Viacom Inc.'s year-old acquisition of DreamWorks SKG's live-action studio has been, at times, more of a nightmare than a dream.

A year after David Geffen, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg sold the studio for $1.6 billion to Viacom's Paramount Pictures, simmering tensions, backbiting and internal power plays between the co-founders and the new owner suggest a case of sellers' remorse.

The self-described ""Dream team"" seems to be having trouble adjusting to its new home. And that comes as little surprise to Hollywood.

From Day 1 of the acquisition, industry insiders presumed the powerful trio would be hard-pressed to relinquish its dream of ruling over a vast Hollywood empire such as the one it set out to build in 1994 with DreamWorks. As a result, the DreamWorks live-action studio has been seen by many as a Trojan horse inside Paramount's gates that might eventually topple management and grab control.

So far that hasn't happened. Viacom Chairman Sumner M. Redstone, who built his entertainment empire from a series of brutal takeover battles and billion-dollar acquisitions, is accustomed to coddling big egos. The 83-year-old patriarch acknowledges the difficulty that founders have in letting go.

""I understand how people like them, entrepreneurs who built companies and are creative geniuses, want a hell of a lot of autonomy,"" Redstone said in a recent interview, after returning from lunch with Spielberg at the Bel-Air Hotel, where one topic was the director's latest installment of ""Indiana Jones"" for Paramount. ""They're entitled to a lot of autonomy and [we] are committed to giving them that.""

/www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-dreamworksjan29,1,5246500.story?track=rss"">Read more at L.A.Times.

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