Mr. Bronfman, Get Ready for Your Extreme Close-Up : Can the New Head of MCA Teach the People Who Run Hollywood a Thing or Two About Entertainment

Hollywood’s newest player is sitting in a temporary office on the top floor of MCA Inc.’s charcoal-colored tower on Lankershim Boulevard in Universal City. It’s somewhat lonely at the top for Edgar Bronfman Jr. on this day, an unusual period of solitude for someone who has become the most watched man in Hollywood. There are no other executive offices on the floor. The elevator doesn’t even travel there. One has to ride it to the 15th floor, where most of MCA’s top managers work, then climb a flight of stairs.

Bronfman sits in an elegant, wood-paneled office that has the feel of a living room. There is a big-screen television and stereo system, supplementing couches, a coffee table and a wooden desk. This was once the office of the late Dr. Jules Stein, who founded MCA and ran it with Hollywood patriarch Lew Wasserman, 82, who is working one floor below Bronfman.

Bronfman is less than half Wasserman’s age, having just turned 40. And as chief executive of Seagram Co. Ltd., he has plunged the $11-billion beverage and liquor giant into Hollywood by buying 80% of MCA and its Universal Pictures unit from Japanese electronics maker Matsushita Electric Industrial for $5.7 billion. He is betting a good chunk of his family’s fortune, estimated at more than $4 billion and invested largely in Seagram, that he can prove the exception to the rule, an outsider in Hollywood who finally succeeds. Plenty of insurance companies, electronics giants and soft-drink makers all thought they could make it but ended up bailing out. Should Bronfman fail, he risks not only similar public embarrassment, but probably the wrath of every Bronfman heir born during the next century.

An Armani-clad figure, the lanky, impeccably coiffed Bronfman has been described by reporters as “Hollywood handsome.” Augmenting that handsomeness is a neatly trimmed, reddish-brown beard that adds maturity to a face that otherwise would look a decade younger. Today, Bronfman is following a breaking development at entertainment giant Time Warner Inc. About two hours earlier, he was meeting with MCA’s top music executive, Al Teller, when they were interrupted by the news that Time Warner’s domestic music chief, Doug Morris, had been abruptly fired. The dismissal of the grandfatherly Morris has rocked the entertainment community, and Bronfman wants to know if it hurt Time Warner’s stock price.

He has two competing reasons to be curious. Turmoil at a competitor creates opportunities. But Seagram is also Time Warner’s largest stockholder, with nearly 15% of the company’s stock. Bronfman calls up the stock quote on his personal computer. He sees it wasn’t affected, but notes there wasn’t much time for it to react because the firing occurred shortly before the market closed.

Bronfman also has a more personal interest. He is a part-time songwriter, and his composing partner of 20 years, Bruce Roberts, is about to release his debut pop album on Time Warner’s Atlantic Records. Bronfman wrote three songs, including the title track, “Intimacy,” for the album, using the pen name Junior Miles. (Miles is his middle name, and Junior stems from the fact he shares his father’s name.) Morris had championed Roberts’ album, which is how Bronfman met and got to like the music executive.

Later that afternoon, Bronfman tracks down Morris, still upset over his firing, by car phone and tells him that he and Teller would love to make him a home at MCA. “Doug, have you seen ‘The Shawshank Redemption?’ ” he asks Morris. The Oscar-nominated movie includes a scene in which a down-and-out character played by Morgan Freeman, on parole from prison, is finally reunited on a beach with a friend from prison, played by Tim Robbins. Yes, Morris says, he saw it.

“Well, you’re the guy who just got out of prison, and I’m the guy who is waiting for you on the beach,” Bronfman says. Within three weeks, Bronfman established Morris as head of Rising Tide, a new New York-based record label for MCA whose name was inspired by Bronfman’s beach analogy.

Since buying control of MCA on June 5, Bronfman has been positioning himself as that guy on the beach for a lot of people in Hollywood. To that end, he three weeks ago signed one of Hollywood’s most popular talent agents, Ron Meyer, president of Creative Artists Agency, as president of MCA in a move that shocked Hollywood. Bronfman declared the signing of Meyer, whose clients included Tom Cruise, Demi Moore and Sylvester Stallone, as an attempt to make MCA “the most talent-friendly studio” in town.

