DreamWorks’ Movie Pipeline Slows to Trickle

DreamWorks SKG set Hollywood abuzz in June 2001 with its surprise hire of Michael De Luca, a brash baby mogul who had made New Line Cinema a hot stop for cutting-edge fare such as “Austin Powers” and “Boogie Nights” during his 16-year run there.

De Luca’s mission as the company’s new head of production: to help boost output to a dozen pictures a year, finally putting DreamWorks within reach of the major studios.

Two years later, De Luca is still in place, still wrapped in his trademark black T-shirt. But the DreamWorks pipeline, instead of gushing, has slowed to a trickle. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s favorite executive wunderkind, who is 37, appears still to be learning the peculiar dynamics of the house that Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg built.

Neither De Luca nor other DreamWorks executives would comment for this story. In more than two dozen interviews, however, executives, producers, agents and others with close knowledge of the company say the current slowdown owes much to conflicting impulses at the heart of DreamWorks’ identity as a studio wrapped around a filmmaker-owned production company -- and a sometimes uneasy mesh among the people who run it.

“DreamWorks is a very unconventional studio run by filmmakers who have strong creative opinions,” producer Tom Pollock said. His production boutique, Montecito Picture Co., co-owned with director Ivan Reitman, has the rare distinction of having made three films in four years for DreamWorks, with another one shooting now.

Other producers affiliated with the studio have found it much slower going. In all, DreamWorks is expected to release just seven films this year, including the animated “Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas,” set to debut July 2. Recently, the company scheduled “Envy,” a Barry Levinson-directed comedy, for release in mid-August. Woody Allen’s “Anything Else” follows in September and then “House of Sand and Fog,” an Oscar bet that stars Ben Kingsley.

The company’s biggest payoff is likely to come from its stake in films it won’t distribute domestically -- this summer’s “Seabiscuit,” which it shares with Spyglass Entertainment and Universal Pictures; “The Cat in the Hat,” a Mike Myers Christmas picture that it splits with Universal and Imagine Entertainment; and “Paycheck,” a John Woo-directed science fiction thriller to be co-financed and released by Paramount Pictures.

Missing so far is that De Luca sizzle. Although the executive had a decent hit this year with Montecito’s low-budget comedy “Old School,” he did less well with the Chris Rock comedy “Head of State” and the action-heavy “Biker Boyz.”

But more than finding hits, De Luca’s toughest job as production chief is how to coexist with the radically different style of his immediate boss, Walter Parkes.

The company’s live-action movie operation has been largely shaped by DreamWorks Pictures co-head Parkes, a former screenwriter who, with his wife and co-chief Laurie MacDonald, once ran Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. Parkes remains closely aligned with the superstar director and his preference for high-end projects such as last year’s “Minority Report” and “Road to Perdition.” With Katzenberg focused on animation, his preferred domain, Parkes’ intense, hands-on approach has become DreamWorks’ signature style.

Meanwhile, De Luca, known as a street-smart operator adept at “working the town,” was brought on board by the like-minded Katzenberg. He was supposed to break a stop-and-start rhythm that grew from Parkes’ habit of focusing closely on a small cluster of movies one year, while finding little time to prepare a slate of films for the following year. De Luca was also meant to bring DreamWorks a new openness and with it some younger, hotter, more freewheeling pictures.

The two approaches may yet find their balance. Company executives are scrambling to assemble as many as 10 films for release next year, including a full complement from De Luca, along with pictures as promising as “Collateral,” in which Michael Mann will direct Tom Cruise, and the computer-animated sequel “Shrek 2.”

An expanded movie slate would be helpful as the studio heads toward 2006, when its biggest investor, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, can begin cashing out his stake. Forbes magazine recently reported that Allen would be entitled to the first $670 million in distributions, plus nearly a quarter of any payouts in excess of $1 billion.

But success may depend on coming to terms with some tendencies deeply embedded in DreamWorks’ corporate DNA.

“They have the burden of a studio but the mentality of a production company,” one executive with close knowledge of the operation said of its preference for auteurism over volume.

