Sitting at the head of the political table in a one-party town is no mean feat, and for the men of Dreamworks, their lock on that much-contested position now looks to set to run into its third decade. Throughout the Clinton era, the President saw in Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen his veritable Hollywood soulmates in the international union of self-adoring baby boomers. The Dreamworks SKG company was in fact founded during a visit to White House, modeled in the heady sense of specialness that dominated those days.

After the diaspora for Hollywood Democrats of the Bush years, there was a mad scramble to see who would emerge as the new President's showbiz BFF, the 2008 campaign setting off a frenzy of industry fundraisers and check-writing. But when the dust cleared and when, just today, the ultimate announcement came, sitting at the head table once again was a certain trio of former partners, initialed SKG.

A couple others made the cut. Of course super-agent Ari Emanuel, having a certain White House Chief of Staff for a brother, got the nod. Also making the list, Sony Chief Michael Lynton, whom has been a heavyweight Democratic fundraiser with, as Nikki Finke outlines, ties to Obama since his first Senate run through his Chicago-raised wife.

Why however, did Obama give three of his five Hollywood seats to the retreads of the Clinton days? Why would he not use the dinner to elevate some brighter, younger activists?

Well, first there is always money. And they gives a lot of it. Katzenberg has written personal checks totally over $800,000 in the past decade while Geffen has shelled out over half a million out of his own pocket to various party coffers, not counting what they've raised from others (Interestingly, as is often the case with Hollywood fundraising the talent rarely feels the need to put much cash on the table, thinking they are doing more than enough by lending their name or showing their face. Steven Spielberg, in contrast to his partners, appears to have donated only around $100,000 from his deep as the Mariana Trench pockets.)

Geffen, of course, was a very vocal early, not just supporter of Obama's but detractor of Hilary's, publicly chastising his ex-friend in Maureen Dowd's column.

But most important perhaps, the former Dreamworks partners, perhaps more than any other showmen in the corporate age of Hollywood, look the part of elder statesmen. They have managed to consistently cultivate their public persona's — led by Spielberg's America's Director shtick — to keep themselves, through all the heavy turmoil of their career and company, looking like the grand old wise men of Hollywood; the boomers graduated into what passes in Hollywood for seriousness.

And even more than Hollywood, politics, above all, respects those who look the part. And so Hollywood's next generation of young upstarts will just have to cool their heels for a cycle or two more.

We already found two donations from David Geffen amounting to $200,000, and, confirming reports, another $100k each from a "self-employed" Brad Pitt and Ellen DeGeneres. And what of donations in support of the measure? We managed to ferret out an "unemployed" Mel Gibson living in Cameron Park who gave $250 to the Yes side. Alas, this was probably not the star but a gay-hater of lesser means bearing the same name, as Cameron Park is a community about 25 miles outside Sacramento. Then again, you never know where the Malibu land baron might have a little pied-a-terre. We'll just assume it is the Apocalypto director until we hear otherwise.

• Follow the money: Track contributors [LAT]

Having soured on the Clintons after raising huge sums of money for Bill and sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom—twice—Geffen found himself enamored of Obama from the first time he saw him on TV, giving a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "I thought he was a remarkable guy," Geffen told me today. "After I heard him give that speech, I called him up and said, 'You're going to run for president and I'm going to support you.' " Geffen says Obama laughed and said he was very flattered, but that he wasn't running.

Cut to two years later. "He called me one day and said with a laugh, ' David, I guess you're right. I am running for president and I'd like your support.' And of course, I said, 'You have it.' "

Geffen then leaned back in his Carbon Beach chaise lounge, asking his second assistant's second assistant to bring over the master to-do list. "Cross out 'Make Obama run for president,'" he instructed, as the assistant's felt-tip marker hovered past "Flowers for Seann," "Bollywood!" and "Smear toothpaste on all the doorknobs at Paramount."

• Geffen on Obama: 'He'll be an inspiring president' [LAT]

Such modesty! To a point, anyway: If and/or when his Reliance Big Entertainment honeymoon ever tapers off, Spielberg and DreamWorks president Stacey Snider really won't have the Geffen touch to help woo another international conglomerate into bed. But by then Spielberg, 62, will probably be ready to scale back anyway, and survival will be less about braintrust than brand (and the library it manages to develop with its new distribution partners at Universal). He shouldn't even be there now, if one of his more illuminating disclosures today is to be believed:

In describing Mr. Geffen’s role at DreamWorks, Mr. Spielberg likened it to a family relationship. “Jeffrey and I were like the kids,” he said, while Mr. Geffen built the house and saw that the bills were paid. [...]

By his own recollection, Mr. Spielberg was initially reluctant to join in creating the original DreamWorks studio, which was conceived by Mr. Katzenberg shortly after he was fired as chairman of the Walt Disney Company’s studio operation in 1994. But Mr. Katzenberg begged for a meeting, and asked to bring a friend. The friend was Mr. Geffen, who not only did all the talking, but insisted to Mr. Spielberg: “I am representing your best interests.”