Ironically, the move came just after negotiations between Bronfman and Meyer’s partner, Michael S. Ovitz, broke down over a number of issues, including the $250-million-plus pay package and Ovitz’s reluctance to leave the agency he founded.

The breakdown of the Ovitz talks became a public spectacle. It raised questions both from those who thought the kind of compensation Bronfman was offering was excessive for a publicly owned company to those who questioned Bronfman’s ability to close the deal.

“It was a debacle that was handled poorly because it was out in the open, but it wasn’t a dumb thing to do if he could have gotten a deal,” says one top Hollywood executive.

In contrast, the Meyer deal was handled smoothly and won him wide praise. Bronfman is “making all of the right decisions. He has a love for this business, and he wants to grow with it. He’s the next Steve Ross,” says music mogul David Geffen. DreamWorks SKG, the new studio Geffen formed with former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and director Steven Spielberg, last month negotiated a film distribution and music alliance with Bronfman.

Hyperbole aside, Bronfman is not Steve Ross. The legendary former head of Time Warner, who died in 1992, lavished stars and executives with attention. He listened to them, pampered them and, in return, got the kind of loyalty no one since has equaled in Hollywood. The fact that some people look to Bronfman to try to fill that role is evidence of how badly the entertainment community misses Ross’ charisma.

Yet, when it was announced that MCA has a new owner, press accounts and the Hollywood gossip mill portrayed Bronfman as a star-struck dilettante using his family’s money to buy control of a studio, the ultimate rich kid’s toy.

“This is such an easy story,” a weary, soft-spoken Bronfman says. “Rich kid movie producer comes back to own a studio. Look, I don’t need to do this for a living. My whole career will be judged on whether or not this was a wise transaction.”

Friends of Bronfman, some of whom are stars themselves, call it a bum rap. “It’s ironic that people can be as shortsighted to dismiss him as being star struck,” says actor and producer Michael Douglas, who has known Bronfman for 13 years. “I know he has a genuine affection for the film business. Through due diligence, and with the advice of others, he sensed an excellent opportunity to get into a business that a lot of people have tried to get into and failed. This was a very, very astute move.”

Someone else is also in his corner. “Before he came to town, people thought this was going to be a rich kid who was going to dabble in the business. But he knows what he’s doing, and he’s setting out to do it. I think he’s doing very well,” departing MCA President Sidney J. Sheinberg says.

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Whatever he does, it’ll be an improvement over Matsushita, whose ownership of MCA was considered a failure despite having “Jurassic Park,” the biggest box-office hit worldwide. While it does fine making camcorders, TVs and VCRs--the conveyors of entertainment--Matsushita never figured out how to exploit its investment. In taking over MCA, Bronfman found a nest of executives who detested Matsushita, which bought the studio in 1990 for $6.1 billion.

No one knows precisely when the relationship soured. But it’s a safe bet that things began heading downhill when, shortly after buying MCA, Matsushita suggested that the company make more hit movies and stop making duds, as if there was a quality-control system for films like there is for VCRs. The relationship later was exacerbated when Matsushita declined to support a potential bid by MCA for Virgin Records, which was eventually sold to Great Britain’s Thorn-EMI, or join ITT Corp. in a bid for the CBS network.

Skeptics abound over whether Bronfman will succeed, if for no other reason than his being an outsider. Hollywood isn’t easy to know. Sony, which dreamed of blending electronics hardware with enterainment “software,” last year posted a staggering $2.7-billion write-down on its books because of Hollywood investment problems. Other companies, ranging from soft-drink maker Coca-Cola to insurance giant Transamerica Corp., found Hollywood equally unfriendly. Why should Seagram be any different?

“Outsiders never understand the culture of the entertainment industry,” one top Hollywood executive notes. “They try to run a studio like they would any other of their businesses.”

