Disney Massacre Makes Entertainment Industry Even More Paranoid About Job Security
When a movie studio serves notice that it's received a cost-cutting mandate from its corporate parent by publicly executing a prominent executive and placing her severed head atop a pike outside the Grill on the Alley, everyone in Hollywood, already the job insecurity capital of the world, reflexively reaches for their necks and wonders if they should get a waddle-tuck before their appointment with the guillotine. Today's LAT attempts to capture the wave of heightened paranoia touched off by Disney's announced 650-person Cast Member Massacre by soliciting quotes from producers entering the brave, new world of seemingly routine cost-cutting and layoffs:
"I think we're moving into uncharted territory, and there's great unease about where we're headed," said Oscar-winning producer Doug Wick, whose credits include "Gladiator" and this year's "RV." "Occasionally, this fear turns into panic."
Producer Brian Grazer, a multiple Oscar winner whose current release "The Da Vinci Code" has racked up more than $700 million worldwide, went further.
"It's as if the managerial elite has made a secret pact to adhere to certain business principles that they want to enforce on agents and artists," said Grazer, who sees studios as more rigid today about how far they'll stretch to compensate even the biggest stars, directors, producers and writers on movie projects.
"That's never happened in the 25 years I've been producing."
Grazer's comments may sound slightly paranoid, but may suggest a strategy for holding at bay the bottom-line-obsessed corporate interlopers threatening the livelihood of the moviemaking castes. What Hollywood needs right now is for its own shadowy elites, the Gay and Jewish Mafias, to join forces and formulate their own secret agreements before they're overwhelmed by an army of ledger-balancers tyrannically demanding acceptable returns on their nine-figure feature film investments. Nothing short of a superproducer's ability to simultaneously maintain seven vacation homes is at stake!
