21. NOBODY'S BITCH

THE NIGHT OF THE OSCARS, March 26, 2000, David Geffen was curled up in a green leather booth at Morton's, where Vanity Fair hosted its annual Oscar party. "Don't stand there!" he yelled to a woman blocking his view of the telecast. Best Original Screenplay was about to be announced, and Geffen was hoping like hell that Alan Ball won. When the envelope was opened, and Ball's name was announced, Geffen lurched forward and said, "Yeah!" in what was more an emission than a burst of enthusiasm. Then he fell back into the booth, spent.

As noted by Frank DiGiacomo in the New York Observer, Geffen might have graced the party with his presence knowing that, finally, DreamWorks would have something to celebrate. But he was still strictly Geffen. Although flanked by a newly single Jane Fonda (now separated from Ted Turner), Fran Lebowitz, and Barry Diller, he was not into revelry. "His face," DiGiacomo wrote, was "an angular relief map of power," which "conveyed only the importance of winning."

Over at the Shrine Auditorium, seated in the "surreal" and "terrifying" thick of things, as he called them, Alan Ball wasn't having much more fun. To keep it together, he periodically dipped into a flask of scotch tucked into his tuxedo pocket. When his name was called, "I went up there and I was out of my body. I had prepared a speech ... but, there's that big monitor at the back that starts flashing '15' [seconds remaining], '14.' I'd be lying if I said I wasn't glad that I won an Oscar ... But I wouldn't put it on my list of most enjoyable experiences."

Until Ball's win, the Seventy-second Annual Academy Awards had been mostly about The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers' gadget-palooza starring Keanu Reeves in a black leather duster and shades. The film had swept most of the minor, technical categories. American Beauty's only other prize up to that point was for cinematography (Conrad Hall, who had last won in 1969, for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). For once, Miramax was low profile. The Cider House Rules won Best Adapted Screenplay (John Irving) and Best Supporting Actor (Michael Caine). But this was no replay of Shakespeare In Love, something Harvey Weinstein had known nine days earlier, when he'd called Katzenberg and told him: "Congratulations. You saw the playbook and outplayed us." He then inquired, pointedly, what movie DreamWorks would be hawking for next year's Oscars.

When Best Actor was up, Geffen again leaned in for what would be a close call. Denzel Washington had been an early favorite for his turn in Norman Jewison's The Hurricane, about the life of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. But—it was Spacey!

"Yeah!"

Geffen was starting to loosen up.

Best Actress was a wash—Annette Bening lost out to Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry. No utterances from the green leather booth.

Then Best Director. Spielberg himself opened the envelope, and when he did, he smiled the smile of a proud parent, and everyone knew who'd won: Mendes.

"Yeah!!"

Geffen was almost ... pumped.

And then: Best Picture. Now Geffen "looked like he was strapped into a NASA rocket sled," wrote DiGiacomo. He was pressing "both of his hands against his forehead as if to keep his skull from exploding."

American Beauty.

"YEAH!!!"

In lieu of embracing Fonda to the point of cracking her skin-tight metallic sheath, Geffen politely clinked glasses and then darted off, dodging past Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone, actress Selma Blair, and socialite Lynn Wyatt as he made his way to the exit. When DiGiacomo caught up with him outside, all Geffen would give was a pursed, "I'm thrilled."

Over at the Shrine, emotions were free-flowing. Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks stormed the stage, thanking Mendes, Ball, and "everyone at DreamWorks from Glenn Williamson to Steven Spielberg"—a line rumored to not have gone over well with Walter Parkes. As the producers walked off, they were embraced by Mendes, Spacey, and Spielberg amid an explosion of camera flashes. "Everyone was clutching the Academy Award," Mendes said, "and Steven, who was visibly bursting with pride, said"—echoing Katzenberg's words—"'I just want to say, you've just made the studio.'"

Then the group was ushered backstage to do press. This year, Spielberg was among them.

Later, at the DreamWorks post-Oscar party in a rose-petal-festooned Spago—where Geffen had headed after the Morton's dash—a still-glowing Spielberg, accompanied by Parkes, approached American Beauty's young director.

