The result of the American Psycho author embracing the platform has him seeing a new phase of glory for his far-too-entertaining feed, where he's written treatments for an American Psycho sequel and given out helpful (and hilarious) ways for the world to further embrace 50 Shades of Grey, including open casting suggestions to actors on Twitter. And then there was that whole thing about the threesome with Rielle Hunter.

Today, Mr. Ellis had a particularly wonderful tidbit for his followers: A claim concerning Deadline Hollywood Daily Editor in Chief and business journalist Nikki Finke, who's widely known as one of the more vindictive, unforgiving, relatively feared and fairlyshadowy trade reporters Hollywood's ever seen (context: also, someone who once famously claimed to have "bitchslapped" New Yorker editor David Remnick over the process of trying to publish a profile of her).

Though Mr. Ellis would dare to argue otherwise:

What spurned Bret's issues with Ms. Finke? Five minutes later, he Tweeted:

ICM: International Creative Management, the monolithic agency whose Amanda "Binky" Urban has been Ellis' longtime book agent (who also made a brief appearance as part of the plot of Ellis' novel Lunar Park). And from what The Observer hears, Mr. Ellis' claim that Ms. Finke rang up ICM (and basically threatened to wring them dry) is true.

A few folks who got word of what happened tell us: Ms. Finke rang Binky Urban's office, and not being able to reach the agent, gave her assistant what was characterized to us as an epic, otherworldly screaming-at, the likes of which the assistant had never previously experienced. What we didn't hear was: Why?

UPDATE: One reader writes in with the theory that a Tweet in June from Mr. Ellis may have inspired the call to Binky Urban's office:

It'd certainly make sense. As we noted above, Ms. Finke is notoriously private: Gawker once offered a $1,000 bounty for a photograph of her, while The Daily once published what they allege to be a photo of Ms. Finke, which she adamantly denied.

UPDATE 2: Gawker's John Cook saw that Penske Media (under which Deadline Hollywood Daily operates) is listed as the owner of an apartment in Bret Easton Ellis' building. Neat! No word on whether or not it belongs to Finke in any way or if she happens to occupy it, but Cook points out that the Hollywood Reporter once tried to poach Finke with an offer that included an apartment in Malibu. Was it Cook's query to Finke as to whether or not she lived in the apartment that alerted her to the Tweets, resulting in the enraged call in the first place? Who knows!

Ms. Urban and her assistant declined to comment; Mr. Ellis (who hasn't Tweeted anything about the fracas since) and Ms. Finke did not immediately return requests for comment.

Do you know if this is the beef between the two? Any specifics about what Ms. Finke screamed at Ms. Urban's (vacation-deserving) assistant? We'd love to hear it.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Kate Lee with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (Patrick McMullan)

The publishing world received a blow today when publishing prodigy Kate Lee officially  left her role at International Creative Management (ICM). (Five days before her scheduled departure date, no less!) Ms. Lee has been with ICM for what would have been 10 years next month, and her trajectory from an assistant at the company to a Talk of the Town subject at 27 undoubtedly served as inspiration for many young agents trying to break into the grind of the publishing world.

Ms. Lee's reputation rose  as a wunderkind agent who spied the trend of publishing Internet writers before anyone else (The New York Observer's own Editor In Chief Elizabeth Spiers was one of Ms. Lee's first clients), and her departure will undoubtedly send many unrepresented bloggers howling into the night.

So why is she leaving?

Dispelling rumors that the recent restructuring of ICM--to give ownership to its core partners--was the cause of her leaving, Ms. Lee told The Observer over the phone today that she had been considering her departure for some time now.

"I thought long and hard about it...this wasn't an easy decision to make, but it was the one I ultimately arrived at. I'm really looking forward to taking some time off and reading a book for pleasure."

"I've had a truly amazing time and career here (at ICM), working with wonderful colleagues at an amazing company," Ms. Lee continued. "I'm sad to go, but excited for what's next."

So what was next? Ms. Lee was vague about future projects, but promised us that she wouldn't be leaving New York (except for that much-needed vacation she'll be taking soon).

"Please tell us you're not retiring!" We begged.

"I'm too young to retire!" Ms. Lee retorted. "That is NOT happening!"

