Hollywood: The Big Ms

With his great bull whip, so goes the legend, Columbia Pictures' late President Harry ("The White Fang") Cohn liked to snap out the lenses of his flunkies' sunglasses. That sort of management more or less characterized the feudal days when the major studio bosses—Goldwyn, Mayer, the Warners, Cohn—were almost as well known as their stars. Now that Hollywood is often duller than its pictures, the mighty name symbolizing the new Age of the Independent Producer is roughly as well known as the incumbent ruler of Bhutan.*

The name is Mirisch, and hardly anyone...