Making Title Waves : A Hollywood Mania Shows No Sign of Cresting

Hollywood’s fixation for titles has escalated to new heights.

The point was driven home last week when Sony Pictures announced its new management structure and reporting order.

In a single press release, Sony identified 12 presidents, four co-presidents, four senior vice presidents, one senior executive vice president, one vice chairman, one co-vice chairman and four executive vice presidents.

Executives around town were chuckling that the banner headline in the Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety read: “Sony Streamlining.”

Defending the new organizational chart, a Sony spokesman simply says, “It’s an organizational structure that reflects the strategic operational and financial realities of the way we do business.”

The spokesman says the structure on the motion picture side does in fact “streamline the creative decision-making process by eliminating a previous layer of management.”

Still, it’s a mouthful of high-sounding titles for an awful lot of executives.

On the day the seven-page press release was disseminated internally, one Sony Pictures employee was so bewildered by what he read he was seen turning the document upside-down to see if it would read any clearer, according to a mole at the studio.

To be sure, Sony’s title fetish is not unique. It’s endemic in the corporate suites of entertainment companies throughout Hollywood. And, it’s hard to think of any other business in corporate America where such an ego- and perception-driven compulsion for lofty titles is so prevalent.

“With the possible exception of the military, Hollywood is probably the most obsessed industry regarding titles,” said Steve Unger, quipping, “Even headhunters are susceptible--look at my title.” Unger is a partner and managing director of the worldwide entertainment and communications practice for the executive search firm Spencer Stuart.

“I suspect that title inflation is a bit like a virus,” Unger says. “As high-tech, consumer products and utilities companies have increasing contact with entertainment companies, this obsession will find itself in these other industries as well.”

Michael Wolf, head of media and entertainment at Booz Allen & Hamilton, suggests that although “Hollywood may be unique bestowing the title president, across corporate America we’re seeing title inflation--look at how many VPs there are at most major corporations.”

Even the liberal outpouring of president titles in entertainment “isn’t so bad,” contends Wolf, “because it shows that there’s an individual with bottom-line accountability” in any given division.

Unger views it another way: “At best these titles are confusing and can slow down the decision-making process. . . . It doesn’t hasten commerce, it impedes it.”

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Wolf observes that title escalation is dangerous “when it translates into a bloated organization.”

Management consultant Steven Abraham, managing partner of the entertainment and media services practice at Price Waterhouse, says that although titles give the impression of multiple management levels, “they don’t necessarily indicate redundancy.”

Both Abraham and Wolf, whose companies are involved in the ongoing re-engineering program at Universal Studios Inc., say they believe the current trend at many major entertainment corporations is to eliminate, not proliferate, layers of management.

“Most entertainment companies are concerned with overhead and are looking at ways to reduce inefficiency, redundancy and waste,” Abraham says.

Meanwhile, Hollywood is generally swollen with self-important titles and in many cases is top-heavy with management.

“It’s escalated and continues to escalate,” Unger says.

At the other end of the industry spectrum, however, there’s DreamWorks SKG, the start-up studio of Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, which doesn’t believe in titles at all. When the entertainment venture was announced just over two years ago, some considered such nonconformity rather pretentious.

But, hey, DreamWorks executives say it works for them.

Helene Hahn, who heads business affairs, administration and legal for DreamWorks, says she and Katzenberg made the decision to forgo titles after being titled to death in their previous jobs.

“We came over from Disney where there was incredible title proliferation and where tremendous amounts of time was spent dealing with titles. Every time someone got promoted, it caused a problem because you had to worry about who else was a senior vice president or a vice president,” recalls Hahn.

DreamWorks, says Hahn, “is meant to be more of a partnership,” so running a title-less company “encourages less competition internally between the executives . . . people can worry more about the work and product than their status vis-a-vis someone else’s status.”

Unger points out that unlike DreamWorks, which was able to “establish a culture from the ground up, making it easier to try out new ideas,” the traditional Hollywood studios “already have an established culture,” whereby it’s an accepted practice for executives to use titles as “a calling card in the industry.”

DreamWorks--where it’s clear who calls the shots--is also structured not to have a lot of middle management, says Hahn, which she claims helps avert potential rivalry among the executives.

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The only drawback she sees to a no-title environment is that executives get shortchanged when it comes to having their promotions announced in the industry trade papers.

And, entertainment executives love to see their names and titles in print as a way to validate their importance in the industry.

Though titles don’t necessarily reflect success, they’re important to executives who want at least to be perceived as successful, because, as one studio president says, in Hollywood perception is everything.

And, it seems that Hollywood keeps on inventing new titles with such incarnations as chief of operations, senior executive vice president and co-vice chairman.

Hahn recalls how when she, Katzenberg and other Disney executives, including Michael Eisner, were at Paramount Pictures in the early 1980s, a Daily Variety story duly noted that the studio had eight presidents while the United States of America had one.

“Titles are meaningless, other than for checking into a hotel,” cracks Hahn.

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Streamlining, Hollywood Style

In Hollywood, getting a big title is almost as important as negotiating a big severance package. As a result, most companies are packed with more presidents and chairmen than there are credits in a movie. Last week, Sony announced a new “streamlined” organization:

Nobuyuki Idei

Sony Corp. President

* John Calley

President, chief operating officer, Sony Pictures Entertainment

* Jeff Sagansky

Co-president

* Bob Wynne

Senior executive vice president

* Jon Feltheimer

Executive vice president, Sony Pictures Entertainment

President of Columbia TriStar Television Group

* Yair Landau

Senior vice president, corporate development and strategic planning

* Yuki Nozoe

Executive vice president

* Ted Howells

Sony Pictures executive vice president and chief financial officer

* Arnold Shupack

President of Sony Pictures Studios

* Lucy Wander-Perna

Senior vice president of human resources

* Ronald jacobi

Senior vice president and general counsel

* Andy Kaplan

Executive vice president of Columbia TriStar Television Group

* Bruce Redditt

Senior vice president of corporate communications and external affairs for Sony Pictures Entertainment

The Motion Picture Team

* Lucy Fisher

Vice chairwoman

* Gareth Wigan

Co-vice chairman

* Robert Cooper

President of TriStar Pictures

* Duncan Clark

President of Columbia TriStar Film Distributors International

* Kenneth Lemberger

President of Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group

* Bob Levin

President of Sony Pictures worldwide marketing

* Jeff Blake

President of Sony Pictures releasing

* Amy Pascal

President of Columbia Pictures

* Ben Feingold

President of Columbia TriStar Home Video

* Ken Williams

President of Digital Studio Division

* Ken Ralston

President of Sony Pictures Imageworks

Sony Pictures Classics

* Michael Barker

Co-president Sony Pictures Classics

* Tom Bernard

Co-president Sony Pictures Classics

* Marcie Bloom

Co-president Sony Pictures Classics

Triumph Films

* David Saunders

President of Triumph Films