20. THE BATTLE FOR OSCAR

AS DALE OLSON LISTENED to Jeffrey Katzenberg, Terry Press, and members of DreamWorks' marketing department discuss strategy for an American Beauty Oscar run, he kept his mouth shut. Olson, former president of the venerable Rogers & Cowan publicity agency, where he'd worked on more than 150 Academy Awards campaigns, knew a thing or two about how to win over stodgy Academy members. But being the new kid, he politely waited before raising his hand to speak.

"You're doing it all wrong," said Olson, who has a roundish face, bright-white hair, and brown, Lew Wasserman—esque glasses. (Spotting them from across the Universal cafeteria, Wasserman had shouted: "Mine are black!") "You have to try to not think like a studio. You have to think smaller —that's where the voters are." Olson then proceeded to explain his strategy.

When he'd finished, Olson held his breath. Surely Katzenberg would snap or Press would shoot back a clever rejoinder. More than likely, he'd be asked to leave.

But after several interminable seconds, Katzenberg finally spoke. "You know, he's right," he said, settling back in his chair and motioning for Olson to continue.

Olson then mapped out in detail his plan for how American Beauty, due out in a few weeks, could reclaim the Oscar crown from Miramax, a year after Harvey Weinstein stole the show.

"I was new, and so I could be bolder," said Olson, who had observed that Press's staff seemed hesitant to challenge their fiery leader. "They were a great team, but when Terry would say something, they all jumped," he continued, describing Press as "fierce."

"Her whole mien ... she's so definite, so strong," Olson said. "She can just make you wither, until you're fortunate enough to get to know her." Months before Olson had been recruited, to work on American Beauty —a first, for DreamWorks—Press had begun laying the groundwork for the film's September 15, 1999, release. She wasn't going to get in the mud, but she was determined to never again be outmaneuvered by Weinstein—or anyone else. She was willing to try new things, having learned the hard way. And with American Beauty, a film Press adored and believed in along with everyone else at the studio, there were going to be no rookie missteps, despite the race with the clock. No one at DreamWorks had seen the film until July, when most studios are well into awards campaigns. Media outlets had already planned their coverage of the fall film season, when studios begin unleashing Oscar hopefuls. When the Los Angeles Times published its fall movie preview in August, there was no mention of American Beauty.

In the past, Press might have gone into overdrive, screening American Beauty for as many members of the media as possible, to build fast, furious buzz. But she held back, treating American Beauty like a precious gem to be shown selectively and with care. In August, she arranged a private screening for the New York Times' Bernard Weinraub, and set up a chat between him and Sam Mendes.

In the meantime, creative advertising head David Sameth came up with an iconic and sexy image to build the marketing around—a photograph of a young woman's nude belly, across which she holds a single red rose. Written underneath were the words: "...look closer."

Weinraub's piece appeared on September 12, on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section. Titled "A Wunderkind Discovers the Wonders of Film," the glowing profile of Mendes and his film included flattering quotes from Spielberg, Kevin Spacey, and Annette Bening, and appeared to be saying go, go, go. "It almost reviewed the movie, which was quite out of character for the Times," Mendes said. "So people were slightly uppity about it, slightly pissed off that this thing had been written. But they were also intrigued—what is this movie?"

The story ratcheted up the buzz ignited at the Toronto International Film Festival, where American Beauty premiered the day before to a thundering standing ovation. Over the years, Toronto had grown into a major event, on par with Sundance. Like that festival, it had become chic, inundated not just with small, arty films—that year's selection included Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown; Miramax's The Cider House Rules; and indie darling Kevin Smith's Dogma—but also with limos and glittering swag. Toronto's timing made it an Oscar springboard. And the night of the American Beauty premiere, the O-word was oft uttered.

"American Beauty is expected to win Oscar nominations, and Kevin Spacey is walking on eggshells, aware he's given a strong performance," observed Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. Still, Ebert couldn't help but wonder: "Will the academy find this material too dark for nominations? Oscar likes to put on a happy face."

When American Beauty walked away with the coveted People's Choice Award in Toronto, one of the only awards bestowed at the noncompetitive festival, any lingering doubts about Oscar prospects were quashed. Now the games really began.