"We've got something for you," Spielberg said as he handed Mendes a gift: a check for a million dollars. "Thank you," he said. And meant it. DreamWorks, at last, had an identity. It wasn't Warner Bros. or Fox, nor was it Miramax. It was its own thing, somewhere in between, original, different. All the adjectives tossed out ad infinitum back in '94 finally meant something. Finally, there was such a thing as a DreamWorks movie.

Vases containing five red roses—in honor of each of the Academy Awards won by American Beauty—were displayed throughout DreamWorks the day after the Oscars. But at the animation studio, they did little to improve the feng shui. Less than a week later, Katzenberg's The Road to El Dorado crashed into theaters, performing miserably. Grossing just $12 million its first weekend, it was more of a bomb than even The Prince of Egypt. And there was no airbrushing the disappointment by holding the movie in theaters to juice its grosses. Unlike with POE, DreamWorks couldn't blame the Bible for not setting audiences on fire. This was pure, unadulterated Bad News. Having cost over $95 million to produce, plus millions more to market, El Dorado made just $50 million.

Katzenberg was stunned. El Dorado had been his inspiration. He'd believed in the film, despite the naysayers. And now, he didn't seem able to accept that it was a failure, that he had been so, so wrong. It was too much.

And so Katzenberg started slamming doors and crossing off names. Not even Elton John, who'd produced such magic on The Lion King, was spared. "If you look at the promotions surrounding El Dorado, Jeffrey was always talking about Elton John. The feeling was, Elton John's a winner. He doesn't write songs to lose," said one source. "But when the El Dorado soundtrack went down like a lead balloon ... Elton was out. They brought in Bryan Adams to do the soundtrack on Spirit [DreamWorks' next animated film]. Either you're a winner or you're a loser. That's Jeffrey."

Katzenberg deflected criticism; he remained in denial that he bore any responsibility for the film's failure. Instead, he pointed to the filmmakers, saying that they should have made him more aware of El Dorado's problems. He blamed his involvement in the Disney lawsuit, seeming to forget how, early on, he'd been criticized for being too hands-on. "He would not accept the blame for El Dorado," said one source. "He blamed the deposition and said he wasn't there enough. But that didn't go down. He did his job, just after hours and on weekends ... He was a hundred percent there, every step of the way."

This was not the Katzenberg who had once gone out of his way to make DreamWorks a creative and collaborative place full of goodwill. Beyond the failure of El Dorado, many people believed the change was due to Katzenberg's victory in court, and the validation that the win had wrought in the number two, who was now very much a number one. "Once he won the lawsuit, he started to believe that he was untouchable, that it was his way or the highway, that his opinion was the only one that mattered," said one source.

Katzenberg didn't seem to know how to handle, or how to justify, things going so terribly off-course with El Dorado. Having prevailed against Eisner, he expected to prevail at DreamWorks, just as he had promised investors and his partners. Worse, when the media weighed in, it was clear that the story line had changed. Katzenberg was no longer being viewed in the context of the hard-done-by subordinate. There was no longer a villain, a job that he was being screwed out of, money withheld that was rightfully his. Now he was the guy who'd gotten his revenge. And his partners made Eisner look like a lightweight.

Nor was there any patience left for DreamWorks to work out its start-up quirks. The honeymoon was long over, and reporters drilled in. The most aggressive story, by Claudia Eller and James Bates in the L.A. Times, pointed out that the failure of El Dorado had ramifications for the Dream Team. "Many in Hollywood believe," wrote the reporters, "that the [animation] division will make or break the company" and that "without the cavernous pockets of DreamWorks' billionaire backer Paul Allen, the studio's animation business might well be on the ropes." In other words: DreamWorks "might well" be on its way out of business.

The story recalled Katzenberg's prediction, way back when, that DreamWorks' animated films would replicate, or at least come close to replicating, the commercial success of The Lion King. The article went on to point out that the combined grosses of DreamWorks' first three animated films—Antz, The Prince of Egypt, and The Road to El Dorado—did not come close to matching The Lion King's $783 million worldwide gross, let alone its gargantuan licensing and merchandising intake.

