0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Re: Michael and ROB LOWE
September 13, 2014, 01:42:57 AM
In one of the videos, Tom Barrack began to talk about Colony's acquisition of Neverland, but then the video was cut short.  Does anyone know where to find the full interview?
friendly
0
funny
0
informative
0
agree
0
disagree
0
pwnt
0
like
0
dislike
0
late
0
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions

Re: Michael and ROB LOWE
September 13, 2014, 01:20:40 PM
Here  two articles that might help:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login

Monetizing the Celebrity Meltdown

Tom Barrack, a billionaire investor who made his fortune in real estate, has discovered a market in distressed celebrities. With Neverland Ranch and Miramax under his belt, he’s now on a shopping spree—and bringing along his buddy Rob Lowe.

5 Comments
By Benjamin Wallace
  Published Nov 28, 2010

You’ll see why Michael called this place Neverland,” says Tom Barrack, the newest owner of Michael Jackson’s Neverland Valley Ranch. Barrack is a 63-year-old billionaire with a gleaming shaved head, summer-in-Sardinia tan, personally trained muscles, and sockless tasseled loafers. He is sitting on the lawn beside the Tudor-style, panic-room-equipped main house, near a gnarled oak tree with steps winding up to the perch where Jackson wrote Bad.

 This, the manicured park with the giant floral clock and movie theater featuring isolation boxes for immunocompromised children—default B-roll for all TV coverage of Jackson—comprises just 32 acres. It scarcely hints at the grandeur of the full property, which is nearly ten times that size, with 67,000 oaks and sycamores, the odd rattlesnake and mountain lion, and a former Chumash Indian worship site overlooking a savannah-like plain. “You’ll feel something, which I think was what drove him,” Barrack says of the Chumash site. “And I don’t mean that—I’m not coming from outer space—but you will actually feel it, I promise.”

 When Barrack’s private-equity firm, Colony Capital, took over Neverland in November 2008, averting foreclosure, even the groomed portion was going to seed. Jackson, self-exiled after his child-molestation acquittal to places like Bahrain and Las Vegas, hadn’t been home since early 2005. His 275 employees had dwindled to four. The amusement-park rides and steam train—operable only by California’s single licensed steam-train engineer—had been sold off to raise money. The petting zoo’s animals had been removed by animal-rescue groups; the snakes from the reptile barn were, um, released into the wild.

 Since then, Barrack’s team has worked steadily to rehabilitate the estate, refinishing the wood floors, relandscaping acres of grass, introducing more swans into the lakes, and repositioning Jackson’s statue of a long-gun-brandishing pirate to scare off coyotes. In the dance studio, a solitary bulb lights a spot worn down by Jackson’s spinning. The elephant barn now houses a labyrinth of walls filled with effusive notes penned by visitors from around the world. The only obvious reminders of Jackson’s complicated legacy are the bronze statues of children at play that dot the estate.

Barrack built his fortune making deals, and in some ways, Neverland began as just another one—a contrarian bet on a troubled asset, an operating business backed by real estate. Only in this case, the operating business was a person. Colony would bail Jackson out of his substantial debt; in return, the firm would assume ownership of Neverland, and Jackson, after a thirteen-year hiatus, would go back to work to generate new revenue. Jackson’s death, before he could carry out a planned comeback tour, turned the transaction into more of a straightforward real-estate play: Colony is fixing up Neverland and plans to sell it, at some point, for a profit. But after doing the Jackson deal, Barrack and his team began to wonder whether they might have stumbled on a whole new class of investment: the distressed celebrity.

Earlier this year, two financial firms, Cantor Fitzgerald and Media Derivatives, moved to create futures exchanges devoted to betting on film box-office receipts. Neither plan made it through Congress, which was heavily lobbied by Hollywood studios, but these would-be speculators weren’t alone in seeking a new way for Wall Street to enter the cultural marketplace. Earlier this fall, CAA sold a 35 percent stake of its agency to the private-equity firm TPG, modeling the deal on Ted Forstmann’s purchase of IMG in 2004. And while there have always been moneymen willing to buy a stake in the big studios, along with a deep bench of bored tycoons eager to “executive produce” their way into hanging out on set, Hollywood is now luring harder-nosed investors backing individual movies in the full expectation of an attractive return on equity.

