What exactly was the relationship between Paramount and Tom Cruise? What exactly is the relationship between Cruise and his new backers?
What’s a production company do?
If the latter question is not relevant to the former questions, I apologize. But I gather that it is.
-FrL-
A production company buys and develop screenplays and sells the finished film to a studio.
They do basically thse same thing real estate developers do with buildings - secure the funds, buy the property, deal with the legalities and hire the artists, artisans, craftsmen and laborers.
What does it mean to say “Paramount fired Tom Cruise.” What did Tom Cruise lose by being “fired?” What kind of exclusive relationship did the two entities have? And so on…
-Kris
Most Hollywood production companies that have a star’s name attached to them are vanity projects, where vehicles are found and developed for the star. I assume these began to come about because the star’s lawyer suggested it, to give a level of corporate liability protection to the star. Some of these, though, actual do become full-fledged general-purpose production companies.
The major film studios largely act in a capacity of corralling the work of various production companies, vanity and otherwise, and marketing and distributing the finished products. Some of these companies have semi-permanent homes on the studio lots. Universal gave a decent-sized acreage on its lot to Amblin Entertainment, as well as the smaller ImageMovers. In the world of television, Gracie Films (Simpsons) is housed in Shirley Temple’s old house on the Fox lot in Century City, just to give a couple of examples. Some of the smaller vanity production companies are housed in trailers on the lot.
Instead of the traditional actor-studio contract, the studio will contract with the actor’s production company for a multi-picture deal. I don’t know the specifcs of Cruise’s deal with Paramount, but it probably demanded several marketable pictures from his production company, in turn providing space for that company to operate, perhaps in a trailer, or maybe one of the many offices behind doors of Paramount’s fantastic New York City street sets.
The made-for-TV *Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ * docudrama (with a few interview segments with Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges suggesting accuracy) touched on this, amusingly enough. There’s a scene in which young Coleman (played by Bobb’e J. Thompson) is advised by his parents to form his own production company - thus forcing the studio to hire his company (and pay his staff, which included his parents) rather than just hiring him as an actor. Supposedly having a company would also make it easier to develop other projects for Coleman.
It, uh, didn’t work out.
Cruise/Wagner was definitely the latter, with several movies not having Cruise taking part. Elizabethtown and Suspect Zero were both C/W productions, for instance - although released and marketed by Paramount. Both could have performed better in the market (as could MI3), and that may have something to do with Paramount’s current stance towards Cruise.
Yup. The bread-and-butter for a movie studio isn’t necessarily the studio’s own productions, but the income from renting out facilities. Currently, there’s 10+ productions shooting on the Paramount lot.
Yup. Of course, when Dreamworks was taken over by Paramount, so was Amblin. I don’t see them moving out, though - those are some nice buildings, obviously a major investment.
C/W more or less had an entire building to themselves, permanently, just for office space. Their footprint expanded tremendously when there was an actual production underways - just Tom Cruise’s “trailer” when shooting was house-sized. From what I could see, C/W were getting the deluxe treatment.