Academy Awards, including Best Pic-
ture. He’d débuted films at Cannes six
years in a row—“The Mission,” with
Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons, won
the Palme d’Or—and helped launch
the careers of Alan Parker, Ridley Scott,
Adrian Lyne, and Roland Jofé. Putt-
nam’s movies were producer-driven
and serious, and built an audience via
a slow graduated- release schedule. He
made anti-blockbusters, and did so on
budget, without caving in to agents,
agent packages, or agency fees. This
was attractive to an industry worried
about cost inflation. In 1986, Columbia
Pictures needed a chairman, and it
sought him out.
Puttnam auditioned by flying to At-
lanta and handing a heartfelt manifesto
to the top brass of the Coca-Cola Com-
pany, which owned the studio. He loved
America, he explained, because he’d
grown up loving American movies. Thal-
berg was his childhood hero. But some-
thing had changed, he believed, and
Americans were becoming indiferent
to their great cultural patrimony—an
indiference that was linked, Puttnam
maintained, to how movies were being
made and distributed. If he came to Co-
lumbia, it would be on a condition. “Tal-
ent packages would be out,” he informed
Coca-Cola. “If I don’t have your sup-
port on this, then I’m the wrong per-
son for you.” He was hired.
Puttnam installed himself in Greta
Garbo’s old villa in Coldwater Canyon
and spent the following year telling
anyone who would listen that serious
films could be popular and popular
films could be serious. Puttnam’s pub-
lic comments as the head of a major
American movie studio are astonish-
ing for their candor. “If Coca-Cola ac-
cidentally created one hundred million
cans of faulty Coke, you know for sure
the entire one hundred million cans
would be dropped in the Atlantic or
Pacific Ocean,” he said. “What do we
do with a crappy movie? We double its
advertising budget and hope for a big
opening weekend.” A few months later,
Puttnam was forced to resign, after
Coca-Cola decided to divest itself of
Columbia Pictures, which was even-
tually sold to Sony.
Among Puttnam’s failures during his
thirteen months in the position was his
inability, or unwillingness, to close a deal
with Bill Murray and his agent, Michael
Ovitz, on a sequel to “Ghostbusters.”
When the movie was finally made, two
years later, it set a box-oice record in
its opening weekend. (The record was
broken, one week later, by “Batman.”)
A few years ago, the Hollywood Reporter
revealed that Sony had plans to turn
“Ghostbusters” into a cinematic uni-
verse. The first reboot, with an all-fe-
male starring cast, was released in 2016.
It was produced by Amy Pascal.W
hen movies were mostly one-
ofs—and not spinofs, sequels,
reboots, or remakes—they had to be
good. A little blunt, too, maybe. Con-
juring a universe out of nothing, bring-
ing it to crisis and back again, all in
under two hours, required, if nothing
else, craftsmanship on a level admired
even by European snobs. “The Ameri-
cans, who are much more stupid when
it comes to analysis, instinctively bring
of very complex scripts,” Godard said,
in 1962. “They also have a gift for the
kind of simplicity which brings depth.”
No matter how well executed, commer-
cial success for such a film was never
guaranteed. Laying out an enormous
sum of money on a product whose cre-
ation depends upon a harmony of mas-
sive egos, and whose final appeal is the
result of intangibles, is a terrible basis
for a commercial enterprise.
For most of Hollywood history, the
movie business has needed a hostage
buyer, a customer with little choice but
to purchase the product. First, this was
the theatre chains, which the studios
owned, or controlled, until 1948, when
the Supreme Court forced the studios
to sell them on antitrust grounds. In the
eighties and nineties, video stores partly
filled the role. But, increasingly, the hos-
tage buyer is us.
Today, the major franchises are com-
mercially invulnerable because they
ofer up proprietary universes that their
legions of fans are desperate to reënter
on almost any terms. These reliable
sources of profit are now Hollywood’s
financial bedrock. The business model
began to take shape, gradually, in the
eighties; it solidified a decade ago, when
a writer’s strike recalibrated Hollywood’s
tolerance for risk. (The global financial
crisis played a role as well.) At the same
time, digital distribution was on therise; Netflix, which launched its stream-
ing service early in 2007, after years as
a mail-order company, began eating
into DVD sales. As the major studios
faced the loss of a large and predictable
revenue stream, they trimmed their re-
lease schedules and focussed more of
their eforts on the global mega-brands:
Marvel, DC, “Harry Potter,” “The Fast
and the Furious,” “Star Wars.” The
movie business transitioned from a sys-
tem dominated by a handful of larger-
than-life stars to one defined by I.P.
This brought the era shaped by Ovitz
to a close.
“Michael Ovitz,” writes Violaine
Roussel, in her book “Representing
Talent: Hollywood Agents and the
Making of Movies” (University of Chi-
cago Press), “is commonly described as
the demiurge responsible for shaping
and leading the reconfiguration of the
system linking together the main agen-
cies and the major studios.” Roussel is
a professor of sociology at the Univer-
sity of Paris, and she spent five years
studying the world Ovitz helped cre-
ate, interviewing movie agents, shad-
owing them at work, and meeting with
their various rivals and counterparts,
including top executives at the major
studios. In Roussel’s telling, agents are
now less like Ovitz than they are like
art dealers in the style of Leo Castelli
or Paul Durand- Ruel: keepers of se-
crets, fulfillers of dreams, bearers of bad
news. Roussel’s interview subjects speak,
repeatedly and sensitively, to the chal-
lenge, as she puts it, of converting “the
symbolic recognition of talent into (po-
tential) economic transactions.” The
agents who talked to Roussel report
being on call twenty-four hours a day,
and structuring their personal lives
around accumulating the social capi-
tal that their work demands. This is
nothing new, presumably, but there is
a fresh note of desolation running
through her account.
Where once an agent was, as Rous-
sel puts it, “a creative entrepreneur” whose
bread and butter was “her close rela-
tionship with star talent,” today a Hol-
lywood agent is “an expert in conduct-
ing risk-controlled investment strategies
by securing the rights to film franchises
and ‘sequelizable’ productions,” some-
one “whose practice resembles that of
certain professionals in the world of