Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: LEGISLATION (90%); RESEARCH (89%); EXPERIMENTATION & RESEARCH (87%); OIL & GAS PRICES (77%); ENERGY & UTILITY SECTOR PERFORMANCE (77%); ENERGY DEPARTMENTS (77%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (76%); CAMPAIGNS & ELECTIONS (73%); BIOCHEMISTRY (69%)
PERSON: JOHN F TIERNEY (55%)
LOAD-DATE: June 10, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

685 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
June 9, 2008 Monday

Late Edition - Final

Films With Limited Release Find a Home on the Web
BYLINE: By MICHAEL CIEPLY
SECTION: Section E; Column 0; The Arts/Cultural Desk; Pg. 2
LENGTH: 752 words
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES
The nonprofit Tribeca Film Institute in New York is joining Amazon.com to create a digital marketplace for films and videos that have been stuck in archives with limited circulation or have been otherwise unavailable through conventional retail and Web outlets.

The service, called Reframe, is expected to become active on Monday through an Internet site, reframecollection.org, the institute's representatives said.

It becomes the latest in a series of efforts to capitalize on the Web's ability to spread little-seen works, this time aiming for educational and institutional audiences, as well as fans of the esoteric.

''We're hoping to get that stuff off the shelf and into people's hands,'' Brian Newman, the institute's chief executive, said in a telephone interview.

The approximately 500 works initially available range from the works of the filmmaker Sally Potter, beginning with her 1979 short ''Thriller,'' to collections of little-known documentaries from various archives. Some of those will be available to purchase only on DVD, because rights are controlled by commercial distributors. But the service aims to provide about 10,000 works over the next year or so and expects to make as many as possible accessible on the Web.

Reframe ''is really attractive to us as a way to deliver works to own or rent,'' said Pamela Matsuoka, the educational distribution director for the Center for Asian American Media, a San Francisco group that has cleared rights to about 15 works for use on the service. One such title is ''a k a Don Bonus,'' a 1995 documentary about the life of a Cambodian high school student in San Francisco, which was broadcast on PBS.

Some forms of Web distribution have been free-form, like YouTube, with its myriad postings. Others have pointedly commercial intent, like a recently announced service, Cinetic Rights Management, through which the independent film entrepreneur John Sloss and his associates are hoping to make a business of circulating films that make a splash on the festival circuit but might otherwise remain undistributed.

Reframe, Mr. Newman and others said, is a hybrid. It is expected to serve as a nonprofit clearing house for short and feature-length films and video works, while giving rights holders a mechanism by which they can sell or rent downloads or DVDs through Amazon.

The service is unusual in that it offers to convert works to the digital format from video without charge and will convert film formats to digital at cost, under an arrangement that allows duplication of a 90-minute feature movie for as little as $672, far less than the thousands of dollars filmmakers usually spend on conversions.

Reframe then returns a digital copy to the rights holder, while retaining the work in Amazon's archive, from which it will be sold at a price set by the owner. The owner is expected to receive a royalty amounting to 50 percent of any download or online rental, or a sliding share of DVD sales that grows as revenue increases.

Mr. Newman said the service was expected to maintain a broad policy when it comes to accepting works for duplication and sale but would not be completely without filters. It will not accept what he called ''typical YouTube video of a cat falling down the stairs,'' for instance. And pornography will be rejected outright.

Ms. Potter's representatives at Cinetic Media said her involvement with Reframe was intended to allow her earlier works to be seen. Rights to her later films like ''Orlando,'' they said, are already licensed to distributors (though available through Reframe on DVD), and the future digital strategy for them will be developed separately.

Reframe was organized over the last two years with help from grants totaling $1 million from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and additional funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. The Tribeca Film Institute has provided staff support but not direct funding, Mr. Newman said. The institute will receive a fee equal to about 5 percent of the service's income, and expects to use that money for the project's future development, Mr. Newman said.