Mr. Tower received unanimous praise for Everything Ravaged, his debut collection, which was published this spring by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Before that, Mr. Tower was known primarily for the long-form narrative journalism he had been doing for The Washington Post Magazine and Harper’s. 

It was through one of his Harper’s pieces that Mr. Tower met Ms. Schroder, who represented a few other writers—Matt Power and Tom Bissell—who wrote regularly for the magazine. 

Initially, Mr. Tower and Ms. Schroder considered trying to sell a book of journalism—one idea was for Mr. Tower to go down to the Mexican border and write about that—but that plan was quickly scrapped as the author realized his heart was in fiction. Within two weeks of sending out some of Mr. Tower’s stories, Ms. Schroder succeeded in getting her client a two-book deal—for the collection and a forthcoming novel—with Courtney Hodell at FSG. 

Mr. Tower is not the first young author to align himself with Mr. Wylie in the wake of an early success. The agent is known for his aggressive techniques and the unsentimental manner with which he calls or writes to authors he admires and explains to them why they’d be better off with his representation. 

Mr. Wylie is the third literary agent Mr. Tower has worked with over the course of his career. In an interview with the online journal The Wag’s Revue, he said he first signed on with someone after the publication of his first piece for The Washington Post Magazine. That relationship ended when Mr. Tower gave the agent a few of the short stories he’d written during his first semester in the Columbia M.F.A. program, and the agent—whom Mr. Tower did not name in the interview—declined to send them out. 

Ms. Schroder and Mr. Wylie both indicated they had no comment. Mr. Tower did not respond to an email.

When the passengers whose lives Mr. Sullenberger saved that afternoon saw the news, they started thinking that maybe they had a story of their own to tell. After discussing it over Yahoo! groups (where about 100 of the 155 survivors had gathered after the incident), they started looking into their options.

Their efforts came to fruition yesterday, when it was announced that Ballantine had bought a memoir co-authored by all of them, and would publish it in hardcover on Nov. 3.

ICM agent Jennifer Joel brokered the deal after beating out two other literary agents for the account, and secured for the passengers a pair of journalists—Vanity Fair contributing editor William Prochnau and former Washington Post aviation reporter Laura Parker—to interview them about their experiences and write the book.

Pam Seagle, who worked in advertising at Bank of America at the time of the plane’s crash landing and sat in seat 12A, took a lead role in exploring book options on behalf of the other passengers in the Yahoo! group.

Ms. Seagle, a resident of Charlotte, N.C., said that after news came of Mr. Sullenberger's book, a few people in the Yahoo! group brought up writing memoirs of their own. After some discussion, though, it was resolved that it'd be better to do one all together. Ms. Seagle had a few contacts in the media thanks to her job at Bank of America, and volunteered to put out some feelers and figure out how to proceed. One of the people she got in touch with, as Pub Crawl learned during the reporting of this story, was The Observer's publisher Jared Kushner, who introduced Ms. Seagle to Ms. Joel at ICM.

“We sort of sat down and started talking a little bit about what a book generally entailed and whether or not we could come up with a way where some significant subset of the 150 passengers who were saved on the plane might work together to tell a unique story,” Ms. Joel said.

The meeting went well, in part, because according to Ms. Seagle, Ms. Joel and the rest of the ICM staff gave off an air of empathy during her visit to their offices because they had watched the rescue through their 26th-story, westward-facing windows while it was happening.

Ms. Joel recruited Mr. Prochnau and Ms. Parker by way of her colleague at the agency Kris Dahl, who represents them.

“We are the authors, they are the writers,” Ms. Seagle explained. “That’s what we’ve been told. We own this content, this is our story, but we’re not writing it ourselves.”

The advance from Ballantine, which was not disclosed, will go to the passengers, who Ms. Seagle said are in the process of forming an LLC. The two journalists, who are technically being hired by the passengers, will be paid for their services out of that advance. Whatever remains will be split evenly among the participating passengers. “We may have enough to take our spouses out to dinner at the end of the day,” Ms. Seagle said. 

At the moment, according to Ms. Seagle, one of the writers is in Charlotte finishing up some interviews, but pretty soon, they will get started on the actual manuscript, which will be crashed into bookstores around the same time as Mr. Sullenberger’s life story.

