Visiting 2 brothers from college and sort of wondered, are there any public restaurants that despite being public, would still not take kindly to white patrons? I ain't trying to be like Pee Wee Herman stumbling into that biker bar.

I realize the characters backstory, a once famed lit agent becomes square old guy repping TV writers in the valley is certainly true-to-life. But so many of the characters, even the small supporting characters are people from Doug's real life career arch. Was Andrew Klein based on anyone specific ?

Wouldn't anyone, even if they were not a suspect, potentially have a variety of emotions in seeing such a morbid site? What reaction are detectives seeking that could only be the reaction of a guilty culprit?

I am just getting started in the business but understand that in pop/rock, songwriting credit can wildly vary based on contribution percentages of a song. If I come in with a song that is 90% written, the remaining 10% can end up a variety of split %. In Nashville, I understand that the common split is equal 3 parts to 3 writers, even if one writer contributed more of the song than the other two parties. If I have a song that is completely written, save for a bridge. Is it improper or unorthodox to want to hold onto 2/3rds of the song, and award only 1/3rd to another party? I am stumped on a bridge and ready to move on.

If you're a songwriter, and someone asked you to write a bridge for 33% of a song rather than 50%, would you take it? Keep in mind, if this were a 3 writer split, that's what you'd be getting anyway.

In the 90's, Cahn Man managed several marquee acts in the punk world such as Green Day, Rancid, Jawbreaker, Offspring, The Muffs and many others. They were on a roll getting Green Day, The Muffs, and Jawbreaker all signed to majors in a very short span and I believe negotiated The Offsprings jump from Epitaph to Columbia in 1996. At some point the company just completely disappeared.

I get that restaurants were legally allowed to be segregated until the major supreme court ruling of Ollie's BBQ in 1964 (Katzenbach_v._McClung). Prior to that abolishment, if a restaurant owner had simply not desired to segregate, were they allowed? Did restaurants exist where whites roamed/sat freely among blacks with no designated separation because the owners simply didn't care to segregate?

Whenever a similar question is posed here about DFW, the answers are always modern novelists and what not. When you look at pieces like "Lobster...", "Supposedly Fun Thing...", "Tracy Austin...", etc., do any modern journalists/critics carry the banner that DFW did ? Anyone close ?

When you consider that he recorded and toured another 34 years, it seems completely implausible that Ozzy would have legitimately had a desire to retire in 1992, but at the same time, the concept of bands boldly lying to their fans about 'retirement' tours simply as a ticket selling ploy hadn't yet taken hold that early. So I wonder, what was the real plan way back when ?

I have history in the literary world, but not the book publishing world. I have a chef who is not of great means but is a fantastic chef. I have offered to help him publish a cookbook, and I am in a bit of a pickle. Listening to this chef speak about his food, and his history in food is a true clinic. There is so much more to his brilliance than simply his recipes. If possible, I would like to create a book that is text-heavy, to allow transcript of his lengthy history in the restaurant business, and lengthy detail of the origin and development of each recipe.

However, I am aware that these days, people want a good photo of every dish, and most cookbooks, even great ones, are thick, vibrant paper books that aren't exactly reader friendly for long text passages. Is there a cook book that has been published as of late that successfully merges the handheld, readable packaging of a text heavy book while also being able to provide 70+ vibrant color pages as well?

I suppose my dream scenario would be to take a thick hardback (imagine Keith Richard's "Life") but rather than have the photo pages lumped together in only two sections, have single photo pages placed sporadically throughout the book (so as to show off dishes). I'm aware that this is expensive and most publishers won't do it.

It's possible that what I really want is out there and I just haven't seen it yet.

Any ideas are certainly appreciated.

3-4 weeks into a new oil change and the oil light comes on. And its low on oil. Serviceman says he sees no evidence of area where oil is leaking. Yes that's a lot of miles, but losing that much oil that quickly is a bad sign. What's going on ?

This is an outstanding article I wanted to pass along. Seems like suing for idea theft almost never prevails. Wild that the woman who sued over Sister Act declined a $1M settlement -- and then lost. Whoops.

Copy Cats: Hollywood Stole My Story!

by Tad Friend  

The New Yorker | September 1998

Studios are awash in copyright suits. Why are they so hard to win?

This summer, Americans spent 575 million hours in darkened cinemas and saw, at most, two new things: the harrowing D Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan and the hair-gel joke in There’s Something About Mary. Yet as popcorn movies have become a tag-team-written jumble of curvy scientists, ninja studs, morphing cyborgs, and basement-loving psychos, one obscure writer after another has come forward to advance the claim that a studio stole his brainchild. Hollywood movies may never have seemed more derivative, but the copyright suits they inspire display an ingenuity and a nuanced concern for story development worthy of the young Orson Welles.

