Transcript: Paramount: Buy, Sell, Fight

Rob Long on the studio's contentious history of suitors

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

Confucius said, “If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by.”

Could have been Lao Tzu. Doesn’t really matter. The point is, I’m pretentious.

And they say that “If you sit long enough at Café Florian in St. Mark’s Square in Venice, you will see everyone you know.”

See? Pretentious. 

The point of both of these sayings is this: if you live long enough, or sit still enough, you’ll see everything parade by, maybe a couple of times.

Here’s the show business version: if you stay in Hollywood long enough, you will see Paramount Studios bought and sold many times over. 

It was a collection of a bunch of things, way before my time — RKO, Famous Lasky, Paramount — and then it got gobbled up by Gulf + Western, a classic 1960s era conglomerate that changed its name to Paramount Communications at some point in the early 1990s — this is when I came to sit at the equivalent of St. Mark’s Square and began watching the parade. 

When I walked onto the Paramount lot, the stationery still had the Paramount mountain, and Paramount Pictures, and below that “A Gulf + Western company.” 

But it’s never been an easy marriage — a big-time conglomerate with shareholders and earnings calls and Wall Street expectations. Show business is feast or famine and it always will be. If you sit in one place long enough you’ll see a lot of smart people try to explain exactly why investing in Hollywood is a good idea, but if you keep sitting there you’ll see their broke corpses float by, too.