Portfolio.com: Hollywood Deal

Sumner Redstone's Song of Himself

Fred Schruers — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:12:16 GMT

Normally these days, Sumner Redstone, at 84, prefers to run his schizophrenic media empire from his hilltop retreat in Los Angeles, taking breaks, per Bryan Burrough's razor-edged 2006 profile in Vanity Fair, to take nude swims in his indoor pool and admire his exotic fish.

But this week found the billionaire in South Korea, at the Seoul Digital Forum in the company of trend surfers like Ann Sweeney and will.i.am of Black-Eyed Peas.

Nothing he said from the stage created anything like the stir caused by a not-so-offhand comment to a reporter who asked about his sometime movie-biz buddy Tom Cruise.

Forget that he booted Cruise off the Paramount lot, purportedly for couch-jumping and other random behavior but actually over the costs of Cruise's deal. (Redstone later said the Mission Impossible franchise was delivering just "peanuts" to Paramount after all the other profit partners on the film had been satisfied.)

Redstone is now, following a much-publicized show of rapprochement at the Beverly Hills Hotel, completely okay with Tom revisiting the franchise for Paramount. (Cruise was "happy I agreed to have lunch with him," the reliably megalomaniac titan recalled.)

Or, as he pointed out in his way of saying everything's peachy with his highly capable executives until suddenly, it's not, "That's really up to Brad Grey, who runs Paramount, he will make the decision.... What I can say is, 'I consider Tom Cruise a great actor and a good friend, and if Paramount decides to go ahead with him, I will not object.'"

And this came even after the studio had established for itself what looks to be its long-sought new tent pole franchise, Iron Man, with its over $100 million debut weekend-plus-Thursday.

Of course, they could very well make further MI iterations, very much depending on whether Cruise, under what will be more advantageous terms to the studio than existed before the banishment, can put fannies in the seats.

Just as significant, though barely peeking out of another Redstone deal, is that Cruise and partner Paula Wagner, under their new United Artists operation, would be likely contributors to Redstone's latest enterprise.

That deal, still going nameless until someone finds a moniker for the cable television channel it will create, is another good example of the mogul's seeming appetite for internecine rivalry.

He recently announced, in self-righteous concert with ascendant Viacom chief Philippe Dauman, that Paramount Pictures would no longer be selling the broadcast rights to its feature films to Showtime, an arm of Redstone-controlled CBS.

Instead, having failed (accidentally on purpose, one might speculate) to reach terms with Showtime, they joined forces with MGM — thus the corporate link to Cruise's United Artists — and Lionsgate to start up a premium channel and video-on-demand service kicking off in fall 2009.

To rub salt in the wound, both those latter studios will now quit funneling movies to Showtime as they had been. As all the other major film-producing studios have other output deals in place, Showtime was left to mutter that they really don't care that much for programming films anyway (although broadcasting features is the crucial engine drawing viewers to their rival HBO).

"We are an independent company," said Mr. Dauman, who has hung in as a Redstone loyalist despite living through a demotion some years ago. "It's our responsibility at Viacom to drive our strategy to benefit our shareholders."

(Making a mere $20.6 million per year compared to Moonves' $36.8 million could make a man want a little edge on the guy across the aisle.)

Experienced at family feuds, of which more below, Redstone seemingly had just this sort of rivalry in mind back in January 2006, when he separated CBS and Viacom — setting his fiefdoms up to compete against one another in the hope of helping both their stock prices.

In a history that's been much-rehashed by the media ever since. The split seemed to set up CBS's Moonves and Viacom's Tom Freston for a succession bake-off that, Redstone surely hoped, would energize both branches.

When an unimpressed Wall Street sat on its hands, Freston, even as he was putting the pieces in place for a now-resurgent Paramount, found himself the target of a Redstone disinformation campaign leading to an abrupt, graceless firing and a very large severance package.

The Freston ouster occurred around the same time as Cruise's departure, and according to Redstone was over Freston's failure to expeditiously acquire MySpace before Rupert Murdoch could grab it for NewsCorp.

Coverage by Burrough and others has pretty well established that it was foot dragging by Redstone and his board, not by Freston, that cost Viacom that deal. When Murdoch quickly sold ad rights on MySpace to Google for $900 million, eclipsing what the purchase had cost News Corp., Redstone's bitterness increased.

The irony is that Murdoch's acquisition is currently ranked as a bit of a performance laggard in a fast-moving marketplace.

Just yesterday, News Corp. C.O.O. Peter Chernin was seeking to reassure analysts that he was "incredibly optimistic" for the social network, despite its role in the company's interactive operation falling 10 percent short of revenue projections for the fiscal year.

Presumably if success in that ever-more-competitive social networking space doesn't come soon, Redstone will rewrite history to say he never wanted it.

Meanwhile, the Paramount administration that Freston put into place is headed for a potential billion dollar summer. (Yes, movie slates are put together across a span of years, but Brad Grey, installed by Freston as production chief, still owns bragging rights to that number).

Grey, though his relationship with indicted private eye Anthony Pellicano was much whispered about, came through unscathed on the stand as a government witness and is in position to keep succeeding at Paramount.

(The jury was still deliberating over Pellicano and his fellow defendants' fate as of Thursday morning.)

In fact, in a typical Viacom-CBS sideshow, Grey's been encouraged to go ahead and start producing television in competition with Moonves's network if he feels like it.

As the guy who was present at the inception of The Sopranos and a number of other lucrative and well-regarded shows, he's well aligned for it.

(Today came the the announcement of a deal in the other direction, in which he'll bring Sopranos creator David Chase into the feature fold for to make an original drama.)

The almost certain departure of DreamWorks, given DreamWorks partner David Geffen's alienation from what he's seen as a credit-grabbing Grey, will have few immediate consequences as the studio continues to distribute a goodly number of DreamWorks projects.

(If Spielberg was smarting at all from Dauman's contention that his contributions to the bottom line are not "material", it's at least temporarily forgiven as Paramount prepares to distribute Indy 4. That film should help Paramount's ballooning market share, if not their less-impressive profit margin.

Redstone's take on the companies' elbowing to make their own content in each others' specialty has been and remains consistently laissez-faire.

"I have stated from the beginning that Viacom and CBS have the right to pursue their own strategic objectives in the best interest of their individual shareholders," he's explained. "Competition between the two companies hones their skills and their productivity."

Redstone' daughter Shari, 53, has long been honing her skills to take over the chairman's kingdom. But she's had to fight a certain alienation that seems to date to her father's 2002 divorce from his wife of half a century, Phyllis, to marry forty-ish Paula Fortunato.

Shari lives in Boston, the ancestral Redstone (once Rothstein) town where her father legendarily hung from a third-floor window to survive a 1979 hotel fire that burned a third of his body, and the happy couple is in L.A.

"My wife is closer to me these days than my daughter," he's said, and when Shari made hr ambitions known, he slapped her down with the assertion that such a succession would be up to company board members.

"It must be remembered that I gave to my children their stock," he noted archly; "and it is I, with little or no contribution on their part, who built these great media companies with the help of the boards of both companies."

Redstone's son, Brent, who owned — but was prohibited from selling — about 17 percent of the family's primordial money maker, a theater chain called National Amusements sued his father last year to break up the company so he could cash out. He and his father settled this year for an undisclosed amount.

Clearly, to paraphrase a line from (the thriving Paramount Vantage's) There Will Be Blood, the chairman has a competition in him.

The creative tension around Redstone may not be great for family harmony, and it can't be fun for executives waiting for his next sideswipe, but Viacom's stock did rise 7 percent in the first quarter.

(CBS has seen a decline, despite good revenue numbers, and as pundits predict that Fox will move ahead of it as the most-watched network, in mid- April the share price hit a 52-week low of $20.68.).

The surprises will probably keep coming. It was at a Paley Center for Media tribute to Redstone in mid-February that newsman Bob Schieffer took the stage with a country and western band to sing a song dubbed "Mr. Redstone" based on "Mr. Goldstone" from the Musical Gypsy.

The paean touched on the Boston legend ("You lost your good pajamas in that fire in Boston"), spotlighted recent history ("You got rid of one Tom Cruise, but you kept CBS News"), and generally seemed to revel in Redstone's sense that at his age, with his money and clout, he can do exactly as he pleases:

"Have an eclair Mr. Redstone, buy some networks, make a movie, play a tune. Take a break now, Mr. Redstone, 'cause another deal will come along real soon...

Photograph of Sumner Redstone with Paula Fortunato at the 2008 Academy Awards by Steve Granitz/WireImage

Actors and Moguls Quit Talks

Fred Schruers — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:06:37 GMT

If the writers strike made for a long winter of Hollywood discontent, the malaise has now officially spread to springtime, and perhaps beyond.

