Rising Star at MCA Is the Point Man in Matsushita Talks
In the MCA Inc. office of Charles (Skip) Paul, according to one visitor, is a small sign that carries a plea for “three digits.”
The digits in question are $100, a price that top MCA executives have long hoped to get for each share of their company’s stock. More than most of his peers, Paul may be in a position to reach toward that prize.
According to MCA insiders and others, the 41-year-old executive vice president has emerged as a key player in the Hollywood company’s closed-door negotiations over its possible purchase by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. of Japan.
Along with Chairman Lew R. Wasserman and President Sidney J. Sheinberg, Paul appears to be one of only three MCA executives with intimate knowledge of the talks. Few details of the negotiations have been disclosed since word of the prospective buyout surfaced in September. But several people familiar with their progress have identified Paul as the MCA operative responsible for coordinating the company’s attempt to sell itself. The deal could be valued at $8 billion, if reports of a likely price range of $80 to $90 a share are correct.
Paul and Sheinberg declined to be interviewed, and both said they preferred that no attention be focused on Paul’s role in the discussions.
Some MCA insiders nonetheless say Paul’s current role has speeded his progress along a fast track that could make him a contender for the company’s presidency if Sheinberg becomes chairman when Wasserman, who is 77, retires. “I’ve always said Skip could be (another) Lew Wasserman,” one admirer says.
Others believe that the presidency would probably go to a divisional head, such as MCA film chief Thomas Pollock. Yet Paul clearly has struck an unusually close bond with Sheinberg since joining MCA in 1985 after six years with Warner Communications’ ill-fated Atari video game venture.
“To be close to Sidney, you have to be a reliable, straight, no-(nonsense) person. Skip is all of those things,” says David Geffen, a major MCA shareholder who has continued to manage Geffen Records since selling his company to the entertainment conglomerate this year.
Shortly after the Matsushita talks were disclosed, Sheinberg, Paul and Wasserman took a vow of silence intended largely to cool attention that might scare off the publicity-shy Japanese. The three shuffled travel plans to confuse market speculators and the press, and they quietly began laying groundwork for a deal that is still expected to take a month or more to complete.
A corporate insider who shuns publicity, Paul has risen at MCA largely by putting out fires. He spent much of the past two years wrestling with the company’s investment in Toronto-based Cineplex Odeon Corp. He also was MCA’s point man in 1989, when the company, in effect, deposed Cineplex chief Garth Drabinsky after challenging the theater company’s management and accounting practices. “As far as Garth is concerned, (Paul is) the Great Satan,” says one MCA insider.
Paul and Pollock joined MCA’s board last year, in a move that appeared to put them on a level with Thomas Wertheimer, a 52-year-old executive vice president who for years has overseen much of the company’s activity in pay TV, video and other new media.
At least one credential has served Paul well in MCA’s often-combative corporate culture: Like Pollock and Sheinberg, he is a lawyer by training.
Born in Long Beach, Paul attended Stanford University and the University of Santa Clara law school before his appointment as a law clerk to John Paul Stevens, who was then a federal appeals court judge in Chicago. When Stevens was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1975, Paul helped set up the justice’s new Washington office and has remained close to him since. “He was good. . . . I always knew he would do well,” Stevens says of Paul.
After three years with the San Francisco law firm Cooley, Godward, Castro, Huddleson & Tatum, Paul moved to Warner’s Atari unit. He served as general counsel and president of the coin-operated game division until some months after Warner sold it in 1984.
At MCA, Paul quickly became known as a “minister without portfolio,” whose projects have included the company’s efforts to establish theme parks abroad--and to iron out the bugs in its problem-ridden Florida park.
The work has had its frustrations. For instance, Paul spent months negotiating a painstaking agreement to sell MCA films and TV shows to the People’s Republic of China, only to have the Chinese government turn around and offer similar terms to other producers.
Although Paul has generally kept a low profile among flashier film and TV executives, he is at home in Hollywood’s inner circle. Among his friends are Jon Peters and Peter Guber, who run Columbia Pictures, which is owned by Matsushita rival Sony Corp.
Columbia insiders say the Sony team would be delighted to woo Paul away from MCA and its suitor, Matsushita. In the words of one Columbia executive: “(They’d) love to steal him.”
