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UPDATE: The people who run Hollywood agencies may talk tough. But in reality they’re a bunch of pussies. For the 3rd time since I founded Deadline Hollywood in 2006, agency bosses wrongly thought I gained access to an internal document because someone supposedly leaked it to me. And their response was to fire people. This first happened at CAA a year ago when I obtained an internal schedule. (While CAA Agents Go On Retreat, Their Assistants Go To “CAA U” …Mandatory!) Then it happpened at WME last October when I obtained an internal memo. (WME Keeps Alicia Keys After CAA Catfight) But I’ve now learned that yesterday WME carried out a mass firing over an internal email I posted last Sunday. (WME Floater Sends Harsh Goodbye Email). When the reality is that not one of those fired staffers at CAA or WME leaked anything to me. Yet, in each case above, both CAA and WME told me that staffers were fired because they had “violated company policy”.
So here’s what happened yesterday: At Ari Emanuel’s insistence, WME conducted a witch-hunt to determine who had sent that Marcus Washington goodbye email to addresses outside the company. (Yes, all the top agencies have the technology to determine that, which has a creepy Big Brother feel to it.) My insiders say 75 staffers were ID’ed.
In the NYC office, an assistant was fired for forwarding that email to a close friend at ICM who had previously worked at William Morris. At LA headquarters, there were multiple firings. First, HR told the ID’ed staffers to come to the conference room. There, they were informed that they had violated company policy by sending the email to their personal accounts or outside parties. Ari Emanuel personally delivered the mass reprimand and spoke about how they’d violated the “trust” of the organization and hurt the company’s ability to work together. Three staffers who’d sent the email to Industry types were axed. (I heard Ari wanted to fire all 75 — but was told he couldn’t.)
Not one of the fired or even ID’ed staffers was responsible for the leak to me. But here’s what also disturbs me. In the case of CAA, a Latino was fired. In the case of WME’s first firing, a gay man was fired. In this latest episode, the leaked email itself was from an African-American who felt “bored, miserable, stifled, underutilized and looked over at WME”. Draw your own conclusions.
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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Running the story was fine. It’s what journalists do. Sniping at your ex-employer on the way out the door is okay, too, if you like the smell of a burning bridge. Disclosing your company’s confidential communications is a big no-no, and you better be prepared to suck on the smoke of that burning bridge yourself if you do it. Kudos to Deadline for getting the story. Kudos to WME for taking care of business and sending a message to the rest of its staff.
I kind of agree. While on the one hand, I think the agency acted like a “pussie”, on the other hand, his behavior was incredibly unprofessional. I don’t see that guy getting too many chances elsewhere now. It’s a small town. Everyone now knows that he’ll cause a scene if he gets fired. He was immature and unprofessional, and the agency’s reaction was immature and unprofessional. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Alright, let’s be constructive, readers:
I’m interested to know how this email could have been STEALTHILY sent to Nikki…Would you copy the email to a word doc then copy it to a portable Flash drive, then send the content of the email to Nikki from an Internet cafe that accepts cash for a computer rental?
This is a serious question. What do smart, independent, non-sheep suggest in these situations?
There is this invention called an envelope, that you put what is called a “stamp” on, next you put a printed copy of the email in the envelope, and add Nikki’s address, or c/o MMC, then you drop it a blue rectangular box called a “mail box” . . .
Don’t get snarky when you don’t know what you speak of. You think WME can’t track things other than its corporate email? Trust me… inside their building, you are on their network. Personal email, printing, flash drives – all of those a digital methods of transfer that will leave a tail if WME’s IT wishes to track it.
You’ve gotta go off network. A digital camera taking a picture of a computer screen, for example. A pen and paper, if you are cool with analog.
Any efforts to “sneak” it out with flash drives or PDFs or personal email accounts are pointless. Just write the damn thing down, or pull your camera phone out of your pocket. Get off WME’s network.
Easy solution –
copy and paste the email into a document.
paste into the body of a personal email account
delete the document
then send it from home on your own computer
Never, EVER, send, forward, or reply to anything from a work account that you are worried about being read by the company.
It is a violation for someone to access your personal accounts – Yahoo, Gmail, AOL – all protected (at least, until the DOJ gets their way)
People should have learned this in 1999.
Besides, they shouldn’t have sent the email anyway – they do sign an agreement, I’m sure.
Oh, and also – WHO CARES???
Point of story:
There are 72 people at WME updating resumes because they know any long term plans there are over.
I just read the guy’s email. What a loser. Anybody who quotes homeless people singing The Greatest Love of All in an email sent to an entire company is too stupid to work there (or any other major corporation) in the first place.
AMEN!!!!!!!
quoting a homeless person singing a crack head’s cheesy lyrics. duh.
There wouldn’t be a doubt that top agencies are racist if you listened to the exploitative way some agents discuss the so-called “urban market” or even some of their own clients (the legendary Cara Lewis is an exception to this).
