Los Angeles Times, October 10, 2005
"No."
That was the curt response allegedly sent by Bill Gates to DreamWorks, who asked Microsoft to partner with them on a gaming studio ten years ago. It was just one of the lofty ambitions of DreamWorks founders David Geffen, Steven Spielberg, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, whose company aimed to do so much more than it ever could.
"Steve and Jeffrey had all these bizarre ideas," recalled a former employee who has asked to remain anonymous. "Some were just weird, like opening a gigantic restaurant under the DreamWorks name. Others were near impossible, like creating an all-CGI animated series to air during primetime."
DreamWorks, a film studio that was once extremely popular and influential, was founded eleven years ago on Oct. 12. Over the next week we will be covering the company's history from its star-studded opening until its untimely demise a few months ago.
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Author's Note:
I picked up the book
The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks by Nicole LaPorte in a bookstore two years ago. It's not a very well-written book, but I found the saga of DreamWorks to be rather interesting. It came out with lofty ambitions in many artistic fields (from film to television to music to gaming to even internet videos) and ended up only influential in one - feature animation (and even that almost bankrupted the company).
Being inspired by the book and by
@OldNavy1988's timeline "American Magic: A Different History of Disney", I thought about making an alternate history timeline for DreamWorks. In 2013, Spielberg himself predicted that the film industry would implode by only producing big-budget blockbusters - this timeline will prevent that by making the "middle-class" film the standard.
The TL's title is inspired by DreamWorks's logo of the boy fishing on the moon - if DreamWorks were the boy they'd be fishing for Earth because their ambitions were so high.
Unlike many timelines on this site which cover many decades, this will only cover one: from March 1, 1995 (the POD for this timeline) to March 1, 2005.