His office looks more like it belongs to a New Age guru than a type-A chief executive crusading to save one of Hollywood's most storied movie studios.
Dozens of crystals, an amethyst cluster as big as a boulder, an amber lion, running-water sculptures and other talismans populate his corner suite at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.'s headquarters in Century City.
Shortly after becoming chairman and chief executive 18 months ago, Harry E. Sloan even changed his office phone number, replacing the 4s with 8s because they're lucky, according to Chinese tradition.
"The whole idea of feng shui is to create good luck," said Sloan, whose spiritual advisor is his Malaysian Chinese wife, Florence. "We all need good luck."
At the moment, the 56-year-old entrepreneur needs an extra-large dose.
He's undertaken a colossal challenge: to rescue from near obscurity the historic studio behind such movie classics as "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz."
After the 80-year-old studio was sold in 2005 by billionaire Kirk Kerkorian to a consortium of investors including Sony Corp., production and distribution of new movies was halted. MGM was reduced to a small film label under Sony Pictures.
Sloan has never run a major studio, an especially difficult feat today, when new technologies are upending the business and rising costs are forcing retrenchment.
Moreover, he's been absent from the Hollywood scene for the last 15 years, several time zones away, building a broadcasting business in Europe that he sold in 2005 for $2.6 billion.
He personally pocketed about $200 million from the sale, yet that fortune did not bring Sloan any fame back home. His name is absent from the power lists occupied by his Hollywood friends, a tightknit circle that includes CBS Chief Executive Leslie Moonves.
Now, this little-known media mogul, originally from Torrance, is looking for his own recognition.
"So, why am I doing this? Why here in Hollywood?" mused Sloan, who lives in an English Tudor mansion overlooking the 18th hole of the Bel-Air Country Club. "I want to pick up where I left off in my hometown."
In the 1980s, Sloan tried to build the now-defunct New World Entertainment into a full-fledged studio, but it never rose above second-tier status. "It was an unfinished foray into the movie and TV business," he said.
