Sidney Jay Sheinberg (January 14, 1935 – March 7, 2019) was an American businessman, lawyer and entertainment executive.
[citation needed] In the summer of 1958, Sheinberg arrived in California where he accepted a teaching position at UCLA School of Law.
[8] In June 1973, Sheinberg was elected president and chief operating officer of MCA, Inc. and Universal Pictures, serving alongside Lew Wasserman.
[8] When 1975's Jaws ran over budget, Sheinberg had Spielberg's back—what skeptics dismissed as an overpriced B-movie became a horror classic that defined the new summer-blockbuster genre.
[15] In 1982, Thomas Keneally published his historical novel Schindler's Ark, which he wrote after a chance meeting with Leopold Pfefferberg in Los Angeles in 1980.
The film was a box office success, bringing in over $320 million and is considered a historic motion picture that poignantly captured the Holocaust.
[18] (See also Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd.) In 1984, as part of MCA's potential acquisition of The Walt Disney Company, Sheinberg agreed to vacate his role as MCA President in order to allow Disney CEO Ron W. Miller to assume the role.
Despite coming close to actually happening, however, Wasserman strongly disagreed and said that Sheinberg should stay as MCA President, causing the deal to collapse entirely.
[20] In 1990, Sheinberg and Lew Wasserman negotiated a $6.59 billion sale of MCA and Universal to Japan's Matsushita Electric in cash and securities.
He was honored by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force for his life's work in civil rights and inclusive support of the LGBT community.
In 1987, he received the DeWitt Carter Reddick Award[25] at the University of Texas in Austin, and in 1989 he was named a Lifetime Honorary Member of the Directors Guild of America for his decades of service on the DGA-AMPTP Creative Rights Committee.