David Zaslav’s Balancing Act

Restoring faith in a studio and its maligned king means facing the darkest passages in Tinseltown’s history

Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslav has made headlines in recent weeks.

Journalists and commentators view Zaslav as a symbol of all that is wrong with Hollywood today and blame him, along with other commercially minded studio heads, for provoking the writers’ and actors’ strike that crippled film production this year.

But the articles, editorials, tweets, and petitions attacking Zaslav lack an element without which it is hard to make sense of events in Hollywood. Namely, historical perspective. Understanding why Zaslav is divisive, and why many cannot accept him, requires a bit more knowledge of the history of the studio he has taken over and those of its rivals than you are likely to find in the barrage of sensational coverage.

Any hopes for his redemption in the public eye depend, equally, on grasping the parallels between Zaslav’s tenure at Warner and earlier periods in Hollywood history, whose lessons the studios tragically have not learned.

Zaslav does not just occupy what used to be Jack Warner’s office. He has failed to convince people that the ghost of the legendary exec is not still running the show.

Tough Decisions

In the time since he took the reins of the entity that sprang from the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery Inc. in April 2022, Zaslav has made many controversial moves, including scuttling the release of the $90 million superhero film Batgirl, the SCOOB! special Holiday Haunt, the HBO Max series Close Enough, and a number of Cartoon Network shows. At a time when people’s prospects in Tinseltown have never been more uncertain, as artificial intelligence evolves and threatens jobs long thought secure, Zaslav has laid off thousands.

Zaslav’s critics paint him as a mercenary decision-maker applying the cold calculus of profit and loss and further wrecking any semblance of balance between commercial and artistic criteria. A lengthy Nov. 15 New York Times article, “How David Zaslav Blew Up Hollywood,” narrates how the mogul who turned Discovery from a niche outlet into a juggernaut uniting genres and styles of programming went on to assume control of one of the world’s most iconic studios following the merger. He proceeded to anoint himself the heir of Jack Warner, installing himself in that legend’s office, rubbing elbows with Steven Spielberg in the Hamptons, hosting a party that was lavish even by Cannes standards, and delivering a commencement address at Boston University.

Here is an exec who relishes the public-facing side of Hollywood even as, in the view of many, he shows contempt for the artistry that the film industry brings to the world.

Besides the Times profile, Zaslav is the subject of a contemptuous GQ piece calling him “perhaps the most hated man in Hollywood.” GQ ran the article online and then mysteriously took it down, but it is not hard to find. A Change.org petition has called for his sacking. A 24/7 Wall Street headline reads, “Deeply Crippled Warner Bros Needs to Fire CEO David Zaslav.”

In the current environment, maybe it is no shock that few have spoken out in Zaslav’s defense. The Times profile briefly notes that two recent Warner releases based on D.C. comics series, The Flash and Blue Beetle, both performed poorly. It might also have acknowledged that the big Disney superhero release of the fall, The Marvels, had a dismal opening and so far has made back just $187.1 million of its $274.8 million budget. So maybe it is a bit unfair to fault Zaslav for having turned bearish on superhero flicks for now. Some of Zaslav’s decisions, even the painful ones, are not without basis in market reality.

This is unlikely to sway Zaslav’s critics, but they have not done themselves any favors or put forward an informed critique. Though many view him as a noxious force in an industry where artistic and commercial criteria are notoriously misaligned, the critiques in the legacy media lack the historical perspective to make this case effectively.

Understanding why Zaslav has alienated so many, and how he could turn the ship around, calls for knowledge of studio history and of the writers who have toiled and struggled and come up against shoals of indifference and hostility.

A New Study

Fortunately for those in search of perspective on the recent impasse, we have Foster Hirsch’s new book Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher—Television.

Warner Brothers Discovery’s PR office will not enjoy this work very much. It offers a detailed account of the late executive whose office David Zaslav now occupies. The Jack Warner we meet in this study is not just callous toward employees and dismissive of their concerns, but often resorts to punitive measures if they get uppity about pay or contracts or whether to commit to a project.

Among the high praise for Warner we find in Hirsch’s text is this passage: “Beneath his dapper, jaunty façade, and the plastered-on smile in which his eyes never seemed to participate, Jack Warner, a man who cheated on his wives, abandoned his son, and battled with and betrayed his brothers, had a deep-rooted mean streak.”

Hirsch goes on to describe Warner as a “penny-pincher” who “bristled” when actors said no to roles or tried, with or without the help of their agents, to negotiate for higher pay. If you did not obey Warner’s dictates and act like a good peon, you and your agent would not have access to the executive dining room. Hirsch relates Warner’s many feuds with leading names of the time, including Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, James Cagney, Lauren Bacall, and Olivia de Havilland.

That last star, who died in 2020 at age 104, had more direct experience than most of the mercenary and brutal policies and tactics that Warner used to keep performers in line. When de Havilland turned down a role, Hirsch relates, she got a suspension, and her employer then took the amount of time that the suspension encompassed and added it to that remaining in her contract.

