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On the flip side, he’s said repeatedly that he wouldn’t be where he is if you hadn’t given him a showcase on ‘Late Night.’

Well, he’s being gracious, because he did as much for us as we did for him—maybe more. He could have accomplished for himself what he did here on any other show. But for us, like I said earlier, to find a regular guest who could always come out and who really could deliver, jeez, that was money in the bank.

On the first day outside parties were permitted to bid for your services, you opened your monologue by saying, “I feel like a million bucks!” Just how does a million bucks feel?

Beats me. I’m just tickled by the phrase.

You’re saying you’ve yet to feel like a million bucks during any of this?

No, no. I’m embarrassed by all the attention.

So what kind of dollar value would you place on how you feel?

I feel like a million bucks.

DAVID GEFFEN

by Patrick Goldstein

April 29, 1993

Did you always want to be in the entertainment business?

I couldn’t wait to be old enough to move to California. I wanted to be where the movies are made, in that land of sunshine and Gidget and surfboards and convertibles and green lawns and beautiful houses. The day after I graduated high school, I moved to Los Angeles.

You were fascinated even as a little boy?

I remember the first time I went to Radio City Music Hall, I went out to get chocolate cigarettes, and when I came back into the theater and opened up those big doors, it was at the end of a Rockettes number, and I was walking down this aisle, and people were applauding like crazy. And I had this fantasy that I was walking down to get my Academy Award. I remember that clearly.

And were you interested in the business of show business?

I used to read everything I could get my hands on about the entertainment business. When I was nine years old, I knew what was in Hedda Hopper’s column and Walter Winchell’s column too. My brother used to say that I was a wealth of worthless information.

And what did you envision yourself doing?

I had an epiphany when I bought a biography of Louis B. Mayer by Bosley Crowther called Hollywood Raja. I read this book and I thought, “I want this job.” To me, it seemed like the greatest job in the world.

But when you finally had a big job in the movie business at Warner Bros. Pictures in 1975, you hated it.

I didn’t find it satisfying at all. The worst job in the world is running a movie studio. It’s very hard when every piece of product costs thirty or forty million dollars, and every day you have to read two gossip-column items in the trade papers which talk about what a schmuck you are for the decisions you’ve made or not made.

Most studio executives seem trapped by this awful malaise.

I don’t think it’s malaise. I think it’s fear. The operative word in Hollywood is “fear.” Most people are afraid they’ll make a mistake, be humiliated and lose their jobs. They want to be safe. I don’t think that’s true in the record business. People don’t lose their jobs because they sign an artist whose record comes out and flops.

You still think the record industry is free from Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality?

You just can’t compare them. You can still make a record for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today you can’t make a movie for less than $18 to $25 million, so the failure of one of those movies has a profound effect on the lives of the people involved. The failure of any record doesn’t have a profound effect on any record company, so there’s a tremendous leeway given for failure. And I think if you don’t give people the opportunity to fail, you don’t give them much chance to succeed either, and so what you end up with in the film business is a lot of shitty movies.

You’ve been involved with a lot of artists, from David Crosby through John Lennon to Axl Rose, who lived on the edge, whether it was drugs or primal screams or throwing tantrums onstage or urinating on your A&R executives’ desks. Why are creative people caught up in so many