Executive Privilege

More like gods than the stars they deal with, studio executives have their hands, light or forceful, on a great many projects. As Mike Medavoy takes pride in pointing out in “You’re Only as Good as Your Next One,” although today’s directors may make 15 films in a career and actors perhaps twice that, he has been a factor on about 300 motion pictures.

Though his passion for his own projects is not surprising (most critics wouldn’t agree with him that 100 of his films were great or that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “The 6th Day” was by any means a significant piece of work), Medavoy’s book is of interest because in many ways he’s not a typical modern studio executive.

Born in Shanghai in 1941, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he grew up speaking Spanish in Chile. By the time he got his first Hollywood job--joining John Badham, Marc Norman and Walter Hill in the Universal mailroom--he already had more of a cosmopolitan outlook than most Hollywood executives, picking up “traces of Russian, Italian and French” along the way.

Partly because of his ability and temperament, partly through good fortune, Medavoy spent a major chunk of his career (from 1974 to 1990) helping run the atypical class acts of the studio system: United Artists and its off-shoot, Orion Pictures. “In the four years I spent at UA,” he writes, “the studio won back-to-back-to-back best picture Oscars for ‘Rocky,’ ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ and ‘Annie Hall’ and finished number one among all studios at the box office for two of those four years.”

Given this experience, it is not surprising that Medavoy has written a decent, intelligent book about a business that is often neither. “You’re Only as Good as Your Next One” reads like the kind of executive he has the reputation for being: determined, no-nonsense, sure of himself. But, paradoxically, this strictly business autobiography is at its best and most readable when Medavoy comes down from the mountaintop and gives in to his irritation with those he feels have done somebody wrong.

Certainly Medavoy tries--with some success--to pass on the common-sense wisdom he has learned in his decades in the movie business, whether it be his standards for a good script or “the three simple rules of packaging” or his conviction that “maintaining your equilibrium in this town is hard when you’re successful.” While all his points are well taken, there is an earnestness to the way they are told that keeps them from being compelling.

More interesting are his stories of his time at UA (which he joined in 1974 as head of West Coast production) and later Orion. Movie business attitudes have so changed that his tales about the UA’s willingness to take chances on dicey material such as “Network” and “Coming Home” or about Arthur Krim’s theory that “nobody ever went out of business by giving away profits” seem to come from a galaxy long ago and far away.

Because of his executive position, Medavoy can relate case histories of how such films as “Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Rocky” and “Silence of the Lambs” came together. His take on the little things that went wrong is also intriguing: He feels the Orion’s penny-wise reluctance to help commemorate the success of the original “Terminator” by taking out trade ads and allowing its producers to order a bottle of vintage Champagne at a celebratory lunch “probably cost Orion nearly a half billion dollars” in revenue from the loss of the sequel.

“You’re Only as Good as Your Next One” is particularly vivid, however, when Medavoy takes off the gloves for a bit, when he abandons the avuncular for the acerbic. As the book makes clear, being treated with decency and respect is critical for Medavoy, and when he is not, he does not forget all about it.

Bob Rafelson, for instance, is referred to as someone who “gained a reputation as an abrasive know-it-all,” and Michael Cimino, whose “Heaven’s Gate” crippled UA after Medavoy left, is labeled “a director who could charitably be called a megalomaniac.” Medavoy is especially dismissive of people he feels have tried to rewrite history. He is irked with Sylvester Stallone for claiming the studio tried to buy him off “Rocky” and with James Cameron for asserting that Medavoy had insisted that O.J. Simpson play the Terminator.

The people Medavoy is most angry with are the former Sony Pictures triumvirate of Peter Guber, Jon Peters and Mark Canton, who he claims made his life a living hell while he was running Tristar Pictures after leaving Orion. He describes Guber, among other things, as “a secretive meddler by nature,” is acidic about a tennis bet he says Canton lost and never paid and pointedly calls the chapter on his Sony days “The Fish Stinks at the Head.” What especially gripes Medavoy is having aided all three men earlier in their careers: “I helped load the gun,” he says, “that later executed me in public.”

Running his own company, called Phoenix Pictures “not for the Phoenix rising from the ashes but because it is a strong-looking symbol,” Medavoy remains a Hollywood presence at a company whose success or failure hangs on his own decisions. As he writes, “if the company fails, it will be because I chose the wrong movies.” When he adds, “even on the worst days, I kind of like that feeling,” no reader of this unapologetic book will doubt him for a minute.