Sensing the minefields, Bronfman appears to be on a crash course to decipher the Hollywood success formula. Since taking over MCA, one executive there notes, Bronfman has met with every “group and every subgroup of a group” to learn exactly what they do and to send a message that the days of Matsushita’s indifference are over.

He has ridden most of the attractions at the Universal Studios theme park, declaring as his favorite the “Back to the Future” ride. He’s even offering his input on movies. After viewing an early version of the problem-plagued Kevin Costner film “Waterworld,” which at about $180 million is Hollywood’s most expensive movie of all time, Bronfman suggested that the film be trimmed, that Costner’s character and the romantic story line be better developed.

Anyone who has looked at Bronfman’s management style would see that he is anything but passive. One of Bronfman’s best friends, advertising executive John Bernbach, recalls dining with his wife at a New York restaurant a couple of years ago with Bronfman, Bronfman’s wife, Clarissa, and Bronfman’s mother-in-law. The party finished a bottle of Seagram’s Mumm Champagne, so another was ordered. The waiter apologized, explaining that that was the last bottle in stock.

After the main course, Bronfman excused himself for 20 minutes before returning for dessert. The next day, Bronfman told Bernbach that he had walked into the kitchen to ask the owner why the restaurant had run out of his product. It turned out to be a supply problem on the Seagram end, he told Bernbach, so he fixed it.

On another occasion, Bernbach recalls, he and Bronfman were at a bar in which the bottle of Seagram’s Chivas Regal scotch was in the second row of bottles, rather than in the front, where people would see it more clearly. Bronfman repeatedly asked that the Chivas be placed in front. “He wouldn’t leave the bartender alone until he moved it,” Bernbach says.

That kind of obsession for involvement couldn’t contrast more with Matsushita’s stony silence. “We now have an ownership that cares very much about what we are doing and wants to support us in doing it well. That is a big change from the ownership we had in the past five years,” MCA Vice Chairman Tom Pollock says.

More important, Bronfman has the cash to do it. The same week he negotiated the agreement to buy MCA, he, in an unrelated deal, netted $7.7 billion for Seagram when the company sold its nearly 25% stake in chemical giant Du Pont back to the company. It was the largest such transaction in Wall Street history.

Bronfman says he has a singular goal: to use MCA to generate better than average returns for Seagram investors. He isn’t spelling out yet exactly how he’ll do that, although some steps are obvious. For starters, he needs to fix what’s wrong. MCA has long depended too much on a handful of filmmakers, especially “Jurassic Park” and “Schindler’s List” director Spielberg, whose Amblin production company has had a hand in most of MCA’s major hits.

To that end, Meyer’s hiring should go toward developing a broader range of relationships with Hollywood talent. Even so, some industry executives believe Bronfman needs another executive with an extensive corporate background. The early betting is that Bronfman himself will fill much of that role, raising questions about whether he will be stretched too thin across the Seagram empire.

When he’s got the right people in place, he has another hurdle to clear. “Assimilating people into a united management is one of the most difficult things to do. First, you have the people who have been at MCA for years. Second, you have outsiders like Ron Meyer being brought in and, third, you have the Bronfman culture,” one rival studio chief notes.

Bronfman’s goal of making MCA “talent friendly” doesn’t provide much in the way of guidelines. Asked whether MCA would ever distribute the kind of rap music albums that Time Warner has issued--which critics say degrade women and promote violence while supporters argue their artistic merit--Bronfman will only promise that “we won’t put out hate music.”

In the meantime, he’ll be dodging the bullets fired by the press over “Waterworld,” which was scheduled to open this weekend. Rife with production problems and infighting, the film has become a symbol in the media of runaway Hollywood excess.

The good news for Seagram is that Matsushita was so eager to cut its ties to MCA that it swallowed most of the movie’s costs by keeping MCA’s debt. With perhaps only $50 million in marketing and final post-production costs to pay, Seagram stands a good chance to make a profit on a movie that by itself would be a major money loser.

