Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Since a typical feature film is a $20 million roll of the dice, Hollywood always wants to improve its odds. That's why studios are so willing to pay breathtaking sums to surefire stars. Now Hollywood's obsession with the talented few is fueling a billion-dollar personnel tug-of-war that pits Warner Bros. against Sony for the services of the two hottest movie producers to come along since Samuel Goldwyn met Louis B. Mayer...
...oddsbusters are Peter Guber and Jon Peters, whose penchant for producing such hits as The Color Purple and Batman has brought Warner hundreds of ( millions of dollars. When Sony announced its agreement to pay $3.4 billion in September for Columbia Pictures Entertainment, the Japanese firm impressed Hollywood with its savvy choice of executives to run the studio: Guber and Peters. But there was one major hitch: in March the two had signed a five-year contract with Warner, which the studio claims was an exclusive arrangement...
...projects, including the film version of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. Sony and the two producers are countersuing for $100 million, charging Warner with fraudulently denying that it had an oral arrangement to release Guber and Peters from their contract and with trying to sabotage Sony's Hollywood ventures...
...Francisco quake could have just as easily happened here." Residents stocked their homes with bottled water, canned food, batteries and first-aid supplies, snapped up wrenches to turn off the gas and prepacked earthquake kits that sell for $30 to $210. Some of the preparations had an only-in-Hollywood quality. One woman whose emergency gear includes a butane curling iron says she is looking for a battery-operated hair dryer that can be used if electricity is knocked out. "Why look a mess even in a crisis?" she teases...
...reaction of the local residents to the filming is not always positive. There is a good deal of ambivalence toward the "rich Hollywood types." Several interviewees see the film's presence as an annoyance. They are disturbed by the awareness that all the good things the production has brought them (i.e. more police officers, clean streets and extra traffic lights) will disappear as soon as the film is over...