Day's end in the sluggish and largely secret negotiations between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (A.M.P.T.P.) and The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) brought dueling announcements that the talks were kaput for now.

Though another negotiating window has been offered by the studios beginning May 28, this breakdown set the stage for the A.M.P.T.P. to open negotiations on Wednesday with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (Aftra).

Beneath those simple equations and unlovely acronyms lies, of course, a heap of troubles to come. The A.M.P.T.P.'s statement might be summed up in the first two sentences of its second paragraph:

"Over the course of 18 days of negotiations, both parties made compromises and concessions. Unfortunately, SAG's negotiators continued to insist on some of the Guild's most unreasonable demands in both traditional and new media areas."

Mentioning the Alliance's successful resolutions with the Writers Guild of America (W.G.A.), The Directors Guild (D.G.A.) and the section of Aftra known as Network Code (basically, daytime programming), the statement added:

"...we hope that these three weeks of work have helped lay the groundwork for an agreement hat can eventually be reached prior to the June 30, 2008 expiration of the current SAG-AMPTP contract."

The SAG statement emphasized its willingness to keep talks going — not without a nod to one important territory the union is fixated on, new media. It quotes SAG President Alan Rosenberg saying:

"It is unfortunate and deeply troubling that the A.M.P.T.P. would suspend our negotiations at this critical juncture. We have modified our proposals over the last three weeks in effort to bargain a fair contract for our members. We are committed to preserving rights that have been in place for decades and not giving the studios the right to use excerpts of our work in new media without our consent and negotiation."

One supposed sticking point in the negotiations is the producers' wish to use short film clips (generally defined as under 10 minutes in length) without obtaining actors' consent or offering payments. This would seem to be a non-starter for a group for whom guarding one's image is paramount.

A failure to find agreement by the existing SAG contract's June 30 deadline, could mean bad news for the TV and movie industries; there will be a very large pothole on the television side within a couple months, and on the feature film side (fortunately, and due to the nature and foresight of that business in keeping the movie pipelines filled well in advance) sometime in mid to late 2009.

And that foreseeable if hardly inevitable dearth of entertainment product may not be the ugliest part. Aftra may strike a deal with the major studios and then start to pillage some of SAG's territory.

Traditionally the smaller Aftra has had control over videotaped shows, SAG over filmed ones, but the current impasse could mean some shows that have been SAG signatories but might be brought over to the Aftra roster.

The agonizing obduracy of the talks thus far — a process which entertainment attorney and former Writers Guild associate counsel Jonathan Handel likens to the evacuation of Dunkirk — is different from the bitter sideshow of the writers strike in several ways.

One crucial difference, he notes, is that the WGA had the solidarity and prospective clout of the 120,000-strong SAG union waiting, as actors will do, in the wings. Given the writers' settlement of earlier this year, which provided that they would not be striking in sympathy with SAG, the actors lack the muscle a coalition brings.

(The DGA, which settled sooner than the writers but provided a workable template for their agreement, has seldom shown the feistiness of their writing and acting comrades.)

Further, the solidarity created by some of the producers' early threats to demand a rollback of certain concessions to the writers that had already been in place from previous battles immediately generated a fierce and lasting solidarity among the WGA rank and file.

Even the protracted strike — which hurt many writers and a wide range of production-dependent workers deeply in the pocketbook — never quite broke that bond, nor did it pry the all-important and powerful show runners out of their comradeship with the humbler writers.

A.M.P.T.P.'s chief negotiator, Nick Counter, seemingly never could shrug off his role as the villain in that scenario, and ultimately the writers strike had to be settled via an end run in which Fox C.E.O. Peter Chernin and Disney chief executive Bob Iger got in the room with the W.G.A.'s West coast president, Patric Verrone; firebrand David Young; and the diplomatic John Bowman to hammer out an accord.

Another complicating factor is the overlap between SAG's massive membership and Aftra's; about 44,000 people belong to both unions. Those highly employable types could be in an uncomfortable position of choosing loyalties — and avoiding breaches of contracts — if Aftra settles and SAG does not.

Adding more hurt to the emotional blowback of a damaging labor dispute is the class war within SAG. Carried out partly in the media and in the comments sections of various actor-centric blogs, this is a rift that could widen as what's generally called the rank and file (but seen by one wag as "120,000 waitresses") is happy to see a strike since it has little to lose anyway.

Then the actors making north of $10 million will be forced to contemplate just how many paydays they want to skip in what can often be a short window of peak bankability.

A strike authorization vote, which SAG leaders (Rosenberg and Doug Allen) may soon be motivated to call for, would naturally give them added clout to bring to renewed talks. But given what's being call a de facto features strike, the key pressure is on the moguls to tend to the late 2009 slates.

One well-placed agent told me today that he's aware of optimistic conversations about features that could jump of in late summer after a presumed strike settlement. In fact, as outlined in today's Hollywood Reporter, there is an upside for both small-scale indie productions and even tentpole-scale films.

But depending on the Aftra negotiations, which stand a good chance of making the SAG-A.M.P.T.P. conversation all the more bitter, mainstream Hollywood faces a potential long walk through a feature production wilderness.

Photograph of SAG President Alan Rosenberg, center, with wife Marg Helgenberger and her C.S.I. co-star William Petersen at the SAG Awards in January by Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Web Bucks Float Tribeca's Brainy Documentaries

Fred Schruers — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:25:26 GMT

Speaking of "American culture" tends to bring to mind Gandhi's famous line about Western civilization ("It would be a good idea"), but some good evidence in its favor can be found in the throngs of Tribeca Film Festival attendees lining up to see some of the festival's thoughtful documentaries.

Two of the more interesting ones are Chevolution and Waiting for Hockney. Each is devoted to circling around themes that remain fascinatingly (some would say frustratingly) elusive.

They share more than their somewhat challenging subject matter; each probably couldn't have been made without an infusion of capital from fortunes made on the Web.

Julie Checkoway, director of the smaller-scale Waiting, was fortunate in that her brother Neal is a retired Web pioneer. He made his walk-away money by founding the Travelocity travel website in 1996 — just the right moment to command a goodly share of the influx of growingly internet-savvy travelers.

He sold his stake, did a year in the Peace Corps in Jordan with his wife, crafted another start-up with his son, and then headed for Mexico — until his ad hoc turn to producing movies, which became a five-year odyssey.

Chevolution's makers were similarly lucky to draw the interest of Netflix's feature film division, Red Envelope Entertainment. Netflix, of course, has minted money with its (also canny and well-timed) bet that Web surfers would come in droves to rent (and now stream) their movies online.

You couldn't call these high-minded ventures wholly philanthropic. Neal Checkoway describes his sister's project in its early stages as "a prototype", and he used a kind of start-up business model to ushr in finacial partners (like the iDeal Film Fund) along the way.) And Red Envelope head Liesl Copland is an indie-savvy film industry vet who underwrote Chevolution based on her company's vision of how their subscribers interact with the Netflix site.

Even with their relatively trim budgets, these are not slam-dunk films in a tricky art-house market.

Another shared attribute for the two docs is that neither Chevolution co-director Trisha Ziff, whose experience was in galleries and museums, nor Julie Checkoway, who was a sometime professor and a contributor to National Public Radio, quite dared to think they had films to direct--until the were goaded into the medium.

In Checkoway's case, it was Neal who told her she should expand her ambitions for the story she couldn't quite grapple with on radio after amassing 30 hours of audio tape with obsessive, Maryland-based artist/bartender Billy Pappas.

In Ziff's case, it was veteran producer Ron Yerxa, who with partner Albert Berger has launched such offbeat hits as Election and Little Miss Sunshine through their Bona Fide company.

As Checkoway told IFC.com's Stephen Saito: "I was in denial, and my older brother ... said to me, `You know, you really need to think seriously about whether you could make a film of this because I'm telling you, it's a film.'"

Though offering much credit to Gerlaynn Dreyfous, herself an experienced producer (2004's Born Into Brothels) who came along and helped finance and guide the picture through a post-production phase that was just as arduous as he shooting, Neal recalls how rudimentary, if hardly naive, the early going was:

"Certainly when she started she tapped friends and relatives through the pre-production and filming phase. Certainly I have some skin in the game, but I can also say it was more a labor of love and sweat equity on my part. We realized we had the potential for creating the product, and that's how I perceived the process-- let's shape this product into something that would be marketable and can be positioned and packaged and distributed."

It all seems to make sense now, with Waiting standing tall as one of the few Tribeca films to draw distribution money thus far — not surprisingly, from the BBC's Channel 4, for airing in a nation where Hockney, who's securely offstage for the entire film, is a household name.

The courting of Hockney — he ultimately, after seeing the film, signed off on the project's use of his paintings — occurred simultaneously with the quest by Pappas to show Hockney his hyper-realistic pencil drawing of Marilyn Monroe.

