Peter Guber

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Howard Peter Guber (b. 2 March 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a Hollywood producer and executive.

Guber was recruited by Columbia Pictures in 1968 and became the studio chief in 1970. During his six-year term, Columbia turned out box-office hits such as The Way We Were, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Guber resigned from Columbia in 1976 and formed Casablanca Record and Filmworks with Neil Bogart. At Casablanca, Guber focused on television production. At the same time, he independently produced The Deep for Columbia and the Academy Award-nominated film Midnight Express. This period of Casablanca's history and Guber's part in it was also marked by notorious excesses and was written up in the best selling book, "Hit Men" by Frederic Dannen - a series of chapters telling stories from the high point of the "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll" period of recorded music in the late sixties and seventies. Guber won his first of two National Association of Theater Owners Producer of the Year award in 1978.

Guber formed Polygram Filmed Entertainment in 1979 and serves as Chairman of the Board and co-owner until selling it in 1983. With business partner Jon Peters, Guber formed the Guber-Peters Entertainment Company (GPEC) that year; GPEC went public in 1988 and was sold to Sony Pictures Entertainment in 1989. Guber then became Chairman of the Board at CEO of SPE.

Guber was asked to leave Sony in 1995 after Sony reported a $600 million loss and wrote-off a further $4.8 billion resulting from the reduction in value incurred under Guber. At the time, this was the greatest single write-off in corporate history and marked the end of an unprecedented string of losses and failures under Guber's management at Sony Pictures. This brief but costly period of Sony Pictures history was chronicled in a best selling book by Nancy Griffin entitled "Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood."

Guber then formed Mandalay Entertainment Group, where he is Chairman and CEO, to produce films and television shows. Mandalay finances and produces films in the U.S. and internationally; Universal Pictures is its primary distributor.

Now also a full professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, Guber also appears each week at 11 a.m. ET/PT on AMC in the interview show "Sunday Morning Shootout" with Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart. Bart and Guber also co-authored the book Shoot Out: Surviving Fame and (Mis)Fortune in Hollywood.