Earthquake Weather: Pop Culture & Tech Goes Weirder
- Thread starter Electric Monk
- Start date
Gerald Ford? Saturday Night Live? This is that same TL idea you told me about many moons ago, isn't it?Glad to see you finally posting it!
Similar POD, yeah. But because you wiped SNL out of existence I figured it was fitting to have that create this alternate universe. Plus simple POD, the other was slightly more complex (not to mention I do believe you've used Police Women a ton in your TL
).Have I mentioned how awesome your videogame timeline is? And, usefully, wildly different from my own plans
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Outline
Not to spoil anything but the POD is simple: Lorne Michaels having just bombed a joke--in front of the President--goes for broke and throws himself deeper into the joke, thus Ford gets it. The details of why this matters will be covered at some point.
(Fellow Canadians may recognize going deeper into the joke as a form of apology, for being unclear on the joke in the first place, whereas most other places follow the Don't Explain the Joke rule. Lorne, being a master, explains the joke while subtly apologizing for it, but keeps it funny by subverting expectations post-explanation, "Hollywood" instead of "The Presidency" which also makes it funnier if--like the camera crew straight faced in the background watching Lorne flail--you got the joke the first time. That said it wasn't a good joke in the first place, so there's only so much I can do with it, lol.)
It doesn't matter much at the outset, Ford winning the Presidency is not the world's biggest change for people in the USA 1977-1979, or so it'd appear. Instead of Congress screwing with Carter, they'll be screwing with Ford. The biggest difference is that, unlike Carter, there is nothing Ford wants from Congress and he's not going to be re-elected so he can literally cut whatever deals he feels like and veto the rest.
(Globally, especially in English speaking countries, politicians trailing in the polls look at Ford's improbable come-back victory and...)
But I chose this deliberately as a low butterfly opening because this timeline is about OTL's pop culture, and how it could have been vastly different. Will that extend to, say, The Simpsons on Tracy Ulman in 1989? I doubt it. Will it extend to an alternate 1991 Simpsons? Probably. Will Sony, if they enter the console wars, name it PlayStation? Magic 8-ball says "most certainly". Obviously the plausibility of that is zero, it's been twenty years of butterflies and names are easy to change... but it also lets me anchor it better for compare and contrast. (If any butterfly purists prefer, I think of it as a quantum mechanical translator for your brain, turning PlayDeck into PlayStation, The Thompsons into The Simpsons
). The practical reason I'm doing this is because I'm going to be using lots of pictures--and even some video--and thus gives me way less to photoshop since I'm not great at it.The primary focus of the timeline will be, suitably: Silicon Valley & Hollywood. Meaning both terms as broadly as reasonably possible.
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Time
Although the POD occurs in early 1976, we do not join the timeline proper until 1986. Various reasons, but in media res was appealing and, yes, starting after my favourite timeline ends was a factor. Plus, write what you know...
Each part covers 5 years, Book I "The Television Will Not Be Revolutionized" (1986-1991) to Book VI "A Whiff of Grapeshot" (2011-2016). As I said each book will be structured to have an ending, in case I never make it to Book VI. That said I wanna finish a fucking timeline after technically being a member here for a decade, so I feel good about the length.
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Structure
(each) Book
Chapter 1 & 2; intro to Silicon Valley & Hollywood topics, setting the scene.
Chapters 3-8; featuring in-depth looks at people, movies, corporations, computers, tv shows, ideas,that sort of thing. Will be narrow (one movie), will be wide (independent movie production in the early 1990s say)
Chapter 9 & 10; Filling in the blanks left by the feature chapters for Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
After each book will be a post from each appendix.
Appendix A: Elections
Appendix B: Misc. Pop culture
Appendix C: Counterfactuals (from an in-universe perspective)
Appendix D: Where Are They Now?
(The Appendices depend on y'all for what you like to see. I have elections planned for the USA/UK/Canada/Australia/New Zealand up to 2000ish so far (except Australia, they're already planned to the end of the timeline), everything else is wide open.)
