Earlier in the week Henry Kissinger came in with Jane Hartley (Ralph Schlosstein's lovely wife). I don't know what they were doing together, but they were holding hands. Then at the end of their lunch, Mr. Kissinger leaned over and said to me, "Can you please call Pete Peterson and tell him that I am having a very amorous lunch with Jane Hartley." They have some little joke going—they both love her. It was very amusing. Harold Ford Jr. was also eating with a married woman. He came in with Jerry Speyer's beautiful wife, Katherine Farley.

Thursday was all money. The whole financial world came—Larry Fink, Steve Schwarzman, Joe Perella, Ralph Schlosstein, Pete Peterson. The only person missing was the chief of Goldman Sachs! You basically don't need to seat anyone on days like that because they all automatically go to their own table. Steve Rattner was back from vacation. He looks better than ever, 10 years younger. I think it's because he's doing what he loves.

Matthew Bronfman ate with two gentlemen at a banquette on Friday, right next to Beth Rudin DeWoody, who was lunching with the brand-new president of the New School, David Van Zant. At a nearby table, former Goldman Sachs partner Henry Cornell dined with associates. He now operates a winery in Napa Valley. His wine is outstanding!

And Clinton crony Vernon Jordan dined with Don Marin. I don't know why President Obama didn't pick him for chief of staff. I would like to have a chief of staff like Vernon Jordan. Can you imagine how many attractive women there would be in the administration?

Julian Niccolini is the co-owner of the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan.

And now here comes Suzanne Hansen, an erstwhile lactation consultant and labor/delivery nurse and married mother of two who’s written a tell-all about her time (a couple of decades ago) as nanny for the former super-agent Mike Ovitz and his family. Her pretty, pink-covered, palm-tree-bedecked book mushes together two subgenres: the inexplicably unstoppable category of “assistant lit,” like The Devil Wears Prada; and the jaded Hollywood homily—hence the title, a reference to the late producer Julia Phillips’ big hit You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again (1991).

You’ll Never Nanny is scads less cynical—and far more lightweight—than its namesake. Ms. Hansen arrives in La-La Land as a wide-eyed adolescent from Cottage Grove, Ore. (“a cross between Dodge City in the 1800s and Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show”), having matriculated at the shabby Northwest Nannies Institute because she lacked career direction and, you know, always sorta liked baby-sitting. She’s a bit hung up on her hick of a high-school boyfriend, Ryan, and misses her “Norman Rockwell painting” upbringing—but she’s hungry to explore the glamour of Tinseltown. Imagine her surprise when she discovers the real seedy Los Angeles (a rite of passage for outsiders that’s perpetually diverting to us residents): Oh my God, what’s with all the mini-malls? Where are all the movie stars? How can you stand this … smog?

After a placement agency sends her on a few amusing false starts, Ms. Hansen lands what seems to be a dream gig with Mr. Ovitz, his wife, Judy, and their three children: a stubborn brat named Josh; an only slightly less stubborn brat, Amanda; and an adorable baby, Brandon, whose mother has seemingly never administered a 4 a.m. feeding nor followed through on a time-out. Unbelievably, the savvy power couple fails to draw up any sort of written contract for their new employee (was she paid off the books, one wonders? This was before Kimba Wood), an arrangement that leaves Ms. Hansen underpaid, dissatisfied, and scribbling feverishly and frequently into her diary—or “journaling” as she puts it—about life chez Ovitz, with one-liners like “Me working here is like trying to mix Metamucil in water—I never fully blend.” The savvy power couple also apparently neglected to draw up a nondisclosure agreement.

Like Bridget Jones and a flock of other scatty chick-lit heroines before her, Ms. Hansen has a remarkable tendency to get into scrapes—sometimes quite literally, as when she plunges headfirst down the slide of the family swimming pool during a stolen nighttime swim, hitting the bricks of the deck and “hurtling through the short length of the pool like a torpedo launched from a nuclear submarine,” ending up with a wound that demands eight stitches. Then there’s the time she borrows a housekeeper’s Chevy truck on the way to a game-show audition (only in L.A., kids) and ignores a parking-structure sign that reads “maximum clearance 8 feet 6 inches.” Or the time she trips hurrying to catch a flight out of Eugene, sending tampons and loose change and self spewing across the tarmac, to the raucous amusement of the waiting passengers.

The Ovitzes, meanwhile, come off as variously clueless (“How do you put him to bed?” asks Mrs. O. re Brandon); crass (she lets Josh pee on a front-lawn tree); cheap (though Disney head Michael Eisner proves even cheaper, sending stuffed Mickey and Minnie Mouses as an anniversary present); and downright cruel: “You make a good coat rack,” remarks the imperious employeress, piling ski paraphernalia on poor Suzy so the family can take a photo op sans nanny in Aspen, during a trip which leaves Ms. Hansen feeling like “the Griswolds’ Aunt Edna in Vacation.” Mr. O. emerges somewhat more sympathetically: worrying that his own kids don’t recognize him; impressing the impressionable Suzy with his wardrobe and unflappable mien (“his very being demands respect,” she “journals” a bit moonily, “maybe it’s because he’s always so impeccably dressed”); procuring her and a friend dinner reservations at Spago; and even occasionally taking her child-rearing wisdom seriously—to the intense displeasure of his wife, of course. One can’t help feeling that the young Ms. Hansen was something of a doormat for the overbearing Ovitzes. Why doesn’t she just quit? you wonder, again and again.

Eventually, she does quit. Predictably, Mr. O. threatens to make it impossible for her ever to work for an entertainment figure again, but she manages to find two more bearable posts: helping dedicated mommy Debra Winger (a staunch proponent of breastfeeding); then tending to the jolly brood of the diminutive duo Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman.

Ms. Hansen isn’t a bad writer. And thanks to her keen memory and nattering network of friends in the nannysphere, the book is full of celebrity cameos (Dustin Hoffman is cranky during a private movie screening! Tom Cruise, né Mapother, is nice on a phone call to an Ovitz child!), not to mention transparent blind items: Gee, wonder who “the daughter of a famous dead rock star and a certifiably crazy mother whose nanny actually wanted to adopt her because she feared for her safety when her mother was on a drug binge” might be? This stuff might have passed for delicious in the People-magazine era of 20 years ago, but at a time when gossip about the famous is measured and digested in gigabytes to the second, it feels about as fresh as warmed-over formula.

Alexandra Jacobs is features editor of The Observer.

And now here comes Suzanne Hansen, an erstwhile lactation consultant and labor/delivery nurse and married mother of two who’s written a tell-all about her time (a couple of decades ago) as nanny for the former super-agent Mike Ovitz and his family. Her pretty, pink-covered, palm-tree-bedecked book mushes together two subgenres: the inexplicably unstoppable category of “assistant lit,” like The Devil Wears Prada; and the jaded Hollywood homily—hence the title, a reference to the late producer Julia Phillips’ big hit You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again (1991).

You’ll Never Nanny is scads less cynical—and far more lightweight—than its namesake. Ms. Hansen arrives in La-La Land as a wide-eyed adolescent from Cottage Grove, Ore. (“a cross between Dodge City in the 1800s and Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show”), having matriculated at the shabby Northwest Nannies Institute because she lacked career direction and, you know, always sorta liked baby-sitting. She’s a bit hung up on her hick of a high-school boyfriend, Ryan, and misses her “Norman Rockwell painting” upbringing—but she’s hungry to explore the glamour of Tinseltown. Imagine her surprise when she discovers the real seedy Los Angeles (a rite of passage for outsiders that’s perpetually diverting to us residents): Oh my God, what’s with all the mini-malls? Where are all the movie stars? How can you stand this … smog?

After a placement agency sends her on a few amusing false starts, Ms. Hansen lands what seems to be a dream gig with Mr. Ovitz, his wife, Judy, and their three children: a stubborn brat named Josh; an only slightly less stubborn brat, Amanda; and an adorable baby, Brandon, whose mother has seemingly never administered a 4 a.m. feeding nor followed through on a time-out. Unbelievably, the savvy power couple fails to draw up any sort of written contract for their new employee (was she paid off the books, one wonders? This was before Kimba Wood), an arrangement that leaves Ms. Hansen underpaid, dissatisfied, and scribbling feverishly and frequently into her diary—or “journaling” as she puts it—about life chez Ovitz, with one-liners like “Me working here is like trying to mix Metamucil in water—I never fully blend.” The savvy power couple also apparently neglected to draw up a nondisclosure agreement.

Like Bridget Jones and a flock of other scatty chick-lit heroines before her, Ms. Hansen has a remarkable tendency to get into scrapes—sometimes quite literally, as when she plunges headfirst down the slide of the family swimming pool during a stolen nighttime swim, hitting the bricks of the deck and “hurtling through the short length of the pool like a torpedo launched from a nuclear submarine,” ending up with a wound that demands eight stitches. Then there’s the time she borrows a housekeeper’s Chevy truck on the way to a game-show audition (only in L.A., kids) and ignores a parking-structure sign that reads “maximum clearance 8 feet 6 inches.” Or the time she trips hurrying to catch a flight out of Eugene, sending tampons and loose change and self spewing across the tarmac, to the raucous amusement of the waiting passengers.

The Ovitzes, meanwhile, come off as variously clueless (“How do you put him to bed?” asks Mrs. O. re Brandon); crass (she lets Josh pee on a front-lawn tree); cheap (though Disney head Michael Eisner proves even cheaper, sending stuffed Mickey and Minnie Mouses as an anniversary present); and downright cruel: “You make a good coat rack,” remarks the imperious employeress, piling ski paraphernalia on poor Suzy so the family can take a photo op sans nanny in Aspen, during a trip which leaves Ms. Hansen feeling like “the Griswolds’ Aunt Edna in Vacation.” Mr. O. emerges somewhat more sympathetically: worrying that his own kids don’t recognize him; impressing the impressionable Suzy with his wardrobe and unflappable mien (“his very being demands respect,” she “journals” a bit moonily, “maybe it’s because he’s always so impeccably dressed”); procuring her and a friend dinner reservations at Spago; and even occasionally taking her child-rearing wisdom seriously—to the intense displeasure of his wife, of course. One can’t help feeling that the young Ms. Hansen was something of a doormat for the overbearing Ovitzes. Why doesn’t she just quit? you wonder, again and again.

Eventually, she does quit. Predictably, Mr. O. threatens to make it impossible for her ever to work for an entertainment figure again, but she manages to find two more bearable posts: helping dedicated mommy Debra Winger (a staunch proponent of breastfeeding); then tending to the jolly brood of the diminutive duo Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman.

