“But time passes, things change /
Don Henley, “Who Owns This Place”
You might get restless, I might get strange /
But everything you do says always /
Who owns this place?”
By 1983, the rubble of the Hollywood studio system was indistinguible from the cocaine dust emanating from executive offices and bungalows of the movie colony. Distressed assets gave way to corporate takeovers — Paramount to Gulf+Western, Warner Bros. to Seven Arts, and Columbia to Coca-Cola to name just a few. With that, the dynamics shifted away from a self-contained industry of hardlined creative management and control to one that matched the laissez-faire economic attitude of American enterprise. In this moment, the power previously maintained by studio bosses was wrestled into the hands of independents and stars with a potent mix of clout and audience appeal. This power then in turn fell into the hands of those representing their interests: agencies.
One such agency, CAA — Creative Artists Agency — effectively restructured Hollywood’s power base by controlling the pre-production process in the form of packaging — aligning key talent around projects and selling to studios in such a way that would pad salaries, which, in turn increased their 10% commission. James Andrew Miller’s Powerhouse, a crucial read early into the pandemic, chronicles the history of CAA from its chief players, the mythmakers making the deals and those burnishing narratives on-screen. It is through this lens that the arcs of professional careers come into focus and works previously considered minor artistically, in fact, become consequential. In such a case, the maxim of “every film is a story of its own making” rings true for a crucial triumph for this modern industrial apparatus, a multi-pronged star vehicle and redemption story: Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money.
Twenty-five years following the events of the preceding film, The Hustler, Paul Newman’s “Fast Eddie” Felson has traded his pool shark past for a lucrative career in selling knock-off liquor to dives and billiards halls. The Hustler showcases its working-class attitudes through a combination of New York method acting in stark black and white Cinemascope, of the moment for the type of vivid character pieces that ushered in waves of new American actors like Newman. In the same way that straight pool has been traded for the more fast-paced style of nine-ball, Scorsese trades in Hustler director Robert Rossen’s boozy pugilism for a punchy kineticism, a style of play that mirrors the brash intensity that Tom Cruise’s Vincent Lauria brings to the game. The sledgehammer intensity of Vincent’s break rattles Eddie’s attention, a disruptive violence that turns into seduction — or, more pointedly, an opportunity to return to his original racket.
How likely was a sequel to The Hustler? In today’s terms, one can hardly imagine any project coming to fruition without the chance of a franchise or tendrils extended into other avenues. Walter Tevis’s manuscript for a sequel had been floated to Newman, a CAA client, who was undergoing a career resurgence with back-to-back Best Actor nominations for Absence of Malice and The Verdict. According to Martin Scorsese, Newman had written a letter to him professing his admiration for Raging Bull and the chance at developing Money together, apparently at the soft urging of CAA powerbroker Mike Ovitz, the unofficial new king of Hollywood. For Scorsese, the collapse of his dream project The Last Temptation of Christ at Paramount had left him at a crucial juncture. He hadn’t scored a commercial hit since 1976’s Taxi Driver, a lifetime ago in this current paradigm, and was in need of a save. Our fourth major player, ascendant actor Tom Cruise, explains his experience with CAA as such:
“I signed with them and went up to their offices and I remember meeting Ronnie, Mike Ovitz, and Rick Nicita and feeling a real sense of excitement and generosity. As a kid I looked at photos of premieres and read about the old studio system. So I realized if I’m going to do this, I have to teach myself, and I have to find out for myself what it is that I want. I remember meeting with these guys and saying that I wanted to sit down with their filmmakers and study their movies, and CAA had all of those connections. I didn’t go to acting class. I didn’t go to film school. Film school was every single day that I was making a movie. I wanted to push myself to learn, and CAA gave me this platform and support where I was able to say, “Can I meet Mr. Pollack? Can I meet Mr. Scorsese? If he would give me an hour of his time, I just want to ask him about movies. And you know, I’d also like to meet Mr. Newman.” And they would facilitate all of that. “Here I am, nineteen years old and having a meeting with Martin Scorsese because of Creative Artists Agency. They knew what I wanted to learn and so I was meeting these people, not just at dinner parties, but at serious meetings about cinema and story.” 1
1Miller, James Andrew. Powerhouse. HarperCollins, 2016.
Under this paradigm, it is considered possible to sharpen creative bonafides and mold a career in such a way that helps line the pockets of those offering a stake. For Eddie, the existential breakdown in his youth lay directly in not knowing when to quit, sacrificing gamesmanship for raw talent. In Vincent, he sees a mirror image, a “natural character” whose obsequiousness belies a chance to turn that talent into profit. A player can win a tournament, capture a grand prize (i.e., an award for performance), but the real ace knows how to continually surprise and reinvent oneself, to play a variety of roles as a way to extract pure profit — a true victory. A lesson in star-making: “[one]’s gotta learn to be himself, but on purpose.” In this, Eddie relays the prevailing textual and subtextual lesson: in order to win, sometimes you have to lose.
It’s easy to read The Color of Money as a compromise for Scorsese, responding to the critical and commercial failure of The King of Comedy and the increasing financialization of popular cinema. But to do so would be to disregard the pleasures of a master working closer to the surface, parlaying his own pop-meets-art sensibilities into a realm of pure confectionery bliss. A Robbie Robertson-backed AOR soundtrack populated by boomer balladeers shares space with bluesman like B.B. King and Willie Dixon; soundtracks were a major source of revenue in this era, though the emotion and narrative of each track finds purchase in audiovisual showcases. Phil Collins’ “One More Night” undergirds Eddie’s discovery of Vincent; Don Henley’s “Who Owns This Place” transplants the aesthetic angst found in Scorsese’s previous After Hours into Vincent’s stormy relationship with his partner Carmen; in arguably the film’s most iconic sequence, Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” frames Vincent’s self-defeating victory against the best player in the room, forfeiting a chance at scoring against other big fish shooters. These sequences set the stage for Scorsese’s next CAA-backed venture, the extended music video for Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” while also acting as a bridge for the musical inflections in his crime dramas, Mean Streets and GoodFellas.
Newman and Cruise forge an old school-meets-new school dialectic that, in other cases, would signify a passing of the torch to a younger generation. Modern legacy sequels act as vessels to continue a franchise by transferring stewardship of the brand from one entity to another, a practice codified by Disney’s failed attempt with Tron: Legacy in 2010 and later successful foray with the Star Wars sequels and extended universe in 2015. To wit, The Color of Money was released in the first two years of Disney’s adult-oriented venture Touchstone Pictures, an attempt to court cost-effective talent with an eye toward the burgeoning home video market — a far cry from the direct-to-consumer, brands-are-your-friends model touted in their 2020 Investor Day presentation. Through varying sleights of hand and apparent betrayals, mentor meets mentee in a post-climactic confidence game layered with double meaning. Both competitors are staged with their partners at opposite sides of a pool table, reflected against a mirror, denoting them as equals. Eddie wins the first shot, and right before thundering the break lets out a reaffirming and declarative “I’m back.”
Cue theme, roll credits.
Newman wins the Oscar, Cruise goes on to make Top Gun, Scorsese gets Last Temptation made at Universal, and everyone goes home with a lot of money.
That’s the stuff that Hollywood dreams are made of.
