Highlights of low moments in ’04

If you think you had a rough year, imagine what it must’ve been like to be Michael Eisner’s lawyer. Everywhere you looked this year, the longtime Walt Disney Co. chief was embroiled in an ugly dispute, often with one of his own key business partners. It was hard to say which high-profile feud inspired the most malicious gossip.

Was it the ongoing shareholder trial over the severance package valued at $140 million that Eisner awarded to his former pal Michael Ovitz? The knock-down drag-out brawl between Eisner and Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein over the future of the Disney-owned Oscar assembly line? Eisner’s politically calculated decision to dump Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which proceeded to make more money than any of Disney’s summer movies? Or the icy relations between Eisner and Pixar Animation Studios chief Steve Jobs, which led to Jobs’ decision to seek out a new distribution deal for the wildly successful Pixar imprint?

If all this weren’t bad enough, Eisner still has to endure the ultimate indignity -- worrying about who’ll play him in “Two Blind Mice,” the upcoming Showtime TV movie about Eis-

ner’s 1995 decision to hire his then-friend Ovitz to be Disney president, only to fire him a year later.

No casting has been announced yet, but would it be too much to ask if Will Ferrell would take the part?

Speaking of thankless tasks, perhaps Eisner’s lawyer would like to commiserate with Jude Law’s agent. The British actor doggedly appeared in movie after movie this year, including the flops “Alfie” and “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.” He even popped up, Zelig-like, as Errol Flynn in “The Aviator.”

At the rate he’s going, soon he’ll be getting the parts Ben Affleck turned down.

Perhaps Law could learn from the legendary Peter O’Toole, who briskly made his amends for appearing in the epic dud “Alexander,” telling an interviewer at the Savannah Film Festival: “Ugh! What a disaster. I watched 15 minutes of the finished film and then walked out. At least I had one good scene.” That would make one more good scene than Affleck had in “Surviving Christmas,” if anyone was counting.

If there’s one maxim that holds true every year, it’s this: Never trust showbiz sweet talk. Just ask Myron Roth, a retired music industry executive, who was persuaded to send away his noisy tree trimmers by a producer filming a series near Roth’s Brentwood home for Paramount Television. When negotiations concluded, the producer agreed to pay Roth $1,000 for his trouble. But instead of sending a check, the producer delivered 20 bags filled with 100,000 pennies to Roth’s house.

Hey, in Hollywood, it’s the thought that counts.

Keeping that in mind, here’s our annual look at some of the entertainment industry’s dubious achievements and other strange-but-true moments:

We can only imagine what happened after they saw “Alien vs. Predator”: Police arrested Melissa and Sean Davidson after the Georgia couple became embroiled in a violent argument after seeing “The Passion of the Christ” in March. The couple left the theater debating whether God the Father in the Holy Trinity is human or symbolic. According to police, Melissa suffered injuries to her arm and face while her husband, Sean, had his shirt ripped off and a stab wound on his hand.

Not that his ex-wife would necessarily agree with him: Musing on the great political leaders of modern times, Ethan Hawke told an interviewer this year: “Martin Luther King Jr. suffered from infidelity, so did John F. Kennedy. You’re more likely to find great leadership coming from a man who likes to have sex with a lot of women than one who’s monogamous.”

And we just thought it was raining: Despite having a reputation as one of the most environmentally conscious rock groups in the country, the Dave Matthews Band was sued this year after its tour bus driver allegedly discharged 100 gallons of liquid human waste onto a boat full of sightseers in the Chicago River.

What news media outlet did Harvey Weinstein credit as being Miramax’s biggest supporter in its fight with Disney over the distribution of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11”?

A) NPR

B) CBS News

C) Fox News

D) New York Times

(See answer below)

Just a hunch, but we’re guessing this guy’s been taking acting lessons from Tom Sizemore: Brian Raber, an actor starring in a Long Island stage production about a stressed-out soldier coming home from war, was arrested this summer on two counts of assault after punching his leading lady in the face and beating up his director backstage just before a scheduled performance.

There’s just no excuse: The New York Post’s Page Six ran a correction this summer saying it mistakenly identified the man sitting next to Lilly Tartikoff at Mr. Chow in Los Angeles as “Brandon Tartikoff.” In fact, Lilly Tartikoff’s late husband, the gifted NBC network programmer, died of cancer in 1997.

And don’t forget my free fresh-brewed nonfat organic double soy latte: In a trial this year over the collapse of the sequel to “Basic Instinct,” a court filing included a list of perks sought by Sharon Stone that included a $3,500 per diem for armed bodyguards, a chauffeured car piloted by a nonsmoking driver, three nannies, two assistants, a presidential suite, deluxe motor home and, of course, retention of all the wardrobe and jewelry worn in the movie.

Actually, Hollywood likes any kind of sex: Catholic League chief William Donohue recently told MSNBC that “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? Hollywood likes anal sex.”

Not to mention causing volcanoes to erupt and rivers to run backward for eternity: After reading an interview in which “Team America” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker said “there’s no shame in not voting if you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sean Penn fired off an angry letter to the duo, saying their film encourages “irresponsibility that will ultimately lead to the disembowelment, mutilation, exploitation and death of innocent people throughout the world.”

Or maybe they just thought the Albanian team’s tank tops were too tight: Earlier this month, the Federal Communications Commission asked NBC to submit a tape of its coverage of the Summer Olympics’ opening ceremonies, apparently in response to viewer complaints that some of the dancing in the show was too sexy for TV.

You don’t even want to know how they treated their gardener: James Jackson, a vice president of legal affairs at Sony Pictures, and his wife, Elizabeth, were ordered by a Santa Monica jury to pay $825,000 earlier this year to a woman who claimed that they kept her as an indentured servant, forcing her to work 18 hours a day and sleep in a dog bed, and that they paid her only $300 for a year’s work.

And you can’t imagine how many people showed up at our door, trying to buy pot from us: Three former high school classmates of “Dazed and Confused” director Richard Linklater filed a lawsuit this fall claiming the negative characterizations of them in the 1993 film have made their lives miserable, exposed them to ridicule and caused their neighbors to think poorly of them.

Hey, he just asked what they were going to wear to the show: After the New York Times reported that Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein had been personally lobbying members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. before the close of voting for the Golden Globes last January, a Miramax spokesman explained that Weinstein was calling only to confirm “their receipt of late-arriving cassettes. If members told him what they thought of our movie, he didn’t ask for it.”

Funny, we thought it was just around the corner from USC: At a news conference promoting “Troy” at the Cannes Film Festival, a geographically challenged Czech reporter asked director Wolfgang Petersen: “Where is the real Troy? Is it in Albania?”

Answer: C). As Weinstein told Variety’s Peter Bart: “The best coverage we had wasn’t ABC, CBS or NBC. It was Fox News. Roger Ailes said a movie that couldn’t be distributed ... was just un-American.”

The Big Picture appears in Calendar on Tuesdays. Comments and suggestions can be e-mailed to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.