Word: paramount
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...native of the Bronx, Davis joined Paramount in 1958 as director of sales and marketing. After G&W bought the studio in 1966, Davis quickly rose to become the principal deputy to company founder Bluhdorn. When Davis gained control of the company in 1983, he immediately spun off some 100 subsidiaries, ranging from zinc mines to sugar plantations. Within 2 1/2 years, he reduced the company's size by half...
Some former employees say Davis is an authoritarian manager who sometimes has difficulty keeping talented subordinates. Among the top-level Paramount executives who have gone to rival companies: Barry Diller, now chairman of Fox Inc.; Michael Eisner, chief of Walt Disney; and Dawn Steel, head of Columbia Pictures. Davis told FORTUNE in 1984 that he was "thrilled" to have made the magazine's annual list of toughest bosses. FORTUNE quoted a business associate saying, "He exceeds all of the qualifications for the category of s.o.b...
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...
...phone on the desk of Richard Munro, chairman of Time Inc., rang at 6 p.m. last Tuesday. On the line was Martin Davis, chairman of Paramount Communications, a onetime industrial conglomerate that had changed its name from Gulf & Western just the day before. Davis had a stunning message for his fellow chief executive. Although Munro had assurances from Davis that he would not mount a takeover bid for Time, Davis was reneging: he declared that Paramount was launching an offer to acquire Time for $175 a share, or $10.7 billion. Time stock had closed at 126 that...
...Paramount's tender set the stage for a clash of media titans that could lead to months of multibillion-dollar broadsides, legal pyrotechnics and dangerously unpredictable consequences. The Paramount bid came just 2 1/2 weeks before shareholders of Time and Warner Communications were to vote on merging their firms into the world's largest media company, with total revenues of $10 billion. But the sudden strike by Paramount, whose operations include one of Hollywood's top movie-and-TV studios and the giant publishing house Simon & Schuster, disrupted those plans and threatened to provoke a free-for-all in which...