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| Birth Name(s) : David Geffen |
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Full David Geffen Biography
David Geffen (born February 21, 1943) is an American record executive, film producer, theatrical producer, philanthropist. Geffen is noted for creating Asylum Records in 1970 (which merged with Elektra Records in 1972 to form Elektra/Asylum Records), and Geffen Records in 1980, along with his later role as one of the three founders of Dreamworks SKG in 1994.
Born into a European-Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, David Geffen's father, Abraham Geffen, is of Polish ancestry and his mother Batya Volovskaya is of Ukrainian ancestry. Both were immigrants from Europe who met in the Palestine-il and then moved to Brooklyn. Geffen graduated from New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn, then attended the University of Texas at Austin but soon dropped out. His mother owned a clothing store, Chic Corsets By Geffen, in Borough Park, Brooklyn. David's older brother Mitchell Geffen was an attorney who attended UCLA Law School and later settled in Encino, California. (Mitchell Geffen was the father of two daughters, who are David's closest surviving relatives.)
Geffen founded Asylum Records in 1970, which signed artists such as Jackson Browne, The Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Linda Ronstadt and J.D. Souther. Asylum was acquired by Warner Communications and merged with Elektra Records in 1972 to become Elektra/Asylum Records. Geffen remained in charge until 1975, when he went to work as Vice Chairman of Warner Brothers film studios. He then retired and was soon informed (erroneously) that he had a life-threatening illness. During his retirement period he spent a short time teaching business studies at Yale University. In 1980 a new medical diagnosis revealed the error in the original diagnosis and Geffen was given a clean bill of health, whereupon he decided to return to working in the entertainment industry.
In 1980, he founded Geffen Records. The Geffen label's meteoric rise to prominence within the year proved a bittersweet success. The December release of John Lennon's album Double Fantasy seems an impressive feat for a new label, but at the time Lennon stated that Geffen was the only one with enough confidence in him to agree to a deal without hearing the record first. An alternate view is that Geffen was the only label head to pay attention to Lennon's wife-partner Yoko Ono. In December 1980 Lennon was fatally shot and Double Fantasy became a massive seller. Over the years Geffen Records/DGC has become well known as a label, releasing works by the likes of Asia with Steve Howe and John Wetton, Cher, Sonic Youth, Aerosmith, XTC, Peter Gabriel, Lone Justice, Blink-182, Guns N' Roses, Pat Metheny, Nirvana, Neil Young, and Weezer
Geffen's Malibu home on the Pacific Coast Highway has been a battlefront in an ongoing struggle between property owners and beachgoers over access to public beaches in front of private residences. In 2002, Geffen sued to block access to the public beach in front of his home. His publicly stated concern was safety. In 2005, facing a rising tide of anger, Geffen relented and allowed access through a non-profit group. Garry Trudeau parodied this dispute in his daily comic strip Doonesbury.
Geffen has an estimated worth of $6 billion, making him the richest person in the entertainment industry.
David Geffen is also the subject of several books, most recently The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood (2001) by Thomas R. King, who initially had Geffen's cooperation, but later did not. An earlier biography was The Rise and Rise of David Geffen (1997) by Stephen Singular. Geffen is also a featured character in the books "Mansion On The Hill" by Fred Goodman and "Hotel California" by Barney Hoskyns as well as several books about Michael Ovitz.
Geffen is a keen collector of American artists' work, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. According to the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Paul Schimmel: "There's no collection that has a better representation of post-war American art than David Geffen's."
In October 2006, Geffen sold two paintings by Jasper Johns and a De Kooning from his collection for a combined sum of $143.5m. On November 3, 2006, the New York Times reported that Geffen had sold Pollock's 1948 painting No. 5, 1948 from his collection for $140m (£73.35m) to Mexican financier David Martinez. Martinez is the founder of London-based Fintech Advisory Ltd, a financial house that specializes in buying Third World debt. The sale made No. 5, 1948 the most expensive painting ever sold (outstripping the $134m paid in October 2006 for Gustav Klimt's portrait Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder).
The art work sales have prompted speculation that Geffen was storing up resources for a bid to buy the Los Angeles Times. In early January 2007, the industry trade paper Daily Variety reported that Geffen had made a $2 billion offer for the Times, estimated to be half of Geffen's net worth. However, the newspaper later reported the offer on hold, pending future negotiations with other buyers, including Chicago real estate investor Sam Zell, who announced his bid in April 2007, and Los Angeles investors Ron Burkle and Eli Broad. |
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