“We clearly all wish him the best and hope that his book does wonderfully,” said Ms. Seagle. “On the other hand, we also felt that we had a story to tell.”
 
Ms. Joel said her clients’ book will appeal to anyone who has ever sat down in a plane and wondered how they’d react if something went wrong.

“As fascinated as I might be about how one lands a plane in the middle of a river with no engines, I’m never going to be sitting in the pilot’s seat,” Ms. Joel said. “What we all stood around our office asking each other and ourselves as we watched that happen was, what are those people going through?”

Not all of the 150 passengers who were on Flight 1549 are participating in the book. According to Ms. Seagle, between 30 and 50 of them have not come forward or taken part in the community that formed after the landing. She said efforts are under way to locate them, but that there is a suspicion that “some of them just do not have an interest or don’t want to be found.”

Mr. Abate, who is in his early 40s, oversaw a number of seven-figure book deals during his brief tenure at Endeavor and built up a staff of several literary agents while cementing his reputation in publishing circles as a brash and sometimes sly businessman. Now he is rumored to be in the process of reconstituting his operation as an independent literary agency. Whether his staff—which included former Dutton editor in chief Trena Keating, as well as Shawn Coyne, Kirby Kim and Rebecca Oliver—would join him there could not be determined. 

What spurred Mr. Abate’s exit from Endeavor, of course, was the firm’s long-planned merger with rival William Morris Agency, which was approved on Monday afternoon by the governing bodies of both companies after months of negotiations. 

Variety called the merger “a giant leap into showbiz’s future,” but what it means for the publishing industry has not been the subject of much discussion in the Hollywood press, because as major as both companies’ literary departments have been in the New York book world, neither generates anywhere near the sort of revenues the two firms take in from their work in film, television and music.  

Once the merger receives governmental approval, the literary department for the combined William Morris–Endeavor firm will be run by Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and Suzanne Gluck, who have spent the past eight years as co-heads of the lit department at William Morris. Ms. Walsh, a high-octane 42-year-old who started her career in publishing about 20 years ago at the Virginia Barber Agency, will serve as the only literary department representative on the combined company’s nine-person governing board.

The reason why Ms. Walsh got the board seat instead of Ms. Gluck, who is several years older than she and no less accomplished an agent, can be explained by Ms. Walsh’s demonstrable will to be a leader in the company and Ms. Gluck’s relative lack thereof. (Unlike Ms. Gluck, for instance, Ms. Walsh served on William Morris’ seven-person executive board, spearheaded the implementation of a company-wide yearly retreat and helped created internal evaluation systems for employees and board members.)

“Jennifer Rudolph Walsh drips ‘alpha female,’ whereas Suzanne Gluck’s m.o. is much more … sweet,” said an editor who has done business with both women. “Jennifer Rudolph Walsh carries herself like she has a razor-sharp mind and a ninja’s body.”

The fact that Mr. Abate will not be working at William Morris Endeavor was for all intents and purposes a done deal after he and Ms. Walsh got together in March to discuss the merger. Despite Mr. Abate’s relationship with Endeavor founder Ari Emanuel, who will oversee the new company’s day-to-day operations as co-CEO, it seems that Ms. Walsh’s leadership position in the lit department was never in much doubt. This was in part because her department was many times bigger and more firmly established than Mr. Abate’s, but also because Mr. Emanuel’s priorities lie with the more lucrative film and TV business, and so giving William Morris control of the book business was an easy concession. As one senior publishing executive put it, “Jennifer’s ascension is the bone being thrown to William Morris.”

The notion that Mr. Abate would be satisfied reporting to Ms. Walsh or Ms. Gluck after running his own show for two years was a tough one to visualize during the run-up to Monday’s announcement. As one literary agent put it this week, “This is a guy who for the first 10 years of his career worked for two very strong-willed women [ICMers Esther Newberg and Amanda “Binky” Urban]. Would he really want to do it again?”

