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" IT WAS ON THE COMPANY JET that Stacey Snider began to get that sinking feeling again. It was October 2000, not long after Edgar Bronfman Jr. had sold Universal to the ambitious French former water company Vivendi. Snider was part of a contingent of executives returning from a getting-to-know-you meeting in Paris. Huddled in the back of the plane, Snider and Universal music executive Jimmy Iovine hashed over their discovery that Vivendi&amp;#039;s vaunted Internet portal was hardly the powerhouse they&amp;#039;d been led to believe. &amp;quot;We had thought it was the Yahoo! of Europe,&amp;quot; says Snider, the chairman of Universal Pictures. &amp;quot;That it was pervasive, popular--at the very least operational. And it wasn&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot;  Universal Studios president Ron Meyer listened disapprovingly, Snider continues. &amp;quot;He told us to stop rabble-rousing. We were bitching in the back of the plane, and he was like, &amp;#039;You&amp;#039;re ruining the gestalt here; you&amp;#039;re bringing us down.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; But Snider had begun to catch a bad odor--and not an unfamiliar one. Her suspicions were confirmed in early 2002, at a company retreat in Deauville, France. Jean-Marie Messier, Vivendi&amp;#039;s flamboyant chairman at the time, had started some serious empire building the year before with his acquisition of the studio. But at the retreat, it became very clear that all was not la vie en rose. &amp;quot;It was so expensive and elaborate--and no one was really working together,&amp;quot; says Snider. Messier urged the French and Americans: &amp;quot;Do deals!&amp;quot; But there was no cohesion. &amp;quot;People felt like they were seeing behind the facade,&amp;quot; Snider says. &amp;quot;There was no grand vision.&amp;quot; Messier was giving off &amp;quot;a real feeling of megalomania--the cameras, the pictures, the press, the microphones, the speechifying. . . . And then it started to feel that there wasn&amp;#039;t any substance behind it.&amp;quot; By July, Messier had been thrown out of a company that was hurtling toward bankruptcy. Ultimately, Universal wound up on the auction block in an anguished, months-long process during which it sometimes seemed that the company would finally be broken up. For Snider, however, all this turmoil was practically business as usual. She has survived such enormous corporate debacles and worked for so many of Hollywood&amp;#039;s most notorious bosses that she jokes, &amp;quot;My resume&amp;#039; is more like a rap sheet.&amp;quot; Now she has landed in the middle of another huge corporate gamble, GE&amp;#039;s acquisition of Universal and its merger with NBC. The deal may not only finally affirm her stature as one of the ablest executives in Hollywood but also test her with the one challenge she has never had to face: owners who might actually know what they&amp;#039;re doing. SHE STARTED UNDER the wing of Don Simpson--the late, drug-fueled producer of films including Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop--and segued to Jon Peters and Peter Guber, the accomplished hustlers who ran Sony Pictures into a $3.2 billion write-down. &amp;quot;It turned out that the experience at Sony was valuable,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Abnormal is normal.&amp;quot; In 1996 she left Sony and went to Universal--&amp;quot;seeking stability,&amp;quot; she now says with considerable irony--as copresident of production. There she enjoyed another lineup of interesting bosses, starting with the chilly Edgar Bronfman Jr., moving on to Messier after Bronfman made his ill-starred sale to Vivendi, and suffering through Barry Diller--the one who made her cry.  Remarkably, Snider has remained steady at the wheel and built a small army of loyal followers who praise her for combining business sense with an actual love of movies. She has also managed to preside over an eclectic and surprisingly strong slate of pictures that included broad comedies (Bruce Almighty and two American Pie sequels), surprise hits (The Fast and the Furious and The Bourne Identity), and a couple of Oscar winners (Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind). She had the nerve to anger longtime Universal producer Ron Howard by refusing to make The Missing, and the guts to say yes to Ang Lee as director of The Hulk. (The latter play might not have worked, but she gets points for trying.) She ponied up an unprecedented $20 million last August to director Peter Jackson, of The Lord of the Rings, to remake King Kong--a deal that was widely criticized as too rich, primarily by executives at other studios who wish they could have made it themselves. She&amp;#039;s also responsible for Dr. Seuss&amp;#039; The Cat in the Hat--an instance in which commerce clearly triumphed over love of cinema. It&amp;#039;s one thing to do a job well in good times. But how did Snider manage to hang on during Universal&amp;#039;s wild ride? She is, after all, not some ball buster in Armani armor. She&amp;#039;s a diminutive woman with a bit of a girlish manner. But this unintimidating-looking executive has also survived a lot, so much that she has even started to wonder about herself. &amp;quot;I actually was thinking, What is it about me?