 Other investors have sought ways to take positions in celebrities themselves. Thirteen years ago, David Bowie famously raised $55 million by issuing so-called Bowie Bonds, paying 7.9 percent interest through album royalties and introducing the concept of securitized intellectual property. Now the model is proliferating. In 2007, Mark Cuban co-founded Content Partners to do for celebrities what structured-settlement firms do for winners of lotteries and lawsuits: pay an up-front lump sum in return for the right to future revenue. (Cuban won’t name names but claims the venture has been “highly profitable.”) Art Capital Group, a high-end pawnshop, lends money to brand-name artists who pledge their paintings and photographs as collateral.
 
Over the past two years, Barrack has been lining up deals that target celebrities and entertainment properties whose value he believes to be artificially depressed. In some cases, that’s because they haven’t yet figured out a way to monetize their assets. But mostly it’s because the investment is, in the classic sense, distressed—individuals like Jackson or Annie Leibovitz whose financial mismanagement has obscured their future revenue potential, or properties like the Miramax film library, which Disney is unloading at a time when no one can agree on what a studio archive is worth.

This summer, Barrack created a new $500 million media-and-entertainment investment fund, working with his friend Rob Lowe, who is a partner in the fund. Together they have been on something of a shopping spree—and generating a little tabloid coverage while they’re at it. In one TMZ appearance, a paparazzo’s telephoto captured Lowe and Barrack, shirtless, checking their BlackBerrys on a yacht in the Mediterranean. In a second, the two men were video-ambushed as they entered the Mayfair restaurant C London for dinner with owner Giuseppe Cipriani and Formula One’s Flavio Briatore.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login

Monetizing the Celebrity Meltdown ShareThis    .

Barrack’s turn into entertainment investing began with a visit to Michael Jackson’s home in Las Vegas in 2008. Barrack had received a call from Tohme Tohme, a fellow Lebanese-American who had become Jackson’s business manager. Jackson hadn’t released a new album or done a world tour in years, but he had three significant assets: the Neverland property, the MiJac catalogue of his own music, and the enormous Sony/ATV catalogue, which included, among other songs, most of the Beatles’ oeuvre. Jackson was facing a crisis, Tohme said. The holder of $270 million in loans to Jackson was foreclosing on Neverland and planned to sell it in five days. Would Barrack meet with Jackson? “It’s so not Tom’s thing,” Lowe says. “Getting roped into spending half an hour with Michael Jackson in some weird house is just not on his agenda.”

 Somewhat grudgingly, Barrack arrived at Jackson’s fifties stucco rental on Palomino Lane. “Not one blade of grass,” Barrack says. “The house was old and musty.” The 1,000-plus-page Sony/ATV catalogue was on the table between them, and Barrack was quickly won over. “For sure, the guy is an absolute genius,” Barrack says. “He was remembering not just songs but every performance, every date, every script.” When it came to business matters, though, Jackson was lost. He knew only that if Neverland was foreclosed on as scheduled, it would trigger a cascade of financial devastation. For the past decade, he had repeatedly staved off financial reckoning by borrowing. Now he was out of options.

Barrack had a relationship with the loan holder, Fortress, and was able to get an extension to give his Colony team time to crunch the numbers. They concluded that the only way to make a deal work would be for Jackson to start generating new revenue, which meant performing old material. Two days later, Barrack called Jackson. “I told him: ‘Where you are is an insolvable puzzle unless you’re willing to go back to work. If you’re willing to do that, then we can help, but if you’re not willing to do that, it’s just presiding over a funeral.’ ” At first, Jackson demurred. “He really had a hard time with that, and he struggled for about three days. Finally, he calls back and says, ‘You’re right, I’ll do it.’ ”

 Colony agreed to bail out Jackson; in return, the firm would take ownership of Neverland and arrange for AEG, the concert promoter owned by Barrack’s friend Phil Anschutz, to stage a comeback. An unforeseen complication arose when Barrack received a call from the King of Bahrain, whom he knew from Sardinia, where Barrack owns much of the Costa Smeralda; astonishingly, Jackson had apparently forgotten that while being hosted in Bahrain, he had signed over a number of recording and performance rights to the king's son. Colony had to buy out that interest. Jackson moved into a gated $100,000-a-month mansion in Bel-Air to prepare for a run of 50 concerts in London that would relaunch his career. Instead, it ended it. He was struggling physically and heavily medicated by a live-in doctor. He died, from a sedative overdose, eighteen days before the first concert.