Mr. Abate had indeed been working in the literary department of ICM for a decade when he decided that it was time to run his own shop. According to a breach-of-contract lawsuit ICM filed against him when he announced his intention to defect to Endeavor in February 2007, Mr. Abate started at the firm as a lowly assistant making just over $20,000 a year. He was made an agent just two years later, and before long, according to the Publisher’s Lunch database, was doing deals for celebrities like Bernie Mac, journalists like Andrew Schneider and several first-time fiction writers.

Since leaving ICM, Mr. Abate has brokered a number of lucrative book deals for Endeavor clients. Last April, he sold a trilogy of thrillers co-written by Heroes creator Tim Kring and the novelist Dale Peck for $3 million. The following September, he got $3 million more for a vampire trilogy by the director Guillermo del Toro. In October, Mr. Abate scored a deal worth $6 million for Tina Fey; two months later, his colleague Ms. Keating got $2 million for Kathy Griffin. In between, there were also good deals for Endeavor clients such as James Franco, Tracy Morgan and Artie Lange.

But Mr. Abate, who began his career in publishing at the age of 30 after completing a Ph.D. in American Studies at N.Y.U. and teaching high school for two years, also has a list of clients of his own, most of whom would presumably follow him to his next gig. When he defected from ICM, he reportedly brought nearly 50 clients with him—among them Evan Wright, It Girl teen-lit author Lisi Harrison, James Swanson and Kate Christensen—and a substantial number of the deals he has brokered since joining Endeavor were for authors who have no affiliation with the talent side of the agency.

Mr. Abate and Ms. Walsh both declined to comment. Ms. Gluck did not respond to an interview request.

lneyfakh@observer.com

John Koblin talks to Sports Illustrated writer Selena Roberts about Alex Rodriguez's criticism of her work and she says, "I think I was saying to myself, ‘That’s a really interesting take on what just happened!’... It’s not at all close to what happened. I wrote it off: It’s a diversionary tactic to throw blame on the messenger."

Leon Neyfakh wonders if there's anyone out there who could write a book about publishing (a novel, a memoir, a work of history) and writes, "ICM agent Binky Urban does not believe it would be possible to write much of a novel about modern book publishing. 'What is there to say?' she said by phone Monday. 'It’s such an internal, sort of cerebral job. "And then I edited …"? I don’t quite get how that would work, to tell the truth.'" Plus: Amid Restructuring, HarperCollins Dismantles Third-Wheel Division.

Plus: Fashion Bloggers Unite!... Gays Love a Depression!... Style Queen of The Age of Obama.

According to Ms. Urban, there might be a few people in the business (she suggested former head of Knopf Bob Gottlieb and Grove publisher Morgan Entrekin—hint, hint) who could write pretty good memoirs in the tradition of longtime Simon & Schuster editor in chief Michael Korda’s beloved Another Life. But in general, she said confidently, the world at large is not so curious about the book business these days. And those books that take it as their main subject—whether they’re novels or memoirs or works of history—never really do that well with readers, even if they do tend to catch the attention of the publishing community.  

“They’re fascinating to all of us because we’re all narcissistic,” Ms. Urban said. “But I don’t know if they would be to anyone outside this area code.”

Ms. Urban is not alone in her view—indeed, many of her colleagues in the industry seem to agree that if the lives of publishing people were ever captivating enough to warrant literary depiction, today, not so much.

As a publishing executive from one of the major houses put it, “Our lives are small, hard and short.” 

Of course, there are those who disagree—writers enamored with the fizzling magic of a publicly struggling industry, and publishers who continue to believe there’s enough glamour attached to the business to sell a few books to readers clamoring for a behind-the-scenes peek into the literary life. In July, the Black Cat imprint of Grove will publish Steve Hely’s How I Became a Famous Novelist, a paperback send-up of the publishing process, which was sold by Jay Mandel of the William Morris Agency. And just last week, St. Martin’s Press put out The Agency by Ally O’Brien, a “working girl” novel built around the story of a dramatic book deal.

Before that, St. Martin’s published Al Silverman’s The Times of Their Lives, a chronicle of publishing’s “golden era,” and New York writer Boris Kachka went out with a proposal for a book on the history of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Earlier this year, Daniel O’Connor and Neil Ortenberg (both formerly of Thunder’s Mouth Press) put out the film Obscene, a documentary about Grove Press’ Barney Rossett, which is coming soon to DVD.

