David Geffen

Tip O'Neill once famously said that all politics is local. Well, in Hollywood, all politics is personal. Take the speculation that began to swirl around entertainment industry mogul David Geffen this week when Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) announced that he was forming an exploratory committee to look into a presidential run. Geffen's name surfaced immediately as one of Hollywood's early major supporters of the young senator, a significant snub to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-N.Y.

After months of planning, two of Southern California's wealthiest men flew to Chicago on Saturday and made their case for buying a large and potentially controlling stake in Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times, KTLA-TV Channel 5, the Chicago Cubs and other newspapers and TV stations.

THE presidential dash for dollars is officially underway in Hollywood. On Wednesday, DreamWorks trio David Geffen, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg sent a letter to 700 political donors and activists asking them to donate $2,300 per person to attend a reception for Sen. Barack Obama's presidential exploratory committee at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Feb. 20.

The California Coastal Commission agreed Wednesday to a settlement proposed by entertainment mogul David Geffen to end decades of wrangling over public access to the beach at his Malibu estate. The 12-member commission unanimously agreed to forgive Geffen for mistakenly building a deck that intruded into a public easement over the sand in front of his beach complex in exchange for his opening a 42-foot stretch of beach that had been closed to the public.

In her run for the White House, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton eventually was going to face the legacy of the more unsavory episodes of her husband's two terms as president. But in a surprise Wednesday, the first person to draw wide attention to some of the old controversies was not a Republican candidate or the "vast, right-wing conspiracy" that the Clintons have assailed, but a leading liberal at the heart of Hollywood.

Long before the fractious public airing of their poisoned relations, the political friendship between David Geffen and Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton was an unconventional alliance with a cloudy future. The outspoken Hollywood mogul Geffen lavished nearly $1.

A month after billionaire David Geffen publicly declared she couldn't win the presidency, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is bringing her campaign to the home of Geffen's neighbor in Beverly Hills, fellow billionaire Ron Burkle, for a fundraiser tonight that is expected to raise millions. It's a neighborhood Clinton knows well. She has visited repeatedly, as the first lady and as New York's junior senator.

Will the next chapter in the Los Angeles Times ownership saga involve David Geffen? The entertainment mogul's $2-billion offer for the newspaper was rejected last year by its parent, Chicago-based Tribune Co. Tribune, which was considering options including a sale of assets, said at the time that it intended to keep itself intact rather than sell off pieces. But the company's deal this week with billionaire entrepreneur Sam Zell to go private may well have changed the equation.

Sam Zell insists he's a builder, not a breakup artist or an investor who flips companies to make a fast buck. "Every company I've ever been involved with I have built," said the real estate maverick, who Monday agreed to take Tribune Co. private in an $8.2-billion deal. "We didn't do this deal to figure out what to get rid of."

Less than two years after Steven Spielberg and his partners sold DreamWorks SKG to Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures for $1.6 billion, a divorce appears to be inevitable. Spielberg and partner David Geffen have felt slighted that they haven't received more credit within Viacom, given the success of their movies.