Months of speculation over whom DreamWorks might be courting to help underwrite its ugly exit from Viacom ended late Tuesday when The Wall Street Journal reported that Reliance ADA Group, a massive Indian conglomerate, is close to sinking $500 million to $600 million into Steven Spielberg's breathless bid for autonomy. As presumed, the deal would expedite David Geffen's eventual departure from the DreamWorks fold and allow Spielberg to keep the DreamWorks name, if not the projects currently in development with Paramount/Viacom — alas, Transformers 2 stays behind. CEO and Spielberg right hand Stacey Snider would follow as well.

They say nobody in Hollywood knows anything, which is true in just about every situation but the one facing DreamWorks and its partners at Paramount — a pair about as likely to split in acrimony within the year as Nikki Finke is to wheeze "TOLDJA!" when it happens. Patrick Goldstein today offers a rough primer for the 'Works/'Mount divorce, with enough oversights and elisions to make it dispensable (for starters, whither UA in the potential coupling of DreamWorks and MGM?) but thought-provoking enough to ask: Where will the 'Works wind up?

Having long ago elected Barack Obama the President of Hollywood, how will the industry react to Hillary Clinton's win in California's Democratic primary? Disappointed kingmaker David Geffen, despite having prematurely predicted victory for Obama, is not yet abandoning ship, even if DreamWorks partner Steven Spielberg is stubbornly sticking out a passionless political marriage with Clinton. Indeed, maybe it's time Geffen starts thinking about his next move, like sitting down with Maureen Dowd for another one of those fun interviews before all of his friends start getting crazy ideas about jumping on the Hillary bandwagon. [Slate]

Lots of fun and crazy items of interest in Bryan Burrough's December Vanity Fair piece about the ongoing nastiness between Viacom and CBS billionaire Sumner Redstone and his Paramount-owned studio Dreamworks SKG. 82-year-old Redstone, not exactly known for his soothing managerial style (although at least just yesterday he sorta reconciled with his estranged daughter), acquired the "Shrek" studio four years ago. Much to his irritation, we're sure, David Geffen came with the place. The two have been thorns in each other's sides ever since. Here's our bullet-pointed breakdown!

Last week Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, anticipating the departure of Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg from their deal with Paramount, suggested that if the DreamWorks pair left that it would have no effect on the company's bottom line. Yesterday, the pair slapped back at Sumner Redstone's company, naming Tom Freston, who was Dauman's predecessor at Viacom, to the board of DreamWorks Animation. It's more a symbolic gesture than anything else—what's Freston going to do, not buy Facebook for DreamWorks?—but still, every now and then it's nice to see a big fat "fuck you" played out in public. [Variety]

As we can think of no better way to kick off a sunny Friday morning than by contemplating the staggering wealth of the Hollywood multibillionaires who can buy and sell all of us like so much cattle, we spent some time with The Forbes 400, the magazine's ranking of the absolute richest of the American rich, to check in on how some of the industry's best-monied overlords are growing their intimidating cash hoards.

Today's Page Six previews W's upcoming story on the rapidly growing membership of the all-female Velvet Mob splinter group the magazine has dubbed the Rubyfruit Mafia, a faction whose influence grows each time one of the industry's power-lesbians makes the brave choice to step out of the closet:

You may at some point in your local travels have stumbled upon the art of prvtdncr: Working primarily in spraypaint on somebody-else's-building, the sloganeering graffiti artist throws up provocative phrases that are meant to hold a magnifying makeup mirror up to certain, unseemly facts about the true nature of Hollywood. As our friends at The WOW Report point out, BUTT magazine's current L.A.-themed issue devotes eight pages to some of his creations, including a less-than-generous sentiment regarding the Most Powerful Gay in the Universe.

Following Thursday's controversy-kickstarting BusinessWeek story "Paramount and DreamWorks: Splitsville?," in which it was suggested that a strained relationship between Steven Spielberg and Paramount might cause the director and his partners to jilt Brad Grey's DreamWorks-dependent studio empire when Spielberg's contract expires late next year, has seemingly induced much pants-soiling from within the walls of the Melrose lot. Hoping to halt the spread of further bowel failures over the rumored state of the DW/Paramount union, votes of confidence have been issued by Spielberg and David Geffen, who took breaks from their filmmaking and shuffleboard-playing duties, respectively, to (at least temporarily) envelop Grey in a warm, reassuring hug. In a story about the alleged looming split, Var's Peter Bart passes along Geffen's regards for the Paramount team:

Rupert Murdoch reportedly tried to talk David Geffen out of buying the LA Times, telling him, "Every day is going to be a headache for you. I'm used to these headaches. You're not." And now they're going cruising on Geffen's yacht together! Curious! [Deadline Hollywood]

Perhaps no one was more eager to leave the dinner than David Geffen and Arianna Huffington: Geffen and Huffington bolted super early and were already in his jet before the dinner had ended. One person who approached Arianna to chat as she was leaving the dinner got the cold shoulder. "Darling, I would love to talk, but I'm getting a ride back with David on his plane." (Oh, and Huffington's efforts to hide her black right eye with bangs didn't fool everyone. She earned the bruise recently when she passed out and hit her head on a desk.)

