Book review – “The Men Who Would Be King” by Nicole Laporte

Anyone with a half-decent knowledge of Hollywood history would had treated the hype that greeted the formation of Dreamworks with scepticism – how much would they really be able to change? Based on the track record of other companies, the most we could expect would be a handful of decent films and the inevitable folding – that happens with all mini studios, such as Seven Arts, Hecht Hill Lancaster and Embassy. (The exception is something like United Artists in the 50s which pioneered a genuinely different way of doing things). And that’s what happened with Dreamworks.

It’s a tale worth telling – not an epic struggle like Eisner vs Katzenberg or Cimino at United Artists, but worth knowing about. The three principals actually didn’t have that much to do with each other – David Geffen seemed removed from the company most of the time except for Dream Girls, Katzenberg was stuck in Animation, Spielberg floated in and out of the company. The driving force of the live action studio in the early days were the husband and wife team of Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, about whom I’d heard little – charismatic, smart, troublesome, with a great track record.

There are cameos by people such as Mike de Luca, Stacey Snider and Terry Press, and interesting tidbits like Rita Wilson sulking because she didn’t get cast as the mother in Almost Famous (Rita Wilson thinks she has that much pull??) The person who comes off best is Katzenberg – he founded the studio to get revenge on Disney only to have running the studio taken away from him and put into animation; he took it like a man, buckled down and worked his arse off.

The main problem with Dreamworks is they couldn’t figure out what they wanted to be. They could have been an artistic hot house a la American Beauty provided they kept their budgets down (eg Almost Famous cost a fortune) – or they could be a commercial mini studio (they made Transformers and had a good relationship with Paramount). The could identify talent – just not keep the bills down.

Laporte writes in a journalistic style, which means over emphasis on things like Oscar campaigns, box office results, and ridiculous personal feuds (eg Brad Grey making feux pas), and little on the quality of the movies. She also makes silly errors such as claiming films rarely get a standing ovation at Cannes. But it’s entertaining.