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Well, isn’t this fun?
I’ve lost my second hard drive in sixteen months and I couldn’t be happier! The column schedule and my attitude may be a little like a rollercoaster until this resolved. My apologies.
Lost in the shuffle was the first half of yesterday’s column regarding the Mike Ovitz imbroglio. Here is what you probably don’t know about the whole nuclear meltdown over the phrase “gay mafia.” In a profile that runs more than eight pages in copy alone, here is the entirety of Ovitz’s attack:
“He calls it the Gay Mafia, though several of its “members” aren’t gay, and much of what he says about the men is nasty and unprintable.”
That’s it! That’s what you’ve been reading about. That’s all the rage. Not a single direct quote of Mike Ovitz using the term in the article. I don’t doubt Bryan Burrough’s reporting that he uses the term. But there isn’t one direct quote, nor is there context of any kind for Ovitz’s usage, as in “constant,” “enraged,” “passing,” “joking,” “relentless…” something!
There are three paragraphs of response to the term from Barry Diller and then David Geffen. In fact, it is Geffen who uses specifics to define what he thinks Ovitz is suggesting by the use of the phrase “gay mafia” and Geffen’s definition has become the lynchpin of much of the coverage of this story. But Geffen, who is presented as Ovitz’s Enemy Number One throughout the article, goes much farther than Ovitz does in this article. If hating David Geffen is hating gay people, then Mike Ovitz is guilty as charged. But if homophobia is the charge, we all need to remember what the word means – fear of gay people, not hatred of gay people. Fear may lead to hatred, but even the nastiest stories I’ve seen about Ovitz this last week seem to be heavy on childish fear more than any real rage.
The only use of the word “gay” in any context in the seven pages of copy, after those four paragraphs, is in regards to a nasty assertion made by Jeff Kwatinetz, who now owns AMG, in a pending lawsuit against Sandy Gallin, for whom Kwatinetz used to work. Where is the rage against Kwatinetz? His public suit is far more offensive and potentially far more damaging to Gallin than Ovitz’s comments are to Geffen or others?
The overall article is clearly a play for sympathy, rather brilliantly constructed by Ovitz, if you ask me. He goes through deal after deal after deal, offering someone else as the reason for each of his recent failures. Burrough does an excellent job, getting most of the people who were involved in each deal to go on the record. The result is that the facts of each deal are confirmed on either side and that Ovitz’s interest in assigning motivation – “They’re out to get me” – comes through loud and clear.
The thing is, business is business, as Sue Mengers smartly pointed out when she talked to the L.A. Times last week. Why did Diller drop out of the AMG deal? It was bad business. Why do I believe that? Because I don’t believe that any smart businessman would ever invest or not invest $150 million based on anything other than business... particularly when it’s a guy like Diller, who had full knowledge of Ovitz going into the deal. It’s not like someone told Diller something that he didn’t already know.
On the other hand, there is Michael Armstrong and AT&T. In that case, I am willing to believe that “bad buzz” about Ovitz could have hurt, since Armstrong was playing around in a business he didn’t really know. Could his $150 million play return multiples of that number? Maybe. Probably not, given the ongoing negative climate for independent television production. But the deal was already a flyer for him and apparently, he lost faith.
It is ironic that Ovitz is complaining that a few words whispered in someone’s ear can make or break a nine-figure deal. He knows that it can. He’s done it.
At Disney, Ovitz’s complaint that Eisner wouldn’t turn over the reigns has been the story for years. Ovitz was not the partner that Eisner needed, yes. But Eisner has yet to find that partner in anyone. Ovitz’s version may be self-serving, but in many ways, it jibes with what everyone already thinks about Eisner.
The deal with Canal Plus that was ended over an audit that turned up some issues… it makes perfect sense that Canal Plus wanted out and used this as an excuse. Again, if it were in Canal Plus’ financial interests to maintain the deal, an auditing issue, whether $200,000 or $2 million, would be worked through privately. Anyone who thinks that there aren’t multi-million dollar improprieties in audits all the time - and that they aren’t handled quietly when the business between the companies is still good – is nuts. Again, no one knows better than Ovitz, once the top man behind the curtain.
On the other hand, Ovitz’s suggestion that Ron Meyer called for the audit in order to get Ovitz… that’s probably complete crap. And there certainly is no proof that even if Meyer called for the audit, that he did it for personal reasons. But that is the story about this story… the factual events are well laid out and then Ovitz spins them to fit his idea of why things happened and why people are out to get him. He assigns motivation. And as anyone who has ever been in a bad relationship knows, assigning emotional motivations to others is usually a fool’s errand.
