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"FacebookPinterest\n\nThe November weather was changing rapidly, in typical London fashion, from snow to rain to\u2014what's this\u2014balmy sunshine while Brad Grey, snug in the backseat of a Mercedes limo on his way to the set of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, offered his frank thoughts on becoming a studio head \"The idea of running a studio\u2014walking through the lot at Warner Bros. or Paramount or Fox\u2014that's a very romantic idea. The problem is, the job is no longer romantic. It's not the studio days of old, in my opinion. At this point you're simply there to make your quarter and give the parent company a good story to go to Wall Street with.\" Grey let out a sneaky laugh. \"Most of my friends\u2014the guys who are running the studios now\u2014will candidly tell you that quite a few of them simply did it for the plane.\" He allowed himself another magnificent and nearly silent snicker. \"But I prefer to pay for my own plane.\"\n\n Some eight weeks after our conversation, on January 6, 2005, Grey accepted an offer to become the chairman and CEO of Paramount Motion Pictures.\n\n When I spoke with him soon after the announcement, he remembered his comments and laughed again. \"Well, contrary to our London conversation, I think this is going to be fun,\" he said. \"The moment I made the decision, I felt this huge sense of invigoration. And I hadn't felt that way in a long time.\"\n\n Grey brings an enviable package to the boardroom The longtime independent has scored as both an Alist talent manager and a highprofile TV producer who, at the moment he was hired, was already translating his smallscreen success with The Sopranos into Hollywood features. When Paramount called, Grey had more than a dozen movies in the works, including a remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with Tim Burton, and The Departed, with Martin Scorsese. He'd also demonstrated a knack for finding profit in underexploited markets, like cable and DVDs, and he did all this without losing his rep as a likable guy, a good listener, and an eager advocate who could turn negotiations of great consequence into reasonable, easygoing exchanges between grownups. Still, the move to Paramount comes with questions Can an independent producer with a gift for attracting and bundling talent pull off the same trick at a major studio\u2014one that's currently in last place\n\n Viacom, Paramount's corporate parent, lured Grey into the fold by combining the better parts of two jobs\u2014Jonathan Dolgen's position as chairman of Viacom's entertainment group and Sherry Lansing's as the head of Paramount Motion Pictures. The consolidation of power got Grey's attention. His friend Richard Zanuck, who had similar control over both content and purse strings as the head of Twentieth Century Fox in the '60s, urged Grey to take it, telling him that challenges of this scope don't come along that often. He also said, \"Brad, do you realize that everybody who does have this job wishes they were you\" According to Zanuck, studio heads looked across the fence at Brad and said, \" 'Oh, if I could only be Brad Grey!' Then Brad Grey decided he wanted to be one of those guys.\"\n\n The most recent example of the 47yearold Grey's skills as both a dealmaker and a people person is the Tim Burton project, which got off the ground when Grey secured the rights to the Roald Dahl book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory from Liccy Dahl, the author's widow. \"Brad got the rights, which was almost impossible to do,\" Warner Bros. head Jeff Robinov said. \"She basically had veto rights, so all the decisions were mutual, over director, actor, script\u2014everything. And Brad was instrumental in helping to build a bridge between us and Liccy.\" \n\n One day last November, at Pinewood Studios outside London, Tim Burton, in a proper director's beret, was busy climbing up and down a stepladder, prepping for the scene in which the goldenticket winners arrive at the dark and awesome gates of the chocolate factory and the main characters\u2014Charlie Bucket, Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregarde, et al\u2014wandered about on the cobblestones and fake snow. No one seemed to notice Brad Grey walking around the action. The only actor to say anything about the producer's arrival was Missi Pyle, playing Mrs. Beauregarde, the Wonkaworld equivalent of a hot tennis mom. \"I saw your name on the check,\" she said. \"I guess that's why you're here.\" Grey chuckled, shook a few hands, politely excused himself, and promptly disappeared around a corner.\n\n As it turned out, Grey absolutely had to find Johnny Depp\u2014the Willy Wonka of the Burton version\u2014to tell him about a surprise deal he'd made the night before. He'd just bought the rights to the Australian novel Shantaram, which Depp wanted to develop into a movie for himself. To get these rights, Grey had stayed up till four that morning, on the phone to California, in a bidding war he finally won\u2014paying $2 million for the sprawling story of an ex\u2013heroin addict who escapes from prison, flees to India, joins the Bombay Mafia, and falls in love. Grey came back from Depp's trailer a few minutes after he'd disappeared, almost out of breath with excitement. \"We were celebrating,\" he said. \"Very happy\u2014very, very happy to get it. He was ecstatic. So I said, 'Give me another assignment, boss. I don't have anything to do tonight.' \"\n\n \"That's what's so much fun about show business,\" Grey said. \"All of a sudden, you get one call, or Johnny grabs me on the set yesterday and says, 'God, I'm passionate about this thing.' And now something wonderful can happen.\"\n\n Grey smiled warmly when I asked him about his business success\u2014how he famously took his management interest in a handful of comedians and parlayed a few talentpackaging deals into sole ownership of a powerful production company. But he was just as upbeat when the conversation turned to the acrimonious lawsuit one of his first clients, Garry Shandling, filed against him for the seeming conflict of interest in the production of The Larry Sanders Show As Shandling's manager, Grey was bound to get the best deal for his client, and as the show's producer he was charged with holding costs down.\n\n \"Everybody has an agent,\" Grey said. \"Everybody has a lawyer. Nobody's pulling the wool over anybody's eyes. I don't believe that happens. Reasonable people make a decision as to whether they want to produce with the people they're in business with on a representation level or not.\" Grey's dual role was not all that unusual. In fact, Shandling's lawyer, David Boies, admitted that the suit was aimed as much at egregious flaws in the standard Hollywood business practice as it was at Grey. But still, it cost Grey a reported eight figures to settle the suit out of court, and it remains the one blemish on his career.\n\n Grey's stature in the world\u2014Emmywinning alpha millionaire with artistic integrity\u2014contrasts nicely with his actual height. When he walks around the studio soundstage, five feet six looks like a personal decision, a modest touch to go with the rest of his quiet perfectionism the flawless dentistry, the perfect shave, the spotless Brioni buttondown. His conversational manner suggests an antiTrump, an Astaire without the tap dancing attentive, selfdeprecating, effortless, and precise. His mentor, Bernie Brillstein, the founding partner of BrillsteinGrey Entertainment, calls him \"a gentleman among sharks.\"\n\n For years Grey concentrated on developing television shows (in addition to The Sopranos, he produced NewsRadio, Politically Incorrect, and Just Shoot Me!) and only fooled around in the movie business. He helped develop the story for The Cable Guy, for example, as a Chris Farley vehicle, but later gave up his interests to Columbia, who made Grey an ecutive producer, essentially paying him to get out of the way. He did roughly the same on a script originally called Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween. Grey bowed out to Dimension Films, receiving an ecutiveproducer credit for Scary Movie in exchange for absenting himself. \"The difference now is that this is the business I'm really focused on,\" Grey said. \"I don't know that I would make those same decisions today.\"\n\n Six years ago, when Grey's two boys were 11 and 9, he hatched the idea of a new adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was then overseen by Plan B, the company Grey owned with Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt. It took five and a half years to develop a workable script\u2014exactly the period during which Grey's reputation began to soar on the strength of The Sopranos. Richard Zanuck, who produced Jaws, moved to London to act as a sort of assistant principal over a cast and crew of approximately 2,000. This ecutive hierarchy allowed Grey to keep close tabs from L.A. on the film's progress and still attend to other projects.\n\n As Grey showed me around the Charlie set, he divided his comments between boardroomstyle briefings on the soundness of the studio's investment (\"I think the movie should span,\" he said. \"Kids will be mesmerized by it, and adults will appreciate the wit\") and a more wideeyed appreciation of Burton's crazy noncomputergenerated effects the nut room, with its staff of forty trained squirrels; Willy Wonka's inventing room, with, among other outsize Goldbergian wonders, a \"fanning angel,\" for cooling chocolate; and an enclosed aquariumlike pool in which OompaLoompas harvest jawbreakers underwater.\n\n \"They're swimming, and you can see them through the glass, like at SeaWorld!\" Grey said, with the sort of religious sense of awe that Burton would be lucky to get from the kid playing Charlie.\n\n \"It's one of those movies where you read the script and you go, 'All right, how are we going to do that' \" coproducer Patrick McCormick said. \"And nobody has any idea. It's never been done before.\"\n\n Grey laughed and said, \"And then we say to the studio, 'No, no, no. We know exactly what we're doing!' \"\n\n When Grey was growing up in Spring Valley, New York, his relationship with money was simple He didn't have it. His father left the insurance business to become a manufacturer's rep, selling women's handbags to department stores in the South. His grandfather was a buckle jobber, and during summers in New York, Grey worked for him, carrying sample cases and selling buckles by the gross to Garment District belt and dressmakers. \"It's a tough life,\" he said, \"the business of being a traveling salesman. I have great respect for them, because I think we all, in some sense, have a deep fear of turning into Willy Loman.\" Grey, who was at that instant riding in his limo on the way to his accommodations at Claridge's, in London, trailed off almost apologetically. \"Doesn't matter what you do. Whatever\u2026\" But then he happily hit upon the proper sentiment that acknowledged his own immediate circumstances and recessionproof impeccability. \"Getting by on a smile and a shoeshine,\" he said, turning to me and, not without irony, flashing his own perfect smile.\n\n According to David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, that sensitivity for the working stiff is one of the traits that makes Grey such a good collaborator and artistic sounding board. Chase gauges the success of various story lines when he sees which ones Grey responds to. \"Whatever he responds to I usually go with, because he responds to the humanity of the stories,\" Chase said. \"He understands the unfortunate compromise. That's what our show is really about. He understands when people have compromised themselves into a very sad or untenable position. He sees the sadness and the humor and the absurdity of it.