(An icon in her own right of course, and by some fuzzy logic involving Castro and J.F.K. she is just a couple degrees of separation from Che, who outlived her by five years to die in Bolivia in October 1967.)

It would be a spoiler to detail how the Pappas-Hockney meeting finally went. It was photographed but not filmed, and later interpreted in widely varying ways.

Suffice to say that the film's emotional resolution is open to interpretation, despite an entirely too on-the-nose song called "Driftwood" that plays annoyingly under the footage.

When Pappas first saw the film, he felt like he'd "been kicked in the chest by a horse." He retreated to Maryland, where he'd continued drawing (the film displays a nude self-portrait of Billy hanging out, Forgetting Sarah Marshall-style) but had returned to his night job of bartending.

By the film's premiere night in downtown New York (which would include a gallery unveiling of Billy's Marilyn and a reunion of filmmakers with subject), Neal was telling himself, "It can only be fascinating."

Happily, Billy was by then reconciled to his filmic portrait and the Checkoways breathed easier: Says Neal, who along with his sister, can stake an honest clam to sharing Billy's working-class roots, having grown up in Newburyport, Massachusetts, as the offspring of an auto mechanic who finally ascended to run a VW dealership:

You could look at my professional or personal life, and my sister's work — we come from humble roots. Part of the reason this story resonated so much with us was here was a working class guy trying to rise above the limits of his particular class, if you will, with no Rolodex and no qualifications other than an art school degree. Billy's mantra was, `Nothing works like work', and to be honest that's how I feel in my professional life.

The Checkoways' documentary, having had a nice reception at Tribeca, now begins making further festival rounds, and although Julie recently took a post as an arts writer (currently blogging re her directorial adventure) at the Salt Lake Tribune, may find herself a fully credentialed documentarian with some career choices to make.

Trisha Ziff, whose film was mentioned early on by that underappreciated cineaste Liz Smith as a contender for next year's documentary Oscar, has her own momentum (as does Luis Lopez, brought in by Yerxa and Copland as an editor but so crucial to the shaping of the film that Ziff happily gave him a directing co-credit).

Although Yerxa insists on downgrading his company's role to a minuscule percentage of the film's heavy lifting, he deserves credit for aligning the project with Copland. The Red Envelope exec not only funded the project, but, Yerxa says, "really got her hands dirty" in the crucial editing phase. He and Berger intend to stick with "the social comedies", like this summer's release of the Sundance discovery Hamlet 2, that make up 90 percent of their slate--but couldn't resist the Che saga: "You do have the opportunity to see Che as a flawed man, but I think it's extraordinary when people put their life on the line."

Although it was the last film Red Envelope greenlit before changing its business model — it has stopped fully financing new films, but is looking to acquire the rights to completed films — it fit neatly into a Red Envelope picture-picking philosophy that had earlier helped launch 2 Days In Paris and No End In Sight.

"It was sort of a no-brainer for us," says Copland, "It's almost like we're programming for our audience in a way. Especially with a film like this, because it is so balanced but also because it's so culturally rich."

Although some of the talking heads natter on in self-satisfied fashion — and you may want to smack the smug young neo-con college kid in a Che T-shirt that says "This shirt brought to you by capitalism" — the film's real heft comes in the archival material Lopez introduced to show history in the making.

The context for the fateful day in 1960 when the photographer and boulevardier Alberto Korda snapped the iconic picture of Che is especially interesting. A terrorist bombing in Havana harbor, intended to undermine the Castro regime that Che had fought so hard to put into place, had killed dozens people and spurred a massive funeral march and rally.

Che silently stepped to the front of the stage to stand with a mixture of anger, sorrow, hope, and defiance, and was looking across the crowd when Korda snapped two images. Neither ran in the national newspaper he was stringing for, but the image gradually took on its own power and the rest, via Chevolution's intelligent treatment, is fascinating sociological history.

If both these documentaries can find a wide audience — and that remains to be seen, as even a good debut at the much bigger Sundance festival no longer seems to guarantee success — then the culture-minded Neal Checkoway, as well as Red Envelope, will have made a bet with their heart that also happens to pay off.

There is more accessible fare at Tribeca. Playing for Change, for example, is a documentary that finds cause for optimism in its tender-hearted and winning look at how musicians worldwide can keep a musical message volleying around the globe.

But Chevolution and Waiting for Hockney seem to benefit from something more visceral, and it may be that what they share in philosophical underpinning has brought them to marker at precisely the right time.

Quotes elicited by Saito from each director show a fascinating congruency in terms of this moment in the zeitgeist. Said Ziff:

"I think it comes back to another question, which is why do we need heroes? What is it that's so appealing that we're seduced to hear the story again and again in all these different versions, or wear it as a T-shirt or have a poster on our wall? There's something very seductive about [Che], or the fiction of him...and I think it's because we live in a time where people are lost, where there is no leadership, where life isn't about making choices because you believe in them. I think we live in a diminished moment, where there isn't the idealism that existed at the moment where he was strong in the '60's."

As Julie Checkoway sees it, in discussing an American Idol world of instant celebrity:

The thing that bothers me about contemporary culture is this notion that many of us, and the culture in general, walk around thinking, someone is going to save us from our ordinary lives.
I was talking to someone the other day who said he thinks the reason it's that way is that we've lost a sense of what a road map should be for how a life can be lived, so all we have is this trajectory of being invisible and suddenly being incredibly visible and fixed and fine and redeemed.

And so when that happens for Billy, I was really dubious, but I also was really happy for him and at the same time...it would be impossible for me to tell a story that was in some way simplistic about fame.

Thanks to the money that's still flowing from Internet savants who took the proceeds off the table at the right time, neither she nor the makers of Chevolution had to.

Defense Bombshell Threatens To Spur A Mistrial

Fred Schruers — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:28:56 GMT

In a trial during which federal prosecutor Daniel Saunders, despite a miscue or two, has scored points with the jury early and often, his aggressive takedown of defendant Mark Arneson last week had seemed to be a key moment. Now the very rebuttal witness Saunders brought on to seal Arneson in the crypt of the government's racketeering case has been used by Arneson's defense attorney Chad Hummel to potentially let the defendant walk away.

Until Friday's session, what Arneson was selling looked like pretty damaged goods. Insisting that his database searches for co-defendant Anthony Pellicano were some sort of quid pro quo for tips Pellicano would give vice squad supervisor Arneson to use in catching bad guys, he hadn't seemed all that credible. He'd answered a lot of both Hummel and Saunders's questions with a bluff, sometimes--in the latter case-- resentful air, admitting to searches that "crossed the line" into misconduct with a kind of "Mission Accomplished" bluster. The implication, in the face of the government's documenting of his $2,500-month "retainer" (Arneson insisted it was for body guarding and security work) was he did it all to protect and serve.

One of his bigger cases was a bust of some low-level accused bookmakers who apparently hung out in west side pizzerias. (You can't make this stuff up. So maybe he didn't.) Arneson even sought to imply that Anita Busch, who'd passed a miserable and teary time on the stand remembering Pellicano's allegedly successful fear-mongering, was a suspected bettor and somehow a target of his investigation. (Combined with his cheap joke around that time that hers was a funny surname for a female, this tack did little to enhance his credibility.) Pellicano would brag to the brother of one accused bookie that he could fix the case using his magic contacts. When Arneson was arrested during the Pellicano investigation, the accused bookie in his case, Erik Portocarrero, cried foul. Ultimately he served just four days.

The part of the government case that would whip around to bite them in the butt was Arneson's purported filing for bankruptcy in 1998. Seeking to establish a motive for him to undertake illegal moonlighting for Pellicano, Saunders and colleague Kevin Lally used documents projected to the courtroom's array of monitors and large screens to show that he'd seemingly filed for bankruptcy. His helpers in this supposed dodge to save his Rancho Palos Verdes house, the government insisted over the ex-cop's strenuous denials, were financial advisers David and Phyllis Miller. One bone of severe contention was the filing itself, with a signature Arneson stoically denied was his.

By day's end, even as that case was built over far fewer than the customary amount of objections from the skilled Hummel, the government had already stepped into the trap Hummel sprang yesterday. One might ask if they even needed that plank; his co-defendants have been tarred as simply greedy, and as far back as his 1997 divorce filing he declared, "I have repeatedly borrowed money, and have been `robbing Peter to pay Paul' to make this situation work."

What must be costing the U.S. Attorneys and their FBI investigative cohort some lost sleep is that the Millers, as earlier court testimony in this case alludes to, clearly had a murky reputation for preying on cops, among other financially vulnerable parties. David Miller was convicted in January 2002 of forgery and theft of elder property, and is reportedly serving an eleven-year term. A relatively quick and simple, Arneson-style check of criminal databases would have revealed as much, and he government might have steered clear.

