Word: seagrams
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Seagram-owned entertainment giant MCA inked a 10-year deal with DreamWorks SKG, the studio created by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. MCA will distribute the studio's films internationally and its music- and home-video releases worldwide. Geffen valued the overall deal as potentially worth $1 billion...
What does $250 million buy these days? Lots of things, but not Michael Ovitz. That wad was not enough for Seagram's CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. to lure Ovitz from Creative Artists Agency, the talent shop he built into Hollywood's prime power brokerage, to become chairman of MCA, the show-biz conglomerate (movies, music, TV shows, theme parks) that Seagram's purchased last week. Thus ended the hottest nonevent since Comet Kohoutek. Except that this one had bigger stars ready to collide. And the meteor showers may be felt for years...
Michael Ovitz isn't going anywhere. Negotiations for the Creative Artists Agency chairman to head MCA collapsed as Seagram completed its $5.7 billion purchase of 80% of the entertainment giant. Disputes between Ovitz and Seagram ceo Edgar Bronfman Jr. over executive autonomy and a compensation package worth more than $200 million are speculated to have caused the impasse...
...lacks a music division, one of the entertainment industry's most reliable profit centers. One solution would be to acquire EMI, known for such performers as Garth Brooks and Sinead O'Connor. Or Murdoch might go after the 15% stake in Time Warner, worth about $2 billion, that the Seagram Co., which recently bought MCA and its Universal Studios, may be ready to unload. But another buyer for those shares, the phone giant AT&T, is rumored to be in talks with Time Warner...
Freedom is exhilarating, and the movie business is intoxicating. Another whiskey merchant, Joseph P. Kennedy, thought so in 1928 when he 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...