Jury’s In: Here’s One Tough Hollywood Lawyer

What Melanie Cook didn’t realize as an impassioned teenager back in the late ‘60s, sitting around her family dinner table fighting to get her ideas heard, is how well it would prepare her for the daily battles she’d have to wage years later in Hollywood.

Mastering the art of debate and positioning at an early age has served Cook, 43, well over a 15-year career in which she’s evolved into one of the most high-powered and well-respected entertainment attorneys in the industry. Two weeks ago, she was named Entertainment Lawyer of the Year by the Beverly Hills Bar Assn. Cook is the first woman ever to receive the prestigious award in an industry where there are only a select group of powerful female attorneys.

“Growing up in a loud family where everybody thinks they’re right was great training for this job,” says Cook, who represents some of Hollywood’s most prominent, colorful and, in some cases, difficult personalities, including Tim Burton, Barry Sonnenfeld, Madonna, Keanu Reeves, Holly Hunter, Laura Dern and producer Scott Rudin.

Cook, a partner at Bloom, Hergott, Cook, Diemer & Klein, was raised in a liberal Democratic family in Orange County, where her father was a judge and her mother was a community volunteer, activist and distant relative of the late liberal-cause attorney Clarence Darrow.

“You got asked your opinion a lot” on such hotly contested issues of the ‘60s as legalization of pot, the Vietnam War, civil rights and freedom of speech, Cook says.

“It helped me because I’m not afraid to have an opinion--even an unpopular opinion,” Cook says. “And I learned there’s room for other people’s opinions,” a lesson Cook says has been invaluable in helping her work in collaboration with agents and managers on client deals.

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As part of a team that typically includes multiple representatives, lawyers play a key role in a client’s careers. They not only review contracts, they help structure and negotiate deals that help establish a client’s clout in the industry and also set precedents. They collect a 5% fee on transactions, compared with an agent’s 10% cut and a manager’s 10% to 15%.

Although each representative has traditional roles (agents and managers usually are more involved in creative decisions), the lines are becoming increasingly blurred in today’s market.

“Lawyers are almost always involved now because so many of these deals are so complicated and the stakes are so high,” Cook says. “Agents and managers really want the attorney on the phone with them in any situation.”

Cook, who also represents five top animators at Disney and several key TV writer and producer clients, says of the changing marketplace: “It’s very interesting times.”

It’s a time when she’ll negotiate a deal for a client on a $100-million movie one day, a $4-million one the next.

With the stakes as high as they are and the economics of the business as bad as they are, lawyers like Cook are increasingly structuring complex back-end deals for clients who are paid less than their normal upfront fees on movies they want to make.

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Cook devised a creative back-end deal for her actor client James Spader on David Cronenberg’s moderately budgeted and controversial film “Crash,” guaranteeing the actor a hefty profit participation in specific foreign territories. “It’s turned out to be a deal that worked out well for the client and producer,” she says.

Likewise, on some mega-budgeted movies, where the producer, director and stars may normally be profit participants from the first box-office dollar a studio collects (rather than after it recoups its costs), lawyers also have to be creative in the deals they make.

“With the escalating budgets, the big fees paid to actors and all the first-dollar gross participants, it can get very crowded at the back end of a picture,” says Cook, noting that in negotiating these kinds of deals there has to be flexibility and accommodation in order to get the movies made.

It’s also the case today that some studios, particularly Paramount, have decided the best way to tackle the escalating cost issue on movies is to look to share the risk with partners.

“The wave of the future is that studios are looking for alternative financing sources on many of their movies,” says Cook, who often finds herself involved in helping put these kinds of packages together.

Studio executives who have to sit across the negotiating table from Cook say she is smart and knows her craft well, and while she can be extraordinarily tough at times, she has the uncanny ability to extract what she wants without making the opposition feel like they have been taken.

“She’s one of the best lawyers to work with because I know I have a partner, not just an adversary,” says Paramount Pictures business affairs chief Bill Bernstein. “She can define solutions to really tough problems and has inexhaustible patience to stay with the issues and make tough transactions succeed by coming up with creative solutions to get deals closed.”

