Showing the sort of bright and sunny leadership that has makes his brother Rahm such an uplifting presence, William Morris-Endeavor chief Ari Emanuel bucked up his troops this week with a poignant reminder that things have sucked for showbiz before.

The LA Times' Patrick Goldstein reports that to cheer up the agency, pertually reeling from wave after wave of media bad news, Emanuel distributed to his team copies of a 1970 Life Magazine featuring a cover story entitled, "Goodby to the Glory Days: Hollywood puts its past up for sale." The story focused on Paramount's CEO at the time, the legendary maniacal wheeler-dealer Charles Bludhorn and his attempts to cut costs and rid his studio of its his big-ticket talent contracts.

Emanuel's message in passing this issue out to his fellow agents was of course, you see, the fools have tried to cut costs before, but the march of eternally-spiraling salaries (and the agency's cut) is a force of nature that nothing, not man, nor beast, nor robber baron, nor multinational corporation can contain.

After the late 60's near meltdown of the industry, Hollywood was saved by a new generation of blockbuster makers coming out of film schools who eventually learned to apply their serious study of cinematic history and theory to making zillion dollar versions of B-serials. What similar brave leap forward
lies over the horizon we can only dare to dream.