As the cost of making movies soared in the 1980s, in large part due to us, Universal hunkered down. Despite the runaway success of George Lucas’s Star Wars, the studio passed on Raiders of the Lost Ark when Tom Pollock, Lucas’s lawyer, demanded a fifty-fifty split. Paramount scooped it up on those terms and made a killing. Lew and Sid Sheinberg chose to ride out the bubble and pass on deals they deemed inflated. But the bubble lasted fifteen years. After Warner merged with Time Inc. and Sony bought Columbia, MCA began to look outmoded.