Ms. Hansen isn’t a bad writer. And thanks to her keen memory and nattering network of friends in the nannysphere, the book is full of celebrity cameos (Dustin Hoffman is cranky during a private movie screening! Tom Cruise, né Mapother, is nice on a phone call to an Ovitz child!), not to mention transparent blind items: Gee, wonder who “the daughter of a famous dead rock star and a certifiably crazy mother whose nanny actually wanted to adopt her because she feared for her safety when her mother was on a drug binge” might be? This stuff might have passed for delicious in the People- magazine era of 20 years ago, but at a time when gossip about the famous is measured and digested in gigabytes to the second, it feels about as fresh as warmed-over formula.

Alexandra Jacobs is features editor of The Observer.

However, now in the quiet lull of a Thursday evening, a couple things must be shared:

· The Transom must point out that this week's Nikki Finke column on Mike Ovitz's art collection as a way to learn everything you need to know about Mr. Ovitz is freaking brilliant. (It also tells you everything you need to know about what a completely shitty industry art dealing is--witness Mike Ovitz trying to cheat $20K off the price of a painting that he'd then take four months to pay for. Classic.) God bless ya, Ms. Finke.

· This week, New York was host to the Country Music Awards, and The Transom studiously ignored the myriad events that splattered on the city. Friend of The Transom, Campbell "Boldface" Robertson, hit the nail on the head this week:

· The Transom has also noticed that Manhattan parties suffer from fools' need to overdocument. Does no one trust the written word any longer? No?

And now, camera-less, The Transom must go follow Rosario Dawson to a party. It is our lot in life.

— Choire Sicha

His frost-n-tipped Allman Brothers mane had matured into a short and bristly Kenny Rogers; the bouncer beard was tamed to a pale goatee. Those hairy-chest Hawaiian shirts had been discarded three years ago with his worn-out existence in Malibu; today he was wearing a sensible thermal pullover more befitting a burgher of Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

Barely visible above his collar was a five-inch scar, a fault line in that ruddy football-coach neck. In March 2001, Joe Eszterhas was diagnosed with throat cancer. It was now or perhaps never to release Hollywood Animal (Alfred A. Knopf), a 736-page monster truck of a memoir that lumbers into bookstores this week.

His four-pack-a day devotion to Salem Ultra Lights had cost Mr. Eszterhas, 59, most of his larynx. He was lucky he wasn't drinking his carrot juice through a tube in his stomach. The demon cells were in remission-for the time being: "My doctor, a very honest man, told me everything is absolutely fine, but with this particular kind of cancer, you could have a lump on your neck and be dead in six months."

In the 80's and much of the 90's, Mr. Eszterhas was Hollywood's best-paid screenwriter, sometimes receiving more cash for a script than the film's director, who would usually find himself in a back-alley brawl with Mr. Eszterhas over their unshared vision. Some of these movies were hits. Some weren't. One could count on seeing cartons of militantly smoked cigarettes, plenty of on-the-job hanky-panky and, in his late-period panty movies, ruttish lesbians and multiple grand-mal orgasms. "You like to play games, don't you?" was a line that Mr. Eszterhas wrang out of his Olivetti manual more than once. Plots usually twisted around people who were not what they appeared to be.

By the time he packed up and left Hollywood, he'd seen an astonishing 15 films reach the screen. He'd sold several other scripts for crazy money. One went for $3 million, another for $3.7 million and yet another for $4.7 million, he tells us in the first 11 pages, before his story has even left the runway. He doodled the plot for a $4 million movie, One Night Stand , on the back of a cocktail napkin. (And then Mike Figgis came along. Mike Figgis! A man who wore a beret to the Golden Globes! Mr. Figgis spat his own words into the $4 million cocktail-napkin movie, writes Mr. Eszterhas, and ruined it for everybody.)

But it was Showgirls, 1995's stripper satyricon, with its oceans of sticky lip gloss, Scissorhands nail extensions and bottles of Cristal bursting in air, that Mr. Eszterhas would never live down. The movie's rapist rock star, Andrew Carver, even looked something like the film's author. The reviews were vicious; people wondered what Joe Eszterhas was smoking.

"From the time director Paul Verhoeven and I read the script," he patiently explained at the Four Seasons, "we were laughing our heads off at certain things. Somehow, people thought it was a very serious drama that had turned into inadvertent comedy. But there was always a lot of humor in the piece. I don't understand how it's not obvious that a line, like, you know, 'How does it feel not to have anyone coming on you anymore?' is funny. It was meant to be a funny line. It was a funny line." He laughed easily-a roll-bellied heh-heh-heh .

In one of many paragraphs in the book spent wresting his reputation from this tar baby, he suggests that too many tokes of Maui wowie had informed the creative process. As for his alleged misogyny, he claims Gloria Steinem approached him after Showgirls to write a film on the young Marilyn Monroe.

How insufferable was I? he asks several times in the course of the book's introduction. The answer is all too apparent, but he clearly prides himself on the carbo-loaded particulars: the Concorde tickets, the "A-list pussy" that rubbed up against his leg, the 2,000 fan letters a week, the T-shirt he wore to meetings that read, "My inner child is a mean little fuck." Mr. Eszterhas' movies grossed more than $1 billion, so he comes by his bragging rights honestly. Still, one can't help but wonder if it was merely an accident of geography that neighbor Bob Dylan's mastiffs often chose to relieve themselves in front of his Point Dume house.

The scorekeeping continues. "For two and a half years, I've had gallons of carrot juice, and my doctor says he's never seen the kind of tissue regeneration that he sees in my case," he croaked. The waiter went to fetch a pot of hot water, antifreeze for Mr. Eszterhas' still-stunned pipes. This morning, there were things on his mind that would no longer go without saying. The operation had left him sounding more don't-screw-with-me than ever.

The way Mr. Eszterhas writes about Hollywood's own tricky peristalsis, it makes you wonder how anything halfway decent ever falls out the back end. Mr. Eszterhas' stories may date from a pre-Ashton-and-Demi era, but like classic-DVD rentals, they still hold up.

There are the actors insisting their characters have a redemptive arc. The female leads forced to pass every studio's "But would you want to fuck her?" test. The grip who dared to suggest to Mr. Eszterhas a fix for the last scene of Betrayed and got socked in the stomach. A quick cameo features a dentist who is a studio head's only trusted pair of eyes-that is, until the dentist drops dead of a heart attack and the studio head's lucky green light goes on the blink forever. Mr. Eszterhas said it's a true story and reached for some Hollywood lore: "People were always saying Michael Eisner's wife had a gynecologist who would read the comedies, and his own doctor would read the dramas."

"I'm a writer. I use people for what I write," Catherine Tramell snarls in the nympho-brainiac thriller Basic Instinct . "Let the world beware." In Mr. Eszterhas' book, Norman Jewison leaves an unsealed envelope in the young Eszterhas' bedroom so he can get a load of all the zeroes on the director's bank statement. Sylvester Stallone tries to heist the credit for writing F.I.S.T. , then objects to being killed off in the script. Glenn Close bans the wild-boar producer of Jagged Edge from witnessing her carefully lighted sex scene. Michael Douglas bloodies Paul Verhoeven's nose on the set of Basic Instinct (or so Mr. Eszterhas' spies report). The late director Richard Marquand has a one-night stand at the Westwood Marquis and wakes up alone, in handcuffs.

Robert Evans is the book's dotty old uncle in a bolo tie, shoving a huge dildo out the car window on his way to rehab. He weeps when a check he's written to Mike Ovitz is returned to sender, ripped into tiny pieces. He uses a naked actress-slash-model-slash-courier to deliver his thank-you notes. Mr. Evans complains about Charles Michener, the Princeton-grad ghostwriter of his autobiography: "He uses the word 'vagina' all the time," moans the priapic producer. "I've never used that word in my life. Now I've got to go back and change all of Michener's vaginas to my cunts ."

Somewhat perversely, there's no index in the back to track the numerous dramatis personae, but if there were, Sharon Stone's entry would read something like this:

Stone, Sharon, 9

Frankenstein-monster creation of, 23, 303, 337, 401

one-night stand with, 27-28, 337-339, 364, 447

in Basic Instinct 's pubic-hair scene, 35-36, 553-554

scratching and clawing for parts and, 302

Michael Douglas and one-upmanship of, 299

Bob Evans' hatred of, 340-341

Ayn Rand and organic healing and, 402

past-life regression views on, 399, 402

married-men seduction of, 9, 27-28, 337-339, 397-403,

407-409, 411-414, 417-499, 422-423, 444, 447, 478-479,

510, 514- 515, 519-520, 528

Mr. Eszterhas cheated on his first wife with Ms. Stone, among others, including the daughter of Ohio governor (now Senator) George Voinovich. But his attentions are mostly glue-gunned to Ms. Stone, portrayed as the most manipulative Cleopatra since Liz Taylor, a queen of the vile. It was on the set of Sliver that Ms. Stone took up with Bill Macdonald, one of Mr. Eszterhas' married producer friends who worked with Bob Evans. Then Mr. Eszterhas left his wife of 24 years for Mr. Macdonald's pretty young wife, Naomi. The tabloids damn near combusted.

He and Naomi now have four little boys. But Mr. Eszterhas likes her to come along on his business trips; she stopped by the table on her way out of the hotel, good cheer illuminating her wide-open face, her hay-colored hair flipped up at the ends. "Naomi and I had an operating principal when we began the book," Mr. Eszterhas said, "which was: If it's true and it happened, let's not hide it. Let's be very up-front about it, even if it doesn't make us look very good." Lengthy outtakes from her own well-tended diary chronicle the collapse of her marriage and the domino crumble of his (that is, when she's not practically videotaping the outrageous antics over at Bob Evans' pad).

"It's a very interesting point of view-a woman's voice right in the middle of my book," said Mr. Eszterhas, very genuinely. "I love the fact that this love story will live forever and our grandchildren will read it, you know?"

Perhaps it's for the benefit of Naomi-the woman he calls his "one true love"-that he decides to reheat a Sharon Stone tale from American Rhapsody , his part-memoir, part-fictionalized 2000 book about Hollywood and Bill Clinton. As viewed again in the mirrored ceiling of his memory, the single night he spent romancing Ms. Stone was now traumatic. There was Thai grass, there was way too much Cristal, and there was much roistering around an ornate dollhouse she kept on the floor of her living room. "It's a Southern Gothic image," Mr. Eszterhas told me, not wanting to say any more-as if there was much more to say. In Hollywood Animal , he suddenly drops that Ms. Stone's body was doughy, like she'd eaten one too many peanut-butter sandwiches.

At the end of the evening, when he shambled back to his hotel suite- where George Voinovich's daughter awaited him! -he now says he felt "underpaid" (though he charitably allows that most screenwriters would have felt overwhelmed). Also new to this book is the bonus detail that Ms. Stone then telephoned, sweaty and scared: She thought she'd heard the burglar alarm and went sprinting down the street with a butcher's knife.

"One of the things that I love about writing books is that I really did get tired of fighting. It's not a healthy way to live," said Mr. Eszterhas. But Hollywood Animal shows that he still has some of the Hun in him.

Mr. Eszterhas liked to approach the studios with an original, already finished screenplay, called a spec. "I love writing specs because there's less of a chance, frankly, that everybody will piss in it," he said. "A spec is almost as close as you can get to a fait accompli. If they like it, they will be in a hurry to make it, and if they are in a hurry to make it, there's less of a chance that 10 development people and the director and the stars are all going to have ideas on how to redo it."

Other screenwriters were far more accommodating, he felt. Namely Bill Goldman and Ron Bass, who "rewrote Barry Morrow's Rain Man and earned a secondhand ricocheting Oscar," Mr. Eszterhas says in his book. These other screenwriters are like hookers, Mr. Eszterhas writes over and over again. Except Charlie Kaufman. Still: "I wouldn't go out of my way to look at his stuff," Mr. Eszterhas muttered at the Four Seasons. He also drew a distinction between those who butter-churned original scripts and those who merely banged out adaptations: "It's very much 'Dennis Lehane's Mystic River ' to me, you know?" he said. "I resent those critics who make it a film by Clint Eastwood and never mention Lehane and talk about how good Clint's writing was. It's not true. It's wrong."

Mr. Eszterhas spends a lot of time in the book unloading a tractor trailer of sometimes-interesting excuses and mea culpas : He even apologizes for using so many limos (the cabbies, he said, were always troubling him to read their scripts).

He fidgeted with his blunt silver knife, pitching and rolling it in those roast-beef fists like a size-XXL joint. The days were gone when he carried a big buck blade like the one he jabbed into the table at meetings when he was a reporter at Rolling Stone . "Smokers need to do something with their hands," he explained.

Today, he said, producers were now merely servants for the studio, and in many cases for the stars, too.

"There are fewer real original characters. People like [ Jagged Edge 's producer] Marty Ransohoff would go storming into a studio head's office and say, 'You stupid motherfucker, you are not doing this!'" he said. "They've all been replaced by these mealy-mouthed, namby-pamby, scared-shitless executives."

Oh, for the days of Mike Ovitz! Read all about Mr. Eszterhas' 1989 exit from CAA, when he decided to dump Mr. Ovitz-who, it must be noted, didn't take it very well. "My foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard each day will blow your brains out," he told Mr. Eszterhas, who managed to sneak these battle plans to the press and eat lunch in that town again. In 2002, Mike Ovitz told Vanity Fair that he blamed the "gay mafia" for kneecapping his own career. Mr. Eszterhas said he wasn't surprised by the choice of words.

"If you leave, you're going to make my agents look like faggots," Mr. Eszterhas claimed Mr. Ovitz told him in their infamous 1989 exchange.

When the droid of a super-agent came meeching around afterward, Mr. Eszterhas instructed his then-wife to hang up on him. He'd already written Mr. Ovitz an "I am not an asset; I am a human being" letter. Mr. Ovitz wrote back, identifying himself as a "sensitive" soft-candy-center guy who only wished Joe the best.

Of course, he didn't really .

Late one night, Mr. Eszterhas writes, the phone rang. It was a mutual friend. "Michael is crazy with this stuff," said the voice. "Watch your driving, check the brakes of your car, see if you're being followed." Producer Don Simpson advised him to check into different hotels under an assumed name when the writer was business-tripping through Los Angeles. Make sure your booze is opened where you can see it, Don said. Mr. Eszterhas writes of death threats and, in the driveway, a San Francisco–appropriate horse's head: A bandanna printed with skulls and bones came wrapped around his Chronicle . The moment he mentioned to someone in CAA's orbit that he was on the verge of talking to 60 Minutes , he claims in the book, those death threats dried up.

"In terms of karma, Mike Ovitz treated a lot of people very badly," Mr. Eszterhas observed darkly.

Mr. Eszterhas seemed untroubled by the state of his own karma. American Rhapsody , a ranty groin-kick directed at Bill Clinton, was a best-seller for seven weeks in 2000. Rush Limbaugh read several pages on the air. Mr. Eszterhas mentioned that Vernon Jordan, impudently labeled the "Ace of Spades," left a message on his machine just to say "thank you." Mr. Eszterhas was at the Democratic Convention when Bill Richardson, the onetime ambassador to the U.N. and President Clinton's Secretary of Energy, strolled up to him outside the green room.

"You're a good man," Mr. Richardson said.

"I was like, 'Jesus, what's he thinking?'" Mr. Eszterhas remembered, shaking his head in disbelief. "And then he said, 'No, I really mean it.' So clearly there were some people around Clinton who liked the book."

Mr. Eszterhas was sure the Clintons would divorce when Bill left office.

"I hope that, on a human level, they're not living a hypocrisy," he said. "They are, however, both political animals. But I hope there's a real partnership there, and that it's not all an act." He's convinced Hillary Clinton will run in 2008. "It'll be a sensational race- great theater! " he growled.

But would he- could he -vote for her? His last book pegged her as an earnest crypto-lesbian (and not even a horny one) who liked to scream and throw things. "It would depend on who she's running against," he said. The cup of hot water scraped its saucer uncomfortably. "No. Eh. But. There are a great many things I like about Hillary and a great many things that frighten me. She was an absolute orthodox, dogmatic true believer in her younger years, in her doctrinaire liberal politics. True believers of the left or the right put me off."

Relocated to Ohio, Mr. Eszterhas has quite the unique perspective on things. "I would love to do something that really captures Midwesterners. They are the flyover people. They are the real Americans. They are the reason George W. Bush is President. And they are the reason he will be overwhelmingly re-elected," he said.

Mr. Eszterhas' last production was 1997's Burn Hollywood Burn , a home-movie-ish satire that incinerated at the box office. And surely these books of his weren't pumping his West Coast Q-rating. Mr. Eszterhas had considered this. "My old agent Guy McElwaine was right when he said the town runs on greed," he said. "Everyone knows that one day I might sit down and write another spec script that's gonna be a $200 million hit movie. This is Hollywood; people know they may need each other again." People like Paramount head Sherry Lansing, who cherrypicked 1995's Jade for her out-of-work director husband, William Friedkin, and then drove the project into a ditch-or so Mr. Eszterhas writes.

"Besides, I worked for nearly 30 years in Hollywood," said Mr. Eszterhas. "I know an awful lot about an awful lot of people. Those people won't consider this book a tell-all." He's still having dinner with Ms. Lansing and Mr. Friedkin.

But amid Hollywood Animal 's stomping and snorting, it's easy to be distracted from the other half of the book, housing a deeply felt immigrant tale.

"It's a kind of love story about my father," said Mr. Eszterhas, who had just been born in Hungary when his parents found themselves trying to survive on pine-needle soup in Europe's refugee camps. His parents were Catholic; his father had been a writer and Hungarian nationalist, and had changed his name from Kreisz to the more Hungarian-sounding Eszterhas. His mother, the daughter of a tavernkeeper, was painfully shy. "The notion that she would have to hear people arguing or making love in the camps must have been the most brutal kind of violation," said Mr. Eszterhas.

After the family docked in Cleveland, his mother had a breakdown when he was 13, apparently suffering from schizophrenia. "One of the most painful things for me was that she would be yelling and very aggressive and hostile. And then she would be very cold and not aggressive and hostile. And then, suddenly, she'd be a friendly and warm and loving mother," he said. His parents kept to themselves even as he rejected violin lessons, eagerly embracing America and Chuck Berry and "bazball." But he was never not an outsider, this kid who was bullied at his parochial schools. A nun threatened him with a Coca-Cola bottle and he knocked her to the ground.

Later in life came the unexpected plot twist. In 1990, a year after the release of Music Box , a moving film about a Hungarian immigrant accused of war crimes, his own 83-year-old father, who edited a tiny Hungarian newspaper in the States, was suddenly under investigation by the Department of Justice for wartime activity in Hungary's Ministry of Propaganda. Mr. Eszterhas discovered that his father had actually fled the old country for fear that he would be prosecuted as a war criminal. A book his father had written long ago, the one his father had always said he wished he had a copy of- that was the one in which he'd called Jews "parasites" on the body politic. His rosary-twisting mother had literally been a card-carrying member of the country's foremost anti-Semitic political party, the Arrow Cross.

This kind of great theater Mr. Eszterhas could have done without.

For the rest of his father's life, Mr. Eszterhas could hardly bear to be around him. His dad hung on for a time, his only companions the nurses his son paid for.

"I've never really been to Hungary," Mr. Eszterhas said. "I was so charged up to be an American. But I think I want to go now." Maybe the thing he's proudest of in the book, he said, is that here, his father will always be alive. "I had to come to the point where I was at the most vulnerable that I'd ever been in my own life to forgive him."

On his doctor's advice, Mr. Eszterhas said he'd also quit drinking. "I was a really terrible, bad, totally functioning alcoholic," he said. He is quick to point out that he never staggered. Still, he said he was "one of those people who were maybe born in need of two drinks, and that became worse with the pressures of a divorce and with movies and with living there ."

After the operation, Mr. Eszterhas found himself unable to write for a year and a half. Writing was just too yoked to "sipping" and smoking. "Both of these things were so central to my conception of myself, I thought I might be powerless without them," he said. "I was terrified. I'm still terrified." He now walks several miles a day to tire himself out, ease the cravings. "Naomi and I used to have these wonderful lengthy dinners. We'd watch the news, and we'd have two or three bottles of wine. All that changed. Dinner became 20 minutes. We changed our lives inside out, you know?"

Mr. Eszterhas now feels clear-eyed. Lucid. "There's a kind of peace I never had before," he said. His editor at Knopf, Peter Gethers, confirmed this newfound calm. "For one thing, he can't yell any more. Even when he gets angry and threatens to kill me when I try to cut several hundred pages, it's not the same."

Mr. Eszterhas has also rediscovered God. That heavy silver ring on his knuckle has the flash of a rhinestone cross. The credits were now rolling, but not before Joe Eszterhas had found his own redemptive arc.

Those blessed with the genius to recognize that everything in the world can be divided into two categories.

And everybody else.

Now admittedly, some might call this labeling naïve, simplistic and ridiculous.