\"\n\n Grey went to the Brockport branch of the State University of New York for a year and then transferred to the University at Buffalo, where he found love and his foothold in the entertainment business. At a party during his first week, he meet Jill, a prelaw student, and he's been with her ever since. (Although no records are kept of such things, this is believed to be a Hollywood record.) In the same week, he dropped by the offices of a local concert promoter named Harvey Weinstein. \"I asked them if I could come work for them for free,\" Grey told a reporter from his alma mater. \"Harvey, being Harvey, said, 'Well, yeah, for free you can.' \" Grey eventually got on the Weinstein payroll and began booking acts for a club they owned in suburban Buffalo. One show he booked included a comic named Bob Saget, who became Grey's first client as a talent manager.\n\n After graduation, Grey kept working for Weinstein, booking comedy acts, picking up more clients, such as Garry Shandling, and establishing connections. Grey left Weinstein in 1983, when the country was in the middle of a comedy craze, and moved to L.A., with not much more than a small portfolio of clients, mostly young male comedians, such as Saget, Shandling, Dennis Miller, and Dana Carvey.\n\n Backstage at a Shandling appearance in 1984, Grey met Bernie Brillstein, Hollywood's leading talent manager at the time and the producer of the recent hit movie Ghostbusters. Grey followed up on the chance encounter with a friendly call, and the two became doubles partners and, soon after that, business partners. At that point, abysmal ratings for Saturday Night Live had NBC contemplating closing the show. Then Grey gave them Dennis Miller, Dana Carvey, Jon Lovitz, and Mike Myers, a timely infusion of talent that saved the comedy institution and gave Grey the reputation as the goto guy for comic talent. In 1991, Columbia Pictures approached Grey to become an ecutive at its company, and in what would become a pattern for later deals, he said no thanks to the corporatehoncho offer and worked out a production deal with the company instead.\n\n Grey made a similar deal in 1994 with ABC, giving the network a 50 percent stake in BrillsteinGrey productions in exchange for a production advance of $100 million\u2014a deal Grey described as \"life changing.\" But in 1995, Disney bought ABC, and Disney head Michael Eisner didn't like the idea of coowning anything, so he contacted Grey to negotiate a settlement. When negotiations stalled a year later, Grey sold the other half of his business to Universal for another $100 million. Or, as he put it, \"Michael wakes up one day and finds out that he's partners with Edgar Bronfman, not me.\" When I expressed admiration for the hardball tactics, Grey sneaked a bit of a wicked curve into his typically upbeat spin \"Listen, I'm really fond of Michael. But you and I don't have to spend any time worrying about Michael Eisner.\" Disney quickly settled, taking a percentage of future syndication rights to NewsRadio and other shows but ceding all ownership interests in Grey's production company, which had just begun developing a show called The Sopranos.\n\n Long before he took the Paramount job, Grey made enough\u2014\"a silly amount of money\" is how he describes it\u2014so that he didn't need to work. He has an almost magical command of the stuff. He has, for instance (and do not try this at home), sold half his company, BrillsteinGrey, three times, clearing around $250 million in the process, and yet\u2014abracadabra!\u2014he still owned all of it on the day Viacom offered him the Paramount job.\n\n As recently as November 2004, Grey dreamily spoke about leaving Hollywood altogether to go back to New York\u2014the ultimate maverick move. (\"There may be more to life than show business\u2014as odd as it sounds,\" he said, laughing at what even then seemed like an unlikely picture. \"I know that's heresy.\") So why is he giving up the business he has built \"brick by brick,\" as he quaintly puts it In taking the Paramount job, he could be walking away from a roster of movies he had in various stages of production; because of the obvious conflicts, the future head of Paramount might have to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with the ticketbuying public at the cineplex. Nor will he have any role in Martin Scorsese's next big film\u2014a sacrifice that has to hurt.\n\n Very few people have taken Grey's path, achieving the position of studio head by demonstrating that they have no need for it. In fact, as Viacom no doubt understands, Grey has been so successful\u2014as Zanuck says, \"He goes from one thing to another, leaving a trail of success\"\u2014that his acceptance of its job offer can almost be seen as an act of largesse by a man of great accomplishment on behalf of a cultural treasure, a Hollywood version of Bart Giamatti's leaving the presidency of Yale for Major League Baseball. Grey certainly is playing up that aspect now, talking about the days of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Adolph Zucker and \"carrying on the legacy of Paramount.\"\n\n But in fact, Grey is taking a big risk to his own legacy by moving to the lastplace studio. It's a risk he thinks he can afford. In fact, he thinks he's going to have a good time on this job. \"When it went from the idea of pure challenge to fun,\" says Grey, \"then it was time to close the deal.\"\n\n Kevin Conley, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of Stud Adventures in Breeding."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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