When I park five stories down past an executive’s assigned space and walk into an office to find a dude in a quarter-zip and box-fresh Allbirds, I can tell there will be a problem before the meeting even starts.
This person does not know what a movie executive is supposed to look like.
This person does not dress like the movies. This person does not watch the movies. This person does not love the movies.
I have been in these rooms before. After another viral music video, another festival hit, another short, I’m back in the office of some producer, executive or studio chief, being handed another free water bottle that will roll around on the floor of my Tesla for the next month with all the others.
In the old days, the last- minute intel I received before these meetings with studio executives was insane. “She loves strong female protagonists — also, she adopted an Asian girl because they stay skinny.” … “He used to drive a cab. He’s weird. May have killed a man. Good luck.”
These were the giants who kept Hollywood profitable. Weirdos, maybe. Lunatics, often. But giants. And they would never have been caught dead in their offices wearing Patagonia vests.
Executives — you people reading this? — deal with artists. And artists learned from movies what executives are supposed to look like. Hollywood has been sewing your costume for decades: Griffin Mill in The Player, gliding across the lot and greenlighting a murder with the same smile he gives a pitch. Robert Evans, tan and ascotted, narrating his own legend like scripture. Jack Lipnick in Barton Fink, barking orders in a general’s uniform like a studio chief sent from Central Casting.
Robert Evans, at home in 2005.
Larry Busacca/WireImage
These men were monsters. These men were magnificent. They understood that the suit was not vanity. The suit was the point. Armor, uniform and threat, all at once. It made artists fear you, which is useful, because artists are children with tax problems.
You show up in a quarter-zip and wonder why you lack aura.
The costume matters because the job matters. Many executives today want to present themselves as California casual, implying they have souls like the artists they work with. But having a soul is not your job. That is your assistant’s job. Your job is to make money.
Real money. Marvel money. The kind of money Hollywood made when it threw muscular white guys named Chris into rubber suits and raked in billions in tickets, billions in toys, billions in theme parks. So much money the studio could dig another five levels down for more parking spaces.
SMASH CUT: The money changed.
COVID waved the audience away like a Disney gate guard and sent everyone home to drink from their Kirkland water bottles. The theatrical business, once the town’s most merciless scoreboard, suddenly gave way to streaming — where success was no longer counted in tickets sold, but in subscribers added, hours watched, churn reduced and whatever metric made Wall Street clap that quarter.
From left: Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold in Entourage and Tom Cruise’s Les Grossman from Tropic Thunder.
Claudette Barius/Warner Bros.; Album/Alamy Stock Photo
The streaming boom became a streaming necessity, and the money got weird. Studios were no longer just making movies for audiences. They were making content for platforms, libraries for algorithms and growth stories for investors. Profit became abstract. Losses became strategy. And the town, stuffed with stock-market funny money, started to believe it had been liberated from the old vulgar burden of making hits.
That is when the suit came off and the executive became the Executive Artist.
No longer disciplined by the box office, executives started greenlighting projects that made them popular at dinner parties in Los Feliz. Luxury beliefs, virtue signals, cultural homework masquerading as entertainment. “I’m not just Hollywood,” they seemed to be saying. “I’m awesome. Promote me.”
Once the Executive Artist took over, the bets got worse. Hollywood had already seen plenty of virtue-signaling reboots explode into culture-war bonfires. But instead of learning that audiences hate being assigned homework with their popcorn, the town doubled down. Now, by the power of Vanguard, the Executive Artists felt entitled to imprint their progressive politics on as much Disney IP as possible. It was no longer only about the best story, the biggest star, the sharpest commercial instinct. It was about who or what checked the right boxes.
Columbia Pictures president Dawn Steel, one of the first women to run a major studio.
Ron Galella Collection/Getty Images
The Executive Artist fell into the same trap as the mere artist: believing you are more interesting and important than the audience. Believing they would marvel at your Marvels.
