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Close watchers of Seagram thought Bronfman got too little for his Du Pont stake. Says Ken Shea, an analyst at Standard & Poor's: "It doesn't make sense to dump a solid business like Du Pont, which throws off good dividends, and take on a much riskier investment in MCA. But then the press accounts of Edgar Jr. don't give him a lot of credit. They paint him as a Dan Quayle who is ready to wreck Seagram."
Bronfman could be Dan Quayle or Champale -- or something more potent, a strong successor to his father. Junior has cut costs, promoted such high-margin products as Martell Cognac and bought the Dole fruit-juice line to complement Tropicana. Seagram's profits doubled in 1994, to $734 million.
Edgar Sr. had his own expensive fling in movies; he bought part of MGM in 1967 only to sell it two years later at a loss of about $10 million. By that time, his son was reading scripts for producer David Puttnam. Edgar Jr. found a script he loved, and in 1972, at Puttnam's goading, produced the movie, a flop called The Blockhouse. He was 17. With a show-biz dilettante's drive, he invested in Broadway plays, wrote pop songs, married a singer-actress and produced a few other films-notably a Jack Nicholson melodrama, The Border, released in 1982 by MCA-Universal.
MCA has lately been involved in its own corporate melodrama. In 1990 Matsushita bought the company in a $6.6 billion deal arranged by the movie Mephisto, Michael Ovitz, chief of Creative Artists Agency. Profits were plentiful, thanks to a flourishing music division, helped by acquiring David Geffen's record holdings, and a folio of hit films, most of them produced by Steven Spielberg. And at first, Japanese-American relations were smooth. Then some of the Matsushita executives who were on good terms with MCA president Sidney J. Sheinberg were fired. Says MCA movie chief Tom Pollock: "I believe if the Matsushita administration hadn't changed, they would not have sold the company."
Sheinberg, a brassy American entrepreneur, wanted to diversify his business, but the conservative Japanese refused. Like Godzilla in hibernation, Matsushita sat in its Osaka cave, occasionally emerging to roar No! "Sid would have bought Virgin Records, he would have bought nbc," says Irving Azoff, MCA's former music boss. "He was really frustrated that the Japanese wouldn't let him do any of that." The brokered marriage was soon looking as vulnerable as Lyle Lovett's to Julia Roberts. And Ovitz, the canny matchmaker, was apparently unwilling or unable to save it.
When Spielberg formed DreamWorks with Geffen and former Disney movie czar Jeffrey Katzenberg, he realized both his value to MCA (he had kept Universal profitable with such hits as E.T., Back to the Future and Jurassic Park) and his personal debt to Sheinberg, whom he calls a mentor. So DreamWorks said some of its products could be distributed by MCA-in a deal that could be worth $1 billion over the next decade-if Matsushita would keep Sheinberg and chairman Lew Wasserman aboard. The Japanese never responded to the offer.