26. THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES

IT IS NOT UNLIKELY that Michael De Luca was the first DreamWorks employee to say, upon being asked in the middle of a meeting why he looked so tired: "Courtney Love and Winona Ryder came over last night at 2 A.M., and I couldn't get them to leave."

For the thirty-six-year-old De Luca, scenarios involving beautiful divas, at hours when most studio executives were tucked beneath their six-hundred-thread-count sheets, were just another day in the life. To DreamWorks' live-action executives, almost all of whom were male and in their early thirties, De Luca's life was fabulous and envy-inspiring: when he arrived at DreamWorks in June of 2001 as president of production under Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, it was like a rock star had driven through the Amblin gates. Fittingly, De Luca drove through them on a motorcycle.

De Luca, a Hollywood wunderkind who'd made his name at New Line Cinema, where he'd become president at age twenty-eight, was DreamWorks' latest solution to the perennial problem of not enough movies. Geffen had first called, and then Katzenberg had wooed, the dark-haired boy wonder—who, in his trademark uniform of blue jeans and black T-shirts, looked like a new-age Fonz, only buffer—after he'd been fired from New Line following a sixteen-year stint. Overnight, the hot-hot De Luca, who'd championed artistically daring filmmakers such as Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia), and realized that the TV comedian Jim Carrey was a movie star, casting him in The Mask, went cold with Warren Beatty's Town & Country and Little Nicky, with Adam Sandler. In January of 2001—to much shock in Hollywood and tears at New Line—he was fired.

De Luca at DreamWorks wasn't the likeliest of unions. De Luca's taste was alternately edgy and ubercommercial, neither of which quite fit the DreamWorks' mold, which, at its best, was about being prestigious. De Luca's personal style was also a bit wilder than those who worked at the family-oriented DreamWorks, with its daycare center and resident dog walker. De Luca, who'd famously been involved in an in flagrante fellatio incident at agent turned producer Arnold Rifkin's pre-Oscar party, wouldn't be needing either service. Terry Press's comment when she heard about the new hire was: "I wonder if we'll have to tell him there's no happy hour here"

But De Luca was a beloved figure around town and with artists, something that DreamWorks badly needed in the live-action studio, given the frustration over Parkes. His sensibility, which Katzenberg told him he "loved" and "needed" at DreamWorks, would complement those of Parkes and MacDonald, who were busy producing big-budget prestige pictures. Katzenberg, meanwhile, was ready to hand over the reins of the live-action studio. Many felt that, unsurprisingly, given his ultraefficient nature, Jeffrey had grown frustrated during his short stint at live action. In the beginning, he'd say in meetings, with willful enthusiasm, "Let's try and get Walter and Laurie to do this!" But eventually he gave up and was ready to pass on the responsibility of ironing out the studio's dysfunction.

Katzenberg was also presumably ready to beat it out of live action given that, though he'd been successful in getting more movies made, they included some rather major flops. There had been the lackluster The Mexican, and the even bigger money-loser The Legend of Bagger Vance. Another dud, Evolution, had also been made on his watch, though Parkes had been involved in that film, laboriously working on several drafts of its script.

When Katzenberg had called on De Luca to take over, De Luca had his own reservations, specifically "the Walter issue," as one source put it. He wondered just how much power he would actually have, given Parkes's controlling style. (Others approached to run the studio, such as Warner Bros. president Jeff Robinov, demurred on that very basis.) The Bob Cooper experiment had been a failure, even if good movies had come of it. But Katzenberg had assured De Luca that it was only a matter of time before Parkes and MacDonald stepped down. After a year, the couple would be transitioning out of the executive ranks.

It all sounded reasonable. And the fact of the matter was that De Luca was less "hot" these days, and no one else was calling with a job. New Line was offering him a $100 million production deal, but staying on at the studio in a less exalted producer role seemed wrong. So he said yes to Jeffrey.

Not that he wasn't excited to work at DreamWorks. One producer friend of De Luca's said that he was "starry-eyed and eager to work at a place that had promises of greatness—there was the idea you'd be working with the single most talented filmmaker in the world."

