Dream Deal High-Tech, Show Biz Giants Team Up To Produce Futuristic Entertainment

Talk about your odd couples.

How about Bill Gates, the billionaire software king, and Oscar-winning movie director Steven Spielberg?

There they were sitting in chairs on the same stage - Gates’ stage, actually, on the Microsoft campus - on Wednesday, Spielberg in his stylish long hair and beard and leather jacket, and the bespectacled Gates looking like a regular computer guy.

They held a news conference to answer questions about a new joint venture between software giant Microsoft and DreamWorks, the new studio formed by Spielberg with his Hollywood buddies, movie producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and music producer David Geffen.

Initially, the two companies will invest a total of $30 million - $15 million each - to create interactive products and other futuristic forms of entertainment.

“Our culture and their culture are a completely unrelated world,” Katzenberg acknowledged. But there is some overlap.

“Steven admits he plays games,” Microsoft CEO Gates quipped. “I have to admit I watch movies.”

DreamWorks SKG and Microsoft Corp. each will contribute 50 percent of the funding required to create the joint venture, which is to be called DreamWorks Interactive.

A lot of details still have to be worked out.

Asked if the DreamWorks Interactive CEO to be named later will come from the software or movie industries, Katzenberg smiled and replied mischievously, “Yes.” Later, when asked who the CEO of the new venture might be, Katzenberg said, “We haven’t told him yet.”

For Gates at least, money is no object.

“It’s fair to say that financial constraints will not be the thing that holds this thing back,” he said.

Spielberg, who is acclaimed for such films as “Jurassic Park,” “Schindler’s List,” ” The Extra-Terrestrial,” “Jaws” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” wants to win some awards with Gates, too.

“We’re planning to make a standout product,” he said.

Microsoft also will become a minority investor in DreamWorks, the entertainment studio formed last fall by Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen. Nobody would say how much.

“It really is a small sum of money,” Katzenberg said.

Although Hollywood studios have increasingly developed relationships with software developers or created departments that make computer products, the Microsoft-DreamWorks alliance surpasses earlier ventures at least in star power and perhaps in capital.

The executives did not announce specific products. They said they are looking for a person to lead the joint venture, which will have operations in both Los Angeles and Seattle.

Talks between the two companies have gone on for months and are believed at one point to have focused heavily on securing Gates, the richest man in the country, as an investor in the entertainment company.

On Sunday, DreamWorks announced that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was investing $500 million for an 18.5 percent stake in the company. Allen owns and invests in a number of companies involved in digital communications but remains a Microsoft director.

Formed last fall, DreamWorks will produce motion pictures, animated films, television shows, records and interactive entertainment.

DreamWorks has previously made agreements with Capital Cities-ABC Inc. to develop programming and Home Box Office to license films.