History for sale. Cheap.

Few studios outside of Hollywood are as permeated with myth, legend and probably more than a few ghosts as the Babelsberg studios just outside Berlin. The glory days are long past, of course, the 20s, when the likes of Fritz Lang, FW Murnau and Josef von Sternberg were working for Ufa. Then, with the rise of Hitler, the studios became Goebbels's plaything. After the war, the East Germans ran the DEFA Studios in Babelsberg (and heavens, there's a body of work ripe for rediscovery outside of Germany), and ever since the Wall fell, the studios have struggled to come up with a formula for profitability.

Tamsin Walker had a good backgrounder on Babelberg's financial troubles in June at Deutsche Welle. Briefly, though, Volker Schlöndorff tried his hand at running them for eight years while the owner, the Compagnie Generale des Eaux, later Vivendi Universal, managed to lure a few high-profile productions - Polanski's The Pianist or The Bourne Supremacy, for example; and Mission Impossible 3 is scheduled to starting shooting with Tom Cruise in August - but never quite enough to turn a buck.

Or rather, a euro, which is precisely how much Vivendi Universal has sold the studios for. To whom remains somewhat mysterious, as Rüdiger Suchsland reports (in German) at Telepolis. The names of the buyers - Christoph Fisser and Carl Woebcken - are known, but not much else about them, other than that they'll also be taking on the studios' debt, around 18 million euros. The suddenness and secrecy of the deal, spelled out a tad more by Jo Johnson in the Financial Times, has been particularly frustrating for the 220 employees who've written a letter to Chancellor Schröder, expressing their worries that the two Munich investors may have little in mind other than selling off the studios all over again, either as a whole or in countless parts.

Posted by dwhudson at July 15, 2004 12:45 PM