Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Less than three months after Tom Cruise suffered an ugly brushoff from his long-time studio home Paramount Pictures, the sidelined star has done what any self-respecting, really, really, really rich and famous guy would do - he got his own movie studio, and one with a storied Hollywood pedigree at that. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. (MGM) has announced a deal with Cruise and his production partner, Paula Wagner, to relaunch the United Artists studio (UA), the company founded by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith in 1919 and responsible for such iconic film franchises as James...
...eyes of many in Hollywood, Paramount-where Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone publicly blamed Cruise's "inappropriate behavior" for the disappointing box office returns of Mission: Impossible III-is no longer such a place. Under Cruise/Wagner Productions' unusually generous Paramount deal, the studio paid out as much as $10 million a year in overhead and development. When Cruise began jumping on Oprah's furniture in rapture about fianc?e Katie Holmes and finger-wagging about psychiatry on the Today Show, "he was embarrassing the studio," Redstone says in December's Vanity Fair. Not to mention costing Paramount, the outspoken executive estimates...
...helping to revive UA as an artist-led studio, Cruise will be the latest entrant in an old-school Hollywood tradition. Like Chaplin's original vision, Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope and Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg's Dreamworks SKG (now owned by those baddies at Viacom), Cruise's UA will, apparently, attempt to nurture a creative environment for filmmakers. In an ever-more bottom-line-conscious era of movie-making, it sounds like an impossible mission. But then, we hear this guy has experience with that sort of thing...
...years, three generations of Robert Blue's family have operated a luggage store at Hollywood and Vine, along the brass-starred Walk of Fame. Lucille Ball bought her suitcases there. The neighborhood fell into disrepair in recent years, though, with homeless people camping out on trash-strewn streets. Blue's shop was looking shabby too, its window displays outmoded, its linoleum worn. But when the City of Los Angeles moved to condemn his building--not to build a school or a fire station but to make way for a glitzy $500 million private hotel and condo complex--Blue...
...Robert Blue, back on Hollywood and Vine, the issue is fairness, whether the government seizes land or merely passes a law affecting the value of a home or business. "If you make an investment and the rules change," he says, "you should be compensated." It's up to his fellow taxpayers in California and the three other states to decide whether they are ready...