Word: studioful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...find yourself in a money pit, try not to brag about it. It's one thing to wave off the corporate bean counters' attempts at cost control, as a studio source says Columbia president Mark Canton did last winter on Last Action Hero, but Canton and his boss, Sony Pictures chairman Peter Guber, were publicly cavalier about the mega-yen budget. A modestly priced Last Action Hero, Guber said at a conference in March, "would wind up being Last starring Arnold Schwarz." At the time, the line seemed funny...
...editor of Variety and ranting about the show-business paper's negative review of Last Action Hero? Columbia executives, crazed with anxiety in their corporate bunker, were peeved when the Los Angeles Times published a free-lance writer's lighthearted, thinly sourced account of a preview screening that the studio plausibly insists never occurred. But did they have to throw an embarrassing, no-win tantrum? Unless the newspaper agreed to keep the reporter from mentioning Columbia Pictures ever again, the studio said it would have nothing to do with anybody from the Times. "It's like Nixon in the last...
...Instead of blaming the press, blame your rivals: they really want you to fail. "I got so many calls over the weekend from people gloating," says a studio head, chuckling over his faxed copy of the disappointing Last Action grosses. "I never knew there were so many vicious people." The same executive helpfully pointed out that Last Action Hero is really the "first big picture" developed by Canton at Columbia, thus denying him credit for A Few Good Men and Groundhog...
...back on the road to success immediately. Luckily for Columbia, next week the studio is releasing In the Line of Fire, Clint Eastwood's entertaining, hugely commercial thriller, which will help the bosses forget this bad patch -- Arnold? Arnold who? -- and turn them back into blithe motion-picture geniuses, their jobs safe. "Remember," says an executive who knows Canton and Guber, "Guber is inextricably tied to this guy." Inextricably? "Yes," the bigwig confirms. "For a while, anyway...
...panicky studio gives "no-brainer" a new meaning...