Roll the Eyes: The Destructive Tao of Ari Emanuel

The swirling, ceaseless, fulminating, agitating, awe-inspiring, exhausting, infuriating whirlwind that is Ari Emanuel has always presented an impossible challenge to Hollywood reporters and chroniclers — me especially.

The thing about this beat is that everyone who comes to cover Hollywood — every would-be Boswell — tells themselves the same thing: There is no reason industry coverage has to be so boring! I’m gonna make characters out of these people — capture the new Ovitzes, Evanses and Mayers in their rises and falls with all the great Shakespearean pathos I can muster.  

That’s what every reporter who steps on these shores vows.

Then they meet the people running the place today in corporate, tech-infused Hollywood.

Say what you will about Ari; he is not boring. What he has to say is never dull — and so his new book, Roll the Calls: A Memoir, is not some staid, corporate-speak road map to somnambulism.

You could die reading interviews or books by some of our potentates, waiting for them to stray a millimeter from the lawyered, preapproved talking points. You look at an account of what was said at one of these summits, and you could, 99 percent of the time, guess the response to every single question within a couple of words.

But with Ari, on the record or off, you never know what is going to come out of his mouth, and most of the time, it’s something that makes you consider an issue or the world differently than you ever have before.

As much as possible, when I’m writing about an issue, I try to get or find the Ari POV, because even when I disagree with where he winds up, his arguments are always formidable, and you need to grapple with them before you can move forward.

Which to a would-be Boswell is manna from heaven.

And then you have the ups and downs, the personal dramas, the stories of the volcanic temper, the falling-outs and the betrayals — what more could I pray for?

So before I give you my read of Roll the Calls — the good, the bad, the outrageous (wait until you get a load of his breakfast) and what Ari’s worldview has to say about Hollywood right now — here’s my personal Ari story, which, I think, is emblematic of the whole sprawling Ari experience.

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Ari, Line One

About eight years ago, I was trying to write a piece on some variation of “Is Hollywood Doomed?” (I don’t stray far from home), and it occurred to me that I could benefit from Ari Emanuel’s thoughts on whatever exactly the topic was.  

So I emailed the comms folks to ask if he had a few minutes. Then I promptly forgot about it because I throw out lots of those requests.

When I’m actually going to talk to a Hollywood ruler, the phone call is usually preceded by a few hundred back-and-forths about what I want to talk about, how long the call will last, signing documents in blood that this will remain off the record and scheduling, rescheduling and last-minute canceling.

Instead, a few days later, I was driving when I got a call from an unknown number, and I answered. 

“Richard, it’s Ari.”