Word: ovitz
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...Election Day, Riordan, wearing a yellow jersey and crash helmet, rested on his racing bike in a eucalyptus-shaded lane near his Spanish-stucco mansion. He lives alone because his three daughters are grown and he is separated from his second wife. ("Did you see Michael Ovitz go by before?" he asked proudly. "He lives around the corner. So does Meryl Streep, and Michelle Pfeiffer.") Riordan said he intends to form an administration not of "technocrats," a breed he abhors, but of "doers and implementers." However, he said, "I am not such an amateur that I'm going to ignore...
...year's scathing parody of movie industry manners. Fade in: A Hungarian emigre becomes a hotshot newspaper reporter in the 1960s, reinvents himself as a gonzo journalist and gets the call from Hollywood to write scripts. He clashes with studio heads and Hollywood power brokers, even the awesome Michael Ovitz, but he survives and thrives. As he turns out a succession of sexy, if not particularly smart, screenplays such as Flashdance, Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct, his fee rises to a record-breaking $3 million per script, making him the town's hottest writer...
...share of screenplay credit. Several years later he butted heads with studio executives over the ending of the courtroom drama Jagged Edge. His greatest confrontation came in 1989, when he decided to leave the Creative Artists Agency for rival ICM and, according to Eszterhas, CAA honcho Michael Ovitz threatened to have his "foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard each day . . . blow your brains...
...Although Ovitz denied making such statements, correspondence between the two men detailing their respective versions of the episode was faxed all over Hollywood, boosting Eszterhas to the almost mythic stature he relishes to this day. "Every time I'm in a limo and it passes the CAA building," says Eszterhas, "there is this right hand that sneaks out of the back window with this middle finger uplifted. I've done that religiously, and I get a great kick...
Within months of the Ovitz imbroglio, Eszterhas made headlines again when Basic Instinct drew protests from gay and lesbian groups for its depiction of a bisexual, icepick-wielding wild woman. The movie nevertheless grossed more than $350 million worldwide, and since then Eszterhas has sold various ideas that could end up making him more than $10 million over the next two years, among them a $3.4 million script about mobster John Gotti. In addition, he has written a TV commercial for Chanel No. 5 that was directed by Roman Polanski, and he is mulling over a possible move into theater...