Word: goldwyn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...studios are so willing to pay breathtaking sums to surefire stars. Now Hollywood's obsession with the talented few is fueling a billion-dollar personnel tug-of-war that pits Warner Bros. against Sony for the services of the two hottest movie producers to come along since Samuel Goldwyn met Louis B. Mayer...
...clout in Hollywood, Martin Davis, 62, would never be mistaken for a movie mogul. He is a soft-spoken man who clearly lacks the bravura of his former boss, producer Samuel Goldwyn, for whom Davis once worked as an office boy and press agent. But Davis is a man in a hurry. He leapfrogged to the top of Gulf & Western over two more senior executives after the death of conglomerateur Charles Bluhdorn. It took Davis just six years to transform Gulf & Western from an unwieldy, 1960s-style pastiche of unrelated companies into the more focused media giant that he renamed...
Davis still tells friends that Goldwyn never got his name straight, referring to him as "Marvin." That slight dogs the Paramount chief to this ( day: he is often confused with Marvin Davis, the Denver oilman who is making a bid for Northwest Airlines. As the struggle for control of Time Inc. heats up, Martin Davis' relative obscurity is likely...
...malapropisms -- calling the French painter "Toujours Lautrec," asking some fellow schemers to "include me out" of a deal -- gained Samuel Goldwyn a perverse fame as the archetypal Hollywood immigrant mogul, crude and semiliterate. But as A. Scott Berg demonstrates in this readable, richly researched biography, Goldwyn was never an archetypal anything, except in his poor Jewish origins in Eastern Europe. Unlike the Mayers and Warners, he made relatively few films, and he never built a mighty empire with a huge star roster and an immense distribution network. He was the ultimate independent producer, with a compulsive need for autonomy...
...Berg's account, Goldwyn's radical self-reliance had something like the nobility of a tragic flaw. His two marriages were deeply troubled, and as a father he was sometimes cruelly distant. What sustained and transformed his life were his simple, almost innocent, aspirations. His movies at their tasteful, well-crafted best (Dodsworth, The Westerner, The Best Years of Our Lives) had the kind of polished literacy the immigrant lad could not himself command but could command others to produce on his behalf...