On the Lot With Frank Mancuso, New Age Mogul

Founder Adolph Zukor and the studio’s epic-making director Cecil B. De Mille might well recognize little about Paramount’s 56-acre lot except the famous arch of the studio’s Bronson Gate, which is almost as recognizable a Hollywood landmark as the Hollywood sign itself.

There is a shiny and modernistic five-story Adolph Zukor office building, the first new structure on the lot in 47 years and headquarters for all the company’s marketing activities, plus domestic television. An asphalt parking lot in front of the dolled-up commissary has been bulldozed away, replaced with grass, trees and a fountain and renamed Paramount Plaza.

The street along the main administration building is now a car-less walkway, set with benches, leading to another grassy area that has at least somewhat the feeling of a campus quadrangle. On another part of the lot is a child-care center, the first at any studio, launched in 1986 and available to the children of stars and stenos alike and accommodating infants as young as six weeks, with a graduation exercise when the toddlers reach school age.

Nearly half the 32 sound stages are now equipped for tape as well as film, and 110 editing rooms have been brought up to date. Two large parking structures have been built. In all, some $50 million have been spent for capital improvements at Paramount, which is the last major Hollywood studio actually situated in Hollywood since Columbia departed Gower Street for Burbank.

Then again, Paramount has money to spend. It has been making money hand over footage, although how much exactly is not identified in the annual reports of Paramount Communications, as the former Gulf + Western conglomerate has been renamed.

In 1986, the studio produced five of the year’s 10 largest-grossing films. It led all studios with more than 22% of the year’s total domestic box office, thanks to hits like “Top Gun” and “Crocodile Dundee.”

It led the major studios in 1987, with winners like ‘Fatal Attraction” and “The Untouchables,” ran a close second in 1988 and, two-thirds of the way through 1989 is a close second again, with “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” among its money-spinners. By year-end, if its Michael Douglas thriller, “Black Rain,” and other late releases do well, Paramount could end on top again.

In three seasons Paramount has had eight films, which each did more than $100 million at the box office, cumulatively grossing more than a billion dollars, the net rental returns from which will buy a lot of grass and trees.

The man who now runs Paramount is 56-year-old Frank Mancuso, a 27-year company veteran who by his own choice keeps one of the lowest profiles in Hollywood and is uncomfortable giving interviews. In an industry known for its superheated egos, Mancuso says: “I really believe in a team environment. When anyone rises above the team, it has a bad effect.

“It’s always difficult for me to do these pieces. It leaves me speaking on behalf of a lot of people, but I’m not doing anything alone. This is not to suggest I’m without ego. But you can’t get caught up in your own publicity. There’s an old adage about keeping your feet on the ground, and I believe in it.”

Born in Buffalo, Mancuso started his career at the bottom, as an usher in the waning days of the great downtown movie palaces. He worked part-time during school days at the 3,000-seat Lafayette Theatre. He’d been a movie fan from the time he took in Saturday matinees. “I was fascinated by what films did to us,” he says. As an usher, Mancuso saw every day how audiences responded to films and were affected by them.

By the time he was a student at the State University of New York campus at Buffalo he’d been made assistant manager at the Lafayette. When he finished college, the Basil Circuit, which owned the theater, hired him as a film buyer for its 50-cinema chain in Western New York and Pennsylvania. That was in 1958.

In 1962, Paramount hired Mancuso away from Basil as a film booker in its Buffalo office. Thereafter he climbed the company’s marketing ladder with remarkable speed. By 1967 he was branch manager, by 1970 vice president and general sales manager for Paramount Canada. Six years later he was in Los Angeles as the manager of Paramount’s Western Division; three years later, in 1979, he was vice president for marketing and distribution of the whole company.

As crucial as marketing and distribution are to the success of motion picture companies, studio chieftains have rarely come from the ranks of marketers, on the dubious presumption that they don’t know enough about the creative process. (Terry Semel, now president of Warners, and the late Clark Ramsey, who briefly ran MGM years ago, were other exceptions.)

The later leaders of the studios have more often come from law, finance, agenting and up the ranks from administration. But, in 1983, Mancuso was made president of Paramount’s motion picture division. In September, 1984, after Barry Diller’s defection to Marvin Davis and Fox, followed within hours by Michael Eisner’s departure for Disney, where he was soon joined by Jeffrey Katzenberg, Mancuso was named to his present post of chairman and chief executive officer of Paramount Pictures by Martin Davis, who took over the leadership of parent Gulf + Western after the death of founder Charles Bluhdorn in early 1983.

It was a formidable job challenge. Under the Diller-Eisner-Katzenberg team, Paramount had had some fat years (“Grease,” “Flashdance,” “Beverly Hills Cop,” several other hits). Now overnight the pinnacle of its creative leadership was gone. Diller had been board chairman and CEO, Eisner president of Paramount Pictures, Katzenberg head of worldwide production.

