When Sumner Redstone, the flinty and abrasive owner of Viacom, completed his purchase of Paramount Studios in 1994 after a bruising and expensive takeover battle, he did what conquerors do when they’ve won a new territory. He made a tour of his kingdom.

Redstone had paid an enormous price for Paramount—the initial stock offer was about $40 per share but the deal closed at $108, and in between Redstone was compelled to merge with Blockbuster Video to raise enough cash to win the fight. It was understood around the lot that anyone who had so vastly overpaid for a Hollywood studio would probably want to take a hard look at things like executive pay packages, travel allowances, and bonus schedules.

The week of the new emperor’s arrival, there were presentations, elaborate tours of the soundstages, grip-and-grins with the stars, all winding up with a cocktail reception under a tent pitched on the fake New York City street on the backlot. The speeches and welcome toasts were delivered with the terrified cheerful bonhomie of the truly desperate, and at some point I found myself standing in between the new owner and a junior executive in the television department who took advantage of the slight pause in activity on the dais to lean across to Redstone and say, unbidden, in a chummy tone of voice he had clearly been practicing, unsuccessfully, all day, We’ve got some terrific new shows coming out.

Redstone turned, and for some reason fixed a stare at me. His upper lip curled. You better have, he said mirthlessly.

The awkwardness was punctuated by a photographer, who chose that exact moment to snap a photo of the three of us. Me in the center, flanked on one side by a young executive in the middle of a coronary occlusion and on the other by a malevolent billionaire dwarf.

I was young and green at the time, but not so untutored in show business that I didn’t know the score. I was a comedy writer and showrunner in the middle of the biggest comedy boom in Hollywood history. Redstone couldn’t fire me. The most he could do was buy me out of my three-year deal, at which point I’d go to 20th Century Fox or Warner Bros. or Universal. It was a bubbly and lively market for guys like me. Not so much for the young executive. He knew that there will always be more executives in show business than necessary or efficient. Put it this way: I’m a writer. If disaster strikes, I can always write myself back into the business. But he was a Senior Vice President of Current Programming, Network Comedy. His job was to watch me do my job. You can’t do that from the Starbucks on Ventura and Whitsett.

That was, as I said, 30 years ago. But when David Ellison, the newest owner of Paramount who is about to be disappointed by show business, completed his purchase of the studio this year, I’m certain there was the same Parade of the Executives and terrified smiles greeting him on his victory tour of the premises. Still: The layoff cascade began last month and will continue until the end of the year. And to make things worse, Ellison is considering adding Warner Bros. Discovery to his collection of Hollywood assets, which will require cutbacks and layoffs and mass firings at both studios. Two big studios means three times the inefficiency. Ellison is following a traditional business playbook, which is to solve one big problem by adding another big problem on top of it.

For most of its existence, the entertainment business has managed to grow and thrive with a very thin layer of supervision at the top. Since the end of the studio system nearly 70 years ago until the cable and streaming boom of the recent decades, show business had been a fairly lean and efficient economic system. A small cohort of salaried executives would supervise and convene creative teams made up of independent contractors—actors, writers, producers, directors—and assemble them for a project, disband them when it was completed and delivered, and repeat this process until someone got fired or the studio ran out of money. The entire show business ecosystem existed to service the kaleidoscope of transactions required to keep the engines stoked with projects. And it all worked, somehow, without a fat corporate layer of vice presidents and executive vice presidents and senior vice presidents to supervise the proceedings.

Which is why whenever some business genius decides to combine show business assets, it’s just a matter of time before it’s announced that, you know, actually, the whole thing would be better if it was just split up. Hollywood works much better and more profitably when it’s made up of independent pieces and two-layer org charts. That’s where Ellison’s new ecosystem is probably headed, eventually, after a period of painful and necessary layoffs, unpleasant conversations with bondholders, rancorous earnings calls, and unhappy owners wondering why 50 vice presidents can’t produce a hit.

“Do you think I would be a good entertainment-industry executive?” a young friend asked me recently. For some reason, despite the relentlessly bad news coming out of Hollywood, some people still dream of being a Senior Vice President of Current Programming, Network and Streaming Comedy.

I told him this story:

There used to be a restaurant on the lot of Paramount Studios called Nickodell’s. It was on the lot, but it was a public restaurant, too. You could come in from the Melrose Avenue door, but if you were already on the lot, you could come in through the back door which opened directly onto the lot. The food was pretty terrible, but they served what functioning alcoholics call a “healthy pour,” and so on production nights we’d all head over to Nickodell’s for a drink and a burger before we’d shoot a show in front of an audience. At a certain point between the first and fourth cocktail, we’d get the call and head out the back door into the bright Hollywood sunshine and do our jobs producing television the way people have been producing television for decades: with alcohol on our breath.

Each time we went, there was a local television news anchorman perched on a barstool, working his way through a mysterious amount of Canadian whiskey, smoking a cigarette, and watching the TV above the bar. He was the lead anchor of the six o’clock news broadcast for the local station that was also based on the Paramount lot. And every time we went, it was the same scene: He was in a suit, already in makeup, every hair shellacked into place. Cigarette in one hand, highball in the other. At some point just before six o’clock, one of us would look up at the bar and he’d be gone.

And then we’d look up at the TV and he’d be there, behind the anchor desk. Good evening, everyone. Here’s the latest from the Southland…

There was still ice in his glass. Still a small dimple on the stool where he had been sitting moments ago. Still smoke, curling up in wisps from his cigarette.

So, I asked my young friend, What do you think of that story?

He could have said a lot of things. That’s really cool. Or That’s very sad. Or That’s an amazing example of dissolute professionalism.

Instead, after a moment of thought, he said: I don’t think the smoke would do that. It would take him at least five minutes to get to the studio, and cigarette smoke wouldn’t still be curling up.

To which I replied: You would make a very good entertainment-industry executive. If, I didn’t feel like adding, anyone was looking for more of those.

Photo: Jason Mendez/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures

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