Steve Spira, executive vice president of business affairs at Warner Bros., says of Cook: “She is strong-willed but fair-minded. She doesn’t leave anything on the table by any stretch of the imagination, but she’s really about solving problems and reconciling competing interests. And she does it with no drama, no hysteria and a tremendous amount of professionalism.”

Spira says the fact that Cook is “egoless about the process and never acts out of fear of losing a client” is what distinguishes her from the pack.

Leaving their own agendas aside is essential for representatives in a business where high-caliber clients often have egos big enough to go around any table.

“What’s totally unique about Mel and the thing that separates her from every agent and lawyer in the business is that it’s never about her, it’s always about the clients,” says Sonnenfeld, who directed such films as “Get Shorty” and “The Addams Family” series. “She’s very self-confident and can get what she wants--but it’s not about her own ego.”

Cook, not someone easily intimidated even by the most menacing Hollywood executive, says confidently: “I know how the business works and I know what’s appropriate. When people try to do things that aren’t right, I say so.” Cook says it’s not so much about being a tough negotiator or “having certain tricks up your sleeve, it’s about understanding what your client’s position and value is and knowing what the marketplace is--knowing what cards you have in your hand.”

With one of the first tough deals she cut her teeth on, Cook had to sit in her conference room with five attorneys from Columbia Pictures to try to get a settlement for producer Rudin, whom the studio had kicked off the lot for breaching his contract and buying the script “Flatliners” out from under it. She not only managed to get her client “a big fat hunk of money,” but ownership of all his Columbia projects, with the exception of “Flatliners.”

“She’s unflappable and knows when toughness is required,” Rudin says.

Nor is Cook afraid to push the envelope for a client.

“She’ll never say, ‘This town is built around precedent,’ ” Sonnenfeld says. “Once she decides she can get you something, she figures out a way to get people to give it to her. . . . I’ve always gotten whatever I wanted.”

If there’s something else Cook is known for in Hollywood, it’s her skill in handling some of the industry’s most temperamental personalities, like the self-admitted handfuls Sonnenfeld and Rudin.

“I am whiny, needy and neurotic and I’m also an insomniac,” said Sonnenfeld, conceding, “This is unfortunate for Mel because when I can’t sleep, I fax.”

Rudin, a notorious screamer who also readily admits to being difficult, says Cook (whom he talks to several times a day) “has a unique ability to get me off the ceiling. . . . She stays calm and has the ability to put things into perspective.”

If it’s not hard enough mediating with the studios, Cook on occasion has to play peacemaker between her own clients.

When Rudin and Sonnenfeld made the original “Addams Family,” together, they fought about everything from who controlled the casting decisions and how many takes a scene required to who could attend the previews.

“First, they would run to their respective trailers and call me,” Cook recalls. “Then they would stand across the room from each other and call me. And then, if they were in good moods, they’d be next to each other and call me.”

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When it came to the sequel, Cook decided to legislate the areas of control between the director and producer with a contract.

“Melanie had to draw up a document pleasing both of us,” Rudin says. “And we had a great time on the sequel. . . . It helped us navigate boundaries and allowed for both of us to be comfortable.”

Cook, who has an 8-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son with her husband of 12 years, Woody Woods, a manufacturer of lifeguard shorts, says she’s passionate about her clients and their artistry and is grateful she pursued the profession she did, though it was an afterthought.

“My instincts were all artistic, like my mother’s,” says Cook, explaining that she also inherited a “hot-blooded passion for debate” from her mother’s side of the family, whose pastimes are “croquet and arguing.”

After graduating from UCLA as a dance major, Cook went to live and ski in Mammoth with her then-boyfriend. While riding a chairlift together, her father suggested she give up her career as a cocktail waitress and consider studying law. Before the next snowfall, Cook followed his advice and entered UCLA law school.

She first worked as a litigator at Rosenfeld Meyer & Susman before moving into entertainment law at Cooper, Epstein & Hurewitz in 1982 and joining Bloom & Dekom (an earlier incarnation of her present firm) in 1987.

Cook says that even now, about 30 years later, when sitting around her family dinner table, “you still have to fight to get a word in edgewise.” But she does.