But for me, it accurately reflects the bifurcated history of civilization on our march to enlightenment:

In the beginning, God divided the light from the darkness.

Then, Moses parted the Red Sea. After that, CNN begat Crossfire , Bill Clinton addressed the great boxer-versus-briefs divide, hip-hop split into East Coast and West Coast camps, and-before you knew it-the M.T.A. established E-ZPass lanes at our major bridge and tunnel crossings.

Such is progress in our civilization: slow, steady and always divisive.

As we all know, a little over a year ago, George W. Bush-he of the Republican Red states (as opposed to the Democratic Blue)-divided the world once again, this time into "Good" versus "Evil."

Now, personally, I have no quarrel with most of these vital and imperative cultural distinctions: In vs. Out. Renter vs. Owner. Beatles vs. Stones. Windows vs. Mac. Time vs. Newsweek . Window vs. Aisle. Summer people vs. Year-rounders. Paris vs. Milan. Manolo Blahnik vs. Jimmy Choo. Token vs. MetroCard. And the all-telling French fries vs. a side of tomatoes.

But it occurs to me that, as we approach the first anniversaries of Sept. 11 and then Enron, an entirely new set of categories is in order. Because it seems to me that the world can now be divided into two completely different kinds of people:

Those who rise to a challenge with the words "Let's roll."

And those who answer a call from on high-usually in the form of a judge or a federal prosecutor-with the words "Not guilty."

Sam Waksal? "Not guilty."

Martha Stewart? "Not guilty."

Don Rumsfeld, the Fire Department of New York, Janet Reno, J. Lo and MSNBC's Jerry Nachman? "Let's roll."

Yes, friends, bear with me here. Because I'm talking about something higher than truth, higher than wisdom, higher than the highest closing price of AOL before the Time Warner merger.

I'm talking about people who, when they get caught red-handed, refuse to take responsibility for the kind of nonsense they knew they shouldn't have been trying to get away with the first place.

Dick (Halliburton) Cheney? "Not guilty."

John (Bill of Rights) Ashcroft? "Not guilty."

Hillary ("It would be illegal to accept those gifts of furniture and china once I've been sworn in, so make sure your checks are dated before Dec. 31") Clinton? "Never guilty."

Bill Clinton? "I suppose that depends on what your definition of 'not' and 'guilty' is. Meanwhile, let's roll, babe."

Yes, my friends, what I'm talking about here is something worse than narcissism, worse than hubris, worse than the self-deluded bombast that passes for good publicity today:

I'm talking about people, places and things with no apparent moral compass, and no sense of right or wrong-as opposed to those with an inner global-positioning system that always finds true north.

The entire kingdom of Saudi Arabia? "Not guilty."

New Jersey Senator Bob ("Make that a 40-regular") Torricelli? "Not guilty."

The parents who let their preteen daughters appear in that insanely inappropriate Sunday Times Magazine fashion spread last August? "Not guilty." In this post–JonBenét Ramsey era, just how striving, how grasping, how starved for attention are you?

New York State? "Let's roll." New Jersey? "Let's roll." Florida, Nevada and Delaware? "Not guilty."

Every S.U.V. on every road in America? "Not guilty."

Microsoft: "Not guilty." AOL: "Not guilty." Merrill Lynch: "Not guilty." Arthur Andersen: "Not guilty." Bear Stearns: "Not guilty." The Red Cross: "Not guilty." The United Way: "Not guilty." Apple, Home Depot, American Airlines and Costco: "Let's roll."

Yes, my friends, let me be clear. What I'm really talking about here is the new definition of weaselhood in America.

Ken Lay? "Not guilty." Jeff Skilling? "Not guilty." Andrew Fastow, Jack Grubman, Peter Bacanovic, Bernie Ebbers, Alfred Taubman, Dennis Kozlowski, Gary Winnick, Richard Grasso and the Rigas family? "Not guilty, not guilty, not guilty."

Cardinal Law of Boston? "Not guilty." Cardinal Egan of New York? "Not guilty." Cardinal Mahoney of L.A.? "Not guilty."

Jean Marie Messier? Mike Ovitz? "Not guilty." Edgar Bronfman Jr.? "Clueless."

The trustees of our art museums, who put Messrs. Messier, Ovitz and Kozlowski on their boards? "Not guilty."

Terry ("I made $18 million on Global Crossing, but I'm preachin' populism now") McAuliffe? "Not guilty."

Al ("No controlling legal authority") Gore? "Not guilty." I mean, did you read his New York Times Op-Ed piece, decrying "those who believed they were entitled to govern because of their station in life"? Oh, please. If you're going to go this route, at least have the grace to say, "As a child of privilege, I know what it was like to be treated better than others-and it was wrong."

Dan Rather? "Let's roll." Tom Brokaw? "Let's roll." Peter Jennings? "Hmmm. What did Rather and Brokaw say?"

All five boroughs of New York City? "Let's roll." Chicago? "Let's roll." Cleveland? Detroit? "Let's roll." Seattle, Phoenix and Santa Monica? "Umm. Not guilty."

Amagansett? "Not guilty." Wainscott? "Not guilty." Sagaponack? "Not guilty." Hampton Bays? "Let's roll."

The Boss-Springsteen-is obviously a "let's roll" kind of guy. But Bono is way too preening to be anything but "not guilty."

Noam Chomsky? "We're all guilty." Phil Donahue? "What do you mean by 'guilt'? Do we really need to roll?" And wouldn't MSNBC have been smarter to challenge Bill O'Reilly with Brian Williams-hard news-rather than another chattering head, particularly one who voted for Ralph Nader and opposed our action in Afghanistan?

Yasir Arafat is not guilty. France is never guilty. The United Nations? The vote was 188 to 1, not guilty.

Winona Ryder? Not guilty-at press time. Lizzie Grubman? A plea bargain.

All forms of professional sports? Nobody's ever guilty of anything. And what about the first set of proposals for rebuilding a certain 16 acres in lower Manhattan? A little too much "not guilty," and not nearly enough "let's roll."

So where, you ask, does your diarist fit into all this? Not guilty? Let's roll? Personally, I've always believed that discretion is the better part of valor. So I leave you with these two words: No comment.

first television appearance on the Charlie Rose show on Jan. 23, he talked a

lot about his father. His dad, he said was one of the top three influences in

his life. The other two were show business visionaries, MCA founder Lew

Wasserman, and late Warner Bros. chairman Steve Ross, so that said a lot.

Mr. Ovitz's father was a wholesale liquor salesman who, as he

told Mr. Rose "covered the chain store accounts." Ordinarily, it wouldn't be

worth noting were it not for the seemingly penitential tone of Mr. Ovitz's

appearance, which has entertainment executives on both coasts talking.

No one has referred to Mr. Ovitz as the most powerful man in

Hollywood for some time now. Though his management group, AMG, which represents

Cameron Diaz, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio continues to thrive, Mr.

Ovitz's attempts to branch out into television production and to catch the

broadband wireless network wave have fizzled. But though he didn't dwell too

much on the present state of his affairs-except to say that he was doing fine

financially-Mr. Ovitz did tiptoe through the lowlights and regrets of his

career in an effort to adjust his image from superman to human. "I must say

that in my early years, I was incredibly aggressive," he told Mr. Rose. "I was

working as hard as I could to build a business, to try to dominate a business.

And I probably irritated a lot of people."

There it was. Hardly an epiphany, but the timing was right. In

the wake of our national agony, Mr. Ovitz, and, yes, Tina Brown before him-two

people driven to put their fingers to the wind-had to figure that this city,

this nation were in a conciliatory mood. Stand up. Embrace your failure. Submit

to its purifying properties. You will be forgiven-and, if you're lucky-reborn.

There was something vaguely Bill W. about Mr. Ovitz's

performance, as if he was taking part in some 12-step program that required him

to apologize to the people he'd hurt in his life.

"Having trained myself for 30

years as an aggressive, insensitive agent," Mr. Ovitz said that he was now

"pushing like crazy to change."

Mr. Ovitz didn't exactly bare his heart or beg for forgiveness

and he spent a lot of time defending his actions, but he did imply that he and

Disney chief executive Michael Eisner, who fell out after Mr. Ovitz's

disastrous stint as Disney's number two, were trying to patch things up.

But he left little doubt that

the situation between him and his former friend and C.A.A. partner, Ron Meyer,

who currently runs Universal's movie studio, was hopeless. Likening the end of

their friendship to "a divorce" and "a huge hole in my life," Mr. Ovitz

admitted, in the end, "I think that he was just one of the people that I was

insensitive to."

It was fascinating to watch

Mr. Ovitz, gap-toothed and visibly nervous, do his television act of

contrition, but, ultimately, there aren't too many of Mr. Ovitz's colleagues

who are buying it. And this is, perhaps, where the influence of Mr. Ovitz's

father comes in.

Mr. Ovitz's attempts to atone for his sins failed because he sold

his apology wholesale when he should have taken it door to door. He should have

appointed himself the Fuller Brush Man of remorse, and expressed himself

privately and personally, not over the distant medium of television.

The number of men and women in show business that Mr. Ovitz has

angered-as important and self-reverential as they are-is not enough to register

with Nielsen. So when Mr. Ovitz went on a national-albeit boutique-television

program to catalog his faint regrets, it was apparent that something strategic

was afoot here.

"It was like watching Nixon," said one entertainment industry

executive who knows Mr. Ovitz. "Sweaty lip and all."

And some of those suspicions were confirmed when, on Jan. 24,

former Columbia Pictures chief Mark Canton was announced as the new chairman of

Artists Production Group, the movie-producing sister company of A.M.G.-even if

the deal feels a little like Moe Howard hiring Larry Fine.

Watching Mr. Ovitz recount

his good friend and client, Michael ( E/R )

Crichton's advice that ``The only way to really learn something is to have

failed" felt a little like watching yesterday's news-because it was! Ms. Brown

had just spent the previous week, in the wake of Talk magazine's demise, dispensing similar pearls of S&M

wisdom.

Still, it's hard to dismiss Mr. Ovitz's intentions as entirely

calculating. He did tell Mr. Rose that he had lost his father a year ago. Even

for a Hollywood ninja, that is a life-altering event, and Mr. Ovitz said that

the experience had made him look "at my life through his eyes and what he

brought to his family and what his legacy was, which was really my brother and

myself."

As for his own legacy, the man who co-founded the formidable

Creative Artists Agency said it is "not going to be about having been the most

powerful man in Hollywood for 10 years because, frankly, that was fun but it

wasn't particularly relevant to me socially or...charitably. The legacy for me

is going to be my three kids, the UCLA Medical Center," to which Mr. Ovitz had

pledged $25 million, "and hopefully, having built a couple of companies from

scratch and-and leaving them in good hands."

