Word: mgm
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...animation, this is a Golden Age. Not since the 1940s -- with Pinocchio and Dumbo from Walt Disney and the great cartoon shorts by Tex Avery at MGM and by Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones at Warner Bros. -- has the form been so commercially successful and artistically exhilarating. Moreover, at a time when mass art is fragmented, even divisive -- when virtually no species of entertainment has universal appeal -- the hip, comic ingenuity and emotional breadth of the best cartoons reunite the consumers of popular culture with Hollywood's surest instinct to please in a vast Saturday matinee of the spirit...
...CRAZY for musicals, says, "When I was little, I used to watch all the big shows. The music! And the lights!" And her chipper beau effuses, "Just imagine this theater -- giving it a whole new life!" The sentiments belong to Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in some Edenic MGM % musical. But the words come from Crazy for You, the 1992 Tony winner for Best Musical...
...allowed to burst into song, along comes Newsies, an old style, live-action musical from Disney. Yet if Newsies is any indication, it would probably be a better idea for Disney to leave the singing to cartoon characters. For the film's attempt to fuse the spirit of classic MGM musicals with a message about workers' solidarity hardly goes beyond the limits of innocent...
...curtain has been rung down on the long-running farce starring would-be film mogul Giancarlo Parretti. Last week a Delaware judge confirmed Parretti's removal from the board of MGM-Pathe studios. A onetime waiter who bought the studio in 1990 for $1.3 billion, Parretti accumulated huge debts during his half-year tenure as CEO, forcing the company into involuntary bankruptcy. The studio's chief lender, the French bank Credit Lyonnais, pumped in $145 million to restore solvency but demanded his ouster. The Delaware judge agreed, condemning Parretti's mismanagement of the firm. The downward slide continued...
...Turner's premonition came close to happening: his acquisition of MGM/ UA for $1.4 billion buried him so deeply in debt that he had to be bailed out by a consortium of cable operators (including Time Warner, which owns TIME) that invested $562.5 million in the company in exchange for minority ownership. Turner remained chairman, but he was forced to give cable operators seven seats on the 15-member board and veto power over any decision that would cost the company more than $2 million. It was a major setback for a man who lived by his father's homespun...