That assurance was to become the theme of Mr. Geffen’s dealings with Mr. Spielberg, who describes Mr. Geffen’s efforts for him over the years as a kind of “altruism.”

Aww! That shouldn't imply Spielberg was in a hurry to race out the door at Paramount, though, where Geffen reportedly had a short stay in mind even before he clashed with Brad Grey in 2006 over credit for Dreamgirls; "I do not like change," the director told the NY Times. And even if we have Tom Freston's firing and other, seemingly circumstantial evidence to vouch for that philosophy, everyone knows the bottom line: The sex just isn't the same off the Paramount lot. Wait and see — he'll be back.

• David Geffen Makes a Sudden Exit [NYT]

The timekeeper cites three news sources in as many weeks that have noted that the $500 million Reliance/DreamWorks deal is "a week" away from closing. The Wall Street Journal was a little more vague when breaking the story last June, reporting only that the parties were "close" to a deal. A fun theory floated at the time suggested outgoing 'Works partner David Geffen fed the story to the Journal to entice a bid from Rupert Murdoch himself, whose 20th Century Fox is on the short (if unlikely) list of potential DreamWorks distributors:

"This is what [Geffen] does really well," a studio veteran said after details of DreamWorks' new deal fanned across the film industry like a Malibu fire. On close inspection, the source explained, those details are not only weeks away from being worked into a contract, but out there in a way to stir up interest from interlopers. Even the scoop by which the deal-in-progress became public — page one, above the fold, in The Wall Street Journal — appeared orchestrated.

Our own DreamWorks digging unearthed little new news, and our Magic 8-Ball isn't much help either, with the inquiry, "Will Steven Spielberg be a free man?" first turning up the response, "Ask again later," followed by, "Outlook good." Whatever — if it's good enough for the Journal, then it's good enough for us.

• Why Is This DreamWorks-Reliance Deal Taking So Long? [The Business Sheet]

Think of how easy it might have been to understand Arianna Huffington's bloggy animus toward Tim Russert if there were a book out chronicling all the sordid details of their decade-and-a-half-long secret feud. (There is.) Every gossip-mongering gadabout should know the full backstory on every spat, falling out, and long-running mutual antagonism in media. Below are the volumes no shelf should be without.

1. The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood, by Tom King

The Gist: A gay Polish-Ukrainian Jew from Borough Park moves to Hollywood and enters the mail room at the William Morris Agency. After forging a letter suggesting he had a college degree when in fact he did not, Geffen rises through the ranks to become an agent, then leaves WMA and founds Asylum Records and produces albums by Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. Asylum is sold to Warner Communications, and Geffen becomes Vice Chairman of Warner film studios. He then retires and un-retires after a minor but erroneous health scare, founds Geffen Records, courts John Lennon and Yoko Ono (see below), produces Cats, Risky Business (see below), co-founds Dreamworks SKG, produces Saving Private Ryan, backs Bill Clinton, gives lots of money to AIDS research, falls out with Bill Clinton over one of the sleazeballs he didn't pardon, and now backs Barack Obama. Along the way Geffen throws many temper tantrums and raises his voice to the point where even Steven Spielberg asks him politely to lower it. He also shows a remarkable ability for betraying the confidences of good friends and business associates in order to charm potential clients he’s just met. The night Lennon was shot, Geffen was in bed with a male prostitute and loves to boast about it.

The Pull-Quote: “’What about my music?’ [Yoko Ono] asked. ‘Well, I’ve never heard any of your records.’ ‘Really,’ Ono said. ‘That doesn’t sound like a very good reason for me to make a deal with you.’ ‘I’m a big fan of John’s, and I have a great deal of respect for the two of you, and we do a very good job. We’re a good record company.’ ‘What do you mean you’re a good record company?’ Ono fired back. ‘You haven’t put out a record yet!’”

The Takeaway: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Be enlightened and progressive on your own time, but cunning and ruthless on corporate time. Respect for others’ privacy won't make you rich and powerful. Endear yourself to those you want to impress by gossiping about people you know behind their backs. It'll smack of such poor judgment that would-be clients will assume you're either crazy or brilliant, and guess what? You are.

2. Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power, by Judy Bachrach

The Gist: Gifted writer Tina Brown makes her fellow students feel small at Oxford, dates a host of famous men (including Auberon Waugh, who washes frantically after sex, Martin Amis, whom she adores, and Dudley Moore, whom she does not), deflects charges of arrivisme, and becomes editor of UK tabloid Tatler at age 25. She meets Harold Evans, then married and famously editing the The Times of London and The Sunday Times, which names her Most Promising Female Journalist. Brown and Evans marry in 1981, then move to New York three years later, whereupon Brown revives the moribund Vanity Fair by turning it into the must-read glossy on celebrity doings and the leisure class. She hires true crime reporter Dominick Dunne, photographer Helmut Newton and inaugurates a new wave of magazine journalism, operating under the assumption that "intellectuals should be read and not seen." Meanwhile, Tina and Harry are now East Coast socialites whose fiercely guarded life together aspires to shape headlines, not become them. (Their best friend is British libel law.) Brown takes over The New Yorker in 1992 and remakes that antiquated smart sheet, too, acquiring Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane and David Remnick, who later replaces her as editor-in-chief. On a manuscript submitted by Yiddish Nobel laureate, Brown writes, "Beef it up, Singer," which more or less encapsulates her style of feared-but-respected-or-hated tenure. She founds Talk magazine in 1999, which folds after just two years, an over-sensationalized failure from which this unauthorized biography derives all of its rise-and-fall schadenfraude. (Bachrach is a contributing editor at the new VF, edited by Brown’s archnemesis Graydon Carter.)

The Pull-Quote: "We live in a time when infamy sells.... There is no honor, no reticence, no loyalty." Spoken by Maureen Dowd on Brown's New Yorker reign, and quoted by author to make a clichéd point.

The Takeaway: Develop a nose for future A-listers. Sleep with as many as you can all the while adopting an “amused” air about them. Overpaying the talent means you can bully them into submission, so don't be cowed by easily tossed around phrases like "national institution" or "greatest living writer." Fuck 'em if they can't take a kill-fee. Oh, and marry old men.

3. How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, by Toby Young

The Gist: Son of highbrow sociologist Michael Young, who coined the term "meritocracy," Toby Young devotes his life to testing how much strain that already weakened concept can take. He writes for the British Times, gets fired from the British Times. He founds celebrated Modern Review, which traffics in "low culture for highbrows," then shuts it down, much to the dismay of everyone else involved. Young moves to New York in the early 90's, gets hired by Graydon Carter as a contributing editor (read: sinecurist) at Vanity Fair, then proceeds overlong tenure as a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of Graydon Carter’s shoe (this is G.C.’s description of him, not ours). Young cracks dud jokes to celebrities, refers to doormen who won't let him into parties he'd end up hating anyway as "clipboard Nazis," does blow while on assignment, asks Nathan Lane if he's gay, gets fired from Vanity Fair. Now back in London (this isn't in the book), Young edits The Spectator, a conservative weekly, and boasts of his "negative charisma," probably as a way to boost paperback sales. HTLFAAP, much like Young himself, has been up and down the wicket of sadomasochistic success. A film adaptation is said to be in post-production, starring Simon Pegg and Kirsten Dunst.

The Pull-Quote: “Cool Britannia was a cry of independence, a howl of protest against the all-enveloping cultural hegemony of the United States, yet, paradoxically, it didn’t really mean anything—it hadn’t really happened—until it was noticed by the American media. That explained the schizophrenic attitude of people like Damien Hirst, Keith Allen and Alex James: they wanted to assert their indifference to the attentions of glossy, New York magazines, and yet they wanted to be photographed striking this insouciant pose in Vanity Fair. Like rebellious schoolchildren, their protest wouldn’t have counted unless it was registered by the authorities. Unfortunately, in this scenario I was cast as the toothless substitute teacher.”

The Takeaway: The memoir is a good object lesson in what not to do if you want to hang onto a job or a masthead listing, or cast the impression that deep down you really had high expectations for the world of glamour-besotted New York media. Also, it pays to be obnoxious in a way that only you find ironic.

4. Spy: The Funny Years, by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, George Kalogerakis

The Gist: In 1986, Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen found the future of piss-taking journalism in the form of Spy magazine. Épater le bourgeoisie never had it so good, or so the editors – now all dressed up and fixtures of the very culture they once lampooned – are the first ones to remind you. Spy pioneers satire as a clever agglomeration of facts, and specializes in the infographic, the listicle (just like this one!) and the blurb cloud. It attempts to decipher just who, exactly, is on the New Yorker’s indecipherable masthead. It follows Anthony Haden-Guest into the dank reaches of his own nightlife. It refines hatred of Donald Trump into an art form. Features include the Liz Smith Tote Board, Separated at Birth, and Logrolling in Our Time, without which everything from The Onion to Conan O’Brien’s pre-interview fooling would be unimaginable. The self-conscious prose style is a cocktail of H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling and Wolcott Gibbs, and its been swigged by every glossy editor in search of a readership ever since. Once G.C. leaves, it all goes to shit. Like Studio 54, the new owners can’t make it work, ergo the justified hubris of the book’s title.

The Pull-Quote: “How easy is it to steal the sour cream?” – in a chart surveying the various Manhattan cafeteria chains.

The Gist: You need only ask yourself if you read Radar to determine whether there’s any pedagogic value to be mined from Spy.

5. Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney

The Gist: Nameless 24 year-old fact-checker for elite New York glossy (a thinly veiled New Yorker) moonlights as an aspiring novelist, or wants us to believe he moonlights as that while he’s busy Hoovering coke by the suitcaseful and partying through the vertiginous 80’s club scene with a yuppie twat called Tad Allagash. Tad calls the narrator, who writes annoyingly in the second person, “Coach.” His mother has recently passed away, so we’re shin-kicked into wondering if a life of artifice and glitz is simply an emollient for real pain. Behind the hatred there lies a plundering desire for love. Or something.

The Pull-Quote: “Just now you want to stay at the surface of things, and Tad is a figure skater who never considers the sharks under the ice. You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you clean up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.”

The Takeaway: Once Tina Brown takes over Coach’s magazine, he’s fired. Sort your soul out before you move to the metropolis of infinite distractions, otherwise you, too, will wind up a shiftless anonymity with withdrawal symptoms. (Your apartment can still be a mess, however.)

6. The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger

The Gist: Recent Brown graduate Andrea Sacks wants to write for the New Yorker (sigh) and blankets the media world with her resume hoping to get a dues-paying job somewhere that will eventually allow her to become Larissa MacFarquhar. Whoops. She gets hired by fashion bible Runway’s bitch supreme Miranda Priestly (Anna Wintour, not even thinly veiled) as her junior personal assistant. Next thing Andrea knows, she’s chasing down lattes at Starbucks and sirloins at Smith and Wollensky instead of learning about ledes and nut grafs. Not what she had in mind but she loves the clothes and even develops a knack for being a second-string slave to a subhuman narcissist. Unlike in the film, Andrea doesn’t quit – she gets fired for saying “Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you.” Ballsy, sure, but she does get to keep some of the Dolce and even snags an interview for a real writing position at another magazine in the same building. (N.B. Author Weisberger was Wintour’s personal assistant, so this novel is a bildungsroman, which is a word Andrea learned at Brown but seldom got to use after graduation.)

The Pull-Quote: “Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you.”

The Takeaway: How many bright young girls have come to New York hoping to fill these Cinderella slippers, only to discover that not only is Wintour not hiring, but she’s honed her filter for confessional opportunists more interested in publishing advances than making sure her Apple Fritter is extra flaky. If you want to be a bona fide reporter, save yourself the aggro and dashed hopes and apply for an internship at the New York Sun your junior year. Also, while it’s true that some ball-breaking editors respond well to self-assertiveness, telling your boss “Fuck you” isn’t the wisest career decision.

7. Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, by John Gregory Dunne

The Gist: The story of Dunne and wife Joan Didion's attempt to transform the life of anchorwoman Jessica Savitch, who died in a car wreck after more or less proving on air in 1983, during a broadcast of NBC News Digest, that she was a drug addict. Instead of a sadder version of Network, the screenplay transforms into the Disneyfied Up Close and Personal, which makes absolutely no mention of Savitch and which even Robert Redford doesn't remember filming.

The Pull-Quote: “The purpose of such a meet-and-greet is to allow the executive to size up the supplicant. [Disney studio chairman Jeffrey] Katzenberg had not read Golden Girl, but he was aware of the less savory details of Jessica Savitch’s life. He liked the ugly-duckling idea; it was the kind of narrative he wanted, and he was also responsive to the television background against which it would be played. He did have reservations, and here I quote Joan’s notes of that first meeting: ‘Wants to know what is going to happen in this picture that will make the audience walk out feeling uplifted, good about something and good about themselves.’”

The Takeaway: Dunne is witty and disarming, especially when he quotes Jack Warner's definition of screenwriters: "schmucks with Underwoods." Interestingly, the "monster" in question is not the industry or any particular studio executive, but rather the money that governs all, including Dunne.

8. You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, by Julia Phillips

The Gist: Scandal-sponge Jewish producer reveals the vast corruption, drugs and sexual indiscretions that motor the movie industry. Phillips gets fired by Steven Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, accuses Goldie Hawn of body odor, and, on the night she becomes the first woman to win a "Best Picture" Oscar for The Sting, downs three valiums, one upper, one and a half drinks, two joints and a dash of cocaine. The book is a sprayfire indictment of practically everyone Phillips ever met in Hollywood, and it got her banned from Morton's.

The Pull-Quote: "They were really a rogues' gallery of nerds. Marty [Scorsese] was tiny and asthmatic, Steven [Spielberg] had the soft, flabby look of a typical Twinkies kid, and Brian [De Palma] never took his safari jacket off."

The Takeaway: Sour grapes ferment the best, although it's not as if anyone still believes in some West Coast Arcadia where dazzling moving pictures are made. Still, you'll hardly do better for the brutally honest story of a show biz prodigy that had to burn everything before she flamed out.

9. Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures With the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media, by Michael Wolff

The Gist: Following up on Burn-Rate (1998), which was about Wolff’s bust foray into the world of online startups, this is the nasty-minded sequel by the former New York media writer who wants badly to be the next Murdoch but can’t and decides to just insult everybody he ever envied instead—especially Fox News President Roger Ailes. Most of the stuff in here consists of Wolff's recycled columns, but it's all in one place and no true mogul ever wasted his time searching through web archives. Harvey Weinstein is obese and grotesque. The media business is "collapsing” like communism. Some of Wolff's axioms should be true even if they aren’t: “The larger and higher-profile the company, the bigger the nutcase who runs it.”

The Pull-Quote: “This was the meta thing. Meta gave both irony and gravitas to what we did. The delicious incongruity between our superficiality and our importance. The joie de vivre of self-referentialism. The stupendous, intoxicating power of being able to create the world we lived in."

Bonus Pull-Quote: “So, as I arrived for my speech, I was thinking of my relationship to the absent but always present [Fox News head Roger] Ailes. He was the greatest, but the Antichrist too.”

The Takeaway: Still fun. Like Young’s book, AOTM is a serviceable monument to failure dressed up as critical thinking. Though most of the wisdom you could just as easily cull by lunching at Michael's. Wolff went on to try and match-make the sale of his old haunt New York (he's now at Vanity Fair) to Mort Zuckerman, who in the event lost out to hedge fund wizard Bruce Wasserstein. That means more meanness is forthcoming in what promises to be the Dance to the Music of Time of inferiority complexes.

The rest of the picture is still taking shape, but after the jump we have a few educated guesses as to where things might land — and it looks curiously like Bollywood.

Led by Anil Ambani, by Variety's count the world's sixth richest man (and the husband of a Bollywood actress), Reliance is apparently taking over Hollywood one A-list player at a time. Its film funding arm, Reliance Big Entertainment, made headlines at Cannes last month when it announced development deals with the likes of George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks and others, splitting with studios the costs of new productions costing up to $1 billion. Reliance's latest venture is decidedly more ambitious, expanding its vast media footprint to claim what will be roughly half of the new DreamWorks: Six or so films a year through a studio to be determined (probably Spielberg's old stomping grounds at Universal, where he still keeps an office).

The deal also continues Asia's incursion into Hollywood, perhaps epitomized by Sony's $4.8 billion takeover (with Comcast) of MGM in 2005. But India has been even more active in the last year, with TV producer UTV Software buying into Fox's The Happening and Lionsgate entering a development deal with Mumbai-based shingle Eros International. The Reliance/DreamWorks pact is the biggest by far, but as noted by WSJ, the Snider connection gives Reliance stable executive footing for its grand Hollywood experiment.

The paper also adds, however, that DreamWorks would be dealing with an Indian conglom with its own internal drama: Anil Ambani is embroiled in a feud with his older brother Mukesh over a multi-billion dollar acquisition in South Africa. The trouble would only touch DreamWorks if the communications arm were ever sold; the brothers have reportedly been fighting over controlling interest in that case.

Spielberg will obviously cross that bridge when he comes to it, as will he face inevitable concerns about investor influence over his and Snider's slate. To wit, are the Clooney/Hanks/Pitt et. al. projects earmarked for the 'Works? How will Reliance play ball with Universal, Fox or another studio enlisted to distribute DreamWorks' films? Will press inquiries forevermore be rerouted to a call center in Bangalore? So many questions!

• Spielberg, India Firm Near Deal to Ally With DreamWorks [WSJ]

It depends on what Steven Spielberg and David Geffen want. Most important is autonomy, which they won't get without once again going the independent route: self-funding their own projects and paying out a distribution fee to a studio with the infrastructure to put their product in theaters. If Marvel can do it, God knows DreamWorks can, but Spielberg wants more — like full-blown "studio" more. That's why we kind of like the Universal prospect floated today by Goldstein:

Pros: No studio has the same emotional tug as Spielberg's ancestral home. Studio boss Ron Meyer would love to have DreamWorks back in the fold, while Spielberg and Snider (a former chairman at the studio) have an easy familiarity with Uni's marketing and distribution machinery.

Cons: After the dysfunction of Paramount, would DreamWorks want to be anywhere near the tightly controlled GE corporate culture that drove away Snider in the first place? GE remains the antithesis of DreamWorks' bureaucracy-free model.

Nevertheless, with everybody else overextended (Warner Bros., Sony) or content with their classier, "independent" outlets (Fox with Fox Searchlight; Disney with Miramax), Universal is the only studio that has would have the 'Works on its own terms. What Universal needs is development, and DreamWorks has that in spades. The bureaucracy would pare down pretty fast if (or rather when) DreamWorks is producing six films a year including one from Spielberg — while Snider is clearing the brush on his behalf. Goldstein even suggests that Spielberg might buy Universal, which, at a valuation of up to $25 billion, is ludicrous (even without NBC involved). But if this deal doesn't happen, it won't be for its principals' lack of trying. And hey, if not, then sure: Hellooooo, MGM!