MCA’s television division demands attention, too. It desperately needs to generate hit shows. It’s practically void of successful half-hour comedy shows and lacks original, first-run programs syndicated to local stations. By contrast, competitors such as Paramount, which developed such shows as the various “Star Trek” programs, have generated huge amounts of cash through syndication.

In addition, the company has been too cautious, partly because of Matsushita’s reluctance to invest. But, as one major investor put it, “They have to get rid of that [risk-aversion] culture and be more aggressive.” Cutting a deal with DreamWorks to distribute its movies overseas and distribute music as well was a signal that Bronfman plans to move more forcefully. An even bolder move would be to join in a bid for a television network such as CBS, as some in Hollywood expect of him.

Bronfman’s record in handling acquisitions is mixed. He was criticized on Wall Street for paying too much (about $900 million) for Martell cognac in 1988, a deal he spearheaded. But it soon became clear that cognac was a drink of choice in Asia, and sales took off, making Bronfman look smart. Seagram’s $1.2-billion acquisition of Tropicana Products in 1988 is helping Seagram develop a huge international juice business, but saddled the company with some under-performing products, notably a fruit drink sold in supermarkets under the brand Tropicana Twister. And the acquisition of SoHo Natural Soda flopped, with Seagram divesting the company in 1992.

Asked what Seagram brings to MCA, Bronfman acknowledges that there is virtually no synergy between the beverage business and entertainment. But he does believe Seagram brings to MCA a better grasp of global markets than most studios have. (He spearheaded Seagram’s push into Asia’s beverage market, pushing sales to $305 million last year from just $28 million in 1989.)

In Hollywood, everyone talks about the importance of the foreign markets, and the appetite in Europe and Asia for U.S.-made movies. It’s the reason Sylvester Stallone can command $20 million for a yet-to-be-named action film, and why “Jurassic Park” grossed twice as much internationally as it did in the United States.

Still, Bronfman thinks Hollywood views the foreign market too narrowly, pretty much as additional multiplexes where distributors can sell movie tickets rather than establishing entertainment businesses in those countries.

“It’s fine for people in the entertainment business to talk about foreign revenues, but that’s all it is,” he says. “That’s not a global business. That’s just a U.S. producer deriving revenue from foreign markets, which is different than having local businesses and local initiatives. I believe that Universal will have 70% to 80% of its revenue--like our spirits business--coming from outside of North America. That may take us 10 years, but that’s the way it should go.”

Closer to home, Bronfman knows firsthand the frustrations of dealing with studio bureaucracies. Fifteen years ago, in another business lifetime, Bronfman was a fledgling movie producer based on Universal’s lot. He wanted to paint his office, but discovered that “Universal white” was the only color permitted. He complained up the chain of command, finally reaching Ned Tanen, then head of worldwide production, who responded in an exasperated tone, “I hate this job.”

The end result, Bronfman says, was “I got a different color. And one of the first things that will happen here is we will make other colors available.”

He’s speaking metaphorically, but the point is clear. He disdains such rigid rules, although the first couple of days he was on the MCA lot he displayed a name tag, as signs around MCA warn all employees to do. It didn’t last long. Spending $5.7 billion does buy some things, one of which is that you don’t need a company ID, especially when you are the most watched person on the lot.

*

Bronfman is moving fluidly through a crowd of more than 50 people mingling in Montreal’s Le Centre Sheraton. Hovering a foot or so above the 6-foot-2 Bronfman are two boom microphones from television camera crews straining to keep pace.

Not long ago, Bronfman could walk down the street in this or any other city and hardly draw a glance. When Seagram first bought stock in Time Warner, owner of Warner Bros. studio and Home Box Office, a Seagram executive warned Bronfman to expect a lot of press. He scoffed at the suggestion. After all, Seagram’s investment in Du Pont was four times the maximum it would invest in Time Warner, and nobody had written about that in five years.

“He said, ‘You’re being naive,’ ” Bronfman says. “And I was.”

Now with MCA in his portfolio, Bronfman gets the star treatment. “It’s more difficult to do business in public than in private. There are parts of this I don’t like. The public nature is certainly one of them,” he says.