The institute was organized by the actor Robert De Niro, his business partner Jane Rosenthal, and her investor husband Craig Hatkoff to boost filmmakers and the fortunes of Lower Manhattan in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The three also run the Tribeca Film Festival.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: INTERNET RETAILING (90%); FILM (90%); INTERNET & WWW (90%); MOVIE INDUSTRY (90%); DOCUMENTARY FILMS (89%); VIDEO INDUSTRY (78%); ASIAN AMERICANS (78%); PUBLIC BROADCASTING (78%); INTERNET SOCIAL NETWORKING (77%); INTERVIEWS (74%)
COMPANY: AMAZON.COM INC (58%)
TICKER: AMZN (NASDAQ) (58%)
INDUSTRY: SIC5961 CATALOG & MAIL-ORDER HOUSES (58%)
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (57%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, USA (91%); CALIFORNIA, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (91%)
LOAD-DATE: June 9, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Colette Laffont in Sally Potter's ''Thriller,'' a short film that will be available through Reframe, a new digital marketplace. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ADVENTURE PICTURES)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

686 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
June 9, 2008 Monday

Late Edition - Final

Local Officials Adopt New, Harder Tactics On Illegal Immigrants
BYLINE: By DAMIEN CAVE
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; National Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 2500 words
DATELINE: MILTON, Fla.
Three months after the local police inspected more than a dozen businesses searching for illegal immigrants using stolen Social Security numbers, this community in the Florida Panhandle has become more law-abiding, emptier and whiter.

Many of the Hispanic immigrants who came in 2004 to help rebuild after Hurricane Ivan have either fled or gone into hiding. Churches with services in Spanish are half-empty. Businesses are struggling to find workers. And for Hispanic citizens with roots here -- the foremen and entrepreneurs who received visits from the police -- the losses are especially profound.

''It was very hard because the community is very small, and to see people who came to eat here all the time then come and close the business,'' said Geronimo Barragan, who owns two branches of La Hacienda, Mexican restaurants where the police arrested 10 employees.

''I don't blame them,'' Mr. Barragan added. ''It's just that it hurts.''

Sheriff Wendell Hall of Santa Rosa County, who led the effort, said the arrests were for violations of state identity theft laws. But he also seemed proud to have found a way around rules allowing only the federal government to enforce immigration laws. In his office, the sheriff displayed a framed editorial cartoon that showed Daniel Boone admiring his arrest of at least 27 illegal workers.

His approach is increasingly common. Last month, 260 illegal immigrants in Iowa were sentenced to five months in prison for violations of federal identity theft laws.

At the same time, in the last year, local police departments from coast to coast have rounded up hundreds of immigrants for nonviolent, often minor, crimes, like fishing without a license in Georgia, with the end result being deportation.

In some cases, the police received training and a measure of jurisdiction from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under a program that lets officers investigate and detain people they suspect to be illegal immigrants.

But with local demand for tougher immigration enforcement growing, 95 departments are waiting to join the 47 in the program. And in a number of places, including Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, police officers or entire departments are choosing to tackle the issue on their own.

State lawmakers, in response to Congressional inaction on immigration law, are giving local authorities a wider berth. In 2007, 1,562 bills related to illegal immigration were introduced nationwide and 240 were enacted in 46 states, triple the number that passed in 2006, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A new law in Mississippi makes it a felony for an illegal immigrant to hold a job. In Oklahoma, sheltering or transporting illegal immigrants is also a felony.

It remains unclear how the new laws will be enforced. Yet at the very least, say both advocates and critics, they are likely to lead to more of what occurred here: more local police officers demanding immigrants' documents; more arrests for identity theft; more accusations of racial profiling; and more movement of immigrants, with some fleeing and others being sent to jail.

''It is a way to address illegal immigration without calling it that,'' said Jessica Vaughan, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports intensified local enforcement. She added, ''They don't just have to sit and wait for Washington.''

Community Complaints

Police officers here in a handful of Gulf Coast counties from Pensacola to Tallahassee said they started hearing complaints about illegal immigrants last year. With the national debate raging and the local economy sagging, many residents began to question whether illegal immigrants were taking Americans' jobs.

It did not show up in statistics -- the unemployment rate in Santa Rosa County was 3.6 percent in 2007, below state and national averages -- so the arguments focused in part on unfair competition.

Donna Tucker, executive director of the Santa Rosa County Chamber of Commerce, said illegal immigration ''creates havoc within the system'' because businesses that used illegal labor often did not pay into workers' compensation funds and paid workers less.

''Those businesses can survive a lot longer than the ones that are trying to do things right,'' Ms. Tucker said.

Some of the frustrations also veered into prejudice.

George S. Collins, an inspector in charge of the illegal trafficking task force in Okaloosa County, said many people wanted to know ''why we weren't going to Wal-Mart and rounding up the Mexicans'' -- a comment Mr. Collins said was racist and offensive.