The problem for me is this… the coverage of this story suggests to me that people are out to get Ovitz. That doesn’t make him anything but one of the most hated men in the history of Hollywood. This doesn’t mean that he isn’t a major homophobe, so unconscious of the lives of those around him that he didn’t realize that there were a lot of closeted gay men working for him at CAA. This is not a defense of Mike Ovitz.
Let me repeat this again… This is not a defense of Mike Ovitz. If anyone would ever go on the record about the guy – and eventually, they will – there will be a great article/book/mini-series from the point of view of the people who feel that he hurt them. If he is The Devil, I will be fascinated to see his horns. But I need more than innuendo. No one denies that Ovitz is a Class A asshole. But there are very few people who get to the top of the food chain by being anything less than Class A.
Think about it. When real venom comes out, is there a purely rational explanation, ever? Or is there always something more? Does any movie really deserve the fire-and-brimstone condemnations that Attack of the Clones or Godzilla received? I don’t care how much you hated the movies. I’m saying, the degree of rage is about more than the film. It’s about some sort of disappointment that was set up long before you spent two hours in the theater. This is not a judgment of your rage. It is just an acknowledgement that there is some displacement. And when we feel that rage, we should spend at least as much time examining ourselves as we do the object of our rage.
Unless you are one of the principals… then this really is personal and I understand your reaction, even if I disagree with it.
Bryan Burrough does not deserve slings or arrows for his work on this story. Vanity Fair’s only sin was to send out the sizzle before sending out the steak, as I believe that most people who wrote about this whole mess last Mon-Wed hadn’t read the complete text or they couldn’t have obsessed on the “gay mafia” issue like they did.
I’ll tell you something else… don’t expect much to come from Variety or Peter Bart on this story. Bart’s verbal indiscretion in the Amy Wallace LA Magazine story was infinitely worse. Bart was reported to have actually suggested that his hiring practices would be affected by someone’s sexuality. That’s illegal in this country. In the worst attacks on Ovitz, no one has unearthed a story about him firing someone or not hiring someone for being gay or suggesting that he would. The worst he has been accused of is being sophomoric, which he doesn’t reserve for gay issues. His, “If they could have taken my wife and kids,” comment was right up there. But equally stupid was any suggestion that there was some sort of sexual innuendo in that comment.
Last week, Mike Ovitz’s enemies were gay and straight and read all over. They probably did see the entire text of the interview and they saw the play for sympathy. They felt the cockroach surviving the nukes with his tale of “they got me” and they tried to make sure that the bug got squished by simplifying the whole thing into a story about “the gay mafia.”
It is one of the best-written stories about Hollywood in years. Anyone reading it without jaundiced eyes will take a lot away from these pages.
This is what I took: Ovitz has lost a step. As a fellow lover of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, I feel the primary lesson of the book is that success hinges on absolute knowledge of your own strength and your opponent’s strength. One’s actions are a direct result of that knowledge and should not be clouded by ego or emotion if you are to win these conflicts. I often miss that boat. Ovitz missed that boat with AMG and with this article.
At AMG, Ovitz’s business plan didn’t seem to understand where the TV business was when he was getting in and most importantly, his hubris allowed him to think he could proceed before he was properly capitalized. Even his friends now say that the business he was attempting to launch needed billions to start, not hundreds of millions. Deep pockets and fat libraries survive. In this day and age, you almost have to assume that you are going to drop the first $500 million just getting started if you want to do film and TV and lit and everything else. An additional $300 million in 2001 might have saved AMG, but it’s not clear that it would have survived more than another couple of years after that infusion.
As for the article, Ovitz gave his enemies one vulnerable spot, no bigger than an Achilles heel. It was the use of the term “gay mafia.” Everything else could have been reduced to “he said/he said” and no one would have played that game too hard… it makes you look weak. If that phrase was not brought up by Burrough in the first page of copy, people would have been quietly fuming all over town, worried that Ovitz might have pulled a Nixon and successfully started his campaign to be seen as a winner again… the legitimacy of that claim also being analogous to Nixon’s. But Ovitz overplayed his hand by one card. And now, it’s too late to pull it back. He made an apology, but the apology is now the proof that he was guilty. HA! Now, if Ovitz’s enemies could disappear every issue of Vanity Fair in which this eight-page article with Burroughs 26-word sentence containing that two-word phrase… that might be the final blow.
P.S. I’m still looking for a single story about Mike Ovitz actually costing a journalist who told the truth about him their job. I know that he’s done terrible things to reporters on a personal level, like sending dangerously obnoxious gifts. But all the journos who have been tough on him in the last eight years during which I have been on this beat seem to be working.