Pausing briefly to shake hands as if he’s running for office, Bronfman moves toward a door where a security man hands him a briefcase containing his speech materials. He slips through the door into a spacious ballroom overflowing with more than 1,000 people.

Bronfman and his family, who have owned Seagram since 1928, have returned to the city that remains Seagram’s historic and sentimental headquarters even though the bulk of its business is conducted on Park Avenue. The stockholders meeting will be used largely to explain for the first time to Seagram’s shareholders--in English and in French--why the company agreed to buy MCA as well as divest its Du Pont shares. It’s an unusual corporate cocktail Bronfman has mixed for his stockholders. One part Chivas Regal, a jigger of Tropicana orange juice, a shot of Absolut vodka, a drop of Martell cognac, a touch of CityWalk, one part Aerosmith and Reba McEntire, garnished with “Jurassic Park,” “Apollo 13” and “Murder, She Wrote.”

Whether shareholders like the taste is moot. There are three reasons why Seagram is buying control of MCA, and each is named Bronfman. The three--Edgar Jr., his father, Edgar Bronfman Sr., and his uncle, Charles, sit together at a table on the stage. They control about 36% of the company. Had any of the three objected to buying MCA, it would never have made the meeting agenda.

Bronfman delivers a 20-minute defense of the sale, stressing that the company bought it cheaply relative to the $10 billion that Viacom Inc. paid for Paramount Communications a year earlier. He argues that Seagram must put its money in investments likely to outperform the general stock market, and that entertainment is the best, and fastest-growing, business it could find.

His father calls his son’s remarks a “great speech.” But if there is confusion about the direction in which Seagram is headed, the next 11 minutes clear it up. A tape that resembles one long movie trailer rolls, giving a high-decibel overview of MCA. Stockholders used to hearing about Crown Royal’s market share in Asia or the new juice flavors that Tropicana will introduce next year find themselves viewing a tyrannosaurus Rex stalking actor Jeff Goldblum, action star Jean-Claude Van Damme kicking a villain across the cheek and B.B. King singing the blues.

The message: MCA is “entertainment for the 21st Century,” and Seagram will be there. The subtler message: It’s a new Seagram now, and if you don’t think you can stomach the ride, you better get off.

Not known to the audience is that a scene is missing from the tape as originally assembled. It’s from the movie “The Border,” which Bronfman produced in 1981. He is sensitive to criticism that he is star struck. So “The Border” scene was edited out. No matter that Bronfman is probably the only one in the room who would have recognized it. His message must remain pure: buying control of MCA is solely a business decision for Seagram, not a way for him to cozy up to stars.

Scrutiny like this is nothing new to the Bronfmans. When Bronfman’s father bought 15% of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1969 and briefly served as chairman, Bronfman Sr.’s late father asked whether his son was making good use of the family fortune. More to the point, liquor tycoon Samuel Bronfman asked, was he betting $56 million of the company’s money merely to meet starlets? No, Bronfman assured his father, the motive was to make money. His adventure in Hollywood didn’t last long because investor Kirk Kerkorian soon bought him out.

At the meeting, one stockholder, in lyrical speech, calls the latest venture a “very turbulent voyage,” contrasting it to the “safe harbor” Seagram enjoyed when it owned nearly 25% of Du Pont. All that required was sitting back and cashing dividend checks from the Delaware chemical and oil giant.

“The world is looking at you very, very carefully,” the man says before sitting down.

*

Although new to the management side of Hollywood, Bronfman is by no means a stranger to the creative end. He knows what it’s like to produce a box-office flop, knows the frustration of trying to interest indifferent studio executives in a project and knows what it’s like to peddle a song you love to which everyone else is lukewarm.

It’s hard to imagine entertainment barons such as Twentieth Century Fox owner Rupert Murdoch or Sumner Redstone, whose Viacom owns Paramount Pictures, scratching out such lyrics as “Where does our love go when love goes away?” “I bless you, I worship at your feet” or songs titled “If I Didn’t Love You.” Bronfman, in what spare time he has, jots such lines on his yellow legal pads, usually when he’s flying in Seagram’s Gulfstream-IV.

