Paramount



PARAMOUNT IN THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: BLOCKBUSTER FRANCHISES AND GLOBAL CONGLOMERATES

The Gulf + Western buyout relegated Balaban to an emeritus role (along with Zukor), as the irrepressible Gulf + Western founder Charles Bludhorn took command of the company. The early Bludhorn era saw an increase in television series production, accelerated by the 1969 acquisition of Desilu, and the unexpected installation of Robert Evans (b. 1930) as head of motion picture production. Both proved to be good moves. The television division generated new hit series ( The Brady Bunch , 1969; Happy Days , 1974, et al.), while the Desilu acquisition gave Paramount several established series like Mission: Impossible (1966–1973) and particularly Star Trek (1966–1969) which, upon cancellation as network series, became hugely successful in syndication during the burgeoning cable era—and later, of course, spawned successful movie franchises. Evans, meanwhile, immediately emerged as one of the chief architects of an "American New Wave"—an auteur-driven cinema geared increasingly to the era's youth and counter cultures. Paramount's output under Evans included Rosemary's Baby (1968), Goodbye Columbus (1969), Love Story (1970), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), and Chinatown (1974). Evans left for independent production in the mid-1970s, but Paramount's success continued—indeed, accelerated—under Barry Diller and Michael Eisner. The studio continued to mine the youth market with films like Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978), and enjoyed critical as well as commercial success with films like Heaven Can Wait (1978), Ordinary People (1980), Reds (1981), and Terms of Endearment (1983).

Paramount also pursued mainstream audiences with calculated blockbuster fare and a big-screen "franchise" strategy—that is, movie series generated by high-cost, megahits like Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and Beverly Hills Cop (1984). Raiders , produced by George Lucas (b. 1944) and directed by Steven Spielberg (b. 1946), launched the highly successful "Indiana Jones" films in a partnership with Lucasfilm Limited, as well as a TV series coproduced by Lucasfilm, Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, and Paramount. The studio coproduced the Beverly Hills Cop films with a company owned by star Eddie Murphy (b. 1961), whose long-term relationship with Paramount generated many other box-office hits ( 48 Hours , 1982; Trading Places , 1983; Coming to America , 1988). The Star Trek series was in a class by itself as an entertainment franchise. Its lineage includes ten feature films, four subsequent liveaction TV and cable series, an animated series, and a literally incalculable number of media tie-ins and licensed products—including an entire book division at Simon & Schuster, a Paramount (now Viacom) subsidiary.

Bludhorn's death in 1983 brought Martin S. Davis in as chief executive officer of Gulf + Western, and a year later Frank Mancuso took over the studio (as Diller left for Fox and Eisner for Disney). Paramount continued to surge, reclaiming its top spot among Hollywood studios, fueled primarily by its hit-spawning movie franchises, along with hit TV series like Family Ties (1982–1989) and Cheers (1982–1993), and a run of box-office surprises including Top Gun (1986), Crocodile Dundee (1986), Fatal Attraction (1987), and Ghost (1990). Meanwhile, Gulf + Western steadily "downsized" to focus on media and entertainment, and in 1989 the parent company's title was officially changed to Paramount Communications. The same year, Paramount attempted a hostile takeover of Time Inc., but the publishing giant opted to merge with Warner Communications. So Paramount continued to look for a suitable partner as a media mergers-and-acquisitions wave swelled in the early 1990s, eventually submitting to a $10 billion buyout (initiated in 1993 and consummated in 1994) by Viacom, a global conglomerate controlled by Sumner Redstone. Viacom had been expanding at a truly incredible rate since Redstone took over the media giant in 1987, and the process continued throughout the booming 1990s. Besides buying Paramount, Viacom also acquired Blockbuster Video in 1994, launched the UPN cable network in 1995, and closed out the decade with the $50 billion acquisition of CBS (formerly Westinghouse) in 1999. The purchase of CBS was a telling irony in modern media annals, in that Viacom was created in 1971 when the FCC had forced CBS to spin off its syndication division.

Paramount continued to produce top movie hits in the 1990s, including Mission: Impossible (1996) and its sequel (2000), and the phenomenally successful Forrest Gump (1994). But the hits were less frequent and many of its biggest hits were cofinanced and thus shared with other studios—most notably Titanic (1997) with Twentieth Century Fox and Saving Private Ryan (1998) with DreamWorks. The studio's success after the CBS merger has been even more sporadic, leading to considerable turnover in the executive ranks—with the sole exception of Redstone himself, who became board chairman and CEO in 1996 (at age 73) and has maintained power over the ever-expanding Viacom empire into the new millennium. The sheer size of this global media giant as of the early 2000s is staggering. It includes over a dozen film and television production companies (including Paramount Pictures and Paramount Television); the Paramount Film Library (over 2,500 titles); over a dozen broadcast and cable networks (including CBS, UPN, MTV, Showtime, the Comedy Channel), along with 40 owned-and-operated stations and some 300 affiliates; the world's number one video rental chain (Blockbuster, with over 8,500 stores); shared ownership of over 1,000 movie screens worldwide; a global distribution partnership with Universal (UIP); amusement parks in the United States and Canada; over a dozen publishing entities (including Simon & Schuster and Scribners); a radio operation (CBS Radio and Infinity) with 180 stations; a music publishing company that holds the copyright on over 100,000 song titles; the number one billboard advertising company in the United States and Europe (Outdoor Advertising), and so on.

While the Paramount "brand name" remains vital to Viacom's success, and the studio's movie products continue to drive the parent company's entertainment product lines, the studio is scarcely on par with the Paramount of old—even the Paramount of the 1970s and 1980s—given the structure, complexity, and general sprawl of the media conglomerate at large. Paramount is hardly able (or expected) to sustain an identifiable house style, which would require stable management and resources, including talent on both sides of the camera, and thus the only consistent "markers" of its style are the signature franchises. The sheer size of the media giant has become so great, in fact, that Redstone in early 2005 proposed it be split into two publicly traded companies: Viacom (which will include Paramount Pictures and the powerhouse MTV network) and CBS (which will include Paramount Television and the other television, cable, and home-video holdings). The Viacom board approved the split in June 2005, and the 82-year-old Redstone told the press, "The age of the conglomerate is over." While that claim is dubious, the split may signal a new chapter in the saga of Paramount Pictures.

SEE ALSO Star System ; Studio System

Bach, Steven. Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend . New York: DeCapo, 1992.

DeMille, Cecil B. Autobiography . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959.

Eames, John Douglas. The Paramount Story . London: Octopus, 1985.

Finler, Joel W. The Hollywood Story . New York: Crown, 1988.

Halliwell, Leslie. Mountain of Dreams: The Golden Years at Paramount Pictures . New York: Stonehill, 1976.

Gomery, Douglas. "The Movies Become Big Business: Publix Theaters and the Chain Store Strategy." In The American Movie Industry: The Business of Motion Pictures , edited by Gorham Kindem, 104–115. Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Zukor, Adolph, with Dale Kramer. The Public Is Never Wrong: The Autobiography of Adolph Zukor . New York: Putnam, 1953.

Thomas Schatz



Also read article about Paramount from Wikipedia

User Contributions:

Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: