This weekend, the question of value was revived again with the debut of George Clooney's The American. Mr. Clooney occupies an unusual perch among Hollywood glitterati--he's the A-lister who doesn't appear in many A-list films. According to The Hollywood Reporter, of the 10 films he's worked on since 2005, only one--Oceans 13--has earned more than $100 million at the domestic box office. His latest effort is a stylish and respectfully received R-rated international thriller that, if not for his presence, might be on the art-house circuit.

And yet Mr. Clooney remains a mega-star, raising the question: Is the box office as powerful a draw as it once was in determining an actor's stature in Hollywood? It was curious to review Forbes magazine's new list of the "best actors for the buck." Essentially, Forbes divided a star's pay by the amount of profit that star's movies have generated, thereby coming up with a pecking order for commercial success. At the top of its list: Shia LaBeouf, who has generated an estimated $81 in profit for every dollar he's been paid. Second place, Anne Hathaway, at $64, and third place, Danielle Radcliffe, at $61. Further down the list, Meryl Streep generated $21; and at $17, Nicholas Cage is only a dollar behind the more widely revered Johnny Depp. 

In the case of Mr. LaBeouf and Mr. Radcliffe, it's clear that being attached to big special-effects franchises and being hired at a relatively young and inexpensive age have contributed to their success. Ms. Hathaway has had a more diverse and impressive career, though of course her high placement in this exercise is similarly skewed by her recent role in Alice in Wonderland (whose chief star was Mr. Depp), and the fact that females are still struggling for pay parity.

And Mr. Clooney? He doesn't even make Forbes' Top 10, making his ability to be both iconic and eclectic seem even more impressive.

rsiklos@observer.com

A few years ago, I was at a kicking Grammy Awards party in a Los Angeles mansion hosted by music company EMI, which was then in the midst of a ditched merger dance with Warner Music. As a journalist covering the merger, I was on the List, and my privileged status granted me access to the cordoned-off VVIP level, which featured better drinks, bigger shrimp and prettier people. Then, to my consternation, I discovered that there was somewhere even better--a VVVIP third level so rarified that even the top execs of EMI and Warner had trouble talking their way in. It was accessible only via a staircase guarded by burly dudes with earpieces.

As the suits disappeared up that stairway and I was left behind, all the free drinks and Hollywood dazzle in the room seemed subpar and desolate. I made it my mission to get past that velvet rope to see what was happening upstairs. Eventually, there was some kind of random distraction and I climbed over a banister and made my way up. Once there, I grabbed a drink, tried to blend in and found ... not much of anything. About 30 famous people were sitting around--Courtney Love, Lenny Kravitz and billionaire Paul Allen among them. But beyond its specialness, there was really nothing special about it. I went up to Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran and said hello. He smiled wanly.

The lesson, of course, was that the real thrill was in the act of getting in somewhere that I wasn't allowed and didn't belong. The risk was that I would be tapped on the shoulder and denied or, worse, tossed to the curb.

Now a proposed law is making its way to the California Senate that threatens to take all the fun out of  party crashing by making it illegal, punishable by a $1,000 fine or six months in jail. The state law, introduced by an assemblyman whose district includes the Rose Bowl and who used to work in the entertainment industry, has been greeted outside of California with the usual hoots--is this what those West Coast looneybirds are wasting their time on while their economy is teetering on collapse, their school system is in ruin and their health care is a disaster? My first instinct on hearing of this was to think of a whole new category of Hollywood-party-related legislation, covering everything from annoying cell phone banter to bad outfits to overpriced valet parking. And yet the proposal is not as ludicrous as it might sound. Unlike New York, where people have a grudging respect for personal space (because there is so little of it), the Los Angeles events-and-party industrial complex has a long history of people who don't understand boundaries, from paparazzi and TMZ camera crews to celebrity-crazed fans. This has been a boon for private security forces, but apparently this new law stems from an incident at the Screen Actors Guild Awards last year, where some unruly people snuck in and were arrested but there was no form of trespass as defined by California law that they could be easily charged with. Apparently, these laws predate Brangelina and date to an age when disputes about rural land were at issue. For example, there are forms of trespass defined under the law for cutting down wood, leaving gates open or carrying away oysters (presumably not off of a buffet table).

I spoke with Assemblyman Anthony Portantino (Democrat from Pasadena), and he made a reasoned argument for the change, calling it "a flaw in the law that needed to be corrected." But I asked him if he'd ever known the shivery thrill of sneaking into a party where he didn't belong--the equivalent of asking if he'd ever inhaled. "I've never broken into an awards show," Mr. Portantino said. Ah, that explains it.

But perhaps a bigger question for the future of 3-D is how This Ain't Avatar 3D is going to perform when it comes out next month. If you haven't heard of the latter, it's a porn send-up of the James Cameron hit from the good people at Hustler. Google it.  

There are serious implications behind the prospects for 3-D porn. The history of modern media is that the adult industry has shaped how mainstream entertainment is consumed. Porn drove consumer adoption of the videocassette player, and the DVD, and was certainly ahead of its time in building online business models, as detailed in the new Luke Wilson film Middle Men. TV makers from Sony and Samsung to Panasonic have now bet their future on 3-D home entertainment. Porn auteurs in Hong Kong, Japan and Italy have all announced 3-D projects aimed to capitalize on the expectation that 10 percent or so of new flat-screens sold in the next year or so will be 3-D capable. Now, we shouldn't underestimate the power of 3-D to enhance more mainstream types of programming-from movies to live sports and video games.

And having struggled with a slumping economy and a plethora of free stuff online, is porn still the killer app it once was? To get an inside view, I rang up Steven Hirsch, the founder of Vivid Video, probably the biggest adult entertainment company. Mr. Hirsch says 3-D is going to be a big deal for his industry, and he is in production on Vivid's first film in the format: another parody, called Star Wars XXX-which will be directed by the same guy who did Ain't Avatar, Axel Braun, who is sort of the Jim Cameron of his milieu. But Mr. Hirsch cautioned that 3-D won't be an instant or easy success: "I think people like to take their glasses off when they watch adult movies, not put glasses on."

It was interesting to confirm with Mr. Hirsch that porn did not have much of an impact on the rollout of high-definition DVDs, either. This, he says, was in large measure because media giants like Blu-Ray inventor Sony made it difficult for porn peddlers to get Blu-Ray discs manufactured. (Apparently, Disney did not want its DVDs duplicated in the same factory as smuttier fare.) In fact, Blu-Ray only accounts for a small portion of Vivid's DVD sales today, and the argument might be made that HD could have been a bigger hit if it had let Mr. Hirsch and his peers lead the way.

But Mr. Hirsch says the bigger issue is that DVDs are "over" and distribution of video is moving largely to the Web and the television set, first via cable (video-on-demand, etc.) and soon by so-called smart TVs that connect directly to the Web. It's not so much that the porn industry is not the technological game-changer in gadgetry that it once was, but that the game has changed. Mr. Hirsch said that as much as 40 percent of the company's revenues come from subscription and video-on-demand sales on the Internet-and his company works hard to shut down pirate content when Vivid has a hot release, like, say, the headline-grabbing porn debut of Laurence Fishburne's daughter. They've also had to re-code their films so subscribers can reach them via Vivid's Web site on the iPad-Steve Jobs' portrayal of it as a porn-free device notwithstanding. And take heed big media: Mr. Hirsch said that the biggest stars in his business are also savvy cross-platform entrepreneurs who can make more money from operating their own Web sites and chatting live with their biggest fans than from making films. The biggest make as much as $1,500 an hour, based on $25 a minute for one-on-one video-cam chats. "Now wait for smart TVs where you're going to be able to get that experience right on your TV-and that's going to be massive."

Clarification: Two weeks ago I incorrectly reported that Rob Lowe and Tom Barrack met in Mendocino, Calif. I should have said Montecito-thanks, Penelope Bianchi, for writing in to set it straight.

rsiklos@observer.com

As business capitals go, Los Angeles is an oddity. There are few corporate headquarters here-after Disney, can you name one?-which makes a financier like Ron Burkle a quintessential L.A. power figure: peripatetic, elusive, canny and demonstrably rich.

He's invariably described as low-key and publicity shy, and articles about Mr. Burkle usually also mention his private 757, his $30 million Hollywood mansion and his political and social ties to P. Diddy and Leo DiCaprio.  

To New Yorkers, Mr. Burkle is perhaps best known for his once-closeness to Bill Clinton and embroilment in the weird sagas of incarcerated Ann Hathaway ex, Raffaello Follieri, and Jared Paul Stern, the former Page Six reporter whom Mr. Burkle accused of trying to extort him. 

But his Yucaipa Companies is a serious wheeler-dealer that has done some $30 billion in transactions, on behalf of pension funds that provide it with capital, on everything from buying and selling grocery chains to owning a piece of the Pittsburgh Penguins. In the past year, Mr. Burkle has circled Barneys and backed Harvey Weinstein's unsuccessful bid for Miramax. Now, he has a genuine East Coast-West Coast showdown on his hands with Barnes & Noble.

Like Mr. Burkle, B&N founder and chairman Leonard Riggio is a college dropout and a self-made man, and he is as singularly New York as Mr. Burkle is Hollywood. There is no evident mutual admiration between the two men, however, as Mr. Burkle has taken a big stake in the company-19 percent-and sued to be able to buy up to 37 percent, which would supersede the 30 percent Mr. Riggio owns. He has also threatened a proxy fight to put directors on B&N's board, and has legally challenged a "poison pill" defense the bookseller put in place. On the witness stand recently in a Delaware courtroom, Mr. Riggio described Mr. Burkle as having left a sour taste in his mouth over a business venture they pursued years ago, but claimed the present dispute was not personal. In Yucaipa's filings with the court, Mr. Burkle accused Mr. Riggio and his brother, Stephen, who until March was the company's CEO, of using the company as a "personal piggy bank," saying that the Riggios were involved in "self-dealing" when they sold a college bookshop operation they held separately to B&N last year.

On Aug. 4, Mr. Riggio effectively threw down a gauntlet by announcing that Barnes & Noble is for sale, and said that he is considering putting together an investment group to take the company private. Even after a bump in its stock price, its market capitalization is less than $900 million. In 2001, it was $2.2 billion. Over the same period, Amazon's market cap has gone from $3.6 billion to $57 billion. The advent of the eBook and the iPad and the Kindle have only served to spook investors further about B&N's prospects during a three-year period in which its profits have plummeted by $100 million, to $35 million. 

What could Mr. Burkle do better than Mr. Riggio and the current B&N crew? Mr. Riggio claimed Mr. Burkle wanted to combine the company with Borders, its struggling rival, but Mr. Burkle denies this. A smarter move might be to sell the company to Amazon, or at least do a deal where Amazon (Jeff Bezos and antitrust watchdogs permitting) takes over its fast-growing but loss-making BN.com. This would be similar to the deal Microsoft struck to take over Internet search for Yahoo, where Mr. Burkle recently left the board of directors. But it would undoubtedly be anathema to Mr. Riggio, digital being the future and all.

In some ways, Mr. Riggio reminds me of Martha Stewart-hard-driving and self-serving, to be sure, but also someone who has built something distinctive and tangible and culture-shaping. If a Left Coast moneyman like Mr. Burkle wants to write the next chapter for Mr. Riggio's creation, he is going to have to pay up for it.  

rsiklos@observer.com

Anyone who has seen Rob Lowe aping Robert Wagner in The Spy Who Shagged Me, or playing the music exec Benjamin Kane in Wayne's World, knows two things: The guy can do funny and the guy can do unctuous. But can he do business?

Mr. Lowe is part of the consortium that sealed a $660 million deal last week to the buy the Miramax library from Disney. The group includes the private-equity firm Colony Capital and its founder, Tom Barrack, as well as Ron Tutor, a construction magnate. In fact, the purchase of the Miramax library is the first on behalf of a "media fund" that Mr. Lowe and Mr. Barrack recently formed.

Colony is primarily a real estate hedge fund with holdings in hotels and buildings around the world. But in recent years, it has branched into some unconventional and eclectic investments, including buying control of Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch, helping Annie Liebovitz out of her financial troubles and owning the soccer team Paris St. Germain. In fact, Mr. Barrack recently told an Italian magazine that real estate is no longer Colony's core business, but "inefficiencies" in celebrity and entertainment could be. "It's an area that generates huge amounts of cash. Huge profits could be earned."

Mr. Lowe knows the world of celebrity as well as anyone, having served burst as a charter member of the Brat Pack with such flicks as St. Elmo's Fire and Youngblood. He was ahead of his day when he was embroiled in a video sex scandal involving (too) young fans, and later made for tabloid fodder with some kind of nanny blackmail scandal. And, although it can be argued that he never achieved the level of stardom as an adult that he did as a young star, he has maintained a solid career, perhaps most memorably through his years on The West Wing. Neither Mr. Lowe nor Mr. Barrack came to the phone, but apparently the pair met a decade ago in Mendocino and Mr. Barrack has advised the actor on other investments, which led to their recent, unlikely pairing.