Bronfman is a romantic. Asked what he likes to write about, he says, “the usual things,” meaning love. At his 1993 wedding to his current wife, Clarissa, in Caracas, the band performed “If I Didn’t Love You” for their first dance. He and Roberts had written it for his marriage to Clarissa, who comes from a wealthy Venezuelan family. Bronfman’s songs have such titles as “Our Love Affair Is Over,” “Quiet Sound of You and I” and “Finding You.” His favorite composers are Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim. Asked to name his favorite movie, Bronfman cites a musical: “Cabaret.”

Bronfman and Roberts began their songwriting career when a music publisher introduced them to each other. “He was just some guy named Edgar,” Roberts says.

Housed in a blue, windowless office at 51st and Broadway in Manhattan, Roberts manned an out-of-tune piano, while Bronfman came up with lyrics. One of the first songs was “Sunshine,” recorded by country singer Diana Trask. She changed a couple of lyrics. Bronfman objected as if she had committed blasphemy, but later realized that’s the way the business works.

The two have continued to write on and off, usually with Bronfman faxing his lyrics to Roberts. The executive woke Roberts at 6:45 one morning with a call to read some lyrics he had written for a song Roberts was trying to finish.

“I didn’t think it would work. He kept saying, ‘Put it on tape,’ ” Roberts says. Roberts went back to sleep, then played it again later and liked it. The biggest recording the two have written is a ballad called “Whisper in the Dark,” which Dionne Warwick recorded in 1985.

Earlier this year, Roberts recalls, he needed one lyric that rhymes with the word or to complete the title song for the “Intimacy” album. Bronfman was in the middle of the two biggest deals of his life: getting rid of the Du Pont shares and buying control of MCA. But Roberts got five minutes.

He walked into his office and repeated the line. Bronfman paused, looked out over Park Avenue, then penned “You’re the savior I’ve been waiting for” on his pad. Roberts thanked him and left.

“There’s a simplicity to his lyrics, but they open up complex, relative thoughts. His words are very poignant, very passionate,” Roberts says.

Not everyone agrees. In 1989, a People magazine reviewer called the song “In Your Arms,” a Bronfman-Roberts composition that the duo Ashford & Simpson recorded, “insipid,” adding that he hoped Bronfman “can always fall back on the family business.”

Bronfman Jr. is the second child of Edgar Sr. and Ann Bronfman. He has three brothers--one works for Seagram, one is an investor and another teaches karate to children--and a sister who runs a yoga and meditation center. The Bronfman clan had built its fortune making Canadian whiskey, with the company originating in Ontario, Canada. Ann’s family was upper crust New York society, the Loeb fortune made in investment banking on Wall Street. They later divorced.

Although the Bronfman name was well known in Manhattan society, its connection to Seagram wasn’t immediately recognized when Bronfman Jr. was a boy. “They grew up when the name wasn’t that important. They were pretty much anonymous,” says Charles Chiara, a cousin of Bronfman.

An avid reader, Bronfman Jr. in 1970 one day found a script on his father’s table for a movie called “Melody.” He told his father that he should invest in it, backing a then-inexperienced producer named David Puttnam, who would later produce the Oscar-winning “Chariots of Fire” and briefly run Columbia Pictures. Puttnam became an early mentor to Bronfman, although they rarely see each other now.

Bronfman Sr. invested $450,000. Bronfman Jr. now had a choice unusual for a 15-year-old: return to summer camp or leave for England to work on the movie. He chose England.

While in London, Bronfman fetched coffee and ran errands. “I was a gofer,” he says.

It was here that he picked up a nickname that sticks to this day. A national advertising campaign was urging people to buy more eggs. Called Eggs for Breakfast, the phrase “E for B” soon became a familiar slogan. Since those letters were Bronfman’s initials, Puttnam began calling him an abbreviated “Efer.” A handful of close friends and family members still call him that.