Our sympathies in these cases tend to go to the little guy—to plaintiffs like Mark Dunn, a soft-spoken clerk at the New York Public Library, who is suing Paramount Studios, the producer Scott Rudin, and the screenwriter Andrew Niccol for $300 million. Dunn alleges that his play Frank’s Life, about the unwitting subject of a TV series, was secretly used as a blueprint by the creators of The Truman Show after they had rejected it as a potential movie. Dunn has earned less than $25,000 from his many years of writing for what he calls the “Off-Off-Broadway ghetto”; The Truman Show has grossed $125 million to date.

Dunn’s suit lists 149 purported similarities between Frank’s Life and The Truman Show. That seems an overwhelming number, and Dunn’s lawyer, Carl Person, says that the two works’ resemblances make the suit “the best copyright case I’ve ever had.” This is not saying much, however, for Person hasn’t yet won any of the five movie copyright cases he’s filed. He probably won’t win this one, either—and maybe he shouldn’t.

Paramount will undoubtedly argue that Andrew Niccol came up with the idea for The Truman Show independently (Niccol’s former manager says that he has the writer’s copyrighted treatment, written in 1991, a year before Frank’s Life was staged) and that Person’s client is either deluded or a stickup artist, or both. In June, Lynn Pleshette, Niccol’s agent, patiently explained to the New York Post, “Every time a big movie comes out, a moron tries to sue.” Though plaintiffs like Dunn radiate aggrieved sincerity, Paul Rudnick, the writer of Sister Act—which also fought off a Carl Person lawsuit—notes dryly that “the prospect of eight figures inspires a lot of sincerity.” Furthermore, as any cost-conscious producer will tell you, it’s usually much less expensive for a studio to buy a property than to steal it.

But the reason that Dunn and Person will probably lose their suit has less to do with the perceived integrity of the plaintiffs and the ostensible skullduggery of the defendants than with the fact that most copyright plaintiffs overestimate how much protection they have under the law. Even more important, they misunderstand how the Hollywood blockbuster gets created. Studios generally don’t want to make something so original that they’d have to steal it from an unsung genius; they want to recast familiar stories and have them endlessly rewritten until every star feels his part is juicy enough. Movies are often sold to the studios in the first place as the genetically predictable offspring of two prior hits (“It’s Working Girl meets Marathon Man!”). Many studios believe that if something is totally new—Koyaanisqatsi, say—we won’t want to see it.

***

In copyright law, it’s the details that matter. The idea of Tom Cruise playing an idealistic recent Harvard Law School graduate who gets pulled into a sinister case that’s way over his head sounds copyrightable—and ridiculously commercial—but it describes equally well two very different films that came out only months apart: The Firm and A Few Good Men. That example explains why, under federal law, ideas—and most characters—can’t be copyrighted.

Sixty-eight years ago, in the landmark case Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corporation, Judge Learned Hand determined that the author of Abie’s Irish Rose, a generic play about Irish-Jewish intermarriage, had no claim against The Cohens and the Kellys, a generic movie about Irish-Jewish intermarriage. Calling the Irish father in the play “a mere symbol for religious fanaticism and patriarchal pride, scarcely a character at all,” and the Irish father in the movie “only a grotesque hobbledehoy, used for low comedy of the most conventional sort,” Hand testily declared that neither story deserved legal protection. “The less developed the characters,” he wrote, “the less they can be copyrighted; that is the penalty an author must bear for marking them too indistinctly.” Thus, you couldn’t copyright a wrinkly but adorable creature, or the idea of his being hunted by narrow-minded humans—which explains why the producers of E.T. were able to fend off three copyright claims from people with prior scripts about wrinkly but adorable creatures, etc.

In theory, you can’t copyright mere ideas because the government wishes to encourage free expression—to prevent pioneering writers such as Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne from locking up all the good American stories. In practice, the law insures that studios aren’t stymied by the success of Die Hard but can illuminate vast new regions of the human soul in Die Hard on a bus (Speed), Die Hard on a plane (Air Force One), Die Hard on a mountain (Cliffhanger), Die Hard on a boat (Under Siege), and Die Hard on a bigger, slower boat (Speed 2).

You don’t even have to go as far as to change a milieu from Vietnam to an L.A. office building (as Die Hard itself did with the Rambo story) to be deemed a “creator” in the eyes of the law. Small changes suffice. Indeed, one could argue that the very definition of creativity in Hollywood is the subtle but legally distinguishing tweak. In 1994, Curt Wilson and his partner, Donna Douglas, sued Walt Disney Pictures because Sister Act resembled a script they had earlier submitted to the studio: both stories were about a woman hiding from the Mob by disguising herself as a nun, though Disney’s movie was much more playful. To the plaintiffs’ amazement—they’d spurned a million-dollar settlement offer—the jury found for the defense. “They would have had to copy our stuff verbatim for us to prevail,” Wilson says disgustedly.

