22. SWORD FIGHTS

"YOU MOTHERFUCKER. I will kill you with my bare hands."

"Hello?" Branko Lustig said, confused and barely awake; it was, after all, 3 A.M. in England.

"You motherfucker," the speaker repeated.

"Who's on the phone? Who is this?" Lustig demanded.

When Russell Crowe identified himself, the genuinely terrified Lustig, one of the producers of the about-to-be-filmed Gladiator, hung up and called Steven Spielberg in Los Angeles.

"Steven," he said. "I'm leaving. Russell wants to kill me."

Having survived a concentration camp, Lustig was not taking chances.

Crowe, not yet Russell Crowe, but still just another verkakte Australian coming off a sleeper (L.A. Confidential), was sour because he believed DreamWorks was low-balling his assistants on their per diems. Rather than raise this grievance at a mundane daylight hour, Crowe opted for a more dramatic statement, a tactic not unknown in these parts. The actor's recent behavior had been erratic, like just about everything else on the project. One of the screenwriters, falling into the everyday hyperbole of dazed moviemakers, described the DreamWorks production as "an epic struggle in every sense."

Back in L.A., DreamWorks executives were panicking, even more so than usual. Uncertainty—approaching apoplexy—over the Gladiator script was delaying the shoot. The budget was ticking upward. Time waits for no movie, despite the faces of Spielberg and the others that hovered like Macy's balloons in the besieged minds of their employees. Filming absolutely had to begin within a month—it was now January 1999—if the picture was to be released in May 2000.

Gladiator had been built from the ground up to become a shining DreamWorks venture. Never before had the company put so much capital—more than $100 million—into a picture. The Crowe Situation had devolved into the Crowe Crisis days before, after the latest round of edits in the still-in-progress script, which did not yet have a workable ending. "We had a bunch of different versions [of the ending]," said producer Douglas Wick. "In one, Russell escapes [from slavery] and comes back with an army, and is reunited with his dog."

Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald had flown in from L.A. to convene at Shepperton Studios, director Ridley Scott's brick-and-ivy-appointed production grounds in Surrey, England, where Alien, among others, was filmed. From the second of Crowe's uncombed arrival at a fraught script conference, it was clear that he was not in the best of moods or shape. He appeared to have barely survived what must have been a long and very recently ended night.

"The character doesn't make sense now," Crowe remarked bitterly. "I don't understand why he's doing what he's doing."

Gently, Parkes began to explain that the latest edits improved the film, that they made Crowe's character, a general in ancient Rome, less of a brute, thus justifying the gargantuan number of human lives to which he lays waste. But the brawny actor, who would become known for the kind of short fuse that leads to flying telephones—wasn't hearing it. He was the Artist, shouldering the burden of Integrity. He stood abruptly and left, rendering those gathered speechless.

"Do you think he went to the bathroom?" Parkes asked hopefully, peering over his reading glasses. This seemed unlikely. More realistically, the lead actor of DreamWorks' most treasured blockbuster-to-be had just walked off the picture.

Screenwriter David Franzoni originally pitched Gladiator to Spielberg himself. The director warmed to the notion of a movie about gladiator fights at the Colosseum after Franzoni, not without savvy, shared his secret. The story was, at the end of the day, not really about those old Romans, but about Hollywood.

"I believed it was about things, it was about who we were," Franzoni said. "The Oliver Reed character was Mike Ovitz. Ted Turner was Commodus. CAA represents the gladiators. This is how I pitched it to Steven. The Colosseum is Dodger Stadium. This is about us."

Of such inspirations are green lights and big budgets born.

"Yeah," Spielberg had said.

Since then, the higher-ups at DreamWorks had intensely monitored the film's development, guiding the script rewrites, and bringing onboard Scott, whose credits ranged from the cultishly beloved sci-fi film Blade Runner to the Go Girrrl empowerment picture Thelma and Louise. But who, more recently, had struck out with films such as 1492: Conquest of Paradise and White Squall.

No one had been more active than Walter Parkes, who had been even more hands-on than usual. Battles with Scott over the script were described by one bystander as "hellacious."

Laurie MacDonald had done her part, making sure all the men making this very manly picture didn't wipe out the women. "Often, Laurie was the only woman in story meetings," said Wick. "One time, when we decided to kill off Connie Nielsen's character in the first act, Laurie—who had left the meeting—came back and said, 'Hey, nice work, guys. You just got rid of the only woman.'"