In fairness to Mr. Lowe, it is entirely plausible that he is a business genius whose abilities have never been fully realized because he is just too good-looking and effective at his day job. Who knows, he could be the model for a whole new generation of actor-cum-players. For most of the 1990s, the model was the "production deal" with a big Hollywood studio that wanted the actor's star power aligned with it. But many of those deals have been cut or downsized. Tom Cruise took a stab at mogul-dom by assuming the titular helm of United Artists a few years ago, but that has fizzled. But there are rare examples-like the producer Robert Evans or Ron Howard or the pre-meltdown Mel Gibson-of people who moved from the other side of the camera to demonstrate business chops. CBS boss Leslie Moonves, for one, started out as a journeyman actor, turning up on episodes of Cannon and The Six Million Dollar Man. Last year, he got paid $43 million. Who wouldn't want to be in his pack?

rsiklos@observer.com 

It was just another Sunday in Beverly Hills for Hugh Hefner. His latest girlfriend, Crystal Harris, and other playmates lounged by the pool at the Playboy Mansion, while Hefner played Backgammon nearby with "the boys." In the evening, it was movie night in the screening room: Inception, which Hef declared "a mind blower," though he and Crystal went on to watch True Blood afterward before calling it a night.

I know all this not because I was there, but because for the last two weeks or so I've become an avid follower of Hef's Twitter feed, a slightly anachronistic thing for an 84-year-old who wears pajamas all day: As he recently told Larry King, Ms. Harris gave him an iPad and "I'm now a Twitter bug. When I was a kid, I was a jitter bug." In fact, I wouldn't pay much mind to Mr. Hefner if not for the curious news a couple of weeks ago that he was planning to make an offer to take Playboy Enterprises, the company he founded 57 years ago, private. 

At first glance, this would seem to be evidence of Aging Macher Syndrome, wherein people with money and power in their dotage do silly things to remain in the mix. (For instance, check out Sumner Redstone's recent voice-mail flap with Daily Beast reporter Peter Lauria.) But now I'm thinking: maybe El Hef-e is a sharper old codger than most people give him credit for.

Playboy ceased being a giant dot on the cultural radar quite a while ago, as its magazine suffered from the same recessionary technological forces beating down everyone, and the company's core competency-hot young ladies in suggestive repose-was usurped by the easy availability of  hard-core pornography in videos and now online. In the latest quarter, revenue at the magazine in the U.S. plunged by half compared to a year ago, and the company overall posted a small loss. When most people think of Mr. Hefner today, I expect the first image that comes to mind is the benign and slightly goofy supporting role he plays in the reality show The Girls Next Door on E!.

MORE> Summer of Hollywood Scandals

But then watch the fascinating new documentary: Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, by Oscar-winning Canadian filmmaker Brigitte Berman. In the film, you see that Mr. Hefner not only pushed the bounds of moral acceptance in the magazine's early heyday, but that he was also a crusader for racial equality and women's rights and even used his private jet The Big Bunny to ferry Vietnamese war babies across America. More than that, you see the present-day Mr. Hefner as lucid and thoughtful as he was as a young man hosting Sammy Davis Jr. on his syndicated black-and-white TV show Playboy's Penthouse.

Ms. Berman said people tend to overlook Hef's serious side because the hepcat and sexual persona is just too distracting. (Typical of Hef's charity, he recently committed $900,000 to save the Hollywood sign from being sold to developers, the second time he has rescued the landmark since moving to L.A. from Chicago in the mid-'70s.)

Where his bid for Playboy is concerned, it's a peculiar thing because his ostensive reasoning is that he is unhappy with the direction the magazine is taking. And, yet, he controls nearly 70 percent of the votes at Playboy Enterprises and is the magazine's editor and chief creative officer. "It really isn't that personal," he told Larry King. "I want to be sure that the brand and the magazine are secure and going in the right direction."

Mr. Hefner's offer was initially seen by analysts as too low, and sure enough a rival company-an Internet outfit that now publishes his once great rival, Penthouse-has made what it calls a higher bid. As controlling shareholder, Mr. Hefner says he's not selling-and he has a private-equity firm ready to go in with him on his offer. One theory, put forward by a Reuter's columnist, is that Mr. Hefner understands that there are undervalued assets in the company, including its 5,000-piece photography and art collection, and particularly the storied mansion. Purchased in 1971, the 20,000-square-foot house is on Playboy's books at $1.2 million, but ought to fetch $25 million or more were it to sell. Mr. Hefner, who is paid $1.5 million a year by Playboy, sends about $800,000 of that back to the company to pay for rent and personal expenses at the mansion.