In the post-television age, it is unlikely that the major studios will again be major in exactly the way they were in the 1930s, with long rosters of stars under exclusive contract, dozens of publicists and an annual output of 50 features plus newsreels and shorts.

But in his quiet way Mancuso, it now seems clear, set about to shape Paramount as near to the Golden Age studio model as you can get--40 years after television has reduced the walk-in movie audience by as much as 75%.

Beyond the specifics, Mancuso has been at considerable pains to create an esprit on the lot, a feeling of family (a word heard often at Paramount these days). Producer A. C. Lyles, a 52-year Paramount veteran, thinks Mancuso the ablest of all the chieftains he has served, commencing with Y. Frank Freeman.

“Frank has instilled a quality of family, lots of warmth and caring. He walks across the lot, calling everyone by name. He reminds me of Walt Disney, when I used to visit him at the studio. He knew everyone by name. It’s so exciting here nobody wants to retire anymore. Nobody’s leaving.”

Mancuso’s approach has its pragmatic side, needless to say. “I want a climate conducive to the highest possible creativity,” Mancuso says. “I believe in the team concept, as in the old days, where you can allow dignity to grow and reward people on a substantial basis, and without the bondage aspects of the old days. I want the best support systems, business affairs, preproduction, post-production. You shouldn’t have to go off the lot for anything.

“If we can make life better here, we will. A nice environment to work in is part of the whole creative environment.”

In another return to the old ways, Paramount, Mancuso says, now develops 95% of its projects in-house. This is a significant change from recent practice in the industry at large when studios have been more often buying packages assembled by the large talent agencies and usually including the agency’s clients as the stars.

Mancuso has established or extended permanent on-the-lot relationships with a large roster of stars and star producers. These include the team of Stanley Jaffe and Sherry Lansing, both former studio heads themselves, who produced “Fatal Attraction” and “The Accused” for Paramount, and this Fall’s “Black Rain,” with Michael Douglas as an American cop in Japan.

“Frank has created a family like the old studio system; that’s the most telling thing I can say,” Lansing says. “We’d been on the lot three years and we’d made two movies, ‘Racing With the Moon’ and ‘First Born,’ and they’d made a total of $1.38. We’d made ‘Fatal Attraction’ but it hadn’t been released yet. Frank came to us and said he wanted to renew our contract.

“I said I was pleasantly surprised. What an understatement! The history of studios is if you don’t hit it right away, bye-bye.”

Partner Jaffe, who ran Paramount briefly until he opted for independent production, says: “Frank is the most remarkable man I’ve ever met in the business. He has immense, immense enthusiasm. He also has that old, shake-hands integrity, and it’s real. When they give you a go on your project, you go; they want you to make it.”

Sherry Lansing adds, “Frank disproves the theory that nice guys can’t finish first.”

What can now be looked back to as the “Fatal Attraction” crisis is also taken as symbolic of Mancuso’s gifts as a studio head. After a screening of the film in San Francisco, it was clear that the audience hated the original ending (in which Glenn Close committed suicide).

“We had the audience for 95% of the movie, and then we lost ‘em, but completely ,” Mancuso said recently. He, director Adrian Lyne and the producers retreated to Hollywood to debate what to do. Robert Towne and Nick Meyer came in as consulting writers; a new ending was devised in which Close was dispatched by the one character for whom the audience felt sympathy, the wife. The cast was reassembled and the new ending shot. The cost was close to $1.5 million, but Mancuso OK’d it without hesitation.

That, too, was like the old days, in which it was said that movies weren’t made, they were remade, reshot until the studio got it right.

“I believe in getting the audience’s reponses early,” Mancuso says. “The audience will make the final decision anyway; you’d better listen to them early on, while you can still shape the film in the cutting process. Some film makers are wary of it. It can be extraordinarily painful to make changes. But most of them come to rely on it. They admit it gets better as you go along.”

Mancuso signed Arsenio Hall to a long-term contract even before “Coming to America,” in which he co-starred with his pal, Eddie Murphy, was released. “Frank,” Hall says, “has vision. He keeps telling me what I don’t know I can do. When he signed me, I said: ‘I’m not an actor, I’m a stand-up comedian.’ But he picked up on what I could do.”

Stage 29 was expensively converted to a state-of-the-art theater for Hall’s successful late-night talk show. “We went after the children of the Carson show,” says Hall. “Frank came over while we were building it and he said, ‘Are you sure the people can see you from these seats?’ The architect looked and said, ‘Maybe you’re right, they can’t,’ and he turned a column.

“Frank goes deeper into people’s art than most executives. That’s all I really need to say. It’s easy for an executive to make money, especially if you don’t give a damn about people as individuals. That’s not his way, and on this lot his attitude spreads. In the cafeteria you can’t tell who the bigwigs are because of the way they treat the littlewigs.”

