Hollywood giant Paramount Pictures has bought one of its best-known rival studios, Dreamworks SKG.
Viacom, which owns Paramount, has agreed to pay $1.6bn (£914m; 1.36bn euros) – more than $1bn in cash, plus taking over Dreamworks’ debts.
It gives the company the talents of one of the most famous filmmakers in the world, ET director Steven Spielberg.
And it appears to show that even a top name like Spielberg cannot create a new independent film studio these days.
: (
Dreamworks was established 11 years ago to combine three talents in the world of film, animation and music – Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Spielberg is known around the world for directing huge Hollywood hits like Jaws and Schindler’s List.
Geffen had been a top record producer and Katzenberg a leading light at Disney.
NBC bid, too, but evidently not enough!
By buying Dreamworks, Paramount has now acquired an impressive library of films, which includes Gladiator, American Beauty, and Saving Private Ryan.
It reportedly plans to sell off the library, expecting it to fetch $850m to $1bn.
The deal does not include Dreamworks’ animation studios – the creators of hits such as Shrek – but it does include the right to distribute already-made animated Dreamworks films.
Paramount will also take over a television division with long-running popular shows like Spin City.
NBC Universal, a unit of GE, had offered $900m but was outbid. Last Friday, it was given an extra hour to improve on its offer but walked away.
BBC North America business correspondent Guto Harri says Viacom hopes the deal will enable it to establish Paramount as an industry leader.
He adds that for Dreamworks, the deal is the final proof that despite the talents involved, the company has failed to become the ambitious media conglomerate that it had once hoped to be.
Recent Dreamworks films include Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and War of the Worlds – coincidentally a joint production with Paramount.
Spielberg and Geffen will reportedly stay with the company.
This is our pal, Pat. Isn’t he hot?
Not only that, he’s smart as a whip on a horse’s back. He and Jen have been living in Little Port Walter (known by those in the know as Club Fed) for nearly two years now and we don’t get to see them as often as we’d like. Guess that’s why i’ve dedicated today’s post to you two. We miss you!
Some cool facts about Pat:
Subsequent to being a Rasmuson Fellow, Pat initially worked as a research analyst at the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission where he reported on aspects of diverse Alaska fisheries including Pacific cod, weathervane scallops, Pacific herring, and horsehair crab. Since 2001, Pat has worked as a research fishery biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service at the Auke Bay Laboratory in Juneau. In his primary role, he studies the effects of commercial fishing on benthic habitats. These studies, utilizing both submersibles and scuba, have varied objectives from simple habitat typing to manipulative studies identifying effects of trawling at varied intensities.
Pat is also involved with other work that is attempting to determine growth rates of two species of sponge and two species of coral. These studies will help managers understand habitat and fishery interactions and allow for sustainable fisheries.
Those interested in checking out some of Pat’s work can find a good start here.
Some cool facts about Jen:
Once had a most unhealthy obsession with notorious Minneapolis band Mango Jam
Has had the experience of fending off brown bears with high powered weaponry (and is licensed by the Feds to do so)
Makes, arguably, the best bread in the world
Perhaps, the only woman we know who can live so self-contained in a place as remote as LPW
Ain’t afraid to GET DOWN ON THE DANCE FLOOR
Able to catch and pull up a 100-pound halibut
The most elegantly diplomatic person we’ve ever met (without being a wanker or sycophant)
Like her husband, Pat, is a TOTAL BABE, which may have something to do with the fact that Jen is a LEAN, MEAN, HIKING MACHINE.
Meanwhile, she awaits the opportunity to administer her homespun insulin treatment to a helpless diabetic stranded in the woods via turkey baster (inquire with questions)
-
c
Trampled by Turtles is an original, non-traditional bluegrass band from Duluth, Minnesota. Their energetic live performances and two well-received albums (Songs From a Ghost Town, 2004 and Blue Sky and the Devil, 2005) have gained them a large and loyal fan base throughout the Midwest and beyond.
“Duluth’s finest Jameson swigging lads, Trampled by Turtles, take to the stage to quench the Lake Superior hippie/yippie/cow-punk contingent’s insatiable thirst for mosh-pit inducing hardcore bluegrass.”
- Transistor Transmission, Dec ‘04
Coming from varied musical backgrounds, the members of Trampled by Turtles blend hints of grunge, punk, alt-country, and pop with the traditional sounds of the acoustic guitar, banjo, mandolin, and bass. The last two years have been spent playing venues ranging from punk-rock basement parties to the Great American Music Hall, sharing the stage with a diverse group of musicians including Low, The Radiators, Pedro the Lion, Nickel Creek, and Charlie Parr.
“The Duluth foursome stretches the bluegrass template with its youth, sardonic humor and indie rock backgrounds.â€
- Duluth News Tribune, Mar ‘05
The group consists of guitar player and lead vocalist Dave Simonett, mandolin player Erik Berry, banjo player Dave Carroll, and bass player Tim Saxhaug.
