Biography | Stacey Snider — The Paramount Gate Where DreamWorks Became Her Desk

People treat DreamWorks as a Glendale animation campus with a dragon on the lawn.

The job Snider took in 2006 was the live-action film unit Paramount had just bought.

On Sunday 26 February 2006 Paramount announced that the chairwoman of Universal Pictures would leave to run DreamWorks as co-chairman and chief executive with David Geffen.

The New York Times dated the story 27 February and placed the announcement on the previous day.

CBS News and the Associated Press printed the same Sunday hire.

Paramount had closed the purchase of DreamWorks on 11 December 2005 in a deal reported at about 1.6 billion dollars in cash and debt.

Snider would report to Paramount chairman Brad Grey and green-light four to six pictures a year with Geffen and Steven Spielberg, at budgets the company put up to 85 million dollars a film.

The animation business under Jeffrey Katzenberg had already been spun off as a public company in 2004 and sat on Flower Street in Glendale.

That campus is the wrong pin for this appointment.

The live-action unit lived inside Paramount at 5555 Melrose Avenue.

The Melrose Gate is the public face of that lot.

She stayed through 2014, then moved to Twentieth Century Fox as co-chairman.

Films released under the DreamWorks banner in those years included Dreamgirls, Sweeney Todd, Transformers, Tropic Thunder, and The Help.

The gate on Melrose is still the studio entrance a visitor can stand at.

The announcement itself was a press release, not a ceremony on the sidewalk.

Photo: Chris Brown (zoonabar), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons