WATER TORTURE

By KIM MASTERS/LOS ANGELES

Early last week, Mark Canton went to a screening of Jerry Maguire, an upcoming Tom Cruise vehicle about a sports agent, and started to think that life might get better. Yes, the chairman of Sony's film studios, which include Columbia and Tri-Star, had presided over a particularly dreadful summer. He had been excoriated for paying Jim Carrey $20 million for The Cable Guy, which faltered at the box office. And as his competitors feasted on the returns from Twister and Mission: Impossible and Independence Day, Canton suffered the further indignities of Multiplicity and The Fan. But the screening of a potential Tom Cruise hit put Canton in a brighter mood. Maybe things would finally turn around.

Then a Sony public affairs man handed him an article from Fortune magazine. There Canton read in the first paragraph that his boss, Sony Pictures Entertainment president Alan Levine, was going to can him. The news shouldn't have startled anyone, but no one from Sony had bothered to tell Canton. The week dragged on, and no word came. On Thursday night Canton and Levine both uncomfortably attended Hollywood's splashy Clinton fund raiser. The next day Levine finally pulled the trigger.

Levine, a colorless lawyer who has never ingratiated himself within the industry, could be facing the same fate himself. By now, Sony Pictures Entertainment has turned into an executive torture chamber, with an extraordinary string of firings in its recent past as the studio has struggled to extricate itself from a morass of big budgets, bad box office and fratricidal infighting.

Canton is widely regarded as a braggart who was lucky to have become chairman of a studio in the first place. But his twisting-in-the-Santa-Ana-winds demise didn't raise spirits at Sony. And he wasn't the only casualty. On Wednesday Variety confidently reported that Arnold Rifkin, worldwide head of motion pictures for the William Morris Agency, had been offered Canton's job. Many observers were surprised, as Rifkin lacks executive experience. But since joining William Morris nearly four years ago, he has done much to re-energize the agency's sleepy movie business, adding such clients as Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis and Danny Glover.

Rifkin confirmed that he was in talks. Unfortunately for him he was talking to Levine, who apparently hoped that a Rifkin hire would help him hold on to his own job. "Arnold was the horse that Levine was riding," says a source sympathetic to Rifkin. "Arnold got to the starting gate and found out his jockey was dead." Early Thursday morning, Rifkin attended a chilly meeting with Sony chief Nobuyuki Idei. After an hour punctuated with awkward silences, it was clear that Sony wouldn't make Rifkin's deal.

Rivals hoped the episode would strike a blow to the resurgent William Morris Agency, because movie stars, notoriously insecure, don't like to think their agents would even consider changing vocations. Competitors mocked Rifkin for making himself vulnerable by acknowledging that he had been in talks with Sony without a deal in hand.

The day after the Sony meeting, Rifkin told associates that he had signed a new, long-term agreement with William Morris, and allies rallied behind him. "He was honest, honorable and forthcoming in a way in which nobody in Hollywood has the guts to be anymore," said DreamWorks partner Jeffrey Katzenberg. Stallone praised Rifkin, and a source close to Willis and Glover says they too will remain with him. Rifkin, known for psychospeak, was philosophical. "I feel as though I've journeyed to a place and I've come back stronger and wiser."

As for Sony, it now appears that just talking to the studio can damage a career. Canton will not be replaced for now (two deputies will share his duties for the time being). But most industry executives believe Sony must do more to fix its studio than merely shuffle executives. After a profligate run that astonished Hollywood, Sony acknowledged in 1994 that it had lost more than $3 billion on its filmed-entertainment operations since it bought Columbia Pictures from Coca-Cola in 1989.

Sony says the studio is profitable now, and the past couple of years have brought a few successes, such as Bad Boys and Jumanji. But the misses far outnumbered the hits, and the studio has never had a major blockbuster. "There have to be big strains," says industry analyst Hal Vogel. "The whole '96 schedule really didn't work very well--and this is after years of trying. Where are they? They're not anywhere."