramount — or one of the streamers — than at a Disney or Universal though. Wild Cards ⚠️
As noted, not only is there no perfect candidate, with all the needs of a modern entertainment Leviathan, there's not even a half-perfect candidate. So as long as they are going off the charts, why not reach for the stars and go off the lists? A wild card play is a lot more likely of course from a streamer than a legacy studio, but these days, is anything off the table?
The Wild Card list is infinite, as full as the stars in the heavens, but the sextet above seem like where those lists might well start. The Entourage fan fiction version of Ari himself taking over a studio, as discussed above, is likely a fantasy. But there are other hard-driving agents in the sea. Jay Sures recently floated his name for the CNN job, so seems to have his eyes on a post-agenting life. If you're going to hire an agent to run your studio, Maha Dahkil checks a lot of boxes — smart, tough, a list to die for, a founder of Times Up (whoops), a diverse choice, TV and film experience. She is the kind of aspirational hire one can easily picture Netflix bringing in to head one of their major divisions, if not the whole thing.
I can't imagine Todd Phillips or Shonda would last a day dealing with the crushing hellscape that is life at the top of an entertainment Leviathan... but I could see the temptation for either. Shonda has actually headed up a sizable company and built an empire. Todd Phillips, if you wanted to take your company in a certain creative direction (i.e. fanboy Babylon), he's a man who could bring you there. The Incumbents 🗂I said I wouldn’t talk about them but I lied Also not to be forgotten — a round of musical chairs with the present occupants of the studio chairs and major divisions. Kevin Feige for instance, if he were ever so inclined (of which there's no evidence that he ever has been) could claim any seat in Hollywood he liked. Tom Rothman certainly would love to ride his Sony success to the chair at a studio that doesn't have a big question mark over it. One has to believe that in some corner of the Harry Cohn office suite are a pile of mouse ears a certain studio chief tries on for size in his quiet moments. A vacancy at Disney or at Netflix would certainly spark a look at some of the rivals. It's hard to imagine any other open seat at this moment drawing a poobah from one studio to another, but maybe a number two becomes the number one down the road? Lastly, The Front Runner 🏃♂️The Man in the Gray Performance Fleece Vest. Always. In these days, the contender you can never count out, who somehow or other always emerges on top. The faceless, nameless corporate functionary, whom we've never heard of but can assure the board and shareholders, he'll keep a constant eye on the share prices and the company humming at maximum efficiency (if minimum inspiration). Meanwhile, Some News of Our Own! 🥳
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© 2022 Richard Rushfield
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Exec Musical Chairs: 37 Interesting Names 🧐
June 21, 2022
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