Oscar consultants were hired—i n addition to Olson, indie film marketer Nancy Willen, and Bruce Feldman, who'd worked at Universal and PolyGram Films—to take a more grass-roots approach and reach out to local radio, colleges around the country, and cable TV. Basically, to work it more like Miramax did. But even as critical reception grew, the question remained: Would American Beauty play? And make money? Producers Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks had already been warned not to expect audiences in small towns or overseas. Expectations stayed low, but reviews glowed. In the New York Times Janet Maslin wrote: "American Beauty, directed with terrific visual flair ... strikes an unusually successful balance between the mordant and the bright." In Variety, Todd McCarthy reaffirmed: "American Beauty is a real American original. Multilayered, bracingly resourceful and tweaked to push its many brash ideas to the edge and beyond, this independent-minded feature represents a stunning card of introduction for two cinematic freshmen, screenwriter Alan Ball and director Sam Mendes."

The film was given a platform release, opening on just sixteen screens around the country, all in major cities. The plan was to gradually open in more theaters as word of mouth spread. The system—new to DreamWorks, which until this point had taken all of its distribution cues from Disney and Universal—was in marked contrast to releasing blockbuster movies, which open "wide" in as many theaters as possible in order to garner big first-weekend grosses. ( Saving Private Ryan, for instance, opened on nearly twenty-five hundred screens.)

Given its small, initial portal, it came as a surprise when American Beauty grossed $861,531 over its first weekend, or an impressive $53,845 per-screen average. Katzenberg, avidly watching the numbers, upped the number of screens for the following weekend from a planned 100 to 429. Marketing dollars also spiked. "Overnight, DreamWorks doubled, quadrupled the spend on it," said Mendes. "Katzenberg basically started marketing it like Forrest Gump, but skillfully. In other words, the marketing spend of a major movie as opposed to a specialty-division movie. He monitored it every week, as they do, and it just kept going. So they kept spending."

DreamWorks bought twice as many ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter than all the other studios, including Miramax. American Beauty kept grossing, and growing, eventually playing on 1,990 screens, an extraordinary number for a so-called small film. "It came on really strong and fast after its opening," said Miramax's Mark Gill. "It had great critical response and went from being barely on the radar to being a phenomenon ... It happened really fast."

By February of 2000, American Beauty had grossed $74 million, almost quintuple what it cost to make. And when Oscar nominations were announced, the film received eight nods, narrowly beating out both Miramax's Cider House Rules and Michael Mann's The Insider (Disney) by one nomination. Another Disney release, M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, was up for six. Press had triumphed: so far. The race was still tight, with no clear front-runner.

Miramax, of course, could never be underestimated. That Cider House Rules, which had never been considered a heavyweight contender, had emerged with so many nominations was testament to Weinstein's prowess. American Beauty's darkness was still an issue for the Academy, which tended to like big and beautiful, not small and quirky. The New York Times would only allow that it was the "narrow betting favorite in Hollywood."

If Press had been on overdrive, she shifted into warp speed. Over the next four weeks, DreamWorks spent more than $774,000 on American Beauty trade ads, making even Weinstein—who spent $350,000 on The Cider House Rules—look like a slacker. The mission, according to Olson, was to sell American Beauty as the movie that was "real," that was about "us." A "story that everyone could identify with," was Olson's line. No one was allowed to sit on the bench when it came to preaching this gospel. Said Mendes: "Terry got on the phone and said, 'You need to come out here ... you need to meet some people, you just need to be around. You need to be aware ... that this is potentially a huge deal for us, and if it wins any awards, it's a huge box-office boost and it's an enormous deal for the studio. And I think we've got a chance.'"

And so, for the next three months, Mendes found himself "sitting in places like this"—he gestured around the white, clapboard interior of the Shutters hotel café, where I was meeting with him—"for months!" He recalls, rather miserably: "It went on forever. And you're not really doing anything, you're just talking about the movie, peddling the myth of the film. You go sort of insane."

