Unfortunately, the world's dream factory, by its very nature, doesn't quite work that way. And it could be that even the business world's richest and smartest minds are helpless to resist a fate that may be determined, in part, by our genes.
Syracuse University evolutionary psychologist John Marshall Townsend suggests that would-be moguls may be driven metaphorically--and sometimes literally, in the cases of Joe Kennedy and Howard Hughes--by the same urges as male bulls: the biological imperative to dominate and procreate. "You're talking about the place where there are the most desirable women in the world," says Townsend, who has studied the sexual behavior of powerful males. "Couple that with the fact that male attractiveness doesn't matter in the subculture--you can look like the Elephant Man if you have enough power. The problem is that the cows are encircled by the bulls who already are in the herd. You've got to get past them."
Daniel Fessler, an assistant professor of anthropology at UCLA, notes that Hollywood in many ways functions as a classic ethnic group. "Essentially, the movie business is a culture of its own in which members use common behavioral markers--their style of dress, various decorations, a distinctive dialect and so on. What these markers are telling you is that another person shares the same values and cultural understandings and expectations of what is appropriate. An out-group female may be allowed in, because from an evolutionary perspective the in-group males stand to benefit from the opportunity to mate. But an out-group male is merely a competitor for resources."
Instead of locking horns like real bulls, the in-group may resort to trickery and exploitation. "The in-group members may look at the outsider and think, 'I'm not going to have reciprocal relations with this person in the future, because he's not going to be allowed to stay.' So instead they go after whatever he's got that's of value."
The idea of biology as destiny might seem odd in a culture where so many conspicuous body parts are fake, and Viagra is dispensed like Pez. But that theory neatly meshes with Roderick Kramer's field of organizational behavior, which studies the motivation, decision-making, uses of power and other things that people do inside businesses, and crosses into the realms of psychology and economics. Kramer sees Hollywood as a series of interlocking networks, composed of various combinations of movie potentates who started together in the proverbial mailroom and clawed their way to the top. Because they didn't kill one another in the process, they form alliances that last--and are almost impenetrable from the outside.
