For the past two years he’s been joined there by Stacey Snider, who left her job as the chairman of Universal Pictures to become DreamWorks’ CEO and cochairman, a title she shares with Geffen. (Spielberg simply uses “director” as his title.) On the day Snider announced her move, she told Variety, “I am the kind of person who turns things over in my heart and my mind until I find clarity.” Faced with a future of sifting through budgets and sitting through corporate retreats in Boca with the heads of other G.E.–owned divisions that make things like airplane engines, microwave ovens and structured finance vehicles, she continued, “I was thinking, What is my next stage in life going to be? Do I want to be the chair of Universal for another four or five years, or do I want to do something different?”
Indeed, DreamWorks is a different species from other modern-day studios. It is, one might say, the antistudio— a paradise where creativity still counts. And yet that’s hardly the full picture: In 2005 Paramount Pictures purchased DreamWorks for $1.6 billion. DreamWorks remains a “studio,” but one with corporate overlords who set its annual budget, handle its marketing and distribution, and reserve the right to veto a project that costs more than $100 million ($140 million if Spielberg is directing). And ever since the purchase, stories suggesting that the DreamWorks leadership doesn’t feel properly valued by their new owners have circulated through Hollywood’s lunchtime grapevine. The tension will soon come to a head: Geffen’s and Spielberg’s employment agreements run out at the end of the year, and there has been massive speculation that they may try to make a new deal with a different studio (most insiders are betting on Universal).
Though Snider has made it well known that if Spielberg leaves she’ll be right behind him, she declines to speculate about the future and insists that work continues unaffected at the studio, despite all the whispering. “It’s like thunder and lightning but no rain,” she says. “It’s in the atmosphere, but we’re not getting wet.” Her only mission, she says, is to make DreamWorks “a little beacon that says, ‘Yeah, you can still be excited about making movies.’”
The inner sanctum of power at every studio is its greenlight committee. This is the group of executives who will give the final verdict on whether or not a movie gets made. Usually these committees are headed up by the studio’s chairman, who’s joined by a chorus of execs from the number-crunching side of the business. The process is cumbersome, and the reasons why a movie shouldn’t get made are numerous: The star isn’t big in Asia; the story’s not marketable; historical dramas do horribly on DVD....
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