Brokaw Pins Tail on ‘New Hollywood’

NEW YORK —  There was a time when they used to drive convertibles in Hollywood. Now they drive convertible debentures.

The effects of this march of the conglomerates on the movie world are being examined Wednesday in an NBC News special, “The New Hollywood.” It’s anchored by Tom Brokaw, who can recall the remnants of the Old Hollywood.

He first saw it in 1966, when he began at KNBC-TV in Burbank as the new anchor in town.

His memories: “In those days, it seemed more stately than it does now. Maybe I’m deluding myself, but it seemed to me there was at least a residue of the old elegance of Hollywood. Now it’s Hustle City.”

When he was new in town, he recalls, assorted sages “were predicting that the era of the big studios was over, that they were going to roll over and die, and the little independent films were taking hold in many ways.”

Well, not even sages can be right all the time.

The “conglomerization” of Hollywood has tended to make the talk there guarded, cautious and corporate, a far cry from yesteryear’s lavish babble.

Thus, Brokaw says, he was surprised that today’s Hollywood inmates, including Oscar candidate director-writer Oliver Stone, were willing to talk to him about the New Hollywood and its bottom-line brigade.

But he drew a blank with one of hamlet’s major movers and shakers, Michael Ovitz, a party often identified as a superagent who handles superstars.

Brokaw said he talked by phone with Ovitz, chairman of Creative Artists Agency, “and he simply would not cooperate. Mike Ovitz said he would be happy to talk to me off the record if I wouldn’t tell anybody that we were talking. So I thought I’d pass.”