Usually though, the complaints were cultural and legal.

Interviews with more than 25 residents and police officers suggest that the views of Harry T. Buckles, 68, a retired Navy corpsman, are common. Outside his home in Gulf Breeze, Mr. Buckles said the main problem with today's Hispanic immigrants was that they did not assimilate.

Even after hundreds flowed in to rebuild Santa Rosa County, Mr. Buckles said: ''They didn't become part of the community. They didn't speak the language.''

Echoing the comments of others, he said he became irritated when he heard Spanish at the Winn-Dixie and saw a line of immigrants sending money home at the Western Union. Mr. Buckles said he feared his community would lose its character and become like Miami, with its foreign-born majority and common use of Spanish.

''We see things nationwide and we know that we could be overwhelmed,'' he said.

In fact, only about 3 percent of the population of Santa Rosa County is Hispanic, according to census figures compiled in 2006. As a proportion of its population, the Hispanic community here is less than half the size of what is in Omaha or Des Moines -- mostly white cities where the Hispanic population is still below the national average.

Santa Rosa is hardly the only place to use a tough approach against a small immigrant population. In Mississippi, where strict laws on false documentation recently passed, only about 1.7 percent of the state's 2.9 million people were born abroad and more than half of them are in the United States legally, according to estimates from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors tightening restrictions on immigration.

But here, the result is a divide often marked by a lack of in-depth interaction.

On one side are longtime residents like Sheriff Hall, who said immigrant laborers were not involved in fixing his office or home after the hurricanes, and Mr. Buckles, who said his relationship with Hispanics was based mainly on seeing them at stores or construction sites.

On the other side are a smaller number of immigrants and employers who use immigrant labor.

Some of the immigrants are newly arrived, sticking mostly to themselves. But the group also includes Antonio Tejeda, 38, a roofer and naturalized American citizen from Mexico who wears an N.F.L. jersey to church and speaks English with a slight drawl; and Ruben Barragan, 19, one of the workers arrested in one of the La Hacienda restaurant raids who, though illegal, spoke English and called his infant son Eric because he wanted him to have an American name.

When told about such men, Mr. Buckles said perhaps the government could find ways to create exceptions. But he was not convinced they deserved to stay.

''They got here illegally,'' Mr. Buckles said. ''They broke the law as soon as they came.''

The Raids

The half-dozen officers involved in the Santa Rosa operations did not announce their arrival. They detained 13 workers at Panhandle Growers. At the two branches of La Hacienda the police quietly detained 10 workers without resistance. And at Emerald Coast Interiors, a boat-cushion factory, the police arrested a handful more.

Sheriff Hall said that his department received tips that led him to all the locations he visited and that he was responding to a steep rise in complaints about illegal immigration. He said he had been frustrated a year ago by a lack of response from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And this time, customs officials said, he did not contact the agency for input before forming a multicounty task force that led to the February operation.

Sheriff Hall said his men were focused on identity theft and did not need special training because ''it's the same thing we do every day.'' He insisted that the officers treated everyone fairly. Unlike Bay County officers, who surrounded construction sites last year and arrested immigrants who ran, ''we didn't chase anyone,'' he said.

And at many locations witnesses said the police treated all workers equally.

Managers at the restaurants Okki, El Rodeo, China Sea and La Hacienda said police officers checked all employees' documents, regardless of their ethnicity.

But other business owners, employees and residents said the police focused disproportionately on Hispanics or the foreign born and seemed determined to scare immigrants out of the area. In many cases, employers said, the officers did not even mention identity theft, narrowing their scope to immigrants.

''They were targeting all the places with Hispanic workers,'' said Elvin Garcia, 26, a waiter at El Rodeo.

At Red Barn Barbecue, witnesses said that skin color clearly influenced police procedure. When several officers visited and saw no one who was Hispanic in the kitchen, they moved on. ''We offered to give them records, and they said, 'No, it's not necessary,' '' said Randy Brochu, whose family owns the business.

Meanwhile, at Emerald Coast Interiors, three employees -- one black, one white, one Hispanic -- independently said the police did, in fact, chase a handful of Hispanic employees who ran. Three women, they said, were caught in a ditch behind the main building.

Luis Ramirez, the plant's operations manager, said the officers asked to see documentation only for the workers who fled. ''It was racial profiling,'' Mr. Ramirez said.

