Peter Guber

 

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.