If Crowe's intention was to walk off, he was either too hung over or too ambivalent. Scott, who had gone off to hunt for him, found the actor in his car, brooding. "He was anxious," said a source. "He was carrying a $100 million movie in which he says, 'My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius' and wears a skirt."

Scott did what he could to mellow Crowe, reassuring him enough so that the director thought he might actually join the rest of the cast for a read-through of the detested script. The atmosphere at the sound stage where this would occur was decidedly festive. Still adorned with the set dressings of whatever had last been shot there— The Canterbury Tales, from the looks of the place—the space was festooned with vaulted ceilings, elaborate scrollwork, and long, medieval-style tables.

In the midst of this fantasia, Oliver Reed, the predictably outrageous English actor (Oliver!, Women In Love) who had been cast as Proximo, the head of the gladiator school, was regaling a group including actors Joaquin Phoenix and Connie Nielsen, as well as Franzoni and another writer, John Logan, with chapters from his wanton history. Particularly memorable was his tale of a trip to a Vermont jail after getting into a bar brawl following a rugby match. (Reed, a famously inveterate boozer/ladies' man, once described his ideal mate as "a mute nymphomaniac whose father owns a pub.")

Yet beneath all the ribaldry was the unspoken question of what had become of the movie's star: it was becoming harder to gloss over the leading man's absence. Though Reed's spirits did not, according to Franzoni, fail for an instant. "He's like, 'Oh my God, they jumped me, it wasn't my fault!' We're having a great time, but we're waiting for Russell. Russell's not appearing."

Finally, Crowe materialized—unrepentant and sans affability. If Scott's pep talk had any effect, it seemed to have lodged deep in the actor's subconscious. Crowe played along, but refused to summon a scintilla of good humor. He didn't so much recite his lines as growl them in a deranged accent that flitted between indeterminate continents of origin. More absurd was Reed's delivery. Even though his lines were as long as haiku, he filled them with dramatic flourishes. Having recently renounced drinking, he said that the only thing he was chugging was lemonade, but the question was just what he was mixing in the stuff.

"My oold frrriend," he read, puckering his lips and rolling his r's with all the pomp of a seventeenth-century thespian.

Crowe, in turn, chewed up monologues, spitting out each and every poisonous syllable.

Logan, who had lovingly crafted many of these lines, watched in horror. He scrawled four words on a piece of paper: "Kill me! Kill me!"

A month later, after filming in England, the shoot moved to Ouarzazate, Morocco—a town near the Sahara Desert, where Hollywood has traditionally gone for its sword-and-sandal needs (Lawrence of Arabia was filmed in the area). Crowe's mood did not improve. Twice he had walked off the set. Even when he was supposedly having "fun," Crowe was a puffy pain. After challenging members of the crew to a foot race, and losing, he would mutter for days, "I would have won, but I can't run in the sand in sandals."

But the thing that most vexed him, that unleashed his not-so-inner fury, was the script. Still. Even after his memorable performance in England, Crowe remained an unhappy camper, experiencing near seizures as his character was shaped, and reshaped, by the writers and then faxed back in L.A. for Parkes's approval. "Russell was getting his lines at such a late date that he had built up a real irritation factor," Ridley Scott said. "So at that moment, when you get that irritated, anything that comes through the door, he's going to get pissed off with." From Crowe, there was a lot of: "I'm not gonna say this shit. It's shit. It's stupid shit. Why should I say this? Why can't we have it the way it was this morning?" according to Bill Nicholson, the designated on-set screenwriter. (Franzoni had dropped in on the set and gotten roped into working by Scott, while visiting with his family.)

Never were Crowe's spirits more in flux than when he was to read the climactic "And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next" scene, in which his character, Maximus, removes his helmet and reveals his identity. It was only the most seminal line in the entire movie, and yet Crowe was convinced that it was ridiculous—overwrought puffery that no man would ever be caught dead saying, least of all a brawny, sword-carrying killer standing under the unrelenting African sun. Scott was one of the few people who seemed to understand Crowe, that underneath all that volatility was a very scared actor who needed to feel safe. Rather than blow up at him, Scott waited until the tantrum subsided. Then he agreed to shoot the scene the way Crowe preferred.

After doing the take, Crowe still looked dissatisfied. "Let me see the other script again," he said to Scott, referring to the loathed revision. After studying the page stonily, he shrugged. "Well, we might as well try it."