His company has not filed a lawsuit, so his accusations have not been tested. But Florida courts have repeatedly held that flight alone is not enough to justify a suspicion of criminal activity or arrest. In Bay County, officials said they tried to avoid chasing people now because prosecutors have warned that it undermines their cases.

Even without a chase, immigrant advocates say that local efforts to track down illegal immigrants undermine community safety by scaring immigrants from reporting violent crimes.

''It's a dangerous route to take,'' said David Urias, a staff lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, which sued Otero County in New Mexico this year after the police raided Hispanics' homes for minor violations like an unleashed dog. ''What you're going to see,'' Mr. Urias said, ''is more people pushed into the shadows.''

The Aftermath

Indeed, three months after the sweeps, nearly everyone agrees that the fabric of this community has changed. Hundreds of Hispanic families, both legal and illegal, seem to have disappeared.

John Davy, a co-owner of Panhandle Growers, said some employers ''treated their guys humanely'' by helping them flee to other areas. ''What we're victims of is a system that's broken,'' he said.

Many residents said they felt torn between competing loyalties to compassion and the law.

''On one hand, I'm sitting here thinking when Ivan was here, you could not get enough people to do the thing that needed to get done,'' said Mrs. Tucker at the Chamber of Commerce. ''And these illegal aliens, people welcomed them with open arms because they were working hard, they were helping our community. But from a chamber standpoint, you're operating on the side of the law. It's a hard thing.''

In the immigrant community, fears now cloud the most basic routines. Many Hispanics said they avoided being seen or heard speaking Spanish in Wal-Mart, even if they live here legally. Others detailed their habit of meticulously checking their cars' headlights, blinkers and registration to avoid being pulled over.

The message many Hispanics have taken from the raids is simple. ''We're Mexican -- they don't want us here,'' said Erika Barragan, 20, whose husband, Ruben, came here illegally roughly six years ago and was one of 23 people scheduled to be deported after the February raids. She said she would go back to Mexico this summer.

Her husband's employers, Geronimo Barragan (no relation) and his wife, Guilla, are trying to remain positive.

They are citizens and parents of four American-born children, ages 2 to 16. They have lived in Santa Rosa County for more than a decade, founding a Baptist church here and working 16-hour days, six days a week to build two restaurants known for their affordable food and Christian atmosphere, which extends to a ban on alcohol.

They said the raids came as a shock.

''We love the community, and we always tried to do our best,'' Mr. Barragan said.

Mrs. Barragan put it more bluntly. ''This,'' she said, ''is like our promised land.''

The Barragans said they did not know their workers were illegal because they provided Social Security numbers and other information that was required. Like most employers, they asked for nothing more.

They have not publicly opposed the sheriff's actions, and in their effort to move on, they have distanced themselves from his critics. Mr. Barragan even visited Sheriff Hall at his office to tell him he had no hard feelings and would do everything he could to comply in the future.

And yet, the cost has been significant. Both of the restaurants were closed for more than two months. Only one has recently reopened.

Unable to find people in the area who can cook Mexican food, Mr. Barragan, 41, has been scouring the nation, recruiting in Houston, Chicago and Baton Rouge. He has yet to find all the workers he needs, relying on a handful of new hires with work visas that expire in November. He said he wished that Congress could find a way to bring more foreign workers to America legally.

For Mrs. Barragan, 39, a warm, thin woman with hair to her waist, the consequences have been more personal. On a recent Wednesday night, her church's prayer service was half-empty. Many of her friends have left. And many of the employees that her family mentored in the ways of America are gone, taken away by the police.

''That's what had the most effect on our lives,'' Mrs. Barragan said, speaking in Spanish so she could be more specific. ''Not closing La Hacienda, or 'we're not going to make money,' or 'how are we going to pay our bills?' I personally didn't think about that. It hurt me more to see them there -- handcuffed. The way they went out.''

