Peter
Guber, Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment Group, has been a force in
the entertainment industry for over thirty years. He has leveraged his creativity and business
acumen into record-breaking profits and critical acclaim, establishing him as
an enormously successful executive and entrepreneur in the entertainment and
communications industries. Films he
personally produced or executive produced, including Rain Man, Batman, The
Color Purple, Midnight Express, Gorillas In The Mist, The Witches of Eastwick,
Missing and Flashdance, have resonated with audiences all over the world,
earning over three billion dollars worldwide and garnering more than 50 Academy
Award nominations.
Guber
joined Columbia pictures in 1968 and within three years became Studio
Chief. During his tenure at the creative
helm, Columbia surged to record breaking profits on the strength of such box
office hits as Shampoo, Taxi Driver, Tommy, The Way We Were and Close
Encounters of the Third Kind.
In
1976, Guber co-founded Casablanca Record and Filmworks. Its record operation
included such superstars as KISS, Donna Summer and The Village People, and
included some of the most successful soundtracks of all time including
Flashdance, which sold more than 14 million albums. In 1979 Guber formed PolyGram Entertainment
where he was Chairman of the Board and CEO.
He sold his interest in Polygram in 1983 and formed and served as
Co-Owner of the Guber-Peters Entertainment Company (GPEC) which established a
major presence in motion pictures, television and music including producing the
Grammy Award winning music and official soundtrack for the 1984 Summer
Olympics. Within five years, GPEC became
a public company and in 1989, was acquired by Sony Pictures Entertainment.
In
1989, Guber was named Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment
(SPE). Under his visionary leadership,
the company re-framed its entire Loews exhibition circuit, introducing Sony’s
SDDS sound system, introduced the concept of IMAX theater and films integrated
into multi-plex theaters and transformed the Sony lot into a state of the art
digital production facility. Guber acquired for Sony the Magic Johnson Theatres
and began an ongoing twenty year business relationship with Magic Johnson. SPE’s motion picture business earned an
industry best domestic box office market share averaging 17% over four years,
propelled by an enormous string of successes including A Few Good Men,
Philadelphia, Basic Instinct, A League of Their Own and Sleepless in Seattle
among many others. During this same period, Sony Pictures led all competitors
with a total of 120 Academy Award Nominations.
After
leaving Sony as CEO in 1995, Guber formed Mandalay Entertainment Group as a
multi-media joint venture with Sony in motion pictures and television. Mandalay Entertainment Group later added
professional sports, sports entertainment and digital media as business
enterprises.
Mandalay
Pictures, a division of Mandalay Entertainment Group, produces motion pictures
for the global marketplace. The company’s rich history of creating filmed
entertainment includes the box office hits, Donnie Brasco, Seven Years in
Tibet, Wild Things, Les Miserables, I Know What You Did Last Summer, I Still
Know, the sequel to I Know What You Did Last Summer, Sleepy Hollow, Enemy At
The Gates, The Score, Into the Blue, The Jacket, Darfur Now, and Never Back Down.
Mandalay recently released When The Game Stands Tall,
starring James Caviezel and Helen Hunt, Horns, staring Daniel Radcliffe, and
Dark Places starring Charlize Theron and Chloe Moretz.
Mandalay
Vision is the company’s independent development, production and financing label
that focuses on innovative storytelling with premier talent. Mandalay Visions's
first release, The Kids Are All Right, won the Golden Globe for Best Motion
Picture - Musical or Comedy, and was nominated for four Academy Awards,
including Best Picture. Mandalay Vision
also released Soul Surfer starring Dennis Quaid, Helen Hunt and Carrie
Underwood and Bernie, starring Matthew McConaughey and Jack Black. Bernie
garnered a Golden Globe nomination for Jack Black and was selected as a 2012
Top Independent Film by the National Board of Review.
Following
his location based entertainment leadership experience with Loews,
Guber expanded Mandalay into a national entertainment sports provider with
Mandalay Sports Entertainment. He
currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors and is the Managing
Partner of Mandalay Baseball LLC, which is a joint venture with ownership of
the Los Angeles Dodgers that recently acquired the Triple-A
affiliated Minor League Baseball franchise in Oklahoma City, and commencing
with the 2015 baseball season, became the Triple-A affiliate of the Dodgers. He
also continues to serve as the Chairman of the Board of Directors for Mandalay
Baseball Properties, which has owned, operated and is currently divesting a
national array of affiliated Minor League Baseball franchises and venues.
Guber
is the owner and serves as the Co-Executive Chairman of the NBA's Golden State
Warriors. As co-managing partner, he and
Joe Lacob were the driving forces behind the ownership group's NBA
record-setting bid (at the time) to purchase the Warriors in 2010. The Warriors were named "Sports Team of
the Year" by the Sports Business Journal at the seventh annual Sports
Business Awards. For the first time in
22 years, the franchise qualified for the playoffs in back-to-back seasons
(2012-13 and 2013-14). The team has 82
consecutive sellouts and established a single-season franchise record capping
season tickets at 14,500 for both the 2013-14 and 2014-15 seasons with over
5,000 members currently on the Season Ticket Priority Wait List. In 2014, Guber
and Lacob proposed to build a new state-of-the-art privately financed arena in
San Francisco and entered into an agreement with salesforce.com to purchase
private land in San Francisco's Mission Bay neighborhood. The team intends to play their 2018-19 season in the new arena. Also in 2014, the Warriors re-launched
the Warriors Community Foundation and in it’s first
year of inception raised over $2 million for underprivileged Bay Area
youth.