Michael Douglas, having just finished “Black Rain” for Paramount, says: “This time I had the luxury of just being an actor, but watching from afar it was fun to see the confidence that success breeds. It’s obvious that Frank trusts Sherry and Stanley a lot and they listen to him. It’s basically nice to see the trust. Not being second-guessed all the time is wonderful.”

Paul Hogan, whose ‘Crocodile Dundee” Paramount distributed domestically and whose “Crocodile Dundee II” it handled worldwide, is in preproduction on a third film at Paramount. “It’s not ‘Crocodile III,”’ Hogan says. “I’m in it, but it would be as good if I were a Czechoslovakian; there’s no cultural orientation. It’s my third go with Paramount and I like these guys. They’re as good as their word. Frank’s a gentleman and a scholar, and the funny thing is that before I met him I never found anyone who would say different about him. Class act all the way.”

Gary David Goldberg, who created the successful television series “Family Ties” at Paramount, is now in post-production on his first feature for the studio, “Dad,” based on the novel by the pseudonymous William Wharton. Jack Lemmon stars, and the film is also inspired by Goldberg’s relationship with his own father, he says.

“My move from television to film is typical of the style of Frank’s management,” Goldberg says. “They came to me and said they wanted to extend their relationship with me. What did I want to do that I hadn’t done. In effect, they said we have faith in you, you design the deal.

“Frank is a mensch --a real man. I had an idea for a child-care center, but he became the real champion of it. Ask him a question and he’ll give you an answer that’s fair and honest. Few of these guys have come up through the ranks like him and really understand the process.

“He doesn’t need to make you wrong for him to be right. If it goes well, he’ll enjoy it along with you.”

Other long-term Paramount relationships include ties with the team of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (“Top Gun,” “Beverly Hills Cop”), Art Linson (“The Untouchables,” the forthcoming “We’re No Angels,” with Robert DeNiro and Sean Penn), and actors Ted Danson and Michael J. Fox, whose companies are now developing feature projects.

Contributing to the family feeling at the studio, undoubtedly, is the fact that the average tenure at Paramount of its present top executives is, according to Mancuso, 11 years.

Sid Ganis, president for production of the Motion Picture Group, is a relative newcomer (four years) after long stints at Warners and then at Lucasfilm. Barry London, president for marketing at the Motion Picture Group, is an 18-year Paramount hand. Mel Harris, who heads the Paramount Television Group, has been with the studio for 12 years.

Under Mancuso, Paramount is making 15 or 16 films a year, at an average cost of $20 million. “Occasionally we’ll go a million or two under that,” Mancuso says. But it is obvious that his philosophy is to spend money to make money. “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” was significantly beyond the average cost figure.

Mancuso has what he calls his “tent-pole philosophy”: hoping for two or three knock-’em-dead successes a year that will support the whole release program, and make exhibitors partial to Paramount product.

“I’ve never separated production, distribution and marketing, as they often are,” Mancuso says. “For me it’s one continuous process designed to get your film before as large a public as possible. And we try to keep as many people involved from start to finish as we can.

“It’s got to be scary otherwise. You put years of your life into film and then turn it over to strangers who’ll be responsible for its birth. But if you’re not dealing with strangers, you’re at a different, higher level of competence.”

Mancuso believes strongly in upfront planning, to make both preproduction and post-production as economical as possible, and to avoid those avoidable overruns during production itself. “Setting up a film right, we stress that,” he says.

The evidence is that Mancuso, possibly remembering the matinee excitements of his youth, believes in the film as Event, a satisfying and usually starry entertainment. The studio developed Brian de Palma’s “Casualties of War,” but finally put it in turnaround, where it was taken by Dawn Steel at Columbia. It has drawn mixed to favorable notices, including a rave by Pauline Kael and a blast in Time, but it has been a box-office disappointment, as Mancuso, with his sense of the audience, may have anticipated.

Mancuso violates Hollywood tradition by enjoying a quiet, not to say invisible, private life, retreating occasionally to Hawaii as what he calls his getaway place. He hits the office at 9 in the morning after phone calls at home from New York and abroad. (Says A. C. Lyles: “From those days in distribution, I swear Frank knows the seating capacity of every important theater in the world, and what kind of business it ought to be doing.”)

He watches all the dailies in the studio or at home at night and is not often observed at the industry’s watering holes.

He observes one Hollywood tradition, occasionally maligned. Son Frank Jr. is a Paramount producer, responsible for the greatly lucrative “Friday the 13th” series of horror flicks.

Mancuso the enthusiast says, “More people are seeing movies than ever before, in theaters, on television, on cable, on cassettes. And the exportability of American films has never been greater. Globalization is an over-used word, and it usually refers to Japan and Europe, but wait to see about Russia and China; that’ll be your audience, too.

“The technologies are enabling more people to see movies all the time. That augurs well for the future.”