Rudeness wins all the marbles

Last month, Darren Statt, a talent agent at Endeavor, showed up at the DreamWorks lot to meet with the studio’s top production executives. When he discovered the execs weren’t around, the Scottish agent launched into an obscenity-filled tirade directed at a production executive’s assistant.

“It was so ugly that someone went around closing all the assistants’ doors. You could hear this guy in every corner of the building,” recalls DreamWorks marketing chief Terry Press. Statt apologized afterward and sent flowers to the assistant. But when Steven Spielberg heard of the incident, the studio called Endeavor to lodge a formal complaint. Statt, who declined to discuss the incident, worked at home for two weeks before leaving Endeavor for good earlier this month. But in Hollywood, bad behavior is rarely punished. Within days, rival agency UTA had snatched up Statt and his star client, the Rock, one of the industry’s hottest action heroes.

“Personally, I think most of the people at Endeavor could use a three-week sojourn to charm school,” says Press. “But this is Hollywood, the only business in the world where people seem to confuse rudeness with power. People think that being rude and demeaning is somehow a show of importance when, to me, it just suggests that you’re dealing with a lot of spoiled brats whose mommies didn’t give them enough time-outs.”

Getting into the Christmas spirit, the industry has been buzzing -- perhaps chortling would be a better word -- over Ken Auletta’s barbed New Yorker profile of Miramax czar Harvey Weinstein. The piece that ran in the Dec. 16 issue was highlighted by accounts of Weinstein’s nasty showdowns with producer Scott Rudin, Universal Chairman Stacey Snider, filmmaker Julie Taymor (who made “Frida” for Miramax) and volcanic-tempered Vivendi Universal chief Barry Diller, who called Weinstein “a bully,” which is sort of like Trent Lott attacking David Duke for being a bigot.

Of course in Hollywood, a town so competitive that people routinely root for friends to fail, many players thought Weinstein got off easy. Several executives I spoke to last week dismissed the profile as “a puff piece.” Translation: The Miramax boss is even a worse ogre than portrayed in the story. Only a death sentence would fit his crimes. In fact, the “hip” Hollywood insult of the moment is for someone, just before slamming down the phone in a fit of rage, to bellow, “You should die!”

The trash talk may have changed, but the sentiments are older than talking pictures. Bad behavior is permanently embedded in showbiz DNA. Since its wild ‘n’ woolly early years, Hollywood has been a briar patch of feuding moguls, narcissistic movie stars and egomaniacal directors. In the old days, it was not uncommon to see disputes settled by bare-knuckled fisticuffs. Errol Flynn and John Huston once got into a drunken brawl at David O. Selznick’s house that sent both to the hospital, Flynn with two broken ribs, Huston with a broken nose. When Flynn called to inquire about Huston’s health, the director said he’d “thoroughly enjoyed the fight and hoped we’d do it again sometime.”

Today’s antics, however, are more Scrooge than Marquess of Queensberry: The miscreants kowtow to the powerful and let fly at their inferiors. Rudin’s tantrums with agents are the stuff of legend; many people believe a Rudin showdown with Endeavor’s imperious Ari Emanuel would draw a bigger crowd than a Tyson-Holyfield fight. But the hot-tempered producer dotes on his favored writers and actors; he throws potted plants only at his lowly assistants. When Viacom Entertainment Chairman Jonathan Dolgen was an exec at 20th Century Fox, assistants were forbidden to say hello to him in the hallways, since a cheery “Good morning, Mr. Dolgen!” might disrupt the great man’s train of thought.

Bad behavior, of course, isn’t unique to show business; it’s simply more virulent and out in the open. Decorum is more prized in professions that have some semblance of workplace behavior protection, in the form of either union regulation or collegial tradition. Even sports, a haven for hot heads of all sorts, promptly penalizes egregious outbursts by tossing people out of the game.

Everyone has a pet theory about why Hollywood is such a hotbed of boorishness. One explanation: Showbiz is teeming with unhappy, insecure people with a lethal combination of big egos and low self-esteem. “Show business attracts a lot of borderline narcissists who had unhappy childhoods,” says Arnold Stiefel, a film producer and manager who handles crooner Rod Stewart. “These are the people who were bullied in school but, now that they’ve become powerful, they’ve become the school bully themselves.”

It’s no wonder people describe Hollywood as high school, except with money. But is it money that corrupts? Or were the scariest showbiz monsters just as devilish when they were 22-year-old nobodies? People say Diller was equally fearsome in his youth. “When Scott Rudin was a young executive at Fox, he’d return my phone calls at 8 p.m.,” recalls veteran manager Bernie Brillstein, who was the first person in Hollywood to blow the whistle on ex-power agent Michael Ovitz’s noxious behavior. “Who was he kidding? So that’s the last time I dealt with him.” Brillstein laughs. “It starts early. I can guarantee you that none of these guys were the most popular person in their high school class.”

Showbiz incivility is also bred by the industry’s ferocious sense of competition. “This is a business where, if you succeed, people will allow you to behave badly,” says Revolution Studios founder Joe Roth. “There are no rules, other than winning.”

Outbursts of pique are also tangled up in issues of ego, entitlement and a mind-bending detachment from reality. Michael Bay, for one, parked his Ferrari in a handicapped space while he had a reporter from Esquire along for the ride.

Actors and filmmakers are coddled like newborn babes, in part because they wield enormous power but also out of a widely held notion that when it comes to the artistic temperament, even the worst infantile excesses must be forgiven. Because Martin Lawrence is a star, he can demand that his film crew never speak to him when he’s on the set. Just imagine the hush if Lawrence and Dolgen ever ended up in the same room!

Hollywood publicist Bumble Ward was on the phone with a prominent director while driving her children home when the client launched into a profane tirade, upset that she was paying more attention to her kids than to him. “If people think you’re brilliant or going to make them a lot of money, everything is forgiven,” she says. “There’s no explaining the level of humiliation people put up with in this town. I’d love to talk to a shrink about it.”

The analysts’ couches must get quite a beating in this business. I was surprised by how many industry-ites I spoke with -- people with reputations for being mild-mannered -- acknowledged having been in therapy for anger management issues. “No matter how corporate Hollywood has become, it’s still a very emotional business,” says Variety editor Peter Bart, who as a production executive in the 1970s fired a director in mid-argument.

“You’re always in situations that are unique to the movie business, where a movie is behind schedule or running 20 minutes too long. But the solution is purely subjective. Everything is opinion. So you argue and people fly off the handle.”

One producer I know uses his quick temper as a motivational tool, saying filmmakers listen only when someone starts yelling at them, mistaking kindness for weakness. Another producer fires someone on the first day of shooting to let the crew know who’s boss.

“People are often tough on their staff because you’re so frustrated by your lack of control of everything else in the filmmaking process that you obsess on the few things you can control,” says Jersey Films partner Michael Shamberg. “So much of being creative is rooted in being childlike, and in that childlike world, a lot of people feel they don’t have to exercise any self-control.”

Maybe that’s it. Hollywood isn’t high school with money -- it’s preschool with a posse of sandbox bullies. The toddler who pitches the biggest tantrum gets the best treats. In modern-day showbiz, no one behaved more abominably than producer Don Simpson, who died awash in a sea of drugs. “And the worse he behaved, the more people talked about him. Everyone loved to tell Don Simpson stories,” recalls his friend, producer Steve Tisch. “A lot of people seemed to live vicariously through him. But what does that say about our industry, that we reward, even deify, that kind of behavior?”

I’m not saying there’s a moral to this story, but in Hollywood, it’s usually the bird that screams until you can see the veins in its neck that gets the worm.

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“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.