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The Apprenticeship of Frank Yablans
“I’m a nice guy,” says the president of Paramount Pictures. “I am not a killer. But I’ll also be very cold. And calculating.”
Yablans — like Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Tatum O’Neal, and, yes, Robert Redford, and, for that matter, Ted Ashley of Warner Bros., Roman Polanski of Chinatown, and Abraham Beame of New York — is short. Only five years ago, when he joined Paramount, he was “assistant general sales manager.” Like Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Bobby Fischer, Bernie Cornfeld, Isaac Asimov, and Abraham Beame, again, Yablans is one of those lower-middle-class Jewish kids from Brooklyn (Williamsburg in Frank’s case) who made it to the top. I asked Charles Glenn, Frank’s top marketing man, what Paramount would do if, hypothetically, it had an absolutely dreadful film the executives were convinced no one — but no one — would enjoy, but to which they thought they could draw enough people; through a catchy title, ads, etc., to recoup their investment.
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