Like big fish out of water

Michael Ovitz stayed in a hotel with no room service.

High-powered L.A attorneys learned that there are places where “freeway accessibility” means there is one. One and a half hours away.

Vanity Fair columnist Dominick Dunne ate in a restaurant where the salad dressing came in plastic packets and, for a minute or two, no one knew who he was.

Hollywood has come to Georgetown, Del. The suit filed by Walt Disney Co. stockholders trying to recoup $200 million in payments and interest tied to the exit package given to Ovitz when he left the company in 1996 is finally being heard. It’s hard to tell who’s the most disoriented -- the 5,000 residents of the tranquil and historic Sussex County seat who cannot imagine why photographers and TV cameramen are hanging around the Chancery Courthouse to film a bunch of lawyers and taking up perfectly good parking spaces, or the West Coast and New York litigants struggling to cope in a town with only one restaurant, no juice bar, no gym and a coffeehouse that closes at 1 p.m.

What is clear is that the celebrity of Hollywood Power Players has limits, and those limits do not extend into lower Delaware. “Who is he again?” a photographer up from Baltimore asked after he dutifully shot Ovitz entering the courtroom. Reporters attempting to gauge the local reaction to the proceedings found themselves explaining the basic nature of the case and who exactly Disney Chief Executive Michael Eisner is. “I did hear Sidney Poitier might be in town,” said Debi Marker, a waitress at Smith’s, the town’s lone sit-down restaurant. (The actor was a Disney director when Ovitz was president.) “That would be interesting.”

Delaware, the self-proclaimed First State, has two electoral college votes, no sales tax and a reputation for very good scrapple. It is also the state in which many Fortune 500 companies, including Disney, choose to incorporate. If the Disney case had been heard a year ago, testimony would have occurred in Wilmington. Via train, Wilmington is just over an hour from New York and Washington. But last May, a new Chancery Court building opened on the Georgetown Circle and, since William B. Chandler III, chief judge of the state’s Court of Chancery, lives nearby, this is where he decided to hold the trial. So lawyers and witnesses on both sides of the Disney debate found themselves two hours from any major airport, walking past half a dozen historic red brick buildings that, with their patriotic bunting and ornate weather vanes, could have been transported directly from Disneyland’s Main Street USA.

Inside the courtroom, which is so small there is room for only seven reporters, Ovitz defended his performance during his 15-month tenure at Disney in testimony that rang with Hollywoodese -- CAA had been devoted to “packaging the talent,” cable pioneer Geraldine Laybourne was a “good get” for Disney, and relationships with everyone from former President Bush to the mayor of Shanghai were solidified in “a terrific meeting,” a “wonderful meeting,” “a really great meeting.” Money? Well money was not the point. “I took a million-dollar salary, which in this country is a lot of money but in the entertainment industry isn’t even a base salary. So it wasn’t about money; I didn’t even think about it.”

Outside, local lawyers and their clients scuttled in and out of the family court, men in hunting hats stood smoking outside the county courthouse, Latino workers came home from their shift at the local chicken factory and people in the cafe discussed the parking problems of “Returns Day,” a 200-year-old festival that occurs the Thursday after general elections, the highlight of which is an ox roast.

The folks who come into Smith’s or the nearby Georgetown Deli are lawyers and farmers, civil servants and shop owners. The waitresses are not looking to slip you a resume and head shot, no one is wearing Prada, everyone’s waistbands are worn at their waists and Botox is clearly not available anywhere nearby. Suits sit next to flannel shirts and everyone seems to know everyone else. People seem more interested in a possible Oprah sighting in nearby Laurel than in Ovitz’s arrival, and they are certainly more interested in local elections -- many people wear buttons for gubernatorial candidates, and the roads into town are chockablock with signs for various races. John F. Kerry and President Bush seem neck and neck, but neither has the presence of one Linda Rogers, whose welter of billboards would seem to ensure her reelection to county counsel.

The learning curve is on an upswing though; bailiff Rocky Justice took some ribbing when he was quoted in the local paper as saying that most folks in town didn’t know either Michael -- Ovitz or Eisner -- from a hill of beans. And the lunchtime patrons of Smith’s are getting used to the photographers and strange citified accents. When Dunne first took a seat among the Americana that decorates the walls, he was acknowledged as an unfamiliar face but nothing more. A few days later, the Vanity Fair photographers arrived, shooting him at one of the tables, and folks began asking for his autograph. By the second week of the trial, patrons were stopping by to chat and buying him lunch while Marker and other waitresses explained to locals who he was. “It’s D-e-b-i,” Marker told one reporter. “I’ve been on the local news twice and in the paper once and they spelled my name wrong. Can you believe that?”The presence of Ovitz’s private Gulfstream jet at the Sussex County airport was the topic of discussion among some of the local police, and Justice, with his system of poker chips -- blue for public, red for press, white for litigants -- has become something of a mascot, but there has been little interaction between the locals and the lawyers. An attorney leading his clients to the county courthouse waved away photographers saying, “Look, no ears,” and he sang a few bars of “It’s a Small World” as he went.