Spacey was caught up in the same nonstop PR machine, a fate that the pregnant Bening was spared. Says a source: "Spacey went everywhere. He was at the motion picture home serving tea."

Other studios took note of DreamWorks' push, particularly Miramax, which recognized itself in DreamWorks' emboldened effort. "For American Beauty, DreamWorks went through the entire Miramax playbook," said Mark Gill. "That campaign was relentless."

Rivals were less diplomatic, cattily sniping about DreamWorks' shameless working of the "gay circuit" in an attempt to accumulate votes, capitalizing on the fact that a number of people involved in the film—such as Ball, Jinks, and Cohen—were openly gay.

Justin Falvey, a senior executive at DreamWorks TV, liked to say that DreamWorks was "too good for TV." It was a particularly Dream-Worksian sentiment—no one had ever accused anyone at the company of suffering from an inferiority complex. It was also a way of explaining, or at least justifying, why so many of the studio's shows got canceled—the tally now included Gary David Goldberg's Battery Park in addition to Peter Mehlman's It's Like, You Know... —and why it still only had one legitimate hit: Spin City. By Falvey's logic, it's not that DreamWorks was making bad shows, the shows were just too smart, too savvy to drive up ratings. However arrogant, the claim wasn't entirely off-base.

It's Like, You Know... about a dyed-in-the-asphalt New Yorker transplanted to the silicone valley of Los Angeles, received high marks from critics who appreciated the show's Seinfeldesque acerbic cynicism. An early sign that the show might be pushing the limits of mainstream television a little too aggressively was the first line of the pilot, when the character of Lauren Woods (played by A. J. Langer, hailing from My So-Called Life) responds to the question of how long she's been living in L.A. by saying: "Well, nine months, but the first month was a total wash, you know—I lost my wallet, I didn't have a car, I had to get an abortion..." ABC insisted on killing the line and, ultimately, the show.

In September of 1999, DreamWorks rolled out another debut designed for the Too Good for TV category: Freaks and Geeks, an eccentrically appealing journey into the tortured existences of slightly-on-the-outside '70s teens. Unlike the rosy-cheeked, deeply earnest Dawson's Creek and Felicity, Freaks and Geeks was angst-ridden and rough around the edges. Most of the previously obscure cast members had been selected by the show's creator, Paul Feig, and producer, Judd Apatow, who were intent on using "real-seeming" teenagers as opposed to what Apatow called "kids who can do Froot Loops commercials." The writing was no insult to the intelligence and actually veered toward the believable: the characters talked as their counterparts on the other side of the screen did. They never seemed to actually be trying to get a laugh. Bad things that happened were not resolved in the third act.

Freaks and Geeks' fresh, edgy unconventionality clicked with critics. Time called it "the best fall drama aimed at any demographic." Rolling Stone gushed: "Stunningly funny and moving." A cult following was instantly born among smart, discerning twenty- and thirty-somethings. It all seemed to be going so perfectly. And then...

Feig had come up with the idea for Freaks and Geeks in 1997, when he was touring his independent film, Life Sold Separately, around colleges in the Midwest. Depressed by it all, he found himself holed up in miserable motel rooms, alone. He'd blown his $30,000 savings to make the film. He'd been fired from his acting role on Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Back in L.A., no job was waiting. Maybe he could clerk in a bookstore? Instead, he decided to write a TV pilot about his maladjusted youth. "I always said, I really want to do something ... that was really about my friends, the world that I knew," Feig said. "When I saw Welcome to the Dollhouse [the Todd Solondz film], I said, 'Oh my God, somebody actually did it, somebody actually made that darker tone real, where the archetypes aren't so stereotyped.'"

Ally McBeal and Felicity had piqued his interest. Here were shows using the hour platform to mix comedy and drama in quirky ways. "So all of that was swirling around in my head, and I was like, maybe now's the time to do my high school show. And just out of nowhere the term 'Freaks and Geeks' came into my mind. I had 'freaks,' because we used to call burnouts 'freaks.' We never used the word 'geeks'—that was too modern. We were either nerds or whatever else. But I was like, 'What rhymes with freaks?' And it just popped into my head."

