Hollywood Attorney, Power Broker Was 82
Skip Brittenham, the forthright Hollywood attorney and power broker who represented A-listers from all corners of the industry, from Kevin Feige, Harvey Weinstein and Toby Emmerich to Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks and Eddie Murphy, died Monday. He was 82.
“Everyone in our industry knew of Skip’s legal prowess,” Ziffren Brittenham, which he founded in December 1978, said in a statement. “But some may not have known of his quiet generosity, his ability to find humor and opportunity in the darkest moments and his unwavering belief that media and the entertainment industry must serve people, not the other way around.”
A Hollywood Reporter “Legal Legend,” Brittenham launched the boutique firm Ziffren Brittenham with Ken Ziffren, and his clients over the years also included Richard Pryor, Tony and Ridley Scott, Joe Eszterhas, Glen A. Larson, Warren Littlefield, Ted Danson, Tom Selleck, Tim Allen, Bruce Willis, Michael Keaton, Jim Gianopulos, Tom Rothman, Dana Walden, Jim Wiatt and Bob Greenblatt.
“What amuses me most about Skip is he often represents everyone in the deal,” Ford told the Los Angeles Times in 2005. “And he does a really good job for everybody … I’ve always walked away from every negotiation and thought, ‘Jesus, how did he get that?’”
Survivors include his wife, actress Heather Thomas (The Fall Guy).
Brittenham, who tried to maintain a low profile throughout his career, nabbed Ford (before Star Wars) and Henry Winkler (when he was a minor actor at the start of Happy Days) as his first actor clients, and a string of success involving novel ideas and practices followed.
He famously played a part in creating backend deals for Winkler and others and was known for opening the gates for executives to make additional money based on their divisions’ performances.
And when streaming upended deal structures, he moved for deep-pocketed companies to buy out clients’ backend.
Brittenham’s transactional work behind-the-scenes also included helping out Pixar years before it was acquired by Disney in 1991; afterward, he played a part in the company’s strategy and deals.
“When I started out with [Pixar founder] Steve Jobs, in the beginning I was mentoring him, and by the end, he was mentoring me in business and various other things. It was a great run,” he told THR in 2020.
When Pixar/Disney animation chief creative officer John Lasseter was forced out in 2018 after he admitted to unspecified “missteps,” he brought on Brittenham as a confidant. “People under attack want a bulldog,” a person who worked with Lasseter told THR at the time.
Brittenham helped Disney scoop up Miramax in 1993, and in 2004-07, he worked on splitting DreamWorks into two firms — with the animation side going public and the live-action side being sold to Paramount for $1.6 billion — and helped set up David Ellison’s Skydance Media and Chris Meledandri’s Illumination Entertainment.
Along the way, Brittenham gained a reputation for telling it like it is.
“In showbiz, a lot of people, golly gee whiz, they don’t always tell the truth,” he said in a 2012 interview. “So by telling the truth, and always telling the truth and always saying exactly what I thought, it distinguished me a bit from some other people. And clients learned to expect it.”
“Singular is an overused word: it should be reserved for the exceedingly rare likes of Skip Brittenham,” Rothman, chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, said in a statement. “A dear friend and valued adviser to me for my entire career, Skip was the wisest man I knew and among the very best.”
Harry Montague Brittenham was born on Sept. 6, 1942, in Port Huron, Michigan. His father was an officer and fighter pilot during World War II who continued his service with the U.S. Air Force until he retired in 1966; his mother was a social worker and housekeeper.
Because of his dad’s job, the family moved a lot, living in states including New York, Mississippi, Alaska and California. “I was never in any place for more than a couple years,” he said.
Brittenham was accepted into the Air Force Academy when he was 17 but didn’t want to go. “The first thing you learned there … was if you quit you’re a quitter forever,” he said. “Obviously I learned as I’ve gotten older that it would have been OK to quit, but at the time it was like, if I quit my life is over.” He stuck in out and graduated in 1963.
An eye injury prevented him from going to pilot training, so he accepted jobs with the Air Materiel Command in Sacramento and with the Office of Scientific Research and Development in Washington.
Wanting to “delay my adolescence,” he said, he went to UCLA law school and graduated in 1970.
With clients like Ford and Winkler in tow, Brittenham was recruited by Ziffren to work for the Hollywood firm that was led by his father, Paul, and uncles, Leo and Lester.
“I said, ‘Let me get this straight, you want me to go to Ziffren, Ziffren & Ziffren and you’re not one of the Ziffrens?’” he recalled asking Ken Ziffren. “‘I’ve got a better idea, how about Ziffren and Brittenham?’ … Shortly thereafter, he decided he would leave them and we would go into business together.”
Brittenham did his first work for Pixar when it was making commercials and served on its board after being recruited by Jobs, who wanted a well-connected Hollywood attorney associated with his Silicon Valley startup. He brokered Disney’s first deal to finance, market and distribute Pixar movies in 1991, four years before the landmark Toy Story reached theaters.
After Brittenham represented writer-producer Gary David Goldberg and Michael J. Fox in a 1996 deal for the DreamWorks Television/ABC sitcom Spin City that he called “the best deal ever made, the best deal that would ever be made,” he realized he “could never do better than this” in television. He then focused on the motion picture transactional business, which involved much larger sums of money.
“Once you have a certain level of clientele and you kind of have dominance in the market, then the other big guys want to come to you because you know what you are doing and you have the expertise and the leverage,” he said.
Outside of his legal work, Brittenham teamed with comic book artist Brian Haberlin to launch Anomaly Productions, which released graphic novels. (He had a vast personal collection of comics and graphic novels.)
The premise of the first Anomaly graphic novel — which was acquired by Relativity Media for a film that was never made — was that “we’ve destroyed Earth with climate change and pollution so we have to live on other worlds in order to survive,” he told THR in 2017.
Brittenham also served on the board of numerous charities, including Conservation International, The American Oceans Campaign and the Environmental Media Association.
In addition to his wife, whom he wed in October 1992, survivors include his daughters, Kristina (wife of Skydance Media president Jesse Sisgold), Shauna and India Rose; his brother, Bud; and four grandchildren.
A laid-back guy outside the office, Brittenham did not bill hourly, which he said gave him more time to travel to remote locations around the world to enjoy fly fishing and heed the Brittenham family motto: “You can never have too much fun, but you can try.”
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