Can the octogenarian reverse the trajectory of print publishing or Internet porn and otherwise turn back the clock to Playboy's glory days? Of course not, but behind the wizened face and lounge wear he knows the party can't go on forever-and he knows a seductive opportunity when he sees one.

rsiklos@observer.com

Audiences everywhere are ranting about Despicable Mel: the unraveling of an actor whose career as an entertainer seems like it ought to be kaput.

In the past two weeks, the Aussie-born Mel Gibson has supplemented past anti-Semitic outbursts with leaked recordings that use the N-word (in an especially off-putting reference to rape) and what sounds like a death threat to the mother of his 8-month-old daughter. "I'll put you in a f------ rose garden. You understand that?" Mr. Gibson is purportedly recorded telling ex-girlfriend Oskana Grigorieva, "because I'm capable of it." 

After the first recording was leaked to RadarOnline, the actor was fired by the talent agency William Morris Endeavor. 

Setting aside how reprehensible Mr. Gibson sounds-even with the caveats that he has battled alcoholism and by some reports was caught unawares by mini-microphones hidden in diamond earnings-his antics have set off a fascinating discussion in Hollywood about how awful you have to behave in this town for your career to be really, truly over. Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times brilliantly terms it a great example of Hollywood's "situational ethics," and Kim Masters in The Hollywood Reporter notes that other stars, like Charlie Sheen, have been forgiven for their transgressions. Mr. Gibson has a couple of films in production, but his latest work, the thriller The Edge of Darkness, came and went quietly. The town actually respects some public self-destruction (à la Robert Downey Jr. or Anne Heche). Actor Danny Glover-Mr. Gibson's co-star in all those Lethal Weapon flicks-has had no comment, but longtime friend Whoopi Goldberg defended him-sort of. "You can say he's being a bonehead, but I can't sit and say that he's a racist having spent time with him in my house with my kids," she told The View. "I don't like what he's done, make no mistake."

It must be noted that just before his firing from William Morris, Mr. Gibson's longtime agent there had passed away. Powerful agent Ari Emanuel had called for a boycott of Mr. Gibson's work back in 2006 when reports of his making anti-Semitic slurs were first made public. And Mr. Emanuel ended up in charge of William Morris after merging his Endeavor firm with William Morris last year, but for whatever reason he held his powder on Mr. Gibson until the tape of him using the N-word emerged. Mr. Emanuel was either biding his time or giving him a second chance, but now Mr. Gibson is toxic and no other talent agency is going to touch him. 

It's worth remembering that Mr. Gibson's The Passion of the Christ generated plenty of controversy and stands as the highest-grossing independently financed film ever. And his directorial follow-up, Apocalypto, was released by Disney several months after Mr. Gibson had to apologize for the anti-Semitic and sexist slurs he made to police officers who pulled him over for a suspected DUI in Malibu. It's cynical to say, but the inescapable reality is that as long as someone is bankable, they are tolerable and even possibly redeemable (a lesson that Lindsay Lohan ought to ponder right about now). While the current view is that Mr. Gibson is done as far as acting in other people's films, he could still use his chops as a director through his Icon Productions.

It's a funny business, though, and a lot can happen over time. While the L.A. Police Department was reportedly opening an investigation into Mr. Gibson for domestic violence, Swiss authorities were denying the extradition of accused underage sex offender and fugitive Roman Polanski. Even Mr. Polanski's 13-year-old victim, now all grown up, has forgiven him, and his latest film, The Ghost Writer, was well received.

Other celebs have survived sex tapes and leaked recordings of mean and bullying behavior, but Despicable Mel is in a category of his own. What happens next is up to him. For starters, a little public contrition should not be hard to muster. After all, the guy does know how to act. 

rsiklos@observer.com 

This is a worthy fight. Say what you will about our cultural drivel, but big Hollywood movies and TV series are among the few things that America still does demonstrably better than the rest of the world.  