That gives me a target post count of... one times one is two... 86. Which, considering the first outline of this was rather different and was over 200 posts is much more reassuring. 86 is doable.
Edit: Not counting guest posts, if anyone feels like such a thing once the timeline is rolling. The 6 part structure is tailor made for fitting stuff in-between the gaps
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Style
Each books narrative thread will focus on a set of corporations, people, ideas, etc... with each new Book changing focus. For example Book I may pay a ton of attention to WB, while Book II cares more about Paramount.This allows multiple viewpoints of the situation because a conceit of the timeline is that there will be more than one omniscient-but-biased narrator (though likely only one a book), to gain some benefits of epistolary timelines without the tons of extra work (also I thought it was a neat idea).
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That's all for now, back to the salt mine to work on this.
(Horrifying, isn't it)
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Teaser draft (Hollywood, 1986)
Chapter 2 "And, just for variety, show the children how to make a Molotov cocktail."
[...]
Don Simpson's nose was stuffy, although he didn't have a cold. He certainly wasn't cold, dressed mostly in leather, and it was a warm sunny South California day regardless. It was, after all, the movie business. Regardless of any other pressing needs, at the moment he'd give anything to be anywhere else, as he watched his ostensible star lose his mind and ruin a million dollar shoot.
-----
EXT. BEVERLY HILLS DRIVE - DAY
A 1960s muscle car screams down the street and burns rubber around a corner, loud popular rock music playing, sirens in background.
CUT TO
Helicopter shot of the car, half a dozen cars spun out behind it.
INT. THE CAR - DAY
A man nodding along to the music, tapping fingers on the steering wheel. Outside cars are moving by fast, the speed limit is a distant memory. He spins the wheel again, the camera mounted to the car's frame spinning with it.
EXT. POLICE STATION - DAY
The car careens into the parking lot, bounces off the most expensive looking car in the lot, spinning around in a barely controlled circle before carefully and slowly backing into a parking spot.
-----
Simpson shook his head, thinking of all that money wasted. How the fuck am I supposed to replace that coked out nutjob, fuck. Fuckity fuck. Agents man, killed. Fuck. At least his nose was clear now, his mind racing. Black man. A funny black man. Keep the explosions. That's what he needed; that's what America needed.
Chapter 2 "And, just for variety, show the children how to make a Molotov cocktail."
[...]
Don Simpson's nose was stuffy, although he didn't have a cold. He certainly wasn't cold, dressed mostly in leather, and it was a warm sunny South California day regardless. It was, after all, the movie business. Regardless of any other pressing needs, at the moment he'd give anything to be anywhere else, as he watched his ostensible star lose his mind and ruin a million dollar shoot.
-----
EXT. BEVERLY HILLS DRIVE - DAY
A 1960s muscle car screams down the street and burns rubber around a corner, loud popular rock music playing, sirens in background.
CUT TO
Helicopter shot of the car, half a dozen cars spun out behind it.
INT. THE CAR - DAY
A man nodding along to the music, tapping fingers on the steering wheel. Outside cars are moving by fast, the speed limit is a distant memory. He spins the wheel again, the camera mounted to the car's frame spinning with it.
EXT. POLICE STATION - DAY
The car careens into the parking lot, bounces off the most expensive looking car in the lot, spinning around in a barely controlled circle before carefully and slowly backing into a parking spot.
-----
Simpson shook his head, thinking of all that money wasted. How the fuck am I supposed to replace that coked out nutjob, fuck. Fuckity fuck. Agents man, killed. Fuck. At least his nose was clear now, his mind racing. Black man. A funny black man. Keep the explosions. That's what he needed; that's what America needed.
Cocaine's a helluva drug. (Kind of a roundabout Eddie Murphy reference, but it's there.)
Surely it's Eddie Murphy you're talking about, right? Or is it all... misdirection?
More importantly, how does that poster play into all this? Google reverse image search yields no matches...
