'Entourage' Chillingly Realistic, Insiders Say
Milhouse Van Houten
By HILARY DE VRIES
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 4 - He's down, he's out and now, after a failed coup
attempt - code name "tsetse fly" - he's last seen trying to save his career
while working out of a coffee shop. That is where the HBO series "Entourage"
left Ari Gold, the conniving talent agent played with lip-smacking relish by
Jeremy Piven, as its second season ended Sunday night.
Real-life Hollywood agents found the verisimilitude of Ari's situation a
little too close for comfort. One confided that he watched the season's
final episodes "with my heart in my throat." Meanwhile, dozens of e-mail
messages containing only the words "tsetse fly" have been whizzing around
Hollywood talent agencies.
This summer, no show captivated Hollywood's "10 percenters" the way that
"Entourage" did, thanks largely to Mr. Piven, whose scene-stealing,
motor-mouthed antics have earned him an Emmy nomination while skewing the
series' storylines much the way David Spade stole the spotlight on NBC's
"Just Shoot Me." Many insiders call it the most accurately nuanced satire of
the entertainment industry since the 1992 HBO comedy "The Larry Sanders
Show." Mr. Piven's Ari Gold, likewise, is regarded as the most incisive
portrait of a big-stakes talent agent since Tom Cruise in "Jerry Maguire."
"When you're on the inside like we are, good water-cooler television is hard
to find," said Jay Sures, a partner at the United Talent Agency.
The show's gossip factor reached a new high with the final two episodes of
the season. A week ago, Ari - rankled at the unexpected return to power of
his duplicitious boss Terence (played by Malcolm McDowell) - plotted to
break away and start his own agency. Those plans were thwarted by a
back-stabbing fellow agent, Adam Davies (Jordan Belfi). Summarily dismissed,
he was stripped of his clients, company phone and company car (an S-class
Mercedes), and reduced to being driven home by his assistant in what he
derisively called "a prop car from 'The Fast and the Furious.' "
"I had more agents tell me that was the most frighteningly realistic episode
they'd seen," said Doug Ellin, the show's creator and head writer. "We
always try to write the show starting with 'What's real?' not 'What's
funny?,' " he added, "but that episode really seemed to strike people."
In Sunday night's episode, Variety trumpeted Ari's dismissal in a front-page
article; meanwhile, he set up shop at a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf outlet,
frantically trying to wooing clients over to his new agency with help from
his loyal assistant Lloyd (played by Rex Lee).
"There have been other episodes that I've related to more, but that was a
classic," said Kami Putnam-Heist, an agent at The Gersh Agency.
Stephen Levinson, a Hollywood talent manager who is one of the program's
executive producers, said the episode resonated with industry viewers
largely because of its accuracy. "Practically every talent agency was
started in this way," Mr. Levinson said. "Agenting is one of the only jobs
where you can literally start in the mailroom and wind up owning the
business," he added. "We're writing the show out of our own experiences."
That they are. Mr. Levinson manages the actor Mark Wahlberg, one of the
show's executive producers and the model for the character Vincent Chase, a
rising young star played by Adrien Grenier. Mr. Ellin based the character of
Ari Gold largely on his own real-life agent, Ari Emanuel. Mr. Emanuel staged
an agency coup of his own several years ago, starting the Endeavor Talent
Agency with a small group of agents who had abruptly quit shops like
International Creative Management and the Creative Artists Agency. Creative
Artists was itself founded by rogue agents who had left the William Morris
Agency.
All of which raises the question: How true to life is Ari Gold's fall from
grace?
Within hours of last week's episode, some Internet message boards devoted to
the show were filled with speculations by viewers on the plausibility of a
powerful entertainment agent - a senior partner and profit participant -
being dismissed from his agency in a matter of minutes and locked out of his
office by armed security guards.
Like many things in Hollywood, reality depends on whom you ask. Or rather,
whom you can get on the phone. The answers can begin to sound like fodder
for a future "Entourage" episode. For every agent who admitted to watching
the final episodes of the series with rapt attention, others invoked
Hollywood-speak, insisting that "there's no upside" in commenting on a
fellow agent, even a fictional one.
"It's good television, in the sense that the stakes have been increased to a
life-or-death level, but it's not all that realistic," Mr. Sures said. He
suggested that the surgical-strike nature of Ari Gold's departure was more
like Wall Street than Beverly Hills. "Departures from an investment bank
would be taken much more seriously," he said.
Norman Aladjem, a senior partner at the Paradigm Talent Agency, said "there
are kernels of truth" that make the show's portrayal of agents highly
watchable. "But it's a very stylized version," he said, adding "when you
compress all that into a 30-minute TV episode, it makes these people look
like they're nuts."
Other insiders disagreed, saying that Wagnerian theatrics are not uncommon
when high-profile agents unexpectedly part company. While contractual terms
can vary from agency to agency, the tactics used in such situations can
range from filing lawsuits to confiscating phones, changing office locks,
even posting photographs of the dismissed agents in company parking garages.
"I was fired from two agencies, and the first time, they padlocked my
office, my assistant was crying and they were literally trying to take my
Rolodex out of my hands - which I later learned you are legally allowed to
take - as I was escorted from the building," recalled Gavin Polone, a former
agent and now a producer. "The best thing was that they forgot to turn off
my company car phone. And back then - this was in 1989 - your car phone bill
could run $800 a month. I wound up using it for four more months."
Mr. Ellin said that while agency coups are common, he specifically did not
write the "Entourage" finale with Mr. Emanuel in mind. "It is definitely not
taken from Ari's story," Mr. Ellin said, adding, "Ari was in very good shape
when he left his agency." (Mr. Emanuel declined to comment for this story.)
As for Ari Gold's future - the "end game," as his assistant Lloyd put it -
viewers will have to wait for next season. "People who've done what Ari's
done are either blackballed or they bounce back," said Mr. Ellin, hinting
that the popularity of Mr. Piven's character would go a long way toward
determining his fate. "At some point," he said, "Ari will be back."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/arts/television/05agen.html