But in the frenzy of posthumous adulation of Jackson—in those first days, it was hard to find an FM radio station that wasn’t playing “Billie Jean” or “Beat It”—Barrack watched as Jackson’s value was suddenly and spectacularly realized. This Is It, a documentary about Jackson’s preparation for the comeback concerts, grossed $261 million worldwide during its theatrical run, a record for a concert film, and the Jackson estate signed a series of lucrative deals, including a video game and a Cirque du Soleil show.

“What’s amazing,” Barrack says, “is he attained in death what he could never attain in life.” It may be an obvious observation, but it’s one with huge financial implications for a long-term investor. Anyone who had seen past the momentary distractions of controversy and scandal could have identified the intrinsic preciousness of Jackson’s talent and fan base. Colony hadn’t predicted Jackson would die, of course, but it had wagered correctly that, over time, Michael Jackson the asset would outshine its liabilities (and even Michael Jackson the person).

 As a rule, Barrack is drawn to distressed situations. One of the adages in a list of “rules for success” that he sometimes distributes to employees is “befriend the bewildered.” And when you start applying the thought process of a vulture investor to pop culture, suddenly the world can seem dizzy with opportunity. Is Lindsay Lohan a drug-addled train wreck or an underestimated future cash machine? What about Mel Gibson? Rob Lowe himself, now a ubiquitous television star, would have made for a profitable distressed investment if Rob Lowe shares had been floated in the late eighties. It’s all a matter of correctly analyzing an asset’s fundamentals and buying at the right time.

Love you Michael!
friendly
0
funny
0
informative
0
agree
0
disagree
0
pwnt
0
like
0
dislike
0
late
0
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions

Re: Michael and ROB LOWE
October 07, 2014, 08:13:04 AM
This line from the second article is interesting. =)

Two days later, Barrack called Jackson. “I told him: ‘Where you are is an insolvable puzzle unless you’re willing to go back to work. If you’re willing to do that, then we can help, but if you’re not willing to do that, it’s just presiding over a funeral.’ ” At first, Jackson demurred. “He really had a hard time with that, and he struggled for about three days. Finally, he calls back and says, ‘You’re right, I’ll do it.’ ”

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login
friendly
0
funny
0
informative
0
agree
0
disagree
0
pwnt
0
like
0
dislike
0
late
0
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions

*

Its her

Re: Michael and ROB LOWE
October 07, 2014, 02:04:17 PM
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login
Here  two articles that might help:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login

Monetizing the Celebrity Meltdown

... Other investors have sought ways to take positions in celebrities themselves. Thirteen years ago, David Bowie famously raised $55 million by issuing so-called Bowie Bonds, paying 7.9 percent interest through album royalties and introducing the concept of securitized intellectual property. Now the model is proliferating. In 2007, Mark Cuban co-founded Content Partners to do for celebrities what structured-settlement firms do for winners of lotteries and lawsuits: pay an up-front lump sum in return for the right to future revenue. (Cuban won’t name names but claims the venture has been “highly profitable.”) Art Capital Group, a high-end pawnshop, lends money to brand-name artists who pledge their paintings and photographs as collateral.
 
Over the past two years, Barrack has been lining up deals that target celebrities and entertainment properties whose value he believes to be artificially depressed. In some cases, that’s because they haven’t yet figured out a way to monetize their assets...


You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login

Monetizing the Celebrity Meltdown ShareThis    .

....

