Citicorp

New York

Corporate loans

Citicorp ranks as Hollywood’s biggest lender, raising more than $2 billion for the industry in 1997.

Its specialty has been putting together syndicated loans, in which a group of banks join together to provide very large sums of money to the major studios. Citicorp has helped Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. and Universal Studios Inc. raise more than $1 billion each for film production through such deals.

Michael Fradkin, Citicorp’s managing director of global media securitization, said such syndicates are a direct response to Hollywood’s increasing focus on “event” films that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. Fradkin believes syndicated deals will remain popular in the future, attracting the participation of insurance companies and other institutional investors.