Her husband agreed, explaining between bouts of tears that some of the deported workers' families had become victims of more violent crime. ''One of them has a small daughter and someone robbed their house while he was in jail,'' Mr. Barragan said. ''Twice.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS (90%); IMMIGRATION (90%); ARRESTS (90%); HISPANIC AMERICANS (90%); POLICE FORCES (90%); LAW ENFORCEMENT (89%); CRIMINAL OFFENSES (89%); SOCIAL SECURITY (89%); LEGISLATORS (89%); US STATE GOVERNMENT (89%); LEGISLATION (89%); IMMIGRATION LAW (89%); IDENTITY THEFT (89%); LEGISLATIVE BODIES (87%); EMPLOYMENT (78%); EXCISE & CUSTOMS (78%); US SOCIAL SECURITY (78%); DEPORTATION (78%); PRISONS (78%); FRAUD & FINANCIAL CRIME (78%); US FEDERAL GOVERNMENT (78%); FOREIGN LABOR (78%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (73%); SENTENCING (71%); RESTAURANTS (69%); HURRICANES (57%); FELONIES (89%); JAIL SENTENCING (68%)
GEOGRAPHIC: FLORIDA, USA (95%); GEORGIA, USA (92%); OKLAHOMA, USA (92%); ARKANSAS, USA (79%); TEXAS, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (95%)
LOAD-DATE: June 9, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Erika Barragan, 20, whose husband was arrested. (PHOTOGRAPH BY DAN ANDERSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg. A1)

LOCAL AUTHORITY: Sheriff Wendell Hall of Santa Rosa County, Fla., said he was enforcing state identity theft laws. (PHOTOGRAPH BY TONY GIBERSON/PENSACOLA NEWS JOURNAL) (pg. A16)

GERONIMO BARRAGAN: The owner of two branches of La Hacienda, Mexican restaurants where the police arrested 10 employees

JOHN DAVY: A co-owner of Panhandle Growers, where 13 workers were detained

ERIKA BARRAGAN: The wife of one of 23 people scheduled to be deported after police raids. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAN ANDERSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. A16) MAP (pg. A16) Map of Milton in Florida.
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Series
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

687 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
June 8, 2008 Sunday

Correction Appended

Late Edition - Final
MGM: A Lion or a Lamb?
BYLINE: By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
SECTION: Section BU; Column 0; Money and Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 2968 words
DATELINE: Los Angeles
ON a Thursday morning last month, hundreds of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer workers filed out of the studio's Century City office tower and into a movie theater across the street. This rare, companywide meeting was a premiere of sorts: the introduction of Mary Parent, once a top production executive at Universal Pictures, as the new chairwoman of MGM's motion picture group.

After Ms. Parent told her troops about green-lighting enough projects for MGM to roar into theaters with as many as 12 of its own movies in 2010, and about why she'd given up a lucrative producing career to accept her new job, the man who offered it to her -- Harry E. Sloan -- took the podium to deliver a confidence-booster.

''We are talking right now to a number of people about getting money for Mary to make all these pictures,'' Mr. Sloan said, according to several people in attendance. ''There's no doubt that we're going to get the money. It's just a question of what the terms are going to be.''

But Ms. Parent's lofty new title and lush, $6 million pay package obscure a harsh reality: despite its enduring legacy as one of Hollywood's most legendary movie studios -- and a seemingly stubborn refusal to disappear -- MGM hasn't fit the profile of a full-fledged production company in years.

Yet Ms. Parent, who had never marketed or distributed her own films before, was being asked to turn MGM into a player, and do it quickly. That feat will require hundreds of millions of dollars that the studio doesn't yet have. What MGM does have, however, is a daunting pile of debt and other financial challenges.

Two and a half years ago, Mr. Sloan -- MGM's chief executive and the would-be heir to Louis B. Mayer -- invested about $15 million of his own money in the faded studio, gambling that he could turn it around.

But MGM is choking on $3.7 billion in debt, forcing it to cough up more than $300 million in annual interest payments while it delays paying down the principal, its financial statements show. Bargain hunters are circling the company as it continues to bleed cash. For the fiscal year ended in March, MGM lost about $400 million; it lost about the same amount a year earlier.

The mounting losses have caused financial headaches for an investor group led by Sony, which brought together Comcast and four private equity funds to buy MGM from Kirk Kerkorian for $5 billion in 2004.

A bright spot for MGM has been its prized library of old film titles. That unit threw off $558 million in cash in the latest fiscal year. But amid an industrywide downturn in DVD catalog sales, by the end of August MGM will have received the last in a series of guaranteed video-distribution fees totaling $625 million from 20th Century Fox. Though that deal has three more years to run, the guarantees are expiring, which means that a source of steady income will be far less predictable.

