Lew Wasserman, the innovative talent agent-cum-studio executive who all but ran Hollywood for almost half a century, was an amalgam of various types of American Jews.
He was the son of Russian immigrants, a street-smart operator who grew up rubbing elbows with mobsters and bookies.
He was a brilliant numbers guy — a “human computer,” according to one associate — who kept everything in his head.
He was a creative strategist able to foresee trends and parlay apparently worthless assets into fortunes.
The diverting documentary “The Last Mogul” weaves these strands into a compelling portrait of a ruthless power player. But since Wasserman didn’t keep notes or pen a memoir, and his widow, Edie, declined to cooperate with filmmaker Barry Avrich, the picture is incomplete. We don’t know (although I’d wager) if he fit the mold of another kind of Jew — wealthy, assimilated, philanthropic and financially supportive of Israel.
“The Last Mogul” received a brief theatrical release last year and has just been released on DVD.
Wasserman was born in 1913, and came of age on Cleveland’s tough east side. He sold candy at a burlesque house and worked the door at a speakeasy owned by the mob before he started booking bands for dances at his high school.
The talent was supplied by a Chicago agency, Music Corporation of America, and just a few years later its head, Jules Stein, hired Wasserman. After stints in Chicago and New York, Wasserman was sent to Los Angeles in 1939 to run MCA’s lagging movie division.
One of its few clients was Ronald Reagan. Wasserman negotiated a million-dollar studio contract for the middling actor, the first of numerous turns they were to do for each other.
According to “The Last Mogul,” it took Wasserman a mere seven years to become the most powerful man in Hollywood. His key? Focusing on the box-office clout of movie stars.
The agent perfected the art of “packaging,” or forcing a studio or producer to accept several of his clients in supporting roles in order to get the star. Wasserman also negotiated the first back-end deal, in 1950, with a strapped studio paying Jimmy Stewart a reduced salary in exchange for a hefty percentage of the box office.
Wasserman was one of the first to embrace television, moving MCA into production so aggressively that by the early 1960s it was handling 60 percent of the prime time schedule.
But the consolidation of talent and production under one corporate umbrella got the attention of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who set about breaking up MCA’s sweet scheme. From this setback Wasserman concluded that the way to fend off external limits on his control of Hollywood was to cultivate friends in high places in Washington.
It’s difficult to gauge Wasserman’s political leanings — he was tight with Reagan but later hosted Clinton fundraisers. The constant, it seems, was protecting his business interests.
To that end, one of his closest advisers was an attorney named Sidney Korshak, whom he’d met during his days in Chicago. The film strongly suggests that Korshak was an intermediary between the mob — which had influence in the Teamsters and other unions — and Wasserman, who wanted peaceful labor relations to keep production (and revenues) flowing smoothly.
“The Last Mogul” is not hagiography, clearly, and Avrich notes that Wasserman had trouble making hit movies after MCA bought Universal. Until “Jaws,” that is, which made Steven Spielberg’s career and marked the beginning of an important relationship between the two men. (Spielberg isn’t interviewed in the film.)
The documentary devotes considerable time to MCA’s acquisition by the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company of Japan in 1990. It marked the end of the line for Wasserman, because the new owners unexpectedly stripped him of his power. Yet he kept coming to the office, even after MCA was sold to Seagram, until his death in 2002.
There are plenty of Jewish executives at Hollywood studios today, but — like Lew Wasserman after 1990 — they are employees of subsidiaries of multinational companies. That’s why he was truly the last mogul.