Teaser draft (Silicon Valley, 1986)
Chapter 1 "Murderers' Row"
Everything was a revolution in the Valley. The latest was perhaps the one that most bothered the venture capitalists, a group that was quite naturally obsessed with the the companies they missed. As a group they prided themselves on foresight, on investing in people not business plans, and of course in outplaying anyone who came to play on their turf. Failing all three, as they had in the case of the corporation that was stirring talk through the Valley, was if not unprecedented, certainly unprecedented on the size of the mistake. The rest of Silicon Valley divided themselves neatly into people that it wouldn't effect (by far, the vast majority, of course), people that were tossing business plans in the trash and hurriedly reconfiguring them, and the incumbent.
Apple Computers had ridden brilliance and insanity in equal measures since its founding but by 1986 things had, perhaps, seemed to calm down under grown-up supervision, CEO Philip Don Estridge had done an excellent job on the Macintosh launch and had carried that forward: by 1986 Apple had opened a clear lead against everybody in the Valley, and their vicious battle against IBM--though orthogonal in nature, given their respective markets--had not been started by Estridge which helped burnish his already sterling reputation. Indeed the cadre of engineers who had been assembled by him, and then broken up through the company, had mostly decamped to the Valley, following Estridge's wake.
Flummoxing some of the Valley was the failure of the competing projects as by 1985 alone several had been released and more in 1986, to a resounding thud as they had no market worth mentioning. IBM was coming; Apple was already there. Even though everyone knew IBM's graphical user interface project was terrible--the Valley's view of it may charitably be described as "a tower of tires on fire in a junkyard"*--it was still IBM, the last word of their name often switched to an expletive that represented the views of those who had gone up against them. Not to mention the relative failure of most companies in the personal computing market, especially those foolhardy enough to attempt cloning IBM's hardware. By 1986 the Valley, ever-searching for the next great clash, had focused in on the one challenger that did seem to stand a chance. It was of course a great missed opportunity by the venture capitalists who hadn't believed, and a shocking upset victory by Hollywood who had no right to play in their arena.
Atari had been through more hell and survived than any Silicon Valley company of the age, as they counted things[1], but somehow they had in fact carried through to the point where they were challenging the reigning champion, Apple Computers. The Amiga project had been masterminded by legendary lead Jay Miner and the pace of technology in the Valley had given him precious months of hardware capability against the Macintosh. Indeed people had literally not believed the Amiga when it was announced, much like the Macintosh before it.
The handful of people in the Valley who bothered to remember the reason the Valley even existed[2] probably could have imparted a lesson to both sides... if they weren't busy.
*The second part of that statement, "with the firefighters arguing over who gets to put out the fire" was generally left off by 1986, it not being as witty. Nevertheless that was a fair-to-generous evaluation of IBM's management and project team capabilities in virtually any area where they would face Silicon Valley competition at the time. Not that IBM understood that.
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[1] Being bought by a Hollywood studio alone counts, given Silicon Valley's biases.
[2] To wit: the military.
Chapter 1 "Murderers' Row"
Everything was a revolution in the Valley. The latest was perhaps the one that most bothered the venture capitalists, a group that was quite naturally obsessed with the the companies they missed. As a group they prided themselves on foresight, on investing in people not business plans, and of course in outplaying anyone who came to play on their turf. Failing all three, as they had in the case of the corporation that was stirring talk through the Valley, was if not unprecedented, certainly unprecedented on the size of the mistake. The rest of Silicon Valley divided themselves neatly into people that it wouldn't effect (by far, the vast majority, of course), people that were tossing business plans in the trash and hurriedly reconfiguring them, and the incumbent.
Apple Computers had ridden brilliance and insanity in equal measures since its founding but by 1986 things had, perhaps, seemed to calm down under grown-up supervision, CEO Philip Don Estridge had done an excellent job on the Macintosh launch and had carried that forward: by 1986 Apple had opened a clear lead against everybody in the Valley, and their vicious battle against IBM--though orthogonal in nature, given their respective markets--had not been started by Estridge which helped burnish his already sterling reputation. Indeed the cadre of engineers who had been assembled by him, and then broken up through the company, had mostly decamped to the Valley, following Estridge's wake.