&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Do I attract chaos?&amp;quot;  WHEN SNIDER JOINED Universal, her boss, Casey Silver, was unwittingly laying the groundwork for a late-1998 double whammy: Meet Joe Black and Babe: Pig in the City. While Silver was doomed by the two flops, his ouster nonetheless contributed to Snider&amp;#039;s reputation in some quarters as a conniving underling. Her defenders say that rap is undeserved--and her defenders include her current boss, Ron Meyer, who has been rumored to be another prospective victim of Snider&amp;#039;s alleged plotting. Meyer says Snider did nothing to undermine Silver. As far as his own position is concerned, Meyer says, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s ridiculous. She&amp;#039;s way too smart to want my job.&amp;quot; One reason--other than sexism--that Snider may get assessed more harshly than a male counterpart is that she possesses a potent weapon that men lack. Slender and lithe in a way that is enhanced by thrice-weekly private yoga sessions, Snider is an undeniably attractive woman, and her manner can be seductive. Messier in particular was said to be charmed. &amp;quot;He was so salivating over her,&amp;quot; says a Snider ally. &amp;quot;It got embarrassing.&amp;quot; Mary Parent, the president of production at Universal, says Snider &amp;quot;can be seductive in the broadest sense, and that&amp;#039;s a compliment. She has an ability to enroll people. Is somebody charismatic, or are they flirtatious? It depends on what you want to suggest about them.&amp;quot; Meyer says that any suggestion that Snider has traded on her sex appeal is unfounded. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s one of the smartest, most talented motion-picture executives I&amp;#039;ve ever known,&amp;quot; he says.  Snider may be ambitious, but she clearly did not get to be chairman of a movie studio through feminine wiles. She has abilities that many top executives seem to lack, notably the willingness to make decisions and communicate them plainly. &amp;quot;You can call people below her and feel like that executive has what they need to get the job done,&amp;quot; says agent Patrick Whitesell, whose clients include Matt Damon, who made The Bourne Identity at Universal, and Hugh Jackman, who stars in the expensive upcoming action film Van Helsing for the studio. &amp;quot;She lets these people do their jobs, so it doesn&amp;#039;t feel like everything is all bottlenecked on her desk.&amp;quot; Whitesell says Jackman initially found the Van Helsing script--which deals with a nineteenth-century monster hunter who does battle with Dracula and the Wolf Man, among other adversaries--a bit too broad to interest him, particularly as he was coming out of an action role in the X-Men franchise. &amp;quot;It was a leap of faith that Hugh&amp;#039;s character would be more fully developed,&amp;quot; Whitesell says. &amp;quot;Stacey gave her word that she would address our concerns. . . . I was able to say, &amp;#039;She  will get it there.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; With the shoot now complete, Whitesell says that the studio lived up to its word.  Of course, that&amp;#039;s not always been the case between Snider and her own bosses. She had not been top dog at Universal for long when Bronfman sold the company to Vivendi. It felt like a betrayal. He had assured the troops that the studio wasn&amp;#039;t for sale, and then sold it. The buyer was Messier, and at first everything was grand. &amp;quot;Messier loved everything,&amp;quot; Snider says. &amp;quot;He used to say, &amp;#039;I love your products.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Before his departure, Messier made a murky and elaborate deal putting Barry Diller in charge of the Universal entertainment assets even while Diller was still running his own Internet concern. Diller soon made his unsmiling presence felt. &amp;quot;He said, &amp;#039;I believe motion pictures are a loss business, so why should a company give you $700 million to $1 billion in production funds and more in overhead?&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Snider says. She replied that Diller&amp;#039;s perceptions of the movie business were out of date. &amp;quot;They reflect an impression of us when you were running Paramount&amp;quot; in the seventies and eighties, she says she told him. &amp;quot;They don&amp;#039;t reflect today&amp;#039;s reality.