Remember when doing a "commercial" was a kiss of death (or at least an eventual  :icon_rolleyes: :icon_rolleyes: :icon_redface: :Crash: embarrassment for artists who were serious about their craft? Savvy people knew then that there was big money to be made in endorsements, but maybe not long term enough to make the humbling experience more lucrative for the actual personality's putting up their reputation, and maybe not enough for anyone but the sponsors. And for a long time it was forbidden for some Americans with accents to even endorse anything on American TV, let alone non-citizens with accents, so that excluded a lot of people from a piece of that pie. So wrong, in America, yet---where every single person has some kind of accent! :elvis-1405:

Well, there's no thing more profitable than a sure thing, and the most sure thing is change. Especially when it is done strategically TO change the way things work. One can bank on it. Little by little some silly walls have been chipped down, and since the eighties (hmmmm) all kinds of celebrities are doing all kinds of commercials. The first time I was told what airtime costs for a few seconds on a televised event such as football, I was stunned at just how profitable this could be, if everyone involved got a piece of the action, not just an honorarium for their face or name and a pat on the back as they parted ways. And I am not saying that MJ is directly responsible for any of this, but he certainly has had a reputation for helping artists get control of their own work and still profit from it in their retirement, instead of dying early and penniless, after blessing the world with their silken voices and gifts of song, etc. He is on record a few times saying or doing something about this, as he has mentored upcoming young artists, and "giving back" behind the scenes, to some old timers who got rooked out of their property.

I think MJ very well may be on the cutting edge of investing in "celebrity" properties (and I don't mean real estate !), and he of all people on earth should know exactly what someone with Hollywood type business savvy and imagination could DO with this kind of investment. I think he intended all along to make ginormous bucks from his catalog of songs, and NOT by simply loaning them to others! :bowdown: I think this began stewing in his imagination since the very first commercial ad he did for that scooter in Japan, remember, the one with that pretty girl trying to steal the scene and then driving away with him? :icon_e_surprised: I always wondered why he did those Pepsi commercials, himself,too---even though he was hot and the cool storylines were a hoot---didn't he know that commercial endorsements only make people take you less seriously???? And, I mean, it's not retirement income; highly shortlived as far as film goes... NOW, since hindsight IS 20/20 (actually crystal clear and perfectly in focus), I'm thinking those commercials were TESTing the waters, in more directions than one, to see how much mileage (and money :woohoo2:  :icon_e_ugeek: :thjajaja121: ) he himself could actually squeeze out of them, if HE controlled the property. :ghsdf: I mean, instead of getting a check for showing up with his little buns and a smile and appear to jump off a building, WHAT IF he stars in it, lends Likeness and Name AND music and lyrics, AND has some kind of personal stake or ownership in it forever????!!!!!  :omg: :omg: :omg: :icon_exclaim: I can see it now, Pepsi agreeing to everything, thinking, "Ha ha this "songbird" thinks this is going to be worth something long after we run it the agreed 1000 times, heh heh heh, OK kiddo. Sure, we'll agree to give you a piece of it. SUCKER :TongueOutSmiley:" (---or was it ALL of it, after the ad is retired that year???? :omg:). Idk all about how these things work, really, but it sounds like Michael Jackson's subtle genius, doesn't it?!!!! :icon_e_smile:  If it never did go like that, HE would be the one to MAKE it go like that!!! :icon_bounce: :icon_bounce: :Michael_Jackson_dancing_smile That shrinking violet is a secret Python in the boardroom---I KNOW it! ;D

THINK about all the mileage (and cash) he has gotten out of his dealings with Pepsi! WHO KNEW the world would be talking about this and showing these "short films" 30 years later? ( :icon_cool: HE did!) :TongueOutSmiley: :TongueOutSmiley:  :th_bravo:

Which...brings me to my point. Has anyone not seen the commercial with "Attractive Rob Lowe and NOT so attractive Rob Lowe", comparing satellite TV to cable? TELL me this doesn't have that wiley fox Michael Jackson ALL over it. The theme to St Elmoe's Fire is even playing, ever so slyly, at the end of this commercial! IT IS A CLUE.  See?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNNkvQ9vkEM [/youtube]

All I can say now is that this gives NEW meaning to the terms, "Make that change" ($$ :michael_jackson-1135: ) & KEEP WATCHIN'  :icon_e_surprised: :Michael_Jackson_dancing_smile
:thjajaja121:
friendly
0
funny
0
informative
0
agree
0
disagree
0
pwnt
0
like
0
dislike
0
late
0
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
No reactions
ONLY Believe...

 

SimplePortal 2.3.6 © 2008-2014, SimplePortal