Yeah minorities are one thing… but how many Republicans work in that office? Natch!
“wanted to fire all 75″
if I were a terminated employee, I would definately have my attorney ldelve into the selective enforcement of this policy.
Don’t print the e-mails, they can keep records of that. Take a photo with your (non-company owned) cell phone and then e-mail it to Nikki from there. This won’t stop the FBI from finding out, but should keep you safe from your boss.
That still won’t work because they’ll just see who all received that email and then question/threaten them. Also, people ALWAYS tells SOMEONE. And if jobs are on the line, friends no longer exist and will sell ‘em out. Best thing to do when you’re in the position of trying to work your way from nobody to somebody is to keep your head down and not rock the boat. It’s all well and fine to stand up and speak up if you’ve been done wrong or mistreated, but the guy sounded like he just wasn’t being given much to do and wasn’t being promoted so he left. While his email wasn’t that big enough of a deal to warrant the potential firing of 75 people, it was rather petty. Ari and WME now look silly and this guy will never get a job at a major agency again. Oh well.
Just out of curiosity, not that I plan to do this or anything, but…would making a screencap of the email and saving it as, say, a jpeg to a flash drive be traceable? This info may come in handy some day!
They know you printed it, but can’t prove what happened to it after that. Print it, make a copy and keep the original on your desk. Take the copy home and scan it.
FWIW, many agencies disable flash drives and access to personal email. There’s also the option of transcribing it into your personal email on your blackberry, but then its authenticity may come under question.
This was a non story until you made it one Nikki – so somehow u are moderately responsible for these people losing their jobs. This site has moments where it is no better than that pathetic creature named Perez. I worked for Ari many years ago and he continues to take my calls to this day
And I’m a massive nobody. He’s not here to help all you beggers, he’s running a company and is a good man. Only those that don’t know him or perhaps he didn’t jump at the opportunity to further YOUR career..write crap about him.
The rules are very clear over there – u don’t send inter-office emails, out. It’s a simple rule. This is nothing more than assistants trying to be cute or gossipy…but they broke the rules.
If u don’t want to work for his company, don’t…ur easily replaceable. If u don’t want his company to rep you, don’t. He’s easily one of the smartest guys you will ever meet.
Is he that smart? He has to call 75 people who work for him into a conference room to not find out who sent an internal document. Then he fires 5 other people and the woman who printed the document says none of those people are the deep throat.
Ari’s intelligence has yet to be determined.
USE YOUR IPHONE TO TAKE A PIC OF IT then you can forward it to nikki when you get home, after you retype it out with addy’s redacted!
NEVER NEVER use your personal email from your work desk at work, the IT dept will check it out. See my earlier comment – use your iphone to take a snapshot of it, then re-type it when you get home
Those 75 people sure as hell won’t be getting promotions anytime soon. Ari never forgets. They might as well start looking for new gigs.
someone else already said that, and it’s actually 72 people–let me spell it out–because 3 were fired.
alright so i’m 20 and in college. i have been reading the trades since be4 i can remember and wasnt one of the kids who hopped onto the Ari Gold/ Entourage bandwagon cause of the show. THIS IS Y I LOVE AGENTS!! This town is the wild west and literally anything goes. You can start at the bottom and tear your way to the top. Of course its hard as hell but its supposd to be. I cant wait to get into the biz and give it my all. I promise each and everyone one of you that i will work and become and agent one day. The reason is b/c of this shit right here. There isnt a business in the world better then this and even though people may say im ignorant and would never want this. Call me ambitious not stupid
It’s called show business…not show up and try to compare the size of your dick.
Appreciate your enthusiasm. But one tip: most agents don’t even love other agents in their own firm, let alone a competitor and half of agents everywhere don’t even love themselves. You don’t need to love agents to be one.
if this is why u want to do what we do because of something like this, you should seriously rethink your chosen career path. This isn’t what the business is about, this is about real peoples lives, you lil tard. maybe you would prefer a career in drama reporting, maybe TMZ
-get a life
Ari is absolutely right to demand the firing of the 75 people who ” betrayed the trust ” of the company that pays them. In any relationship from business to personal there must be trust, if WME can’t trust their employees that they will not do ” harmful ” things to destroy their income and reputation then by law they are the boss and can fire anyone they want. This is not a case of racism of any kind! WME is the victim of evil acts committed by their own employees. I would suggest that WME hire people with character and integrity only from now on.