And so the scene was reshot. Everyone agreed it was brilliant. Everyone, that is, but Crowe. "Russell, what's the problem?" Scott asked, finally showing a hint of exasperation. "It worked."

"It was shit," Crowe repeated, "but I'm the greatest actor in the world and I can make even shit sound good." And with that he marched off.

At times, however, not even Scott could control Crowe. Even during brief periods of calm, the actor would end up blowing up. Once, Crowe invited Scott and Franzoni out to his villa for dinner to discuss, of course, the script. Although everyone else, including Scott, was staying in a hotel in Ouarzazate, Crowe had his own mansion, located about an hour away, near the Algerian border. "It was out in this area where all these Moroccan generals had built mansions and created an artificial lake, so it looked like Westlake or Thousand Oaks," said Franzoni.

After being dropped off by their driver, Scott and Franzoni were greeted by one of Crowe's many assistants, who handed them each a glass of wine.

The hospitable vibe lasted but briefly. Before long, "Russell and Ridley start yelling at each other" about the script, Franzoni said, a confrontation that ended with Crowe yelling, "Fuck you, get outta here! I'm going to bed!"

The two men were kicked out, and stranded—the driver wasn't due back for two hours, and no one's cell phone was working—in the midst of North African suburbia.

According to Franzoni, while they waited for their ride, they did the obvious thing: "We break into the rec room of some general's house, he's not there, and we played pool and Ping-Pong all night."

Six thousand miles away in L.A., Parkes had done his best to control the chaos. More than any other DreamWorks film to date, Parkes was entrenched in Gladiator.

If Parkes's skill, as screenwriter Zak Penn describes it, is "recognizing material that can get nominated for an Oscar and shepherding it in that direction," he'd found the perfect vehicle with Gladiator, which he always saw in the most lofty, epic terms.

"I remember saying to Walter, 'Yeah, it's a revenge movie,'" Penn said. "I said, 'It's Death Wish in ancient Rome.' And he's like, 'No, it's not. It's a movie about politics and this and that.' I said, 'Well, there are speeches about politics, but fundamentally, this guy's wife gets killed, the guy goes and almost kills himself, goes back and kills the guy who killed his family ... There's nothing to be ashamed of, it sounds like a cool action movie."

But Parkes disagreed, and he'd made it his mission to prove that he was right; that Gladiator was in fact much more than just a cool action movie. In the early stages of development, as Franzoni's script was being worked on by Logan, he'd written a twenty-page treatment giving his take on things. He and Wick, who'd helped develop Franzoni's original pitch into a script, had gone to enlist the services of Scott, toting an enormous neoclassic painting to serve as a pitch. It had worked. Scott had studied the painting—which featured a gladiator standing in the middle of the Roman Colosseum, triumphantly astride his defeated opponent as he looks up to see the emperor's verdict—and then pointed at it, saying, "I can do that."

Though DreamWorks was still nervous about a $100 million so-called sword-and-sandal picture—a genre that, since Ben-Hur, had become a parody: Roddy McDowall in robes and Roman cuffs in Cleopatra. And so, Universal was brought in to cofinance the film.

As the script problems persisted, Parkes had been in constant communication with Wick and Scott, no newbie director who was going to be "puppeted," as one person put it, by Parkes, as so many other directors at DreamWorks had been. Moreover, Scott appreciated Parkes, recognized that he had good ideas, and was willing to go back and forth with him creatively, a sometimes combative process, as each man argued for his version of changes to the screenplay. It was the very best version of being in the ring with Parkes, whose more intellectual storytelling instincts complemented Scott's visual strength. The situation was also helped by the fact that there was a script "committee," as Wick called it, which vetted all the tweaks, meaning no one person could hijack the script.

"There was constant arguing, but it was a healthy version of combat," said Wick. "It was the best team sport I've ever played on, despite the tensions. It was a bunch of kids shoving in the sandbox, but it was the most constructive version of that."

At one point when a friendship between screenwriter Franzoni and Crowe was sparked by their mutual love of motorcycles, DreamWorks got nervous, fearing that Crowe would use the relationship to have his way with the script, which was exactly what started happening. "I got along with Russell," Franzoni acknowledged. "Russell did not believe in the movie. He was scared. But I couldn't disagree with him. I thought he was very lucid in his concerns about where the script was going. It wasn't one of those cases where somebody's out of their mind. He was right. We'd be on the set in the morning, and he'd have these ideas. The thing with the guy who stabs with two swords and cuts his head off—that's all Russell's idea."

