Peter Guber

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Howard Peter Guber (b. 2 March 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a Hollywood producer and executive.

One of Hollywood's most accomplished producers, Peter Guber was formerly the studio chief at Columbia Pictures and chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures. He is now chairman of Mandalay Entertainment, which he founded in 1995. The films he has produced -- including Midnight Express, The Color Purple, Rain Man, and Batman, among many others -- have reportedly earned more than $3 billion in worldwide revenue, and have been nominated for numerous Academy Awards.

Guber resigned from Columbia in 1976 and formed Casablanca Record and Filmworks with Neil Bogart. At Casablanca, Guber focused on television production. At the same time, he independently produced The Deep for Columbia and the Academy Award-nominated film Midnight Express. This period of Casablanca's history and Guber's part in it was also marked by notorious excesses and was written up in the best selling book, "Hit Men" by Frederic Dannen - a series of chapters telling stories from the high point of the "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll" period of recorded music in the late sixties and seventies. Guber won his first of two National Association of Theater Owners Producer of the Year award in 1978.

Guber formed Polygram Filmed Entertainment in 1979 and serves as Chairman of the Board and co-owner until selling it in 1983. With business partner Jon Peters, Guber formed the Guber-Peters Entertainment Company (GPEC) that year; GPEC went public in 1988 and was sold to Sony Pictures Entertainment in 1989. Guber then became Chairman of the Board at CEO of SPE.

Guber's most important contributions to Sony Pictures Entertainment were a company restructuring and, perhaps more importantly, rebuilding the lot located at Culver City for over $103 million, making it a state of the art film and TV production facility. Within the Sony empire, Guber played a substantial role in the creation of such Columbia Pictures' box office hits as A Few Good Men, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Groundhog Day, and In the Line of Fire along with his other major financial successes released through the Sony TriStar Pictures banner that included Terminator 2, Basic Instinct, Sleepless in Seattle and Philadelphia. This left the competition clearly in the dust with Sony achieving a box office market share of 17 percent as well as leading the industry with nine $100 million dollar blockbusters and twenty-one $50 million dollar domestic hits garnering a remarkable 120 Academy Award nominations, the highest four-year total ever for a single company.

Nonetheless, Guber was asked to leave Sony in 1995 after Sony reported a $600 million loss and wrote-off a further $4.8 billion resulting from the reduction in value incurred under Guber. At the time, this was the greatest single write-off in corporate history and marked the end of an unprecedented string of losses and failures under Guber's management at Sony Pictures. This brief but costly period of Sony Pictures history was chronicled in a best selling book by Nancy Griffin entitled "Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood."

Guber then formed Mandalay Entertainment Group, where he is Chairman and CEO, to produce films and television shows. Mandalay finances and produces films in the U.S. and internationally; Universal Pictures is its primary distributor.

Now also a full professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, Guber also appears each week at 11 a.m. ET/PT on AMC in the interview show "Sunday Morning Shootout" with Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart. Bart and Guber also co-authored the book Shoot Out: Surviving Fame and (Mis)Fortune in Hollywood.

Guber was recently (i.e. November 2006) elected to the board of directors of the GoFish corporation, a leading consumer online video destination. Guber stated: "Professional content creators will need to adapt to a fundamentally new form of storytelling, one where users become a critical part of the creative process. GoFish is one of the few companies in this space that wants to differentiate itself by collaborating with the scarcest resource - the talent. As a creative entrepreneur in filmed entertainment in all media for over 30 years, I find this medium incredibly exciting."