Buh-Bye, Blowout Bash: Hollywood’s Lean Year Crashes the Holiday Season
Invites dry up, checks are split, the $400 Wally’s gift basket is gone. Says Erik Feig: ‘Efficiency is the word of the day’
Nicole LaPorte wrote about the battle over Brentwood Country Club’s barbed-wire fence, the 19 press tour stops Hollywood publicists care about now, the spec script market comeback and how Hollywood DEI is now D-I-E.
On the evening of Dec. 5, Keys nightclub on Sunset Blvd. was overflowing with producers, managers, agents and studio execs attending a holiday party thrown by producers Todd Lieberman (The Fighter, Wonder) and Kristin Burr (Freakier Friday, Cruella). Despite the abundance of dealmakers, the mood at the three-tiered, 12,420-square-foot club was free-wheeling kitsch as opposed to — as Lieberman puts it — an event where “you have to put on your Hollywood face.”
There were breakdancers, tarot card readers, an off-kilter Santa who (intentionally) made naughty comments and, at one point, a flash mob. Frank Marshall had been requested to spin at the DJ booth but, alas, the director-producer was in London.
The party was dubbed a “20th anniversary” bash, seeing as Lieberman and Burr first threw their holiday fete back in 2005. For a number of years it was an annual, end-of-year tradition with fun twists — one year Wicked director Jon M. Chu choreographed a dance number; Marshall became the staple DJ — where industry players came together to let loose. The price of entry? An unwrapped toy for Toys for Tots. (This year more than 700 toys were donated.) But as the years wore on and Hollywood began paring back as it went through contractions before being completely thrown off kilter by Covid, the bash was put on ice for many years — until this month.
“People hadn’t seen each other in a long time,” Lieberman says. “With people moving [out of L.A.] and dissipating due to Covid, it just felt like a really fun time to get everyone together.”
Given the current vibe in Hollywood, the night felt like an anomaly. “Back in the day, my calendar this time of year would be Christmas party after Christmas party,” one manager tells me. “Now that’s such a rare thing. That decadence and excess doesn’t exist like it once did.”
Naturally, some revelry continues. WME is renting out a Universal soundstage for its annual end-of-year L.A. shindig; it’s also hosting celebrations in London and Nashville. CAA’s Maha Dakhil and producer John Davis also are hosting personal holiday parties. But the days of Fox (before it was swallowed by Disney) throwing a lavish holiday celebration on one of its soundstages, or Michael Bay — during the Transformers years — having a blowout in his production offices on Colorado Ave. in Santa Monica (“your gift was being invited,” noted one party-goer), are long gone.
In a climate defined by severe cutbacks and uncertainty, when one of the most legendary movie studios in town is about to be (potentially) subsumed by a streamer, “Everyone is just trying to figure out ways to cut corners,” says one veteran producer. Indeed, December is wrapping up one of the most dismal years on the books, one that started off with the wildfires that displaced thousands of industry workers and went on to include (yet more) layoffs, a theatrical business holding on for dear life and deepening declines in the number of TV and film projects, not to mention surreal meddling from the president on the free speech front. Last week the murder of Hollywood treasure Rob Reiner and his wife Michele felt like the worst kind of capstone to a very rough year.
A quieter party circuit is just one sign of these new times. A growing number of customs, traditions and perks that made Hollywood one of the world’s most glamorous industries — and that always helped to make up for/veil the grueling hours, often indecorous behavior and outsized egos — are falling by the wayside in this ever-leaner era. Everything from lavish production offices — J.J. Abrams’ sumptuously whimsical, red-brick Bad Robot office building in Santa Monica, once supported by a massive overall deal at Warner Bros., recently sold for $31 million — to fancy lunches to uncapped spending accounts are being reined in on a daily basis.
And yet it’s not all coal-filled stockings. Necessity has bred invention and new approaches — as well as much-needed community — at a moment when Hollywood players are trying to control the only thing they can: their work. In my conversations below with top agents, producers, managers, publicists and studio execs — some of whom requested anonymity to discuss this most challenging period in their careers — many are forging ahead with as much chutzpah as possible. From split checks and scaled-back gifts to shrinking offices and capped agency expense accounts, they reveal how they’re adapting — cutting costs, collaborating, co-working and finding every which way to keep working.
Cutting ‘Empty Calories’ of Excess
The holidays, when Hollywood has always gone not just big but biggest, are making the industry’s slimming-down even more glaring. Year-end gifts of yore — Breitling watches, full-screen TVs, $400 Wally’s gift baskets — now seem garish. This year expect an email informing you that a donation to a charity has been made in your name, a tradition that began with some companies years ago but is now widening across the industry. (CAA recently sent out over 20,000 of them.) If booze is still being delivered, there’s less of it. “A few years ago, by now I probably would have gotten a dozen bottles of spirits” says one publicist.
Now? “I think I’ve gotten four.”