Flummoxing some of the Valley was the failure of the competing projects as by 1985 alone several had been released and more in 1986, to a resounding thud as they had no market worth mentioning. IBM was coming; Apple was already there. Even though everyone knew IBM's graphical user interface project was terrible--the Valley's view of it may charitably be described as "a tower of tires on fire in a junkyard"*--it was still IBM, the last word of their name often switched to an expletive that represented the views of those who had gone up against them. Not to mention the relative failure of most companies in the personal computing market, especially those foolhardy enough to attempt cloning IBM's hardware. By 1986 the Valley, ever-searching for the next great clash, had focused in on the one challenger that did seem to stand a chance. It was of course a great missed opportunity by the venture capitalists who hadn't believed, and a shocking upset victory by Hollywood who had no right to play in their arena.
Atari had been through more hell and survived than any Silicon Valley company of the age, as they counted things[1], but somehow they had in fact carried through to the point where they were challenging the reigning champion, Apple Computers. The Amiga project had been masterminded by legendary lead Jay Miner and the pace of technology in the Valley had given him precious months of hardware capability against the Macintosh. Indeed people had literally not believed the Amiga when it was announced, much like the Macintosh before it.
The handful of people in the Valley who bothered to remember the reason the Valley even existed[2] probably could have imparted a lesson to both sides... if they weren't busy.
*The second part of that statement, "with the firefighters arguing over who gets to put out the fire" was generally left off by 1986, it not being as witty. Nevertheless that was a fair-to-generous evaluation of IBM's management and project team capabilities in virtually any area where they would face Silicon Valley competition at the time. Not that IBM understood that.
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[1] Being bought by a Hollywood studio alone counts, given Silicon Valley's biases.
[2] To wit: the military.
I'm guessing that everything before the SNL bit was retconned out of existence? Would it be possible for Max Headroom to still be more successful? Or is that as dead as the old timeline?
Philip Don Estridge I suppose was the point alongside Atari being a going concern in 1986. Whether or not WB held onto it is another matter
. Or, more likely, I loved the font that Apple Computers was rendered in and that draft logo of Atari was cool.Well then we've all learned that reverse image search relies heavily on matching resolution, because I cropped that picture.
Not retconned, particularly, since this will be a different timeline and I'm just using this thread for planning (and staying under the radar while doing so, I suppose) but as much fun as that timeline was I didn't have much of a through-line, only short-term plans. Darts on the wall, as it were. Although details here and there are going to be different, yeah I'm planning to reuse the darts I threw previously because I did have some plans for the darts.
No wait, I can do that metaphor better.
So the timeline is a pond...
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No need for another metaphor, I get it. I'm just glad that you're going to save my favorite underated television show. Find a way to get Quantum Leap (if it exists) a decent ending and you'll be my hero.
I was just kidding about the more metaphors
. Really, you're that one guy! No I'm with you, that show was great and in this universe I'm still planning for it to be great. The one theme I was carrying off in the previous version of this was a little more cyberpunk, that'll certainly continue ITTL.Quantum Leap, well I dunno
.
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(Merry Thanksgiving everybody )
Chapter 2
(Hollywood, 1986) draft
"And, just for variety, show the children how to make a Molotov cocktail."
“Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood -- and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else.”
― Raymond Chandler
The new year dawned bright and cold over the glass towers of downtown Los Angeles, bracketed by mountains and freeways. 1 January, 1986; sixteen months after yet another Soviet victory in the Olympic Games, although Los Angeles herself cheated her way to victory. The subterranean rumble of new subway cars; sparks of electricity above as trains rolled on shining rail. Los Angeles Metropolitan Authority's friendly Llama the llama signage heralded the change, displayed up and down the length of a pair of growing subway lines and two light rail lines[1]; Llama's beaming visage and safety warnings were the spokesperson for Metro, as well as perhaps every single graffiti artist in town, with train cars in the system spoken of reverently. A sea of slowly moving metal still existed on vast swatches of freeways but the heady 1972 days of cheap gas and unlimited highway--the new American frontier--were long gone, and the cars were smaller.