And yet here's a not-so-secret secret about Hollywood that is at odds with the message sent by the studios and the piracy police: No one actually pays for anything here because this is the town that has turned the freebie into an art form. Whether we're talking about an Oscar swag bag, the preposterous "gift rooms" around award shows or the "celebrity outreach" emissaries of luxury and gadget companies, a mark of success in L.A. is getting things gratis (in inverse proportion to how much you actually need something for free) and showing the world how awesome that is. Practically no one I know who is tangentially in the biz goes to the movies as a civilian on a regular basis-the exception being if they have small kids and a Toy Story 3 comes along. Instead, there is a steady stream of buzz-building advance screenings that are the preferred mode of cinematic consumption by many, along with deep gift closets full of the latest DVD releases. And some people who receive Oscar screeners have practically set up lending libraries (complete with waiting queues and due dates) because their friends are shameless about asking to borrow them. The rest of the country might say, "I'll wait for Cyrus to come out on DVD." In L.A. we just say, "I'll wait until Dave gets his screener."

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has tried to crack down on this practice by putting watermark codes in the screeners and even giving out special DVD players to watch them on, though the latter moved proved to be a bit of a bust. Still, it's notable that this year, far fewer screeners were leaked online than in previous years, according to Andy Baio, a journalist and programmer who has been tracking these trends for sport since 2003. "Are studios doing a better job protecting screeners and intimidating Academy members?" he wondered on his blog Waxy.org. "Or was this year's crop of films too boring for pirates to bother with?"

Regardless, all across the media, the tide is turning in the quest to disavow people of the notion that everything should be free-provided you have given all your pocket money to Steve Jobs and some kind of broadband provider.

One minor but interesting local example of this was the opening a few months ago of a branch of Soho House in West Hollywood. Founder Nick Jones insisted on keeping the club true to its London roots by charging a membership fee, but he initially faced resistance from celebrity handlers who expect their clients to be granted free access (and everything else) in exchange for their illustrious presence and the good publicity that would bring. But Mr. Jones held fast with a no-freebies policy, and the celebs have turned out in volume nonetheless.

But even beyond the velvet rope, the idea that everyone should pay their freight equally is one whose time has come. I have more to say on the matter, right after I see about getting invited to a screening of Inception.

rsiklos@observer.com

That's a retro question nowadays-the kind of thing that is earnestly said about John Lennon or Elvis Presley. For this generation, obviously, the answer is: You were at your computer and read it on TMZ. It's hard to believe that a year has already passed since the megastar was pronounced dead on June 25, 2009, apparently from an overdose of the anesthesia he was being administered to feign sleep as he rehearsed in Los Angeles for a series of comeback concerts portentously titled "This is It."

And by "hard to believe a year has already passed," what I mean is it actually feels considerably longer. So much has happened since Jackson's untimely death at age 50. He's had a hit movie with a big-selling soundtrack; sales of his past recordings have skyrocketed; and every move or utterance by his children, parents and siblings is followed by the celebrity press and blogosphere as though they were the Kennedys in the days of Camelot. Later this year, an original album of unreleased Jackson songs will be released, and a Cirque du Soleil show in Vegas is in the works.

The conventional line now is that Jackson is bigger in death than he was in life-and even bigger than Elvis Presley, the musical "King" whose daughter, let's recall, the "King of Pop" was married to for a brief time. (And, yes, at some point there will be a Neverland permanent attraction to rival Mr. Presley's Graceland, though the betting is it will be in Las Vegas rather than at the existing Neverland Ranch near Santa Barbara.) Setting aside the tragic fact that Jackson is not around to see it, his renewed mega-stardom would no doubt have pleased him deeply-after the success of his record-setting Thriller album 27 years ago, Jackson sought only to top himself, an ambition that was clearly as unhealthy as it was unrealistic. 

Transformed physically and behaviorally into the tabloid caricature of Wacko Jacko, the singer spent roughly the last decade of his life in the creative and personal wilderness (though, by many accounts, he was privately anchored by his devotion to his three children). But one thing Jackson never lost was a devout if not rabid fan base, particularly outside of the U.S. He was finally compelled to go back to work via a series of concerts in London because he was teetering on financial ruin; despite shrewd investments in song catalogs back in the 1980s, he had already had to hand over control of Neverland to a financial firm because he could not cover the mortgage on the property. Mounting payments on even bigger loans-some $435 million in all-jeopardized his ownership of his chief assets: his own music catalog as well as his half-interest in the Sony/ATV music catalog that includes more than 200 Beatles tunes. All the while, Jackson lived far beyond his means, running annual deficits of more than $10 million. Officially, Jackson's position was that he was coming back to perform one last time (hence "This is It") so that he could show his kids what dad was like in his heyday, before the allegations of molestation that dogged him for years, and that he was ultimately found not guilty of. 