There were other moments that seemed genuine, too. When Mr. Rose

asked Mr. Ovitz: "How are you different today than you were at the height of

the power of CAA"? Mr. Ovitz said he'd just had the same conversation with his

21-year-old son.

"I tried to explain to him errors that I made in my career and

things that I thought that I did were good. And on the error side, a lot of it

had to do with immaturity and with insensitivity and with an agenda of wanting

to get out of what I called "the valley.''

"San Fernando Valley," Mr. Rose said.

"Yeah. I grew up in the

valley, and I just wanted to make something of myself. And I had a lot of

ideas, and I wanted to do things.…And in order to do that, I pushed really

hard."

That sounded real. Unfortunately, Mr. Ovitz's comment that he and

his family "play Ozzie and Harriet" on the weekends did not. And why is it that

entertainment moguls always profess their human frailty when they're on the

skids?

There was also something hinky about Mr. Ovitz's attempts to

bring to light his philanthropic side, perhaps because it's the one thing that

the natural-born killers of the corporate world try to dredge up when they're

trying to look human.

Mr. Rose did his part to shill on that front-after all, Mr. Ovitz

had chosen to wear the stubble shirt on his program. In his wiry Southern

gentleman's voice, he told his television audience that Mr. Ovitz's "friends

want you to know that there is another side that is not seen and not told, a

family man who's a superb art collector and generous in charity."

Then Mr. Rose asked: "What is it you want to say? What's...wrong,

you think, with the image that many people have [of you]?

"One of the reasons I called you is that I was having dinner with

a friend of mine who I had helped," Mr. Ovitz said. I'm involved at the UCLA

Medical Center in raising money to build a new hospital. And she had called-I

hadn't talked to her in some time-and asked if I could help a friend of hers

who was in very serious trouble."

Mr. Ovitz lent his assistance, and he said, his friend had told

him: "You know, you are so opposite of what I read about.'' That, Mr. Ovitz

said, was what had led him to appear on Mr. Rose's show.

"I mean , all of us are

probably three people. We're probably the person that we think we are, and

we're probably the person that you or somebody else perceives us to be, and…

frankly, we're probably somewhere in the middle. And I think that it's

important that there be a balance with respect to how individuals are-you know,

are looked at," Mr. Ovitz.

Two days after his appearance, Mr. Ovitz's remarks about his

charitable acts was met with a headline in

The New York Post : "Pay Up, Mike Ovitz." The story's writer Nikki Finke,

who has written for this newspaper, reported that Mr. Ovitz, who had promised

the $25 million in April 2000, had made payments toward the pledge but had yet

to deliver the full amount.

That same day, UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale issued a

statement in response to the Post's article. Mr. Ovitz's "generosity is not

only a gift to UCLA; it is a gift to mankind," the statement read. "The gift,

like most major gifts, is to be paid over a period of years, and I have every

confidence that Michael will live up to his commitment." Mr. Ovitz's spokesman

Mike Burns did not respond to the Observer's request to interview Mr. Ovitz,

but he did tell UCLA's Daily Bruin

newspaper that Mr. Ovitz's pledge is not supposed to be fulfilled until 2007.

Mr. Ovitz had gone on television and expressed some regrets. His

comments had ridden out on the signals and particles of electronic media that

his friends and rivals control and monitor on a daily basis and the immediately

the response had come back.

The message was in code, but it was unmistakable: You are not yet

forgiven.

 Liza, With a G.O.P.

Liza Minnelli has recorded a lot of enthusiastic numbers in her

day, but her latest happens to be a political endorsement for Republican State

Assemblyman John Ravitz.

Mr. Ravitz, who's running in the Feb. 12 special election for

State Senator Roy Goodman's seat, was in attendance when Ms. Minnelli laid down

the spot at a Manhattan recording studio on Jan. 20. According to the

candidate, this was the entertainer's first political advertisement.

The Transom obtained a copy of the 60-second spot, which opens

with a few piano bars of what Mr. Ravitz described as a creative "mix of

['One,' from] A Chorus Line , and 'New

York, New York'." Neither tune could be used because of copyright restrictions.

Ms. Minnelli pops up seconds

later. "Hi, this is Liza Minnelli!" she says in a peppy tone that must have

sent the V.U. meters to the moon.

For whatever reasons, Ms.

Minnelli has adopted an extremely sibilant style of enunciation lately, and

when she announces in the ad that she'll be voting for Mr. Ravitz for "State

Senate in the special election," she sounds as if Lucifer got waylaid at the

Lucille Lortel Theater on his way to the Garden of Eden.

"Now as a longtime resident

of the East Side"-Ms. Minnelli owns a co-op apartment in the Imperial House on

East 69th Street, in the district where Mr. Ravitz has served for 10

years-"I've seen our city come together after the tragic events of last year."

Ms. Minnelli memorably responded to the tragic events of Sept. 11

by refusing to fly to Los Angeles for a benefit concert. At the time, she told

the New York Post 's Cindy Adams that

her "Washington contacts" had advised against flying and sagely remarked, "I

should risk my life for one fucking song?"

But for Mr. Ravitz, Ms. Minnelli had softened her tone, if not

her pitch. "We need to stay together to preserve the things that make New York

so special, like the arts," Ms. Minnelli says, with slight slur, explaining

that Mr. Ravitz understands "how important the arts are to our city and our

souls."

"They create jobs and are the"-here Ms. Minnelli builds to a 42nd Street crescendo-"very heart- beat of New York!"

After reiterating that Mr. Ravitz "understands how [the arts]

enrich our daily lives," Ms. Minnelli inexplicably follows with the

announcement that "he's 100 percent pro-choice and favors strong gun-control

laws."

Then, sounding a bit like Kathy Bates in Misery , Ms. Minnelli yelps: "And guess who loves him?"

The deafening answer?

"Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg!"

So, Ms. Minnelli concludes, "start spreading the news!"

Mr. Ravitz said that the final line was Ms. Minnelli's personal

flourish, "because it's from 'New York, New York,' which she is so proud of."

The radio ad was suggested by a mutual friend of Mr. Ravitz and

Ms. Minnelli, whom Mr. Ravitz declined to name. The friend encouraged Mr.

Ravitz-who's focusing much of his campaign on "protecting cultural and art

institutions"-to call the performer, who "knew [his] record through newsletters

and things," Mr. Ravitz said. Soon after, Ms. Minnelli contacted the mutual

friend and asked what she could do to help the campaign.

Ms. Minnelli, who is in London presumably planning her March

wedding to music producer David Gest, which will feature Michael Jackson as best,

man and Liz Taylor as maid of honor, could not be reached for comment.

- Rebecca Traister

Blair Ditch Project

What do you have to do to get booted off MTV's Total Request Live ? All actress Selma

Blair did was take a role in a Todd Solondz movie.

On Tuesday, Jan. 22, Ms. Blair was in town to promote her role in

Mr. Solondz's new film, Storytelling .

Despite Mr. Solondz's predilection for skeevy subjects-1995's Welcome to the Dollhouse dealt frankly

with seventh-grade rape fantasies, and 1998's Happiness had an unsettling subplot about a pedophile-MTV had

booked Ms. Blair for an appearance to promote the new film to TRL 's core under-18 audience.

Storytelling contains a

scene in which Ms. Blair's character, a college student named Vi, has sex with

her black professor. The scene is explicit enough that Mr. Solondz avoided an

NC-17 rating by obscuring part of the steamy image with a digitally produced

red box.

But the show's producers didn't screen the movie until the night

before Ms. Blair's appearance-and that's when they decided to disinvite her

from Tuesday's show, which is cablecast live.

Ms. Blair's publicist, Troy Nankin, said that he received a call

on Tuesday morning "saying that upon review of the tape sent to them of Storytelling, they would be unable to

honor their commitment to have Selma appear on TRL in support of that film."

A spokeswoman for MTV released a statement which emphasized that

the network "has had Selma Blair on MTV numerous times to talk about her

various projects which resonate with our audience."

The statement went on to explain that "We didn't get a screener

of Storytelling until late, and once

we had the opportunity to watch it, we decided that the film's content was not

appropriate for the TRL audience."

"The TRL audience" is

not exactly a bunch of delicate blossoms. In July, the Backstreet Boys chose TRL as the forum in which to disclose

that band member A.J. MacLean was in treatment for alcohol addiction. And in

August, the cast of the R-rated American

Pie 2 (which included Mr. Daly's ex-fiancée, Tara Reid) appeared to promote

their film. American Pie 2 included a

scene in which Jason Biggs' character glues his hand to his penis, which is

arguably more disturbing than Selma Blair and her professor going at it behind

a red box.

Both MTV and Mr. Nankin

confirmed that Ms. Blair will make her next TRL

appearance in March, when she'll be promoting The Sweetest Thing, co-starring Cameron Diaz, Parker Posey and

Jason Bateman.

Jason Bateman? Now that's skeevy.

- Rebecca Traister

Party Out of Bounds

No one dances on Ron Porges'

bar-not even Fred Schneider. Things got a little too frisky-for Florida-at the

closing-night after-party for the Sarasota Film Festival at Ovo Cafe on Jan.

26. R.E.M. front man Michael Stipe and B-52's singer Fred Schneider were in

attendance when the café's D.J. cued up the latter group's "Love Shack" and Mr.

Schneider jumped on the bar to sing along. The crowd loved it, but Mr. Porges,

who owns Ovo, did not. "We got pretty nice bars, with high-gloss finish," he

told The Transom. "To have someone dancing on it, I don't care who it is-it's

not cool."

Mr. Porges said he didn't remember what happened next, but one

Ovo employee told The Transom that the owner pulled Mr. Schneider off the bar

and admonished him about proper saloon etiquette.

The D.J. tempted fate again when he played R.E.M.'s "It's the End

of the World as We Know It", but Michael Stipe stayed put on the floor.

"He wasn't really dancing," said the employee. "But you can't

really dance to their music, can you?"

-Blair Golson

As CNBC's Street Signs and Business Center anchor, Mr. Insana's bald, bobbing visage beams into 73 million households. Hedge-fund giant Julian Robertson returns his phone calls. The Street's James Cramer sings his praises. Now he has written a book–a severe, instructive small-bore tome with a please -take-me-seriously title: The Message of the Markets: How Financial Markets Foretell the Future–And How You Can Profit from Their Guidance . It is adorned with loving blurbs from Steve Rattner–"a must-read for professional and individual investors alike"–and George Soros.

