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July 23, 2007
When You're In Love With A Beautiful Woman...
I'll keep this brief.
One of the difficult parts of juggling a blog, a column, a news site, and a lot of time on the phone and in person with "the industry" is remaining clear on what I have actually said or written out loud and what has been conversation between the lines. Remembering what is on and off the record is clear. But sometimes I feel like I have been talking about something forever and then I have to really consider whether I wrote it down for your consumption.
I have had so many conversations about Par and DW in the last two years, on and off the record, with stories I have run or decided to let slide, I have lost my grasp of what page I stopped reading at "last night." So I shall sum up...
Ron Grover's Business Week story on Paramount and DreamWorks was, essentially, a four-month old look at the situation at the studios Though it did a nice job of tying much of it together, it missed some of the real and simple causes of friction.
Meanwhile, C. Nikki Finke is trying to claim ownership of the issue, almost none of which dropped for the first time on her blog, no matter how many times she tells everyone she had an exclusive. The exception, however, is that she's been getting the real inside spin from Grey's camp for the last few months, starting with the comedic piece about how DreamWorks now looks like a reasonable purchase by Paramount. The problem with that analysis is that it is all surface. Someday, Nikki will learn to do her math and not just take everything at face value. “I understand Brad just had a very cordial dinner with David at Mr. Chow's,” is not news or really anything… except for someone trying to get a message into Nikki’s column.
LATE ADD - Peter Bart's take
My take is this… the DreamWorks deal will either cement Brad Grey’s position by 2010 or it will be the end of his career as a studio guy. (His old life as a manager and producer waits for him with as much, if not more, power than ever.) He will be the hero or the cuckold and all he can do is wait and see. (The hope of a Pellicano Demise is now 98% fantasy for Brad haters.)
Grey, by bailing out DreamWorks on a financial level that GE could never accept – especially the $900 million for the library, which Paramount could not afford in the deal and laid off for a few years to private pirates - took S,K & G out of the financial muck that was created in the early years of the studio and made them more than whole. Further, by screwing up utterly with his production team, he put last year and at least a couple of years to come squarely into DreamWorks hands.
The excitement over specific DreamWorks product is missing the point utterly. Paramount has become, loaded with DreamWorks personnel, essentially working now as an output structure for DreamWorks Productions. But while everyone else in town is trying to put themselves in a similar position - with outside money paying the bill for production while they suck up distribution fees and overhead - Paramount is eating the costs on both sides, which is not a winning proposition for the studio… especially if a few DW films go bad.
Moreover, Paramount was already partnering with DreamWorks on a bunch of films and could have continued to do so on many. Indiana Jones, for instance, was always owned by Paramount, so if there was to be a new one, it was always going to be a Paramount film. The illusion that it (or War of the Worlds, for instance) was every going somewhere else without this deal is just wrong. For Paramount to earn $700 million-plus on this deal will take many years, if it is to happen at all.
But the real point of all of this for Paramount is stock price. And the stock price is just about the same place it was when the acquisition process started… and in between, it has mostly been down.
In the meantime, DreamWorks has been like a defeated character in a horror movie, face down in the grass after a fall from the fifth floor, and when we went looking for the body, found it missing. Happy Halloween, Hollywood.
What happens from this moment on is not in Brad Grey’s hands, though his ego could push the issue in a bad way. DreamWorks is born again. S, K & G could go out and raise the money from a hedge fund and not a single partner (no Paul Allen redux) to relaunch their own studio or buy an existing studio (and there is only one with their primary offices on the lot). Or they could, like in The Hidden, be in complete control of their decisions and financial freedom while living off the earthbound human distribution-and-funding flesh bag that is Paramount.
It’s a great place to be. And for Paramount, it is a crap place to be.
Fortunately for Paramount, much of the Paramount infrastructure is staff from their own long-standing team. Gerry Rich has been getting the job done in marketing. In fact, aside from a few irritating decisions from the Rob Moore (especially saying too much to the press), the biggest problem has been Brad Grey’s urge to behave like a studio chief at a studio where he has set it up so the Big Kahuna is in an adobe off Lankershim.