Hollywood's geographical location was right next to Los Angeles, as the subway testified burrowing north and west, but the mental location of Hollywood was both broader and vastly simpler: whatever people think it is. In 1986 Hollywood encompassed a slew of major and minor studios, the TV networks and production companies (if counted as lesser, of course) but the growing subway was a fine portent of Hollywood's increasing connection to the rest of the world. For much of Hollywood was no longer independent, instead swallowed up by corporation after corporation, although those corporations then often then named themselves after their movie studios.
Regardless of the corporate deals flying around above them them Paramount Pictures has produced The Killer Dillers--the name referring to Barry Diller, long-time head of Paramount Pictures and the team he trained to run the studio with him--with their impromptu exodus from Paramount Pictures leaving the former team dominating a good portion of Hollywood.
20th Century Fox
Barry Diller himself jumped ship from his near decade long run to 20th Century Fox in 1983, beginning the long game of musical chairs. By landing at Fox he has also joined one of Hollywood's two studios that remained independent, as Marvin Davis owns the majority of the company now that John Kluge has bought in via his privately held Metromedia had covered his leveraged position. Davis had remarkably taken just $50 million in cash to buy Fox for $725 million, although with $426 million in liabilities that he cleared off by selling Fox's strange holdings: a Coca-Cola bottling plant and several resorts. Despite the Metromedia deal Davis remains mired in debt, and persistent rumours have swirled around the sale of Fox.
Independent Production Companies
Jerry Bruickheimer and Don Simpson also jumped ship from Paramount Pictures, leaving in 1982 to form an independent production company together. Their first few films have been major successes and indeed their production deal with Paramount is being enviously eyed by other major Hollywood figures eager to get out of the paperwork involved in running a studio. Naturally the failures of similar production companies, perhaps most prominently the Warner Bros. backed The Ladd Company whose head had greenlighted Star Wars when at Fox, were quickly forgotten.
Walt Disney Company
Michael Eisner was under consideration for the top job at Paramount after Diller left in 1983 but instead he and Jeffrey Katzenberg landed at Disney where Eisner and Frank Wells (formerly of Warner Bros.) share the CEO position, although everyone knows that Vice-Chairman Wells does the hard work and lets Chairman Eisner do whatever catches his fancy; Jeffrey Katzenberg is charged with turning around the movie business. In 1984 their purchase of ABC for $2.5 billion dollars had made them the first studio with a television network.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Of course with one studio now owned by a television network for a mere $692 million and another owned by a cable station (just $480 million)[2] Disney aquiring ABC has made the rest of Hollywood surprisingly happy. The closer integration of television and movies as well as the rise of paytv and home video, United Artists leaving Transamerica, and the de-conglomeration of Paramount Communications has made Hollywood increasingly key parts of much more focused entertainment companies, less the useful shiny baubles they had been in the '60s and '70s.
MGM itself has finally escaped the mad tyranny of Kirk Kerkorian and has held together as a full studio under Turner, continuing to hold their strong production and distribution connections as well as the backlot and lab facalities. However MGM desperately needs a strong leader and nobody seems interested...
Columbia Pictures
Last but certainly not least, Dawn Steel had been the final Killer Diller to leave Paramount, taking over Columbia Pictures as CBS floundered with their purchase in 1985 and becoming the first woman to run a movie studio in Hollywood. William Paley is certainly not going to make her his successor, but he wants Columbia to bring in some serious money and the Killer Diller's out-sized (and, according to around half of Hollywood, undeserved) reputation made her a natural choice.
Warner Communications
Elsewhere in Hollywood the unflappable Steve Ross runs Warner Communications with a firm hand although he leaves his key divisions to the people that run them: Del Yocan at Atari, with Robert Daly and Terry Semel at Warner Bros, as well as the various smaller but successful ventures such as Warner Books. Ross's nose for stable talent was legendary, with Ted Ashley and John Calley having been his previous long-term movie studio team through much success in the 1970s.
