The only person in the entertainment industry who gets better press than Mick Jagger is Steven Spielberg. For weeks we’ve been hearing about his big-money deal with an Indian company called Reliance, which is going to be giving Spielberg and David Geffen a half a billion dollars to make movies any day now.

The patsy, according to the stories, is Paramount, which has Mssrs. Spielberg and Geffen’s company, DreamWorks SKG, under its roof, having bought it for $1.6 billion three years ago. Spielberg and Geffen have been complaining ever since, and now they are leaving Paramount high and dry.

But like the stories about the Stones leaving EMI this weekend, it’s hard to see why Paramount is the only loser. It’s possible that it overpaid for DreamWorks. But after watching Spielberg operate DreamWorks for fifteen years or so, it’s plain that the other studios are now onto his game, and that’s why he turned to India.

But that’s not how the papers look at it.

The latest is a story in the NYT today, which asked the only-in-Hollywood question, “Why did Saint Steven have to go to India for money?”  The tone of the story is slightly incredulous:

That Mr. Spielberg and his business partner David Geffen had found an investor wasn’t surprising. Mr. Spielberg is a superstar. DreamWorks had made it clear for months — via public comments and private grousing fed into the Hollywood grapevine — that they hated being part of Paramount and were going elsewhere as soon as it was contractually allowed.

But there was still an element of shock: Hollywood could not come up with a rich enough deal for Mr. Spielberg, the most bankable director in the business and a “national treasure”? His last movie alone, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” has sold $743 million in tickets and is still playing in theaters around the world.

And actually, as you can tell from the emphasized passage, the story was extremely incredulous.

The pair had to sell DreamWorks because it wasn’t a successful operation. So they did what smart business people would do. Their animation arm, led by Jeffrey Katzenberg, was successful; they spun that off as a public company and cashed in there.

The slightly mangy beast that was left didn’t have too much appeal in the industry.But wait—what about those big ol’ blockbuster films by Mr. National Treasure, the superstar?

A lot of them were either done for other studios, or were done as co-productions with other studios. DreamWorks didn’t see any of that Lost World or Indiana Jones money, and only part of the take from Saving Private Ryan and War of the Worlds.

Spielberg reportedly wanted to take the company to his second home, Universal, but Universal offered only $1.2 billion.

Paramount eventually bought the company for $1.6 billion. Note the word “bought,” which doesn’t turn up in much of the reporting on Spielberg. He sold his company.

Now he’s unhappy about it. So he’s leaving DreamWorks behind and looking for new deep pockets. He couldn’t get the money he wanted from anyone else in Hollywood not because, as the Times has it, the companies can’t afford him—he’s an extraordinarily prolific filmmaker. Studios “afford” him an average of once a year. It’s because he’s not worth the money he wanted to do boutique stuff while he did the blockbuster projects elsewhere. But he, like Jagger, has cachet to sell, which is a lot more valuable to a company from India with designs on Hollywood.

Paramount isn’t unculpable, of course: It probably paid too much for Spielberg and his cachet. (The company doesn’t even owe the big latest Indiana Jones movie to Spielberg; Paramount had released the previous ones.) What’s not surprising now is that no other Hollywood studio wants to buy what Spielberg is selling. Why don’t the papers say that?

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Previously in Hitsville:

Return to “The Spielberg Zone”
Indiana Jones Agonistes
Scary Steven Spielberg!