When the story ran, Press and Katzenberg were irate, feeling that it made unfair presumptions. The issue was personal as well as professional: Eller and Press were extremely close friends. The two women socialized together, and Eller had even hosted a baby shower at her home for Press, when she had been pregnant with twins. The women were similar creatures—brash firebrands unafraid to speak their minds. They were also alternately tough and nurturing; a combination that worked brilliantly with the kings who rule Hollywood, so many of whom are hard-charging bullies with paper-thin skin. When Katzenberg was at Disney, Eller had been one of his closest media allies and had written many flattering articles. But Eller called it like she saw it. And the way she saw it now, DreamWorks was in trouble.

"I think it hurt everybody," said Finkelman Cox. "Everybody was mad at Claudia. It was a wrench for her and Terry. I don't remember if anything that negative had been written about DreamWorks before that."

The Times story did not overstate the case. Allen's billions were no luxury option. He was called on to supply a billion-dollar credit line to stanch the financial bleeding from El Dorado, which rocked the company more severely than any single event in its history. Years later, when from a more objective standpoint, Katzenberg could be more honest, he called the El Dorado fiasco "like nothing I've experienced in twenty years. I've never had anything like that." It was "more humbling and humiliating than anything else." The following spring and summer were "a tough six or nine months," he said. "I was sweating."

So were others at the studio, on whom it was dawning that this was no fluke, that something was constitutionally off: "I think that was the moment, for me, when I started to feel nervous—when El Dorado was released and didn't do well," said artist Paul Lasaine. It was the first major sign, added art director Richie Chavez, that "the market wasn't embracing us."

The market was actually threatening to leave DreamWorks in the dust. In 1994, the year the studio was formed, four animated feature films had been released in theaters; by 1999, that number had more than doubled, thanks to the efforts of studios like Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox, and Miramax. Not only were there more animated movies, but computer animation was beginning to look like the future.

In November of 1999, Pixar had released Toy Story 2, which grossed $477 million worldwide, making it the second-highest-grossing animated film behind The Lion King. The theory that computer animation was merely a flash-in-the-pan fad was losing its legs. As the shift in thinking took root, studios started cutting back on traditional animators. In 2000 DreamWorks downsized to 324 artists from 500 a year earlier. Long gone were the days of million-dollar signing bonuses and years-long contracts. Animator Floyd Norman recalled returning to L.A. in 2000 after working up at Pixar on Monsters, Inc.: "I began to see a real shift in the industry. Prices were falling. So much talent was available that studios no longer had to ... offer top salaries."

By 2000, the animation studio had shed its cozy, family-like proportions, from the days when artists huddled together in the old Lakeside Drive building on the Universal lot. There may have been fewer artists on the payroll, but with more movies, the studio needed more administration and management. As a result, some of DreamWorks' early, idealistic innovations were being cast aside, such as the no-job-titles policy, which had proven not so much democratic as confusing. To the outside world, no titles meant that it was not clear who was in charge of what. Within DreamWorks, it meant that employees stepped on each other's toes and that there was no clear reporting structure, which led, according to one former employee, to the establishment of "empires"—i.e., self-created hierarchies. Katzenberg didn't necessarily mind this; when he was confronted about it, he replied, "I like empires. It means that people are passionately trying to accomplish things."

The lack of titles also created an ostensibly flat reporting structure in which there was Katzenberg and there was everyone else, a situation that caused its own set of headaches for managers who felt usurped when Katzenberg would go directly to an executive under them instead of through the chain of command. While employees appreciated that, unlike most CEOs, Katzenberg was readily available and would return every phone call and agree to any meeting, regardless of the employee's stature, the situation also gave rise to a cult-like environment in which a big part of surviving was playing up to the cult's king.

