The NYT this a.m. had a story by Michael Cieply about how Paramount needed to step gingerly in its divorce negotiations with Steven Speilberg and David Geffen. Paramount bought the pair’s Dreamworks studio three years ago, and the relationship has been rocky ever since. The story is another in an ongoing case study in how Spielberg gets the best press in Hollywood.

If the pair do leave Paramount, Cieply reports, the process could be painful. Spielberg apparently has a contractual claim to certain personal projects at Dreamworks, which he would accordingly be able to take with him to another studio. The rest would presumably be Paramount’s. But the story seems rather finely attuned to Spielberg’s delicate sensibilities:

If the Paramount and DreamWorks sides don’t soon resolve their rocky relationship, one that has played out messily in the public eye over matters of proper credit and respect, they may have to figure things out project by project, reliving any breakup a hundred times over.In the worst case Paramount could see a big chunk of its development schedule paralyzed and its relationship with its most prized filmmaker, Mr. Spielberg, endangered. To offend him is to risk his saying “I’ll never make another picture at Paramount,” said Roger Smith, the executive editor and a motion picture analyst for Global Media Intelligence, a research company.

Emphasis added. The story also says this:

The DreamWorks side might assert that he, by virtue of his position with DreamWorks, is effectively attached to the entire development pool—more than 100 projects […].

Given the reach of Mr. Spielberg’s contract, attachment to all the projects could let him block Paramount from using them without his consent—enormous leverage in any negotiation over taking the projects elsewhere.

Whether a claim of such broad involvement would survive a legal challenge is an open question. Simply to assert it, however, could put Paramount executives in the unhappy position of having to confront the filmmaker who is arguably the industry’s most powerful.

This report, like much of the commentary surrounding the departure of the Weinstein Brothers from Disney and, more recently, the departure of Bob Shaye of New Line from Warner Brothers, is written in an oddly blindered way.

Spielberg and Geffen sold their studio to Paramount for 1.6 billion dollars (more on that figure in a minute), just as the Weinsteins sold theirs to Disney and Shaye sold his to Warner. When, after a few years, the minimoguls decide they don’t like working for someone else, they always try to make it seem like the big bad studio is crushing the little guy.

I have no love for the studios, but there’s a really simple way to not get into that situation, which is not sell your company in the first place. But Spielberg and Geffen had their eyes on that $1.6 billion. You can’t blame them or the Weinsteins for milking the idea as much as they can, but the stories about these contretemps should forcefully put the matter in context. (”Harvey Weinstein’s $35 million payday from Disney made him a decisively rich man and set him up to make millions more off ever-bigger budgets supplied by the studio. But now he’s learning the downside as he prepares to leave Disney and is confronting the fact that the studio is under the to-him-bizarre misapprehension that it owns Miramax, rather than he…”)

If you don’t include that information, it’s easy to step into the realm of the unreal. Isn’t the idea, for example, that Steven Spielberg could walk off with all of DreamWorks’ current projects slightly far-fetched? Yes, he could “assert” that right, but the fact is, he sold those rights in 2005. Imagine the Times story written this way:

Steven Spielberg’s failed dream of his own studio went several further steps down the road of absurdity this week. He is preparing to leave his DreamWorks, which is now owned by Paramount. His office tried to float the idea that, upon his departure, a “personal project” provision of his contract might encompass all of the DreamWorks studio’s 100-plus films in some form of development.

After 11 years of only intermittent success with DreamWorks, Spielberg and his partner, David Geffen, gave up and sold their company to Paramount for $1.6 billion in 2005. The idea that the director could walk away with the studio’s inventory was greated with hoots at the Paramount offices. “Sure, he can have all those projects,” said one Paramount executive, who asked not to be named because it is company policy not to be quoted ridiculing the talent. “All we need from him is … a check for $1.6 billion dollars!”

That’s closer to what’s going to happen. Spielberg is always being portrayed as a tender button whose fragile self-image is ever in danger of being undermined, when in fact he always elicits special treatment. (Remember too that Spielberg made most of his biggest movies for distributors other than DreamWorks.) The DreamWorks/Paramount feud blew up last fall when Geffen had a public pout because he and Spielberg weren’t being sufficiently appreciated by their Paramount and Viacom bosses. (One said the studio wouldn’t miss Spielberg, financially speaking.) The pair’s third partner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who now oversees DreamWorks Animation, a separate company, called Spielberg a “national treasure.”

But it’s possible that in the end, Paramount already overpaid for the company, so Spielberg and Geffen have even less to complain about. DreamWorks wanted to sell itself to NBC Universal, but the deal was scotched when NBC lowered its offer. So the trio ran to Paramount, which paid $1.6 billion and then turned around and sold off the company’s library for $900 million. Since then, DreamWorks has continued to be only intermittently successful; the animated films don’t count, remember, and it had to share profits of its highest-grossing hit, Transformers, with Universal. How this track record entitles the director to walk off with the office equipment as he leaves Paramount’s employ is a mystery.