As for Mr. Ovitz, well, he is no longer a mere agent. His newly formed television company, ATG, has a large–and for a manager of talent, somewhat unprecedented–investment in Fox's highly anticipated The Street , debuting Nov. 1.

Together, these two developments would seem to suggest that, with close to 50 percent of Americans now said to be invested in the stock market, there is no better time to package and sell the idea of the markets as a cultural phenomenon to the public at large. If hundreds of thousands watch Mr. Insana on television, it follows that they should crave his investing tips. And if the stock-obsessed hordes are tuning so obsessively in to Mr. Insana and his merry band at CNBC, shouldn't it follow as well that viewers would be drawn to Wall Street-themed prime-time drama? So go the hopes, then, of Mr. Insana and Mr.Ovitz.

It's 3 p.m. on a mid-October Tuesday in the CNBC studio in Fort Lee, N.J. The market is plunging on heavy volume, and Mr. Insana–clean and crisp in his dress shirt (he rarely wears a jacket on air)–is getting plugged in. Literally, it seems. Wires spring from his back and snake to the floor. There is a plug in his ear. If his naked pate were not caked so thickly with makeup, it would surely shine; instead, it glows a dull yellow. Indeed, it was only two years ago that Mr. Insana ditched the toupee he had worn for his 15 previous years as an on-air personality. Hundreds of thousands watch him every day; his pronouncements are known to move stocks now and again. Let Marv Albert wear the rug; Mr. Insana's got gravitas. And as the public face of CNBC, he can afford to bare all.

On the set, Mr. Insana goes through his paces with speed and dispatch–a perfunctory interview with a magazine editor; a quick cut to an obscure money manager in L.A. He is robotic and efficient, a bit bloodless even–cutting people off when they run on.

The Dow continues to swoon–bright-red market-curb signs flare up on studio screens. It's time for some gallows humor. Squawk Box star Joe Kernen–who mans a console not far from Mr. Insana's sparkly round desk–jumps up and yells across the studio: "Hey Ron, do you do dinner theater?" and then breaks into song: "I've gotta dance … I've got my ass in a sling." Mr. Insana's grin is thin. He lacks the earthy, relentlessly ironic spirit that has made Mr. Kernen–with his big hair and locker-room swagger–a cable pop hero (Mr. Kernen appears on the wildly popular early-morning market chat show with his colleague, David Faber). His gaze shifts quickly down to his sheaf of neatly stacked notes.

Is it that Mr. Kernen's ribbing cuts too close to the bone? Not really. CNBC and Ron Insana's career both are booming; he will not be singing for his dinner any time soon. Up or down for the market, no matter–people will continue to tune in to listen to Mr. Insana every day. But Mr. Kernen may be onto something. Ten years ago he himself was a down-on-his luck retail stock broker going through a divorce and looking for a career change. It was a bear market, but Mr. Insana hired him anyway at FNN (Financial News Network), the now-extinct cable TV station.

At the time, Mr. Insana was no less obscure: He was then a fresh-faced anchor for a TV show on the markets that hardly anyone watched. Months later, FNN was hoovered up by CNBC, and Mr. Kernen and Insana were hired. The great bull market soon commenced, and Mr. Insana, as a ubiquitous markets anchor, and Mr. Kernen, with his early-bird Squawk Box show (which premiered in 1995), became the semi-celebrities they are today.

Which is not to say that Mr. Insana–who grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Buffalo–has not paid his dues. "I've been doing this for 16 years–it hasn't been all of a sudden. It takes time to build a personal business," he says in a television-bedecked CNBC office. "I came into the markets knowing nothing. Should I apologize for all the studying that I have done on my own?" Surely not. Like many people these days who follow the markets very closely (he starts his day by poring over six newspapers), Mr. Insana is indeed well informed. He is up on all the jargon; he knows a lot of the major players. "Stanley Druckenmiller comes on the show all the time," he says eagerly. "Same with Julian Robertson. John Kenneth Galbraith, too. I get to talk to the greats in the game. They explain things–you can't get that with an M.B.A."

Sure, he is an anchorman–but it's not the weather he's talking about here, it's the stock market. Long-Term Capital, the Asian crisis. Mr. Insana knows this stuff cold, and that gives him pride.

"When Long-Term Capital collapsed in 1998, you had to figure out how to explain to people that this started with the Asian crisis, went through the Russian crisis and created an economic debacle the likes of which we have not seen–all based on bets on the bond market. This is some of the most complex stuff I've ever seen. Now, how do you tell that story here, on the Today Show , the nightly news? It's a challenge."

Quite so–wrapping Katie Couric's brain around some of the finer points of bond arbitrage is no small feat. So why not write a book?

It's the kind of thing you can do in the middle (dare we say tail end?) of a bull market. The thesis need not be startlingly original, either. Like its author, The Message of the Markets is earnest (if not a bit striving) in tone. There are a lot of charts and some decent recaps of past market events. Not to mention a snappy disquisition on the yield curve. The main point: that markets carry a message that savvy investors may perhaps discern.

"The markets do have some intrinsic value beyond being a place to invest; they are sending out signals every day," Mr. Insana gravely explains. "The professionals I know are using the markets to get a heads-up on what's going on in the future. I don't think the general population fully appreciates the extent to which the markets can help plan their financial future."

So what is the message? "You don't have to be blindsided by the markets if you listen to them."

A fair point to be sure. Mr. Insana is smart, self-taught and now, as CNBC continues to seep into the popular culture, he is a celebrity of sorts. Try eating your dessert in peace these days in Little Italy if you are Ron Insana. So let him write his book–the market is hot, and so is he. Prudential Securities market strategist Ralph Acampora also has a book out; Goldman's Abby Cohen has one in the works. Everyone, it seems, is cashing in. So if TV anchors can write decently selling how-to-invest books– Message of the Markets hit 1,842 on Amazon last week–shouldn't television be able to dramatize Wall Street?

Mike Ovitz certainly hopes so. If you think Mr. Insana is making a bet with his book, that's small change compared to the outsized bet Mr. Ovitz's new television group, Artists Television Group (ATG), is making on Fox's new prime-time offering, The Street . Sources in Hollywood say–and a spokesperson for ATG confirms–that together with the $10 million-plus paid up front to Darren Star, the show's executive producer (as part of an exclusive three-year deal that includes The Street and Grosse Pointe ), Mr. Ovitz's ATG is on the hook for another $605,000 or so per show. With Fox having bought 13 shows, that makes for another $7.9 million. It's the kind of risky wager that would make the pedal-to-the metal traders so lovingly featured on The Street proud.

But Mr. Ovitz's money is real. So you bet he was at the screening and the swank downtown bash that followed at Eugene's last week, gliding wraith-like through the glittering swarm–his glasses horn-rimmed, his suit a basic blue, his hair a touch thin. (Shouldn't his shoes be shinier? This is Mike Ovitz, after all, not some mid-level commercial banker.)

There is no entourage; no crowd follows. People give Mike Ovitz his space. Save for Joe Kernen, that is–he is invading it. He doesn't watch a lot of TV, but his wife loves Darren Star's Sex and the City , so she dragged him to the screening of The Street . And he couldn't believe his eyes: All these guys in the show, hanging out on the trading floor watching some decidedly- not -CNBC show on TV. So he went straight up to Mr. Ovitz (addressing him as "Mr. Ovitz," of course) and complained: It's just not realistic.

Mr. Ovitz agreed. As it turns out, he is a fan of the show–he watches every morning (early: Squawk Box airs from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. E.S.T.) from his perch on a stationary bike. They bond, then Mr. Ovitz gives Mr. Kernen his business card and they go their separate ways.

"Another thing, too," Mr. Kernen adds as he bellies up to the bar. "All that about Ivygene opening down and then closing so strong [a scene in The Street where an I.P.O. opens weakly and roars to a stupendous close]: That was a bit of a stretch."

But hey, that's Hollywood. The markets are soaring, Mike Ovitz is a fan–maybe it's time for Mr. Kernen himself to write a book. Indeed, shouldn't it be Joe Kernen, with his rapier wit and cult following, and not Ron Insana with the book deal? "I've been thinking about it," Mr. Kernen says. "The time is certainly right. My agent wants me to do it. Ron is doing it; he is going on a book tour. It would raise my profile." He pauses. "But I remember college: I hated writing papers. A whole book? They would have to pay me a lot of money–right now I'd rather play golf."

You don't know me, but we go back a long way. I was one of maybe six people in the nation who caught every episode of your long-forgotten, failed but brilliant Morning Show , the one you did before you switched to late night and became a big star. I loved that morning show; it was so exhilarating to see television being reinvented, turned inside out, turned into a satiric commentary on television. Nobody saw through its tics and tackiness, its pretenses and strangeness better than you. Nobody. The group of writers and performers (like Chris Elliott) you gathered around you was smarter, sharper and funnier than the overrated Algonquin wits, more sophisticated than Saturday Night Live at its best, cut as deep as the geniuses of SCTV , MST3K , The Simpsons , the best of Spy and ranked up there with, I think, the almost-forgotten, unacknowledged model for talk-show mockery, the great Fernwood 2Nite .

But now it's all gone bad, and we've got to find you an honorable exit strategy. It's painfully obvious that it's torture for you to do the show, it's torture for us to watch and no amount of shouting and whooping by the overamped frathouse morons in your studio audience can conceal the painful emptiness in the Ed Sullivan Theater.

It started to go bad the moment you made your supposedly triumphant switch from your fringe late-time slot at 12:30 A.M. on NBC to prime-time late-night, 11:30 on CBS. It started to go bad the moment your show stopped being about ridiculing big-ass, pompous television-and started becoming big-ass, pompous television. In doing so you made your show a big tourist attraction on Broadway, but that's the problem: You've become a bad theme-park version of yourself.

I'd like to blame Mike Ovitz. By extorting that huge, $15-million-a-year contract from CBS, big mainstream-star money, he put you in a position where you felt you needed to earn it by doing a big mainstream-star show. But really, it wasn't the money, it wasn't Mr. Ovitz's fault, it was your decision, your misguided belief you had to be bigger and brassier to live up to the money; your belief you had to become someone else, to become someone more mainstream, to become Johnny Carson.

And I'd like to blame Johnny Carson, to blame your childish hero worship of that overrated icon. Because it misled you grievously. You're much funnier than Johnny Carson ever was, much sharper, and you were doing something Johnny Carson in his vast complacency was never doing. You were doing anti-television, meta-television, television that made fun of television. But somehow you never copped to the nature of your own genius, to the value of what you were doing, to the fact that, at your best, you were the anti-Carson. Instead you idealized a guy who, however appealing (and I liked Johnny myself), was just doing TV and at the end had little to offer beyond tired celebrity plugathon television.