And Ms. Parent's production spree -- after unsuccessful moves putting the MGM logo on other companies' poor-to-middling films and turning over MGM's United Artists unit to Tom Cruise -- could drive MGM's costs through the roof next year.

Mr. Sloan, undeterred, says Ms. Parent's push could also bolster the studio's value in a sale. (Comcast, which owns 20 percent of MGM, has already passed on buying the rest; 20th Century Fox, which releases MGM's movies overseas in addition to managing its library, is seen as MGM's ideal buyer. Neither company would comment.)

''I think when people see that there's a strong pipeline for 2010 and beyond, the value goes up,'' said Mr. Sloan in a recent interview.

Still, MGM's unexpected re-entry into the production business is sowing dissent among its financial backers, with conference calls becoming ''contentious'' at times, according to one participant, who, like other investors, insisted on anonymity to avoid upsetting other partners.

For the moment, the uncertainty has left Mr. Sloan and Ms. Parent in the unenviable position of having to compete for filmmakers and actors by assuring them that MGM will have the money to shoot their movies, even if it has to resort to its dwindling supply of cash.

That means the pressure is on MGM to deliver hits, with little margin for error. ''Nothing else matters -- it's just the movies,'' Ms. Parent says. ''And making sure that the people driving the movies aren't panicking. And that they're not panicking because they think we don't have money.''

SITTING in his 14th-floor office, just off a rotunda where MGM's ancient Oscars are displayed behind glass, Mr. Sloan ticks off his accomplishments in the last six months.

It's a recap of news releases: ''Quantum of Solace'' and ''The Pink Panther 2'' went into production; Peter Jackson will produce two new films based on ''The Hobbit''; ''American Gladiators'' became a prime-time hit for NBC; Mary Parent was hired; MGM joined with Paramount Pictures and Lionsgate in announcing a pay-TV channel to take the place of their expiring deals with Showtime; and the new MGM HD channel, yet another outlet for its film library, has been picked up by the five biggest domestic cable and satellite distribution systems.

''I think there's a lot of evidence that we've begun the turnaround,'' Mr. Sloan says, looking up from his talking points.

Even so, MGM appears to be -- literally -- buying time, which is only the latest plot twist in the saga of a company that seems oddly indestructible. Its golden age was already over when Mr. Kerkorian bought it for the first time in 1969, then began unloading assets and scaling back its filmmaking. He sold it to Ted Turner in 1986, then bought much of it back when Mr. Turner's financing collapsed. Mr. Turner held onto the fabled MGM library, while Mr. Kerkorian sold MGM again in 1990 to the freewheeling Italian financier Giancarlo Parretti.

In 1996, after Mr. Parretti foundered and a French bank, Credit Lyonnais, took over MGM, Mr. Kerkorian stepped in for a third time and led a $1.3 billion buyout of the studio. For his third act, Mr. Kerkorian cobbled together a new mix of film and television libraries, overseas distribution deals and modest commercial successes like ''Legally Blonde'' and a remake of ''The Thomas Crown Affair.''

But MGM made fewer big bets during this time, even slowing its output of James Bond films. In the spring of 2004, Mr. Kerkorian loaded the company with $2.4 billion in debt to finance a one-time $1.89 billion cash dividend, and pocketed his three-fourths share. He also put the studio and its library up for sale. He declined to comment.

With a format war looming over the next generation of DVD players, MGM's library of 4,000 films gained heightened importance and set off a bidding contest for the company. To bolster its Blu-ray players, Sony of America, blocked by its Japanese parent from buying MGM outright, persuaded Providence Equity Partners and the Texas Pacific Group to put up the bulk of the equity. Toshiba, which was pushing a different DVD standard, quietly backed Time Warner in a rival bid.

Once Comcast joined Sony's side, the group got MGM for about $5 billion. Sony planned to shutter MGM's studios and use Sony Pictures to distribute the MGM catalog, remake some MGM titles and produce only the best-known MGM franchises like James Bond and the Pink Panther.

That blueprint also called for MGM to make about four new films a year, to keep its library relevant to retailers. But Sony home-video executives bridled at the plan, and MGM's private equity owners quietly sought a new distributor.

Enter Harry Sloan, a lawyer turned jet-setting entrepreneur who considers Rupert Murdoch to be his role model. (Their wives, both Chinese, are friends, and the two women recently set up a film production venture together.)

Mr. Sloan had steered the movie company New World Entertainment into TV production and comic books in the 1980s, but New World became hobbled by debt problems and was sold in 1989.