• DreamWorks is ready to bolt from Paramount [LAT]

We take particular inspiration from skeletal Viacom executive presence Sumner Redstone's position at #41 on the list, as his $7.6 billion net worth represents the culmination of over seven centuries of tireless work in the entertainment sector, a career that began when Redstone ran a gang of picketpocket minstrels who secretly fleeced the European peasants they tried to amuse with song before the Black Death claimed their wrectched lives. (Consider how far the mogul has come: Redstone is now so rich that he can fire Tom Cruise just because he annoys his wife. Amazing!) Some other Hollywood notables charting: Dream Works pals David Geffen (#52) and Steven Spielberg (#117), George Lucas (#86), and Power Rangers magnate Haim Saban (#102). Enjoy!

• The Forbes 400 [Forbes.com]

THE lesbians of Hollywood seem to be multiplying as they come out of the closet. "Call them the Rubyfruit Mafia," W magazine says in its latest issue. Movie producer Nina Jacobson said she didn't know of one other openly lesbian executive in Los Angeles in the early '90s when she told a colleague at Universal Studios, "I actually am not straight."

Jacobson, who now has three children with her lesbian partner, said, "It was certainly an acceptable choice to be closeted then. Now, in Hollywood, it would be a little pathetic. You would only look afraid." W reporter Kevin West also names HBO's head of programming Carolyn Strauss, Fox 2000 executive v.p. of production Carla Hacken, Sundance Institute's Cynthia Wornham, and "The L Word" creator Ilene Chaiken. Chaiken succeeded in pitching the series to Showtime's development executive Mark Zakarin after describing the characters, their relationships and some of the "arcane sociology of lesbian life, like the hotly debated question of whether you have to buy a new dildo when you get a new girlfriend."

While the piece will surely raise the Rubyfruit Mafia's profile in mainstream Hollywood, the Sapphic gang should further consolidate its power with a more dramatic demonstration of its potency. Perhaps it's time that Nina Jacobson, defying a direct order from gay-mob boss David Geffen, to finally put out that long-delayed hit on Disney chairman Dick Cook, serving an ice-cold dish of revenge for his delivery-room firing of Jacobson while her partner was giving birth. Such a chilling revenge-slaying would certainly deliver the message that fucking with any made member of the Rubyfruit Family carries severe consequences.

• H'WOOD LESBIANS OUT AND PROUD [Page Six]

You may at some point in your local travels have stumbled upon the art of prvtdncr: Working primarily in spraypaint on somebody-else's-building, the sloganeering graffiti artist throws up provocative phrases that are meant to hold a magnifying makeup mirror up to certain, unseemly facts about the true nature of Hollywood. As our friends at The WOW Report point out, BUTT magazine's current L.A.-themed issue devotes eight pages to some of his creations, including a less-than-generous sentiment regarding the Most Powerful Gay in the Universe.

In fairness to David Geffen, however, we think it's only right to point out that because of poor spacial planning, the original tag, which was to end, "human seagulls of Carbon Beach and Hillary Clinton!" was truncated to the far more inclusive message of intolerance pictured above.

• We Heart Art [WOW Report]
• [BUTT]

Geffen himself, calling from his yacht, insisted Friday that "Steven and I are very happy with the performance of Paramount's marketing and distribution teams in handling our films." He cited Rob Moore and Jim Tharp, among others, as contributing to the success of such DreamWorks-Paramount releases as "Transformers" and "Disturbia."

And on the Grey-Spielberg front, DHD's Nikki Finke reports that the embattled Paramount emperor, dejected about the BusinessWeek story, reached out to the director on his Indiana Jones 4 location shoot to be cheered up:

A few weeks ago, when Brad Grey visited Steven Spielberg in Connecticut where Indiana Jones 4 was shooting on location, the DreamWorks partner put the Paramount boss's mind at ease. "Steven said to Brad that he intended to be in business with him a long time," a source tells me. As a result, Grey was flabbergasted when he saw the headline "Paramount & DreamWorks: Splitsville?" from the new issue of Business Week which was reporting how it's "entirely possible" that Spielberg could want to leave Paramount as soon as late next year. The timing couldn't have been worse for Grey. Thanks to yet another DreamWorks pic Transformers performing spectacularly at the summer box office, not only had Paramount climbed to No. 1 in studio market share this year but boasted a new movie franchise to exploit. Grey had been celebrating. Now, because of the article, Brad was "bummed out", a source close to him told me. Also Grey knew that every other Hollywood mogul like him attending Jack Valenti's memorial service last Thursday had heard about the bombshell. So the Paramount chief needed to know if this was real or not. He spoke to Spielberg right away. This time, the director was on location in Hawaii. "And Steven continued to tell Brad he is 'very happy'," an insider tells me.