"Everybody had access to Jeffrey—there was very little in between," said Bill Villarreal. "Because of that, [DreamWorks] became a very political place. Because, of course, when you have access to the top guy, you're going to play yourself up and ... it became about self-promotion." But something else that was chipping away at the hitherto free-'n'-easy culture and giving way to a more rigid ethos was the very real pressure that the studio was under. As DreamWorks' other divisions—from music to TV to video games—failed to hit their strides, animation (the company's presumptive cash cow) was ever more under siege.

Katzenberg didn't bend, but bore down deeper, committed to winning the way he'd always planned he would—by making compelling story-driven movies that were good no matter what the platform—old-or new-style animation. He wasn't dismissing CGI— Shrek, which had been sent up to PDI after Antz was released, had finally found its footing in CGI and was readying for release. Yet he remained staunchly devoted to the art form he'd fallen in love with, and been schooled in, at Disney. He still tossed out the well-worn sound bite about rereading Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston's book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation—a book he considered his "Bible"—every year while on vacation with his family in Hawaii.

Once, during a trip up to PDI, animator Noel McGinn bluntly asked Katzenberg why he wanted to continue with 2-D when CGI clearly offered more possibilities.

"I would never, ever give up on 2-D. Never," Katzenberg replied.

"He was basically affronted by the whole idea," said McGinn.

And so, he plowed onward, never considering moving the next two 2-D films in DreamWorks' pipeline—Spirit and Sinbad —over to the CGI pipeline. Good storytelling, not spectacular graphics, was the thing, he always said.

***

The financial troubles wrought by El Dorado—which considerably dimmed the rosy blush left by American Beauty —coincided with another wave of partnership talks, this time between DreamWorks and Pop.com ally Imagine Entertainment. The idea, as it was fleshed out informally with lawyers and Paul Allen's people, was that Imagine would be melded into DreamWorks, with Brian Grazer overseeing the studio, Katzenberg staying put running animation, and Ron Howard coming aboard as a content provider, directing and producing movies. It would be a win-win for everyone. DreamWorks' recurring problem of never having enough movies would be solved. Grazer and Howard would become business owners, not just highly paid producers who worked for studios.

Despite their differences—the boyishly affable Ron Howard versus the slightly maniacal Brian Grazer—both men were radically ambitious. And to both of them, the idea of owning something bigger than Imagine was tempting. Imagine was a very successful company, but it was also a place where, essentially, a studio backed in a truckload of money. Although Grazer and Howard received enormous salaries and a high percentage of first-dollar grosses, they didn't own the company. And they wanted to own. And own big.

There were questions, of course—namely, just how equal a partnership it would actually be, a detail significant in the event DreamWorks were sold. And could the various players, used to competing for projects, truly get along? This issue was already becoming a problem at Pop.com, where, one executive told Time, "We'd go through the slate of projects and Steven would like this, Ron would like this, Jeffrey liked this, and Brian liked this."

But that was the least of the problems at Pop, which would have been more aptly called Implode.com. By the spring of 2000—when Pop was supposed to launch—there was no actual Web site in sight. Nor was there any clear timetable for when engineering issues would be resolved. Or the building of hundreds of different Web applications.

Not that this stopped anyone. Practically overnight, there were 125 people on the Pop payroll, all of whom showed up for work every day in a Glendale warehouse that had housed the early Shrek animators. Inside, on the stage where the Propellerheads had once supervised motion-capture tests, couches and beanbag chairs were set up for gatherings. A piano and Ping-Pong table were propped nearby. Lunch was delivered daily, and, on Friday afternoons, party food and beer were rolled in.

"Pop was a very busy place for a company without a Web site," said Phillip Nakov, cofounder of CountingDown.com, a site bought by Pop. "Between production, design, writers writing things, people shooting things, making shows, editing shows, acquiring content ... There was a lot of activity." But Mike Kelly, founder of Undergroundfilm.com, which Pop was in the process of acquiring, was more dubious. "They had a lot of people working there," he said. "Everybody had an assistant. I just couldn't identify what they were doing."

