Diller to Hollywood: Lay off the layoffs?

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It’s getting close to the time of year when all the Hollywood studio chiefs boast about all the profits they’ve made during the past 12 months, thanks to the endless string of lucrative remakes and sequels they’ve churned out during the year. So after seeing that both NBC Universal and Viacom announced a big round of layoffs today, with Viacom laying off 850 employees and NBC Universal firing 500 employees, I wondered just who former studio mogul Barry Diller might be referring to when he lashed out at certain profitable companies who were having cutbacks ‘just so they can earn another $12 million or $20 million or $40 million in a year where no one’s counting is really a horrible act when you think about it on every level.’

Geez, could he possibly be talking about the titans of the entertainment business who are still keeping their corporate jets even as they engage in another brutal round of layoffs? While there’s no one who seems to loathe the old entertainment biz more than Diller--now that he’s an Internet entrepreneur and gadfly instead of a studio chief, he often sounds like a reformed drunk railing at his old drinking buddies--you have to wonder if he doesn’t have a point. Speaking at the Reuters Media Summit today, he argued that ‘it’s not that you don’t want to earn as much money as you can--it’s your obligation, of course--but companies have obligations beyond that,’ adding that firing people in economic downturns is ‘doing it at the worst time. It’s throwing people out to what is inevitably a larger unemployment heap for frankly no good reason.’

Someone, as they always do, asked Diller if he missed Hollywood. Not a chance. ‘Margins used to be very good in the movie business,’ he said. ‘They’re now, what, 4%, 5% in a decent year. Where’s the joy in that? Is there really a joy in ‘Superman 17’ or ‘Iron Man 2’?’ It’s just a hunch, but I’m betting Barry didn’t see ‘Saw 5’ or ‘The Mummy 3’ or ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ or he’d have really worked himself into a lather.