The Miramax story took another strange turn yesterday when actor Rob Lowe emerged as a potential player in a bid to acquire the film studio from Walt Disney Co.
Lowe has ties to Tom Barrack‘s Colony Capital, which five days ago threw its hat into the ring for Miramax as part of a bid spearheaded by Hollywood financier David Bergstein and construction magnate Ron Tutor.
“It’s fair to say Lowe’s a friend of Colony and he’ll be involved in some larger sense,” one executive familiar with talks said. “They value his opinion and he has ideas.”
Santa Monica-based Colony is taking the lead in talks, which sources say could wrap up in the next few days, in part because the firm hired former Disney CFO Richard Nanula, who knows Miramax well from the old days. Lowe was first placed in the midst of the Miramax talks by gossip site TMZ.com.
Meanwhile, brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who co-founded Miramax and made it famous with hits such as “Pulp Fiction” and “Shakespeare in Love,” are seething that another bidder may take the studio.
Colony is known as a contrarian investor. The firm, which once made a failed bid for Michael Jackson’s music catalog, is set to put between $600 million and $700 million on the table for Miramax. That’s more than other potential buyers have said it is worth.
Indeed, the Weinsteins’ earlier bid, backed by magnate Ron Burkle, was in the $550 million range.
“Colony is seeing value others are not seeing,” said one source. Both Disney CEO Bob Iger and Harvey Weinstein are attending the Allen & Co. retreat at Sun Valley, Idaho, this week, though neither executive was available to comment.
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News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller is here looking for growth opportunities for the firm’s cyberspace empire, which includes MySpace. (News Corp. also owns The Post.)
MySpace Music executives are out talking to the music labels about an all-you-can-eat subscription music offering, according to two sources.
MySpace music chief Courtney Holt has been discussing the particulars of the prospective in-the-cloud venture this past two weeks with Universal, Sony, Warner and EMI. Google and Apple are eyeing similar services.
The current business model of the site is free, ad-supported streaming music. The subscription model is likely an alternative to the free one, although it hasn’t been decided. A source said: “It’s been brought out but it’s far from flushed out.”
The music giants are also co-investors with News Corp. in MySpace Music, a unit of the social media giant.
“We’re always exploring new monetization opportunities, but there are no immediate plans to jump into premium music,” a MySpace spokesperson said. catkinson@nypost.com