Universal Pictures, every mention
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every year anyone Ben Gilbert 18David Rosenthal 16Michael Ovitz 13
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Universal Pictures comes up
Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · Acquired
- ▶ 58:56 David Rosenthal But then they sign up with universal as their movie distributor, and they set up their headquarters on universal's lot, which is also a theme park.
The Walt Disney Company: The most successful enterprise for monetizing human nostalgia (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:29 Ben Gilbert And when you look at Disney's profits today, it is in a whole different league than Paramount or Universal or Warner Brothers or any of the other sort of classic Hollywood studios.
- ▶ 24:18 Ben Gilbert Do you know this story of the Universal lot?
- ▶ 24:21 Ben Gilbert So he rolls up to the Universal lot after getting there, having no job, no money, borrowing a bed, and he goes and has fake business cards made that says he is with Universal.
- ▶ 24:34 Ben Gilbert He's just the Kansas City representative, so no one at Universal would really know who he is.
- ▶ 24:57 Ben Gilbert I'm sort of like with Universal, and now I have experience, and can you give me a job?
- ▶ 30:44 David Rosenthal With Universal Pictures, the big New York film distributor, to on the sly create a new character to rival Felix.
- ▶ 31:51 David Rosenthal He's got the backing of Universal distribution behind it.
- ▶ 31:54 David Rosenthal That's a big hit for Universal, a big hit for Winkler and Mintz, and a big hit for the Disney Brothers cartoon studio.
- ▶ 35:58 David Rosenthal Universal does.
- ▶ 39:32 Ben Gilbert It was Universal, which was owned by NBC, which is now owned by Comcast.
- ▶ 48:18 David Rosenthal I mean, the only reason that the Oswalds worked, even though they were a ripoff of Felix, was because they came built in with the universal distribution.
- ▶ 48:33 David Rosenthal So, Walt lines up access to the cinephone sound recording system from a character named Pat Powers, who had actually helped create Universal, you know, some number of decades earlier, and then had gone on to become a sound accolade and…
- ▶ 54:18 David Rosenthal His partner in the sound technology, who had been one of the, you know, original universal executives, and they cut a deal where Powers will be Disney's direct distribution agent in return for just 10% of the gross revenue on the Mickeys,…
- ▶ 4:10:50 Ben Gilbert The business of movie production on its own is a terrible business, but the other studios, like, you gotta give Universal a ton of credit.
- ▶ 4:11:00 David Rosenthal Universal is probably the closest, but even then, it's not Disney.
- ▶ 4:11:05 Ben Gilbert I mean, isn't Universal running effectively the, the same playbook, but with
- ▶ 4:11:12 Ben Gilbert Less valuable IP or IP that they don't own.
- ▶ 4:11:14 Ben Gilbert So they have to sort of share it.
- ▶ 4:12:16 Ben Gilbert Universal doesn't own all of the rights to everything Harry Potter, but Disney for sure does own all the rights to everything Buzz Lightyear.
- ▶ 4:16:03 Ben Gilbert What's your favorite Universal song?
- ▶ 4:17:03 David Rosenthal Right, and Nintendo is partnered with Universal now for their perks.
SONY (75 years of electronics history in 3 hours) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:01:33 David Rosenthal At that point in time, Universal, I forget which shows they were, but they had two of the top TV shows that they, they created the shows.
CAA (with Michael Ovitz) · Acquired
- ▶ 14:37 Michael Ovitz Picked up, and Michael decided to write the script, subsequently brought in some help, and basically I went to Universal, which was where Stephen was housed, and I called the head of the company, Sid Scheinberg, and it was kind of a famous…
- ▶ 15:48 Michael Ovitz And I said, so Stephen doesn't control it, which means your first look with him disappears, but Stephen wants to make the movie at Universal.
- ▶ 16:06 Michael Ovitz I told him the deal, that we were going to be partners with Universal, dollar for dollar.
- ▶ 24:36 Ben Gilbert To Lou, when he's a studio head at Universal, that's gotta be kind of a wild, full turn of events to, to, you know, um, really get the better of that deal.
- ▶ 25:36 David Rosenthal But then he went to the dark side and he stopped being an agent and he, an MCA, his, his agency bought universal.
- ▶ 25:53 Michael Ovitz First, he bought the pre 1948 Paramount Library for Universal, and he made a decision basically that it was better economics on the other side of the deal.
- ▶ 26:15 Michael Ovitz Then he bought universal for a period, by the way, David, Lou was still an agent while he owned review television.
- ▶ 27:13 David Rosenthal How, how would you characterize Lou then and what he did with universal?
- ▶ 29:45 Ben Gilbert Meanwhile, MCA buys Universal, so you have one company there that's both an agency and a studio.
- ▶ 30:51 Michael Ovitz Was MCA to stay together as an agency and leverage him at Universal.
- ▶ 1:21:00 Ben Gilbert And then the second, I want to talk about, um, when you explore Universal and potentially becoming a studio head yourself.
- ▶ 1:21:31 Michael Ovitz Universal was under siege.
- ▶ 1:22:17 Michael Ovitz I couldn't afford for Universal or Columbia or MGM or Warners to shut down or to reduce the scope of their budgets.
- ▶ 1:30:41 Ben Gilbert And this is to buy Universal.
- ▶ 1:30:43 Ben Gilbert Or MCA Universal at the time, which they.
- ▶ 1:30:45 Michael Ovitz Which to buy MCA Universal.
- ▶ 1:31:09 Ben Gilbert And they ended up owning Universal for, gosh, was it 10 years before it sold to Vivendi, and then later to, or I'm sorry, it was Seagram's, right?
- ▶ 1:31:23 Michael Ovitz They had a very bad experience with Universal.
- ▶ 1:31:27 Michael Ovitz So when I brought the CEO of Matsushita to the universal lot after the deal was consummated, I had had lunch with Lou the day before, and I said to him, I said, Lou, you are the greatest executive in our business, but once you sell this…
- ▶ 1:32:43 Michael Ovitz And he and Sid ran universal like they didn't have owners, but they did.
- ▶ 1:35:56 David Rosenthal At Universal.
- ▶ 1:40:58 David Rosenthal If the Universal job had worked out, if you had gone to Universal, do you think things would have played out differently?
- ▶ 1:41:05 David Rosenthal I mean, Universal is a very different company than Disney, much more pure play focused on, on content at the time, uh, than, than Disney was.
- ▶ 1:41:58 Michael Ovitz I had a chance to buy from Universal, um, Penguin, Putnam, which is now the biggest publishing company in the world.