Meeting the Little People on the Way Back Down

For Hollywood, it’s the Gary Condit story of the early summer, L.A.’s answer to New York’s fascination with the beleaguered Martha Stewart. “It certainly has struck a chord,” notes producer Tom Pollock, former chairman of Universal Pictures. “When I wanted to talk to people about Vivendi Universal or Time Warner--which is really important stuff--all anybody wants to talk about is Mike Ovitz and the gay mafia.”

Ovitz’s self-immolation in the pages of the August issue of Vanity Fair, in which he claims a “gay mafia” engineered his downfall, has flared up higher than any Westside barbecue.

It’s just the kind of delicious gossip that passes for communal bonding here; despite what Ovitz might say, hatred of Mike Ovitz crosses all class and clique lines. It’s an enmity that links all the warring social groups that make up Hollywood. Indeed, those truly in the know are already talking about what author Bryan Burrough cut out of the piece, allegedly vile and incendiary remarks by the onetime super agent that never would get by any libel lawyer. “That’s the Holy Grail. The unedited tapes,” one top executive says with a sigh.

Certainly, the town could use a diversion. Why would anybody want to talk about the implosion of Universal, a $30-billion media company that employs thousands of people in L.A.? Or the ongoing turmoil at the top of AOL Time Warner or whether Michael Eisner will survive another year at Disney? Who among the Armani class really wants to dish about the fact that they’re getting poorer every day as the stocks of the various entertainment-media conglomerates tumble? Almost every big entertainment story is another reminder that Hollywood is fast becoming just another division in huge multifaceted companies run by moguls who view the entertainment business as a wayward stepchild.

The Mike Ovitz story is different. It’s the tale of a local boy gone very, very bad. The true Hollywood titans are fading out. Gone are Lew Wasserman and Steve Ross. Bob Daly and Terry Semel have moved on to the Dodgers and Yahoo, respectively.

The Hollywood-style paternalism of those men--and of Ovitz--is a thing of the past. In a town where fortunes are increasingly affected by the rise and fall of the German stock market, Ovitz’s public humiliation is refreshingly human-scale. It’s deeply personal. Ovitz didn’t buy and sell companies, sending fortunes tail-spinning; he was mean to the little people. He broke Hollywood’s cardinal rule: “Be nice to those on the way up because you’ll meet them again on the way down.”

For Ovitz, the way down from the agency he co-founded, Creative Artists Agency, included an aborted stint as the No. 2 of the Walt Disney Co. and the failure of his new management company, Artists Management Group.

Yet his beef with DreamWorks SKG founder David Geffen, in Ovitz’s mind the architect of his demise, goes back to a fairly routine tangle over the 1982 movie “Personal Best,” a time when Ovitz was king and Geffen didn’t yet have his billions of dollars.

This week, it was hard to find anyone sympathizing with Ovitz’s poor-me scenario, even after he apologized for his remarks. Still, almost no one was willing to disparage even a flogged and dead horse publicly.

In Ovitz’s heyday, “he acted just like the Wizard of Oz. I think of him huffing and puffing and threatening and it turned out to be a guy behind the curtain with a lot of levers,” a prominent marketing executive says.

One well-known producer who’d locked horns with Ovitz adds: “This idea of poor victim Michael Ovitz: David Geffen is out to get him. Why did Michael Eisner fire him? How did David Geffen mastermind that? He was mean-spirited. He would make everyone bleed on every deal if he had the upper hand.”

“Seriously, the man’s ego has just taken over,” says another top producer. “If he actually thinks there’s a cabal formed with the sole intention of destroying him, that’s an ego at work.”

“It’s one of the most pathetic throwings of blame I’ve ever read. It was so weird and homophobic. What kookiness,” says another top player. “I think people are just fascinated by this incredible fall from grace, that no matter how powerful you are it can all be gone in a blink of an eye. It’s also the reminder that maybe karma really does matter.”

Of course, most believe that Ovitz really did have enemies, such as Geffen, or Universal Chairman Ron Meyer, or Ovitz’s former proteges at his onetime agency CAA. Yet, as one Hollywood sage said, “If Mike Ovitz had made the same self-pitying interview with Bryan Burrough but hadn’t used the word ‘gay mafia,’ it wouldn’t have been such an interesting story. It’s the ‘gay mafia’ part of it.”

Traditionally among a certain set of high-powered cognoscenti, the term “gay mafia,” or “velvet mafia,” has been used to refer to a tiny, select group of friends of which Geffen happens to be a prominent member. It’s more of a tony social clique, akin, say, to the high-testosterone pack of heterosexual players who go river-rafting together, or the Hollywood wives who pal around.

It’s hardly a monolith, encompassing every one of the many prominent gay men and women in town, and the few heterosexual members who get to join because they hate Ovitz. Notes Scott Seomin of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, “There is not a gay mafia, but there is a large number of gays and lesbians compared to other industries. Hollywood is not run by any one group, gay, Jewish, African American or otherwise. Just as there is no exact recipe for a blockbuster film, converting to Judaism or coming out of the closet is not going to make you successful.”

As one studio head says, “It’s nonsense. No one has ever called me and influenced what I do.”

Zvi Howard Rosenman, a producer who is gay, adds: “There are enough straight people to be able to help you if you have the product.”

Still, a producer who also is gay, quips: “Judging from my phone sheet yesterday, if there wasn’t a gay mafia, there is one now.”

To most, Ovitz’s “gay mafia” comment was just more evidence of how out of step he was with the times, at least in Hollywood. “Public homophobia is out of style,” notes one top executive. “It’s in very bad taste. It’s like going around making racist comments.” Indeed, already there’s a generation to whom Mike Ovitz is simply a fascinating relic of another era. To them, the story of Mike Ovitz is just that--another Hollywood story of a bygone era, a slightly mythological figure like David Begelman or Howard Hughes.

“I never talked to him on the phone,” explains one of Hollywood’s bright new stars. “When he was the king of kings, I was a lowly servant.”

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Dana Calvo contributed to this report.