A year later, Mr. Sloan formed SBS Broadcasting and built it into Europe's second-largest broadcaster, which in turn became the largest shareholder of Lions Gate Entertainment; Mr. Sloan was Lions Gate's chairman until April 2005. That fall, he sold SBS for $2.6 billion. He declined to say how much he made, but at the time he owned 11 percent of the stock.

Five days later, he was named chairman and chief executive of MGM. Executives at Providence Equity, who were familiar with Mr. Sloan's track record, recruited him to execute the strategy behind the $5 billion buyout.

After hiring Rick Sands, a former Miramax and DreamWorks executive, as his chief operating officer, Mr. Sloan outsourced filmmaking to independent producers. Mr. Sands, who resigned after Ms. Parent's hiring, persuaded 20th Century Fox to commit to the five-year distribution deal for MGM's library.

''We were looking at probably making a move to Warner, setting up our own unit, or joint venturing with CBS -- a lot of possibilities,'' Mr. Sloan says. ''The guys from Fox came in and blew me away.''

Although the switch to Fox was a humiliating blow for Sony, Mr. Sloan said that it was necessary. ''What was important was to rebuild the business,'' he says. ''The value of a static library is going to decline anyway, and on top of that you're going to fall off a cliff if you're only depending on the guarantee.''

Fox has lost $15 million on the guarantees, but made slightly more than that in distribution fees on MGM's international releases, executives familiar with the deal said. On the other hand, outsourcing production to independents has been a disaster for MGM's image and has done little for its bottom line.

Aside from ''1408'' ($72 million) and ''Halloween'' ($58 million) -- both from the Weinstein Company -- 17 other MGM titles last year averaged just $12 million in ticket sales, according to boxofficemojo.com.

''The quality of the movies, I admit, weren't what we expected,'' Mr. Sloan says. ''But you would've expected Tom Rosenberg, coming off 'Million Dollar Baby' -- but what does he give us? 'Feast of Love.' ''

Mr. Rosenberg, chairman of Lakeshore Entertainment, said he had shown that film to MGM's publicity, marketing and distribution team and asked for a box office estimate. ''They said between $40 and $50 million,'' he said. ''We decided to release the film through MGM based upon their enthusiasm for it. Sometimes good films lose money.'' The movie's box office receipts were $3.5 million.

As for Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who have voiced frustration to others that MGM has feckless relations with exhibitors, Mr. Sloan says: ''Nobody wants to tell you they made a bad movie; they want to blame the distributor. I thought I was making a deal with the guys who'd just come off Oscars for 'Chicago,' 'Gangs of New York' and 'Aviator.' Instead they went to the festivals, picked up movies and arbitraged MGM's deal on Showtime. But we still made money on every single Weinstein picture.''

In response, Harvey Weinstein said: ''I understand Harry's frustration, because in the beginning, we didn't have time to produce our own movies. We had a pipeline to fill, and we relied on acquisitions. The success or failure of our movies is our responsibility, not anybody else's.''

Mr. Sloan says that while MGM's string of duds may be embarrassing, it hasn't sullied MGM's image. After all, the ubiquitous MGM lion still roars on TV, computer and theater screens.

''You might say there was some damage to the brand in that the movies weren't great,'' he allows. ''But I don't believe people pay much attention.''

IF buying into the MGM library on the theory that it would be a huge cash cow didn't work because it had to be nurtured with expensive new films, and renting out MGM's distribution system didn't work because of quality control problems, Mr. Sloan's team still had other cards to play -- like forging a partnership with Tom Cruise.

Mr. Cruise's ejection from the Paramount lot in 2006, after his sofa-jumping antics the year before, created an opportunity in Mr. Sloan's eyes. He quickly gave a 35 percent stake in the dormant United Artists film label to Mr. Cruise and his producing partner, Paula Wagner. The hope was that UA would provide the four or so films a year that Sony was originally to have produced to keep the MGM library refreshed.

After saying early last year that UA was close to securing $500 million in financing from Merrill Lynch, it took Mr. Sloan and MGM's investors an additional six months to complete the deal. The resulting production fund, which would cover up to $60 million of a single film's budget, required MGM to kick in $75 million and cover any excess costs.