You, by contrast, had invented something brilliant, television that saw through television, that gave all of us who have a love-hate thing about the tube, who had to put up with the piety and crappiness of television, at the end of the day, a relief, a virtual exorcism of television's hysterical conventionality. But the moment you stopped mocking television, the moment you started doing television, the moment you became all reverent about the "great tradition" of the Ed Sullivan Theater, the moment you allowed your producers to whip your audience into indiscriminate woo-woo frenzy that guaranteed you a laugh no matter how lame your material-and it just kept getting lamer-the moment you started flashing those lustrous, expensive double-breasted suits, was the moment it all began going bad.

I wish I could blame the suits. A few years ago I wrote a column just about those suits, about the way they embodied all that was going wrong with your show. About the way they had become expensive confinement garments, like the expensive trappings of your new set, lush and shiny on the outside but increasingly empty on the inside: The real David Letterman, the brilliant sardonic ironic genius, had been devoured by your suits. Their double-breastedness expressed the double bind you'd put yourself in: trying ever more fanatically to be someone you weren't. The David Letterman show, you, Dave, had become an empty suit without a real David Letterman, just a tortured simulacrum, inside.

But you didn't listen to my advice then-to go back to being the one TV show that took on TV, that made mincemeat of Must-See TV. Instead, the show became ever more painful to watch. It used to be about your contempt for showbiz phoniness, it's come to be about your contempt for yourself, for being in show business. A self-hatred not without a bit of phoniness to it, by the way. If it's all so contemptible, if it's all so beneath you, if you're so morally superior to it, then why not just get the hell out, Dave? You're not gonna starve to death if you leave, but you will die inside if you stay without changing. Look what's happening to your hair: That's not male-pattern baldness, that's test pattern baldness, bad TV on the brain burning out the follicles from within.

There was a moment on one of your recent shows, a moment in a sketch that inadvertently said it all about your awful self-image. It was a sketch about alleged TV bloopers, and you ran some tape of a "little glitch" you'd supposedly noticed in one of the opening-week broadcasts of the new Bryant Gumbel morning show. It was a clip of Bryant and Jane chatting superimposed on which was footage that made it seem as if a donkey was meandering in front of the camera-the "little glitch." Pretty funny, I'll admit. But beneath the subtext of the gag-your long-running, slightly overdone hostility to Mr. Gumbel-there was I think a sub -subtext: your own self image as jackass wandering loose on network air, meandering pointlessly with nothing much more than jackass attitude to justify your presence in front of the camera.

But you're not a jackass, Dave, you're a talented guy trapped in a jackass role, a format that tortures you and what you need is an exit strategy. I can offer two.

Exit Strategy No. 1 : Junk the celebrity plugathon and go all comedy. Of all the aspects of your show, this is the one-the couch segments with the Arnolds and the Julias plugging product-where your discomfort, your self-hatred has always been most painfully obvious. And the stupid competition with Jay Leno for idiot stars telling vacuous anecdotes to plug lame action movies … It's sickening to watch, it's a pathetic simulacrum of entertainment, but every talk show has been convinced they have to do it.

And it isn't even working for you. If it were part of a winning formula, if you were regularly beating Jay and Nightline in the ratings, perhaps it would have some pro forma economic justification. But you're not, and it doesn't.

So why not just junk it? Tell CBS, "Homey don't play that no more." Instead, go all comedy, give us real laughs, hire more smart, funny writers, hire back some of the people that made your NBC show great (like Chris Elliott, say), feature sharp young comics; I have a feeling you could find and encourage some genius comic talent: You have a pitch-perfect ear for it. And go back to your own inventive, subversive comic roots. Take on the idiocies of TV; be the TV show for people who love to hate TV-which is really all of us who love to watch TV. Take on the entire celebrity plugathon culture, ridicule the way Jay and the awful morning shows fawn over big stars with bad movies. Take on the bad movies themselves; people are dying to have someone ridicule the emperor's new clothes, the big-assed double-breasted suits of infotainment-industrial-complex product. You could create controversy, revitalize show business, entertain us and have a lot of fun doing it.

I think it could be a big success. But if it isn't, you'll still go out in a blaze of glory, making a statement, doing the kind of TV you want to, not the stupid celeb plugathon that makes you cringe doing it and us cringe watching it. And if CBS doesn't like it, pick a public fight with them. You'll be a major hero telling the network you're tired of shilling for second-rate Hollywood crap. You might actually do something to turn the tide against celebrity schlock plugola.

Recently, you've been obsessing in your monologue about the fact that Entertainment Weekly named you No. 64 in their special issue on "The Hundred Greatest Entertainers" of the past half-century. You sort of make it sound as if, in your mind, being No. 64 is some kind of diss. You get self-deprecating laughs out of ranking behind Jim Henson (No. 59), Cher (No. 58) and way behind The Simpsons . You ought to take a lesson from The Simpsons (No. 10), which has maintained its subversive anti-television television stance and still done well. It's kind of sad that a Fox cartoon has far more edge than you do. But really, Dave, with the kind of show you're doing these days, 64 is generous . The high 90's-near James Garner and Garth Brooks-is more like it. But you could change all that with one bold stroke by casting off the chains of celeb plugola, striking a blow against the publicity industrial complex. I think that would put you on a lot of people's all-century Top-10 List.

But maybe you're not up to a bold move like that, maybe too much bad TV has taken too much out of you. You don't have the energy. If that's the case, you still need an honorable way out of the hell you've created for yourself. So let me suggest

Exit Strategy No. 2: Control your succession, get Jon Stewart to replace you . I don't know if you've been watching The Daily Show , maybe you think you're above checking out the competition, but Jon Stewart has just become majorly great. In a low-key unobtrusive way that doesn't draw attention to itself, his Daily Show on the Comedy Channel has become the smartest thing on TV since The Larry Sanders Show and MST3K went off the air.

I have to admit it, Dave, I was a little late in catching on to just how smart Jon Stewart's version of The Daily Show had become in the 10 months since he took over last January. I guess I'd tuned out on the Craig Kilborn-hosted version of the show by that time-after his one-note, ain't-my-arrogance-cute shtick began to grate on me. That and the fact that it was up against Simpsons reruns in the 7 P.M. slot and I found myself preferring to watch Homer and Apu go to India for the fourth time rather than The Daily Show once.

But The Simpsons recently moved to 7:30 and so I began checking out Jon Stewart and quickly became hooked. It was not just funny, it was consistently funny: I found myself laughing out loud throughout every half-hour. And consistently smart: The Daily Show realized that the satire of anchormen and newscasters à la Saturday Night Live 's "Weekend Update" had just about been done to death. And they found themselves a juicy new target on the infotainment spectrum: the TV "magazine shows" that are devouring prime time, spawning clones like 60 Minutes II , multiple Dateline 's and 20/20 's and the like, not to mention the even schlockier cable counterparts the E! Hollywood specials, the VH1 Behind the Music mini-specials etc.

Nobody does the smarmy urgency, the earnest, empathic, head-tilted, reaction-shot hyper-sincerity of news magazine "reporters" than Jon Stewart's current crew of "field reporters": Vance Degeneres, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell and Beth Littleford. Their heroic efforts to keep a straight face while interviewing the lovably demented eccentrics, obsessives and weirdos they track down is itself a hilarious subtext to their reported pieces, which are all true stories, real people and sometimes evince the deadpan sense of wonder Calvin Trillin and now Errol Morris bring to their dispatches from the land of the odd.

But the key distinction of Jon Stewart's Daily Show from the past Daily Show and from every other show of its kind on now, Dave, is Jon Stewart's apparent prodigy-level, almost idiot savant -level talent for spontaneous ad libs. I say "apparent" because sometimes I can't believe they're not scripted, they seem so lightning-quick. But it's more than pure speed, it's the little twist, the curve he puts on it, the spin that warps a wisecrack out of conventional comedy to some meta-wisecrack dimension. I'm not saying he's the funniest or most innovative comedian I've ever seen, but he may be the fastest on his feet.

Or is he? Had I seen enough shows to say that? When I started writing this column, I got the Comedy Central publicist to send me several hours of past shows on tape, and a cassette of Jon Stewart's appearance at a Museum of Television and Radio panel (along with the show's super-sharp producer, Madeleine Smithberg, some writers and actors), and Jon Stewart was pretty impressive in what seemed unscripted circumstances. Just as fast on his feet as he appears in The Daily Show 's "Four Minutes With …" segments, in which he's transformed celebrity plugola into a compressed, absurdist, sped-up version of the tired couch-talk-segment convention.

I had just finished watching those tapes, and I still wasn't sure , when I got a fortuitous call from my friend Christine, who said she had an extra ticket for the live taping of The Daily Show 's Millennium Special that evening. (It airs Dec. 15.)

And I have to say watching Jon Stewart work live at that four-hour taping over on 10th Avenue, watching him interact, between the scripted segments, with the audience, the crew, the band (They Might Be Giants-a perfect touch: Jon Stewart in his low-key, nerdy way might be a giant), I have to tell you, Dave, he seems to be the real thing. Watching him catch a remark coming at him and mint it instantly into a smart, goofy, unexpected wisecrack-it's the comedic equivalent of watching a Magic Johnson no-look pass: genius at work. Indeed, it was almost like watching a child prodigy do astoundingly complex mathematical computations in an instant.

Afterward, Christine, equally dazzled by Stewart's verbal facility, compared it with the grim death march your nightly monologue has become-endlessly, tiresomely making the same smirking jokes about the failure of your jokes. Dave, your body language cries out: "I don't belong here. I'm better than this shtick I'm doing, I'm on a higher level than Jay Leno, but I'm trapped into doing Jay Leno material." It really begins to grate, Dave. Jay is what he is. You can't keep pretending you're meant for something better without at some point delivering something better. You can't keep coasting on the serene certainty of your contempt.

Which is why it's time to get you out of the self-created hell of self-contempt you're trapped in. Time for Exit Strategy No. 2 to get you off the show. Time for you to arrange your succession. Now the thing people say about you, Dave-and it may not be true, but it's true that it's what they say -is that you are deathly afraid of letting other comics, other host personalities, show you up. Which is why, they say, a few years ago you nixed Jon Stewart for the time slot following you on CBS in favor of the unthreatening Tom Snyder. That's why there are no guest hosts for you.

Garry Shandling had fun with that widespread perception when he cast Jon Stewart as his ambitious replacement-rumor rival. And maybe Mr. Shandling should be a lesson to you: He refused to shift his brilliant show from HBO to the networks, kept it fresh and focused on cable and then left it when it began to go a little stale on him. In doing so, he earned the kind of respect and honor you once had. He didn't earn the kind of money you're making, but you have enough to last a lifetime: What you've lost is the kind of respect money can't buy.

Exit Strategy 2 is a bold stroke that could get it back for you: Find a way to make Jon Stewart your successor. Bring him on your show, the way Johnny did with you. Make him a regular, ask him to guest-host, set it up with CBS so you leave early to do some prime-time specials and he gets your chair. It would be a stunning, utterly classy move. And, hey, if you really want to go out in a blaze of glory that would reignite your career creatively, try Exit Strategy 2A: a job switch with Jon Stewart . Let him take over the Late Show gig and you go to Comedy Central. Work a smaller room for a while, where you can resuscitate and reinvent your talent. It would be like Michael Jordan playing basketball for love. From your new post at The Daily Show , you can become the cult fave you once were, you can really express your anger at the crappy absurdity of mainstream TV the way you no longer have the energy or edge to do on mainstream TV. The switch could be the hottest thing since those two Yankee pitchers swapped wives. Call me and we'll work out the details. And do me a favor: Don't listen to Mr. Ovitz this time.

On April 14, a front-page story in The New York Times changed all that. Much to the dismay of his enemies out west ("They're treating it like he bought three studios," groused one), Mr. Ovitz became a somebody again by digging a stubborn toe into Disney turf: the new, improved Broadway. And while Mr. Ovitz won't be transplanting his family to Gotham any time soon, those who know him say that his investment in Livent–he purchased 2.5 million shares–is a first step in Mr. Ovitz's attempt to remake himself as a New York-style mogul in the molds of his good friends, the secretive billionaires Ronald Perelman and Ted Forstmann. The new Mike Ovitz is someone who buys undervalued, troubled properties, fixes them, then either flips them for a profit or uses their stock to acquire additional companies. Said a friend, "He wants to become a turnaround artist."

Mr. Ovitz apparently intends to accomplish this metamorphosis while keeping his roots in Los Angeles. Although he is a frequent commuter to New York and keeps a diffidently furnished apartment in Metropolitan Tower (which he bought from C.A.A.), Livent's new chief executive, Roy Furman, told The Transom that "there has been no talk about relocation at all" for Mr. Ovitz. Yes, many of Mr. Ovitz's post-Disney relationships–besides Messrs. Perelman and Forstmann, there's David Letterman, investment banker Herbert Allen, real estate mogul Jerry Speyer, literary agent Mort Janklow and director Martin Scorsese–are New Yorkers. But Mr. Ovitz is very close to his parents, who live in California, and relocating would certainly disrupt the life of his oldest son, who is a junior in high school. Moreover, Mr. Ovitz's last high-profile appearance in New York did little to enhance his reputation as a media manipulator. Surfacing as a chairman of PEN International's annual fund-raiser, his presence drew scorn from the media and a number of the organization's literary lions, which seemed to leave Mr. Ovitz shellshocked at the event. At least one of Mr. Ovitz's friends also laughs at the notion of the notoriously secretive former agent loosening up enough to pass the scrutiny of the co-op board of an exclusive Manhattan building.

Mr. Ovitz's eyes and ears in New York will be David Maisel, a loyal longtime employee of Mr. Ovitz who was first with him at C.A.A., then at Disney and most recently with the mogul in his exile. Mr. Furman said that Mr. Maisel would be the one who will be traveling east. "This is an investment for Michael," said Mr. Furman.

"He sees this as a good way to cut his teeth and turn around a company," said a friend of Mr. Ovitz who still does business with him. "It is, pure and simple, a financial play for him." As for New York, the friend said: "He sees New York as a refuge. He sees it as virgin territory."

Virgin territory such as Broadway that is being plundered by some of his old comrades, as Mr. Ovitz must have seen when he recently checked out a preview performance of the play Art , with his friend and former client Sean Connery. Of course, there's Disney, which single-handedly resurrected the theater district with a relatively small investment. Mr. Ovitz's former C.A.A. partner Bill Haber has also found success on Broadway, most recently as a producer of John Leguizamo's one-man show Freak . Although Mr. Furman said that competition with Mr. Eisner, or anyone else for that matter, "never even crossed [Mr. Ovitz's] or my mind," the appearance that Mr. Ovitz has payback on the brain certainly makes him look a lot more vital than he did six months ago.

The question remains whether Mr. Ovitz's investment in Livent has any connection to another recent co-venture: his decision to build a number of sports- and entertainment-themed malls with Herb Glimcher, the developer brother of art dealer Arne Glimcher. Asked if Livent, with its roadshow theater productions, could figure into the mall business, Mr. Furman said, "not that I'm aware of," adding that he didn't know much about Mr. Ovitz's mall development plans. "When an investor puts money into different entities, there doesn't have to be any relationship [between those entities] other than that they're interesting to the investor," said Mr. Furman.

Indeed, Mr. Ovitz's decisions to invest in the seemingly incongruous businesses of shopping malls and entertainment production is not that different from Mr. Perelman's holding company, MacAndrews & Forbes Inc., owning a cosmetics company, a cigar manufacturer and a camping equipment business.

One of the things that the control-obsessed Mr. Ovitz apparently likes about Mr. Perelman's way of doing business is the billionaire's penchant for secrecy. Mr. Perelman's control is a factor of his net worth. Even with his platinum parachute from Disney (worth $190 million) and the more than $10 million that C.A.A. sources estimate Mr. Ovitz has taken in over the last few years from his sale of the agency he co-founded, next to Mr. Perelman's billionaire status, Mr. Ovitz looks like a relative pisher .

If Mr. Ovitz is indeed modeling himself after someone like Mr. Perelman (his incredible self-consciousness would never permit him to admit it), the question that looms for him is what will be his Revlon Inc. In other words, what will be the company that pushes him to the next status level of moguldom? While Mr. Perelman, after his brief but profitable fling with the media company New World Group, has shied away from the glitzy components of the entertainment business, the shuck-and-jive of the show business is exactly what floats Mr. Ovitz's boat.

"We are not bean counters," said Mr. Furman, who is well respected in the entertainment industry. (One theater producer called him a "genius.") "We are sensitive to the creative juices." And rumors persist that if Japan's Sony Corporation finally spins off Sony Entertainment Pictures into a public company, Mr. Ovitz, whose friend John Calley runs the place, could attempt a takeover and finally end up with a Revlon of his own. If Livent or his mall business doesn't turn out to be a Marvel Comics.

Nike Plants Dim Bulb in Holland?

Right before Nike Inc.'s chief executive, Phil Knight, makes an on-camera ass of himself in Michael Moore's new documentary The Big One , Mr. Moore receives a phone call from a guy named Keith Peters. At the time, Mr. Peters headed up Nike's public relations department at its Beaverton, Ore., headquarters, and he is heard (and appears briefly) in the documentary inviting Mr. Moore to come interview Mr. Knight.

Given that chief executives tend to punish anyone but themselves for their on-the-job gaffes, The Transom couldn't help but wonder what happened to Mr. Peters following Mr. Knight's squirm-inducing performance. (At one point, the Nike chief corrects Mr. Moore's assertion that 12-year-olds in Indonesia are making his company's athletic shoes for minimal wages. In reality, he says with a straight face, the laborers are all at least 14 years old.) At the New York premiere for The Big One , which took place at the Screening Room in TriBeCa on March 31, Mr. Moore told The Transom that he'd heard that Mr. Peters had been transferred to the Netherlands.

Indeed, Mr. Peters now works out of Hilversum, Holland (about a half-hour from Amsterdam), where he toils as the director of communications for Nike Europe. Reached by The Transom, he said he had been in Hilversum for approximately 16 months, which would have meant he departed not long after Mr. Knight's interview with Mr. Moore, which took place in the fall of 1996. Mr. Peters denied, however, that his transfer was some kind of punishment for not keeping his boss from being gummed to death by Mr. Moore's sweetly insidious style of confrontation. While Mr. Peters conceded that he was "involved" in the decision to put Mr. Knight in front of Mr. Moore's cameras, he said that "it's not unusual for people from Beaverton to kind of come over here and contribute to" Nike's European push. Mr. Peters was reluctant to make any additional comments about the documentary, saying: "I'm probably not the best person to be talking about it." As he pointed out, "I live in Europe now," far away from the U.S. media machine.

Vada Manager, a Nike spokesman based at the company's Oregon headquarters, said that, in many ways, Mr. Peters' transfer was actually a promotion. "As we get more involved in European issues, it's a natural evolution to have a seasoned person in a market where the brand is not as well known," he said.

The Transom Also Hears

… Despite the buzz generated by the February 1997 cancellation of his high-profile "Birthday Bash" fund-raiser, septuagenarian Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan intends go ahead with a $1,000-a-head cocktail party on April 21 to replenish his re-election coffers for a run in the year 2000.

When Mr. Moynihan canceled the birthday event, he stated that he was doing so out of deference to the campaign finance reform movement. Still, his bagging of the Rainbow Room shindig, which had secured a guest list of 4,000, served only to fuel speculation that he might not run for re-election. And now, knowledgeable sources, who believe the 71-year-old senior Senator would like to retire, are wondering what he might do with the contributions garnered from the April 21 fund-raiser at the St. Regis hotel if he chooses not to run.

According to Federal Election Commission regulations, he can donate the money to charity, another political campaign or his alma mater, Tufts University. He cannot pocket it–though up until four years ago, he could have.

In 1989, Congress passed a law that repealed legislation allowing its members to keep excess campaign funds. It did leave one loophole: If a member had begun serving before 1980 and stopped serving before the 103rd Congress convened in January 1993, he could keep the money. Though Mr. Moynihan has held office since 1977, he did serve in the 103rd Congress. Thus, he won't be keeping the money.

Tony Bullock, Mr. Moynihan's chief of staff, acknowledged that the Senator has been equivocal on the subject of campaigning for re-election. "He's been a little coy, to be honest," said Mr. Bullock, "[but] the most recent word is that he will decide after the 1998 elections, and that he will decide after consulting his wife, Liz [Moynihan]." He added that "we are certainly operating as if he were running," and that in any event, the Senator "would comply with the law."

–Kate Kelly

… Cavorting in the nostalgia-heavy space of the old Studio 54 made at least one invitee to New York magazine's 30th-

anniversary party on April 2 behave as if it were 2 A.M. and 1978 once more. "Sodomize me!" cried über-publicist Bobby Zarem as a video cameraman zoomed in on him standing in front of a couple of drag queens. Because it was 10 P.M. and 1998, however, the remark prompted performance artist Reno to ask him: "How do you mean that?"