Instead came the two-act play of Friday. (Monday will bring the potentially tumultuous third act, as the judge decides whether a mistrial or some lesser remedy is apt.) Act One was Saunders' fairly pro-forma evocation of what Phyllis Miller knew. A woman who looked to be in her mid-sixties, with hair a faded soda color not found in nature and an abstracted air, she weathered that part quite readily. What followed was an appearance by Florida dermatologist Christopher Virtue, who gave a dignified and marginally mournful count of being "terrified" by a phone call from Pellicano that came after his daughter Tarita was known to be "talking to the Feds". He said he'd dissembled with Pellicano at the time "to protect my daughter", and on cross-examination by Pellicano, whom he fixed with a gaze that wavered between neutral and mistrustful admitted to telling a third party to inform Pellicano that Virtue "had him in your prayers". Pellicano's finishing, "And so I card very much for you" as just another bizarre moment in a trial that's been packed with them.

And then shortly after, in what is typically a lulling post-10 a.m. trough as everyone's morning caffeine rush falters, Hummel began Act Two as he planted himself thirty feet from Miller for a cross-examination that was done with a blunt, quiet remorselessness that made it clear this trial was no country for old ladies. Drawing admissions that her Child Technology Institute had its nonprofit status revoked that her husband was doing time in state prison or his crimes, and that the signature of a fraudulent bankruptcy filing (supposedly on behalf of Arneson) was indeed Mr. Miller's, Hummel summed it all up as "a massive fraud scheme".
It was then that Judge Dale Fischer instructed the witness to say nothing further, informed her of her right not to incriminate herself, and added that the still imperturbable Miller could have a Federal Public Defender or any lawyer of her choosing.

The normally vocal Saunders had gone virtually silent as the general shock and awe continued to reverberate, and the Judge made it clear that Hummel had "done a better job of investigating" than the government had, and based on her generally positive responses to Hummel's reiterations that the Miller testimony had been -now wrongly, it seemed clear --heavily prejudicial to Arneson's case.

What happened soon after reinforced that the Majesty of the Law can come in humble guise? A senior member of the Federal Public Defender's office, Angel Navarro, appeared wearing a crisp dark suit and a troubled expression. He looked distinctly seasick as he glanced over at the prosecutors who had landed him there. "I'm coming in at he bottom of the 9th here," he told the judge morosely. "It's even later than he bottom of the 9th," she told him and his quick analysis that his brand new client would be speaking no more in court this day drew an assenting laugh from the room. Next will be a flurry of brief writing by the opposing lawyers, and a judicial take on the motion for a mistrial come Monday. (The judge's pessimistic if not definitive view was, "I suppose I'm going to have to declare a mistrial if this can't be resolved.")
The long-since excused jury wasn't present for the legal discussion of what remedies short of mistrial might apply, and of the possibility that Miller could be immunized and then testify In any event, the consequences for the government case and no just Arneson, but four other defendants, loom large.

Distinctly anticlimactic but not irrelevant was the final skein of testimony, from a career LAPD officer and now senior Internal Affairs captain named Michael Patrick Moriarty (if he'd been born in Queens with that name he would have been sent straight from high school to the police academy). Lally drew him out as the strict unacceptability of much of what Arneson had done. Nonetheless, the two well-acquainted veteran cops gave each other a gesture of greeting as Moriarty departed.

Arneson's normal low boil seemed to be tinged with something mellower at day's end, as he headed out, presumably to his big pickup truck with the license plate frame that reads, "Goin' To The River/To Abuse My Liver". And after a day containing a window of hope such as Hummel had just provided him, who wouldn't?

Pellicano Trial: "Perry Mason All the Way"

Fred Schruers — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:39:38 GMT

As Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Saunders came out of a typically combative session of the trial in which he's leading the prosecution of ex-private investigator Anthony Pellicano, he was clearly aghast at what he overheard.

A small pack of journalists—as one of them, I may as well admit to a shameful kinship with the pathetically lightweight performance of Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos in the recent Democratic debate—were obsessively trying to make sure they had accurately recorded a particular quote.

The quote was not the product of one of Saunders' buzz-saw cross-examinations or a fine point of case law. Nope—it came out of the mouth of winningly blithe witness Barry Barnett, who finished his time on the stand with an impressed smile for Judge Dale Fischer: "This is not no Judge Judy," he said, while pens raced across notepads. "It's Perry Mason all the way up in here."

Well, sort of. Television archivists may recall that Perry Mason was a defense lawyer, specializing in beating murder raps, who would pluck his clients out of the clutches of the state with deft late-innings revelations.

Attempting to fill that role today was defense attorney Mona Soo Hoo, who's such an exception to the crackling pace set by Saunders and the keen interrogations of defense attorney Chad Hummel that the judge is often heard telling her such things—in this case, after a row of sustained objections to her line of questioning—as "Miss Soo Hoo, you really can't do this."

When her labored mumblings are thwarted—and they are objected to or stricken from the record at almost as high a rate as those of Pellicano himself—there's usually a painful pause to (not quite) regroup.

It was hard to say if Soo Hoo's client Rayford Turner has been aided by the present defense efforts. A succession of phone company employees seemed to land somewhere in between character witnesses and experts but were not very convincing in either regard.

Longtime phone company technician (and sometime president of Local 9000 of the Communication Workers of America) Janice Wood was positively buoyant about the untenability of the company's code of conduct.

"We say, 'The only thing you sign is your paycheck,''' said Wood, who later shared a smile with the room in depicting the equipment-laden belt known as a butt set. She was at pains to point out that in Beverly Hills, anybody could open the phone company's street boxes (presumably to set up the wiretaps that Turner is accused of rigging for Pellicano).

Wood went from chipper to anxious and agitated as Saunders cross-examined her by citing a specimen quote about one of her accused union members from the wiretapping conspirators ("I really doubt she would rat on us").

Barnett was either simply truthful or the best actor to hit the stand as he said that Turner, his great friend of 18 years, had never mentioned doing work for Pellicano. "After work, we don't talk about the job," he said.

Right.

An added element was the defense's presentation, via Turner pal and witness Alphonse Arnold Jr., that Teresa Wright (a phone company employee who confessed to abetting Turner's wiretapping work and gave testimony earlier in the trial) made amazing fried chicken that she'd bring to gatherings at Turner's house, where he was seen handing her money.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Lally, who earlier in the trial had enumerated some of the payments to Wright, wondered on cross-examination if Arnold had ever seen "Turner provide her $700...for a chicken dinner?"

It was that kind of day in court.

Adam Braun, the defense lawyer for computer expert Kevin Kachikian, seemed intent on proving that his client was too disorganized to be part of what the government, in its racketeering investigation, calls the enterprise.

Sometime Pellicano Investigative Agency lab tech Ricardo Cestero was, as ESPN commentators say, as cool as the other side of the pillow in describing his interactions with Pellicano. He said he'd show in flips-flops and a Hawaiian shirt to present his handwritten bills, which, he acknowledged, were "not particularly well itemized or organized."

The lab tech said he once left Pellicano so "frustrated by his informality" that the boss slammed a computer on the counter and stormed out as Cestero urged him to "chill out, Anthony."

Cestero is now, ironically if not so surprisingly, a lawyer with Greenberg Glusker (home of noted celebrity lawyer Bert Fields, the case's mystery man, who narrowly avoided being called to the stand by Mr. Hummel this week).

Cestero and another witness, Greenberg colleague Jill Cossman, who helped Pellicano seek a patent for his Telesleuth device, both came off unmarked enough to leave their attending colleagues from the firm wearing placid expressions.

(The last thing the big Century City law firm needs is the kind of public relations drubbing that Terry Christensen's firm may be facing when he is tried with Pellicano as a co-defendant in the coming weeks.)

In fact, the trial is drawing to a close, and the players have had a snootful of each other.

Thus it seemed a breath of fresh air when a diminutive Alabaman named Doug Jones took the stand. Jones did yeoman's work for a U.S. attorney in Alabama in winning convictions—35 years after the fact—against the Klansman who blew up a Birmingham Sunday school in 1963, killing four black girls.

Jones seemed to set the courtroom to thinking of what greater evils than wire fraud may exist in life—and correspondingly, as he said when he emerged with a conviction (that would result later in a life sentence) against the first of two Klansmen responsible, what can be done in the face of that evil. As the New York Times' account in 2001 said:

"They say that justice delayed is justice denied, and, folks, I don't believe that for a minute,'' Mr. Jones told the reporters who mobbed him on the steps of the Jefferson County Courthouse. ''Justice delayed is still justice, and we've got it here in Birmingham, Alabama."

Jones' testimony could help to rehabilitate what's left of Pellicano's image. The private investigator had, after all, used his audio forensics expertise to detect a third voice on a murky tape recording of one of the church bombers bragging to his wife about planning the murderous attack. The presence of that third party allowed prosecutors to use the tape as evidence, since a conversation only between spouses normally would have been inadmissible.

