(2 of 3)
Last Monday the trio met with MCA-Universal boss Lew Wasserman, at 81 still the Godfather of Show, and his deputy Sid Sheinberg. Wasserman and Sheinberg were rankling under the ownership of Matsushita, the Japanese conglomerate. MCA was home to both Geffen, whose current music company is housed there, and Spielberg, whose Amblin films are distributed mainly through Universal; the director regards Sheinberg as a mentor of nearly 30 years. "Lew and Sid's intentions were to get back control of their company," says Katzenberg, "and they hoped we'd be an ally to them. We assured them we would. It didn't go beyond that."
After Wasserman and Sheinberg gave their blessing to the trio, the contracts for the new company were signed -- in a mere six business days after the bustling Katzenberg had left Disney. And on the seventh day, did he rest? Of course not. He worked the phones.
He and his chums will have to keep working -- and praying -- to make their studio flourish. Huge investments in scripts, real estate and a large staff are always vulnerable to the fickleness of the marketplace. Such ambitious outfits as First Artists, Orion Pictures, the Ladd Company and Francis Coppola's Zoetrope Studios all came and, sooner or later, went under. With the iffy exception of TriStar, formed in 1982, no successful major studio has started from scratch since Disney in the 1920s.
If anybody can break the spell, says Hollywood royalty, it's the Katzenberg Kids. Film producer Steve Tisch, who is a close Katzenberg friend, says he would "love to be aligned with them. Plenty of executives would like to work for them -- I hear a lot of Xerox machines running today." Even Disney chairman Michael Eisner, who will not be sending his resume to Katzenberg, gives the troika a rave review. "Competition ignites and stimulates excellence," he says, "and for that I wish them well. I think they'll do well. And I think they'll force us to do even better than we've done in the past."
The new company was already proving its entertainment value by midwifing many a rumor. West Coast gossip: deposed Warner Bros. music kingpin Mo Ostin would work with Geffen. East Coast gossip: Tina Brown, the editor of the New Yorker, would be coming aboard. A spokeswoman who asked Brown about the rumor received the response, "No, no, no."
For the industry the big question is what role the three amigos will play in the Wasserman rumpus with the Japanese. In 1990 Matsushita spent $6.6 billion on MCA, whose prime asset is Spielberg. Since 1982, five of the six Universal films to gross at least $100 million at the domestic box office (E.T., Back to the Future, Back to the Future Part II, Jurassic Park and The Flintstones) have come from Spielberg's Amblin. Another Spielberg film, Schindler's List, | earned $96 million and a slew of Oscars. Universal Studios Florida, the company's pricey rival to Walt Disney World, is virtually a Spielberg shrine, with major rides celebrating E.T., Back to the Future and Jaws. But without its main man, Universal is a crippled company. The rest of its movie trove is a dog named Beethoven and some other dogs named Dr. Giggles, Splitting Heirs and Havana.