Concerning the letter from the black employee who left and was so unprofessional to defame his boss by acting out like a child, he will not work in the industry again. He is a total moron to have quoted in his own letter, admitting that he got such as life and work advise from a ” homeless woman ” on the subway! Thank god the idiot left, if he had a brain cell in that head of his, it would die from loneliness! A piece of advise for all morons out there, if you want to succeed in this world, NEVER take advise from a homeless person! And in business situations, when things don’t work out the way you want, which happens to everyone at some point, remember NEVER to burn your bridges! The industry is small and people talk! His action of writing that stupid letter was unprofessional and unacceptable behavior! He has no class and it would have it that fate would have him voluntarily leave a great agency! He didn’t deserve to be there to begin with! Good riddance!! Anyone else wants to follow the moron, they all should leave as well and remove their negative energy from the company!
Ari can’t tell people to do good and right, he can only take actions from his part to get rid of evil demons!!! So he can protect his agency that he has worked so hard to build for years! Ari should fire them all and get better people in there!
Saint777,
You are unemployed, aren’t you?
Ha, ha, ha.
Oh, and by the way, my neighborhood homeless person kicks some serious knowledge. I wouldn’t be too quick to judge where good advice comes from.
You spelled “advice” wrong three times.
I love Doug Stanhope.
One can be homeless and still have intelligent insights into the world. Your logic is flawed. Denigrate a person for their status. Very agent like. It’s actually funny how many morally ambiguous people can be.
Mr. Washington did not write a letter for public consumption. He wrote an email to the firm. I would not have chosen to do that, but rather send it directly to the bosses I had a problem with and left it at that. But it’s apparent he has no intentions of working the agency game again. So no big shakes. As far as him working in the business in general he can easily do that if he creates a product that has a demand or produces a money or talent stream of some sort. Hollywood is a town of money whores and anybody can rise or come back. Just follow the money.
Nikke, plse b careful when you post these internal docs. Collateral damage is a by-product. Innocent bystanders got canned in a terrible job mkt.
I did the same thing about 7 years ago at Innovative Artists — letting the trades know that Scott Harris was letting go of a large number of assistants prior to the Writer’s Guild strike.
They did a massive internal witch hunt — but alas, their I.T. guy never caught me, even though I personally forwarded Scott’s email announcement about rollbacks straight to the trades…
Sounds like Ari has better technology — too bad he doesn’t have Scott’s gap-toothed-grin.
Mackay Bell- I was just writing the same thing when I looked up and saw what you wrote. We obviously went to the same asst school or had the same really shitty boss.
All I know is that I see a future episode of “Entourage” right here.
For the love of God, AMERICANS were fired. Your PC comments make me want to puke!
as a former hr exec at one of the big three agencies, and maybe this one, i will tell you that your comment, though idealistic [and that is great to have at times] is incredibly naive.
my mandate has often been, in unwritten, off site mtgs, to lay off those who “dont belong in our culture”
i got the picture.
sadly, you don’t, and the naivete you possess wrongly criticizes the years and experience that people like Nikki and myself have in this business.
I’m not saying Ari is racist b/c I don’t know him, but I was at WMA when Steve Dontanville abruptly sent an extremely bizarre email to the entire company announcing he was quitting the business (anyone on here remember that?). This email quickly made it out of the company and before you knew it Kevin Huvane was leaving a vm on Reese’s machine letting her know her longtime agent was leaving the biz (to her shock). WMA IT tracked down who had sent the email out into the wilderness… to a very privileged (also white), rich kid on a certain senior agent’s desk. He got in a lot of trouble but alas was not fired and eventually even promoted to agent. That was a different regime (JW, DZW, JMF), but Nikki isn’t entirely crazy to imply that sometimes the, how should i say it, the black jellybeans get stuck to the bottom.
Sorry, MCE isn’t one of the rich kids.
Yes, I saw similar elsewhere a few years back so I am not sure if that’s still the issue these days.
Further to the first comment above. In this instance, it wasn’t an email. The WMA assistant called his girlfriend, a CAA assistant, from his desk to deliver the news. In addition to having IT audit forwraded emails from that afternoon, Irv examined the outgoing call records of every office and ID’d the call to CAA that was made within minutes of SDO’s email being sent. The assistant talked his way out of the situation, which explains why he’s currently an ace sales agent today.
So does that mean WME is currently hiring for floaters?
Is it wrong that I take great pleasure in those 75 people sweating it out, not knowing if they will be fired or not in the near future? Is it so wrong that their misery gives me a warm-fuzzy?
I’m a WME client and bullshit like this makes me want to find another home. I have a good agent and I’ll probably stay with WME as long as s/he is there, but I wish he would move. WME is obviously the place to be for TV, but features now seem to be low on their priority list, and the talent department has recently lost some big feature names. Since WME are one of the few agencies who genuinely do know how to package, it’s got to be a worry for them.
Excuse me, please, but wasn’t it ARI who did the same thing when he left ICM to form Endeavor. Didn’t he raid INTERNAL files? Or was I mistaken. Someone, please, refresh…
And doesn’t A.R.I. stand for Agent Raids Internally?
Please refresh…
LOL!
Uh, yep, and he was fired….