Hollywood’s endangered entrepreneurs
Posted by Neal Roscoe on March 12th 2008 in Generate Press
With the demise of New Line’s Bob Shaye, is the last of the old guard being pushed aside?
By Patrick Goldstein, THE BIG PICTURE March 11, 2008
It’s hard to imagine New Line Cinema without Bob Shaye, its prickly paterfamilias. The company is being absorbed into Time Warner’s Warner Bros. film division, with Shaye and most of the employees being cast adrift. Long after he’d sold his company in 1993, Shaye continued to treat New Line as his personal mom-and-pop movie store.During the company’s “Lord of the Rings” heyday, Shaye would host a pre-Oscar party at his stylish home off Mulholland Drive. One night I found myself chatting with the New Line founder when one of his aides scurried over, eyes bright with big news. Shaye’s then boss, Time Warner chieftain Richard Parsons, had arrived. “Shall I bring him over?” the aide asked breathlessly.
Irritated at being interrupted, Shaye waved him away, saying, “He can wait.” ….As the curtain rings down on New Line, a bigger question remains: Is there still room for entrepreneurs in today’s corporate entertainment business? One thing seems certain. The new breed of entrepreneur will look very different from the generation that produced Shaye and others like him.
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What is the common denominator here? “It always seems to come back to new technology,” says Jordan Levin, former head of the WB network, who is now the chief executive of Generate, a new media production and management firm. “Whether it’s the early movie theater owners, the early broadcast TV titans and cable entrepreneurs, they were people taking risks on something new.”
Read the full article at latimes.com
