Rupert gambles with Rice

Like him or loathe him, Rupert Murdoch is the last of the great media swashbucklers, a throwback to the pirates, cutthroats and visionaries who used to run the business before it was engulfed and devoured by giant risk-averse corporate behemoths. The earthquake that rocked News Corp. this week was a typical Murdoch seismic event. As one of his top executives once told me: “Rupert is a gambler. He tolerates noble failure more than complacency.”

More than anything else, that maxim seems to best explain the dramatic moves Murdoch made Thursday. Before his longtime No. 2 man Peter Chernin had finished cleaning out his desk, Murdoch boldly revamped his company’s executive superstructure. There were many moves in Rupert’s chess game, but the key ones were all about Murdoch’s lucrative but endangered profit center: the Fox TV business. He essentially has taken three executives who had great success propelling Fox film divisions and installed them in positions of power, running the TV wing of the empire.

20th Century Fox Co-Chairmen Jim Gianopulos and Tom Rothman, who’ve presided over the most disciplined and profitable movie studio of the past decade, will now also oversee TV production along with a host of Chernin’s former duties, most crucially much of News Corp.’s new media ventures. This includes online media ventures such as Hulu that Chernin had practically willed into existence when most established media companies were still obsessed with suing YouTube and keeping their most valued programming off the Internet.

I’ve been tough on them over the past year, but giving Rothman and Gianopulos more clout was a no-brainer -- they’ve earned it. Murdoch’s most unorthodox move is the promotion of Peter Rice, until now the head of the Fox Searchlight specialty film division, who will run the Fox TV network. Hugely successful as a specialty division czar, having made or acquired such hits as “Sideways,” “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Juno” and this year’s Oscar winner, “Slumdog Millionaire,” Rice has always been Rupert’s fair-haired boy. For a man whose relationships with his own sons have blown hot and cold, with the offspring often chafing under their father’s rule, Rice has been the good, dutiful son, his relations with Rupert unburdened by blood relations.

Very buttoned-down, always wary of the media spotlight, Rice plays his cards close to the vest. Even when he was having lunch with an old friend this week, he acted as if he was staying put, saying he felt most comfortable remaining at Searchlight. But Murdoch clearly wanted to give Rice a bigger portfolio. He’s quietly made himself an indispensable News Corp. player, careful enough not to seek credit for his triumphs, shrewd enough to avoid the blame for his rare missteps, such as Fox Atomic, the genre division that was a very quiet failure.

Running Fox’s TV division, Rice will either succeed or fail in a very public way, since most Fox insiders see him as Chernin’s eventual successor as Rupert’s right-hand man. At 42, Rice is closer in age to Rupert’s sons and daughter (we’re not counting the toddlers Murdoch has from his most recent marriage), making him a generational choice as well, since he will surely someday be working alongside whichever one of the Murdoch offspring ends up inheriting the empire after their father’s death or retirement.

So why put the future of the TV network, the empire’s most valuable resource, in the hands of a TV neophyte? Murdoch is a gambler, with a gambler’s instincts. As anyone in the media game will tell you, the network TV model is broken, on the brink of collapse, just as the newspaper business and the music industry before it. It is no longer time for incremental fixes; radical change is needed. That’s what Rice is there to provide. If you believe in upending the entire business, searching for a new economic model, you don’t hire a solid, experienced veteran, you hire an outsider who’s not tied to the old ways of thinking. In Murdoch’s announcement, he didn’t say Rice was the right person to “run” the TV business; he said he was the right person to “transform” it.

Murdoch has looked at the TV business and seen the obvious: TV’s old mass audience is quickly migrating to YouTube, Hulu and Pirate Bay. The TV models that still work are niche businesses, cable channels that appeal to specific audiences, not the vast mainstream wasteland. The executive who Murdoch ousted Thursday was Peter Liguori, who’d done a great job reinventing Fox’s FX cable channel but couldn’t get any traction running the network. I suspect Rice will learn from Liguori’s experience. He will have to find a way to rethink and reinvent network TV, finding a way to free it from the old mass-audience model that -- with rare exceptions such as Fox’s own “American Idol” -- is going, going, gone.

Seeing a new business with fresh eyes doesn’t guarantee success. But it doesn’t bode ill either. Chernin was a TV guy who started in the book business and ended up running Murdoch’s film studio, with pretty impressive results wherever he went. Barry Diller was a success untold times over, moving from TV to film and then back to TV -- he’s the one who invented the Fox network in the first place. But Brandon Tartikoff, who was a genius at running a TV network, stumbled badly overseeing Paramount Pictures. Andy Lack, a savvy TV news guy, was a disaster running Sony Music. If NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker could sing, he’d be crooning, “Regrets, I’ve had a few, mostly like hiring Ben Silverman to run the network.” It’s a crap shoot. But Rupert believes that talent is translatable. His operating instinct is to give new or bigger jobs to people who’ve shown a gift for consistently growing their businesses and keeping their divisions in the black.

The last thing anyone has to worry about is Fox Searchlight. Even with Rice gone, it will be in good hands with its chief operating officers, marketing whiz Nancy Utley and distribution guru Steve Gilula, who are held in great regard, even by longtime rivals. Rice’s charisma may be missed, but it’s unlikely that Searchlight’s business model will change. It has been the one company that has consistently married art to commerce, finding quirky films that could cross over to a broader audience.

Under Murdoch, News Corp. has been a strange hybrid of wildly different management styles and corporate cultures -- intensely entrepreneurial, quick to embrace innovation, largely decentralized and always, but always, a realm that celebrates fierce competition.

But for all of its survival-of-the-fittest ethos, for all its willingness to adapt to hard new realities, News Corp. is still the equivalent of a Middle Eastern dictatorship. With Chernin and now Rice, its executives have succeeded on merit. But the top job at the company is a Murdoch family reserve, which is why Chernin packed his bags in the first place. One of the kids will eventually be given the keys to the kingdom. Our fascination with all these dramatic changes revolves around how much of the kingdom will be left when Rupert finally passes the torch.

‘Twilight’ rumor is eclipsed

I hate to be the skunk at the picnic, but Summit Entertainment has not -- I repeat NOT -- hired “Orphanage” director Juan Antonio Bayona to direct “Eclipse,” the third film in the wildly successful “Twilight” series.

That would be the exact opposite of the “news” circulating earlier this week, which stated that Summit “has tapped Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona to direct ‘Eclipse.’ ”

By sheer coincidence, I had lunch Thursday with Erik Feig, who’s president of production at Summit and the man most involved with managing the hit series of films. (“New Moon,” the second film in the series, begins production later this month with Chris Weitz at the helm.)

Feig was shocked to see the media reports saying Summit had hired Bayona.

“The ‘Eclipse’ directing job hasn’t been offered to Juan Antonio or anyone else,” he told me. “We’ve met with three or four talented filmmakers and we’ll be meeting with three or four more other candidates before we make any decision. No one has been offered the job.”

As it turns out, Bayona was in town and had a Wednesday meeting with Summit execs, who are certainly impressed by his resume. Bayona has also met with “Twilight” author Stephenie Meyer, who has a lot to say about any key creative choices made on each film in the series. On the other hand, Bayona has told friends that he isn’t sure he wants to tackle the film. Though he also admires the series, he’s concerned about how much creative involvement he would have coming in to direct the third installment in a series, where most of the casting and character development is already in place.

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patrick.goldstein@latimes.com