Wednesday, February 4, 2009

David O. Russell


David O. Russell's freak-out on the set of "I [Heart] Huckabees" to surface on the Internet. It's hardly a dirty little secret anymore: In Hollywood, everyone looks the other way at bad behavior, as long as it's the behavior of someone powerful enough to get away with it, be it a top actor, a studio chief, an agent with a hot client or a powerful producer.

Not to single him out, but Scott Rudin hardly blinks anymore when someone recounts one of his outbursts. He's the best in his field, so dealing with his volatile temper is simply viewed as the cost of doing business. But to be fair to the movie business, the examples of bad behavior hardly end when you leave the force-field of Joel Silver's office.

Whenever I'm around cynical old sportswriters, they are happy to trot out endless stories of equally awful behavior by various stars in their field, be it football, basketball or baseball, which has a murderer's row of rough customers, recent Mr. Nasty entries including the Dodgers' Jeff Kent (who treated every sportswriter he met like dirt), Manny Ramirez (who clobbered a clubhouse attendant in Boston last year) and Barry Bonds, who couldn't even be bothered to act like a nice guy when he had his own reality TV show.

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