Paramount’s micro-micromanagement

More troubling for screenwriters in the 1980s, Paramount’s micro-micromanagement seemed to work.

Barry Diller and Michael Eisner hired additional staff, ambitious young Jeffrey Katzenberg as Diller’s assistant, for example, with no film background. Dawn Steel and Don Simpson joined as production executives.

Another manic-depressive, Simpson was the champion note-writer among them, churning out thirty pages in a weekend, in the habit of conferencing the others and reading them aloud at four-thirty on a Monday morning.

The others admired his skill for dissecting a screenplay, pinpointing exactly what was needed (and what the screenwriter had missed), something he called a “movie moment,” a flourish of emotion, joy, or sadness.

Katzenberg would reach the lot at six-thirty and feel the hoods of the other executive cars to see if they were still warm. Diller inaugurated his if-you-don’t-come-in-on-Saturday, don’t-bother-to-show-up-Sunday work ethic.

The Killer Dillers, as his staff was known, peered down their noses at talent if only because they worked so much harder. Eisner was accused of having cheeseburger taste – products aimed at your knees, as one of his executives put it – but the studio released a list of estimable movies in the early 1980s: Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People” (with Alvin Sargent adapting a Judith Guest novel), David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” (screenplay by Christopher De Vore, Eric Bergen, and David Lynch), Steven Spielberg’s “The Raiders of the Lost Ark (story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman, screenplay by Larry Kasdan).

There just wasn’t a lot of humor.