Short Biography

Howard Peter Guber (b. 2 March 1942 in Newton, Massachusetts) is an American film producer and executive. Peter Guber was formerly the studio chief at Columbia Pictures and chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures. He is now chairman of Mandalay Entertainment, which he founded in 1995. The films he has produced -- including Midnight Express, The Color Purple, Rain Man, and Batman, among many others -- have reportedly earned more than $3 billion in worldwide revenue, and have been nominated for numerous Academy Awards. Guber resigned from Columbia in 1976 and formed Filmworks, Inc. A Year later in 1977, he merged his company with Casablanca Records headed by Neil Bogart to formed Casablanca Record and Filmworks. At Casablanca, Guber focused on television production. Guber formed PolyGram Pictures in 1979 and served as Chairman of the Board and co-owner until selling it in 1983.

Guber`s most important contributions to Sony Pictures Entertainment were a company restructuring and, perhaps more importantly, rebuilding the lot located at Culver City for over $103 million, making it a state of the art film and TV production facility. Within the Sony empire, Guber played a substantial role in the creation of such Columbia Pictures` box office hits as A Few Good Men, Bram Stoker`s Dracula, Groundhog Day, and In the Line of Fire along with his other major financial successes released through Sony`s TriStar Pictures banner that included Terminator 2, Basic Instinct, Sleepless in Seattle and Philadelphia. Sony achieved a box office market share of 17 percent as well as leading the industry with nine $100 million dollar blockbusters and twenty-one $50 million dollar domestic hits garnering a remarkable 120 Academy Award nominations, the highest four-year total ever for a single company.

Now also a full professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, Guber also appears each week at 11 a.m. ET/PT on AMC in the interview show Shootout (formerly "Sunday Morning Shootout") with Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart. Bart and Guber also co-authored the book Shoot Out: Surviving Fame and (Mis)Fortune in Hollywood. In November 2006, Guber was elected to the board of directors of the GoFish corporation, an online video site. Guber stated: "Professional content creators will need to adapt to a fundamentally new form of storytelling, one where users become a critical part of the creative process. GoFish is one of the few companies in this space that wants to differentiate itself by collaborating with the scarcest resource - the talent. As a creative entrepreneur in filmed entertainment in all media for over 30 years, I find this medium incredibly exciting."

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