Most copyright lawyers believe that if Shakespeare were alive today and had preserved his copyright on Romeo and Juliet, he would find it difficult to win a case against West Side Story. Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim would testify that they’d vaguely heard of Mr. Shakespeare and his Italy-based twist on the star-crossed-lovers scenario, but they’d certainly never read it. The defense would parade experts to testify that Mr. Shakespeare’s melodrama was utterly different, since it contained few, if any, Puerto Rican seamstresses and ballet-dancing street gangs. And they would also make the legally weighty argument that because Mr. Shakespeare had himself, as usual, stolen his plot—in this case from Arthur Brooke’s tedious epic poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet—he had no basis for a lawsuit. The legal term for his predicament is “unclean hands,” an evocative but uncopyrightable metaphor that was borrowed, one likes to imagine, from Shakespeare’s own Lady Macbeth.

***

The copyright plaintiffs’ legal steeplechase begins with an attempt to show that the studio had the opportunity to borrow from their work. This is the one hurdle plaintiffs can usually clear. If they have written a play or a book, then someone connected with the movie could easily have read it. “Or they submit the script to CAA, looking for an agent,” Creative Artists Agency executive Robert Bookman says wearily. “The agent never sees it, the reader is the lowest person on the totem pole, it’s a pass, the agent looks at the last page of the coverage, sees ‘pass,’ and his assistant writes a nice note. Then these plaintiffs say, ‘We sent it to CAA. That’s how Michael Crichton’”—a CAA client—“ ‘got the script.’”

But after proving “access,” the plaintiffs must demonstrate that the two works are “substantially similar.” This entails stacking up “articulable similarities between the plot, themes, dialogue, mood, setting, pace, characters, and sequence” of the two works. In addition to this “objective” test, the court also applies the “subjective” test: whether a layman would perceive a substantial similarity in the works’ “total concept and feel.”

Mark Dunn’s list of 149 similarities between his play Frank’s Life and The Truman Show includes the pervasive (“Hidden cameras placed all over the sprawling set and unknown to Frank/Truman”; “Frank/Truman were having what appears to the TV audience to be a normal sex life with the actor wives, raising various unspoken moral issues”), the picayune (“A specific volcanic island, within a group of such islands or archipelago, in the southern Pacific Ocean, with double-sounding name—Pago Pago/Fiji—is used as remote place . . . to escape from the effects of the Show”), and the perplexing (“The genre of Frank/Truman is a comedy, but with a uniqueness which is difficult to otherwise categorize”).

The courts have held, however, that such lists are “inherently subjective and unreliable,” particularly where “the list emphasizes random similarities scattered throughout the works.” Louis Petrich, a copyright-defense lawyer, says, “You can tell that the plaintiffs are stretching if their lists abstract or trivialize. In the first case, they say, ‘When the boy falls into the pit, that’s like our scene of the man being chased by the bull, because in both there’s “jeopardy.” ’ And in the second case, they say, ‘Each story has a red Chevy.’ Sure, but what does the Chevy have to do with the story?”

The highest hurdle that plaintiffs face is the fact that most scripts contain a lot of boilerplate that has no particular “author”; it consists of segments that are known legally as scenes à faire. As the court defined them in Alexander v. Haley, a 1978 copyright case against Roots, scenes à faire are “incidents, characters, or settings which are as a practical matter indispensable, or at least standard, in the treatment of a given topic.” Thus the court suggested that when one is writing about slavery, one would almost perforce include, among other things, “attempted escapes, flights through the woods pursued by baying dogs, the sorrowful or happy singing of slaves.” Another court held that a realistic portrait of cops in the South Bronx would necessarily contain “drunks, prostitutes, vermin, and derelict cars.”

The notion of scenes à faire is capacious enough to include the manner in which a reasonable person might develop an idea even if another reasonable person had earlier developed the same idea in the same way. For instance, if dinosaurs were reanimated, they’d obviously have to be kept far away from the nearest nursery school. So a writer who claimed that he had banished his velociraptors to a remote island before Michael Crichton did the same in Jurassic Park got nowhere in court: the judge ruled that “placing dinosaurs on a prehistoric island far from the mainland amounts to no more than a scene à faire in a dinosaur adventure story.”

