Peter Chernin, new member of the post-mogul set

What does a captain of the entertainment-industrial complex do for a second act?

That’s the conundrum facing Peter Chernin, who on July 1 will bail from his long tenure as Rupert Murdoch’s wingman, the president of News Corp., and unofficial dean of the Hollywood mogul set.

Chernin joins a rarefied group of alumni -- including former Disney impresario Michael Eisner, who now owns a trading card company; Barry Diller, who has the Home Shopping Network and an assortment of Internet commerce businesses; and Michael Ovitz, the onetime king of Hollywood, who’s now fallen off the Tinseltown radar.

Chernin is relatively young -- a mere 57 years old -- meaning he has plenty of time left for another act, and he wasn’t deposed against his will, so he doesn’t have to spend time licking his wounded ego or managing perception. Still, there’s a major altitude adjustment ahead as he transitions from mogul to mortal, and successful Act 2s aren’t guaranteed, even for those who have routinely hobnobbed at Camp Allen.

Undeniably, first up will be some unfamiliar time for reflection.

“When you have a job like what Peter has, you’re working 24/7. You don’t have a chance to think,” says Chernin’s friend Bob Daly, who, with business partner Terry Semel, ran Warner Bros. for decades before opting to leave in 2000. “All you’re thinking about is the meeting tomorrow, beating numbers for the next quarter, worrying about labor unions.”

There also will likely be some reality realignment.

“The next day you have to do things for yourself,” Bill Mechanic says with a wry chuckle. Mechanic was chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment through much of the ‘90s, before turning to producing, most recently the 3-D animated “Coraline.” He describes an almost King Lear-like existential dilemma awaiting former bigwigs. “The question is, have you become what you are? There’s a point at which it doesn’t matter what you were, you get used to things. The pace, the thousands of phone calls. If you’re a total junkie, you would miss that. If you’re a normal human being, that is not something you miss.”

Unlike some other ex-moguls, Chernin’s getting a sweet goodbye gift -- an extremely lavish movie and TV production deal at his former digs, with a guarantee that NewsCorp.-owned Fox studios will greenlight two of his films a year. Chernin is already in talks with recently deposed NBC television studio head Katherine Pope to front his TV operation. Yet, according to an informed source, Chernin, who declined to comment for this story, plans to spend only a third of his time producing content. Another third will be devoted to his nonprofit Malaria No More, and the final third to an undetermined opportunity in the media and tech sphere.

Still, few Hollywood titans are able to launch second acts that are not only culturally relevant but put them back atop the Hollywood food chain, notes USC communications professor Jonathan Taplin.

“I think it’s interesting that some of these moguls like Barry Diller never quite get back to the place where they were when they were running a major entertainment company,” says Taplin. Diller’s various businesses, which include Expedia.com and Ticketmaster, don’t quite seize the imagination the way “American Idol” does and have largely been flailing in the recent economic downturn. Eisner owns card-maker Topps and Vuguru, the new media studio behind such Web shows as “Prom Queen.”

Eisner’s CNBC talk show recently folded. “It feels more like a hobby,” says Taplin of Eisner’s pursuits. “I don’t think it passes the who cares test.” Eisner declined to comment.

Ironically, one of the hardest transitions for these captains of media industry is the one that involves getting your hands dirty -- actually making a movie or TV show, rather than just administrating an empire and jabberwockying with Wall Street. Chernin is known for having a creative pulse (he created Fox Searchlight, Fox 2000, Fox Animation, ran the studio and the network, and personally greenlighted “Titanic”), but it’s been years since he’s been involved with the nitty-gritty of the creative endeavor, and that particular path remains treacherous, and laden with casualties.

Consider the fate of Sidney J. Sheinberg, Steven Spielberg’s mentor, who ruled MCA Inc., as Lew Wasserman’s right-hand autocrat for 34 years. When Seagrams bought the company, Sheinberg was given a production deal, one he bragged was “the most lucrative afforded an autonomous entity by a studio.” He had the power to greenlight three to four pictures a year, for five years, which resulted in . . . 1997’s “McHale’s Navy” and a series of other flops. The deal ended three years early.

Ovitz’s post-CAA travails have been practically Shakespearean. After leaving his throne as head of the town’s dominant agency, Ovitz spent 18 months as president of Disney before getting booted. He rebounded from that karate chop to the ego by launching a would-be management empire, AMG, which was eventually dismantled and sold amid a frenzy of bad will from Hollywood insiders.

And then there’s Joe Roth, the onetime chairman of Walt Disney Studios, who had plenty of producing experience but whose post-Disney gig, Revolution Studios, became notorious for aiming low and missing. Launched with a billion dollars in financing from entities like Sony Pictures Entertainment and Fox Broadcasting, Revolution made some 47 films, with a few hits like “xXx”, and many lowbrow flicks and flops like “Tomcats” and “Gigli.”

Roth disbanded the ambitious 75-person operation at the end of 2007. He’s now spending much time pursuing another rich man’s pursuit: sports team ownership. Roth’s the majority owner of Seattle Sounders FC, the major league soccer expansion team that will begin playing this spring.

Still, former moguls keep throwing their hats into the ring, and recently, some of have turned to Wall Street to scoop up funds to launch their own mini-studios -- ventures like Overture, run by former MGM Vice Chairman Chris McGurk, and Summit, where Paramount’s former Rob Friedman holds sway. It’s too soon to know how these ventures will ultimately fare -- especially given the current credit crunch -- although Summit has recently launched its first successful franchise, the “Twilight” series.

Tom Pollock, who chaired Universal Filmed Entertainment for 10 years before launching a successful production shingle with director Ivan Reitman, says success in content production is often reflective of a mogul’s interest in the nitty-gritty of filmmaking -- prior to launching a second act.

“I got into the business in the first place because I loved movies,” says Pollock, whose company produced “Disturbia,” “Old School” and, most recently, “I Love You, Man.” “If your goal is you want to go run companies, that’s different from loving movies.” He adds, “There’s a tendency of some studio heads to think of themselves as buyers, then it’s hard to transfer into being a seller, which is what a producer is.”

A few hardy souls do forage outside traditional Hollywood. Daly landed his fantasy job, as part-owner and general manager of the Dodgers. “That was a passion that went back to when I was 6 years old,” says Daly, who stayed for four years until the team was sold to Frank McCourt. His former partner, Semel, went on to run Yahoo for six years, a job that garnered him more than $400 million in compensation. Yet Semel failed to counter the threats of Google, or MySpace, and was ultimately replaced by Yahoo founder Jerry Yang in 2007, when the stock went into free fall.

There’s also always the option of doing good, like former Paramount Chairman Sherry Lansing, who has devoted her retirement to her foundation and launched a variety of programs such as En Corps teachers, which helps retirees with math and science degrees become LAUSD teachers. “I don’t think people really retire, they rewire,” says Lansing. “If you have a lot of interests in life, the third chapter is just glorious. The thing I initially felt was this freedom. If you were a corporate CEO, you’re always answering to somebody, no matter who you are, to a boss, or shareholders. You didn’t control your own time. You’re always beholden to some crisis.” Giving up her job, Lansing says, “I felt like I did when I first got out of college. The whole world was new to me.”

Still, as Mechanic notes, moguls re-create themselves because they want to, not because they have to. In 2008, Chernin’s compensation was $28.8 million. He has infinitely more options than a laid-off factory worker forced to learn new skills.

“The truth is, you get to choose what you’re going to do, an option which isn’t available to everybody. You get to choose what you want to do or be,” says Mechanic. “There are no rules you have to do this or you have to do that. You don’t have to do anything.”

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rachel.abramowitz @latimes.com