The idea of De Luca at DreamWorks sent shock waves through Hollywood. No one could help wonder how the guy who held court at Chaya Brasserie—New Line's virtual commissary, where the leggy waitresses all fawned over the coolest studio exec in town—would mesh with his new home, and especially with Parkes, given their divergent styles. Besides the obvious superficial differences between the two—one person described the contrast as a "shot of Jäger" versus a "shot of milk"—De Luca's approach was nothing like Parkes's. Willing to fight like a dog to get a director hired, or a movie green-lighted, once all the pieces were in place, De Luca begged off. He let filmmakers do their thing. Austin Powers producer Jennifer Todd recalled working with De Luca on the Vin Diesel thriller Boiler Room at New Line, and how, after calling him on a Friday to make a plea for a green light on the movie, De Luca got back to her the following Monday.

Todd recalled: "He called me and said, 'Are you going to be there 24/7?' I said, 'Yeah.' 'And the director's not going to fuck up?' 'No.' And he said, 'OK, you can make the movie.' And the next time he got involved was in post [production]."

Furthermore, executives under Parkes understood their boss's narrow taste range and knew better than to even bother trying to pitch him a lowbrow movie. As one former executive said to me, "If you brought up a genre action movie in a meeting—forget it."

And now, the guy behind not just The Mask, but Rush Hour and Austin Powers was moving in. The town held its breath.

By the time he took the job at DreamWorks, De Luca had dialed back his life quite a bit. Friends say that his expulsion from New Line had a serious effect on him, and he was determined to turn over a new leaf. Things hit a low when he received a DUI and had his license revoked, meaning that he had to travel either by motorcycle or black town car—a mode of transport that only enforced his rock star image. De Luca had always been laid-back, but at DreamWorks, he gave off an even more mellow vibe. Now, instead of heading out to clubs or parties in the Hollywood Hills after work, he went home and worked out with his yoga instructor, named Happy, and personal trainer.

When producers stopped by his new office, they assumed they'd walked into the wrong room. Unlike his New Line lair, which one producer described as "totally rock 'n' roll"—the place was more like a college dorm, with posters of movies (Menace II Society) and grunge bands (Cold), and a littering of Austin Powers toys—De Luca's DreamWorks office was sparklingly spartan, with two coffee-table books decorously arranged on a low table that was so clean you could have eaten off of it. It didn't seem in any way reflective of the guy who'd once said, "Some days, I feel like P. T. Barnum, but with a better circus. And bad days, I feel like Fatty Arbuckle, but with better lawyers."

At DreamWorks, De Luca spoke regularly with Katzenberg, in some cases pitching projects to Katzenberg and Parkes simultaneously. He communicated less with Spielberg (and even less with Geffen), but when Spielberg discovered that De Luca shared his obsession with sci-fi and fantasy movies, he would call to rhapsodize, say, about a Twilight Zone episode. De Luca would pick up immediately on what Spielberg was describing, and chime in—"Oh, yeah, episode 23!"

Spielberg also liked that having De Luca at DreamWorks occasioned visits from filmmakers such as Paul Thomas Anderson, and when the Boogie Nights writer-director stopped by De Luca's office, Spielberg swung by and sat down for a lively chat. But whatever interests the two men shared, it was clear to De Luca that only one person at DreamWorks had Spielberg's ear, and that was Parkes.

As De Luca settled in to his scrupulous new quarters, Parkes and MacDonald were busy with a number of films they were producing under their new contract, such as the $80 million sci-fi film The Time Machine, a particularly troublesome project whose director, Simon Wells, was ultimately replaced by Gore Verbinski.

Then there was The Ring, based on the Japanese horror film Ringu, about a cursed videotape that upends the lives of a single mother (played by Naomi Watts) and her son. The film had been brought to the studio in January of 2001 by executives turned producers Roy Lee and Mike Macari—Macari had passed on a copy of the Japanese film to DreamWorks executive Mark Sourian, who'd watched it with Lee at Sourian's West Hollywood apartment. They were scared out of their minds by the time the credits rolled—"We were like two kids watching the movie," Lee said. "And at the end, when [the spirit] comes out, we literally jumped out of our seats."

The next day Sourian had driven the film over to Parkes and MacDonald's house to watch it with his bosses; when the film was over, Parkes, sensing something special, ordered Sourian to buy it, which DreamWorks did, beating out Disney, for $1 million. Neither Lee nor Macari had producer experience at that point (Lee would go on to make his name as the "Asian remake guy," producing films such as The Grudge and Dark Water, but The Ring was his start), and so Parkes and MacDonald became the producers and the movie was barreling forward.

Partly as a thank-you for stepping in on Time Machine, Verbinski—in the director doghouse after The Mexican—was asked to direct by Parkes and Spielberg, who still believed in him.