Paramount Communications
Paramount Pictures, after the disruption of the Killer Dillers in 1982-3, has settled down with Frank Mancuso in charge and Ned Tanen as his deputy; Paramount has defied commentators by having their string of hits continue through 1985 and 1986. Their parent company Paramount Communications and CEO Martin Davis is content as long as the high money flow of the Diller era continues, his strategy echoes that of Steve Ross at Warner Communications.
Universal Pictures
[3]
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[1][2][3]Footnotes left out.
I still want to add brief movie slates to each section, plus Universal of course. And a ton of re-writing.
)Chapter 2
(Hollywood, 1986) draft
"And, just for variety, show the children how to make a Molotov cocktail."
“Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood -- and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else.”
― Raymond Chandler
The new year dawned bright and cold over the glass towers of downtown Los Angeles, bracketed by mountains and freeways. 1 January, 1986; sixteen months after yet another Soviet victory in the Olympic Games, although Los Angeles herself cheated her way to victory. The subterranean rumble of new subway cars; sparks of electricity above as trains rolled on shining rail. Los Angeles Metropolitan Authority's friendly Llama the llama signage heralded the change, displayed up and down the length of a pair of growing subway lines and two light rail lines[1]; Llama's beaming visage and safety warnings were the spokesperson for Metro, as well as perhaps every single graffiti artist in town, with train cars in the system spoken of reverently. A sea of slowly moving metal still existed on vast swatches of freeways but the heady 1972 days of cheap gas and unlimited highway--the new American frontier--were long gone, and the cars were smaller.
Hollywood's geographical location was right next to Los Angeles, as the subway testified burrowing north and west, but the mental location of Hollywood was both broader and vastly simpler: whatever people think it is. In 1986 Hollywood encompassed a slew of major and minor studios, the TV networks and production companies (if counted as lesser, of course) but the growing subway was a fine portent of Hollywood's increasing connection to the rest of the world. For much of Hollywood was no longer independent, instead swallowed up by corporation after corporation, although those corporations then often then named themselves after their movie studios.
Regardless of the corporate deals flying around above them them Paramount Pictures has produced The Killer Dillers--the name referring to Barry Diller, long-time head of Paramount Pictures and the team he trained to run the studio with him--with their impromptu exodus from Paramount Pictures leaving the former team dominating a good portion of Hollywood.
20th Century Fox
Barry Diller himself jumped ship from his near decade long run to 20th Century Fox in 1983, beginning the long game of musical chairs. By landing at Fox he has also joined one of Hollywood's two studios that remained independent, as Marvin Davis owns the majority of the company now that John Kluge has bought in via his privately held Metromedia had covered his leveraged position. Davis had remarkably taken just $50 million in cash to buy Fox for $725 million, although with $426 million in liabilities that he cleared off by selling Fox's strange holdings: a Coca-Cola bottling plant and several resorts. Despite the Metromedia deal Davis remains mired in debt, and persistent rumours have swirled around the sale of Fox.
Independent Production Companies
Jerry Bruickheimer and Don Simpson also jumped ship from Paramount Pictures, leaving in 1982 to form an independent production company together. Their first few films have been major successes and indeed their production deal with Paramount is being enviously eyed by other major Hollywood figures eager to get out of the paperwork involved in running a studio. Naturally the failures of similar production companies, perhaps most prominently the Warner Bros. backed The Ladd Company whose head had greenlighted Star Wars when at Fox, were quickly forgotten.
Walt Disney Company
Michael Eisner was under consideration for the top job at Paramount after Diller left in 1983 but instead he and Jeffrey Katzenberg landed at Disney where Eisner and Frank Wells (formerly of Warner Bros.) share the CEO position, although everyone knows that Vice-Chairman Wells does the hard work and lets Chairman Eisner do whatever catches his fancy; Jeffrey Katzenberg is charged with turning around the movie business. In 1984 their purchase of ABC for $2.5 billion dollars had made them the first studio with a television network.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Of course with one studio now owned by a television network for a mere $692 million and another owned by a cable station (just $480 million)[2] Disney aquiring ABC has made the rest of Hollywood surprisingly happy. The closer integration of television and movies as well as the rise of paytv and home video, United Artists leaving Transamerica, and the de-conglomeration of Paramount Communications has made Hollywood increasingly key parts of much more focused entertainment companies, less the useful shiny baubles they had been in the '60s and '70s.