Indeed, even before things went awry for him, Jackson professed strongly that he did not want to continue performing. Rather, he wanted to be a kind of Walt Disney, making theme parks and video games and, above all, movies. A decent chunk of his fortune was frittered away on projects that never came to fruition, as well as questionable advice from an ever-changing coterie of business advisers who briefly held his ear. With the concert rehearsal film This Is It-shot for an entirely different purpose and cobbled together in just a few weeks-Jackson (sort of) achieved his wish of celluloid immortality.  Meanwhile, the millions of movie tickets and DVDs and CDs and licensing deals struck by his canny executors in the last year have swiftly moved Jackson's balance sheet out of the dire situation that led him to need to do the comeback tour in the first place. Without Jackson around to spend his newfound gains, something with the contours of a real business is being built. Michael is gone, but he's back.

rsiklos@observer.com

Richard Siklos is writing a book on Michael Jackson for Crown Publishing.

For the recent MTV Movie Awards, pop culture aficionados were delighted to see the resurrection of Les Grossman, the feral, vulgar movie producer from the Ben Stiller film Tropic Thunder, as the purported producer of this year's awards. It's worth remembering that when Thunder was released in 2008, the word was that Grossman was some kind of revenge caricature concocted by Mr. Stiller and Tom Cruise-who was brilliantly transformed into a bald, aging, Diet Coke-swilling mogul with oversize hands and hairy forearms-against Sumner Redstone, the billionaire who ultimately owns the Paramount movie studio. Mr. Redstone, as we all know, trashed and ostensibly booted Mr. Cruise publicly in The Wall Street Journal two years earlier from his long and profitable relationship with Paramount, citing Mr. Cruise's public championing of Scientology and seemingly over-the-top behavior on Oprah when he was promoting War of the Worlds. The Grossman character bears little literal resemblance to Mr. Redstone physically-though the latter is known to be irascible and profane-but it was not hard to infer that Mr. Cruise enjoyed a poke at the old man while  cutting loose from his usual role as intense leading man.

At the same time, Mr. Cruise was in fact trying to be a Grossman-level movie mogul himself, having struck a deal to effectively run the United Artists movie label owned by MGM in tandem with his longtime producing partner, Paula Wagner.

Fast-forward two years: Ms. Wagner is long-gone from UA; Mr. Cruise has not much to show for his time as a suit; and the fate of Mr. Cruise's career remains one of the most-chattered-about subjects in town. His trajectory faltered at a time when the whole business changed and the notion of mega-stars who can open movies big (Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Will Smith, Leonardo DiCaprio and Denzel Washington among them) has been called into question. Not one for small measures, Mr. Cruise's own Web site crows that his movies "have earned in excess of six billion dollars worldwide-an incomparable achievement."

Now Mr. Cruise is attempting something of a career back flip. For years, comic actors have tried to evolve into serious thespians, something at which Tom Hanks succeeded handily but others, from Mike Myers to Jim Carrey, have largely faltered. As part of his purported comeback, Mr. Cruise is doing the opposite-rather than chasing an elusive Oscar, he's showing he can lighten up and have a laugh.

Like most of the characters he's played, he's going full throttle. A full-fledged Grossman feature is being developed by Paramount, which-such irony!-along with MTV is controlled by Mr. Redstone. (Both Mr. Cruise and Mr. Redstone maintain they are now "friends"-my quotes.) And Mr. Cruise and Mr. Stiller are developing a comedy in which they play the teen sleuths of The Hardy Boys as middle-aged brothers, called The Hardy Men-though word is that it's a long way from production.

More pressingly, June 23 is the release date for Knight and Day, the comedy-thriller distributed by Fox that stars Mr. Cruise and Cameron Diaz, in which he plays an intense and possibly insane secret agent. It's the first time Mr. Cruise has been in a marquee role since the middling Valkyrie, which was done at UA. And once again his role involves large helpings of winking self-caricature.

The inside word on how the film will fare at the box office is mixed-no one seems quite sure who Mr. Cruise's audience is anymore. What's clear, and actually kind of admirable, is that he is willing to do whatever it takes to try to find out.   

rsiklos@observer.com