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Ortenberg said he believes strongly that life in the publishing world deserves to be written about and described no less than any other human experience.

“I think art can be made of it, absolutely,” Mr. Ortenberg said. “When Six Feet Under was a great hit on HBO, people could have said, ‘Who gives a shit about undertakers,’ too.”

He said the book business is “almost Shakespearean”—”it’s been hanging off a cliff by a fingernail for quite some time”—and if done right, a story told with it as its backdrop could be poignant indeed.  

“People write articles about publishing in The New York Times as though it’s a really sustainable, viable, powerful industry, and it’s really not,” Mr. Ortenberg said. “There’s something kind of sweet about that, in a way.”

Jennifer Weis, the editor at St. Martin’s Press who worked on The Agency, said she was bucking conventional wisdom when she acquired that book at the London Book Fair.

“The old adage has been that books about publishing don’t sell,” she said.

The problem might be that the Great American Publishing Novel just hasn’t been written yet, Ms. Weis said, proceeding very professionally to suggest that maybe The Agency, which she discovered as a partial manuscript, will be the first.

“There wasn’t a word wasted,” Ms. Weis said, explaining what appealed to her about the book’s initial draft. “It was so smart. It had this great character who was not a caricature at all but a really real person with flaws and the ability to be bitter and hostile, who fights for her work and her reputation and her love life. For me it was all about, ‘Do I identify with this person? Does she really make the world come alive?’”

And yet, as Ms. Weis discussed the book on Monday, it was clear that for all her enthusiasm, she feels compelled to apologize a little for its subject matter.

“This is really not a book about publishing,” she said. “This is about the agency business. When I bought this, I thought about Entourage.”

Ah, Entourage, that marvelous, intoxicating thing—the show that brought to life the machinery of Hollywood and, in its popularity, demonstrated that people were dying for a glimpse into the movie business’ inner workings, even though most of what was ever associated with the golden era of showbiz is gone.

Book publishing, on the other hand …

“I don’t think by itself the subject is that compelling to a lot of people,” said Mr. Kachka, whose book on Farrar, Straus and Giroux went on the market last week. “People read business books about show business because it’s closer to fame somehow. It seems like talking about publishing is one or two or three steps removed from that.”

Mr. Kachka, who covers the publishing industry for New York, said that two of his sources in recent weeks had expressed personal enthusiasm for his FSG project but seemed to think, nevertheless, that it wouldn’t be viable. “People will say, ‘I would love to read this book, but, you know, who’s it for?’”

It has been this way, according to several seasoned veterans, pretty much since Michael Korda’s memoir was published at the end of the last century.

When former book editor Tom Engelhardt went out with his novel The Last Days of Publishing, in 2002, he had trouble convincing a major house to consider it, and finally put it out through the University of Massachusetts Press. He estimated yesterday that the book has since sold around 4,000 copies.

“The wisdom in publishing was, no one is interested in publishing, and that probably was semi-right,” Mr. Engelhardt said.

This wasn’t always the case: Jay McInerney’s Brightness Falls, Scott Berg’s bio of Max Perkins, not to mention James T. Fields’ 1879 classic Yesterday With Authors—all found an audience. And when asked if he’d ever read a great novel about the book business, Gerry Howard, the Doubleday editor, was able to rattle off no fewer than four titles, including Helen Eisenbach’s 1988 book Loonglow, about a “somewhat lovelorn woman editor at a big paperback house, and her struggles with the tyrannical woman publisher who makes everybody’s life a living hell,” and T. Gertler’s Elbowing the Seducer, which most believe is a roman à clef about Knopf editor Gordon Lish. Mr. Howard also named a movie—Bell, Book and Candle with Jimmy Stewart, Kim Novak and Jack Lemmon—and a play called Substance of a Fire, which is about “a family-owned publishing house and its patriarch, a man with many similarities to Roger Straus.”

Asked if he would ever consider writing his own memoir, Mr. Howard shot back immediately, “For God’s sakes, no.” 