When he'd finished his script, Feig sent it to his friend Apatow, who'd recently signed a TV and film deal at DreamWorks. Apatow was the hottest name in comedy that no one outside Hollywood had heard of. His reputation came from writing for the offbeat sketch-comedy series The Ben Stiller Show, and HBO's The Larry Sanders Show. Both series were revered by people who considered themselves "real" comedy connoisseurs. Apatow had also produced and rewritten The Cable Guy for his friend Jim Carrey.

Apatow and Feig met in the mid-1980s, following fast times at USC. Both were orbiting the Ranch, a "piece of shit" house in the Valley, a place where a lot of comedians were congregating to hang, smoke, chug coffee, and play poker. The nebbishy, bearded Apatow had been a comedy overachiever for forever or at least since his adolescence in Long Island, where he'd hosted a high school radio show that featured—thanks to his mom's job at a comedy club—interviews with majors such as Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, John Candy, and Garry Shandling. At NYU, Apatow had boosted his credentials further by rooming with Adam Sandler.

Feig's trajectory had begun outside Detroit, where he had grown up at least slightly off-center, worshiping Woody Allen and Steve Martin. Hollywood had not beckoned, but the summer after his freshman year at Wayne State he'd landed a job as a tour guide at Universal Studios. He got the job because he was funny, at ease in front of crowds. But his looks—he was pale, slight of build, and less than radiantly complected—caused concern. Before he started, he was ordered to spend hours sitting outside in the sunshine, because "They didn't want some white, pasty kid with acne standing up in front of people," Feig said.

Apatow was younger than most of the guys at the Ranch, but he and Feig bonded over their similarly deranged senses of humor. One particular tape (this was pre-Internet, when underground comedy traveled via VHS), of what seemed to be a rather harrowingly demented woman doing standup with a laid-in laugh track, sent them into spasms. "He and I thought it was hilarious," Feig said. "We just couldn't get enough of watching it ... Everybody else felt dirty watching it because, they're going, 'You're just making fun of this person, she's almost retarded or something.' "

Feig, who at the time "couldn't pull my life together," was impressed with how "in charge" Apatow was for someone so young. Here he was, booking comedians for a club and volunteering for the HBO show Comic Relief. When some elder Ranchers gave Apatow a hard time, Feig told them, more presciently than he could have ever guessed: "You guys better be cool to him, because he's gonna run the town someday."

When Feig sent his high school script to Apatow, he loved it, and sold it to DreamWorks. NBC then snatched it up, but it was January 1999—way past the TV-development period for that year. Yet, because NBC was happy with Feig's script just the way it was, they agreed to jam production in order to have episodes ready for the fall. At their first meeting with NBC brass, Feig and Apatow had agreed that there was one thing they were holding firm on: they were not going to cast Hollywood-type actors in Freaks and Geeks. Having once played a nerd in a propeller beanie on The Facts of Life, Feig loathed all the tired conventions of alienated TV kids—the tape on the glasses, the calculator in the pocket, the hiked-up polyester pants.

"I remember saying to Judd, 'We cannot do a show where they're gonna make us cast good-looking kids and dress them up as nerds ... We're not going to make them cartoon characters.'" Apatow and Feig prepared for the type of creative battles that victims of network television tell of around campfires fed by script pages. But NBC, at an apparently laid-back moment, gave its blessing to cast as they saw fit. With casting director Allison Jones, they searched the country for new forms of unconventionality. "You have to ... see a thousand guys and look for the weird kid and see which one you can teach to act," explained Apatow. "They have to be characters."

