Qintex Entertainment

David Evans, president and chief executive of Beverly Hills-based Qintex Entertainment, has been named to those positions at its successor, United Artists Corp. Australian-owned Qintex is acquiring the major Hollywood studio as part of the $1-billion purchase of MGM/UA Communications, which will be completed this summer. Evans, who came to this country from Australia five years ago, also named four key executives at UA. Not surprisingly, three of the appointees are from the MGM/UA ranks and one is from Qintex.

Qintex Australia Ltd., the media and property empire built by entrepreneur Christopher Skase, went into receivership Tuesday in an effort to ward off complete liquidation. The cash-starved company, which has been in a downward spiral since its proposed buyout of the MGM/UA movie studio collapsed in October, asked an Australian court to place it in receivership to prevent the group's foreign and Australian banks from breaking up the company.

The collapse of the deal under which MGM/UA Communications Co. was to have been sold to the Australian Qintex Group drove down the prices of both companies' shares Wednesday, while on another front, media magnate Rupert Murdoch toyed publicly with the notion of reviving his earlier offer for MGM/UA. Murdoch--who has been in Australia for the annual shareholders meeting of his 45%-owned News Corp.--told a television audience there that News Corp. is not "lusting after" MGM/UA.

Mitsui & Co. and Nippon Shinpan Co. have agreed to invest $350 million in three resorts owned by Qintex Australia Ltd.--one in Hawaii and two in Australia--establishing a relationship that could extend into Southern California or other areas of the Pacific basin, Qintex said Friday. Each firm will invest $175 million, and each will get 24.5% of the equity in the three existing Mirage resorts. Qintex, based in Brisbane, Australia, retains 51% ownership of the resorts.

Christopher Skase, the 40-year-old Aussie who is buying MGM/UA Communications for $1 billion, said Friday that his path for resurrecting 70-year-old United Artists as a movie maker calls for "evolution, not revolution." UA, founded by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith, has been dormant as a producer since MGM/UA folded its two production units into a single operation last fall. During the latter half of 1988, the studio was marked by wholesale departures of film-making talent assembled by Lee Rich, formerly MGM/UA's chief executive.

The drama mounted for the Australian Qintex group Monday with the announcement that the firm--which failed two weeks ago to make good on its $1.5-billion bid for MGM/UA Communications--now intends to sell off $600 million (Australian) in assets to reduce a crushing debt burden. The Australian dollar was listed at 77 cents on currency exchanges Wednesday.

Christopher Skase is no Rupert Murdoch--not in background and certainly not in name recognition. But with his deal last Friday to buy most of the assets of MGM/UA Communications, Skase is preparing to follow in the famous media baron's tracks to become the second Australian to take over a major Hollywood movie studio. The 40-year-old Skase is the majority shareholder of Brisbane-based Qintex Group, which boasts $2 billion of assets in resorts and television broadcasting and programming.

MGM-UA Communications Corp. today accepted a $1.5-billion buyout offer from Australia's Qintex Group today, a sweetened bid that topped a $1.4-billion offer from media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Qintex, which also will assume $400 million in MGM-UA junk bond debt, increased its offer to $25 per share of common stock, up from $20. Murdoch's News Corp. Ltd. and its Fox Inc. unit had offered $23.16 a share and had negotiated with MGM-UA's board until late Thursday.

American media keep using "brash" to describe Australian financiers, including Christopher Skase. But the label just doesn't seem to fit this 40-year-old television broadcasting baron from Brisbane, who has one foot firmly in Hollywood. In an interview Tuesday, the sartorially exact Aussie came across as cautious and methodical, talking circumspectly about plans to expand his U.S. toehold by, oh, maybe $1 billion or $2 billion.

Before the premiere of the CBS miniseries "Lonesome Dove," the question Motown Productions President Suzanne de Passe found herself answering most was: "Why is Motown making a Western?" Now, a week after the critically acclaimed adaptation of Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel scored a coup for the No. 3 network as the highest-rated miniseries of the past five years, a more likely question might be: "How fast can Motown make another Western?"