Peter Guber

Howard Peter Guber (born. March 2, 1942 in Newton, Massachusetts) is an American film producer and executive.

Career

Notable films produced

Peter Guber was formerly the studio chief at Columbia Pictures and chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures. He is now chairman of Mandalay Entertainment, which he founded in 1995. The films he has produced—including Midnight Express, The Color Purple, Rain Man, and Batman, among many others—have reportedly earned more than $3 billion in worldwide revenue, and have been nominated for numerous Academy Awards.

Casablanca Record and Filmworks

Guber resigned from Columbia in 1976 and formed Filmworks, Inc. In 1977, he merged his company with Casablanca Records headed by Neil Bogart to form Casablanca Record and Filmworks, Inc.. At Casablanca, Guber focused on television production. At the same time, he independently produced The Deep for Columbia and the Academy Award-nominated film Midnight Express. This period of Casablanca's history and Guber's part in it was also marked by notorious excesses and was written up in the best selling book Hit Men by Frederic Dannen - a series of chapters telling stories from the high point of the "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll" period of recorded music in the late sixties and seventies. Guber won his first of two National Association of Theater Owners Producer of the Year award in 1978.

Polygram Filmed Entertainment and the Guber-Peters Entertainment Company

Guber formed PolyGram Pictures in 1979 and served as Chairman of the Board and co-owner until selling it in 1983. With business partner Jon Peters, Guber formed the Guber-Peters Entertainment Company (GPEC) that year; GPEC went public in 1988, merged with Barris Industries, and was sold to Sony Corporation in 1989 for $200 million. Guber then became Chairman of the Board and CEO of SPE.

Columbia Pictures

Guber's most important contributions to Sony Pictures Entertainment were a company restructuring and, perhaps more importantly, rebuilding the lot located at Culver City for over $103 million, making it a state of the art film and TV production facility. Within the Sony empire, Guber played a substantial role in the creation of such Columbia Pictures' box office hits as A Few Good Men, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Groundhog Day, and In the Line of Fire along with his other major financial successes released through Sony's TriStar Pictures banner that included Terminator 2, Basic Instinct, Sleepless in Seattle and Philadelphia. Sony achieved a box office market share of 17 percent as well as leading the industry with nine $100 million dollar blockbusters and twenty-one $50 million dollar domestic hits garnering a remarkable 120 Academy Award nominations, the highest four-year total ever for a single company. Critics point out that "market share" is a negligible indicator of a studio's success as it fails to factor in a film's profitability. Gruber was notorious for luring creative producers to Columbia with lucrative deals then allowing them to languish by failing to "green light" their projects. Frustrated producers were eager to flee to competing studios where they could actually get their movies made.

Guber was fired by Sony in 1995 after Sony reported a $600 million loss and wrote-off a further $4.8 billion resulting from the reduction in value incurred under Guber. At the time, this was the greatest single write-off in corporate history and marked the end of an unprecedented string of losses and failures under Guber's management at Sony Pictures. This brief but costly period of Sony Pictures history was chronicled in a best selling book by Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters entitled Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood.

Mandalay Entertainment

Guber then formed Mandalay Entertainment Group, where he is Chairman and CEO, to produce films and television shows. Mandalay finances and produces films in the U.S. and internationally; Universal Pictures is its primary distributor.

Recent activities

Now also a full professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, Guber also appears each week at 11 a.m. ET/PT on AMC in the interview show Shootout (formerly "Sunday Morning Shootout") with Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart. Bart and Guber also co-authored the book Shoot Out: Surviving Fame and (Mis)Fortune in Hollywood.

In November 2006, Guber was elected to the board of directors of the GoFish corporation, an online video site. Guber stated: "Professional content creators will need to adapt to a fundamentally new form of storytelling, one where users become a critical part of the creative process. GoFish is one of the few companies in this space that wants to differentiate itself by collaborating with the scarcest resource - the talent. As a creative entrepreneur in filmed entertainment in all media for over 30 years, I find this medium incredibly exciting."

Films produced

• Balls Across the Nose (2007) .... executive producer .... producer
• Beard (2005) .... executive producer .... producer
• Into the Blue (2005) .... executive producer
• The Jacket (2005) .... producer
• A Thousand Roads (2005) .... executive producer
• Alex and Emma (2003) .... executive producer
• With Honors (1994) .... executive producer
• This Boy's Life (1993) .... executive producer
• Batman Returns (1992) .... executive producer
• The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) .... executive producer
• Tango & Cash (1989) .... producer
• Batman (1989) .... producer
• Rain Man (1988) .... executive producer
• Gorillas in the Mist: The Story of Dian Fossey (1988) .... executive producer
• Caddyshack II (1988) .... producer
• Who's That Girl (1987) .... executive producer
• The Witches of Eastwick (1987) .... producer
• Youngblood (1986) .... executive producer
• The Color Purple (1985) .... executive producer
• Clue (1985) .... executive producer
• Flashdance (1983) .... executive producer
• An American Werewolf in London (1981) .... executive producer
• Midnight Express (1978) .... executive producer
• The Deep (1977) .... producer

Trivia

Lists of miscellaneous information should be avoided. Please relocate any relevant information into appropriate sections or articles. (March 2009)

Guber served on the jury which heard the Winona Ryder shoplifting case.^[1]

Guber is notorious for borrowing the Oscar statue won by Keith Forsey (for Best Music, Original Song: "Flashdance - What a Feeling") and getting paparazzi to snap photos of him holding the award statue...even though Guber himself had not been nominated in any category.

Further reading

• Griffin, Nancy; Masters, Kim (1996). Hit & Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony For a Ride in Hollywood. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-80931-1. 

References

External links

• Peter Guber at the Internet Movie Database
• [1]
• Sunday Morning Shootout at AMC
• Sunday Morning Shootout Best of Season 1 on DVD
• PBS Frontline Interview with Peter Guber
• Peter Guber Bio at Mandalay Entertainment
• Hit Men
• Hit and Run
• Shoot Out
• Peter Guber Interview Transcript