Word: edgar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That 1985 Dionne Warwick ballad, Whisper in the Dark, summons up the erotic appeal of the unknown. And now the man who wrote its lyrics, Edgar Bronfman Jr., is coming closer to possessing something he has desired for most of his 39 years: a Hollywood studio. Last week Bronfman, the president and chief executive officer of Seagram Co., was deep in negotiations with Japan's Matsushita Electric Industrial to take control of MCA, which owns record labels, theme parks, TV shows, a pleasant parcel of Southern California real estate-and Universal Studios. Seagram, the Canadian purveyor of whiskey, wine...
...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...
...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...
...either of them would surely insist on substantial equity, and last week both were denying any interest in the job. It is more logical that Bronfman would urge Sheinberg to stay on-not least because that would assure MCA of a Spielberg-DreamWorks connection-but that Edgar Jr. would run the show...
...briefly took over Patha pictures. Back then, Jules Stein, MCA's founder, was booking singers into speakeasies; and Sam Bronfman, the new owner of Seagram, was bootlegging spirits across the Canadian border into Prohibition-era America. Wall Street is hoping that for Seagram's sake, Sam's grandson Edgar Jr. does not forget the first rule of a speakeasy: the bartender is supposed to stay sober...