A pudgy, rebellious youth and self-described “indifferent” student, Bronfman early on decided to shun college even though it was expected that all of the Bronfman children would attend. He liked writing songs and movies and saw no use for college. To this day, he says he doesn’t regret it.

It did, though, strain his relations with his father, who told him that if he didn’t go to college, he wouldn’t continue to support him. “He didn’t let me starve,” Bronfman says now. But he also wasn’t a walking automated teller machine.

That and some other disagreements, including Bronfman Jr.’s decision to elope with his first wife, actress Sherry Brewer, with whom he has three children, went against his father’s wishes. In 1991, Bronfman and Brewer divorced amicably.

With Puttnam’s help, Bronfman at age 17 got a chance to produce a movie called “The Blockhouse,” with Peter Sellers, about troops in World War II trapped underground. Bronfman says that at the time he thought it was the best script written. Now, he rolls his eyes when he says that, noting that nobody in their right mind would want to see such a depressing film.

All the while, he showed no interest in Seagram. He landed a production deal at Universal, where his “Efer Productions” turned out “The Border,” a drama about corrupt U.S. Border Patrol agents in Texas, starring Jack Nicholson, Harvey Keitel and Valerine Perrine. The movie was a box-office dud. Bronfman was only 26.

“ ‘The Border’ was a good picture, but it wasn’t a great picture. It had a sufficiently downbeat kind of quality. Those are the kind of pictures that have got to be great pictures. If you don’t turn in a great picture, that kind of movie doesn’t work,” he says.

Needless to say, he didn’t turn in a great picture, but says he learned a lesson that will be helpful now. “When you try very hard to do something excellent and don’t make it, it certainly helps you understand the creative process. It also makes you understand that this business is really hard. It gives me a better ability to understand and manage the business than if the picture I had made had been a great success,” he says.

While Bronfman produced movies, he and his father were at times barely speaking. It was at the premiere of “The Border” at which they broke the ice and brought up the subject of Bronfman’s joining Seagram. His brother, Sam, was good, the elder Bronfman told his second-oldest son. But you are better. At the time of the decision, he said he saw more of himself in Edgar Jr. than in Sam.

“I had a very long talk with my father,” Bronfman says. “I think one of the major factors in bringing myself to that point was that I had a career. It gave me the self-confidence to know I was joining the company because I wanted to. I felt both an obligation to the family that the third generation should carry on the work of the first two.”

Bronfman told his father--whom he calls Edgar when speaking about him--that he would try working for Seagram for a couple of months, and return to Hollywood if he didn’t like it. Bronfman says he loved it from the first day.

Bronfman insists he didn’t leave Hollywood because of a lack of success, as many have suggested lately upon his return. Quite the contrary, he claims. He had made a Jack Nicholson movie, something few producers ever get to do.

“I didn’t leave the industry with my tail between my legs to join Seagram because there was nothing else to do. I had spent 10 years getting to the point where I could say: ‘Hey, I know how this works. I can deal with a studio. I can do this,’ ” Bronfman says.

It was risky. Now he had a job where his father ran the company and people assumed he was there because of his name, not his skills. “I am the son of the chairman. I am young. Therefore, I have to prove myself more than someone else,” Bronfman says. That said, Bronfman adds candidly: “I don’t remember a day when the disadvantages of being who I am outweighed the advantages.”

Bernbach, son of a prominent advertising agency owner, says he and Bronfman used to joke about forming a club for sons who share the same line of work with their highly successful fathers. It’s something actor Douglas, son of film legend Kirk Douglas, says “ties us together.” “The easiest thing is not to give credit. I know what it’s like to not be getting proper credit due to the fact you are involved in the same business as a father who is very successful.”

In Bronfman’s case, he began to earn credit after being sent to Europe for Seagram in what amounted to on-the-job training. The operation was losing money, and the executive overseeing him there told him to expect even more losses. Bronfman took that as a challenge and put the operation in the black.

He immersed himself in other Seagram ventures as well. He led the company’s push into the wine cooler business in the mid-1980s. He personally selected actor Bruce Willis as the product’s pitchman, explaining to his father that it was an instinctive decision. Seagram soon led the field. All the while, Bronfman cultivated powerful friends, many of them with entertainment connections such as Ovitz, Wall Street investment banker Herbert A. Allen Jr. and entertainment executive Barry Diller.

