Word: ovitz
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Enter Ronald Perelman, 51, the multibillionaire Revlon chief. A friend of such Hollywood power brokers as Barry Diller and Michael Ovitz, Perelman began to build an entertainment empire in 1989 when he bought New World, a small producer of movies and TV shows (Crime Story, The Wonder Years). Last year he started acquiring TV stations, first buying seven local outlets owned by then bankrupt SCI Television and later picking up eight more from two other station groups, in deals that are in various states of completion...
...sudden storm of rumors that Seagram's president, Edgar Bronfman Jr., had finally decided to go for an outright takeover. Rumors endowed Bronfman with a long string of potential allies (several phone companies, the cable-TV firm Tele-Communications Inc. and such Hollywood powers as superagent Michael Ovitz and QVC chief Barry Diller) and even set a potential price: $55 for each of the 322 million Time Warner shares that Seagram does not already own. One story had Bronfman taking time at his wedding reception this year to huddle with Ovitz and Diller about takeover strategies...
Similar contemporary fantasies abound, although Mike Ovitz does tend to replace E.B. White in these confections...
...conventional wisdom is that Hollywood has taken over the Sundance Film Festival. But one could just as easily argue the reverse. The Mike Ovitz pretenders flock to Bob Redford's mountain to view the sort of offbeat, low- budget films that they would probably not otherwise see or pay much attention to. Struggling filmmakers, meanwhile, can meet, and perhaps impress, Hollywood decision makers without a bossy secretary blocking the way. "The festival gives people access to Hollywood who wouldn't otherwise have it," says Tom Rothman, president of worldwide production for Goldwyn. "Here you don't need a reservation...
Fischler is even willing to say that sometime customer Michael Ovitz, chairman of Creative Artists Agency and the most powerful person in show business, is a bit of a stiff. "I can kibitz with everyone except him. He can afford to be independent, I suppose." Judging by his candid razzing of the movie-business elite, Fischler can obviously afford to be independent as well...