One by one, the cast filled out. The asparagus-thin, Coke-bottle-glasses-wearing Martin Starr; the lumbering, goofy Jason Segel; the vulnerable but in no way a knockout Linda Cardellini. And then came ... Seth Rogen. "When we found Seth, we both thought we'd found God," said Feig. "My jaw hit the table," he recalls, when, in Vancouver, Rogen walked in and started reading. "So funny, and so ... He had this weird voice, and he was kind of oddly confident. The first speech he read was this nerd speech, it was about kung fu, like 'I can do kung fu,' and it's all kind of goofy. And then he read the stoner one, which was about how to grow pot ... It was like ... oh my God, he's perfect! He just cold-read it. He ended up getting cast from that"

In some cases, the kids were unique enough to inspire Apatow to begin tearing up the script and re-creating characters based on the kids who had come through the doors, a process that had Feig, an admittedly persnickety and self-protective writer, "freaking out." But he tried to chill, knowing Apatow's reputation for guarding the creative process at all costs. Once, when an executive at Fox had offered him notes on The Ben Stiller Show, Apatow fired off a memo: "I'm not changing anything. Now what happens?" (What happened was this: the show was killed.)

Wisely, DreamWorks and NBC kept their distance, creatively, from Freaks and Geeks, despite the money being spent ($1.5 million per episode) and the unorthodox style of everything taking place around them. Director Jake Kasdan described the visual philosophy as based on "uncosmetic decisions." "The close-ups are looser than you'd expect—there's a little too much space, and the kids are kind of awkward in the frame—and we used a very cool palette as opposed to most network dramas, which are very warm, and everyone's incredibly pretty and healthy looking ... On Freaks and Geeks everyone's face is sort of like ... light blue."

Katzenberg swung by the set one day and slung compliments. Soon Spielberg would be sneaking in to stealthily check out the first episode. Afterward, he wrote Feig a letter telling him he loved what he'd seen and calling the show the most honest portrayal of high school he knew of. Delighted, Feig framed the letter and hung it on his wall. When Apatow heard about the communiqué, he fumed: "I can't believe you got the letter from Spielberg!"

The trouble-free development process soon slammed to a halt: when Freaks and Geeks, which was to debut in September, was slotted at 8 P.M. on Saturdays, aka the "death slot," Apatow and Feig started drawing up their wills. Adding to the crepe hanging was the fact that Garth Ancier, who ran programming at the WB, had been made president of NBC Entertainment, replacing Scott Sassa, who had been all about "Go forth and do your thing." Ancier saw everything differently.

Feig got his first taste of Ancier at the upfront presentations—when the networks present their fall lineups to much schmoozing and free-flowing booze in New York City—when he introduced himself to the new man in charge. According to Feig, Ancier simply looked at him and said, "Just deliver the goods, man. Deliver the goods. You don't want to end up like this guy," he continued, pointing to a fellow next to him who looked like a caricature of a hapless schlub.

Driven by those rapturous reviews, Freaks and Geeks did well on opening night. Then ratings dropped precipitously. Things got worse as NBC put the show on a succession of hiatuses, making way for sweeps season and the World Series. When ratings stayed at cellar level, the suits lost all pretense of interest or patience. "They started to panic and their notes were getting a little more nervous—'Should you do this? Should you do that?'" Feig said.

To Ancier, the product of boarding school and Princeton, the show seemed to represent an alternate, alien, and unappealing universe. Over lunch with Apatow, he brought up the episode when Sam (John Francis Daley), the show's seminal loser, is asked to have lunch with Cindy (Natasha Melnick), the leggy cheerleader he adores, only to get the news that she digs someone else.

"There are no victories, man! Your show has no victories!" Ancier told Apatow.

In March, the show's breathing became extremely labored: Freaks and Geeks was "relaunched" (for the third time) on Monday nights, pitted against ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, a low-budget ratings ruler. Within a month—no Freaks, no Geeks. Apatow got the call. "I'm screaming and half crying," he told the L.A. Weekly's Robert Lloyd of his chat with the less-than-human-seeming Ancier, "saying every single thing I ever wanted to say to him ... And he's a hard person to talk to, because he's one of those people who does not confront you, so you could say anything and he'll just go (sympathetically) 'Yeah, I know, yeah.' So it's no fun even to let it all go. He sounds like he's made that call a thousand times ... For all I know he's on a speakerphone and there's someone else in the room and they're giggling. I know it doesn't bother him. So it's just a terrible moment."