What Parkes didn't love about The Ring was, at least at first, Naomi Watts. Parkes derided her as "a TV actress" when she was first proposed by Macari's producing partner, Neal Edelstein. Edelstein had just produced David Lynch's Mulholland Dr., which had caused a stir in Cannes but hadn't yet been released in the U.S. DreamWorks had already made offers to Jennifer Connelly, Drew Barrymore, and Gwyneth Paltrow, all of whom passed. (Paltrow said she couldn't do it because she was dating Luke Wilson and wanted to spend Christmas with him in Texas.)

It wasn't until Mulholland Dr. was released in theaters, in late October, and Watts began receiving critical attention, that Parkes came around, and Watts was hired.

Besides The Ring, Parkes was also working with Scott Frank on the Minority Report script, and butting heads with Sam Mendes over the creative direction of Road to Perdition, a $90 million Depression-era mobster film that Parkes thought should adhere more to its pulpy roots (it was based on the graphic novel by Max Allan Collins), but which Mendes wanted to be more polished and highbrow.

The project had been submitted to DreamWorks by Dick Zanuck—Spielberg's longtime producing pal—and his son Dean, also a producer, who'd first come across Collins's graphic novel in a pile of scripts that he'd taken home for his weekend read.

"I put it in my bag and read it that weekend, and as soon as I put it down, I told my wife, 'Something special's going to happen with this.' I could feel it," said Dean, who is tall and blond, with a square jaw and the wavy-haired good looks of a surfer.

Dean next contacted his father, who was shooting in Morocco. Zanuck père was also intrigued by the material, especially by the father-son story that existed below the surface of the film's more shoot'em-up gangster elements. He wrote Spielberg, who got back to him in two days. "I like this," he said over the phone, "I think we should develop it. Call Walter and make the necessary arrangements."

With Spielberg's blessing the project sped ahead: screenwriter David Self was hired and turned in a draft, which Parkes brought with him while he and MacDonald were on a yacht with Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson. When Parkes was fifty pages in, Hanks asked if he could take a look. Parkes handed the screenplay over, and when the actor finished reading it he announced he wanted to star in the movie.

Next, Parkes sent it to Sam Mendes, who was also very quickly involved.

Unaware of these transactions, the Zanucks, back in L.A., were worried. They'd sent Parkes the script three weeks earlier and still hadn't heard back. "It was very unusual, because Steven is especially known for, the next day, [giving you] handwritten notes, detailed thoughts on a draft. And we didn't get any of that," Dean said. "We got nothing from Walter. We confirmed that they got the script. We didn't know what was up, it was kind of an uncertain period."

Finally, Parkes called. "We've got a movie. Sam and Tom want to do this," he told the Zanucks.

"For producers, that's the dream," Dean said. "You've got Sam off his Academy Award, he's the hottest director in town, and Tom, of course, is just an amazing actor ... When you have Sam and Tom, they're just like magnets. Paul Newman came to the table, Jude Law, and all the best technical crew hopped on." (Including cinematographer Conrad Hall, who'd collaborated with Mendes on American Beauty.)

And so DreamWorks had what it hoped would be a follow-up to Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind —a big, lavish production that would do great things at both the box office and the Oscars.

Dean Zanuck said that on Road to Perdition, which Parkes signed onto as an executive producer, "Walter was very helpful in the preproduction period. There's a lot of talk about Walter and Laurie ... But what we experienced was a guy, a very smart guy, who had a lot of good ideas for this piece and was trying to help get it made." At the same time, he added: "If you're submitting [a movie] to Walter, you're inviting another producer on—that's the Catch-22."

On all the films he was working on, Parkes was characteristically hands-on. Script meetings on The Ring would go on for eight hours—lunch would be catered by the DreamWorks chef—during which Parkes would scrupulously break down the script, discussing theories and concepts that seemed lifted from a graduate seminar. A DreamWorks memo from an August 10 script meeting between Parkes, MacDonald, Sourian, Verbinski, and screenwriter Ehren Kruger goes on for pages, and includes nearly thirty subheadings of topics discussed: "The Spectral Presence," "Samara's Projected Daguerreotypes & Early Video," and "Rachel & Aidan Driving Home" ("Address Aidan's perceptiveness. Does he read the subtext of Rachel's actual questions and ask a question in return that addresses her state of mind?").