Hirsch describes this as a common practice in Hollywood at the time, but states that Jack Warner made such free use of it to cow and punish actors and actresses that Bette Davis took him to court in the 1930s. De Havilland pursued legal action in the hope of succeeding where Davis had failed, earning not just Warner’s enmity but an attempt to land her on a studio blacklist.

An under appreciated truth of Hollywood is that the A-list names widely seen as having beaten the odds, having succeeded where most fail, and living charmed lives are often the people who had the most awful experiences. As Tom Dardis details in his study of the Hollywood years of famous novelists, Some Time in the Sun, the studio that Zaslav has taken over was horrible back in the day not just to actors and actresses, but to writers, including ones with a spot in the nation’s literary canon, who moved west to try their hand at screenwriting.

Faulkner and West

By the time that William Faulkner signed a contact with Warner Brothers, effective as of July 27, 1942, he had published The Sound the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and most of the other books on which his reputation as a genius today rests. Try to imagine the pain, anger, and humiliation that Dardis details as Warner Brothers stipulated he would earn only $300 per week and then, after ramming through an unsingable contract, offered one with the same terms to the relatively unknown Alvah Bessie.

“At the time Bessie had published but a single novel, whereas Faulkner had published more than a dozen. It made absolutely no difference to Warner’s—they were both ‘junior writers,’” states Dardis.

Needless to say, Faulkner was neither the first nor the last to receive this treatment. When you look back on his struggles, it is hard not to wonder what lessons Warner Brothers Discovery and the industry have derived and why the striking writers on the picket lines deserve less sympathy than Faulkner.

“If Faulkner had ever bothered to think of himself as having a ‘career’ in Hollywood, it was clear that it had now assumed a steadily downward direction, with Warner Brothers as the last stop,” Dardis adds.

If Warner Brothers was the bottom of the barrel, that does not mean that other studios behaved admirably, as another scribe who moved west and joined the industry in the summer of 1933, Nathanael West, was to find. The author of the avant-garde The Dream Life of Balso Snell and Miss Lonelyhearts went on to write A Cool Million after a bit of time in the trenches of show business, and his 1939 masterpiece The Day of the Locust was to be his hate letter, if you will, to Hollywood. There can be little doubt as to the sources of the cynicism and despair of those two later works, the second in particular.

Like Faulkner, West was an accomplished novelist who dreamed of attaining still greater heights. But things did not work out much better for the New York transplant. Columbia Pictures laid him off in August 1933, after which he must have felt quite at home among the hangers-on and has-beens he renders with such grotesquerie in The Day of the Locust. West may have felt no small elation when Columbia Pictures picked up the screenplay for A Cool Million. But, as Marion Meade details in Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathnael West and Eileen McKenney, things never came to fruition. After toying with the idea of producing a Bob Hope vehicle based on A Cool Million, Columbia scuttled its plans to adapt West’s book.

One need look no further for the sources of the bitterness in West’s writing about life and work in Hollywood. As he went on to sign a contract with Republic Studios in January 1936 for a lower salary than he had earned at Columbia, West must have felt the sting of betrayal in every fiber of his creative being. The climactic scenes of The Day of the Locust, where the mobs of unknown strivers and enviers wreak mass devastation on the streets outside the studios, are the rage and pain of a failed writer projected onto a giant canvas. In the novel, this is literally true. A painting entitled “The Burning of Los Angeles” depicts characters fleeing for their lives from a bloodthirsty mob, foreshadowing the climax.

But the studios today, and one in particular, appear to have learned few lessons from the blistering feedback of those they have chewed up and spat out. Batgirl is not a film that this journalist would go to see if it were in theaters, and David Zaslav may have a rationale for having canned it. But in nixing this and other projects, he has toyed with and annulled the dreams of authors, directors, and actors in a manner no less cavalier than Columbia’s betrayal of West.

When the announcement came out with great fanfare at the end of September that the picketing writers had won—though the actors’ strike continued—and would get a number of concessions from the studios, many rejoiced. Among the settlement’s terms are higher pay, guarantees of royalties (“residuals”), and, importantly, limits on the use of AI. There are also long-overdue safeguards around screenwriters’ second-step contributions. But even after so much painful experience going back many decades, there is nothing about kill fees, or any form of compensation or remediation when an executive decides to do as Zaslav did and quelch a project when it is literally days from its scheduled release. To use an analogy, there is no penalty for a late-stage abortion.

Back in the 1950s, as Foster Hirsch reminds us in his magisterial new study, Olivia de Havilland’s stand against Jack Warner paid off, and ever since then a law named after the star has barred studios from enforcing contracts for longer than seven years after their start date, regardless of any suspensions meted out to actors. The strikers this year have acted in the spirit of de Havilland and won notable victories. But until David Zaslav and other studio heads align their commercial sense with a proper respect for the writers they employ, history will repeat itself and The Year of the Locust may yet arrive.