If you think this economy is causing problems for you, shed a tear for Steven Spielberg. As Kim Masters reports, DreamWorks, the film company that Spielberg co-founded in the '90s with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, "sold itself to Paramount in 2006 for about $1.6 billion, but the relationship with Paramount chief Brad Grey quickly soured. When contracts allowed it, DreamWorks partner David Geffen stepped out and stepped down. Spielberg and CEO Stacey Snider also left, planning to raise their own money and distribute their films through Universal. That's the studio that Spielberg has always considered his home. (He kept his offices there even after his company sold itself to Paramount.)" At the time, nobody thought that Spielberg would either be begging for pennies or sweating to close a movie deal anytime soon. But then the bottom fell out of the economy, and DreamWorks started ceding to Paramount its right to participate in the production of some hotly anticipated projects that it had developed, treating them as so many sandbags that needed to be tossed over the side. Of course, Spielberg has never lacked for a full plate, but at the moment he's been focused on Lincoln, the planned biopic starring Liam Neeson and written by Tony Kushner. Part of the idea behind the movie was to have it ready for release this year, as part of the celebration of Abe's 200th birthday, and Spielberg was hoping to begin shooting in a few weeks. But he was also hoping that he'd be able to raise the money. When he and DreamWorks found that tough sledding, they asked Universal, which was expected to ultimately distribute Lincoln, to chip in with financing. When Universal proved cool to that, DreamWorks entered into tentative, secret talks with Disney, talks that became a lot less tentative when it turned out that they weren't all that secret. When Universal, which thought it had an exclusive offer from DreamWorks, found out about the Disney negotiations, the studio pitched a fit and, in what Masters calls "an embarrassment that stunned Hollywood", told the aging golden boy and his company to go screw, "pushing DreamWorks into a hasty distribution deal with Disney—a deal less favorable, in certain respects, than the one that had been contemplated at Universal."

Lincoln is now in limbo, along with a few other DreamWorks projects (including Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones) that the studio doesn't want to relinquish its rights to but can't afford to fund or buy outright. Spielberg is hoping that Paramount will foot the bill on Lincoln--Masters notes that the decision will be made by "Brad Grey—the man the DreamWorks team treated for a long time as a mortal enemy." A couple of things make this more complicated than it might seem from a distance. For one thing, Spielberg's relations with Universal run so far back and so deep that nobody's sure whether their disagreement is just a little tiff--Spielberg still has his office on the Universal lot and "continues to serve as a consultant on the Universal theme parks, for which he collects a princely two percent of the gate from all of the parks outside Southern California." And nobody's sure about the commercial prospects of Lincoln: it's one of Spielberg's "serious" movies, and might well turn out to be less along the lines of Schindler's List in terms of popualar appeal than his previous attempt at dealing with the issue of slavery, the ambitious and much-unloved Amistad. So whoever gets in bed with Spielberg for this may not be beginning a long-term relationship with the world's most successful director; they could just be paying for one of his tax write-off projects before he gets over his mid-life crisis and goes crawling back to his first wife's house. (Meanwhile, Disney is said to be toying with the idea of tying its Lincoln-themed attractions at its own park to the movie by hiring Liam Neeson to supply the voice of the Robo-President, an idea that, if anything came of it, would surely have Universal lawyers parachuting onto the Disney CEO's front lawn.) No doubt this will all end up working out in a way that makes everyone involved feel just wonderful. Until then, writes Masters, "the spectacle of Steven Spielberg reduced from 800-pound gorilla to maybe 400-pound gorilla is enough to send shivers through even the iciest executives in the business."