That was a mystery hard to penetrate. Pop's CEO, Kenneth Wong, another Katzenberg hire from Disney, where he'd worked at Imagineering, had no experience in the Internet and seemed clueless as to how to get Pop up and running. An architect with a background in management construction, Wong was accustomed to Disney's rigid bureaucratic structures. He was hardly an entrepreneurial Internet pioneer who thought in terms of overnight growth and profitability. Wong's number two was another tech newbie: Dan Sullivan, a twenty-seven-year-old Wharton grad who had overseen business development at Imagine.

One Pop employee called Wong the "cheerleader in chief"; someone who was good at team spirit and talking the talk, but who had more trouble with the meat of it all. There were meetings, inspirational speeches, and bonding activities, but as for meaningful work getting done: not so much.

In the dot-com spirit, Pop's compensation model was all about stock—the plan was to build the company quickly and then make millions, if not billions, in an IPO. Employees were paid in stock, as was the talent being wooed to make content—a model that was especially pleasing to the frugal Katzenberg. The only problem was that there was so much stock—Pop was incorporated with 250 million shares—that it wasn't ever likely to be worth very much.

"Having raised money and incorporated a company, I remember looking at the number of shares and thinking, Lord, that is an astronomical number," said Kelly. "A lot of people probably thought they were getting a buck a share, that the company would go public and they'd be selling for $40 a share. But if the hundreds of millions of shares are, when you go public, ten shares to one or something, it's sort of misleading, and I think that was the purpose—to mislead."

Some balked. When the stock situation became clear, the deals with A-list talent, always a part of the plan, fizzled. (Pop had even established a star tier system, which broke down actors and filmmakers that Pop hoped to hire into A, B, and C lists. Each category was allocated different stock paydays. A-listers included Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, and Jim Carrey. Jerry Seinfeld was B team. And MTV prankster Tom Green a hapless C-lister.) When this "list" was leaked via reporter Chris Petrikin in Inside.com, agents bristled. Pop was now a foe.

From the Pop point of view, it was agents who were "pigs at the trough," said one source. "Everybody was in the roaring dot-com mindset, where any agent thought they had a viable name that could change the face of the Web." Mike Myers's agents asked for the most and, when Pop didn't give it, they discouraged their client from doing work for Pop. Not that he especially wanted to—Myers was already in an ugly feud with Imagine over the film Dieter, based on Myers's black-turtleneck-clad, Teutonic "Sprockets" character on Saturday Night Live. Myers, a longtime friend of Brian Grazer, had just finished filming How the Grinch Stole Christmas for Imagine, which Ron Howard directed. Next, he was supposed to turn to Dieter. Only, at the last minute, he balked, saying he didn't like the script—a dubious claim, seeing as he'd written it with his longtime collaborator Michael McCullers.

As reported in Time, lawsuits flew back and forth between Universal, Imagine, and Myers, who was seeking $20 million in damages, claiming Universal had been "thug-like," "outrageous," and had demonstrated "reckless conduct." Imagine, which claimed $30 million in lost profits, called Myers "egomaniacal," "irresponsible," and "selfish."

In the midst of the drama, Katzenberg, who knew a thing or two about legal mudslinging, was brought on to broker peace. But he wasn't exactly an indifferent party. Myers was Katzenberg's star voice talent on Shrek, and he didn't like seeing his name sullied.

Katzenberg assumed the role of Myers's agent, calling up Universal chairman Stacey Snider, saying, "You don't know what you're doing! You're not handling this the right way! There's no way to win this!" according to a source. More diplomatically, he brought Myers to a Lakers game that he knew Grazer was attending. It didn't do much good. Both Grazer and Myers were "major grudge holders," said one source, and neither was about to budge.

Katzenberg called on Spielberg to help, but it was Jeffrey who finally made the save that pleased both Imagine and Myers and benefited DreamWorks. The proposal was for everyone to join forces on a Mike Myers film— The Cat in the Hat, specifically, a project that had been languishing in Amblin development hell for years. One of the problems in getting the film off the ground was the difficulty of getting the blessing of the Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) estate. But Imagine had an in, having just come out of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. And with Imagine's involvement with Cat, boom: rights granted. Everybody got a movie, everybody was happy.