“I have had some particular experiences with particular authors that might be worth essays,” he continued, “but unless one is of a stature of a Bob Gottlieb or Robert Giroux or Ted Solotaroff, say, an editor’s life would be strictly dullsville on the page.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

But recently Mr. Abate had become disenchanted with his job, which was set to expire at the end of 2007. A few weeks earlier, his bosses had offered to extend his contract for three more years. After mulling it over, Mr. Abate decided to reject their offer.

Now it was time to break the bad news.

Not long after arriving at the World Wide Plaza building on Eighth Avenue, Mr. Abate approached Esther Newberg, his longtime mentor and the head of ICM’s book division, and told her his final decision.

But what would he do next?

Mr. Abate said that he was hoping, at some point, to go to work for Endeavor, a rival talent agency that, like ICM, was based in Hollywood. Unlike ICM, however, Endeavor didn’t have an East coast literary division. At least, not yet.

Later that afternoon, he reported for work at Endeavor, to open up the first books division under super-agent (and Entourage inspiration) Ari Emanuel.

PUBLSHING FOLK—FROM AGENTS TO EDITORS to publicists—frequently seem to jump from house to house, firm to firm, without too much fanfare or consequence. But Mr. Abate’s departure from ICM was something different. Despite the fact that they have New York offices, ICM, like Endeavor, is fundamentally a Hollywood agency, and operates by Hollywood rules. Meaning: Leaving one for the other was seen as a cataclysmic betrayal. Accordingly, when he left ICM, the agency sued Mr. Abate, who managed to take 48 of his 50 clients with him to his new job.

As it happens, defecting from ICM is a time-honored tradition at Endeavor, which was formed, in fact, in 1995, when Ari Emanuel and several other agents walked away from ICM.

As Mr. Abate, who declined to comment for this article, would later testify in court, on that Friday morning in February, Ms. Newberg gave him some words of advice: Leave the building right now before L.A. wakes up. If you wait, they’ll escort you out with security guards. L.A. is going to be furious.

In geography and mind-set, culture and disposition, the worlds of New York book publishing and Hollywood moviemaking are far, far apart. (Think about how different the citizens of the two cities are, and multiply that by 10.) But increasingly, the two are colliding with one another. Authors, their agents and their publishers stand to make big money from film deals; more and more, novels are sold in pre-emptive deals to film-production companies before they’re even on the shelves. Of the many agencies in New York, just two—mega-agencies ICM and William Morris­—manage to represent clients in both worlds simultaneously: actors, screenwriters and directors in the brassy, ballsy world of Hollywood, as well as authors in the genteel, cerebral world of New York publishing.

During his decade at ICM, Mr. Abate belonged wholeheartedly to the latter camp. Still, he was Hollywood-savvy enough to be attractive to Mr. Emanuel, who courted him for the Endeavor job. It was practically a perfect match. The only surprise is that it took so long for the edgy agency to get in on the books end of the action.

According to his later testimony in court, Mr. Abate had long anticipated that ICM, which employed him for a decade, would fire him as soon as he turned down their contract extension. In case of that eventuality, for weeks he had been working on Career Plan B—setting up a new literary division for ICM’s Hollywood rival, Endeavor.

In the wake of his apparent dismissal, Mr. Abate moved fast. By the end of the day that Friday, he had set up a makeshift workspace in Endeavor’s New York offices in midtown. There, in a group conference room, he propped up a computer on a filing cabinet and got to work contacting his clients.

On March 5, Variety reported that Endeavor had hired Mr. Abate to set up the agency’s nascent East Coast literary division. By that point, the bulk of Mr. Abate’s former clients had reportedly followed him to Endeavor.

Around that time, Mr. Abate contacted his former office to see if they would send over all of the book proposals, novels and query letters that had been piling up in his absence. He was particularly worried about offending his nephew’s teacher, who had sent in a novel in progress. His former colleagues in the literary division obliged. In New York, collegiality prevailed.

Not so in L.A.

On March 7, two days after the piece in Variety, the ICM honchos in Hollywood filed a $10 million lawsuit against Mr. Abate in New York District Court, accusing him of breach of contract and seeking an injunction to prevent Mr. Abate from working for Endeavor until January 2008. In the complaint, the lawyers pointed out that prior to his employment at ICM, Mr. Abate had been working “as an assistant at a book publisher earning $20,000 a year.” In 2006, ICM paid Mr. Abate $225,000 plus an $85,000 year-end bonus.

