Ask the executives at DreamWorks what they like most about going to work every day and you’ll likely get a lot of answers related to food.
“It’s like when you go to college and put on the freshman 15,” says Christine Birch, who started as the marketing head a year ago, about the two buffet tables that are stocked throughout the day in the tiled courtyard at the center of the adobe offices. “It’s nuts.”
Others will talk about the studio’s cofounder Steven Spielberg.
Steven Spielberg (at left) and David Geffen on the DreamWorks lot
“He comes into my office to say hello and to talk about what he’s read and talk about a movie that’s in production and talk about a video game that he played over the weekend,” says production head Adam Goodman, who started as an assistant with the company in 1996. “Which then means that I’m telling my friends, ‘F---ing Steven Spielberg just came into my office!’ That thrill isn’t lost on any of us.”
Others revel in both the food and their fearless leader. Chief operating officer Jeff Small, another recent hire, remembers one of his first days on the job: “I walked out to go to the chow line and there was Steven just making a sandwich. I thought it was the greatest thing ever.”
Of course, employee satisfaction may also have something to do with the fact that 2007 was DreamWorks’ most profitable year ever, during which this boutique studio gave its corporate behemoth counterparts a run for their money at the box office. It scored its biggest live-action box office gross ever with Transformers, which earned $702 million worldwide, and expects the toy-based movie to become a lucrative franchise, with a Transformers 2 already in the works. It had films with more modest aspirations far exceed expectations, including the Will Ferrell–Jon Heder ice-skating comedy Blades of Glory ($144 million worldwide) and the surveillance thriller Disturbia ($117 million), starring budding Spielberg protégé Shia LaBeouf. And it basked in critical success and Oscar buzz with the holiday releases of Sweeney Todd, the Johnny Depp–Tim Burton musical collaboration (which received four Golden Globe nominations), and Marc Forster’s The Kite Runner (two Golden Globe nominations).
DreamWorks began as the creation of a trio: Spielberg, billionaire music mogul David Geffen and animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg. Katzenberg now heads up DreamWorks Animation in Glendale, California, which was spun off as a publicly traded company three years ago. And Geffen does his pit bull–ish dealmaking from wherever he pleases, be it his Malibu beach house or his yacht. These days, it’s Spielberg alone who still shows up at the office in the Valley every day.
