The industry's evolution during the 1980s concealed a paradox. Complicating their drive to keep all revenue streams in-house, the majors failed to control a vitally important resource-the talent required for making films. During the 1930s and 1940s, the major studio-distributors maintained repositories of in-house talent that they kept under long-term contract. Such an arrangement assured relatively stable relations with the personnel needed for production, and the old-line studio moguls treated most of their directors, screenwriters, and actors like what they were-studio employees. As producer Bernie Brillstein noted, "When Spencer Tracy [under contract to MGM's Louis B. Mayer] wanted to make a movie for Columbia, lie had to beg Mayer to let him".¹

By contrast, in the 1980s the majors labored under the constraints that had prevailed since the 1947 divestiture ruling and the industry changes that it helped to instigate. Chief among these were the...