Before David Ellison Took Over Paramount, I Watched the Hollywood That Brought Me Here Disappear

As the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger hurtles toward the inevitable, an IndieWire writer looks back at his time on the Paramount lot in the mid-1990s.

As the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger headed toward what now seems to be its inevitable resolution this week, I started thinking about where all this began for studio mogul David Ellison. It became even more interesting when my boss reminded me that Ellison‘s first on-screen credit wasn’t as a producer or executive but as an actor, when the then-23-year-old scion of tech billionaire Larry Ellison appeared in the 2006 war film “Flyboys.”

“Flyboys” was reportedly financed either entirely or in part (depending on which account you read) by the elder Ellison, and it was a passion project for USC film school dropout David, who by then was already an accomplished pilot. “Flyboys,” directed by Tony Bill and starring James Franco, was a heavily fictionalized — and heavily criticized — account of Americans serving in the Lafayette Escadrille during World War I that let David indulge his two primary interests at the time: flying and moviemaking.

Thinking there might be some kind of article in what “Flyboys” foretold about Ellison’s career path, or what it said about his personality, I watched the movie again for the first time since its release. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to say about it; it’s not so much bad as embalmed, a lifeless period piece that goes through the motions of a rousing adventure film without stirring a single authentic emotion. As an actor, Ellison isn’t bad, and he isn’t great — he’s serviceable, like pretty much everything else in the movie.

Watching “Flyboys” didn’t give me much material for an article, but in its slower moments it did cause me to drift off into some Paramount-adjacent daydreams; namely, memories of my own early history with the studio in the mid-1990s. As a 21-year-old intern who had just arrived in Los Angeles from the Midwest, when I began working on the lot in 1994, I felt like I was at the beginning of something very exciting — what I didn’t know was that I was actually experiencing the end of the Hollywood that brought me out here in the first place.

I was a film student at USC, and I interned as a development intern for producers Mace Neufeld and Robert Rehme, then riding high as the makers of the Jack Ryan movies starring Harrison Ford. My job was to be the first line of defense when it came to literary submissions; I was one of a few readers who wrote up coverage on every script that came into the company, and if the coverage was positive, the scripts (or books, or whatever) would move up the chain of command.

Leaving aside the absurdity of a college student with the life experience of a turnip being the gatekeeper writers had to get past (a practice still prevalent today, and one that probably explains a lot about what gets made and doesn’t), it was a great opportunity for me. Not so much the reading, which wasn’t really all that educational (I learned a lot more about screenwriting just from watching great movies), but the chance to wander that Paramount lot and breathe in Hollywood magic every day.

You see, I was lucky enough to arrive in Hollywood at a true inflection point, a moment when the most exciting filmmakers of the next generation — Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Richard Linklater — had just emerged or were about to, but the old guard was still very much around, and in some cases still active. I had an office on the same floor as William Friedkin, who had a nice late career run at Paramount thanks to the patronage of his wife, studio head Sherry Lansing. I was all for the nepotism, since it yielded a few pretty good movies (“Blue Chips,” “Jade,” “Rules of Engagement”) and one great one (“The Hunted”).

Other veterans still on the lot who had made some of the movies that made me want to make movies included Robert Evans, a long way from the glory days of “Chinatown” and “Urban Cowboy” but still cranking out pictures, and Walter Hill, who was (and is) one of my filmmaking heroes and who inexplicably indulged me dropping by his office whenever I felt like it to grill him about the making of “Streets of Fire” and “The Warriors.” I would run down to the commissary and walk past Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, or extras dressed in full Klingon and Vulcan regalia from whatever “Star Trek” TV show or movie happened to be shooting at the time.

I got to visit the set of Neufeld and Rehme’s “Beverly Hills Cop III,” directed by the guy responsible for the single moment in movies that made me want to become a director: John Landis. (For those who care, that moment came when the car crashed through the wall of the Toys ‘R’ Us in “The Blues Brothers.”) The night I was there, Landis was shooting a scene with director John Singleton appearing on screen as an extra — and the conversation Singleton and I struck up led to me getting to go to his set, where I watched him direct scenes for what would become one of my favorite movies, “Higher Learning.”

This was all awfully exciting to me, but I also realize now that on some level I took it for granted — I would go to a screening at the DGA and Peter Bogdanovich would be there, or Billy Wilder, or Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews. I saw Q&As with legends like Sam Fuller, Richard Pryor, and Budd Boetticher, guys who are no longer with us, but back then were just hanging around all over Hollywood.

As much as I took advantage of being in proximity to these people (I was never particularly shy about interrogating someone whose work I admired, a trait that ultimately led me to the job I have now), I look back and I wish I had appreciated it more, and seized every opportunity that I let slip by. It didn’t occur to me that there’d ever be a moment when you couldn’t just walk up to Dean Martin at La Famiglia and ask him about “Some Came Running” or “Ocean’s 11.”

I also realize just how much I took for granted the breadth of material Paramount was cranking out in those days. While I was working at the studio, it released idiosyncratic auteur movies (Friedkin’s “Blue Chips,” Barry Levinson’s “Jimmy Hollywood”), “Saturday Night Live” spinoffs green-lit in the wake of the unexpected success of “Wayne’s World” (“Tommy Boy,” “Stuart Saves His Family”), modest but artfully made comedies (“Nobody’s Fool,” “I.Q.”) and a couple of risky period pieces that turned out to be Oscar-winning blockbusters (“Forrest Gump,” “Braveheart”).

There were also the usual sequels (“Naked Gun 33 1/3,” “Star Trek Generations”), offbeat star-driven dramas (“Intersection,” “Losing Isaiah”) and a terrific old-school action movie (“Drop Zone”), among other things. Not all of these movies were great — though several of them were — but the fact that they all coexisted under the same studio banner now seems kind of miraculous. At the time I didn’t necessarily think that movies like “Milk Money” (an odd comedy about a trio of 11-year-old boys who fix up dad Ed Harris with a prostitute played by Melanie Griffith) indicated I was living through any kind of golden age, but now I think I might have been — it was the range of movies, both in terms of budget and subject matter, released in the Lansing regime that made it special more than the quality of the individual films.

Whether that kind of range can come back remains to be seen; we’ve heard promises of 30-plus theatrical releases from Ellison’s new entity, so I’m cautiously optimistic. It would be nice if this piece, looking back at my time at the studio, turns out to be just a nostalgic remembrance, and not an obituary.