In April, the production had moved to Malta, where the gladiator fight scenes would be shot in a full-scale replica of the Colosseum that had been built; or, rather, a third of it had been built—the rest would be added digitally. Now there was a new problem that was much more serious than a script. An actor was dead.

Bill Nicholson, who by now had returned to England, heard the news when he received a call from Parkes. "Oliver Reed died two hours ago," Parkes said. "Get on a plane and go back to Malta and create a new ending."

Sometime since the script read-through, when Reed proclaimed he was sticking to lemonade, he'd apparently traded it in for more lethal stuff. In Malta, on his days off he would head to a local pub in the city of Valletta in the morning and stay until the afternoon. He became something of a fixture—a gregarious bloke who amused the locals and the British naval officers who frequented the place, and who never let anybody buy him a drink, even when they figured out that he was the guy from Oliver!

On one of these days, after twelve double rums, Reed had a heart attack. On the ambulance ride to the hospital, Reed had another heart attack, this one fatal.

"We were seeing dailies of Oliver, thinking, 'What an extraordinary performance.' Ollie looked so tan and so great," said Parkes. "And we were just talking about the fact that Oliver Reed has come back—an amazing actor is suddenly going to have a rebirth in his career. That was a Friday, and then Saturday morning I got the phone call that he had died.

"You first take in the human loss and then, much too quickly, the producer takes over and you say, 'That's terrible. How much of this have we shot and how are we going to deal with this?' "

How it was dealt with was that Nicholson rewrote the script so that Reed's character, Proximo, dies earlier in the story. For scenes he absolutely had to be in, editor Pietro Scalia combined footage of Reed that had already been shot with CGI effects to create new material. In some instances, a body double acted out the scenes, and a digital mask of Reed's face was mapped on to the actor's face in the editing room.

A year later, in the spring of 2000, Gladiator was finally ready for re-lease. On opening night, Friday, May 5, Parkes, MacDonald, Wick, and his wife, Lucy Fisher—who'd recently stepped down as vice chairman of Columbia-TriStar to join her husband as a producer—packed into a car to check out theater lines, a ritual in Hollywood that provides the first glimpse of what will be either a very good, or a very unpleasant, weekend.

As they drove into Westwood, the UCLA village where Gladiator was playing, no one had any idea what to expect. Now that all was said and done, DreamWorks and the filmmakers felt they had a strong action movie on their hands, one that would surely attract teenage boys in droves. But they worried that women would be turned off by all the blood and violence, and would stay away. In postproduction, Scott had chopped away some of the brutality and played up the love-story element of the film, but there was no escaping the blood and guts in Gladiator.

Terry Press, high on her American Beauty victory, had done her part, with what was now characteristic chutzpah. In addition to a strong, traditional marketing campaign—an onslaught of billboards, radio, and TV (including a costly Super Bowl ad), double-truck ads in the New York Times and the L.A. Times, etc.—Press had screened Gladiator to Harry Knowles, the founder of the popular movie fan site Ain't It Cool News, and two hundred of Knowles's friends.

A pudgy movie geek with long, curly red hair who lives in ragamuffin bachelor quarters in Austin, Texas, Knowles—or "Harry"—is universally feared by Hollywood movie studios. Ain't It Cool News has incredible influence among Hollywood's most sought-after demographic—teenage boys—as well as an alarming number of "spies" who seem to be on all Hollywood sets at all times, gathering behind-the-scenes intel and posting it on the site. If Ain't It Cool smells a turkey, it says so, months before a film is released, muddying the film's reputation and causing migraines for marketing executives in L.A. On the other hand, if Ain't It Cool likes a movie, it provides the kind of word-of-mouth buzz that is impossible to buy.

Press was correct in guessing that Gladiator was the kind of movie that would fall into the latter category. "This is the Ridley Scott that we fanboys and girls drool over," Knowles began, in a review that was posted on February 25.

Later in the piece, he wrote, "When Russell Crowe says, 'I will win the crowd. I will give them something that they have never seen before.' The utter shiver of coolness that goes through you is ... electric."

With the help of Knowles, Gladiator received a strong Internet push months before its release. Press had other tricks up her sleeve, such as making a deal with Wells Fargo, which aired the Gladiator trailer on the screens of six thousand ATM machines around the country.

