Page Six This!
L.A. Preoccupied By Private Eye Pellicano
By Bruce Feirstein
April 17, 2006
If you live long enough in New York, sooner or later you learn that no
matter what you’ve got—no matter what status you
hold—there’s always some guy waiting to trump you. It
doesn’t matter whether or not you care. Because for him,
that’s entirely beside the point: He’s always got some ace
in the hole—some connection, some overhand tennis
slam—designed to take you down a few notches and put you
away. Among a certain class, it’s the local intramural
sport.
So join us now as we listen in on the top-seeded players in this
week’s pan-Manhattan freestyle status-strutting competition:
Plutocrat I: “I’ve got a Park Avenue penthouse, a $2
billion hedge fund, a ranch in Montana, a condo in Beaver Creek, a
cottage in East Hampton, a GV at Teterboro, a yacht in Saint
Bart’s, a Renoir at the Met, a wing at Beth Israel, a string of
ponies at Wellington, an ex-wife in Greenwich, and I’m dating a
supermodel.”
Plutocrat II: “How nice for you. Steve Rattner got my kid
in pre-school, David Boise handles my corporate litigation, Eddie Hayes
takes care of the criminal stuff, Howard Rubenstein is my P.R. guy,
Bill Clinton sits on the board of my private equity group and
Harvey—you know Harvey, don’t you?—last year Harvey
published my daughter’s tell-all novel about her insane mother,
and this year he’s releasing my son’s first feature. He
said that Marty said it’s going to go to Sundance.”
Plutocrat I: “I was on Page Six this morning.”
Plutocrat II: “I was on the front page of The New York Times this
morning, in a story about how I was shaken down by Page Six.”
Point, set, match. Game over.
Your correspondent is filing this diary from Los Angeles, where
—apropos of our own “tale of the tape” imbroglio, the
Anthony Pellicano case—Variety’s Peter Bart has reported
that “Private investigators say they now have a booming business
in sweeping homes for suspected taps.” Commenting on this
newest of status-driven trends, Mr. Bart mused, perhaps not altogether
facetiously: “Remember, the guy you hire to check for taps may
also be putting them in.”
I’ll have more to say about this in a minute. But in the
meantime, as the children rush off from the Seder table to find the
hidden matzo (and maybe turn up a wiretap or two), here’s the
rest of what some of L.A. is talking about.
The Immigration Bill: As I write this, the streets are filled
with protesting Latinos playing to the news cameras, demanding the
decriminalization of workers who’ve entered the country
illegally. At the same time, the airwaves are filled with
right-wing radio talk-show hosts playing to their constituency, bashing
George W. Bush and John McCain for their so-called “amnesty
program” while spitting vitriol about overburdened emergency
rooms, prisons filled with illegal immigrants, national security and
jobs taken from bona fide American citizens.
What’s surprising here is that the talk-show trolls don’t
seem to grasp the bigger picture, and what’s really in play:
California’s emerging Latino majority. A group that’s
religious, pro-military, pro-law, upwardly mobile and willing to cross
party lines inside a voting booth.
Let me frame this in Hollywood terms: If you made Chico and the
Man today, Chico would own a painting company with 125 employees and a
contract for the Staples Center, and “The Man” would be his
investment counselor at Wells Fargo.
In short, this ain’t about the borders. It’s about
California’s 55 electoral votes and the 2008 Presidential
election. And the really surprising thing here is that Karl Rove
hasn’t been able to impart this notion to his talk-radio foot
soldiers.
The Pellicano Case: Recently, I met with a talent manager who hired
Anthony Pellicano during the mid-1990’s, on behalf of a
movie-star client with a female-stalker problem. As the manager
recounted it, their first meeting eerily foreshadowed Jared Paul Stern:
“Pellicano offered us a laundry list—a menu—and asked
exactly how far we wanted to take this,” the manager said.
“Nobody can plead naïve here. We all knew exactly what
we’d bargained for and what we were getting billed for.”And
now all of Hollywood waits, with a mixture of glee and horror,
endlessly clicking on Nikki Finke’s DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com to
see who’s getting indicted next. As the manager put it,
“Everybody’s going to turn. These are wimpy white guys;
they’re not going to jail.” He’s right. It
isn’t like John Gotti and the Mafia. You don’t get to run a
studio— greenlighting Ben Stiller pictures—from a prison
cell.
As I’ve written before, Hollywood has become a meaner and nastier
place over the past few years. Lots of little people chasing big,
soul-crushing dreams. None of this is surprising. It used to be:
“It’s not enough for me to succeed; I want my friends to
fail.” These days, the expression is: “It’s not
enough for me to succeed; I want my friends to get indicted.”
The Strike Zone: You hear it in dribs and drabs and whispers: from film
directors over dinner, from screenwriters lingering at lunch, from
actors killing time between takes: Hollywood may go to war next
year over DVD payments. As Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Big
Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood, explained to
me: “These days, a typical picture earns 45 percent of its
revenue from DVD’s and only 14 percent from its theatrical
release. The rest comes from TV, cable and other forms of distribution.
But the definition of profit—how much a movie actually
makes—still comes from the days when box office was king.”
There’s a growing sense that the time is ripe to address these
issues, along with payments for iPods and Google. The call for strikes
hasn’t reached a boil yet, but the pot is definitely simmering.
Hillary 2008? As the Los Angeles Times recently reported, the junior
Senator from New York is losing her allure out here. Sure, in any
group setting, everyone loves her and bemoans “those people out
there” who won’t vote for a woman for President. But
one-on-one, the litany begins: She’s an opportunist;
she’s on the wrong side of the war. Enough of the Clintons
already. Ultimately, we’re the people out there who won’t
vote for her.
In any case, this is going to follow an entirely predictable story arc
over the next two years: She’s invincible, she’s
vulnerable, the front-runner stumbles, she’s the new comeback
kid; Bill does something stupid to undermine her; it’s all a
horserace.
Page Six, Anthony Pellicano and Hillary. Too bad you can’t TiVo ’em and fast-forward to the highlights.
http://newyorkobserver.com/20060417/20060417_Bruce_Feirstein_media_newyorkersdiary.asp