By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

PUTTING TOGETHER A $2 BILLION business from scratch is a sweepingly ambitious, often frenetic and sometimes messy task. The same could be said, on a smaller scale, of the journalistic task of reporting on such a company start-up. To assemble this week's cover story on the new Hollywood studio DreamWorks SKG, Time fielded a gifted crew to keep pace with the vision and entrepreneurial energy of DreamWorks' Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen--our own "dream team."

From the start, says West Coast bureau chief Jordan Bonfante, "the key was exclusive, firsthand access." Jeffrey Ressner, TIME's entertainment correspondent, was able to chat with Spielberg at his Pacific Palisades home. He interviewed Geffen in the record mogul's austere office. And he was with Katzenberg from the producer's trademark dawn breakfast meetings through his final business phone calls, way past the Letterman hour. Says Ressner: "While all three men were press-savvy, they opened up and seemed genuinely stoked about their new adventure together."

New York correspondent Adam Cohen traced DreamWorks' boldly unorthodox web of financing, from Wall Street, where Chemical Bank extended a $1 billion line of credit, to the West Coast, where the California Public Employees Retirement System was considering an investment. The closest Cohen--"a movie fan but a Hollywood rube"--had ever come to a movie studio was when he worked as a civil rights lawyer in Lafayette, Alabama, which had been used as a location for Mississippi Burning. Now here he was, having lunch with Ressner and the DreamWorks principals on the Universal lot.

As the story grew, other reporters joined in. San Francisco bureau chief David S. Jackson flew to Seattle to interview financier Paul Allen, a key investor. Reporters Tara Weingarten and Lise Hilboldt filled in details of DreamWorks' film and TV plans. And bureau chief Bonfante sounded out tough-minded observers who could subject the company's projections to a skeptical view.

The stories in the cover package were written by "the two Richards" of TIME's cinematic realm. In New York City senior writer Richard Corliss wove together the main story, while Los Angeles-based critic Richard Schickel commented on what all this has to do with the Oscars, and vice versa.