But now was the real test. Gladiator had been built. Would audiences come? Reviews, so far, were mixed. Although Crowe's performance was praised, critics were less enthusiastic about other aspects of the film. " Gladiator suggests what would happen if someone made a movie of the imminent extreme-football league and shot it as if it were a Chanel commercial," wrote Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times, taking a swipe at Scott's early work as a commercials director.

In the L.A. Times, Kenneth Turan wrote: "Gladiator delivers when it counts—but then and only then. Like an aging athlete who knows how to husband strength and camouflage weakness, it makes the most of what it does well and hopes you won't notice its limitations." Variety's Todd McCarthy, however, gave the film a rave review. "After a virtual absence of 35 years, the Roman Empire makes a thrilling return to the bigscreen in Gladiator. A muscular and bloody combat picture, a compelling revenge drama and a truly transporting trip back nearly 2,000 years, Ridley Scott's bold epic of imperial intrigue and outsized heroism brings new luster and excitement to a tarnished and often derided genre."

As Parkes and Co. cruised by the theater, their worst fears were confirmed. People were showing up—this was good—but they were virtually all male. And not just boys, but men. Real men. "They were almost like motorcycle gangs," recalled Wick. "These thuggish males. We were shocked." The next night, Saturday, another drive-by excursion proved more promising. Now there were women standing in line to buy tickets. Not a lot, but some.

In the end, Gladiator triumphed. After opening to a solid $34 million, the film went on to gross $187 million in the U.S. and even more overseas, totaling $457 million worldwide. Though, like Saving Private Ryan, the riches would be split with another studio, in this case, Universal. In hindsight, the decision to share Gladiator was "a big mistake," said Branko Lustig. "But there is a proverb: You cannot fuck and be a virgin at the same time."

The success of Gladiator was followed with more good news at the live-action studio. Virtually the entire summer lineup—the first time that DreamWorks had a summer slate—performed so strong that DreamWorks wound up being number one at the box office for the season, beating out Disney, which came in second, and Paramount, whose Mission: Impossible II was the top-grossing summer movie— Gladiator was the second highest.

The other films bolstering DreamWorks' bottom line were the Robert Zemeckis—directed ghost thriller What Lies Beneath, which grossed $155 million; and Todd Phillips's comedy Road Trip, which took in $68 million on a budget of $16 million. And an animation collaboration with the British Claymation company Aardman— Chicken Run—was hailed by critics and made $106 million. Although Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks wasn't a big moneymaker—it grossed $29 million worldwide on a budget almost as high—Allen received more praise than he had in recent years and the film was seen as a mini comeback.

At least so hoped DreamWorks, which made a deal to release Allen's next three comedies. Katzenberg, who'd worked with Allen at Disney, on Scenes from a Mall, and, more recently, when Allen lent his voice to Antz, had forged the deal, which was less about financial reward than the prestige of being in business with Allen. "Of all the people I've worked with, he's the one who impressed my mother the most," Terry Press once said.

But of all the movies, Gladiator represented a crowning triumph—the third film in three years, following Saving Private Ryan and American Beauty —that validated DreamWorks as being, whatever its financial ills and Internet travails, a pedigreed film company that specialized in high-end fare with commercial appeal. DreamWorks' original claims of setting out to be different—and, it was implied, better—than the rest of the Hollywood studios were not just ringing true but were seeming like a lasting proposition. If American Beauty had "made" the studio, Gladiator patented the studio more lastingly as a success.

Someone who should have been thrilled, even gloating, was Parkes. With Gladiator, he'd shown Katzenberg that not only could he deliver a summer movie, but he could deliver a finely crafted summer movie, one that already was receiving early Oscar buzz. (He could take less credit for the slate, seeing as Katzenberg had been responsible for half of it: Chicken Run, Road Trip, and Small Time Crooks.) And he'd shown how his intensive approach to guiding movies at DreamWorks—which, in this case, was essentially producing the movie—did not always end disastrously with filmmakers.