Hopefully, Grey has had his bruised feelings adequately soothed by Spielberg's assertions of happiness and promises of a long, fulfilling relationship (well, at least one that survives into 2009), allowing him to finally halt the hourly deliveries of FTD's popular "Please Tell Me I'm Pretty Again" flower arrangements to the Indiana Jones set, the alarming frequency of which was starting to seem "a little needy" to the busy director.

[Photo: Getty Images]

• Geffen, Spielberg may walk [Variety]
• Spielberg Tells Grey He's "Very Happy" [DHD]
• Paramount and DreamWorks: Splitsville? [BusinessWeek]

"AMERICAN Pie" star Sean William Scott [sic] is very comfortable with his sexuality - so much so that when another paper claimed Scott had shown up with David Geffen at "Heat," a nonexistent L.A. gay bar, he didn't even bother to correct them. Maybe it's because he was too busy laughing.

Scott showed up at Upper East Side eatery Phillipe the other night with his longtime girlfriend, Victoria's Secret model Deanna Miller, and enjoyed a two-hour dinner while engaging in some major public displays of affection. Onlookers say they looked "very much in love and were all over each other." A friend of Scott said the two have quietly been dating for more than two years.

We always had our suspicions about the sighting (though the Defamer Correspondent on Chickenhawk-Related Activities tells us the bar in question was probably "Tigerheat," the gay dance club frequented by Britney Spears whenever she needs some cheering up by way of watching her security detail taser overly enthusiastic fans), but with this report of a dinner featuring fine champagne sipped from intertwined arms, lots of lingerie-model face-sucking, and Scott spinning around repeatedly to shout to neighboring tables, "Can you believe how not gay I am? It's like, ridiculous, right?" we are now 100% convinced of its fraudulence.

• GOOD FOR YUKS [NY Post]

• Out [Out.com]
• 'Out' Ranks the Top 50 Gays [NY Mag]

"The word gentrification is used when wealthy people move into a new neighborhood and fix it up," said Richard Riordan, the former Los Angeles mayor whose mansion on Carbon Beach is steps away from the weekend homes of Terry Semel, the chief executive of Yahoo, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, a movie executive and a friend of Mr. Geffen's. "But when it is billionaires taking over from multimillionaires, I'm not sure what you call that."

.

Friends of Mr. Geffen and Mr. Ellison said that each man wanted to create a resort they might frequent themselves, in a seaside colony that was the birthplace of California surf culture and more recently has been a weekend retreat for Hollywood power brokers. Twenty-five miles from Beverly Hills, moguls stroll the white sand along Carbon Beach and sometimes gather at "Dealmakers' Rock," an outcropping where movie deals are said to have been made.

The horrors of a supergentrified Malibu are almost too unspeakable to contemplate: stretched to their financial limits of skyrocketing housing costs, poorer millionaires will be forced to pick up side work swabbing the deck on Geffen and Ellison's shared yacht, bussing the billionaires' tables at their new resorts, or quietly assassinating interlopers strolling along the semipublic stretch of Carbon Beach Geffen pretended to concede to the Coastal Commission back in February. Faced with such myriad indignities, industry social climbers may decide to abandon Malibu entirely, ceding total control of the area to the merciless robber barons who seek to use their addiction to the uncut white sands to enslave them.

• Billionaire Beachcombers [NYT via Glass Shallot, who's really pissed off about the whole deal]

· Keith Urban takes a long, deep whiff of wife Nicole Kidman, whose juniper berry shampoo is the next best thing to an actual gin and tonic. [People]
· Velvet mafioso Don David Geffen and Mr. Diane von Furstenberg Barry Diller do their part to make Jack Nicholson feel comfortable with his new look, though Geffen has trouble hiding the crushing disappointment of having his 25-year passion project lose to a heroin-snorting grandpa and a lesbian folk song. [VF]

It's doubtful that the entire affair will last much beyond a day —- or that it will play much of a factor in either side raising money in Hollywood. Clinton is scheduled to visit Los Angeles today for a series of receptions with high-dollar donors including events hosted by Haim Saban, Sim Farar, Ron Burkle and John Emerson and another gathering at CAA.

That Clinton would seek the help of the evil agenting monolith in securing Hollywood's souls should indicate how desperate the candidate is not to lose the industry to Obamamania; she's obviously willing to look the other way as the agency's political consultants greedily gnaw on plump infant legs while spitballing ideas about how to change the current course of the campaign, deciding whether it's a better strategy to have the troublemaking Geffen's limousine blown up on the way to the Oscars or just turn their roof-mounted cannon towards Malibu and incinerate his entire compound as he sleeps.

