Word: perelman
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...Ronald Perelman...
...started out as a routine encounter between two broadcast bigwigs. On Tuesday afternoon, May 10, Rupert Murdoch welcomed a visitor to his office on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles: William Bevins, chief executive of Ronald Perelman's New World Communications Group. Murdoch and Bevins talked about each other's company, and the conversation inevitably got around to football. Eight local CBS affiliates owned by New World were about to lose their Sunday-afternoon N.F.L. games thanks to Murdoch, who last December paid $1.58 billion to take them away from CBS and bring them to the Fox network...
...that scene was added, in the final days, a cadre of briefcase-toting lawyers who invaded the Fox lot. In the end, Murdoch agreed to pump $500 million into New World in exchange for nonvoting convertible preferred stock and other redeemable securities representing potentially a 20% share of Perelman's company...
Enter Ronald Perelman, 51, the multibillionaire Revlon chief. A friend of such Hollywood power brokers as Barry Diller and Michael Ovitz, Perelman began to build an entertainment empire in 1989 when he bought New World, a small producer of movies and TV shows (Crime Story, The Wonder Years). Last year he started acquiring TV stations, first buying seven local outlets owned by then bankrupt SCI Television and later picking up eight more from two other station groups, in deals that are in various states of completion...
...Murdoch, the New World stations were a tempting target, especially since many were CBS affiliates still smarting over the loss of N.F.L. football. On Perelman's side, an alliance with Fox provided an opportunity to create a "vertically integrated" media company that would offer a wider distribution system for New World shows. "We now have the opportunity, with the Fox slots that we got, to really crank up our own programming, in size and number and quality of projects," says Perelman...