A Carefully Crafted Rise to Paramount’s Top

Methodically, like a chess master thinking 10 moves ahead, Brad Grey has spent years plotting his entry into Hollywood’s upper echelons.

On Thursday, he finally arrived. As expected, the 47-year-old manager-producer was named chairman and chief executive of Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures -- the latest in a series of carefully calculated steps to the top.

In his 20s and new to Los Angeles, Grey couldn’t even afford to rent office space. Then the onetime comedy promoter became friends with legendary talent manager Bernie Brillstein. Soon he was playing tennis on the courts at Brillstein’s Beverly Hills home with power hitters such as the late Brandon Tartikoff, then president of NBC Entertainment.

“We’d tell stories and Brad soaked it up,” Brillstein recalled in his 1999 memoir. “He instinctively knew it was a good thing to hang around and be accepted by show-business people who had more experience.”

In 1997, when he was just 39, Grey managed to snare an invitation to New York investment banker Herbert Allen Jr.’s exclusive annual conference of media, technology and entertainment titans in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Grey, who was by then the head of Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, was the only talent manager invited that year -- the only one in fact ever to join the likes of cable magnate John Malone, News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone.

But according to people who know Grey well, Sun Valley’s rarefied atmosphere was the air he had long been yearning to breathe.

“He’s less a Hollywood schmoozer than a schmoozer of power brokers,” said Lions Gate Entertainment chief Jon Feltheimer, who has done business with Grey for years. “That’s where he likes to play.”

Grey’s ascension to Paramount comes despite his lack of experience as a studio executive. Though known as a tough negotiator and TV industry maverick who has used Brillstein-Grey’s TV production arm to back such cutting-edge shows as “The Sopranos,” he is a novice at navigating the corporate culture of an entertainment conglomerate.

Grey replaces outgoing Paramount chief Sherry Lansing and will report to Viacom co-President Tom Freston, a friend who handpicked him for the job. The two are among a group of high-profile entertainment figures -- all of them men -- who vacation together in exotic locales such as Brazil and Cuba.

Grey has made a career as a seller, mostly in television. Now, he’ll be a high-profile buyer -- one of the few people in town who can green-light a movie simply by saying yes. That he was named despite the gaping holes in his resume is a testament, many say, to Grey’s unflagging drive.

“Brad is very determined to get what he needs to get,” said former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of Brillstein-Grey’s many high-profile clients. “And he usually has four or five different ways to get there.”

Dozens of interviews with people who have worked closely with Grey paint a portrait of a skilled strategist whose single-minded focus has made him effective not just at closing deals but also at creating the kind of alliances that are essential to launching projects.

“Brad has a way of defusing situations,” says Warner Bros. production President Jeff Robinov, who credits Grey with helping the studio win a bidding war for rights to a Chinese gangster film that director Martin Scorsese is remaking under the title “The Departed.” Grey, Robinov said, “contacted the producers in Hong Kong, and then was prepared to put up his own money after we had gone as far as we were going to go.... If not for Brad, it would have fallen apart a million times.”

In contrast to many in Hollywood, Grey is also not afraid to admit he doesn’t know something. On the set of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” which Grey’s movie company, Plan B, helped to make, “he didn’t try to butt in,” said veteran producer Richard D. Zanuck. “He was anxious to be educated in the mechanics of making a film, where he didn’t have any experience whatsoever.”

As collegial as Grey can be, he can also seem distant, even aloof. People who’ve worked under him at his management firm say he can be a “one-man band” who keeps his own counsel. Despite carefully cultivating certain key relationships, he is rarely seen on the Hollywood party circuit, preferring to spend time with his wife and college sweetheart, Jill, and their three children.

Born in the Bronx, the youngest child of a New York garment industry salesman, Brad Alan Grey sold belt buckles made in his grandfather’s factory when he was still in high school. He began his industry career while still in college, working as a gofer for a concert promoter by the name of Harvey Weinstein, who would later go on to co-found Miramax Film Corp.

During the week, Grey studied business and communications at the State University of New York at Buffalo. On the weekends, he’d drive south to Manhattan to check out the comics at the Improv, where he met a booking agent named Chris Albrecht.

