Hindi
Spielberg to raise $1 billion for DreamWorks
MUMBAI: Steven Spielberg aims to raise over $1billion in third-party financing to recreate DreamWorks as a separate company that reacquires ownership of films.
Spielberg wants to reestablish DreamWorks as a studio that owns the movies it makes. Currently, DreamWorks is a unit of Paramount Pictures, a subsidiary of media conglomerate Viacom. DreamWorks was acquired by Paramount in 2005.
Earlier, Spielberg was supposed to grant the distribution rights to Universal who lost the acquisition in 2005. But on the recommendation of his advisers, Spielberg will allow a bidding effort among studios for the acquisition of distribution rights of future DreamWorks movies.
From 1 May Spielberg‘s personal contract with Paramount allowed him to discuss potential offers for his services from rival studios. And since then Spielberg and DreamWorks chairman David Geffen and attorney Skip Brittenham have held several meetings with studio suitors and financiers.
Major studios include Universal, Disney and Fox. Spielberg‘s contract is valid until 2010 but he can terminate it early at year‘s end. Snider and Geffen have similar clauses in their deals with Paramount. However, Paramount owns “Transformers” and other films produced by DreamWorks while it was housed at the studio which could lead to conflicts regarding rights between Spielberg and Paramount.
DreamWorks-produced movies have helped fill distribution pipelines at Paramount. The loss of such content would put severe demands on remaining production executives.
But this summer, Paramount has been a distributor in high-profile releases, such as the Lucasfilm-produced Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the Marvel-produced Iron Man and the DreamWorks Animation-produced Kung Fu Panda.
Hindi
Remembering Gyan Sahay, the lens behind film, television and advertising
From a puppet rabbit selling poppadums to Hindi cinema, he framed it all.
MUMBAI: There are careers, and then there are canvases. Gyan Sahay, the veteran cinematographer, director, and producer who passed away on 10 March 2026 in Mumbai, had one of the latter. Over several decades in the Indian film and television industry, he turned lenses, lights, and the occasional puppet rabbit into something approaching art.
A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Sahay built his reputation as a director of photography across a career that stretched from the early 1970s all the way to the digital age. He was the kind of craftsman who understood that a well-composed shot is not merely a technical achievement but a quiet act of storytelling.
For most Indians of a certain age, however, Sahay will forever be the man behind the rabbit. His direction of the iconic long-running television commercial for Lijjat Papad, featuring its now-legendary puppet bunny, gave the country one of its most cheerfully persistent advertising images. It was the sort of work that sneaks into the national subconscious and takes up permanent residence.
His big-screen credits as cinematographer include Anokhi Pehchan (1972), Pagli (1974), Pas de Deux (1981), and Hum Farishte Nahin (1988). In 1999, he stepped behind a different kind of camera altogether, making his directorial debut with Sar Ankhon Par, a drama that featured Vikas Bhalla and Shruti Ulfat, with a cameo by Shah Rukh Khan for good measure.
On television, Sahay was particularly prized for his command of multi-camera production setups, a skill that made him a go-to technician for large-scale shows and reality programmes. In an industry that has never been especially patient with complexity, he was the calm hand on the rig.
In later life, Sahay turned teacher. He participated regularly in masterclasses and Digi-Talks, often hosted by organisations such as Bharatiya Chitra Sadhna, sharing hard-won wisdom on cinematography, the comedy of timing in a shot, and the sweeping changes brought by the shift from celluloid to digital. He was also said to have been involved in a project concerning a biographical film on Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy.
Tributes from the film industry poured in following the news of his passing, with colleagues remembering him as a senior cameraman who served as a rare bridge between two entirely different eras of Indian cinema. That is, perhaps, the finest thing one can say of any craftsman: he kept up, and he brought others along with him.
