It All Must Come to An End

It was June 2002 when 89 year old Lew Wasserman died and unfortunately by then he was no longer in control of the empire he dedicated his life to building due to change in the financial climate and also mergers that didn’t allow him he kind of control he was accustomed to. The demise of MCA would begin as soon as the Lew Wasserman was no longer in control and it was eventually dissolved into the universal imprint but the presence of Lew Wassermann is still to this day very instrumental with all the related companies. After reconciling with his daughter Lynne Wasserman he began to establish a very close relationship with Grandson Casey Wasserman who he mentored and who has since successfully carried the Wasserman legacy into a good career.

A Sharks Tale

Wassermann also took a gamble with a then unknown movie director by the name of Stephen Spielberg. Spielberg was yet to prove himself as a director and based on the climate of the industry the need to take a fair amount of risk. It was said at the time Lew Wasserman a veteran at the Hollywood scene, needed to “keep his finger on the cultural pulse” and he did this by employing new and younger talent for the fresh ideas. This calculated risk came in the form of letting young Stephen Spielberg Direct the groundbreaking film “Jaws”. The film cost 7million dollars to produce and the commercial and critical success superseded all the expectations and it has since been considered top 50 greatest Hollywood movies of all time.

Expanding & Acquiring

A major leap in MCA’s advancement came as a result of a merger in the mid 60’s that would in turn give MCA full control of Universal but would also require MCA to dissolve the talent agency. This particular move was instrumental in ushering MCA in to Hollywood’s new phase because it was also during this same time that the industry was going through some very big changes. For about 10-15 years MCA would continue to acquire different business ventures that continue to build the brand and take it to heights unforeseen only a few decades prior, from book publishing, record company etc.

Organized Crime & Hollywood

Wasserman’s business practices were always in question the authorities conducted numerous investigations that always turned up no results at all. It Is easy to speculate just based on the nature of the entertainment business but still no proof to this day of malpractice. Although when Bobby Kennedy looked into the monopoly created by MCA in Hollywood and they managed to get an anti trust ruling against Wasserman and his business partners, it did serve as a major blow, but in general Wasserman managed to stay a step ahead of the authorities or his business practices managed to stay within the legal guidelines of the constitution.

Wasshington Here We Come

Wasserman managed to forge very strong and strategic alliances within the agency and outside Hollywood. Wasserman was very good friends with Ronald Regan, James Stewart, Henry Fonda and many more. Reagan and Wasserman maintained a very close relationship on and off the scene even though it has been stated their wives were not too fond of each other. Ronald Reagan’s career as an actor had peaked out when Wassermann noticed how powerful a speaker Reagan was. It was then that Wasserman began to plant the seeds of Reagan’s political career, a move that came as a result of an investigation into the business practices of Wasserman and other MCA executives. The investigation cost Wasserman and his partners millions of dollars and was also very humiliating. As a result Wasserman began to position his long time friend Ronald Reagan strategically to build a political career first by helping him become President of Screen Actors Guild SAG, then Governor of California and eventually president in 1980.

Hollywood Take Over

Lew Wassermann’s accolades had a directly dependent relationship with anything and everything MCA did for entertainment/Hollywood. The two cannot be separate Lew Wasserman was MCA and MCA was Lew Wasserman. Wasserman’s career actively in Hollywood span close to six decades. Wasserman in the 1930’s managed to convince his MCA bosses that Hollywood would be a better place to establish and grow the company. By the end of the 30’s MCA would become the largest talent agency in the world with over 700 client’s which included movie stars, recording artists, Broadway actors, radio stars, producers and directors.

Lew Wasserman 1913-2002

“If Hollywood was Mt Olympus Lew Wassermann was Zeus” said the late Jack Valenti, former president of the Motion Picture Association of America. Very rarely especially in today’s entertainment business atmosphere does any one individual embody an industry in the way Lew Wassermann did. Lew began as an usher at a Cleveland theatre, to working directly under Dr. Jules Stein the founder of Music Corporation of America (MCA). Lew Wassermann was instrumental in building MCA into the Multi Billion dollar company it would eventually become and he was responsible for thousands of careers in and out of Hollywood, most notably Ronald Regan’s, Stephen Spielberg just to name a few.