Word: tristar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...records and other "software" for Sony's hardware: TV sets, vcrs and gadgets of the future. He started slowly at first by acquiring CBS Records for $2 billion in 1987. The real spree began in 1989 when Schulhof paid $3.4 billion for perennial also-ran Columbia and its sister TriStar studios. He immediately spent some $800 million more to recruit Batman producers Jon Peters and Peter Guber, who had never headed a major film company, to run the acquisitions. Next, Schulhof popped for a $175 million make-over of Columbia's movie lot in Culver City, California, and threw...
Sony invested $5 billion to buy Columbia and TriStar Pictures back in 1989, propelled by a romantic notion that constructors of compact discs and , television sets could marry makers of music and movies. Last week Sony sobered up. The firm took a $2.7 billion write-off -- one of the steepest in Hollywood history -- on its money-losing film studio and reported a second-quarter loss of $3.2 billion. "If we didn't do it once and for all now, we would continue to face losses in our entertainment business," said Tsunao Hashimoto, Sony's executive deputy president. That...
...Huge investments in scripts, real estate and a large staff are always vulnerable to the fickleness of the marketplace. Such ambitious outfits as First Artists, Orion Pictures, the Ladd Company and Francis Coppola's Zoetrope Studios all came and, sooner or later, went under. With the iffy exception of TriStar, formed in 1982, no successful major studio has started from scratch since Disney in the 1920s...
...this was very nice for director Jonathan Demme and TriStar Pictures, which had nervously spent $26 million on the drama about a gay lawyer (Hanks) who contracts AIDS, is fired by his staid Philadelphia firm and hires a streetwise attorney (Washington) to press his case. The public was buying Philadelphia, or at least paying to see it. But among homosexuals all over the country the film was stoking an agitated debate. Their central questions: Is the movie accurate? Is it good for gays? And does its success mean a more gay- friendly cinema -- one that admits to the existence...
...When TriStar executives read Kramer's diatribe, they might well have uttered joyful yelps -- the show-biz equivalent of "The Eagle has landed!" Even if their feelings were bruised, the movie's makers had reason to cheer. Now Philadelphia was not just a worthy film and a likely moneymaker; thanks to Kramer, it was a flashpoint for argument. As Demme says, with a soft laugh, "Any kind of debate about a movie is always stimulating to public interest in the film." Translation: controversy sells...