That the countless claims and promises didn’t always jibe with reality was to be expected. Of course, DreamWorks did its best to deflect attention from its bad moves. “But what about a story without the DreamWorks’ spin?’’ Nicole LaPorte asks early on in her book “The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale Of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks.’’ A film industry reporter for Variety, LaPorte set out to tell the behind-closed-doors machinations of DreamWorks, the most hyped and ambitious entertainment venture of the past half century.
The central problem she faced was this: no participation from S, K, or G. None of the three would speak to her. Katzenberg even made calls warning sources not to talk to LaPorte.
So how do you tell the story of an empire when the emperors won’t sit for their close-ups? You interview lots of insiders, more than 200 of them, and hope their blow-by-blow accounts fill the hollow core. Compounding this, many of the secondary sources, understandably afraid to reveal anything too incriminating, insisted on anonymity. To make up the shortfall, LaPort bookends gossip with attributions like “according to sources familiar with Katzenberg’s thinking at the time.’’ Not that the author had a choice in the matter, but the omission of the founding fathers amid a cloak-and-dagger tone hurts the book.
On the plus side, we’re still privy to some serious dirt. We see Katzenberg’s attempts to bring down arch-nemesis Michael Eisner (his old boss at Disney) and best Pixar (the folks behind “Toy Story’’) at its own game. We witness muckraking Oscar campaigns between DreamWorks and Miramax.
We watch the studio’s inroads into video games and music hit dead ends and wince as the money pit of building a physical studio — what was to be a “giant dose of Ritalin’’ to focus a distracted Spielberg — gets deeper. More than $1 billion in investor capital evaporates.
