Word: edgar
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Bronfman thinks he has an ace in his close relationship with Vivendi CEO Jean-Rene Fourtou. But whether in Edgar Jr. they can trust elicits a Gallic shrug from shareholders. If he offers the right price for the Universal units, says Colette Neuville of a stock owners' group, "whether Bronfman can run it well is another matter that doesn't concern us." --With reporting by Peter Gumbel/Paris and Jeffrey Ressner and Sonja Steptoe/Los Angeles
...only Edgar Bronfman Jr. could borrow the powers of God, like Jim Carrey in Universal Pictures' Bruce Almighty. Then the former CEO of Seagram, the distiller that once owned Universal, could turn back time and erase the disastrous sale of the firm his family founded to France's Vivendi. Since that deal in December 2000, Vivendi Universal's stock has dropped 71%, devastating the Bronfman family fortune. And Edgar Jr., despite some successes at Seagram, has reinforced his image as dilettante and wannabe mogul. Business Week crowned him one of the worst managers of 2002, and New York magazine called...
...make no mistake, say his friends: Edgar Jr. would love to climb back into the mogul role. He has always loved Hollywood. The grandson of Seagram founder and former bootlegger Samuel Bronfman, Edgar Jr. began his career writing songs performed by Dionne Warwick and Ashford and Simpson and producing small movies. Pulled into the family business in 1982 by his father and made CEO in 1994, he scored wins by pushing premium brands like Chivas Regal and Absolut, and buying and selling Tropicana for a juicy profit. But Hollywood continued to beckon. He dumped the company's safe, lucrative stake...
...merger; the wedding of Time Warner (parent of TIME) to AOL comes to mind. But that's not much comfort to the Bronfman clan, which has seen its stake shrivel (in part because of stock sales) from $6.5 billion to a little more than $1 billion. So where will Edgar Jr. get the money for his bid? Analysts say Universal Music Group could sell for about $7 billion, and the rest of the entertainment units--Universal Pictures, TV networks including USA and Sci Fi, Vivendi Universal Games and the Universal Studios theme parks--for at least $13.5 billion. Bronfman...
...time the eco-terrorists show up--a band of tree sitters, with names like Lynx and Aquarius and Smokebomb, who drop from the skies, rappelling down the trunks of a redwood grove onstage--your head is already spinning. Daughters of the Revolution, one-half of David Edgar's two-play cycle about an American political campaign called Continental Divide, has mostly been talk up to this point. But what talk! The play has nearly 50 characters, rapid-fire dialogue and an impossibly complicated plot involving leftover '60s radicals, skeletons in the closet, the clash between ideals and pragmatism in politics...