By the time the second bombing plotter was successfully prosecuted, the government case against Pellicano was in the news, and Jones left the forensic audio magic out of his presentation. (The Alabama lawyer would also be in the hunt for abortion-clinic bomber Eric Rudolph, who was caught and prosecuted four years after his crimes.)

Pellicano, who had begun the day stating that he was going to skip cross-examining the F.B.I.'s lead investigator, Stanley Ornellas, because he "no longer believed in the fairness of the trial," later gave a better than typical account of himself in grilling Ornellas about the government's crucial (and only) recorded wiretap, that between businessman Tom Gores and his inamorata, Lisa Gores, who happens to be his brother Alec's wife.

Once the jury had been excused for the day, Judge Fischer took some time to further caution Soo Hoo ("You weren't laying the foundation...") and tried to set a schedule that could wrap up the trial expeditiously.

"I'm not chastising you," she told Braun while instructing him to keep his witness ready for Wednesday's session.

When he playfully responded, "I'm not chastising you, either," the judge shot him a second look.

"Good," she said, with a smile that may have been a little frosty at the edges. "We don't allow that."

Former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones outside the courthouse after the 2005 conviction of clinic bomber Eric Rudolph; photo by Brian Schoenhals/Getty Images.

Ex-Cop's Move For Mistrial Fizzles

Fred Schruers — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:25:10 GMT

Anyone who visits the Roybal Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles—say, as a defendant in a racketeering case like the current one starring Anthony Pellicano—would pass by some massive sculptures by Jonathan Borofsky. One, called Molecule Men, is of perforated metal figures either dancing or locked in struggle.

If the Pellicano trial has been marked mostly by a good degree of civility since it began in early March, in recent days the mood and tone has changed, and it has started to resemble that dancing sculpture.

The scrap that began early Tuesday morning following ex-cop and Pellicano crony Mark Arneson's testimony the previous Friday was different in kind and degree from all that came earlier.

Arneson is a hulking, sun-reddened figure, generally bearing the sullen air of a man who's facing a considerable stretch in a place where cops aren't always popular. During his testimony Friday (more on that in a moment), he showed the articulate, even convincing streak that almost turned him into a writer before his older brother enlisted him in the police force.

And then Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Saunders took on the attributes of another Borofsky work, Hammering Man, and left Arneson's "just doing my job" defense in broken shards.

Arneson's attorney Chad Hummel looks a bit sunburnt as well lately, or perhaps it was the choleric mood he's been in since that pounding cross-examination. He filed a motion Monday—identified in boldface capitals as an EMERGENCY motion—for a mistrial.

U.S. District Judge Dale Fischer had barely greeted the competing parties when Hummel, citing improper introduction of prejudicial testimony on Friday, warned the judge that "our intention is to file a writ in the 9th Circuit today."

Hummel's beef was that the government had violated an evidence tenet called Rule 16 by momentarily handling a tape of Arneson being questioned by the L.A.P.D.'s internal affairs division.

Such sessions are considered "compelled testimony" and so "immunized,"—off limits to prosecutors. Someone in the City Attorney's office had mistakenly included the forbidden tape in a box of otherwise acceptable evidence.

Federal prosecutor Kevin Lally would say that he'd heard just five seconds or so of the tape on March 11, realized it was protected, and immediately handed it over to the government's "taint team" to keep he and Saunders in the dark as to what it contained.

Such maintenance of separate "clean" and "dirty" teams of G-men is an accepted practice, but Hummel argued that the mere fact the government had such a tape in its possession should have been communicated to Arneson. That fact, Hummel said, citing case law, would have affected Arneson's decision to take the stand to "rehabilitate himself" in the eyes of the jury.

Judge Fischer, realizing Hummel was at minimum going to slow her trial down and might possibly sink it, gave him a look that was pretty much the polar opposite of the rather sweet smile she wears when saying to the jurors, "I order you to have a nice weekend."

On Tuesday, following a robust debate between Hummel, the defense lawyer, and Saunders, the prosecutor, she called the jury in, said little more than something had come up, and dismissed them for the day. That opened time for the opposing sides in the case to take it all down to jurisprudential molecules.

Fischer is an impressive jurist. After spending 16 years as a civil litigator in private practice and six more as a judge in Los Angeles Superior Court, President Bush nominated her for the federal bench in 2003; the Senate confirmed her 86 to 0.

Known as strict but also fair and reasonable, she took on the current trial based on her early entry into the Pellicano brouhaha via a separate fraud case against Daniel Nicherie, who's now jailed while his brother Abner is a Pellicano co-defendant.

(Abner's tale is so complicatedly scammy—he seduced, then traduced his fraud victim's wife, for starters—that he can't muster enough interest in most of the trial proceedings to stay awake for all of them. For reporters already envious of the trial participants' right to have large bottles of water and access to their laptops, this freedom to nap during laborious cross-examinations is perhaps the most envied perk.)

Fischer, who as a Municipal Court judge fought off an effort by ex-N.F.L. star Jim Brown to brand her as a member of "a radical extremist group" (the Inns of the Court, founded in 1980 by former Chief Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger) and presided over a guilty verdict for Brown for smashing his wife's car with a shovel, actually looked forlorn.

"Everyone seems to have joined in the writ in case there's a spillover," she said after the co-defendant's attorneys said they too felt the prejudicial damage might affect their cases.

The issue centered on a section of Saunders' slamming cross-examinations that Hummel read back. Referring to a 1999 investigation of Arneson by the L.A.P.D.'s internal affairs division, the prosecutor all but spat, "And you beat that internal investigation because you lied to them, didn't you, sir?"

Arneson, who had been accused by fellow officers of spending his time searching police records (for Pellicano's nefarious activities, if you ask the prosecutors), replied, "That is incorrect."

On paper, Arneson mostly sticks to his guns (though he was harried enough to say he couldn't remember things he had admitted to earlier in his testimony). But an elaborate portrait of himself as a dedicated cop that Hummel had painted him as was largely destroyed by Saunders' detailed, angry cross-examination.

Perhaps he had no lower moment than when Saunders, the prosecutor, was showing a greatly magnified list of database searches, illuminated on one wall, and the former vice cop spotted one miscreant's name hidden in a row of unsuspecting citizens who were Pellicano targets. "That's [name redacted for this posting]...a local Venice prostitute," Arneson said.

"Are you saying," Saunders slowed down to inquire with rich sarcasm, "that on that day you ran something legitimate?"

Arneson sketched out a career of chasing down pimps and other threats to the public safety, using Pellicano's tips, as he advanced in rank and responsibility.

He said Pellicano paid him $2,500 a month for a variety of security and bodyguard services (clients included Farrah Fawcett, Goldie Hawn, Whoopi Goldberg, and Nicolas Cage). Arneson added that a number of the searches recounted in court must have been done by someone who jumped on his computer using his password.

And yet Arneson falsely told a department commander that Pellicano never took part in his investigations. Arneson said he'd lied to his commander to avoid tainting a particularly long-running investigation.

Ultimately, Arneson said, "I take responsibility today as I did five years ago [in interrogations by authorities]...I thought it was for the good of a greater cause. I crossed over that line, and I shouldn't have."

Arneson criticized government investigators for trying to turn him against Pellicano: "They read me my rights an threatened to charge me with RICO (racketeering, which he is indeed now faced with) if I didn't roll over."

He also said that F.B.I. agent Sam Ornellas, the case's pivotal investigator, asked him to run a pair of database searches: "He said that his neighbor was an asshole."

By the time Saunders had finished working on Arneson—amending the ex-sergeant's initial confession of 50 to 100 searches for Pellicano to the likelier figure of "thousands"; showing the stack of search printouts before Pellicano was arrested (thick) and after (thin); and using an audiotape to undercut his contention that he knew nothing about the search names—all of his defense lawyer's assiduous character rehab was a fading memory.

From the expressions on jurors' faces, they didn't much enjoy having it made clear that the defense was just maybe trying to sucker them.

Perhaps Hummel, who graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1988 and has been generally impressive, was simply taking his best shot at a dwindling cause when he brought up the mistrial motion.

And yet his heat and investment seemed real enough, as his face grew more florid and his expression grimmer as the judge pushed back against his contentions. He scored a minor victory in getting prosecutors Saunders and Lally on the stand to defend their handing of the tape.

Saunders, though adamant that the tape was not an issue, was clearly repentant for having made an issue of the internal affairs investigation, and sometime during the rare lunch break the judge granted (the trial sessions typically run from 7:45 a.m. to 2 p.m.), he and Hummel achieved detente.

The moments right after lunch yielded an odd tableau, with Arneson's wife idly thumbing paperwork on the government's table and Hummel chatting away with prosecutors—even Pellicano laughingly joined in.

