Entertainment

The motion pictures of American angst-meister Woody Allen have never made a lot of money by Hollywood standards, but they are worth their weight in prestige. Which is why some of the world's most powerful movie studios behaved not unlike the shark in Jaws when word got around that after 11 films with Orion Pictures (including Hannah and Her Sisters his top earner for the studio at $40 million), the director was considering at least a temporary move to another studio. Reason: despite such recent cash coups as Dances with Wolves and The Silence of the Lambs, Orion carried a $300 million bank debt from an earlier string of failures that made it unable to finance Allen's next project.

After weighing offers from Disney and 20th Century Fox, Allen announced last week that he would make his upcoming film for Sony-owned Tri-Star Pictures. A deciding factor was Tri-Star's chairman, Mike Medavoy, who was Orion's head of production for much of Allen's career and thus is familiar with Woody's singular style of filmmaking. If Orion fails to recover from its financial fix, the cineast's sabbatical may become a permanent leave.