A continental shift for DreamWorks

The Indian billionaire owns movie production facilities and theater chains in his homeland, as well as a piece of an Indian post-production company, Prime Focus Group, that lately has been acquiring similar firms in Hollywood. His wife is Tina Munim, a famous Bollywood actress and former Miss India.

Now Ambani is making a play for a major share of the Hollywood limelight. His Mumbai-based Reliance ADA Group is in talks to help finance a move by DreamWorks SKG, the studio founded by Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, to become an independent company again.

Just last month, a Reliance division, Reliance Big Entertainment, announced deals to provide production financing to Hollywood A-listers such as George Clooney, Tom Hanks and Brad Pitt. At the time, the company said it planned to spend $1 billion on entertainment projects over the next year and a half.

Ambani's ambitions go beyond trying to win Americans over to Bollywood films, which are popular around the globe but have had limited success in the United States.

"He wants to do that," Gunjan Bagla, author of the forthcoming book "Doing Business in 21st Century India," said of Ambani's plans. "But he signed the production deals with George Clooney and others, and he's making this move toward DreamWorks, because he has ambitions of owning a studio in Hollywood and participating in the revenue stream that Hollywood generates."

Ambani, 49, is a scion of the dynasty founded by industrialist Dhirubhai Ambani, the patriarch of one of India's best-known business families.

"Think of Rockefeller, Bill Gates and Howard Hughes combined," Bagla said. "That's how well the Ambani family name is known in India."

After the elder Ambani died in 2002 without leaving a will, Anil and his older brother Mukesh engaged in a very public brawl over the family empire. According to the family, the truce that was finally negotiated in 2005 was largely the doing of Anil and Mukesh's mother, although major Indian banks that had invested heavily in the Ambani empire apparently played a role as well.

The deal broke Reliance into two parts. Besides his entertainment interests, Anil Ambani has holdings in telecommunications, healthcare and financial services. Mukesh heads petrochemical giant Reliance Industries.