Judge Fischer's summary of her thinking in denying a mistrial was so detailed and lucid that everyone seemed to collectively realize hers was the biggest brain in the courtroom. "I know you didn't want to have a hearing like this," she told Saunders, and congratulated both sides on their professionalism amidst "vigorous advocacy."

Fans of vigorous advocacy will want to pay heed to Wednesday's proceedings, as attorney Bert Fields, who had the Pellicano investigation breathing down his neck for years but was never charged, was scheduled to be called by the defense.

Scheduled to be on the stand on Tuesday, Fields had turned up early only to be left to haunt the witness room and cafeteria of the 22-story building with his Greenberg Glusker colleagues (notably his chief advocate, Brian Sun.)

The information that Arneson had earned part of his $2,500 stipend one month by supervising a 24-hour surveillance of Fields' home while it was tented and fumigated for termites had provided some comic relief on Friday; if the government team finishes its cross-examination of Arneson as avidly as they started it, then seeks to buttress their case against the defendants via an extended grilling of Fields, the humor and goodwill that closed Tuesday may evaporate very quickly.

Bread, Roses And A Dead Fish As Ovitz And Busch Testify

Fred Schruers — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 06:18:38 GMT

In a trial which some had forecast as sensational--in the tabloid sense of the word--but which has often been lacking in red meat, Wednesday's wrap-up of the government's case at least provided a couple of other food groups. There was toast, as in the general assessment of Anthony Pellicano's pro se defense as things stand after a month in the federal courthouse. And of course there was a dead fish, as in the wet, slimy symbol that a person or persons unknown slapped onto reporter Anita Busch's Audi convertible under an overturned pan and alongside a rose, a hole in the windshield, and a hand-lettered sign reading, "STOP".

If you ask Busch, it was the doing of the day's other star witness in concert with the trial's key defendant: "I know that he hired Anthony Pellicano and the evidence points to Mike Ovitz." That testimony was evoked during a robust but gentlemanly cross-examination by lawyer Chad Hummel, representing Pellicano co-defendant Mark Arneson, and he'd been asking if the fish was possibly planted as a result of another investigative series, about actor Steven Seagal and his mobbed-up sometime partner Julius Nasso.

Less gentlemanly was the interrogation by Pellicano himself. The former p.i is broke and broken, and in his Velcro-cinched sneakers and tent like prison garb, nobody wants to meet the former dandy's tailor anymore. But when he stands at the podium with one foot crossed over an ankle and his hand held disconcertingly behind is back, dipping his beak in his accusers' miseries, he's somehow threatening. She managed a few ripostes, at one stage saying, "it was relentless attack, Mr. Pellicano-as you know."

Busch had already been subjected to a necessary round of questions from Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Saunders. He took her through the history of some stories she free-lanced for in the New York Times, most but not all co-bylined with Bernard Weinraub, with headlines like, "Actor Defects From Ovitz--Another Setback For Troubled Agency". (The actor was Robin Williams, and the agency was his Artists' Management Group, which at the time of the Times stories was heavily leaking clients, prestige and money--or, as Ovitz put it, "doing just fine". But as the television/telephony producing side of his tripartite enterprise tanked (AT&T pulled out of financing it) and his former CAA brethren (like earlier witnesses Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane) froze him out, "We were reeling...all I wanted was a graceful exit."

(Or as another Times headline would term it, "A Faded Power Broker Relinquishes His Talent Business". Feeling the press reports were "wildly personal and wildly embarrassing", Ovitz, who seemed to quite enjoy his comparison of the Hollywood mogul scrum to high school and was hardly the picture of remorse on the witness stand, freely confessed to hiring Pellicano because he worked with "the highest levels of the community...the same people who were sourcing the press".

Notable on Ovitz's enemies list today were a man he has accused of bringing him down via Hollywod's "gay mafia", David Geffen, as well as his sometime partner in founding Creative Artists Agency, Ron Meyer. Ovitz said Pellicano "knew a substantial number of people in the West Los Angeles business community. He was working with people I was having problems with -- Ron Meyer, David Geffen" .In fact, in "embarrassing" Busch and the other detractors, Pellicano would prove "extremely helpful". The $75,000 he spent for such information was hardly the biggest tab paid to the private investigator during his thriving years.

Ovitz has not been charged in the case, and with the statute of limitations on any wiretapping charges reportedly now expiring, only if he's perjured himself will he face prosecution over the whole adventure. "I never instructed him to do anything illegally," he said of Pellicano. (The private detective gave him the code name Gaspar, which Ovitz acknowledged with some befuddlement. It just might be a reference to the Spanish pirate who wrapped an anchor chain around his waist and plunged to his death in the brine rather than surrender.)

The government's twin prosecutors, Saunders and Kevin Lally, would seem, from the attention they paid to cross-references during their direct examinations of Ovitz and Busch in quick succession, to believe otherwise. Saunders introduced the evils visited on Bush by degrees--her home (and home office) phones were hooked up to "half-taps", which were traced to Pellicano's office, and her computer and its files, included e-mail were preyed upon. And the infamous fish incident clearly traumatized her. But her tormentors' piece de resistance, which she related tearfully and with long pauses to regain composure, came on the morning of August 16, 2002, when she left her apartment to walk to her rental car and was accosted by two men who roared up her street off San Vicente Boulevard in what she saw as a "dirt-colored" Mercedes, stopping to confront her after she scurried into her car. "I remember thinking, 'I'm going to die!' " she sobbingly told the courtroom, "I thought, 'This is how it ends.'" The car's passenger gave her "a sickening smile" held a finger to his lips, and then gave a two-fingered ta-ta wave.

It's quite evident that Busch, whose courtroom support included her First Amendment lawyer, as well as the attorney representing her in civil suits against Pellicano and Ovitz, a journalist friend, and her sister, has not emotionally recovered from her ordeal. She has abandoned--as Pellicano and attorney Hummel were at pains to make her reiterate- a book project whose draft was titled A Woman At Risk, and she's done more editing than reporting of late.

If Pellicano has garnered any good will from the jury with his unctuous, daily "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the jury," he pretty much wrapped it in an anchor chain and threw it away with his cross-examination of Busch. Having grilled her a t the street layout that day (of which he seemed highly knowledgeable), he raked at her over details. Early on, Saunders objected with "asked and answered", and though he habitually shoots down entire skeins of Pellicano cross-examination with objections the judge sustains, he then seemed to strategically desist and let Pellicano dig and dig until the entire courtroom's unease (and dislike for the p.i.) became palpable.

Busch described a post-threat meeting with the editor of the Los Angles Times, who by then had hired her, and said the paper's general counsel Karlene Goller proposed hiring Pellicano to find the source of thereat--"She wanted you to come aboard" - to which Busch, as she said even as the courtroom tittered, remembered replying that he "didn't have a very good reputation."

After the prosecution finishes with some dense business regarding wiretapping technique tomorrow, they'll close the case in chief, and Pellicano will be the first among the four defendants present his case. (Of course, he's got an entire second trial alongside Century City lawyer Terry Christensen, also indicted due to their shared work for Kirk Kerkorian, to face after this one.)

Thus far, Pellicano's sandbagged himself with those clumsy or alienating cross-examinations, which the quietly droll but definitely serious Judge Dale Fischer steers back on track with pained good grace, and observers are wondering just how much bigger a hole he can dig for himself.

As was pointed out early on, through his assiduously collected but ill-advisedly stashed tapes of his own conversations ("Always an open ear," as Ovitz warmly said) he's been the trial's best witness for the prosecution. The courtroom would hear Ovitz, in another one of Pellicano's taped conversations with the clients he steadily milked for large payments, saying to him, "I need to see you--I have a situation, I think it could be beneficial to you and probably to me--this is the single most complex situation imaginable."

And yet, Ovitz promised, relating it all would take only 30 minutes that evening. That was April 11, 2002--six years to the day this Friday, as Pellicano prepares to defend himself. He apparently still hasn't decided if he will take the stand in his own defense, which may tempt his outsize o but leave him open to a righteous prosecutorial pummeling. And that, to borrow Ovitz's agently exaggeration, is almost certainly the single most complex situation imaginable.

(Ron Meyer, left, and Mike Ovitz in happier days circa 1998; photo by Time-Life Pictures/DMI//Getty Images)

Charlton Heston Gave `Em (All) Hell

Fred Schruers — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:24:45 GMT

Perhaps the best-known image of Charlton Heston--the default picture to sit atop the many obits that ran after he died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills--was of the actor as Moses, holding up the Ten Commandments. Although he eventually became the National Rifle Association's leader with a zeal that made one wonder if he'd seen something on those tablets about the right to bear arms, over the span of his life he emerges on balance more as a libertarian than right-wing crank. (Though it is hard to erase a second memorable image of Heston holding a musket over his head at a convention of the firearms-faithful, hollering, "From my cold dead hands!") Having begun his career being praised for his stage work by Olivier, and more or less closing it as the Player King in Kenneth Branagh' s 1996 film Hamlet, he wasn't one to miss a moment that was teed up for him.

