PGF

"STOKES’S INSTINCT TO avoid the mob turned out to be strong. So did his misgivings about whether the boom would last. But the itch to join the big league of media players niggled at him. It was a make-or-break moment. If staying in the market was a test of nerve, as so many of the 1980s big shots implied, would selling out brand him as some sort of failure? Even (or especially) with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, the politics of it was as primitive as playground push-and-shove. Nobody wanted to blink first. But Parker advised Stokes to follow his instinct and step off the train in case it crashed. Parker had got it wrong with PGF and Stokes had got it wrong with Pacific Film, waving aside Bill Rayner’s gentle protests that film processing was…"

"PACIFIC FILM HAD one thing in common with PGF: Stokes bought it just as its market was colliding with technical changes that made long-held knowledge and ‘advantages’ obsolete. Buying Pacific Film was ‘like buying a yacht with a big hole below the water line’. He explains: ‘I misread the problem. I thought it was marketing but it was the same problem Kodak had: the world was going digital.’"