If you’ve seen Paramount’s The Offer—the 2022 streaming series dramatizing the chaotic making of The Godfather—you’ll recall Burn Gorman’s standout performance as Charlie Bluhdorn, the Austrian Gulf+Western boss who ran Paramount like a crazed despot. Barry Diller, a junior executive in his early-20s, earned Bluhdorn’s respect by pushing back on a terrible slate of films Bluhdorn was trying to offload on ABC. At Bluhdorn’s invite, he eventually ran Paramount as Head of Production. His famous proteges—among whom were Michael Eisner (later head of Disney) and Jeffrey Katzenberg (co-founder of DreamWorks)—became collectively known as “The Killer Dillers”—a reference to the infamous slasher movie The Driller Killer.
Diller, now a billionaire, started in the William Morris Agency’s mailroom, spending hours rifling their archives. He learned, among other things, that Elvis never toured internationally because Colonel Parker was an illegal immigrant who feared he’d never get back into the U.S. Landing a job at ABC in the late-1960s, Diller pioneered the TV Movie of the Week and the mini-series, most famously Roots. He moved to Paramount in the mid-1970s, just in time to witness Coppola cobbling together Godfather II from a plotless five-hour rough cut.
In the mid-1980s, he jumped ship to 20th Century Fox just as Rupert Murdoch moved in. Diller greenlit Die Hard, telling marketing not to feature Bruce Willis on the poster because “everyone hated him.” He approved The Simpsons, and something called Not the Cosby Show—eventually retitled Married… with Children. He launched the Fox network, America’s fourth TV channel. Murdoch’s debt-laden empire, he claims, was saved by the box office profits from Home Alone.
By the early-1990s, Diller felt the need to be master of his own destiny. He invested in the home shopping network QVC, and later in internet platforms such as Ask Jeeves, Expedia, and Tinder. At the time of this writing, he’s on business number 11, overseeing 30,000 employees. He also bankrolled Little Island, a terraced park floating on stilts on the Hudson River. On holiday in Ireland, he rescued an abandoned Jack Russell puppy and then had her cloned.
Who Knew? isn’t a scandalous Hollywood tell-all like Robert Evans’ The Kid Stays in the Picture or Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It’s not a CEO how-to like Bob Iger’s The Ride of a Lifetime, and you’re likely to tune out once Diller leaves Hollywood. Like most memoirs, you suffer through the usual childhood and sibling filler—and Diller’s struggles with his sexuality—before the real stories begin. You’d think a movie veteran would know how to cut to the action.
The book ends with Diller describing the pleasures of a billionaire lifestyle and some tedious talk about corporate responsibility. Still, Diller’s media insights are valuable. He claims TV-makers once had a sense of public duty, but film was always pure chaos. The takeaway point is an important one: he blames the current decline of the movies on the death of the high-concept formula pioneered in the 1980s, now replaced by lifeless superhero sequels, IP reboots, and streaming. Like many industry doomsayers, he says the future is in AI. To an investor this seems like an opportunity but for movie-lovers and those making them, it’s a terminal prognosis.