Fans of Freaks and Geeks, who tended to lurk on Internet chatrooms and truly cherish their moments of actual identification with commercial entertainment products, saw red. And charged. "Do you have blind chimps making your programming decisions?" questioned one such F&G fanatic online. "Are you guys high? No more NBC for me after the last episode airs." Fans were adamant—and organized; they even banded together and bought an ad in Daily Variety (at a cost of $3,746) that read: "The fans cared enough to get together and pay for this ad. Now doesn't that speak for itself?...GIVE FREAKS A CHANCE!"

All kinds of observers felt that Freaks and Geeks had been "dicked around," according to one former DreamWorks executive, who said that some NBC executives actually later admitted, publicly, that they should have kept the faith a bit before moving in for the kill.

DreamWorks may have been willing to bet outside the box in television, but the bets were costly and the losses were racking up. Like all the studios, DreamWorks was throwing money at writers in the hopes that just one hit would stick to some wall somewhere. But other TV studios—especially those owned by conglomerates—had much deeper piles of dough, and TV was in flux in a major way. With the advent of cheaper-to-make reality TV and game shows, and fleeing advertising dollars, the justification for insane spending was fading. Still, DreamWorks stuck to its belief that good, smart material would prevail.

In late 1999, DreamWorks Interactive was sold to video-game goliath Electronic Arts (EA), continuing DreamWorks' painful diminishment. In its last year, the company had begun to turn a profit, but too little, too late. DWI employees who had joined up from Microsoft were not just jobless; they had to face missing out on a significant payday at their old home. Microsoft's stock (which they'd given up) had soared over the previous four years.

The sale was finalized in February, just as DWI's latest game, the Spielberg inspiration Medal of Honor, was taking off. Rather mightily— Medal of Honor would not only foster a new genre, World War II video games, but go on to be one of the biggest-selling titles ever. By 2007, the franchise had sold over 31 million units, generating nearly $1 billion in revenue, all of which went to EA. (Had the game been based on the Saving Private Ryan license, DreamWorks would have also had a stake.) Looking back, COO Glenn Entis called DWI "an impressionable youth—a new shiny thing. Everyone had ideas about how it should work, how it should be. But at the end of the day, you had to create a profitable business."

But DreamWorks and all things digital hadn't parted company entirely. Dot-com mania was sweeping the nation. Twenty-six-year-olds were becoming insta-millionaires. It was perhaps inevitable that DreamWorks would want in. Here was an industry where money could be made overnight in an initial public offering, give or take a solid business plan, and that spoke directly to Spielberg's inner geek. This was the guy, after all, who had a T-1 line way back when. When Netscape initiated the Internet boom back in 1995, raising $2.2 billion its first day as a public company, Spielberg had brought in the press release announcing the news to the guys at DreamWorks Interactive, remarking how "cool" it was. Four years later, with the bubble wildly expanded and tech IPOs in headlines daily, DreamWorks wanted to move, as did many others in Hollywood.

It became "a bit of a land grab," said David Bloom, reporting on the tech boom in L.A. for the publication Red Herring. "It was like the Oklahoma Sooners—Oh my God, there's free land, we have to grab it!" Paul Allen was, at last, witnessing his wired world becoming reality. By 2001, Allen said, people would no longer be dialing up to their AOL accounts, but connecting via broadband (i.e., high speed). The delivery system for broadband, he believed, was cable—not satellite, the prevailing wisdom earlier. During the previous year Allen had spent more than $20 billion buying up cable companies, including his flagship-to-be: Charter Communications. Almost overnight, Allen was the fourth-largest cable operator in the U.S. and, for content, he was scooping up Internet companies. Enter DreamWorks with a proposal for an entertainment dot-com. See Allen pledge $50 million for a 50 percent stake in what would become Pop.com.

Allen had no interest in being actively involved—which is exactly how DreamWorks preferred it. Being the Dream Team's biggest backer meant showing up for presentations and glamorous Hollywood events, such as movie premieres, the Vanity Fair Oscar party, or a Spielberg movie set. Geffen was charged with managing Allen, whom he hovered around like a "secret service agent," said Variety party columnist Bill Higgins. "If anyone wanted to go up to Paul, it was clear that you had to go through Geffen," who seemed to be protecting Allen—and DreamWorks—from himself. ("Like when I bring my mom to a premiere," said a source, "but tell her she can't talk to the talent.") Geffen's buffering of Allen was not just to keep competitors away. It was also, presumably, to make sure that Geffen remained Allen's primary source of information about DreamWorks.

