THE GOODBYE GIRL

You've been in the industry more than 30 years. What's been the biggest change?

When I started, the most important thing was the movie. You made a good movie and you didn't really worry about opening weekend, because you knew that with word of mouth, the second-weekend gross would be bigger than the first. Today I believe that the marketing is more important than the movie, and that, to me, is tragic. "Fatal Attraction" opened at $7.6 million. Think about that. It went on to make $156 million domestic, but if a studio movie opens at that amount today, it's over.

Paramount's box-office performance has not been great the past two years. The criticism has been that you don't take creative risks.

We take creative risks constantly. The problem is that after a movie becomes a hit, people don't remember how risky it was. People say, "Of course you said yes to 'Forrest Gump'." Really? It's a movie about a mentally slow guy sitting on a bench and telling his story. Mel Gibson in a kilt? That was pretty risky, too. Look at "The Hours," a film about three gay women who want to commit suicide, and tell me that everybody knew that would get nominated for best picture and make $109 million worldwide. Please.

So what went wrong?

I'm not saying we did everything right. We made mistakes. Sometimes we were too tough on a deal, too tight with someone's budget. We were so successful for so long, but the business started to change and we needed to change with it. Other studios were spending more money on movies and on marketing, so we needed to start spending more money on both of those things to stay competitive.