Studios typically release as many as two dozen films a year to justify the expense of their marketing and distribution operations. DreamWorks, considerably smaller than Universal or Paramount, needs about 12 films a year to support its overhead. But it has never been in a hurry to make that mark.

Founded in 1994, the privately held DreamWorks didn’t release its first film, “The Peacemaker,” until three years later. True to their production company roots, its top film executives eschew conventional titles and remain headquartered on the Universal lot in Spielberg’s famous Amblin quarters -- a sprawling bungalow with the look of a Santa Fe hotel, where morning visitors are offered a courtyard breakfast while they wait. DreamWorks also maintains an elaborate, Italian-style animation villa in Glendale.

One of the company’s deeper idiosyncrasies is an unusual system that favors projects championed by Parkes and MacDonald. Under their contracts, the pair not only head the studio but can personally produce movies of their choice, with Spielberg’s blessing.

Last year, Parkes was credited as producer of five films, four of them made or co-produced by DreamWorks and one, “Men in Black II,” made with Amblin and Sony Corp.’s Columbia Pictures. On two other DreamWorks films, “Road to Perdition” and “The Tuxedo,” he was executive producer. MacDonald was similarly credited on a smaller number of pictures.

In fact, Parkes received credits on all but two of the studio’s productions last year, which contributed to the company’s uneven release pattern. He isn’t a producer on any of the films in this year’s smaller-scale slate. Next year, he will be credited on “Lemony Snicket’s a Series of Unfortunate Events,” the Spielberg-directed “Terminal” and perhaps others.

Parkes and MacDonald can collect at least $1.5 million as an advance against 4% of studio revenue when they produce a movie, according to people familiar with their arrangement. Joe Roth at Revolution Studios, Harvey Weinstein at Walt Disney Co.’s Miramax unit and even De Luca while at AOL Time Warner Inc.’s New Line Cinema have often taken executive producer credits; but to act as full producer with substantial fees is extremely rare among Hollywood’s studio executives.

And Parkes -- a 52-year-old Yale graduate who was best known as a writer and producer of the computer-hacker romp “Sneakers” before joining Amblin -- takes a strong hand in shaping projects and has been known to rewrite pages himself.

Such heavy creative involvement can be galling to writers and filmmakers, though directors such as Gore Verbinski and Sam Mendes returned for encore performances at DreamWorks. Some observers agree, moreover, that Parkes’ input has produced consistent quality and, sometimes, superior results. Parkes has been credited as producer or executive producer of “Minority Report,” “Catch Me if You Can,” “Gladiator” and “The Ring,” among others.

But Parkes’ keen attention to his own films has tended to bottleneck production, creating no small frustration among other producers who are vying for a piece of the DreamWorks action. A number of independent producers under DreamWorks deals are largely working at other studios, while finding it difficult to get a go-ahead from Parkes and De Luca.

At the same time, some De Luca projects have taken a back seat, at least temporarily, while Parkes-driven films moved ahead.

In one such instance, screenwriter Robert Gordon was assigned to work on a “Matt Helm” script for producers Suzanne and Jennifer Todd, who signed on to a DreamWorks deal after having launched the “Austin Powers” series with De Luca. But Gordon was interrupted by Parkes, who drafted him for a rewrite on his own “Lemony Snicket,” a Jim Carrey movie that DreamWorks is co-producing with Paramount. The Todds declined to comment.

Gordon, whose credits include “Men in Black II,” is not expected to resume work on “Matt Helm” for another six weeks. But it’s not unusual for a “go” project such as “Snicket” to take priority over a property in development.

Still, such encounters haven’t made it easier for De Luca and the company’s family of producers to create a full slate -- which can take several years even in the best of circumstances.

Some observers argue that the process of launching pictures is getting slower even at places less peculiar than DreamWorks.

“It’s not easy to get a movie made there, or anywhere, because the making and marketing are so expensive, and everybody is more selective than before,” noted Pollock, whose company is currently shooting a comedy for DreamWorks, having previously made “Road Trip,” “Old School” and “Evolution” for the studio.

For the rest of the year, in any case, the Dream Team’s tap will still be stuck at little more than a drip.