“I'm not destroying my career over a minimally
talented spoiled brat who thought nothing of shoving this off her plate for
eighteen months so she could go direct a movie. I have no desire to be making a
movie with her, or anybody, that she runs and that we don't. She's a camp event
and a celebrity and that's all and the last thing anybody needs is to make a
giant bomb with her that any fool could see coming.”—Film producer Scott Rudin
on Angelina Jolie, quoted in Sam Biddle, “Leaked:The Nightmare Email Drama Behind Sony's Steve Jobs Disaster,” Defamer/Gawker, December 9, 2014
The Office of Super-High Intensity Training (O.S.H.I.T.)
has had many occupants over the years, but its latest resident, Scott Rudin, seems to have forgotten
perhaps the most important lesson of this indispensable organization: If you engage
in S.H.I.T., make sure it doesn’t splatter all over you.
Leave aside the question of whether it’s an inside
job or if a cyberstrike by a North Korean government out for vengeance over the
satire The Interview. The Sony hacking scandal is such a hydra-headed monster that it may take years for its full
dimensions to be understood. The most visible—but not necessarily most
important—tale to leak out to date might be the charming exchange between Rudin
and studio co-chair Amy Pascal
concerning Barack Obama’s supposed yen for African American-themed releases.
It’s easy to laugh at the latter—as I will, all the
harder, when Hollywood brags at the next Oscar ceremony over how tolerant it
is, hoping that nobody will recall the racial condescension engaged in by two
of their more visible figures in 2014.
But before Sony persuades us to pass over in
decorous silence their e-mail fiasco, it would do well to put Rudin’s comment
about Angelina Jolie under the microscope. To start with, many would regard the idea of
Jolie as “minimally talented” as questionable, pointing to her Best Supporting
Actress Oscar for Girl, Interrupted.
But a more fundamental question lies behind that
tart phrase of Rudin’s. Surely, he is not urging that Pascal and other execs
stop working with every “minimally talented spoiled brat” to come down the pike
in Tinseltown. If he were, the industry’s productions would shut down faster
than those strikes engineered by one of its unions.
The ways of Hollywood royalty have frustrated
producers and directors for far longer than Rudin had access to a computer, but
moviemakers had to put up with it because of stars’ box-office clout. Billy
Wilder, for instance, moaning about Marilyn Monroe, acknowledged, “My Aunt Minnie would
always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my
Aunt Minnie?”
In one way, it is understandable why Rudin felt
annoyed with the star. The word “Cleopatra”—the project that so intrigued Ms.
Jolie that she had lobbied for hot director David Fincher to helm it, rather
than Rudin’s latest pet project, on Steve Jobs—still retains an evil allure in
many quarters as the budget-buster that nearly wrecked a studio (Twentieth Century Fox).
Yet the person associated the most with that
all-time disaster is perhaps the closest equivalent we have to Ms. Jolie today:
Elizabeth Taylor—another
hubby-swiping megastar and tabloid mainstay who, by battling a potentially
deadly medical condition and engaging in humanitarian work, became, improbably,
sympathetic. (She even surpassed Ms. Jolie in number of Oscar statuettes--two vs. one--though her acting talent took a back seat to her looks until she gained weight for her role in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
This is not to say that Ms. Jolie comes out of the
now-notorious Rudin-Pascal exchange with an immaculate reputation. The comments
section on the Web site where I first learned of the Rudin-Pascal exchange were running—oh,
rough guess—13-to-one against the actress. She and her P.R. team might want to
consider whether all that “Brangelina” publicity has really endeared her to the
public.
Not knowing Ms. Jolie personally, or having read
much about her interactions with other industry professionals, I have no idea
if she is indeed “spoiled.” But I strongly suspect that few, if any, of those
Internet readers who have denigrated her in reading Rudin’s quote have any idea
of the man who lashed out at her.
If you’re a star and you get on Rudin’s good side,
you will adore him forever, as, it seems, Chris Rock was ready to do this week in an appearance on Charlie Rose. (Will the
comic actor-director revise his feelings now that he knows the contents of
Rudin’s messages to Ms. Pascal about Obama? Stay tuned.) But if you’re one of
his underlings—well, just expect a shorter life expectancy and/or years of psychoanalysis.
This, after all, was the fellow named “The Most Feared Man in Town” by The Hollywood Reporter four years ago.
Since he had already appeared on a ranking by the Web site Gawker of “New York’s Worst Bosses” (by virtue of
his Broadway productions) several years before that, this made him a bicoastal
threat to employee sanity.
Among Rudin’s sins, as catalogued in the two articles:
temper tantrums so ferocious that one assistant took ulcer medication;
frequently firing personal assistants; keeping as many as five on at the same
time, and sometimes firing several simultaneously; throwing things (like
Blackberries!) at them; and banning use of the subway, the one
place on Planet Earth where workers could be safe from a phone call from him round
the clock.
Rudin does not sound terribly abashed by his e-mail
screeds. His “apology,” such as it was, turned out to be broad and none too
specific: “I made a series of remarks that were meant only to be funny, but in
the cold light of day, they are in fact thoughtless and insensitive - and not
funny at all. To anybody I've offended, I'm profoundly and deeply sorry, and I
regret and apologize for any injury they might have caused." (It might also be said that only he could regard his remarks as "funny" rather than sarcastic. Good thing he's not a comedian or he'd join the permanently unemployed.)
Given Rudin’s history, it is undoubtedly hopeless to
expect anything deeper or more sincere than this. It’s probably a useless
undertaking, anyway—Rudin could warble, “Angie, I still love ya,
baby” and it still wouldn’t satisfy Ms. Jolie or her outraged spouse, Brad Pitt. (You
should have seen the fish-eye Jolie gave Pascal when the two met the other day—and the Sony exec wasn’t even the one calling her a “brat”! No wonder “a mild bout of chickenpox” led the star to withdraw from the premiere of her new
film Unbroken.)
I run a PG-13 site compared with the rest of
cyberspace, but I am not oblivious to the number of hits and “likes” that occur
when I post a photo of someone easy on the eyes. Many regard Ms. Jolie as a
virtually charter member of this group.
And Mr. Rudin? I doubt that many would place him in
such august company. In fact, if you look at his picture here, you might be
tempted to think that he belongs not in entertainment but politics. You know
politics, right? The profession once described by one of its most colorful characters,
Democratic consultant James Carville, as “show business for ugly people.”
So—I think we might have a new profession for Mr. Rudin. But by all means, let’s make sure that elective office doesn’t open a door to another career, diplomacy. Otherwise, World War III—with North Korea, no less—might be in the offing.
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