The question of whether Spielberg & Co pulls up stakes and moves along is really up to them and can turn on a whim… leaving Paramount in the role of the man who is desperately in love with the fickle woman who others are dying to have.
And I should say, the fickleness of DreamWorks – truly a three headed (charming) monster of a company – is not reserved for Paramount. The internal temperature of the company about its own team has required taking every few weeks. It does seem to me that Stacey Snider has really settled things down. She has taken a strong team and made the whole thing work much more smoothly, less reliant on her high-flying bosses, allowing them to relax and be less whimsical. Stacey is the key, at this point, to DreamWorks’ stickiness at Paramount and my sources don’t seem to think her exit from her Paramount contract is quite as easy as the Grover story indicates. But I haven’t read that contract, so maybe it is as easy as “Stacey leaves if Stephen leaves.” If that is the case, it is yet another example of Paramount getting trampled by DreamWorks in the dealing room.
So what will Lady DreamWorks decide? Does she want Prince Not-So-Charming or will she go back to Shrek, an idealized utopia with all the farting and belching of trying to make it as a studio without the corporate bulk that protects the other majors?
At 60 years old, Steven Spielberg probably doesn’t want to have a newborn in the house. But then again, ego and passion are always in fashion.
The threat will hang over all of Paramount’s dealings with their dominant, aggressive #1 child. The next two real landmarks will be a determination of the future of the DreamWorks library, currently in a very expensive holding pattern and the effort to re-sign Spielberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen to contract next year. Along the way, there will be fights and threats and success and screw-ups… many of which will be accurately reported weeks after they happen and everyone involved has moved on.
Ain’t love a bitch?
Posted by poland at July 23, 2007 10:05 AM
Comments
Blah blah blah - what's the new site?
Posted by: bipedalist ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/nav-commenters.gif)
at July 23, 2007 11:42 AM
huh?
Posted by: David Poland at July 23, 2007 11:48 AM
David, you wrote "juggling a blog, a column, a new site," which was probably supposed to be "a news site," right?
Posted by: PMartin at July 23, 2007 12:20 PM
ahhhhhhhh... thanks... fixing.
Posted by: David Poland at July 23, 2007 01:58 PM
I just think it's amazing that Dreamworks has already endured so many ups and downs and it's only been a studio for 10 years. I remember being really excited to have a new studio out there, perhaps they would dare to make the films that the other studios wouldn't. Unfortunately, Dreamworks doesn't stand out from the rest of the studios, they don't have a "hook" other than the cachet that the names of Spielberg, Geffen and Katzenberg bring. They are a studio, and have been a studio, without a personality and that is the fundamental flaw.
Posted by: Noah at July 23, 2007 04:24 PM
I'm not being critical but I think it's funny that the first sentence is "I'll keep this brief."
Posted by: Hoju at July 23, 2007 10:56 PM
Believe me... this is the short version.
But, funny...
Posted by: David Poland at July 23, 2007 10:59 PM
good piece.
Dreamworks, to me, was doomed to failure from the start, if only because anytime i hear about something new and 'different' existing within the same structure and system, you start to wonder how new or different it really is.
it reminded me of the 90's, when the trend in television was to pitch a new show with catch phrases like "from the creators of (INSERT HIT SHOW) and (INSERT HIT SHOW) comes the surefire hit of the fall season"
And of course, that show was usually cancelled within 4 episodes.
And it was always some massively popular shows cobbled together, like "From the Producers of The Simpsons and the Creator of Roseanne comes (BLANK)"
There isn't much new under the sun, or the Hollywood Sign, but the job of these guys is to convince people that what they're doing was new and exciting and warranted attention and financing. In reality, it was the same dance with a different whore.
Posted by: anghus at July 24, 2007 05:02 AM
An article on Variety says,
"It's hard to figure what would make the DreamWorks troica happy, since boxoffice success seems only to have made things worse."
http://weblogs.variety.com/thompsononhollywood/
So, is there anything that Paramount could do to make the situation work, or is it out of their hands. If it's totally up to the Dreamworks guys, then you can't really blame Paramount if things fall apart.
"And for Paramount, it is a crap place to be."
Hmmm.
Posted by: R Scott R at July 24, 2007 06:40 AM
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