Why do all these powerful, wealthy alpha males venture out of their comfy enclaves and plunge into an utterly unfamiliar, notoriously Byzantine business that they often approach with distain and condescension? What sort of mass-induced hypnotic state convinces a German investor, for example, that it's a sensible idea to sink millions into a film homage to L. Ron Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth"? Or an otherwise adroit telecommunications mogul into putting his name in the credits of an unnecessary remake of "Around the World in Eighty Days"? Is there some sort of semiotic explanation for why otherwise astute people from another culture--whether it's Amsterdam or Peoria--get hopelessly tangled up in movie industry lingo and end up mumbling about "synergy" after that disastrous first-cut screening?
Chew. Spit. Repeat.
The Movie Industry Consumes Carpetbagging Investors Like Prime-Cut Steak. What's the Appeal of Being Eaten Alive?
Cover story
To truly understand why would-be moguls mostly fail, we must look past the conventional explanations and into the realms of behavioral psychology and anthropology. It also helps to understand a bit about chaos theory.
The film industry is so notoriously hard to crack that there's a rich literary genre on the subject--ranging from "Final Cut" (Steven Bach's account of Transamerica's disastrous stewardship of United Artists in the 1960s and 1970s) to "Out of Focus" (Charles Kipps' account of David Puttnam's brief tenure as head of Coca Cola-owned Columbia in the late 1980s) to innumerable fly-on-the-wall exposes of the tribulations of Bronfman and others. Similarly, the precise strategic mistakes of the Matsushitas, PolyGrams and JVCs have been dissected and number-crunched by savvy business journalists in the Wall Street Journal, Variety and other business publications. Yet the mountain of bleached bones does little to deter the next wave of wannabe moguls, simply because the one enduring truth about all this is that we're dealing with human nature, not logic.
"Outsiders who've been very successful and made a lot of money rightly think they're smarter than the average person and perhaps even somewhat creative," explains Roderick Kramer, a onetime Hollywood script reader who is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University's graduate business school, where he also teaches a course on the movie industry for MBA students. "They want to believe they can translate that experience and power into success in Hollywood."
