Sidney Sheinberg

produced Jaws?

Jaws was universal, Sidney Sheinberg.

Okay, yeah.

But the other thing that happened is that all those men with beards, almost every one of those cool 70s filmmakers eventually laid a giant egg, possibly because they were on drugs.

In terms of just when you started this journey of doing this book, what would you consider to be kind of the biggest surprise, something that you didn't know going in that you really found interesting coming out of it?

So this one I did not know, and I do – I love this so much that I actually put a copy of the original in my book, which is Sid Sheinberg, who is the president of Universal Studios.

He made some actual really smart changes to the script, like small things, but things that worked out.

Like, hey, let's not call him Professor Brown.

Give him a dog.

And name him Einstein, right? And I believe Bob Gale said, well, you know, we can use a chimp.

And Sid Sheinberg said, no movie that ever stars a chimpanzee ever turned a profit.

And then Bob Gale said, what about Any Which Way But Loose? And Sid Sheinberg said, that was an orangutan.

That was fascinating.

But one of my favorite stories was Sid Sheinberg.

Sid Sheinberg was the president of Universal, the studio obviously making the film.

Yeah.

He had read an early draft and the early draft of Back to the Future.

And even Marty McFly was a video pirate who was, you know, filming bootleg movies and the time circuits were powered by Coca-Cola.

And like there was a really different kind of movie.

But Sid Sheinberg, present studio, had some really good suggestions on how to make it better.

Then comes the ad about Kojak and Columbo, both of them Universal shows.

Sidney Sheinberg has been president of MCA, the company that owns Universal, since 1973.

MCA has spent years developing a laser video disc called DiscoVision, a disc that plays movies on a TV but can't record anything.

So Sheinberg tells the studio's lawyers that a home recorder shouldn't be sold at all.

He says the studios are asking the courts to build a bigger system of rules and payments than Congress has set up for copyright.

And they want it so they can tax a brand new industry.

In Universal City, Sidney Sheinberg has waited seven years for this, since the Kojak ad.

MCA's lawyers in the Black Tower, the company's headquarters, write up what they want from the trial court.

yeah the the interesting thing and i again like i was gonna talk about this in the book and then i was like ugh But like, you know, like Landis' segment is partly about the Holocaust.

And what's interesting is Sid Sheinberg, right after Twilight Zone, Sid Sheinberg gives Spielberg the manuscript for Schindler's List.

And a part of me wonders if Spielberg got interested in that project as almost a reaction to what Landis had done, how Landis had handled it in the movie.

I don't know.

They replaced him.

Um, cause he wasn't getting the jokes, uh, Sid Sheinberg, who was the producer or, excuse me, president of Universal Pictures at the time, he had this idea of a few things.

He was like, hey, I don't like how y'all call it the springtime in Paris, Dan.

Let's call it Enchantment of the Under the Sea.

So a little bit different from the story that we know.

And I think the biggest one is Sid Sheinberg, who ran Universal.

He was the president of Universal.

He had some notes for them on the script, like studios do.