His death within a day of the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination offers a window into a kinder, gentler Heston from the 1960's. The image accompanying this post shows Heston in Washington on August 28, 1963, huddling with James Baldwin and Hollywood fixture (he won Best Director and Best Screenplay Oscars two years running, the latter pair for 1950's Best Picture All About Eve) Joseph Mankiewicz. They would be marching with Dr. King en route to his famous "I Have A Dream" speech before 200,000 who had gathered to prod Congress to take action on civil rights. Heston, nominally there as president of the Screen Actors Guild (his predecessor was Ronald Reagan) read a statement from James Baldwin--who'd agreed to avoid the podium because he'd becomethe symbol of a kind of apocalyptic uprising as author of The Fire Next Time--
As Heston told the Chicago Sun Times in 2000,

I wasn't crazy about that idea. Anything that goes out with my name on it, I write. Besides, Jimmy Baldwin was on the left fringe of the civil rights movement. I don't know how Dr. King felt about his being there. But the point is, he was there.
When an awful lot of good parlor liberals didn't show up in case things turned nasty, Jimmy did. What's more, as a good writer, the speech he wrote for me wasn't what he would have written, but instead close to what I wanted to say. He died (in 1987) . . . in self- imposed exile in Paris. We'd both traveled some little distance to come together, though, as so many hundreds of thousands of people did that day.

Malcolm X, disgusted that Baldwin couldn't speak, would erroneously report that Burt Lancaster had delivered Baldwin's thoughts that day. It wasn't an entirely illogical mistake: though Lancaster was born eleven years earlier, in 1913 both arrived at their career peaks in the late 50's slid into the 60's. Lancaster had scored early in the 50's with Come Back Little Sheba and From Here To Eternity, but bettered those with is role as J.J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell Of Success in `57, and Elmer Gantry in 1960. Heston was The Ten Commandments' Moses in 1956, the Mexican detective Manuel (Mike) in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil in `58, and Ben Hur in `59. As David Thomson writes in describing him as the essence of the "monolithic" actor: "The man who contributes to a film through his presence and the innate splendor of honest muscle and strong-jawed virtue. He was the screen hero of the 1950's and early 1960s..." Still, Thomson finds him overrated: ".., he falls a little short--not as reflective as Mitchum, but not as gaily agile as Burt Lancaster."

If Lancaster cemented his stature among cineastes with Visconti's 1963 The Leopard and Louis Malle's 1980 Atlantic City, Heston -before becoming somehow constricted by his growing political rigidity? --may have notched his most interesting performances during his second career act. He did it with Will Penny, the role he said was closest to his own loner nature in 1968, and the following year's Number One--respectively about a cowpoke and a quarterback past their primes.

There's another shot from that day in Washington, showing a distracted, half-turned Heston in an unguarded moment, perhaps not long before he took the stage. (Unlike Marlon Brando, who appeared clutching a cattle prod from Dixie-fied Gadsden, Alabama, he had no prop but his own
air of righteousness.) The edge of anguish in his eyes is a reminder of the mostly hidden complexities beneath. If the Times of London also poor-mouthed him in their obit with the assessment of "a little unapproachable on film -- not quite as interestingly flawed as Henry Fonda or Gary Cooper", Heston deployed a potent screen persona by using what Pauline Kael, as quoted in the Washington post called, reviewing his epochal Planet of the Apes, ": his perfect, lean-hipped, powerful body, Heston is a godlike hero; built for strength, he's an archetype of what makes Americans win. He doesn't play nice guy; he's harsh and hostile, self-centered and hot-tempered. Yet we don't hate him because he's so magnetically strong; he represents American power -- and he has the profile of an eagle."

Though he consistently dined out on his connection to King--including one of his rabble-rousing speeches that caused a sensation when Rush Limbaugh read it on the air--his latter-day conservative-leaning politics probably cost him most of his Hollywood credence, at least until the recent run of rather fond obituaries. One memorable moment came when he stood up at a Time Warner shareholders' meeting in 1992 to protest an Ice-T's "Cop Killer". Slowly intoning the song's lyrics, he managed to help strong-arm the company into censorng Ice-T, and the song was lifted from the album.

He might have been a good ally for Tipper Gore in that sense--Ice-T spat out vulgarities about Al and Tipper's 12-year-old niece in the song--, but he would collide poetically with Al Gore, using Gore as the whipping boy for his famous speech at a Charlotte NRA raly in 2000: "When the loss of liberty looms as it does now, this is for those who would take it -- and especially for you, Mr. Gore -- from my -- cold -- dead -- hands!"

Of course a life lived on alternating sides of the political fence can have its own brutal contradictions. The rifle that James Earl Ray--who lived for a spell in a crummy hotel on Hollywood Boulevard--used to kill King was purchased from a Birmingham, Alabama gun store using an alias, because Ray himself was a prison escapee. But even after the legislation Lyndon Johnson pushed through in the wake the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations in 1968 had wide-ranging impact, it would not, the pro-gun faction claims, have prevented Ray's purchase of the rifle. (Beyond citing the claim, this writer doesn't claim the expertise to weigh in on the legal intricacies of gun control in America.)

By the time Michael Moore returned the favor, ensnaring Heston as the bad guy in what has gone down as one of the documentarian's less shining moments, Heston had grown frail. He retreated, in what Thomson calls "maybe the most moving scene in all of his work", and soon would be looking down the barrel of Alzheimer's. Though his cause of death w as not stated, he was showing likely symptoms of the malady when he sent a note his well-wishers saying, "I must reconcile courage and surrender in equal measure. Please feel no sympathy for me," and quoting the words of Prospero In Shakespeare's The Tempest:

Be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air...

(James Baldwin, Charlton Heston and Joseph Mankiewicz after arriving in Washington D.C. for the August, 1963 civil rights march; photo by Eliot Elisofon/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Stop-Loss Battles The War Film Jinx

Fred Schruers — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 01:18:55 GMT

The reality that the American public has little appetite for Iraq-themed films is old news by now. And yet it still seems deeply ironic that in the midst of a presidential campaign in which that war is second only to the economy as a hot button issue, yet another such film is in the process of tanking.

The uninspiring box office results for Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss--the film, which cost about $25 million to make, generated just $4.5 million in its opening weekend in about 1300 theaters--only deepens the irony. The practice referred to in the title--essentially conscripting solders back into active duty even though they've served their first (often perilous and emotionally damaging) tour--has been called "a back-door draft". Whatever one makes of "the surge" in boots on the ground--which even some war critics had found helpful until the recent explosion in street violence--it probably couldn't have been executed without the stop-loss provision. (Which, the military is quick to point out, is legitimately outlined in every soldier's contract.)

What Stop-Loss considers, often subtly and at times a bit ham-handedly, is the human cost back home. The stop-lossing of Staff Sergeant Brandon King (actor Ryan Philippe is generally impressive as the film's hero) sets up the tale's road-trip scenario as he takes off in the company of his best buddy's girlfriend (the still-maturing but masterful Aussie Abbie Cornish) to seek help from his Congressman. The spoiler at the end of this sentence is that he will fail, which is what makes this film an apt bookend to tragedian Peirce's 1999 Boys Don't Cry. The director's younger brother himself enlisted and landed in the war zone, which only confirmed her earlier fascination with the lives these under-recognized and little-thanked patriots are living--or losing.

Having steeped herself in the troops' own handmade videos of grunt life, death, and boredom, Peirce aims to probe their fierce camaraderie. Her film really concentrates less on the issue of stop-loss and more on showing us the flesh-and-blood impact that post-traumatic stress, in various permutations, has on her emblematic trio of soldiers. (Highly touted newcomer Channing Tatum and the film's secret weapon, Joseph Gordon Levitt, are both sterling in their roles alongside Phillippe.)

Much has been made of the sponsoring studio's efforts to dress Stop-Loss up for marketing as a kind of coming-of-age story. (When this writer asked for some still pictures that would show aspects of the film's agonizing, opening battle sequence, the better to illustrate certain insights from an interview with its military consultant, retired Sgt., Major James Dever, the request was quietly tabled.)