In 1986, it was decided to announce that Bronfman was the eventual Seagram heir. The platform to trumpet the news was a father-son cover story in Fortune magazine.

Bronfman’s uncle, Charles, was miffed enough to make his feelings known to his hometown newspaper in Montreal. At the time, there were suggestions that he wasn’t happy that Edgar was being groomed for the job. Instead, Bronfman says, Charles was unhappy his brother violated corporate protocol by announcing the decision with a splashy magazine article without first discussing it with directors.

“A couple of bases weren’t touched,” Bronfman says today, adding that it was always his understanding from the day he joined Seagram that the top spot was his to lose. First, however, he ran it by his openly disappointed brother to make sure he was comfortable with it. Bronfman didn’t want the selection to cause any brotherly strain and considered his brother’s blessing critical. He got it. Bronfman formally assumed the chief executive title from his father last year.

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The genesis of Seagram’s Matsushita deal began in late 1994, when the company’s rift with Wasserman and Sheinberg blew up publicly. Tired of being trashed in the press by MCA executives, Matsushita hired advisers to assess its investment in MCA. In January, the late Seagram Chief Financial Officer Stephen Banner mentioned in a casual phone conversation with a lower-level Matsushita executive that Seagram might be interested in buying MCA.

After looking at such industries as perfume and fashion, Bronfman had decided a couple of years earlier that entertainment was the best investment choice. But he had failed to gain a seat on the board of directors of Time Warner.

MCA executives were kept in the dark. Negotiations started in March when Bronfman flew to Osaka, where Matsushita is based. Key to the deal was Bronfman’s ability to gain an exclusive negotiating agreement. He had seen the bidding for Paramount Communications, which didn’t even have a record company, soar to $10 billion in 1994 when Viacom’s Redstone and Diller became locked in a bidding war. In early April, a deal was reached in which Matsushita was so willing to sell control of MCA, it took a $1.9-billion loss caused largely by the yen’s strength against the dollar.

“My take on Edgar is that he bought MCA at a very attractive price, probably the most attractive price of recent studio acquisitions,” says Gordon Crawford, senior vice president at Capital Research Co., one of the nation’s biggest institutional investors in media and entertainment.

Adds Bronfman: “We paid wholesale.”

He signed the deal on Sunday, April 5, with Matsushita keeping the other 20%. Comedian Dennis Miller joked on his weekly cable show that it was the first time Seagram ever left a fifth on the table. Still, Bronfman’s timing turned out well. Recently, the studio’s “Casper” opened as a hit, as did “Apollo 13.” He is quickly assimilating into Hollywood--renting a beach home here, driving a leased Mustang convertible and mingling at movie premieres with the likes of “Apollo 13” star Tom Hanks and its director, Ron Howard.

Nevertheless, Bronfman remains bruised by some of the attacks immediately after the deal. Initial press reports erroneously had him buying 80% of the company for $7 billion, which touched off a wave of criticism that he was overpaying for his ticket into Hollywood.

Lately, however, that has been changing. Seagram’s stock has been climbing steadily, and some of the nation’s most astute entertainment investors are putting their money into Seagram stock. MCA’s music operation, led by its country music division and such rock groups as Live, has been a pleasant surprise for Seagram, turning in results far better than forecast. Still, there is an underlying uncertainty about where it all is going.

“It’s absolutely fair to say, ‘Look, they bought it well but will they be able to do anything with it, or are they going to do like Matsushita did and screw it up?’ ” Bronfman says. “But you can’t say we overpaid or start out with the presumption that the kid is crazy. The jury is out on the future, but demonstrably the kid is not crazy.”

He pauses, then reflects: “I’ll tell you what I think the real story is. The real story is this company has transformed itself. It has invested in a growth business versus a non-growth business. It bought very well, and the jury is out. Five years will tell whether we knew what we were doing.”