Just hours after Orion Pictures` stunning ”sheep sweep”-winning five top Oscars for its film ”The Silence of the Lambs”-tears were flowing.
The sobbing started at Rex, a posh Los Angeles restaurant where some 400 jubilant celebrities and guests, including Best Actor-winner Anthony Hopkins and Best Actress-winner Jodie Foster, crowded together to sip champagne and feast appropriately on roast lamb.
”It was hard to tell whether everyone was crying for joy-or with sadness,” says Christine LaMonte, acting president of marketing for Orion and one of the key architects of the company`s successful Oscar campaign.
But the triumph of ”Silence” is a hollow, bittersweet victory for the bankrupt distribution company that may go belly up in the not-too-distant future.
As ”Silence” director Jonathan Demme said over the din of the noisy post-Oscar party: ”It`s not an irony at all-it`s a tragedy.”
Indeed, with hurrahs for ”Silence” still echoing around the world, everyone in Hollywood is waiting for the seemingly inevitable moment when Orion, which is reportedly more than half a billion dollars in debt, is declared officially dead.
”I feel like the captain of the Titanic,” says LaMonte, one of the few remaining Orion executives still on hand at its Los Angeles office. It is there that she daily awaits word of her company`s fate-and her own.
Orion`s future has been in limbo since December, when the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. But executives and other employees are keeping their fingers crossed-hoping for an 11th-hour rescue.
Currently the front-runner in the Orion savior stakes is the independent film company New Line Cinema, which made big money with the ”Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” films and with the Freddy Krueger ”Nightmare on Elm Street” horror movies.
New Line is reportedly in the process of finalizing a reorganization plan for Orion, whose majority shareholder, billionaire John Kluge, has owned just under 70 percent of the company`s equity since 1988.
Meanwhile, as Orion`s future is debated in the stark chambers of a New York bankruptcy courtroom, at show-business hangouts from Morton`s in Hollywood to Elaine`s in Manhattan, the topic on everyone`s lips is:
Why is Orion, with its five Oscars for ”Silence” this year and its seven Oscars for Kevin Costner`s ”Dances With Wolves” last year, so down and out when it should be flying high?
The night the Oscars were given out Billy Crystal, the host of the March 30 awards ceremony, jokingly observed that Orion ”can`t afford another hit.” In today`s Hollywood, where creative minds constantly clash with cost-conscious movie moguls, what has made Orion so attractive to top filmmakers such as Demme and Woody Allen is that it has become known for turning out high-quality films with low levels of corporate interference. Orion has a reputation for allowing unprecedented artistic control.
In its 14-year history Orion has not been a stranger to Oscar. Oliver Stone`s ”Platoon” (1986) and Milos Forman`s ”Amadeus” (1984) are among the award-winning features the company has backed. (Each won two Oscars.)
Susan Seidelman, director of the 1985 Madonna hit movie ”Desperately Seeking Susan” and the 1989 Meryl Streep-Roseanne Barr flop, ”She-Devil,”
told The Wall Street Journal last year, ”If Orion folds it will leave a real void. It`s the only studio that bridges the gap between the artistic freedom of an independent and the viable financing of a major studio.”
Yet despite ”Wolves” having made $157 million in America and
”Silence” having racked in $137 million on U.S. soil so far, Orion has continued to sink deeper into the fiscal mire.
The company has been plagued by a string of costly flops including ”She- Devil,” Sean Penn`s ”State of Grace” (1990), Don Johnson`s ”The Hot Spot” (1990) and Dennis Quaid`s ”Great Balls of Fire!” (1989), the story of rocker Jerry Lee Lewis.
”Studios like Disney and Universal can afford disasters because they have deep pockets and can cushion their losses with money, spinning amusement parks and profitable subsidiaries,” said one Hollywood executive who spoke on condition of anonymity.
”Orion doesn`t have that cushion-(it doesn`t) have enough meat-and-potatoes films to offset ambitious projects that bombed.”
Some people in Hollywood think Orion`s flop problem may have been compounded by certain critical business-end mistakes made by money-hungry executives.
In their desperate search for quick fixes and ready cash to keep the company afloat, Orion fell back on measures such as selling the Anjelica Huston-Raul Julia black comedy ”The Addams Family” for about $20 million to Paramount. The film went on to become one of the smash hits of 1991, earning more than $100 million.
”They did what they had to do,” says LaMonte, who had remained optimistic about the company`s future until two of the firm`s top executives, who might have led a resurrection, jumped ship.
Marc Platt, former president of production at Orion, defected at the end of January to become president of Tri-Star Pictures, one of Orion`s crosstown rivals.
William Bernstein, former president of Orion, left at the beginning of March to become the executive vice president at Paramount Pictures, another Orion competitor.
With their departures, LaMonte says she feels she may be presiding over a ghost ship.
”What`s particularly sad,” LaMonte continues, ”is that we have a terrific slate of films but no money to release them.”
Indeed, 10 completed pictures representing an estimated $150 million worth of investments are sitting on Orion`s shelves, gathering dust.
They include ”Love Field,” a drama about the lives of three people during the turbulent days following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, with Michelle Pfeiffer; ”Married To It,” a comedy about relationships that co-stars Beau Bridges and Cybill Shepherd; ”Blue Sky,” a drama about the cover-up of a nuclear-bomb test, with Jessica Lange and Tommy Lee Jones; ”The Dark Half,” a contemporary thriller based on a Stephen King book, which co-stars Timothy Hutton and Amy Madigan; and ”Car 54, Where Are You?” a big-screen update of the classic `60s TV series, with David Johansen and Fran Drescher.
While there are some who are still hoping against hope that the cavalry will ride in any day now to save Orion from shutting down, more realistic souls see a recent blow as symbolic of the firm`s fading fortune.
When Orion`s skeleton staff came to work recently they were horrified to discover that the glittering Oscars that Orion had collected over the years were gone from the display cases in the company`s reception area.
”They told us that security had taken them away for safekeeping,” said a teary secretary. ”But for us it was the final straw. Now the cupboard is really bare.”