Sources say that Allen had become concerned about DreamWorks' balance sheets. But not exceedingly so. "To Paul, DreamWorks wasn't about making money. He was ready to give it a long ride," said one person who knows Allen. "The only time he worries about things is when they make him look bad. If a bad investment makes him look foolish, then he cares. If someone tells him he looks stupid, then he'll turn on it, get rid of it. But only then."

However, "when he turns, he turns hard."

Pop was actually the brainchild of Ron Howard, one of the biggest directors in Hollywood (Parenthood, Apollo 13) and one-half of one of the biggest production companies in Hollywood, Imagine Entertainment. The other half was Brian Grazer, a high-energy, spiky-haired surfer who prided himself in knowing everyone (an assistant cum cultural attaché rounded up names and forged introductions to people like The Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell and Frank Wilczek, a Nobel-winning expert on particle accelerators). Grazer flipped when he heard tech geek Howard going on about using the Web as a platform for inexpensive, experimental entertainment, or "pops": short films, streaming video, performance art, etc.

When Spielberg, a longtime friend of Howard's, heard about Pop, he flipped, too. While Spielberg and Howard gushed ideas, Grazer and Katzenberg became designated implementers, despite the fact that they were far less Web-savvy than their partners. (Katzenberg "searched" the Internet by having his staff "record" Web pages onto a videotape, which he then popped into a VCR. He replied to e-mails by fax. Grazer had to ask his assistants to pull up Web pages for him. Underlings also printed out his e-mails so he could read them on paper.)

In October, Pop.com was announced to enormous fanfare: a revolution was at hand. Grazer was flying all over, meeting with potential contributors and partners, such as Interview editor Ingrid Sischy, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, and artist Jeff Koons. And then there was the Imagine and DreamWorks' Hollywood roster: Mike Myers, Steve Martin, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and so on. Katzenberg and Grazer went to all the agencies, pumping Pop, comparing the Internet to what MTV had been twenty-five years earlier. Spielberg called it a "large, fertile field." "You can harvest all sorts of spinoffs, just from whatever germinates," he said. "It could be a book, a piece of music, a movie—who can say?"

It was a good question. Not anyone at DreamWorks, or anywhere else, for that matter, could necessarily define exactly what they were setting out to do. Or what limitations they were facing with a platform—the Internet—that was not yet fully mature. Allen's prediction concerning full broadband access within a year was far from certain. Timing would matter quite a bit, considering that the types of content Pop would carry—streaming videos, short films—would require quick, uncomplicated access in order to download in a user-friendly manner. (Via dial-up, a short film might take eight hours to download.) But tough questions weren't part of the dot-com mentality. "All of these guys were ahead of their time, but most were not sufficiently concerned about a sustainable business model," said reporter David Bloom.

In March of 2000, just months after America Online met Time Warner and wed to the tune of $200 billion, Pop.com held a launch event at the Chateau Marmont during the Yahoo! Internet Life Online Film Festival. The party was far more opulent than those of any of the other companies playing host at the Chateau. DreamWorks/Imagine rented out one of the fabled hotel's biggest bungalows—more of a house, actually—and handed out fruity cocktails by the pool, along with "tchotchkes with striking graphics and uncertain utility," said Bloom. Most impressive of all, the stars themselves showed up, or at least some of them—Howard, Grazer, and Katzenberg—who chatted with young Netheads hawking streaming shorts.

A new era was at hand. The Chateau, formerly ground zero for Hollywood bacchanalian behavior—Jim Morrison had leapt from the roof; John Belushi had overdosed here—was now playing host to squeaky-cleans whose drugs of choice were venture capitalism and portfolios. As Red Bulls were passed around, DreamWorks executives gulped and then raised up the cans to toast another relatively "risk-free"—or at least entirely bankrolled—investment whose upside was the chance to make history. What could possibly go wrong?