So, rate the marketing as somewhere in between desperate and deceitful--albeit in a good cause. What isn't immediately clear from a few quick cuts in the trailer is how the film delivers an array of gritty and even pulpy action-movie moments. The alleyway battle is convincing and suitably nerve-wracking; back home, when a battle-rattled King snaps off a rifle shot to kill a rattler, or takes on a whole gang who have gotten the drop on him, Peirce nimbly shucks off her indie-goddess reserve and gives us something from a Steve McQueen (or is it Steven Seagal?) movie. Even Abbie Cornish's character, who at one level can be seen as a fetchingly perspiring blonde on the run with a buff young dude in a muscle car, is an action-ready good ol' Texas gal--a pretty fair hand popping a magazine out of a Glock or knocking back a row of tequila shots. This push-pull is probably what led Variety's Joe Leydon to describe the film as "A wildly uneven drama, by turns sincere and synthetic." By contrast, it's won rave reviews in Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, where David Denby called it "forceful, effective, and alive, with the raw, mixed-up emotions produced by an endless war."

As hinted at in a number of reviews, notably from the New York Times' A.O. Scott,

Ms. Peirce's movie, which she wrote with Mark Richard, is not only an earnest, issue-driven narrative, but also a feverish entertainment, a passionate, at times overwrought melodrama gaudy with violent actions and emotions.... Instead of high-minded indignation or sorrow, it runs on earthier fuel: sweat, blood, beer, testosterone, loud music and an ideologically indeterminate, freewheeling sense of rage.

Taking charge of the soldierly sequences--and this is first and foremost, as co-producer Greg Goodman notes, "a film about solders"--is Sgt. Major (Retired) James Dever, who spent over two decades in trouble spots as a Force Recon marine. He was the military consultant who guided Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers (in which Phillippe played a Navy corpsman) as well as The Last Samurai, Jarhead, and Stop-Loss's the-war-at-home cousin in disappointing box office, Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah.

Dever recounted for me the moment in Morocco, in a hectic house-to-house gun battle staged in a slum area on the outskirts of Marrakech, when his actor charges were to react to the sudden, blood-spattering wound through the neck one character takes. (The character who has a small speaking part, is s played by a real-life Iraq veteran who's part of Dever's team.) In the screening room where I saw the film, the audience of about forty let out a collective cry of alarm when it happened, "I told them, when you got a man down, you've got to keep fighting, or the rest of you will die."

Dever's training regimen wasn't much different from what's become the familiar formula for Hollywood--isolate the trouper troops (in this case, in a tent encampment at the still-standing set for The Alamo outside Austin Texas), wake them in the dark (5:30, a good 90 minutes before dawn), "P.T" them with calisthenics and a run, and only then provide a shower, shave and chow, followed by and training--in this case, in weapons handling and close quarters battle, or CQB. Dever had the squad leader, Phillippe, boss them around ("You're not gonna be their buddy right now," Dever told him.) On the final night, Phillippe et al were awakened at 3 a.m. to stage a mock assault on a building without instructors.

Paramount and Peirce began in a rush of hope--she told a Rotten Tomatoes interviewer that the studio was high on the film:

I sold it as a spec, greenlit screenplay, to Paramount with Scott Rudin. And when I was ... screening it during editing, the studio saw it and they were very excited because it was a commercial movie. It appealed to young and old, men and women. MTV is part of Viacom and they felt it was wonderful because it applied to their audience.

However, as the film dawdled toward the marketplace, missing the early controversy over stop-loss and falling in line behind the others that went into a box office ditch--the studio ended up accused of everything from dumping to the film (hardly logical, since they had MTV's "interstitial" promotional apparatus essentially available for free) to what the Los Angeles Times' Chris Lee said might be perceived as a "bait-and-switch":

But by catering directly to the interests of twentysomething moviegoers (that is, by fixating on the movie stars' physiques and personal chemistry) and deliberately de-emphasizing "Stop-Loss' " second Gulf War pedigree, marketers for its distributor Paramount hope to avoid the fate shared by other recent Iraq war-related movies -- "In the Valley of Elah," "Rendition," "Redacted," "No End in Sight" and "The Kingdom," which all tanked at the box office.

With 21 (in which the smartest guy at M.I.T. hides hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in his ceiling panels--really?) still stomping around like a box-office gorilla, and the demo-swallowing Leatherheads and The Ruins opening this weekend on 2,700 and 2,500 screens respectively, it's hard to like Stop-Loss' prospects. As Goodman says, "This was really risky material. It's not doing what we would have liked at the box office but time can be a friend to a movie like this." In dog years--say, when we still have troops in the region in a hundred years--he's no doubt right. Americans may catch up one day to what its tattered soldiery gave up with very little complaint (it's seemingly up to the artists, from Michael Moore to Peirce and the other bold filmmakers, to do that). Meanwhile on the MTV site where Stop-Loss is promoted, the unnamed spokesman for a real-life group of stop-loss captives has raised a cry:

I represent a unit called 3/509th Airborne Infantry stationed out of Fort Richardson, Alaska.
I realized when I signed up back in July '04 that inevitably I would serve in Iraq and that it would be the longest year of my life. I found out back in April '07 that my unit would be extended by an additional 90 days. We carried on with the mission without complaint and did precisely what was asked of us... Home at that moment seemed even more distant and the possibility of seeing wives, children, mom and dad seemed bleak at best.

We arrived back from a long and drawn out deployment in November '07 with 8 less men (just my company) than when we left. The unit altogether suffered the greatest number of KIA's than any other unit serving during that 14 month period. We paid dearly both in the physical and mental realm and some men paid the greatest cost. ...[after] a month of being back from post deployment leave those with ETS [Expiration Term of Service, or retirement] dates later than October 1st were informed that they would be stop loss and that by or around February '09 we would be heading back to another hot spot in the world, Afghanistan, for another 12 month deployment.

The movie we feel will go a long way in defining for audiences the precise agony and disgust we are all feeling about this.

Your characters are as real as the air you breathe, Ms. Peirce, and they number not just in the hundreds but thousands.

Barring some unforeseen spike in its popularity--perhaps on some game-changing pronouncement from a White House which (until it's speared by news reports about execrable V.A. hospitals or some other news story) has been deaf, dumb and blind to the miseries of what most Americans, in polls, regard as a misbegotten war--Stop Loss seems relegated to an obscure position in any national debate. But we may look back on it over time and give it credit for what's been pointed out by critics like the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle:

Clearly, Peirce's motives are pure. She's not using the 'stop-loss' issue as a wedge to make the government or the administration look bad. She's using it to dramatize an injustice and to advocate on behalf of the soldiers.

"I was doing this way before any of these other movies were on the map," Peirce told Rotten Tomatoes, " I'm thinking about the soldiers and their experiences."

Goodman, who began as a set p.a. fetching coffee and came up through the ranks working with pal David O. Russell, finds any number of reasons why Russell's 1999's Three Kings, which he also co-produced, made $108 million in the U.S.:

The big difference with this and Three Kings is, we told the story about a war that had already been over for seven years; that gave us all enough distance to have a little bit of wisdom. It's hard to make a movie about a current war. Look at he Vietnam movies I remember so well, most of them happened three or four years after the war was over in 1975. Coming Home and Deerhunter in 1978 and Apocalypse Now was 1979.
I think in the time between when we went out and made the movie [in 2006] and now, when the fact emerged that movies about the current Iraq war, as a genre, are not resonating with audiences--that's something no one would have known when we got this movie greenlit.

Also I think this movie is, as we're seeing, an innately tough sell. It's very had to get people who see [the war] in the news everyday to go ahead and plunk down twelve dollars to go and see it in a theater. Whether I agree 100 percent with the particular strategy Paramount employed, I think they were trying very hard to get people in there.

It's not a war movie, it's a movie about soldiers.

I think that's the tricky part, telling a fully fleshed story about real people. A movie about the war can't just become a polemic, it has to be about flesh and blood people and that's where I think Kimberly particularly succeeded-- bringing these guys alive.

Goodman echoes a thesis that's been heard from other quarters when he notes that in cloaking much of the war from the American public, the administration as isolated the awareness to those most affected--the 4,000-plus killed, the 20,000-plus wounded, the many tens of thousands whose lives have been turned upside down, and their families:

Other than the characters in Stop Loss and characters in In The Valley of Elah or any of in these films, the rest of us aren't being asked to sacrifice anything-- except maybe now we are with the economy.

Goodman notes how the movie's oddly disturbing final moments--the men with whom we've grown familiar sitting on a bus and bound for the flight back to the war zone--emphasizes the painfully self-sacrificial grit that keeps the system going:

These guys aren't an underclass-- they made a choice to do this. They weren't guys who were bereft of options; they were guys who believed in their country and that's what makes the film so powerful, especially the end of the film. [Sgt. King's] his choice transcends the politics of George Bush or why we're in the war. It hearkens back to the core values that he has as a Texan and as a brother to his compatriots. And that's what's devastating to me about the film; that those underlying values that are so powerful and are being kind of taken advantage of for a meaningless war.

(Abbie Cornish and Ryan Philippe, on the run in Stop-Loss, stop to down some shots.)