Defamer readers might recall a post from late last July regarding a NY Daily News sighting, which put Most Powerful Gay in the Universe David Geffen on the arm of Seann William Scott, aka That Dude Who Managed To Spin Stiffler Into A Reasonably Successful Movie Career That Peaked Two Years Ago, at an L.A. gay bar. A mere nine months later, Page Six is happy to offer the real scoop on the actor, with a clarifying item that doesn't at all feel like a publicist-planted tip about the hyper-heterosexual, Victoria's Secret-model-fucking habits of their not at all gay—but entirely comfortable with the concept!—client:

• Tribune: The Chandler family hits the road, Sam Zell talks to David Geffen, gets veto power on the board, bashes Google. [LAT]
  

Congratulations are in order for Velvet Mafia don David Geffen, whom Out magazine has named the Most Powerful Gay in the Universe, a title he will likely hold until the day his lifeless body is buried beneath the Carbon Beach sand he so dearly loves. NY Magazine has reproduced Out's entire Power 50 list, which includes Hollywood Gays of Note (we're ignoring the ones from less interesting industries) from the diverse worlds of talk-show hosting (#3 Ellen DeGeneres and #6 Rosie O'Donnell), superproducing (#18 Scott Rudin), evil agenting (#31 Bryan Lourd of CAA), superhero-movie directing (#32 Bryan Singer), soap-opera writing (#40 Marc Cherry), and glass-closeted Oscar-collecting (#43 Jodie Foster). All lower-charting Power Gays should immediately submit their full-page tributes in the trades recognizing Geffen's achievement before inventory sells out; those shut out because they waited too long will undoubtedly be subject to the DreamWorks mogul's bloody reprisals for their failure to publicly pledge their fealty in a timely fashion.

With the recent plagues of fire and ice sent down by annoyed local landowner God utterly failing to dislodge beach-hogging Malibu squatter David Geffen from his oceanside compound (His view was totally fucking ruined by Geffen's place), residents of the sleepy community now find themselves helpless against the whims of the mogul and the ten-figured pals who seek to slowly annex the entirety of The 'Bu. Yesterday's NY Times discussed Geffen and "software giant" Larry Ellison's acquisitions of the Casa Malibu Inn and Malibu Beach Inn, respectively, which they plan on transforming into the kind of places in which the merely wealthy might feel uncomfortable:

· Sharon Stone (who swept the Razzies!) brought the dominatrix-auctioneer routine she perfected in Berlin to Elton John's annual AIDS fundraiser, where "unsteady on her feet and slurring her words, [she] rambled, 'I've been sitting at my table with P. Diddy and Jon Bon Jovi, and I'm a little messed up.'" She did manage to coerce $4.2 million out of attendees, for auction items like a $65,000 soccer lesson from Dave Beckham, and $125,000 to have James Blunt promise he wouldn't perform all evening. [AP]
· Vanity Fair's Little Gold Men blog has updates and photos from the VF party, where they note a preponderance of "impossibly glowy women" and an extremely not-glowy Nikki Sixx. [VanityFair.com]
· Anderson Cooper and Daniel Craig shared a corner banquette at the VF party swapping secret agent tips, while party host Elton John planted a deep, passionate kiss on American Idol judge Simon Cowell, who couldn't help but gush all evening that "the little girl I once accused of being utterly forgettable and dressed like an overstuffed burrito had finally arrived!" [Towleroad]
· Enjoy TMZ's nausea- and seizure-inducing handheld camera footage of celebrities entering the Soho House after party, including "bushy-browed Martin Scorcese [sic] and a boob-a-licious Courtney Love." [TMZ]

• Maer Roshan, the "battle-scarred veteran" of the "buzz-intensive media hothouses" that are New York and L.A. is back, and this time "the buzz seems to be moving back in his favor." That picture can't hurt. [WSJ]
  

There's been a big falling out between gay gajillionaire David Geffen and lady-loving former president Bill Clinton (and his partner-by-marriage Hillary). Political analyst Mickey Kaus (who proves that you don't have to believe in any single plank of the Democratic platform to still call yourself a Democrat) believes the enmity stems from Bill Clinton's "lying about whether he was going to pardon [jailed Native American activist] Leonard Peltier". Makes sense to us—Hollywood executives are so rarely lied to that when it actually does happen, they're outraged. The Times, on the other hand, has a different theory which, as with seemingly everything else in our world, features Ron Burkle.

By now, everyone's aware of the shocking attacks DreamWorks mogul and Democratic primary fixer David Geffen made yesterday on Hillary Clinton, her intern-despoiling husband, the White House's substandard lodgings for billionaire rainmakers, and all that is good and holy about civilized political campaigning in an attempt to demonstrate that all of Hollywood has fallen prone at the feet of Barack Obama, ready to do the Chosen One's bidding. Now that most of the factually inaccurate, post-attack bickering has been dispensed with, Team Hillary is regrouping today, ready to launch a Hollywood counteroffensive that includes trips to fundraisers hosted by her own stable of local billionaires, and, ominously, a trip to the CAA Death Star. Says Var:

Not content to demonstrate his Democratic kingmaking power by throwing a beachside cocktail party/Hillary Clinton effigy burning for Hollywood Chosen One Barack Obama on the pristine sand behind his Malibu compound last night, DreamWorks activist David Geffen granted the NY Times's Maureen Dowd an exclusive fireside chat, during which the power-mad billionaire stroked an overfluffed white cat while cackling his way through his plans to destroy his presidential-hopeful nemesis. The column is behind a subscriber wall, but here are some of the thoughts Geffen shared with Dowd about Hillary, Bill, the political hot water in which Steven Spielberg finds himself submerged for going along with the Obama fund-raiser, and his luxurious sleeping quarters: