Viacom Dios

I have been a lttle remiss in not commenting on the whole Tom Cruise/Paramount imbroglio before now, but I wanted to hold off awhile and see how the whole thing shakes out.

And now the pattern is becoming clear.

Did Viacom (the parent company of Paramount Pictures) end their 14-year deal with Tom Cruise because of his recent bizarre behavior? Of course not: that was just a preemptive strike of sorts to try and get the moral high ground in spinning the failure of a negotiation.

The truth is a whole lot more complicated. And more interesting.

This is about business. Sumner Redstone could give two shits about what Tom Cruise does or does not do in public. He could have been spotted walking down Times Square stuffing his newborn baby in a blender to make Suri milkshakes -- and if "Mission Impossible III" had brought in $800 million dollars at the box office, Redstone would have told him that his kid was delicious and bought him a new blender.

Not only did the film underperform at the box office, the way Cruise's deal was structured meant that he might have made more money than Paramount. Cruise is one of a handful of performers (Tom Hanks is another) who get what they call "first dollar gross": between that and the amount of money he takes off the back end (from DVD sales and other ancillary rights), he stands to make an enormous amount of money from any given film. Way more than any studio is comfortable with him making.

And what's where we get down to the crunch of the issue, which is money and power.

Is Tom Cruise slipping? Possibly -- I implied as much in a previous blog entry. But he's still got a lot of clout at the foreign box office, even if he has damaged his domestic reputation with his arguments with Brooke Shields over prescription medications to fight post-partum depression and his ridiculously testy exchange with Matt ("You're glib") Lauer. But what Paramount is trying to do, it seems to me, is to send a shot across the bow, not just of Tom Cruise, but of every overpaid movie star out there whose films aren't grossing enough to satisfy the studios.

You're not worth the money we're paying you, the studios are saying. And we're not going to put up with it anymore.

There is a precedent for this kind of thing. Because this isn't the first time in film history that studio heads have tried to put recalcitrant movie stars in their place.

Back in 1919 the studios felt that the stars were getting too much money. Salaries were getting out of hand. So they decided to do something about it. Namely, to merge all the movie companies together into one big conglomerate -- and that way be able to demand whatever they wanted from their hired hands, otherwise known as actors. If filmmaking became a monopoly, the stars would have nowhere else to go, and thus would have to agree to whatever demands the studios made of them. Hollywood would become one big plantation.

Several big name movie stars of the day learned about this scheme (with the help of a female PI getting information out of an infatuated studio executive), and when they found out about it they decided to act. And so Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and star director D.W. Griffith decided to pool their resources and create their own, independent studio -- United Artists.

Could Tom Cruise do the same thing today? Could he become another Chaplin and make his own films his way? Is he willing to put his sizable fortune where his mouth is and finance his films himself?

It's quite possible that Cruise could have the last laugh in this situation. But he might do well to remember the words of another man who put his cash into pictures -- William Randolph Hearst.
Hearst had gone into pictures in a big way, and had lost a lot of money in trying to turn his mistress, Marion Davies, into a movie star in big, bloated costume epics (she later found her true niche in comedy).

When someone told Hearst, "You know, there's a lot of money in pictures," he is alleged to have replied: "Yes, I know -- mine."

Something to think about if you're Tom Cruise.

Tom Moran