“He’s always been a dedicated, loyal, hardworking guy with business savvy and creative instincts,” said Albrecht, who is now chairman of HBO, the home of “The Sopranos.” “It’s a rare combination.”

Of course, Grey wasn’t always as polished as he is today. Comedian Bob Saget first met Grey in upstate New York when he agreed to perform in a Comedy Store college tour that Grey had booked. Grey picked Saget up at the airport and drove him to a local TV station, where the comic was due to appear on the morning show. When the interview began, Saget was amazed to see Grey join him on camera.

“We were on the air -- together!” Saget said, still marveling at Grey’s callow behavior.

In the early ‘80s, Grey moved to Los Angeles. One of the first people he met was Marc Gurvitz, a young manager who was aghast to learn that Grey was trying to build a business working out of his living room.

“I said, ‘You can’t work out of your apartment,’ ” recalled Gurvitz, who years later would become one of Grey’s lieutenants at Brillstein-Grey. So Grey moved into Gurvitz’s small space in a Wilshire Boulevard management firm. “He put this little desk in my office,” Gurvitz said, “and we both worked for six months” at that cramped location.

Things began to change in 1984, when Grey met Brillstein at a television syndication convention in San Francisco where Grey’s then-client Garry Shandling was the comic keynote. The next year the two managers bumped into each other at a Hawaii resort -- a coincidence so unlikely that according to Brillstein’s memoir, “Where Did I Go Right?” some have speculated that Grey purposely tracked him to the hotel. Grey denies that.

In 1985, Grey suggested that Brillstein merge his established company with his own small firm. “Brad’s timing was perfect,” Brillstein wrote, recalling how Grey could “talk to CEOs and the [talent] acts, and feel equally at home with both. He understood power and its uses.”

Grey was made a full partner in 1991. Four years later, Brillstein -- then 64 -- stepped back from daily management, selling his stake to Grey. By then the firm was already a powerhouse brimming with A-list stars such as Brad Pitt, Adam Sandler and “Saturday Night Live” producer Lorne Michaels.

Bent on establishing the firm as a major supplier of TV programs, Grey strategically expanded the business into production. He then amassed a personal fortune by selling off parts of the TV production arm to different buyers in three separate deals.

Under the first of these deals, ABC in 1994 paid Grey an estimated $100 million for about 50% of the TV operation. Two years later Grey sold most of the rest of it to MCA Inc., then owner of Universal Studios, for about $80 million.

Eventually, though, both ABC and MCA walked away from the TV unit, allowing Grey to take control again. He soon struck a new partnership, worth more than $50 million, with Sony Corp.

Some have accused Grey of profiting at others’ expense.

In 1998, Shandling -- an 18-year client -- filed a $100-million breach-of-contract suit against Grey alleging that he had put his own interests as an executive producer of “The Larry Sanders Show” ahead of the comedian’s interests. Grey countersued for $10 million and the parties settled out of court.

Others say Grey can be stingy in rewarding associates. For example, when the TV series “Just Shoot Me,” starring David Spade, went on the air, Brillstein and Grey collected a $50,000-per-episode executive producing fee. Gurvitz, who is Spade’s manager, complained that he had been unfairly cut out of the deal, according to a person familiar with the dust-up.

Gurvitz, who also represents Jennifer Aniston and Jim Belushi, eventually shared in the money. But one person who worked closely with Grey for years said the incident underscored something that his underlings know full well: “He’s in a rocket ship to the stars, but it’s a one-seater.”

For his part, Gurvitz scoffs at the notion that Grey is not generous with his staff: “I’m very happy with the arrangement that we have,” he said. Grey declined to comment on the matter.

It isn’t clear just how much Grey has made over the years at his management and production firm or how much he’s set to pull down as Paramount chief. This much is certain, though: He isn’t hurting.

He drives a black Mercedes S-600, a $125,000 car. After buying and razing the Pacific Palisades house in which Hollywood legends Charles Boyer and Joseph Cotten once lived, Grey built a seven-bedroom, 12-bath home in 1997. He also bought some adjacent properties.

“He always dreamed of having a big lawn and lake,” said Grey’s friend Brian Grazer, the Academy Award-winning producer. Soon, bulldozers and backhoes tore down the house next door and dug a huge hole.

Now Grey not only has his bass-stocked lake, he has become a truly big fish himself.