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How Joe Biden won friends in Hollywood by helping studios get their movies into China
By EVAN HALPER, LA TIMES STAFF WRITER , JULY 18, 2019
Xi Jinping, then the vice president of China, speaks with then-Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa while Jerry Brown, then governor of California, watches a game between the Lakers and the Suns at Staples Center in 2012. At top right is Jeffrey Katzenberg, then-CEO of DreamWorks Animation, who used his ties to California politicians — and to then-Vice President Joe Biden — to lobby Xi for access to the Chinese market. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
WASHINGTON — When then-Vice President Joe Biden hosted Chinese leader Xi Jinping for a five-day diplomatic blitz in 2012, a Hollywood Democratic mega-donor kept popping up with them. There was Jeffrey Katzenberg, then the head of DreamWorks Animation, dining alongside Xi, the then-vice president of China, at a State Department welcome lunch in Washington. And there he was again, standing just behind Xi, then-Gov.
Jerry Brown and then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa at a Lakers game in Los Angeles. And there was Katzenberg hanging out in a nearby hallway with Disney CEO Robert Iger to provide last-minute counsel as Biden closed a deal in which China committed to considerably expand its market for American films.
On the final day of Xi’s visit, Dreamworks announced Xi had signed off on the company’s own deal — the launching of Oriental DreamWorks, a $330-million joint venture with Chinese companies to develop and distribute animated films in China.
Several of the candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination have significant support in Hollywood — Katzenberg, for example, has kicked in $2,800 each to 14 of them already — but none has as long a history of delivering for the industry as Biden. His deep ties to studio executives and decades-long advocacy for their agenda has helped cement Biden’s support even as it may also open him to criticism for too cozy a relationship with big donors.
Biden is returning to Hollywood this week for another round of fundraisers, including the second Biden event co-hosted by Katzenberg and leaders of several major studios. Biden’s first Southern California fundraiser, which Katzenberg co-hosted in May, netted more than $700,000 in one night. “Joe was our champion inside the White House,” said former Sen. Christopher Dodd, who led the Motion Picture Assn. of America for much of the Obama era.
“There is no question about it. Even before Joe Biden decided to run, I would get calls and have conversation with the major studio figures, with them saying, ‘You tell Vice President Biden 100% we want him to run.’ This wasn’t waiting around to see who would do well in polls.”