2015
was a monumental year for the Golden State Warriors. In April, two-time NBA All-Star, Steph Curry,
was voted the NBA's Most Valuable Player. In May, the Warriors won the Western
Conference Finals. In June, the Warriors
won the NBA Championship. Also, in 2015, Steph Curry won the ESPY Award for
Best Male Athlete and Steve Kerr won the ESPY Award for Best Coach/Manager.
Prior
to the 2011-12 season, the Warriors ownership group
acquired the D-League team, the Dakota Wizards, and moved the franchise to
Santa Cruz, California. With a new name
and location, the Santa Cruz Warriors are the official NBA D-League affiliate
of the Golden State Warriors and play in the newly built Kaiser Permanente
Arena. In 2015, the team won the NBA
D-League Championship.
In
2012, in a
third partnership with Magic Johnson, Peter Guber became an owner of the Los
Angeles Dodgers, the storied Major League Baseball franchise, led by the
Guggenheim Baseball Management group headed by Mark Walter together with Magic
Johnson. Under their ownership, the franchise has won the 2013 and 2014
National League West championships.
Also
in 2012, Guber and Mandalay Entertainment partnered with CAA Sports, the
world's leading athlete representation agency and Mike Tollin, Emmy and Peabody
Award-winning film and television producer/director to create Mandalay Sports
Media. The diversified sports media business creates, finances, and acquires
operating businesses, intellectual property, and varied enterprises within the
sports and media sectors, as well as develops high-quality sports-themed
entertainment programming for distribution across multiple platforms including
film, television, mobile and digital.
Mandalay Sports Media has several entertainment projects in development
with ESPN, Turner Sports, New Line Cinema, and Incognito Pictures, among other
distribution media venues. In October 2014, Mandalay Sports Media invested in
and became the largest shareholder in OYO Sports, a “fan engagement” company
that produces buildable mini-replicas of athletes from major professional
sports leagues including the MLB, NFL, NHL and MLS, as well as some universities.
In
addition, in 2012, Guber joined with Guggenheim Partners and Allen Shapiro as
CEO to purchase Dick Clark Productions. Peter Guber was named Chairman of the
company. Founded by the late Dick Clark, Dick Clark Productions is a leading
independent producer of television programming including perennial hits such as
the American Music Awards, Golden Globe Awards, Academy of Country Music
Awards, Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve and So You Think You Can Dance.
In
October of 2014, Peter
Guber became the owner and executive chairman of Major League Soccer's Los
Angeles Football Club (LAFC). The ownership group includes entrepreneur Henry
Nguyen, sports veteran Tom Penn, Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Mia Hamm
Garciaparra and Tony Robbins, among others.
The new club is scheduled to debut in 2018 in a new soccer stadium built
specifically for the team which will be located adjacent to the Los Angeles
Memorial Coliseum.
Peter
Guber is a full professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television
and has been a member of the faculty for over 30 years. He also co-teaches an annual MBA course with
the dean of UCLA's Anderson School of Management. He is a member of the UCLA Foundation Board
of Trustees, as well as the winner of UCLA’s prestigious Service Award for his
accomplishments and association with the university. Guber is the Chair of the Founding Board of
Advisors for The Center for Managing Enterprises in Media, Entertainment &
Sports (MEMES) at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. MEMES is the preeminent Center for thought
leadership and management education in the global media, entertainment and
sports industries.
Guber
has turned this legacy and experience in front of the camera where he has been
seen every Sunday morning for six years on American Movie Classics (AMC) cable
network, as co-host of the critically acclaimed national TV show,
Shootout. AMC moved Guber’s talents to
prime time with a series of one hour specials in 2009 called StoryMakers. Guber
was most recently seen as co-host of In the House, a weekly, national half-hour
news and interview show on Encore and KNBC.
Peter
Guber is a noted author with works including “Inside The Deep” and the L.A.
Times best-seller “Shootout: Surviving Fame and (Mis)Fortune
in Hollywood,” which was the impetus of his long running TV show of the same
title. In December 2007, Guber wrote the
cover article for the Harvard Business Review titled,” The Four Truths of the
Storyteller.” He has also authored op-ed
pieces for the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Guber recently released his third book, Tell To Win - Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden
Power of Story, which became an instant #1 best seller in the New York Times,
USA Today, Wall Street Journal and on Amazon.com. Fortune magazine chose Tell To Win as one of their "5 Business Books You Can Really
Use" and Hudson Booksellers, retail book stores in airports throughout
North America, chose Tell To Win as one of the "5 Best Business Books of
the Year."
A passionate,
humorous, and tireless motivator, Guber is a sought after speaker for
corporations and global events. He is a
regular contributor in the national media, both in print and on television.
Since October of 2008, he has been seen on Fox Business News, appearing on
America’s Nightly Scoreboard and After The Bell as an
Entertainment and Media Analyst. He has also appeared on Good Morning America
(ABC), Today (NBC), The Charlie Rose Show (PBS), Your World with Neil Cavuto
(FOX NEWS), Lou Dobbs Tonight (FOX NEWS), Bloomberg TV and Morning Joe (MSNBC),
among others.