Company Town : Is Jeff Sagansky the Odd Man Out at Sony? Top Execs Say Yes

Asked following a small news media gathering with Sony Corp. executives in Tokyo last week whether he plans to stay at the company and if he is happy in his job, Jeff Sagansky responded: “I’m here. I like coming to work. I have lots of work and lots of challenges.”

Not exactly the most enthusiastic, or even direct, answer. And for most of the hourlong session, Sagansky sat quietly amid a room full of executives falling over themselves to talk about what they are doing.

A more appropriate question for Sagansky might be, “Yeah, but wouldn’t you like coming to work better if you had lots of work and lots of challenges somewhere else?”

To top Sony executives, the answer is yes. They portray Sagansky as increasingly the odd man out at Sony, frustrated with the narrow, relatively unexciting role he was confined to following the abrupt ousting of Sony’s former top U.S. executive, Michael P. Schulhof.

A spokeswoman for Sony calls any talk about Sagansky’s future “a lot of speculation,” and said there wasn’t much more to add. But conventional wisdom among senior Sony executives is that Sagansky in the next few weeks will find a way to exit gracefully.

“There is no spot for Sagansky,” said one executive.

It wasn’t long ago that Sagansky, whose title is executive vice president, was seen as the logical heir to Schulhof. It’s a role, Sony executives say, for which Sagansky felt he was qualified.

But Sony President Nobuyuki Idei apparently saw otherwise, choosing to eliminate the middleman in its U.S. operations by having the heads of the company’s film, music and electronics units report directly to him at Sony’s Tokyo headquarters.

On a broader level, Sony is increasingly flattening its U.S. organization, scaling back its Sony Corp. of America umbrella organization, which Schulhof ran, into a mere holding company.

In a memo last month detailing the lines of authority, Idei defined Sagansky’s orbit as pretty narrow, to include unclear “strategic efforts” as well as overseeing Sony’s retail, interactive and syndicated radio businesses.

No doubt it’s a decent job, but hardly the pinnacle of the entertainment business. This is a guy who once sat atop the television world as CBS’ entertainment chief when the network was first in the ratings, something that seems like an eternity ago given the rotten shape CBS is in these days.

Sagansky was paid handsomely for his efforts, earning nearly $14 million total in a two-year period of 1992 and ‘93, much of that from bonuses for keeping CBS in first place in the cutthroat world of network TV.

In recent weeks, Sagansky, who a year ago was visiting the Sony Pictures lot in Culver City practically every week, has been virtually invisible.

One executive says that as of last week, Sagansky hadn’t even placed the pro forma calls to studio executives to congratulate them on “Jumanji,” a risky film that has emerged as a moneymaker for the studio with a strong domestic and international box-office showing.

Also working against Sagansky has been his getting the cold shoulder in recent weeks from Sony entertainment executives cautiously guarding their turf against any unwanted intrusions.

Top music executives have spurned overtures by Sagansky to meet individually with him, sources say, with one top music executive even asking Sagansky to leave a meeting to which he wasn’t invited.

Relations with Sony Pictures Entertainment executives have been equally frosty. Schulhof initially pronounced that Sagansky would take a “more active role” at its Columbia and TriStar studios.

Executives there feel they’ve improved operations without his help to the point where the company is expected to show an operating profit of about $250 million when its fiscal year ends in March. But they’re bristling at Sagansky’s efforts to get his hands on scripts to read, and also were upset last summer when he took the initiative in selling a drama called “Dark Skies” to NBC.

Their message to him: We’ll listen to your advice, but keep your hands off the operation.

Certainly it’s unfair to blame Sagansky for his predicament. By all accounts, he’s one of the smarter and more decent guys in the business.

If there’s fault to be found, industry source say, it’s with the maddeningly vague management style practiced by Schulhof and the bumbling way in which he brought Sagansky into the company late in 1994.

Things got off to a bad start, and only got worse.

In hiring Sagansky, Schulhof sent contradictory signals on whether Sagansky had a hands-off or hands-on role, and also was forced to issue a memo clarifying that music chief Thomas D. Mottola didn’t report to Sagansky, only to Schulhof.

What’s more, wary Sony executives instinctively put up the drawbridges on Sagansky, because none were certain that Schulhof didn’t have another agenda.

Probably the thing working most against Sagansky now is that he was a Schulhof hire in the first place.

Said one senior Sony executive, “It doesn’t help that he was consigliere to the guy who got canned.”

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Further proof grand juries hurt stock prices: Shares in Cinergi Pictures plunged 50 cents to $1.625 in over-the-counter markets Monday in the first day of trading after the Santa Monica-based company disclosed that its chief executive, Andrew G. Vajna, is being investigated by a federal grand jury over personal tax issues.

The disclosure followed a Times report last week that subpoenas have been served seeking information on financial transactions by Vajna and Mario Kassar, former partners in Carolco Pictures.

Last year, Cinergi’s stock traded at more than $11 a share. The company has been hurt by a string of box-office disappointments, including “Judge Dredd,” “The Scarlet Letter” and “Nixon.” Vajna is one of Hollywood’s best-known producers and was feted last year as producer of the year at the annual NATO/Showest convention held by theater owners.

One of the investors hurt by the stock drop is Walt Disney Co., which distributes Cinergi movies. No doubt a company the size of Disney, which is said to own less than 5% of Cinergi and has about $2 million invested, can absorb the loss.

Times staff writers Hilary E. MacGregor in Tokyo and Chuck Philips in Los Angeles contributed to this column.