Hollywood loves uplifting tales of romance, redemption and courage. But when it comes to axing its own people, the industry serves up horror stories.
This week Disney production chief Nina Jacobson found out she was losing her job while her partner was in labor with the couple's third child. Jacobson wasn't even the first studio executive to get fired in a maternity ward -- the late studio executive Dawn Steel was about to give birth in 1987 when she learned that Paramount Pictures was booting her out.
In show business, an industry that's all about relationships, the ways people get tossed can resonate louder than box-office grosses. Keeping score of who's up and who's down dominates workplace conversations because the latest pecking order determines the fate of projects.
Still, Hollywood seems to have a knack for the memorable pink slip. Directors are canned weeks into filming, executives find their office furniture in hallways and on lawns, fathers sack their sons and studio chiefs hear of their demise from journalists.
"It's one of the primary ways of exercising power in Hollywood," says industry author Peter Biskind. "And it's often done by people who relish ruling by fear."
But even the most intimidating can be humbled themselves.
Michael Ovitz, once the most feared figure in Hollywood when he was an agent, was dispatched as Walt Disney Co.'s president in 1996 by then-Chief Executive Michael Eisner when the Disney chief invited him one night to his mother's apartment in New York.
Eisner was waiting with a news release that said Ovitz was leaving "by mutual consent." Two years earlier, Eisner got rid of studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg in a similar manner.
Testifying at a trial related to his dismissal, Ovitz said, "I was cut out like cancer. I guess you could say I got pushed out the sixth-floor window."
Even blood can't save a job. Mogul Ted Turner told son Robert, "You're toast," when breaking the news to him that he was out. The legendary Darryl F. Zanuck fired his son, producer Richard Zanuck, in 1970 as president of 20th Century Fox. The son's undoing? He had fired his father's girlfriend.
So traumatic was her own firing that actress Annabelle Gurwitch collected dozens of similar tales from friends and turned them into a book, "Fired! Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized and Dismissed." Gurwitch says she was dumped from her dream job in a play directed by Woody Allen, who, she said, told her she "looked retarded."
