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The Dream Team: The Rise and Fall of DreamWorks: Lessons from the New Hollywood

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Almost 13 years ago, three of the most talented and most powerful people in Hollywood who also happened to be close personal friends -- Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen -- announced at a press conference that they were forming a new company that was later named DreamWorks. At that time, Katzenberg referred to the three founders as the "Dream Team," the business equivalent of the U.S. basketball team that won the gold medal at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. That was arguably the greatest basketball team ever assembled, beating its eight opponents by an average of 44 points. Its 12 members included Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.

Eleven years after the initial press conference, despite DreamWorks' successes (e.g. American Beauty, Gladiator, Saving Private Ryan, and Shrek), most of it was sold off or shut down and the three founders went their separate ways, pursuing new opportunities. What happened and, perhaps more to the point, what didn't happen? Why didn't DreamWorks continue with two or at least one of the founders still involved? Finally, what lessons can be learned from what is frequently referred to as the "New Hollywood"? Daniel M. Kimmel offers his answers to these and several other questions.

I found Katzenberg to be the most interesting of the three founders, in part because he had the most at stake and thus the most to lose. Because the litigation with the Disney organization had not as yet been resolved in his favor, he mortgaged his home to raise the investment funds his partnership with Spielberg and Geffen required. By then, Geffen had founded and sold at least two companies and was a billionaire. Spielberg was already wealthy (perhaps almost as wealthy as Geffen) and could always concentrate entirely on directing films. The relationships between and among the three were both complicated and fragile. The same can be said of DreamWorks' relationships with what is generally referred to as the "Hollywood Establishment." Kimmel examines all of these relationships with rigor and precision.

Among the many lessons to be learned from the rise and fall DreamWorks, one of special interest to be was what Kimmel has to say about entrepreneurs such as John Kluge and Rupert Murdoch "who were willing to take a chance on various deals where they might lose vast sums because the potential returns made the risk worth it...No one at DreamWorks was willing to play for those stakes." It is probable, for example, that the Playa Vista studio project (1,087 acres of commercial and residential development) was doomed from the beginning but it eventually fell apart because Spielberg and Geffen were told they had to start risking some of their own money on the project. However worthy the project, the company couldn't afford it. The lesson: If you want to "play with the Big Boys" (i.e., General Electric, NewsCorp., Sony, Time-Warner, Viacom, and Walt Disney), you better have deep pockets or at least the highly developed skills of a riverboat gambler.

There are no head-snapping revelations in this book, nor does Kimmel make any such claim. What he has done, as he previously did The Fourth Network: How FOX Broke the Rules and Reinvented Television, is to bring together all of the most relevant information about a company and its principals, absorb and digest it, and then share his thoughts about the significance of what he has learned. Because he learned a great deal about DreamWorks, so did I.

Despite not having access to the principal players, Daniel M. Kimmel has written the definitive book on the rise and fall of DreamWorks. He goes into great detail on the company's successes and failures, and presents an insightful analysis explaining what this means about Hollywood in general.

The Dream Team is a thoughtful book on the rise and fall of DreamWorks SKG. The author points out the main reasons why the company started by heavyweights, Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen with so much hype and promise failed to meet the promise. The author attributes DreamWorks failure outside of animation due to initially trying to do it all - film, tv, interactive games, distribution, and music. The large studios (Disney, Time Warner, etc) do all of this with success but as a startup it was impossible. The inability to do all of it of course made DW dependent on film which is difficult as every year you have a few winners and many losers. The larger reason may have been that two of the three founders (S and G) had very little to prove. Spielberg was first and foremost a movie maker and not a movie mogul. He made as many movies for other studios as he did for DW. Geffen having become a billionaire after two successful ventures in the music business had no interest in the day to day operations of DW. Katzenberg was different and hence Dream Works Animation SKG is still a successful independent company. The author also does an admirable job pointing out that none of the main players involved actually failed. In terms of both financially due to the sale to Paramount and the spin off of the Animation unit and from a film perspective some movies that will go down in history as exceptional.

The book was informative and easy to read at 206 pages. Mr. Kimmel is not a business journalist so I was left wanting more details of the business side. Also the narrative style as not as interesting as a similar book - "Disney War" which chronicles the downs, ups and then downs of the Walt Disney Company. However it fulfilled it's thesis of explaining why Dream Works failed.

... that you wouldn't already know from reading the papers or watching the news. It's simply an overview of events (and not all events) without any true insight. Don't waste your money!