MGM itself has finally escaped the mad tyranny of Kirk Kerkorian and has held together as a full studio under Turner, continuing to hold their strong production and distribution connections as well as the backlot and lab facalities. However MGM desperately needs a strong leader and nobody seems interested...
Columbia Pictures
Last but certainly not least, Dawn Steel had been the final Killer Diller to leave Paramount, taking over Columbia Pictures as CBS floundered with their purchase in 1985 and becoming the first woman to run a movie studio in Hollywood. William Paley is certainly not going to make her his successor, but he wants Columbia to bring in some serious money and the Killer Diller's out-sized (and, according to around half of Hollywood, undeserved) reputation made her a natural choice.
Warner Communications
Elsewhere in Hollywood the unflappable Steve Ross runs Warner Communications with a firm hand although he leaves his key divisions to the people that run them: Del Yocan at Atari, with Robert Daly and Terry Semel at Warner Bros, as well as the various smaller but successful ventures such as Warner Books. Ross's nose for stable talent was legendary, with Ted Ashley and John Calley having been his previous long-term movie studio team through much success in the 1970s.
Paramount Communications
Paramount Pictures, after the disruption of the Killer Dillers in 1982-3, has settled down with Frank Mancuso in charge and Ned Tanen as his deputy; Paramount has defied commentators by having their string of hits continue through 1985 and 1986. Their parent company Paramount Communications and CEO Martin Davis is content as long as the high money flow of the Diller era continues, his strategy echoes that of Steve Ross at Warner Communications.
Universal Pictures
[3]
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[1][2][3]Footnotes left out.
I still want to add brief movie slates to each section, plus Universal of course. And a ton of re-writing.
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Should I phrase it like the Wiki, "She was the first woman studio head."? Besides, what are you implying? (lol)
(Well if you wanna unquote it the word movie is in there now
, although I dunno why we're comparing a movie studio to a television production company... . Seriously though, that's an interesting question: would anyone in Hollywood movies even think of television studios as studios? Because that's more or less the tone I was going for with the narrator, who gets in a couple digs at TV through-out.)Remember that IOTL Coca-Cola (of all companies) bought Columbia in 1982, picked a terrible person to run it, string of bad movies, better person to run it but only gave her a couple years, and then sold it to Sony in 1989 who also ran it terribly. The above post is set early in 1986. ITTL CBS picked up Columbia instead of the joint ventures of OTL (that is, TriStar; and better CBS then the other potential buyer of either timeline, Kirk Kerkorian) but of course IOTL they bowed out of TriStar fairly fast. We'll have to see how they do here.
Whether or not Sony buys it, or a different studio, or indeed any studio depends on plenty of other factors. Frankly given Sony's hands-off attitude to running their movie studios IOTL, what happens to TriStar might be far more important.
Subways or Hollywood? Out of curiosity
.
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That you're Ignoring the Legendary Wacky Redhead and that leave braibin bad.
You should rephrase as the female leader of a mayor Distrbuitor and developer(studio) company, like Columbia or Paramount,rather mr Lucille who was a studio(just filiming) company).
Ironically i've little complains about sony-columbia except that awful robocop and chappie movies
Well, in the 1967-68 season, Desilu produced four television series (Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, Mannix, and The Lucy Show). Respectively, 26, 25, 24, and 24 episodes were produced of those series. The average episode length for each show was 50, 50, 50, and 25 minutes, respectively. That's 1,300, 1,250, 1,200, and 600 minutes respectively, for a total of 4,350 minutes of content produced with a turnaround time of about a year (from story outlines for the earliest episodes to broadcast of the season finales). 4,350 minutes, divided by the 90-minute average length of a feature film, is 48.33. It's safe to say that no film studio in Hollywood was producing anywhere near 48 films per year in the late-1960s. So you're right, film studios aren't nearly as productive as television studios(Well if you wanna unquote it the word movie is in there now