Except, that is, Pop.com, where, still, nothing was happening. Meanwhile, Grazer and Katzenberg, who had each been clocking in as much as thirty hours a week on Pop, were by now smelling failure and started pulling back.

As for Spielberg and Howard, Pop's biggest cheerleaders, they were being sucked back into directing projects. Spielberg was preparing to shoot Artificial Intelligence: A.I., having put Minority Report on the back burner. Like so many things at DreamWorks whose creation was owed to Spielberg's interest and enthusiasm—DreamWorks Interactive, TV animation, GameWorks, not to mention Playa Vista—Pop was ultimately abandoned by the director when his ever-shifting attention was captured by something that looked like more of a winner.

And then the real bottom fell out: in April, the NASDAQ collapsed. The Internet gold rush was over. Dot-coms had gone from bubble to bust. San Francisco, the bust's epicenter, was being deserted by entrepreneurs turning out the lights and putting their names on the months-long U-Haul waiting list. Suddenly, the prospect of Pop ever going public and making a gazillion dollars was as likely as Katzenberg turning into Steve Jobs.

Pop reacted with typical Hollywood denial. With Spielberg, Allen, and Geffen as protectors, Pop was immune. Right? "We were aware of the Internet bubble bursting, but felt we were insulated because we were a privately held company," said Nakov. "We had Vulcan [Paul Allen's] funding, we felt we were insulated from everything going on in the rest of the world."

The attitude at Pop could best be summed up by a contest that Wong, who always tried to maintain a certain campy cheer, organized to choose the company's logo. In the spirit of Everyone's Ideas Are Important Here, he sent around a memo, urging all to help determine the catchphrase that best defined the company.

The winner, by a landslide, was: "Nobody's Bitch."

When the Internet bubble burst, that attitude kicked in: Screw you, we will survive! But outside the insulated walls of the Glendale warehouse, Pop was becoming a lightning rod for reporters hungry for the next dot-com bust story. Sensing something brewing or busting, Entertainment Weekly and Inside.com were among the news organizations taking a look.

Screenwriter Scott Frank had been working with Spielberg for a long, difficult year on the script for Minority Report, when he walked into Spielberg's office in the fall of 1999 and was told by the director: "We're in a race. I'm writing A.I., and whichever script gets done first, I'm gonna make." Frank did not take the news as an occasion for optimism. He had a good idea who was going to win this race, and he was not surprised when, in the spring, Spielberg decided that A.I. was his next film, leaving Minority Report in a sprawling, 180-page state of chaos. After months of struggling through the script, with the help of Spielberg and Parkes, Minority Report —a futuristic thriller in which a special "Pre-Crime" unit enlists "Pre-Cogs" to foresee crimes before they take place—remained a conundrum.

Besides its being a complicated story, Spielberg had told Frank that he was uncomfortable with mysteries. And in Minority Report there was not one, but two mysteries, one of them being why the protagonist (which Tom Cruise had signed on to play) himself is identified as a pre-criminal.

At one point, Spielberg, Parkes, and Frank had decided to give up, but Cruise remained an enthusiast so they'd stumbled on. Then, with Cruise's schedule delayed with Mission: Impossible II, and Spielberg having fallen harder for A.I., whose script he'd rewritten himself (after taking over the project from Stanley Kubrick when Kubrick died of a heart attack), A.I. it was. Frank lost all hope in Minority Report ever making it to the screen. "I thought the movie was dead," he said.

Years earlier, Spielberg had confessed to Geffen, while aboard the DreamWorks jet, that A.I. was the best project he'd ever read. Only it wasn't his. Kubrick had been working on it since the 1970s, but had been stalled over how to pull off the high-tech elements in the futuristic film. The project was loosely based on a 1969 Brian Aldiss short story, "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," about a robot boy and his struggle to become real. Kubrick had enlisted Spielberg's help, when he was considering using special effects to create the boy-robot instead of casting an actor.