They did not (2023, $237 million net loss).
Now there is an Executive Artist bloodbath, and it is time for executives to drop the artist, put the Italian power suit back on and become what we, the hardworking artists and crews, need them to be: Gordon Gekkos.
Stop pretending you are one of us. Stop trying to be one of the theater kids at the Oscars, voting for obscure movies and performances when the people just want to see Ryan Gosling talk with a rock. Or The Rock (before the wig).
Stop high-fiving each other when you help turn a Backrooms or an Obsession into a hit. Those are nice. Those are doubles. Back in the day, a double was a slow Tuesday. You cannot sell a themed toothbrush off that IP, so stop celebrating like you cleared the bases.
As Justin Timberlake said in The Social Network: Three hundred million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Three billion dollars!
The unions have pensions to pay. Stop fucking around.
You, the executives, have the most important job in our business: You place the bets. We depend on you to feed the ecosystem not by being more artistic than us, but by being smarter than us. Instead, some of you decided to focus on progressive social agendas for the wrong reasons: You actually believe in them.
No. The only reason to replace Iron Man with a Black woman is because you believe a Black Iron Woman will make more money.
Respectable effort. But.
From left: The famously formidable Lew Wasserman, who turned MCA into an empire; MGM’s notoriously sharky co-founder, Louis B. Mayer.
Bill Nation/Sygma/Getty Images; John Springer Collection/Corbis via Getty Images
You have confused being respected with being loved. Yes, we respect that you have the virtues of Buddha crossed with an Aaron Sorkin speech. But we love when you feed our families.
If you do not start making more movies about white guys flying fighter jets, the box office will not justify the monthly gardening bill at the Paramount lot, and you will be replaced by Larry Ellison’s AI or Netflix’s Deep-learning Algorithm Network Licensing Intelligence Node, aka DAN LIN™.
Part of it is pathological. Other smart people like you entered businesses where corporate machinations can make them the star: Jensen Huang, the CEO of Planet Fitness, whoever. In our business, you will never be the star. That seat is always roped off for Timothée Chalamet, the latest horror director who 100x’d a budget, or a Kardashian. It is an ego check of a position: playing the game with children while being the only adult in the room.
And that is the ultimate lesson here. We do not need a new Coppola. We need a new Robert Evans. We need a studio head constructed out of parties and vice, with infinite taste and style. Someone artists feared and loved, who may not have had a soul, but had the genius to find the people who did.
Evans took over Paramount in 1966 and turned out hits like Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story, The Godfather and Chinatown over the next eight years.
Nik Wheeler/Corbis/Getty Images
So this is what we need you to do with your elite MBAs and high SAT scores: Get back to being a meritocracy. Drop the affectations. Best, most profitable idea wins. Hire crews and staff based on excellence, not what your favorite Harvard admissions counselor would love. Build movie stars. Learn what the poors want — people in flyover states who make less than $300,000 a year. Make sure those movie stars do not offend those poors by insulting Jesus or Tom Brady.
You are part of a great legacy. The Movies. You know: the great American cultural export created by Jewish Eastern European garment tradesmen. Honor them by wearing expensive clothes, making expensive movies, entertaining as many people as possible and selling millions of electric Hulk toothbrushes.
The executive’s job is to be the brilliant, greedy, tasteful money animal who funds the dream, and pretending otherwise is what broke the business. The business forgot it is supposed to be a hit-driven, star-driven, spectacle-driven machine, not a lifestyle brand for coastal creatives.
They have been calling you a suit like it is an insult.
It isn’t.
It’s the job.
Wear the suit. Be a suit.
Joseph Kahn is the Grammy-winning director behind some of the biggest music videos of the past three decades, working with everyone from Taylor Swift and Britney Spears to Eminem, Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar. His feature credits include Torque, Detention, Bodied and Ick. He is also an enthusiastically unfiltered presence on social media. This is his first column for THR.
This story appeared in the July 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