The process may have been grueling—Parkes and Verbinski were, again, going at it—but it seemed to be working. By the end, the script had an airtight, near-perfect story structure. In postproduction, however, Parkes pushed Verbinski over the edge when he insisted on testing his own cut of the movie, in which the first twenty minutes of the film were lost. The final version of The Ring was a compromise—Parkes's cut remained (it had tested well), but some parts of Verbinski's version were added back in.

With Parkes tied up deconstructing scripts, De Luca got to work. His mandate was simple: make more movies, broaden the slate. So he pursued his New Line strategy, going after smaller, art and genre pictures. Old School was Todd Phillips's follow-up to Road Trip, a comedy that the Montecito Picture Company had been developing about a group of middle-aged guys intent on recapturing the fun and recklessness of their youth by forming a fraternity. Appealingly low-budget—$26 million—it fell into the category of films that De Luca could oversee (anything under $30 million). Even so, its budget was a battle. A big sticking point was the cost of Vince Vaughn, cast along with Will Ferrell, then a tall, goofy regular on Saturday Night Live.

Vaughn had won critical acclaim for his turn as a fast-talking hipster in Swingers, but he wasn't considered a commercial star, and DreamWorks balked at his $2 million fee. (The cost of Ferrell, who received $1.2 million, was less of an issue.) But Phillips was adamant: no Vaughn, no movie. In the end, the producers found ways to trim the budget and Vaughn was in. But money remained a sticky topic, and Phillips felt much like the American Beauty team had felt years earlier—that their movie was being made in spite of an executive's support (in this case that of De Luca), not because of it.

Other projects De Luca jumped on were the family comedy Surviving Christmas, and Biker Boyz, another inexpensive film that flew well below Parkes's interest radar. Although De Luca wasn't taking on what seemed like major pictures, his arrival had sent a much-needed message to the community and inspired some who'd sworn they'd never return to DreamWorks to reconsider, such as Barry Levinson, who had no interest in making another DreamWorks movie after Everlasting Piece. But with De Luca's assurances—the two had worked together on Wag the Dog at New Line—he signed on to direct the satirical comedy Envy.

Though De Luca was moving forward on certain films, it became clear that his sensibility was not always going to fly at his new home. When he proposed that DreamWorks release the next Terminator —the Arnold Schwarzenegger, I vill be baack franchise financed by Intermedia—it was quickly shot down, despite De Luca's prediction that the film could make at least $80 million at the domestic box office and that the new T-X Terminator was "kick ass."

Part of De Luca's interest was in getting a franchise going at DreamWorks, which, somewhat astoundingly, had never made a sequel. In Hollywood, franchises such as Spider-Man are bread and butter to their respective studios. Even Miramax was in the franchise business.

People outside DreamWorks began to get the sense that De Luca's rein was not going to be so free when, not long after he arrived at the studio, he, Parkes and MacDonald, and senior live-action executives made the rounds at all the major talent agencies. The point was to introduce De Luca as the studio's new president, and to talk up DreamWorks. At each agency, the team met in a conference room with about thirty to forty Hollywood agents.

But if the agents had thought that DreamWorks' new head of production was to be the special honoree that day, they were mistaken. As De Luca and the other executives waited outside, Parkes and MacDonald began with a presentation of the movies they were producing and told agents that they could be commissioned as producers. Only when they were finished did De Luca and the rest of the troupe come into the room to talk about DreamWorks.

"It was unbelievable," recalled one agent who was in attendance. "You let them all wait outside, because you want to talk about your agenda. And then, when you're done with your personal business, you open the door and let everyone in to say, 'Here's what's going on.'

"The writing was on the wall, right there. [Their] agenda was first, and Mike was an afterthought. I would have been mortified."

DreamWorks sources say, however, that the event was an example of Parkes and MacDonald's naivete when it came to how to conduct oneself in Hollywood. They wanted to reach out to agents and ask them to submit material directly to them. It wasn't just to benefit them—part of their job, after all, was to scour for material for Spielberg. If anything, they were, apparently, attempting to create a kind of church and state separation between the rest of the studio and themselves. But whatever their intentions, the episode went down as the latest example of Parkes and MacDonald's self-interestedness, and yet another way in which Parkes was "deaf to how he's perceived," said one DreamWorks source.

When Jeffrey Katzenberg announced that Robert Redford had agreed to star in the military drama The Last Castle, he said, "That's the good news and the bad news."

