‘They don’t have any show business in their blood’
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Producer Richard Zanuck, who years ago ran 20th Century Fox, said in the days when he was boss, the studios deferred to Lew Wasserman to work things out with the unions:
‘Swear to God, if Lew said, ‘We can’t go any further’ or ‘This is as much as we are going to give,’ the unions knew he wasn’t bluffing. So, he could wrap things up. There were prolonged strikes that he was involved in, but he could normally wrap things up. The management side doesn’t seem to have found a replacement figure for him.’ ‘In those days, there were just the studios. But today, there are the parents of the studios, and the parents aren’t really show biz people. They are super-management. They don’t have any show business in their blood. A lot of these major companies tolerate moviemaking and the creative process, but tolerate is about as much as they care for. For them, it doesn’t make any sense, mathematically, but they are stuck with it in order to feed all the other things they are doing.’
-- Robert Welkos