Various defense lawyers have their lunches brought into offices around town by the Lighthouse, a restaurant from nearby Lewes. “I heard those [defense] lawyers cost too much to take the time to eat like regular folks,” sniffed Marker as she dished out the pork barbecue and crab soup, the sweet tea and Parker rolls at Smith’s.

None of the attorneys is staying in Georgetown because there is no place to stay in Georgetown -- the only hotel in town is a Comfort Inn out on DuPont Highway. So both teams, representing seven law firms in L.A., New York and Wilmington, and their witnesses are putting up in Rehoboth Beach, a small seaside vacation community 15 miles away. Every day the litigants board minivans supplied by Eagle Limo out of Dover and ride past the oceanside strip, with its sprawl of outlet malls and fast-food restaurants, an inordinate number of which urge motorists to “try our new stuffed French Toast,” then along the two-lane rural route that leads to Georgetown. Ragged Vs of geese honk their way south, and the treeline burns scarlet and ochre and gold around fields of winter wheat and prickly brown rows of soybeans.

The plaintiffs are at the Boardwalk Plaza, which is the only hotel in Rehoboth with room service, and the defense, along with Dunne and other members of the media, is at the Bellmoor Inn and Spa, a relatively new establishment catering to business trade that, with two outdoor pools, an indoor hot tub and a gym that consists of two treadmills, a recumbent bike and a Nautilus machine, is considered the swankiest place in town.

“It’s really lovely here,” said Ovitz when he arrived in court for the first time on Tuesday. “I spent last night eating at Friendly’s and walking through Wal-Mart. The two things the West Coast needs is Friendly’s and Steak ‘n Ale, and you can learn everything you need to know about America walking through Wal-Mart.” The Bellmoor has hosted other teams for big legal trials but none as high-profile or extensive as the Disney case. Ovitz and some of the defense lawyers stayed on the fourth, or club, floor where there are 12 suites with Jacuzzis, marble showers and private sitting areas. Wine and cheese, homemade cookies and other snacks used to be available, says Moore, but health regulations put an end to unpackaged snacks, and a visit from alcohol enforcement officials ended the complimentary wine.

A few glitches have marred what will be a monthlong stay for some of the attorneys. A local dry cleaner is swimming in court-formal shirts and suits, and some things sent out seem to have disappeared. And there’s always the question of where to eat. “The most powerful man in this whole proceeding is our concierge,” said Ovitz. “Because he tells us where we should have dinner.”

Although the Bellmoor does serve a full breakfast, it has no real kitchen, restaurant or bar; dinners are being catered by a rotating group of local restaurants and served en suite and in the hotel’s dining room.

“All the restaurants involved are trying to be very innovative,” said Shawn Xiong, owner of Confucius, one of the restaurants that will do the catering. “Although I can’t imagine what people from Los Angeles are doing here. It’s pretty lively in the summer, but now.... “ He gestured toward the window through which the empty street and several restaurants, closed for the fall and winter, were visible. A block or so away the Atlantic Ocean churned milky white a few feet from the boardwalk and its shuttered French fry and saltwater taffy stands.

Ovitz complained that he had not been allowed out of his suite from the time he arrived on Sunday until he began to testify on Tuesday. “And then they make me wear an ankle bracelet,” he joked. He has spent some time reading books and magazines and too much time “talking to my lawyers.”

He does not like being in the courtroom too much. On the first day, he hung around outside the chambers, chatting and joking with reporters until he was called to the stand. “No, it’s not Armani,” he said when asked about his black suit. “It’s my court suit. Why? Should I go home and change?” On the second day, he sat with his lawyers in a dusty green Kia for 15 minutes rather than show up early.

Lunchtime patrons shake their heads at the sums described in the courtroom. They do not remember the go-go ‘90s, when Ovitz, with his talent packaging and his super meetings, almost single-handedly defined Hollywood culture, when Eisner’s abilities seemed almost supernatural. Even for those who do, heard in a land of red barns and where streets have names like Sweetbriar and Gravel Hill, the story of this power friendship’s rise and fall seems at once impossible and inevitable. Impossible that so much money and power circulates among so few and inevitable that those who live at such giddy heights would fall.

At the Disney Catalog Outlet Store in Rehoboth, sales clerks are aware of the trial -- Delaware residents get the courtroom Internet transmission of the trial for no cost -- but company policy does not allow them to give their names, be photographed or comment on having such a trial in their own backyard. “No seriously,” one said. “We’ll get in trouble. But what I want to know is: Where are all those L.A. folks eating dinner?”

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Mary McNamara can be emailed at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.