Redford was, famously, a mixed bag. He was, of course, Redford—the Sundance Kid, the Natural, one of the President's Men. But on set, he could use his golden locks and perfect features to excuse behavior that would never be tolerated by anyone of lesser beauty. For one thing, he operated on what was known as "Redford Time," which pushed the limits even of what passed as acceptable in Hollywood, where to show up anywhere on time was to appear unimportant, a lesser player in the game. Redford wasn't minutes late, he was hours late, to lunches, dinners, camera calls.

The Last Castle, which came out in the fall of 2001, was one of the last films commissioned under the Katzenberg reign at the live-action studio. An expensive ($72 million) production, The Last Castle was green-lighted, in the spring of 2001, when a writers and actors strike was threatening to bring Hollywood to a standstill. So Katzenberg pushed the movie ahead at full speed, ordering executives to "Get this movie made!" Also problematic was the fact that another Redford film was coming out in November—Universal's Spy Game. DreamWorks wanted Last Castle out early enough to give that film room to breathe.

The result was that Rod Lurie, a West Point graduate and onetime film critic, whose experience was limited to two small films (one of them was The Contender, which DreamWorks had acquired and re-leased), was left to churn out a big-budget film, with a major headache of an actor, in seven months.

Even before cameras rolled, Redford was having his way with The Last Castle, which, as originally written by David Scarpa, told the story of a beleaguered prison warden, Colonel Winter, who finds himself in over his head when his military prison is overtaken by the megalomaniacal, Pattonesque general Eugene Irwin, who proceeds to organize a prison uprising. The villain in the film was Irwin, whom Redford was playing, and the sympathetic "access character" was Winter, played by James Gandolfini.

"In the script I wrote, General Irwin was a Clint Eastwood type, a darker-shaded character," said Scarpa. "At first he seems like a John McCain, he seems very heroic, and the colonel he's up against is a bureaucrat. But over the course of the movie, the general is gradually revealed to be delusional, and the colonel, the bad guy at the start, eventually becomes the good guy."

According to a source involved with the film, when Redford signed on, he expressly said he was interested in playing against type as a dark antagonist. However, during development, he became more uncomfortable with the way General Irwin was portrayed, and over the course of rewrites by Richard LaGravenese—a screenwriter with whom he had worked on The Horse Whisperer —Redford's character became the film's hero and Gandolfini's character became unsympathetic. (Screenwriters Graham Yost and Bill Nicholson also worked on the script.) Sections of the screenplay that delved into Colonel Winter's family life, portraying him as a compassionate Everyman, were entirely cut, while scenes depicting the torture and brutality inflicted on inmates by Winter—and, by extension, the U.S. military, which he represented—were added. The shift in story line caused the U.S. Armed Forces, which had originally supported the film, leading the filmmakers on a tour of Fort Leavenworth for research, to withdraw its involvement.

"It was a clear case of the star taking control," said one person involved with the film. "[Redford] became the creative locomotive on the project."

Facilitating this was Lurie's inexperience. Word was getting out that he was ill-equipped to be making such a large-scale film. Barely a week into shooting, Lurie had come a hair's breadth from being fired when DreamWorks was unhappy with his arty, indie style. So he quickly changed course. Then he had to contend with Redford, of whom one source said: "On the set, in post, it's all about Bob. As long as you agree with him, he's charming and affable. But as soon as you're anything different, suddenly you're vilified, you can't be trusted, you're part of the studio system that's corrupt. You're demonized."

Lurie professed nothing but love and admiration for Redford, denying any contention. Others were more dubious. Once, in postproduction, after Lurie cut down a scene in which Redford carries huge rocks back and forth as a form of punishment, Redford confronted the director. The actor, who appears shirtless in the scene, had prepared for the sequence for weeks, training and working out with weights. (One person snidely referred to it as his "Bridge on the River Kwai moment.") While shooting the scene, he had asked for several takes, intent on getting it just right. But when Lurie screened the footage, the scene dragged on for nearly twenty minutes.

"I don't get it, where's my rock-carrying scene?" Redford asked. When Lurie explained his rationale for the cut, Redford grew angry and stormed off.

(Gandolfini, who's also known to possess prima donna tendencies, grew similarly outraged when one of his monologues—the speech, he said, that made him want to do the movie—was trimmed.)

Meanwhile, Parkes was sending pages that he'd rewritten to the set to be shot the following day. In some cases, Parkes's notes were impossible to execute. For instance, he suggested staging a mass prison escape in which the prisoners literally tear down the prison walls. Considering that The Last Castle was shot at a real prison, the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville, with a historical legacy—it was where James Earl Ray was held after he killed Martin Luther King Jr.—tearing down the walls was not happening.