But although DreamWorks' position was looking increasingly solid, Parkes and his wife were reassessing their relationship with the studio, according to sources close to the couple. Five years in, they were exhausted. The start-up demands of running the studio and simultaneously acting as producers on movies had taken their toll. And what was obvious to everyone else was just as obvious to them: they were not cut out to run a studio. They couldn't break out of thinking like producers, not studio executives, and meticulously focusing on one film at a time as opposed to an entire slate. As a result, DreamWorks' pipeline was dangerously thin. When there was a robust lineup of films—in 2000, for the first time ever, DreamWorks released ten live-action films—it was short-lived: only five films were on the 2001 slate. Parkes and MacDonald simply couldn't keep up.

With their five-year contract about to expire, Parkes and MacDonald made a decision: they were going to step down and go back to producing. There was only one problem—at the prospect of yet another one of his family members abandoning him, Spielberg said, No way. And he was willing to do whatever it took to keep them in the fold. And so he came up with a proposal: What about if the couple got to produce movies at DreamWorks, even as they continued to run the studio? Then would they stay?

It was quite an offer. Unprecedented, in fact. To be able to run Steven Spielberg's company and produce—and be compensated for—their own films. "Isn't it a direct conflict of interest?" asked one studio head turned producer. "As a producer, you fight for movies, no matter what. As a studio executive, you have to represent the interests of the studio. I've been on both sides. In a way, those responsibilities are mutually exclusive. It's just an untenable tightrope to walk."

It was unorthodox, to be sure. It was also, quite possibly, the most amazing deal ever crafted in Hollywood, combining power and creative freedom—and the potential to become very rich—in a way that would never have passed muster at a public company checked and balanced by board members. But unorthodox was the DreamWorks way, never more so than when the idea came out of Spielberg's imaginative head. Helene Hahn might be angry about it (as many suspected), though when she was confronted by one executive who was dumbfounded that either she or Katzenberg could have signed off on something that was so, as this person believed, "bad for DreamWorks," she dutifully defended the policy.

As for Geffen and Katzenberg, whatever reservations they may have had took a backseat to keeping their main man happy. Just as they'd gone against their better instincts and agreed to Bob Zemeckis's rich ImageMovers deal (which, as of yet, had produced just two films for DreamWorks, one of which was What Lies Beneath), and to pursuing money- and resource-sucking projects such as Playa Vista and DreamWorks Interactive, they again gave Steven what he wanted.

But even while the deal was justified by DreamWorks' status as a private company that wrote its own rules, no one was blind to the questions it would raise, and so ground rules were established. For one, it was agreed that Parkes and MacDonald would never green-light their own movies. That would be left up to Spielberg. In other words, at least in theory, movies that Parkes and MacDonald produced would be subject to the same questions of merit and financial prudence as any other potential film.

It was another example of the way that at DreamWorks, what was good for the people who worked at the company was frequently put before what was good for DreamWorks, the company. Once, when I was talking to a former executive, he explained the attitude at the studio, as proselytized by its founders, as: "We are fulfilling our destiny. We want you to stay here and fulfill your destiny with us. And as long as your agenda fits with ours, we're cool."

Placating any doubters was the understanding that the arrangement would be temporary. Parkes and MacDonald still wanted to shed their studio duties, and while this was a fabulous interim arrangement, they didn't want it to be long-term. It was agreed that at some point in the relatively near future someone would be brought in and Parkes and MacDonald would step down.

Around DreamWorks, Parkes and MacDonald's new contract was described as "the deal of the century." Everyone knew Spielberg cherished Parkes, would do anything for him, but this was a new level of largesse. On a practical level, executives worried that they would now have even more trouble getting Parkes interested in their projects, now that he'd have more incentive to focus on his and his wife's. For it was no secret that Parkes was a hard sell when it came to ideas that didn't come out of his own, pedigreed head, or that appealed to his not-so-catholic tastes. Desperate executives had even come up with tricks to try and spark his attention, the underlying theme being to make it about him. In a technique they called "the assist," they would pitch an idea and refer back to something he'd brought up in the past. E.g.: "You know how you were talking about X? Well, this is a lot like that, in that..." Or: "This is a more mainstream version of X." They were appeals founded in narcissism, and, very often, they worked.

When he was interviewed by Variety about the new deal, Parkes admitted that it was "unconventional," but said that now that DreamWorks was working with more experienced directors, such as Bob Zemeckis and Cameron Crowe, who didn't need (and wouldn't put up with) as much studio meddling, there was more room for him and MacDonald to jump in and make movies themselves. As for the effects he thought the change in course would have on DreamWorks, Parkes said, "I don't think things are going to change much."

Others weren't so sure.