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 dissolution of in-house talent repositories and the major studios' abilities to function as centers of film production, rather than, as in the eighties, centers of financing and distribution with downscaled production operations. As a result, the majors had to bid for the services of actors, directors, and screenwriters. Talent agents represented performers, writers, directors, and other personnel for hire, while entertainment lawyers would take the point when negotiating for a producer aiming to get a project going or when negotiations turned on fine legal distinctions.
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