Word: seagal
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...wouldn't dare say this in their presence -- if you're smart, you won't invite them to the same planet -- but Steven Seagal and Spy magazine have a few things in common...
Both leaped to prominence in the late Reagan years: Seagal as a from-nowhere star in his first movie (Above the Law), Spy as the hipper-than-thou champion of attitude journalism. Both like to make fun of short people. Both offered sleek twists on tired genres: Seagal the martial-arts movie, Spy the glossy gossip rag. Both are deeply indebted to Creative Artists Agency boss Michael Ovitz, who is Seagal's movie mentor and Spy's eternal obsession. And both have sturdy Time Warner credentials: Seagal as one of Warner Bros.' most reliable moneymakers (Hard to Kill, Under Siege...
...sleepy-eyed star and representatives of Spy get together soon, it won't be to swap Separated at Birth stories but to stare one another down in court. Seagal, a sixth-degree black belt in aikido, is steamed by the prospect of a blistering profile written by John Connolly, a former New York City police detective. The article, to be published this week, alleges that Seagal associates with gangsters and that he offered money to ex-intelligence agents to have one of his adversaries entrapped and two others murdered...
...Steven won't talk, on or off the record," says a Seagal spokesman. Neither will Ovitz. And Warner Bros. publicity chief Robert Friedman will say only that Seagal is "an extremely cooperative filmmaker and actor who's a pleasure to do business with." But on April 16, when Connolly was still compiling his article, the star filed a slander suit against the writer and Robert Strickland, a former Seagal friend and Connolly's main source. According to Seagal's attorney, Martin Singer, Strickland had been harassing and defaming the actor. Singer contends that Connolly, in his interviewing...
...Seagal used to enjoy hinting mysteriously about the "special work and favors" he did for "many powerful people" in Asia in the '70s. Sounds suitably spooky. "Steven likes to be at the cutting edge of the unsaid truths about 'how the world works,' " says director Andrew Davis (Above the Law, Under Siege). "He enjoys that kind of stuff . . . He tries to live it." But Strickland and Gary Goldman, an ex-mercenary who worked on a Seagal script before falling out with the star, have insisted that Seagal purloined these life-or-death exploits from actual agents. Writer Alan Richman addressed...