&amp;quot;  In fact, things had been warming up nicely for Universal, which had broken records in the summer of 2001 by opening four consecutive number-one films: The Mummy Returns, The Fast and the Furious, Jurassic Park III, and American Pie 2. Snider set out to prove Diller wrong, hoping, she says, to shield the studio from budget cuts. She studied up on details, from the cost of standing displays in theaters to the markup on DVDs. And she felt that her team was making a convincing case that the studio was, indeed, being run responsibly. But her hopes of sparing the studio from cuts were not to be fulfilled. At one point, she says, she told Diller, &amp;quot;If you&amp;#039;re just going to take money, then take it. But if you&amp;#039;re going to make us justify our existence, will you at least be intellectually honest?&amp;quot; She continues: &amp;quot;He said yes, and he was, and he still took the money. It was, &amp;#039;You&amp;#039;re healthier than I thought, but the [corporation] is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Vivendi&amp;#039;s deepening problems--combined with Diller&amp;#039;s relentless questions and demands--added to an already heavy load. &amp;quot;There was never credit that we weren&amp;#039;t cowboys, and we had run the studio without supervision for three profitable years,&amp;quot; Snider says. &amp;quot;It didn&amp;#039;t feel like it was acknowledged. It was this idea that we were profligate, crazy, risk-taking--you know, &amp;#039;Let&amp;#039;s make this movie &amp;#039;cause, damn! I like it.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; The meltdown came in a meeting to win Diller&amp;#039;s approval to make Van Helsing. With its complicated special effects, the movie has a budget that&amp;#039;s said to exceed $135 million. &amp;quot;We have a whole ongoing process to debate the merits of the movie and the parameters in which we felt it should be undertaken,&amp;quot; Snider says. &amp;quot;It was a risk we were prepared to take.&amp;quot; So they presented their arguments. &amp;quot;We were doing well,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;And then Barry asked me about our overall spend [on movies]. We were making points on Van Helsing, so he sort of switched the topic, which is one of his MOs. So he asked me what we spend compared to other studios.&amp;quot; And Snider made a poor move. &amp;quot;On the lower end of the spectrum,&amp;quot; she said. But she was wrong; Universal&amp;#039;s outlay on films wasn&amp;#039;t the highest, but it wasn&amp;#039;t on the low end, either. &amp;quot;And he seized upon it,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It was a mistake and it was inaccurate. But all of a sudden, the whole meeting was going down because of this misstatement.&amp;quot; Snider says she felt suddenly overwhelmed--and victimized. &amp;quot;Why did I open my mouth?&amp;quot; she asked herself. &amp;quot;Oh, my God. Could I have cost the company the movie?&amp;quot; As her colleagues looked on, she started to tear up. &amp;quot;It got worse from that point,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I definitely cried in the meeting and had to excuse myself.&amp;quot; It was a bitter moment. &amp;quot;All the poise and grace and endurance that I bring to it--I just embarrassed myself,&amp;quot; she says ruefully.  Meyer was enraged. After the meeting, he convinced Diller to apologize, but the incident never faded away. &amp;quot;It definitely alienated us,&amp;quot; Snider says. Meyer--usually so deft at handling his many bosses--was increasingly confrontational with Diller (who did not respond to inquiries for this article). Meyer believed that the collegial culture that was his signal contribution to the company was being destroyed. &amp;quot;All we cared about was that Ron not push it so far that he got fired,&amp;quot; Snider says.  Salvation came when Vivendi finally sold Universal not to a Diller ally but to GE. Snider couldn&amp;#039;t believe her luck. Over the years, she had come almost compulsively to expect the worst. &amp;quot;I just thought, There&amp;#039;s no way I&amp;#039;m not going to be working for Barry Diller,&amp;quot; she says. The merger with NBC won&amp;#039;t close until later this year, but it appears that this will be a rare case in which new management doesn&amp;#039;t change everything. Although NBC president Jeff Zucker will have increased responsibility in the combined company, his hands are expected to be so full with integrating the cable units and trying to get the network back on top that he&amp;#039;s not likely to try to interfere too much with the studio, at least for a while. And NBC CEO Bob Wright, while likely to apply GE&amp;#039;s rigorous cost controls to Universal, nevertheless seems happy with Meyer and Snider.  GE bosses are praising the studio management publicly, and a former GE insider says the praise is actually sincere. &amp;quot;Their presentations [to GE management] were outstanding,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;They were organized and correctly analyzed their past successes and failures.&amp;quot; No doubt the skirmish with Diller--like so many bad experiences before--helped Snider hone her performance. The big mystery now is what she might do if she has to cope with a stable management. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a1715/esq0204-feb-industry/>