A very smart person commented in passing, in a different conversation, about a very interesting piece of history that is more relevant today than it was even a day ago. It’s a little hard to put together some of the details, since the memory goes back to 1996… before the web grew up and, interestingly, earlier than Variety’s archives seem to go. But…
John Lesher’s 28 month tenure at Paramount Vantage (nee’ Classics), then the move to “Big” Paramount is remarkably similar to Tom Rothman’s move from Searchlight to “Big” Fox (and then, to sharing Bill Mechanic‘s job with Jim Gianopulos).
Lesher’s first release at/as Vantage was the Sundance pick-up, An Inconvenient Truth, released about six months after he took the job. The film was a publicity bonanza, and in spite of a huge amount of spending to get all that attention, the film grossed a remarkable $24 million, making it the third highest grossing domestic doc of all time. (It’s now #4 with Sicko surpassing it by a small amount.) It would turn out to be the only profitable film of the extremely high profile Lesher regime.
Lesher’s second release at Vantage came 6 days prior to his one year anniversary with Paramount, though the film, Babel, was not made under his auspices (except as an agent, since he made the deal for the film repping his client, Alejandro González Iñárritu with Bred Grey while still at Endeavor). He fought to get the film under his banner… and succeeded. And his team, led by Megan Colligan, fought hard and long to get an Oscar nomination. Unfortunately for them, they sold off the foreign rights on the film, which is where the movie made triple what it did in America, which meant that Paramount would lose money on their first Oscar nominee since 2002’s The Hours, which was their first since Titanic in 1997.
Black Snake Moan was the second release… also from the previous administration… also a money loser, with a worldwide gross of just $10 million.
Lesher’s first release of his own (kind of… it was via Plan B, Brad Grey’s production company with Pitt and, then, Aniston) was Mike White’s Year of the Dog, 18 months after he took the job. It was the start of a run of 7 films from high profile directors that Lesher had worked with at Endeavor.
Mike White – Year of the Dog – $1.5 million
Michael Winterbottom – A Mighty Heart – $9.2m
Sean Penn – Into the Wild – $18.4m
Noah Baumbach – Margot at the Wedding – $2m
Marc Forster – The Kite Runner – $15.8m
Paul Thomas Anderson – There Will Be Blood – $40.2m
Martin Scorsese – Shine a Light -$5.3m
Five of the films would be sold as Oscar contenders. One would be nominated. None would break even. But the time the last film was released, Lesher had been promoted to “Big” Paramount and the responsibility for the future released vetted by Lesher would be on those left behind.
A similar thing happened at Fox Searchlight, created by Tom Rothman in 1994, and exited by Rothman for a bigger job before he released his tenth movie via the division, leaving the clean-up to Lindsay Law, a PBS exec and producer who was over his head in the job for about three years… years that included getting an Oscar nomination for The Full Monty, a title that would also remain Searchlight’s biggest grosser for seven years – four years into the Rice regime – until Sideways. (Rice more than doubled that top earner last year with Juno.)
Rothman’s first release was also a pick-up… Edward Burns’ The Brothers McMullen. The film would be the highest grossing film of his tenure with $10.4m. His next biggest hit was a follow-up by Burns (shades of Black Snake Moan, the follow-up to Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow), She’s The One, which grossed $9.5 million.
Everything else would lose money.
Rothman had high profile taste, like Spike Lee (Girl 6, $5m gross), Bernardo Bertolucci (Stealing Beauty, $4.7m gross), Al Pacino (Looking for Richard, $1.4m gross), Nicholson buddy and 70s legend Bob Rafelson (Blood and Wine, $1.1m gross), Bergman collaborator Billie August (Smilla’s Sense of Snow, $2.4m gross), and Dangerous Liaisons writer/conceiver Christopher Hampton (The Secret Agent, $106,606 gross).
Lindsay Law wouldn’t do much better with his 25-or-so shots at the brass ring. He and his team hit the home run with The Full Monty. But only five other films in his tenure would crack $5 million. He too would miss with some big names.
But Tom Rothman went on to the Big Show to great success while Law had to sell stuff that Rothman launched and for which he didn’t have to take the heat. Of course, Rothman’s Searchlight films were not nearly as expensive and didn’t lose nearly as much as Lesher’s… so maybe Lesher will be an even better “Big” studio exec!
The news that finally landed, that Team Vantage was being melded into Big Paramount was not that big a surprise. Things clearly couldn’t continue the way Lesher and Grey had allowed them to, no matter how much attention they got with the films. Eventually the pool of red ink would be noticed. And now we know… it was.
Thing is, Tom Rothman has remained, for over a decade now, remained very committed to the division he birthed. He and Jim G have been smart enough to let Peter Rice and his key team of Gilula and Utley have their heads.
Dick Cook and Bob Iger figured out the right role for a post-Weinstein Miramax and Daniel Battsek has been nothing short of brilliant in navigating the territory.
Focus became an international asset for Universal, as much as it was a domestic art division, and David Linde is now co-running the big show.
And Sony Classics has its own unique set of goals and expectations in its Big Sony marriage and works well within them.
This step backwards for Paramount and Vantage is indicative of the fact that they jumped in with both feet… and never had a vision for the division that went past gathering attention. As a result, there is no way to continue down the road that they were on. The company has just three releases on the schedule the rest of this year… only one that they had their hands on in the making. And it may well be that film – Revolutionary Road – a Scott Rudin-produced film – that has as much as the Vantage marketing remaining intact. They are seen as the ones who can push an Oscar film. (Par can also expect a lot more help from 42 West on this one… as it is likely the go-to film ahead of Rudin’s Doubt, which will be over at Miramax.)
There was some talk, a little while back, that the Vantage kids might knock Gerry Rich from his perch. Didn’t happen. But sometime in the fall, as DreamWorks leaves Melrose in the dust, the ranks will surely be thinned again.
In the meanwhile, the circle just keeps turning…

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