WHILE ICM WAS BUSY DEFENDING THEIR TERRITORY in court, another one of their West Coast competitors was making plans to move in on the same market. In April, the Gersh talent agency announced that Phyllis Wender, a longtime New York–based literary agent, would be joining the firm to launch its first book division.

If Mr. Abate’s struggles to open up a book division for Endeavor show off everything that can go bitterly wrong when the New York publishing world gets tangled up with the Hollywood movie culture, then Ms. Wender’s move to Gersh demonstrates all of the potential upside of such cross-continental partnerships.

Ms. Wender, who was born in New York City and raised outside of Princeton, N.J., has deep roots in the New York publishing industry. In 1981, she co-founded an independent literary agency, called Rosenstone/Wender. Over the years, she built up a long, impressive roster of clients in the theater and book world, including the director Jack O’Brien, the novelist Amy Bloom, the actress and children’s-book writer Jamie Lee Curtis, and the estate of the late Wendy Wasserstein.

Overnight, by bringing Ms. Wender on board, Gersh established a formidable presence in New York. By teaming up with a well-connected L.A. agency, Ms. Wender can now offer her clients great access to screenwriting and directing opportunities in Hollywood.

Likewise, if Gersh clients (including studio actors and professional athletes) want to write a book, they can pass them along to the in-house New Y
orkers. Already, Gersh’s sports division has handed over one client to Ms. Wender’s division—namely the mixed-martial-arts fighter, former U.F.C. titleholder and budding author Randy Couture.

“The flow of information between Los Angeles and New York is incredibly useful,” said Ms. Wender. “And it goes both ways. It’s good for everybody involved.”

Unless, of course, it isn’t.

ON FRIDAY, MARCH 22, MR. ABATE trudged into a courtroom in lower Manhattan to square off against ICM lawyers at a hearing in front of Judge Peter K. Leisure.

Much of the acrimonious debate that followed more or less boiled down to one contested issue: Did Mr. Abate quit his job? Or was he fired?

During the hearing, under examination by ICM lawyer A. Michael Weber, Mr. Abate admitted that he had been in contact with Endeavor agents for months gauging their interest in forming a book division. Before turning down ICM’s offer, Mr. Abate said he spoke on several occasions to Nancy Josephson—a former colleague of Mr. Abate’s at ICM who had been fired in 2006 and subsequently joined Endeavor. “She said a lot of people there are book people,” said Mr. Abate.

“Your honor, let’s be candid here,” replied ICM’s Mr. Weber. “This wasn’t a friendly conversation about ‘Gee whillikers, aren’t books interesting?’”

About a week or two before he turned down ICM’s offer, Mr. Abate said, he had received a phone call at home from Ari Emanuel. Mr. Abate denied that Mr. Emanuel made him any specific job offer at the time. According to Mr. Abate, they had simply talked about Endeavor’s theoretical interest in books.

“Did you discuss going to the library together to get some books?” said Mr. Weber.

At one point, Mr. Abate rationalized his inability to remember specifics. “You don’t work as an agent,” said Mr. Abate. “But there’s a little joke among us called ‘agent’s brain’: We deal with hundreds of issues every day, and it’s really hard to remember anything.”

Eventually, like countless writers and actors before him, Judge Leisure lost patience with “agent’s brain.”

“You have to be careful,” the judge warned Mr. Abate. “Your lack of memory on things that were only 30 to 60 days before surprised me …. You’re wasting my time.”

Throughout the hearings, which lasted over two days, Mr. Abate continued to portray himself as a victim, a man who was caught up in the middle of a long-standing, acrimonious war between the L.A. offices of two rival companies; ICM’s legal team continued to portray him as an ungrateful employee who unlawfully broke his contract.

By the end of the hearings, Judge Leisure had rejected ICM’s request to prohibit Mr. Abate from working elsewhere. But as for the claim of damages, for the time being, the case remains in arbitration. The parties are due back in court later this year, on Nov. 15.

In the meantime, Mr. Abate is now working at Endeavor. In 2006, he co-wrote young-adult novel called The Taker, which he published under the pseudonym J.M. Steele. The Taker continues to be represented by ICM.