When UA released ''Lions for Lambs,'' a film about war and politics that cost about $35 million to make and even more to market (though Mr. Cruise, one of its stars, worked without pay), it flopped at the box office. MGM immediately lost about half of its $75 million UA investment, Mr. Sloan said.

UA then green-lighted a second war movie, ''Pinkville,'' about the My Lai massacre, from Oliver Stone. It spent $6 million on preproduction costs before canceling the movie a week after the opening of ''Lions for Lambs.'' That leaves ''Valkyrie,'' a costlier star vehicle for Mr. Cruise that was already surrounded by negative buzz.

In that film, Mr. Cruise portrays a heroic Nazi officer who turns on Hitler. The release date for ''Valkyrie'' has been delayed twice, contributing to a cloud of gloom hanging over the project. The film cost close to $95 million to make and will cost about as much to market, putting its worldwide break-even point north of $200 million in box office receipts, MGM executives said.

MGM's financial records show that UA has already consumed about $150 million of its $500 million financing fund. But if the UA fund begins to dry up, Mr. Sloan says he is ready to replenish it.

''We're not going to let that thing fail,'' he said. ''That is a non-duplicatable asset today, in these credit markets.''

Dennis Rice, a UA spokesman, said that UA was excited about ''Valkyrie'' but that its financing was not dependent on any one movie. ''We expect to have hits and misses just like any other studio,'' he said, adding that UA is close to deals for three other films with top talent. ''We stand by our business plan and want to be judged over the long haul.''

As MGM continues to monitor its relationship with UA, it recently decided to end another with Showtime, the cable TV network.

Because Showtime offered only half of what it previously had paid to license MGM films for pay-TV programming, MGM formed a new cable network with Paramount and Lionsgate. But the three partners have yet to identify any distributors, and analysts are skeptical about its eventual reception.

On the theatrical front, MGM has already punted for 2009 to avoid the quality problems that have bedeviled it. Mr. Sloan says the breathing room allows Ms. Parent to put together classier projects.

''If you don't have a major summer and a Christmas picture, you're not a player at the studio level,'' he said. ''The best you're going to be is Lionsgate.'' A Lionsgate spokesman declined to comment.

In the interim, Ms. Parent says she has faith in the films that MGM will distribute with its partners. The James Bond movie this year, and the ''Pink Panther'' sequel next year, both to be released domestically by Sony Pictures, have already been paid for. A recent screening of ''Valkyrie,'' meanwhile, caused her to breathe ''a sigh of relief,'' she says.

''It didn't get out of the gate right, so we have to make sure there's adequate time to contextualize the film,'' Ms. Parent says. ''It's a hard sell. It just is. But it's a film that people will be proud of.''

Ms. Parent has been buying books and pitches, any one of which she says could become a major 2010 release. ''The Matarese Circle,'' a thriller based on the popular Robert Ludlum book, is being developed for Denzel Washington. A remake of ''Dirty Rotten Scoundrels'' is planned, as is a romantic comedy from the director of ''Wild Hogs.''

SHE also says she has been wooing talent by casting MGM's negatives as positives. So, Ms. Parent says, the studio isn't understaffed; it's ''streamlined.'' It's not desperate; it's ''hungry.''

As for complaints about MGM's marketing, she says, ''Don't worry, I'm taking care of it.'' Insiders say MGM has offered the top marketing job to Terry Press, formerly head of marketing at DreamWorks; Ms. Press confirmed that she had been approached, but declined to say more.

Meanwhile, speculation continues in Hollywood and on Wall Street that MGM will be bought, leaving Mr. Sloan scurrying for the same thing everyone else in Hollywood is seeking: cash. He says he wants to raise a new, $650 million production fund to keep MGM's perilous finances intact -- and maybe find new investors to pay down its debt.

Time is of the essence. Mr. Sloan's and Ms. Parent's talk of possibly dipping into MGM's cash coffers to have movies launched drew a sharp response from one member of the studio's board who requested anonymity to avoid friction with other directors and managers. ''We are not going to jeopardize or compromise the financial health of this company based on funding negative costs of films,'' the board member said.

While Mr. Sloan says he's prepared to use MGM's cash, what he won't do, he says, is ask existing investors to double down.

''I think it's a character of private equity that the last thing they'd want to do is put themselves in the situation where they said, 'We didn't capitalize the company optimally,' '' he says. ''So I kind of see it as my job to take the deck that I was dealt, which is a lot of leverage, and make it work. I think I can make this work.''