Pride of Spielberg and Katzenberg takes a fall

It's pathetic really. So much of what happens in Hollywood has to do with pride and ego. Take DreamWorks, the movie studio co-owned by Steven Spielberg, which has just been handed a timely $1.2bn lifeline from the Indian entertainment giant Reliance.

DreamWorks was founded in 1994 because of wounded pride and damaged ego. Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of the company's founders, felt he had been terribly slighted by Michael Eisner, who then ran the Walt Disney Company. Katzenberg (right) had been Eisner's loyal lieutenant during Disney's most successful years and felt he should be better rewarded. Eisner balked and famously admitted his true feelings for his diminutive underling: "I hate the little midget."

Thus the slighted Katzenberg persuaded music mogul David Geffen and filmmaker Spielberg to join him in what was trumpeted as a grandiloquent venture: Hollywood's first

new fully fledged movie studio in 60 years.

Launched in October 1994 to enormous fanfare, DreamWorks offered its three principals and Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder who was its main financial backer, tremendous ego-gratification, including the cover of Time magazine.

DreamWorks was going to build a fabulous new studio which would have as much as 1.5 million sq ft of studio space as part of a huge 47-acre 'Entertainment, Media & Technology campus' which itself would be part of an even more massive development - on land once owned, appropriately enough, by Howard Hughes - which would include some 13,000 new homes, parks, shops, churches, museums and schools. And DreamWorks itself was to be not just a movie studio but a television, music and game production company.

Gradually, over the next decade, almost every aspect of this grandiose dream fell by the wayside. Not a single brick of the studio was ever laid. The television production company had some successes, including the mini-series Band of Brothers, but never found its footing. The music division was sold in