• Geffen ignites Clinton-Obama feud [Variety]
• Previously: Obamamania: David Geffen Declares War On Hillary [Defamer]

Not content to demonstrate his Democratic kingmaking power by throwing a beachside cocktail party/Hillary Clinton effigy burning for Hollywood Chosen One Barack Obama on the pristine sand behind his Malibu compound last night, DreamWorks activist David Geffen granted the NY Times's Maureen Dowd an exclusive fireside chat, during which the power-mad billionaire stroked an overfluffed white cat while cackling his way through his plans to destroy his presidential-hopeful nemesis. The column is behind a subscriber wall, but here are some of the thoughts Geffen shared with Dowd about Hillary, Bill, the political hot water in which Steven Spielberg finds himself submerged for going along with the Obama fund-raiser, and his luxurious sleeping quarters:

"Not since the Vietnam War has there been this level of disappointment in the behavior of America throughout the world, and I don't think that another incredibly polarizing figure, no matter how smart she is and no matter how ambitious she is — and God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton? — can bring the country together.

"Obama is inspirational, and he's not from the Bush royal family or the Clinton royal family. Americans are dying every day in Iraq. And I'm tired of hearing James Carville on television." [...]

"I don't think anybody believes that in the last six years, all of a sudden Bill Clinton has become a different person," Mr. Geffen says, adding that if Republicans are digging up dirt, they'll wait until Hillary's the nominee to use it. "I think they believe she's the easiest to defeat."

She is overproduced and overscripted. "It's not a very big thing to say, 'I made a mistake' on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can't," Mr. Geffen says. "She's so advised by so many smart advisers who are covering every base. I think that America was better served when the candidates were chosen in smoke-filled rooms." [...]

Did Mr. Spielberg get in trouble with the Clintons for helping Senator Obama? "Yes," Mr. Geffen replies, slyly. Can Obambi stand up to Clinton Inc.? "I hope so," he says, "because that machine is going to be very unpleasant and unattractive and effective."

Once, David Geffen and Bill Clinton were tight as ticks. Mr. Geffen helped raise some $18 million for Bill and slept in the Lincoln Bedroom twice. Bill chilled at Chateau Geffen. Now, the Dreamworks co-chairman calls the former president "a reckless guy" who "gave his enemies a lot of ammunition to hurt him and to distract the country." [...]

I ask what he will say if he ever runs into Bill Clinton again. " 'Hi,' " he replies. And will he be upset if Hillary wins and he never gets to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom again?

"No," he says with a puckish smile. "It's not as nice as my bedroom."

Clinton's camp has already responded in outrage, hilariously demanding that Obama return Geffen's dirty money, but the war for Hollywood's political-starfucking soul is officially on. We fear that the acrimony will continue until some sort of Solomonic compromise is reached on the Spielberg Question, perhaps with the influential director offering to tie himself to the backs of their OBAMA '08 and HILLARY 4 PREZ campaign buses and then having them driven in opposite directions, with each candidate allowed to keep whatever grisly part of his torn-asunder body is still lashed to their vehicle.

• Obama's Big Screen Test [NY Times, sub. req'd.]
• Clinton, Obama Trade Barbs Over Donor [AP]

Just in case your assistant has forgotten to pencil it into your calendar, tonight is the $2,300 per person fundraiser/pre-coronation ceremony for Barack Obama that begins at the Beverly Hilton and ends at David Geffen's Malibu compound (the parade from the hotel to the beach, during which kingmaking DreamWorks billionaires Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Steven Spielberg will take turns carrying the senator on their shoulders, is expected to be spectacular), where Hollywood's hottest presidential hopeful will officially receive his much-anticipated reacharound from industry players who were able to scare up 20 well-monied Friends of Barry for the event. In an effort to keep out undesirables, only those who've ponied up their tribute will be allowed to join in the festivities. Reports the NY Times:

The ticket price of $2,300 reflects the maximum individual donation to a federal campaign, and, unlike those behind so many other Hollywood galas, organizers of this one vowed to bar the door to freeloaders, no matter how famous.

"We've turned down people who asked to bring a guest," said Andy Spahn, a political adviser to Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Katzenberg, among other industry people. "There will be no comps. Celebs are writing checks. Everybody's writing." [...]

What is known is that there will be no red carpet or V.I.P. room, no sit-down dinner and scant opportunity for one-on-one conversation with Mr. Obama, except for those who make it to Mr. Geffen's home. "It's going to be very democratic, with a small D," Mr. Spahn said.

The conspicuous absence of a red carpet and the strict door policy have obviously been put in place to keep out the kind of scenewhores who might steal Obama face time away from the evening's more legitimate political-starfuckers; the last thing the campaign wants is for a studio head like Universal's Ron Meyer to stand impatiently by as their candidate is engrossed in a conversation about Britney Spears' bald head with Paris Hilton.

[Photo: Getty Images composite]

• The Hot Ticket in Hollywood: An Evening With Obama [NY Times]
• Previously: Obamamania: Hollywood Will Take Its Sweet Time Before Crowning Its Democratic King, Thank You Very Much [Defamer]