اBarry Diller's Journey From Mailroom to Television Executive Vanity Fair Videos The Scene

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• published: 26 Oct 2016
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اBarry Diller's Journey From Mailroom to Television Executive Vanity Fair Videos The Scene s a really, really broken studio,” one longtime Hollywood executive recently lamented to me when describing Paramount. The studio, which Sumner Redstone purchased for $10 billion in 1994, was once a sizzling-hot media property—one that Redstone acquired in a bidding war against the mogul Barry Diller, and one that he would subsequently refer to as his “baby.” Paramount, after all, was once the home to creative minds such as Robert Evans, Michael Eisner, Sherry Lansing, and Diller himself. The studio cinematically defined a generation with The Godfather and Godfather II; Love Story and Chinatown; Grease and Heaven Can Wait. But in recent years, Paramount, a division of Viacom, has floundered. According to Viacom’s most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, its “filmed entertainment” division—largely Paramount—generated an operating loss of $308 million on revenue of $1.8 billion during the nine months ending June 2016. And then there was Ben-Hur, a remake of the 1959 classic, which bombed this summer. In September, Viacom also announced it was taking “a programming impairment charge of $115 million” in its fourth fiscal quarter. The write-down was “related to the expected performance of an unreleased film,” which The Hollywood Reporter later unveiled as Monster Trucks, a movie about monsters inhabiting the trucks of attractive teenagers that somehow tested poorly in screenings. When Philippe Dauman, the former C.E.O. of Viacom, tried to sell a 49 percent stake in Paramount to Dalian Wanda Group, a Chinese media company controlled by Wang Jianlin, one of the country’s wealthiest men, the studio was valued as low as $8 billion—or $2 billion less than Redstone had paid for it 22 years earlier article,paramout,viacom,shari redstone,sumner redstone,new establishment,new establishment summit,vanity fair new establishment,vanity fair summit,vfsummit,Arts & Culture,Politics,Vanity Fair