For as long as Hollywood has made movies, its relationship with the truth has been as shaky as a hand-held camera. Actors -- and legions of others in the industry -- lie about their age; producers fudge the real costs of making movies; studio executives distort box-office grosses. One movie producer titled her memoir "Hello, He Lied."
But can Hollywood handle the truth?
As the economic squeeze around the movie industry tightens, with executives openly worrying about the long-term prospects of the business, cracks are appearing in the industry's carefully tended facade. Tensions between the studios and their movie stars have been rising all summer, turning this into an uncomfortably hot season of candor.
When Viacom Inc. Chairman Sumner Redstone cast off Tom Cruise and producing partner Paula Wagner this week with a frank assessment of the actor's personal liabilities, it was just the latest salvo. In a biography released this summer, director M. Night Shyamalan excoriated the top brass at Walt Disney Co., the studio that backed his films for years, for daring to offer a blunt assessment of his latest project, "Lady in the Water." Producer James Robinson chastised star Lindsay Lohan for her partying ways in a no-holds-barred letter that was quickly "leaked." And top agent Ari Emanuel and Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal publicly denounced Mel Gibson for his anti-Semitic rant as he was being arrested for driving while intoxicated in July.
Even the Internal Revenue Service warned the town's A-list stars that they needed to bring a little more truth to their tax returns, warning them that the free swag they cart off from award shows and film festivals counts as taxable income.
The town's newfound honesty may last no longer than "Poseidon," but agents and producers fear it will be here for a while, a consequence of an increasingly corporate culture in which a studio's next quarterly earnings matter more than its past relationships and today's stock price carries more weight than tomorrow's potential blockbuster.
Top stars were usually spared public chastisement, but they are no longer immune. "There are fewer and fewer movies being made and fewer places to make them, so the tolerance for someone whose value is seen as being less than it was is much lower," said Mark Gordon, the producer of "The Day After Tomorrow" and "The Patriot." "People feel freer to make more cavalier comments."
