Brad Grey obituary: TV and film producer brought 'The Sopranos' to the small screen

Grey was chair and chief executive of Paramount Pictures until shortly before his death

Grey in 2006: he was a meticulous, smooth-talking operator who had a hitmaker’s taste (Getty)

Brad Grey was a Hollywood agent who produced television hits such as The Sopranos and spent 12 years as head of Paramount Pictures, where he greenlighted such lucrative franchises as Transformers and Star Trek but resigned in February amid massive losses. He stepped down as Paramount’s chairman and chief executive after a year in which the studio reported losses of nearly half a billion dollars.

Grey was a meticulous, smooth-talking operator who courted actors and comedians, possessed a hitmaker’s taste and was known for his meticulous knowledge of the business world.

“He was the first guy I ever saw in this business who read The Wall Street Journal,” the veteran manager and producer Bernie Brillstein recalled. “I saw him with the paper and said, ‘What are you doing with that?’”

He began his career working with Harvey Weinstein, who went on to form the production company Miramax. The studio was later a crucial collaborator with Paramount, joining a division set up by Grey to distribute the Oscar-nominated 2007 films There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. Grey’s “genius at picking and identifying talent was unprecedented”, Weinstein said.

Grey teamed up with Brillstein in 1984. The pair formed what The New York Times described as a Hollywood “odd couple” – Brillstein, who died in 2008 and helped shape Saturday Night Live, was a flashy and voluble presence alongside the spare and laconic Grey – while building one of Hollywood's most powerful management firms.

Their clients included Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox, comedians Garry Shandling and Mike Myers, Brad Pitt and Nicholas Cage and former politicians such as New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, for whom Grey negotiated a $3m book contract.

In 1994 Brillstein-Grey Management began producing films and television shows, many of them featuring some of the 200-odd stars the firm represented. It was, Grey acknowledged, a conflict of interest: managers negotiating contracts for their stars while also haggling on behalf of the programmes they appeared in. “I don’t shy away from it,’ he told Forbes magazine in 2002. “I like to be crystal clear about it and acknowledge it.”

Grey was a producer on ‘The Larry Sanders Show’, whose creator and star Gary Shandling (right) he also managed, but their partnership ended in court (Rex)

The practice resulted in at least one lawsuit. In 1998, Shandling sued Grey for $100m, alleging that the manager and producer had misused their business relationship to gain an unfair advantage. The case was settled out of court.

Grey’s strategy helped him earn millions of dollars from hits such as the NBC sitcom Just Shoot Me and the HBO crime drama The Sopranos, for which he served as co-executive producer. Sopranos creator David Chase credited Grey with finding a home for the series after it was rejected by the major networks, and said Grey’s blue-collar background made him a crucial collaborator. “Whatever he responds to I usually go with,” Chase said, “because he responds to the humanity of the stories.”

The show won Emmys in 2004 and 2007, and marked a turn toward increasingly ambitious productions. Grey joined Pitt and Aniston’s production company Plan B as a partner, and there, partly inspired by his two young sons, produced the Johnny Depp film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and Martin Scorsese’s mobster drama The Departed (2006).

Grey had by then taken the reins of Paramount, charged with reversing a slump in fortunes. He sacked about a third of the company’s 3,000 employees and brought in fresh talent, working with Steven Spielberg and his production company DreamWorks, while also scoring deals with blockbuster producers JJ Abrams and Michael Bay.

In 2007, two years after Grey took over, the studio topped the US box office charts with $1.5bn in domestic revenue. Paramount scored hits with the franchises Transformers, Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. By 2012, Grey had produced eight of Paramount’s 10 highest-grossing films.

But a succession of box-office failures, among them Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows and Zoolander 2, sent Paramount into the red. In its most recent fiscal year, losses were $445m.

Grey was optimistic about engineering a turnaround. “The history of show business,” he told Vanity Fair in October, “is that you’re always a couple of hits away from a turnaround.” Four months later, however, Grey resigned.

Bradley Alan Grey was born in the Bronx in 1957, and grew up in Spring Valley, New York. His grandfather sold buckles in New York’s garment district while his father sold women’s handbags to shops in the southern states.

Grey served as co-executive producer of the HBO hit ‘The Sopranos’

He studied communication and business at the State University of New York at Buffalo. After graduating in 1979, he teamed up with Weinstein, a fellow Buffalo alumnus.

His first marriage, to Jill Gutterson, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of six years, Cassandra Huysentruyt Grey, who runs the luxury beauty line Violet Grey; three children from his first marriage, and a son from his second marriage.

Grey, who died of cancer, liked to say that the nature of the business was to oscillate between success and failure. “We fail more than we succeed in show business,” he told Forbes, “but every now and then we really succeed.”

Brad Grey, born 29 December 1957, died 14 May 2017

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