There was something heartwarming about the sale of DreamWorks for an irrationally exuberant $1.6 billion to Viacom's Paramount Pictures this week instead of to its longtime suitor, General Electric's NBC Universal. It proved all over again that even if Hollywood looks overrun with corporate suits and marketing drones, it's still activated by emotion and perception.
Who cares if, in the long term, NBC Universal Chairman and CEO Bob Wright turns out to have been smart to have hesitated at the altar? What if there aren't any new hit movies out of DreamWorks? Or Paramount doesn't manage to sell the DreamWorks library for the crazy price the company paid for it? Or Paramount isn't able to extract the four to six movies a year it is supposed to get from DreamWorks' notoriously elusive maestro, Steven Spielberg? Will anyone remember that Wright was the shrewd Cassandra who exercised caution? Of course not. This is Hollywood. Would you go to see a movie called "Due Diligence?"
It's always been said that Hollywood is a relationship business, and there's something to that. If it were really a bottom-line business, it wouldn't exist. Smoke and mirrors, sex, sentimentality and shared secrets have to be mixed in equal parts with greed to make the wheels go round.
One of my favorite examples of Hollywood semiotics is the expression "This is a personal ask." It is generally used as a desperate ploy at the end of a particularly cutthroat negotiation. One party, determined to win a particular negotiating point, will tell his go-to guy to deliver the following unignorable message: "Tell him Jake said it's a personal ask." In the pause that follows no one would dream of asking what the backstory is. (It's some combination of "the time I bailed him out of the sexual harassment suit on the picture in Rio and the time I leaned on that guy at the bank not to call in the loan on the Taiwanese co-production and the time I said in the meeting that the foreign rights would get twice as much as we knew they'd get because I was a stand-up guy.") The plea usually works ("Okay, Zach says he can't do 50; he'll do 35"), but it comes freighted with tacit payback for a rainy day. And in sunny Hollywood, the rainy day always comes.
GE, through NBC, has been in the entertainment business long enough to know that moviemaking is not susceptible to the forecasts applied to refrigerators and light bulbs, but its corporate instinct before the high dive will always be to keep checking how much water's in the swimming pool. The DreamWorks deal with Universal was supposed to be signed around Thanksgiving -- that is, until Wright made a move that incensed the lethally acute David Geffen. After shaking hands on an agreement, Wright asked for a discount on the grounds that two projected box-office blockbusters from DreamWorks -- "The Island" and "Just Like Heaven" -- had turned out to be seasonal turkeys instead of seasonal hits. Huh? Expecting some kind of rational value out of the mercurial business of public taste? In Hollywood that's like rudely exposing the wires in a magic act. And after a handshake? The miscue declared that even after 19 months of GE's ownership of Universal, Wright is still not an inside member of the club. Plus he embarrassed his own executive -- Universal's much-admired president, Ron Meyer, who had been trying to make the deal on GE's behalf for more than a year. In Hollywood, everyone felt for Ronnie.
The slow demise of the DreamWorks SKG adventure as a stand-alone studio should have bummed out Hollywood sentimentalists. It suggested that even the combined entertainment brilliance of Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Geffen couldn't fight the trend of needing to be part of something much bigger to survive. From the vantage point of now, there is something so '90s about its founders' flamboyantly grandiose vision. In those heady dot-com days it was all about synergy. (I tried it myself with the ill-fated marriage of Talk magazine and Miramax Films.) The three biggest reputations in entertainment were giving birth to a full-fledged studio that combined TV, video games, movies, the Internet and a record company -- until they discovered that synergy, most of the time, is an impractical, time-consuming, ruinous drag. Remember those busloads of journalists who were ferried out to view the weedy acres of the Playa Vista campus near Marina del Rey where the studio would sit? DreamWorks settled instead for building an adobe village on the Universal lot.
SKG escaped disaster by dexterously selling the record company, dumping most of the TV production, spinning off the successful animation company and seeking a way to cash out. The dream had been a lot of work, but the moguls made a lot of great movies ("American Beauty," "Gladiator," "Saving Private Ryan") and they're all still preposterously rich.
That's why in all the pragmatism of the industry at the moment -- and a lousy year at the box office across the board -- it's reassuring for Hollywood to see how much smoke and mirrors still count.
Brad Grey, the new head of Paramount, wanted the deal so bad he was able to mobilize the Viacom board and outside resources in a week to make a deal that GE was still poring over after having spent all those months of tortured negotiation. In doing so Grey kick-started his ailing studio with a perceptual win.
And to Hollywood it declared anew that Steven Spielberg is still star power incarnate, able to be the carrot in a $1.6 billion deal that essentially rents his cachet for a few years (and allows him to retain his pasha rights to work from his adobe kingdom at Universal even though he's now, officially, an employee of Paramount.)
Katzenberg is still the Sultan of Shrek, still the king of DreamWorks Animation, and thus still in a position to show his old nemesis Michael Eisner that he was never the mere "golden retriever" Eisner took him to be -- that he was a true "storyteller," as studio heads like to style themselves. After all, if this is a "relationship business," relationships aren't unalloyed sweetness and light. They are also about turnabout, revenge, the pleasures of "screw you" and "I told you so."
Geffen, meanwhile, shows he may have lost his hair but not his edge. With impeccable timing he unloaded DreamWorks just before the negative buzz on Spielberg's "Munich."
All three founders of DreamWorks, it seems, still have in reserve plenty of personal asks.