"Walter had a lot of radical ideas that he was suggesting when we were already shooting," said one person on the set. "They were challenging because they were coming from the head of the studio. There would be long conversations, then he would fly down and try to come to some sort of compromise. There wasn't a purity of vision on the film."

After a whirlwind, twelve-week shoot, The Last Castle wrapped in late June. Almost impossibly, and with the assistance of two editors—one who worked on dialogue and one who worked on action sequences—Lurie had a rough cut to show DreamWorks a month later. Now there were less than two months to test and edit the film and have it in theaters. Lurie and the DreamWorks crew, which now included Katzenberg and Press, began shuttling back and forth on the DreamWorks jet to San Diego for test screenings. At one of the first screenings, a reel broke fifteen minutes in, causing a fifteen-minute pause in the proceedings.

During this interruption, Katzenberg marched out of the theater and announced to Lurie: "The movie's great, but you're going to have to shorten the action sequences. I can tell you, you've given them too much."

"But Jeffrey—" Lurie began, thinking to himself, How can he say that after seeing just a snippet of film?

"Rod," Katzenberg interrupted. "It's gonna work."

Katzenberg also predicted the movie wouldn't test higher than 80 percent, "because the lead character dies at the end and people don't want to see that."

"So the polls come back, 77, 78—he was exactly right," Lurie said. "When people write down what they don't like: Redford dying. Jeffrey knew exactly what was right and what was wrong with the film."

Redford, who had already begun to withdraw from the movie during postproduction, unhappy about how the film was being edited, refused to do press for The Last Castle.

"When he saw it was being turned into an action movie instead of a character drama, he thought it was being cheapened and trivialized, and he stopped cooperating," said one source.

Making matters worse, Redford lambasted DreamWorks in the media. In an interview with Sydney's Sun-Herald, he griped about a change in the film's ad campaign that occurred following 9/11. Then he went on to say that he never saw the finished film and to slap DreamWorks for "jamming [Last Castle] into release way early," an act, he said, that was "unfair to the director and the film."

"None of the actors thought the movie should have come out that soon," Redford said. "The director should have been given a little more time to complete the work."

Lurie seemed surprised when he was told about Redford's comments.

"He did see the finished film," Lurie said. "He means he didn't see it with color timing. I've had nothing but good conversations with him."

ImageMovers' relationship with DreamWorks had gone from bad to worse, but Robert Zemeckis's production company remained bound to the studio until the end of 2002. Cast Away and What Lies Beneath remained ImageMovers' only DreamWorks films. Meanwhile, DreamWorks (Spielberg aside) was still resentful of how much money the director's friend's company was getting in terms of overhead and development funds.

The situation reached a head when, for the first time, Rapke employed the clause in ImageMovers' contract that allowed the company to "put" a film to DreamWorks—in other words, force DreamWorks to green-light a movie. When Katzenberg refused, Rapke was furious. Not only was Katzenberg reneging on a deal, but, per ImageMovers' contract, the company was not able to shop the project to other studios.

According to sources, a blowup ensued, with Katzenberg insisting on restructuring ImageMovers' deal so that it was much leaner, and in line with more traditional production deals. He also wanted, essentially, to lose Rapke. Zemeckis finally agreed to a slimmer deal, one that was no longer exclusive to DreamWorks, though Rapke stayed.

To all involved (except Spielberg, who was still out of the loop as to what was transpiring), it was clear that DreamWorks was no longer the best fit for ImageMovers, and Zemeckis and his colleagues began quietly looking for a new deal. It didn't take long before Warner Bros., eager to be in the Zemeckis business, opened its arms. The deal got so far along that ImageMovers was looking at office space on the Warner's lot when Spielberg got wind of what was going on and "went ballistic," according to one source.

Katzenberg was then dispatched to ImageMovers' villa to make amends. For a full hour, he sat with Rapke behind closed doors, receiving a verbal mauling. Rapke must have been enjoying—at least a little—the satisfaction of seeing the man so desperate to get rid of him in supplication mode. "We want you here," said Katzenberg, trying to calm Rapke, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation. Besides offering goodwill, Katzenberg also expressed reassurance that things were going to change at DreamWorks for the better.

Katzenberg then sat with Zemeckis in his office for another hour, saying more or less the same thing, but in a less charged setting. Zemeckis did not scream or curse.

In the end, Katzenberg's mission was successful. He had fixed another problem for Spielberg. ImageMovers remained at DreamWorks—at least for now.