There are guides to the nuts and bolts of making movies, but until now there has been no instructional text for top people in Hollywood -- that is, those dozen or so executives whose job it is to hand out several billion dollars of other people's money (especially Japanese people's money) to extremely good- looking, talented and/or lucky Southern Californians.
1. Don't believe in sure things -- not even Arnold Schwarzenegger. When you hire Arnold for a movie, as Columbia Pictures did for Last Action Hero, the industry's working assumption has been that "you couldn't miss $75 or $80 million at...