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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Uh… Toldja? Lionsgate Sues Icahn

I guess blowing my own horn is obnoxious, but if you have been reading my coverage of Lionsgate/MGM, this lawsuit today wouldn’t be much of a shock. Analysis, not regurgitation.

What I don’t buy, in terms of the lawsuit, is that Icahn was setting Lionsgate up for the fall here from the beginning. I do think he completely believed that Lionsgate was being mismanaged. His argument, whether you agree with it or not – that Lionsgate should not be in the over-$30 million movie business – makes sense to a lot of people. And the lawsuit is clearly coming from LGF leadership that sees their exit becoming inevitable if Icahn buys up enough MGM debt to control the merged business… today at a much better price!.

What really changed in the last few months was the economics of the deal. When MGM debt holders decided to take the “No Merger” road, treading water with Spyglass, waiting for the market to improve, the map changed dramatically. Combine that with the ferocity with which the LGF Kings were fighting him off there and BOOM!, eating the whole thing to create value for himself was easily the best way out.

And then, yeah, he fucked over the guys at Lionsgate by agreeing to do what they asked him to do. Support a merger… a merger they have wanted to make happen for a long time.

They just missed one little thing. If he couldn’t buy up any more Lionsgate to take that company over, he was and is free to buy as much of MGM as he likes.

Scoreboard: Pissed Off Billionaire 3, Feltheimer/Burns/Drake 2

And the game plays on…

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7 Responses to “Uh… Toldja? Lionsgate Sues Icahn”

  1. Joe Leydon says:

    “I guess blowing my own horn is obnoxious…”

    Yes, it is.

  2. Don Murphy says:

    That’s okay it’s pretty much the only blowing going on in his life!

  3. Joe Leydon says:

    Don, that’s a low blow.

  4. cadavra says:

    God, I hope this blows over soon.

  5. Joe Leydon says:

    Well, judging from the number of comments this post has generated, I’d say most people have blown off reading it.

  6. Shillfor Alanhorn says:

    Don Murphy is the Ernst Stavro Blofeld of The Hot Blog. (Wait… that would mean DP = James Bond. Bad analogy. Scratch it.)

  7. Joe Leydon says:

    The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

The Hot Blog

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon