There’s talk of some form of a relationship with George Lucas, maker of Star Wars. Not that the conglomerate has been idle: there has already been a $200m deal with Capital Cities/ABC to create a new television studio; it has sold TV rights to all its movies for 10 years to Home Box Office, a US cable channel, and it has announced the formation of a $30m interactive media company with Microsoft, the software giant.And more developments are in the offing. So it is hardly surprising there are suggestions that it is already getting impatient with the lack of action, although much of its criticism is delivered anonymously (“even enemies of Spielberg won’t admit to being enemies these days,” one source told me). “If you don’t believe, you have no business investing in this deal. And if you do believe, then you understand, and you are in for a very, very interesting ride.”Hollywood hates this; it hates not knowing what is going on.

We know its founders aim to position themselves to cash in on every conceivable opportunity the multi-channel 21st century may offer – retaining as much control as possible of their products wend their way down the Information Highway.But that’s about it The rest still lies in the realm of crystal ball gazing. “You are dealing in the arena of the unknowable, that’s why when you talk about these things you have to believe,” says Peter Dekom, a Hollywood entertainment attorney and analyst. Their biggest financial coup was the decision by Paul Allen, co-founder of the software giant, Microsoft, to invest $500m of his estimated $3.9bn fortune in return for a 20 per cent stake.Allen’s involvement has surprised some analysts, not least because it remains unclear exactly what he has bought. We know that DreamWorks hopes to be an integrated multi-media empire, which will crank out movies, television programmes videos, CDs and tapes, interactive toys and games, CD-roms, and more. (Spielberg told one journalist that investors were queuing up “like stacking time at Kennedy airport”). According to Fortune magazine, which has examined a copy of its terms for equity investments, the trio has put up 10 per cent of the firm’s capital – $33m each, a relative pittance for the vastly wealthy Geffen and Spielberg, but a stretch for Katzenberg, who is said to have mortgaged almost everything he owns to play with the big boys. Yet their combined $100m gives them two-thirds of the profits, and 100 per cent of the voting stock.

Major potential investors have said they want no part of it, the magazine claims.This is unlikely to worry Messrs S, K, and G, who have so far had no problem raising investment. But the decision to build Chinese walls dividing their fiefdom was none the less wise: Spielberg will run the live-action film unit, with several lieutenants from his production company, Amblin Films; Geffen will run DreamWorks’ music division, and Katzenberg will be in charge of the animation and television companies.Not everyone has been impressed by what they have heard about DreamWorks’ financing. And they have not always been quite so friendly as they appear today. In her tell-all book You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, the producer Julia Phillips claimed that Geffen once told her that Spielberg was “selfish, self-centred, egomaniacal – and worst of all – greedy.”It is a statement Geffen denies. Are these three really any different? I don’t think so.” Will the Dream Team meet the same fate?The prophets of doom (and they are easily found in this jealous town) predict that one of the biggest hurdles facing the triumvirate is simply the business of getting on together The three men have juggernaut-sized egos.

Over the years the industry has seen plenty of film-makers branch out on their own – from Preston Sturges’s disastrous association with Howard Hughes in the Forties to Francis Ford Coppola’s production company, American Zeotrope in the Seventies – only to fall flat on their faces.”Our factories come and go,” one leading Hollywood director says wearily, “and their owners come and go. Chaplin only made a handful of films for it, and Mary Pickford retired not long after it was founded.As the rhetoric that greeted their launch begins to fade, Hollywood is wondering how viable their plans really are. Since then, the trio’s every pronouncement has been a headline story, their every deal the subject of tireless speculation. All this fuss, over a company that has no premises and, so far, released no products.Is it hype or history in the making? There was a similar hue and cry over the launch of First Artists 25 years ago by Sidney Poitier, Barbra Streisand, and Paul Newman But it, too, eventually folded in disarray. And even United Artists had a horribly rocky passage, although it struggled on for decades.