These guys were music to our ears last night at First Ave.
-
c
“I am an incredibly powerful salesperson who continually climbs higher and higher up the ladder of success.
SUCCESS!!!”
-
c
For those of us who are born geeks, Linux is a blessing. For others, a curse given the lackluster GUIs which require users to delve deep within its various levels of complexity via the command line. Surely, some like to know how the car works, others just like to ride. Not only that, but some fellow geeks i know and admire just prefer graphical interfaces. The battles of taste shall never be won.
Thus, it is with great excitement that the Linux world welcomes Ubuntu, a strain of the Debian distro that has come leaps and bounds towards being friendly to graphicos and commandos alike.
If you haven’t tried Linux but have always thought it sounds cool, here is a perfect opportunity for you to broaden horizons. Ubuntu loads up real nicely on most anything but especially well on laptops, as it finds devices like no other distro that has gone before.
In fact, i recently installed it on an old PII lappie with only 128MB of RAM and had to do little to make it fully operational (wifi included). It hums along quite well, given it’s gotta lotta miles on it. That makes four machines i’ve dedicated to running it, each proving rock-solid stability and ease of use. Really.
So, if you’ve been faint of heart about venturing forward into the much-talked-about Open Source community but curious, have no more fear. Ubuntu Linux is here.
-
c
by Steve King
On this day in 1980 Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon outside his New York City apartment building. There are two books by him (In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works), and many about him, but the book which will forever be associated with Lennon is The Catcher in the Rye. After shooting Lennon four times, Chapman sat down on the sidewalk to read the book while he waited for police — or perhaps just to have it ready for presentation, given that he had inscribed the inside cover with “This is my statement. Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye.” Even Chapman’s previous days were made to parallel Holden’s: a lonely, pre-Christmas wandering through the streets of New York; a prostitute, who arrived as Holden’s did in a green dress (and also left without doing much more than take it off); talks with strangers about where the central park ducks go in winter (though this to a cop rather than a cabby, and getting not even a stare rather than a reassurance about how Mother Nature provides). To all this Chapman, or his voices, added his own twists: the refrain, The phony must die says The Catcher in the Rye, the gun and hollow-point bullets, the lifelong confusion over identity and purpose.
This last question, recast now as a search for motive, dominated the next days and months — and still dominates, if not Chapman but his parole board is right. Two hours after the murder, Chapman told police that he killed because he wasn’t Holden enough:
Then this morning I went to the bookstore and bought The Catcher in the Rye. I’m sure the large part of me is Holden Caulfield, who is the main person in the book. The small part of me must be the Devil.
I went to the building. It’s called the Dakota. I stayed there until he came out and asked him to sign my album. At that point my big part won and I wanted to go back to my hotel, but I couldn’t.
At the trial, he killed because he was too Holden, his pre-sentence statement being a reading aloud of the passage from the text which begins, “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all….” And months afterwards Chapman was happily handing out autographed copies of the book from the supply he kept in his cell. After many years in isolation, Chapman now mixes with a controlled group of prisoners, and says he is over wanting to be Holden, or famous. His keepers have now turned down his parole bid three times, citing the “bizarre and morally corrupt” nature of the crime, and “your continued interest in maintaining your notoriety.”
For Lennon and Yoko Ono, the most persistent and last literary connection was not Salinger but the Brownings. Lennon’s last journal entry quotes the very un-Holden beginning of Robert Browning’s “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” turned into song in Lennon’s last year-”Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be….” The recent DVD, Lennon Legend, tries to keep the man and the music in view, but the flip-side continues to intrude: last week four bidders met the half-million dollar asking price for the “Double Fantasy” album which Lennon autographed for Chapman just hours before being shot. This was found on the ground at the murder scene, and as it was used in evidence at Chapman’s trial, it boasts his “forensically enhanced” fingerprints.
$1,845,034,000 worldwide and $600,788,188 are the all-time boxoffice records for a single movie, TITANIC, first released on December 19, 1997.
Now roars along another December blockbuster, KING KONG, a film many top Hollywood executives predict will break the record!
The movie opens wide as Victoria Lake next Wednesday, but recent screenings by UNIVERSAL have left the audience cheering and sobbing.
“Grown men around me were crying,” says one Hollywood insider. “Yes, I think this will do TITANIC numbers. It is going to be a huge movie.”
Complaints the Peter Jackson movie starts slow and is too long [more than 3 hours] will fill critics’ columns. “The human relationships are s**t … the dialogue is piss poor and there is a scene of Jamie Bell shooting gigantic bugs off of Adrian Brody with a tommy gun … those are the bad parts,” says a Hollywood reporter. “But…. the scenes between Kong and Naomi Watts tug at the heart strings big time. And the final scene was just great! There were one too many longing looks between the ape and Watts … but the audience around me ate it up.”
