Execs Exit Scene as Paramount Sale Looms

With its parent company at the center of a takeover war that’s raged for nearly five months, the executive floodgates appear to be opening at Paramount Pictures.

Greg Gelfan, the veteran head of business affairs for the studio’s Motion Picture Group, on Thursday confirmed reports that he is leaving to become executive vice president of business and legal affairs at 20th Century Fox, in a management reorganization at that studio.

Several other Paramount executives, including theatrical exhibition group president Larry Gleason, have recently resigned to accept jobs at MGM/UA. While that partly reflects loyalty to former Paramount Chairman Frank Mancuso, who now heads MGM/UA, sources say senior Paramount executives have become steadily more restless as the parent company’s sale nears.

Gelfan, a 10-year studio veteran who is known as one of the industry’s toughest negotiators, is the most high-profile executive to leave the studio in recent weeks. Sources say he became frustrated by management turnover at the studio, which has had three chairmen in four years, and by the bureaucracy.

Paramount, for its part, attributes the move to the usual corporate turnover.

Gelfan’s transfer to 20th Century Fox was orchestrated by Bill Mechanic, who recently left Disney to become Fox’s president.

“This is part of Bill’s intent to mold the studio more in the model of places from which he came--Disney and Paramount,” said one source. “And Greg (Gelfan) is a very logical candidate. He has spent his whole career on the studio side.”

Fox formally confirmed the hiring late Thursday as word quickly spread through the usual gossip channels. In a statement, Mechanic said Gelfan is being brought in to help accommodate “increased production.” Fox has said it plans to raise the number of movies it makes each year from 14 to as many as 18.

Gelfan, 43, will oversee both the legal and business affairs departments in his new job, which begins next month, and will report directly to Mechanic and Fox Chairman Peter Chernin.

“It’s an exciting opportunity,” Gelfan said Thursday. “It’s a company that really seems to be moving ahead, and they are some great people to work with.”

Paramount executives say privately that Gelfan’s move was expected since he made no effort to renegotiate his contract, which expires in eight weeks.

The leading candidate to replace him is Richard Fowkes, Paramount’s senior vice president of business affairs and acquisitions.

Sources say they expect a decision within a week. At Fox, meanwhile, news of Gelfan’s imminent arrival stirred fears of further upheaval.

Melinda Benedek, executive vice president of business affairs, and Lyman Gronemeyer, executive vice president of legal affairs, were apparently told this week that they will be reporting to Gelfan.

While both have been encouraged to stay on, people close to the studio say Gelfan’s coming aboard is largely viewed as a move by Chernin and Mechanic to put their own man in place.

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Benedek and Gronemeyer both predate the Chernin regime. Ironically, Benedek was recently listed among the most powerful and respected women in Hollywood by the American Lawyer.

“This is just part of an ongoing effort to get rid of the Joe Roth people,” said one source, referring to Chernin’s predecessor at Fox, who is now an independent producer.

Market share mania: Last week’s column, in which Sony Pictures Chairman Peter Guber challenged the distributor-based market share system, got a real rise out of the industry.

Guber said market share should be based on a company’s combined domestic revenue.

At that time, he said Sony had the lead, with a 19.2% “corporate” market share among its four divisions--Columbia Pictures, Tristar Pictures, Triumph Releasing and Sony Classics.

The first rebuttal came from Disney, which said its corporate market share was even higher--19.5%--when revenue from its Miramax Films division was added to the mix.

Then Warner Bros. weighed in with a forceful rejection of both companies’ arguments. Warner defended the existing system, noting that its single distribution company had outperformed all competitors by pulling in 18.7% of the domestic returns.

Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter agreed, this week awarding Warner the box office crown for the third year in a row.

More trouble: After excluding Hollywood from the GATT agreement, the protectionist-minded Europeans appear to be moving to keep their momentum alive. On Thursday, Greek Minister for Culture and former film star Melina Mercouri was quoted as saying she would fight Hollywood’s dominance of European cinema in her new role as leader of European Union culture ministers.

King of All Media update: Main Events Television, which distributed the “Miss Howard Stern New Year’s Eve Pageant,” now estimates that the raunchy pay-per-view program reached about 400,000 households.

That puts it far ahead of the previous entertainment champ for pay-per-view, a 1991 New Kids on the Block concert. While the figures are preliminary, 400,000 homes would bring in gross revenue of more than $15 million. As much as $5 million could go directly to Stern.