Spielberg and Kubrick discussed the film at great length over the years, engaging in marathon phone calls between L.A. and London, where Kubrick lived, during which the only times they would break would be to go make sandwiches and then come back to the phone. Kubrick even insisted that Spielberg install a fax machine in his bedroom so that he could receive Kubrick's sketches and outlines any time of the day or night. Paranoid that anyone wise up to what they were doing, Spielberg kept the fax in a locked closet, to which only a very few people had a key.

When Kubrick passed away, Geffen swooped in, on cue, and negotiated with his pals at Warner Bros., Bob Daly and Terry Semel, to arrange for Spielberg to pick up where Kubrick left off. A deal was reached whereby Spielberg would not just direct A.I., but write it (taking his first screenwriting credit since 1982's Poltergeist), using Kubrick's script, notes, and drawings as a guide.

DreamWorks, meanwhile, was faced with the reality that yet again their star player was getting up to bat for another team. Although DreamWorks was brought on as a coproducer on A.I. and would handle foreign distribution, Warner Bros. had the more enticing role of releasing the film in North America. Once again there were murmurs that Geffen and Katzenberg weren't keeping their boy on a tight enough leash.

Spielberg's hopscotching between projects was tolerated by the studios—everyone got on line to be in the Spielberg business—but there was a greediness to his behavior that did not go unnoticed. For instance, with Geisha, even if Spielberg couldn't get around to it yet, he wasn't going to let anyone else step in. Ron Bass, the original writer of Geisha, told the Washington Post, "Columbia [Pictures] said to Steven many times, 'If this is something you've lost interest in, tell us. Lots of other directors would want to [direct].' He said, 'Absolutely not. I'm directing it. I just don't know when.'"

"Steven's like a hungry kid," said one Hollywood veteran. "He can be naughty, such as with Geisha, where he kept it for a long time while he made other movies."

Spielberg was also making mischief with Harry Potter, a franchise that Warner Bros. was desperate to get going before Christmas and have out the following year, now that J. K. Rowling's books had become a global phenomenon. Nothing would delight Warner Bros. more than to pair one global brand (Spielberg) with another. Only, Spielberg wasn't sure he wanted to direct the movie, and took his time deciding. As he hemmed and hawed, the clock ticked. Executives at Warner Bros. ground their teeth, but did the only thing they could do: wait, for several grueling months, while their would-be tent pole remained unmade.

Spielberg's interest in Harry Potter also upset his friend and protégé, director Brad Silberling (he directed Casper at Amblin), who was originally attached to direct the film. When new management came in at Warner Bros., Silberling was put on ice, though he only found out about Spielberg's involvement in the project when Spielberg called one day to say he was thinking of directing Harry Potter. Spielberg made no apology for the fact that he was considering taking over what had been a dream gig for Silberling, who had already begun mapping out how he wanted to make the movie. Granted, it was Warner Bros.' decision as much as Spielberg's, but Silberling was nevertheless hurt, according to a source. Such was the price of being friends with Steven Spielberg.

In the end, Spielberg "passed" on Harry Potter, or so he liked to say. In reality, the talks fell apart when Spielberg and Warner Bros. came to a creative impasse: Spielberg wanted to combine more than one of the Harry Potter novels into one movie, with the intent of making one of the greatest movies of all time. Warner's wanted to stick to just one, saving the rest for sequels down the road. Spielberg then asked to be a producer on the film, believing that, during his talks with Warner's, he'd helped the studio solve some of the film's creative issues. But Warner Bros. didn't think Spielberg had been indispensable. Nor did it care to give away 50 percent of Harry's grosses on a Spielberg producing deal.

Nor did Silberling, alas, wind up with the job, which went to Chris Columbus, the director of the blockbuster Home Alone.

Meanwhile, DreamWorks' own live-action studio was hanging in the balance. Would American Beauty prove to be just a fluke—the first and last "DreamWorks" movie—or was it just the beginning of something more lasting, something great?

The next test was Gladiator, which had millions more of DreamWorks' resources tied up in it, and which, unlike American Beauty, was doing anything but flying under the radar. If it failed, it would make The Road to El Dorado look like a very minor misfortune.