The well-known Hollywood lawyer Bert Fields, who is defending Fox Searchlight Pictures in a copyright suit against The Full Monty, breezily explains the film’s similarities to a play called Ladies Night by offering a similar argument. “Once you’ve got the idea of male strippers,” he says, “it’s all scenes à faire: the inevitable scene when they first put on a G-string, the inevitable scene when someone’s naked body is shown as rather unattractive. You’ve got to have a problem for each of the six guys, so one guy having impotence just goes with the territory.”

A further obstacle for plaintiffs is that courts have tended to rule that “copying deleted or so disguised as to be unrecognizable” is not, legally, copying, and therefore that early drafts of a movie’s screenplay—even drafts that show evidence of copying—are not legally relevant. Martin Garbus, a copyright lawyer and First Amendment expert who has often sued the studios, says ruefully that people in Hollywood “know to change a description of Lincoln just enough—to put ‘black hat’ at the end of the sentence and ‘legs like a grasshopper’ at the beginning, and then take two other sentences from somewhere else. These are very sophisticated people.”

Plaintiffs have an especially hard time when there’s no paper trail. While aspiring screenwriters dream of a chance collision with a moviemaker (a screenplay was recently handed to Emma Thompson as she was being slid into an MRI tube), nothing could be worse from a plaintiff’s point of view. If a producer is stuck on a ski lift with a writer who regales her with his nifty twist on the asteroid-hurtling-toward-earth plot, and she steals it, that’s just too bad for him. He can try suing on the ground that there was a tacit mutual assumption that promising material would be paid for—the theory of “implied contract.” But unless the writer is already known as a high-concept guy, someone whose very laundry list or drunken e-mails might contain the germ of a billion-dollar idea, this imaginative legal strategy rarely works. Bert Fields says, “If I’m talking to Tom Clancy, there is probably an implied contract. If I’m talking to my dentist”—who had pitched Fields an idea the day before—“probably not.”

After contemplating all these barriers, many potential plaintiffs decide not to sue, simply because they lack the necessary funds. Martin Garbus told me, “The people who file these suits can’t afford the $250,000 to $500,000 to mount a fight against the studios and their big insurance companies. The studios’ theory is that if you spend the money and fight, you’ll wear your opponents down and discourage others from suing. It’s a successful tactic.”

Not always. In 1980, the prolific fantasy writer Harlan Ellison won $337,000 from ABC and Paramount, which had shanghaied his idea for a TV series about a robot cop. He then spent $7,000 of his booty to rent a billboard across the street from Paramount Pictures, which read, “Writers, don’t let them steal from you! Keep their hands out of your pockets!” “I did it to piss the shit out of them,” Ellison says, “and to send the message that writers can’t be ripped off.”

The studios aren’t as invulnerable as they appear. Bert Fields, who has represented them in dozens of copyright cases, told me, “People have learned that the studios often settle if it’s cheaper than the cost of litigation”—and that cost shoots up $650 an hour when Fields gets involved. “Studios will throw out $5,000 if it’s a weak case and $200,000 to $300,000 for a substantial case. Sometimes much more.” Last year, Barbara Chase-Riboud sued Steven Spielberg for “brazenly stealing” from her novel Echo of Lions to create his film Amistad. Then she suddenly dropped her suit and declared, “Amistad is a splendid piece of work, and I applaud Mr. Spielberg for having the courage to make it.” One can’t help but hear in such public reversals the ka-ching! of the cash register in the background.

Yet many plaintiffs, it seems, don’t want hush money as much as they want recognition. Last January, after a jury rejected the writer Stephen Kessler’s plagiarism claim against Michael Crichton for Twister, there was a curious moment when Kessler tried to shake Crichton’s hand (Crichton refused). The copyright-defense lawyer Louis Petrich says, “The plaintiffs don’t see themselves as calling the defendants thieves and jeopardizing their careers. They think that now they’re in show business, one of the big guys.” Certainly Mark Dunn is an unabashed fan of his opponents’ work. Dunn owns an early-draft Truman screenplay but says, “I feel guilty even looking at it,” because it was smuggled to him without the producers’ knowledge. This is a touching amount of reverence for a script that Dunn believes is premised on his own play. “Hollywood inspires yearning and delusion,” Paul Rudnick observes, “and this sort of litigation is really a kind of affection and fanship—a foothold.”

***

The giddiest aspect of copyright suits is how often the studios try to prove that their story was so derivative that they couldn’t have stolen it from any one source. Thus, while some reviewers acclaimed The Truman Show as a bold departure, Paramount may well point out at the trial that it wasn’t. At least seven previous works featured unwitting subjects on camera, including the sixties TV show The Prisoner, three Twilight Zone episodes, and a short Paul Bartel film, Secret Cinema. When millions of Americans are watching television, it will inevitably occur to more than one of those watchers that television may be also watching them. Ideas occur unpredictably, in odd, fractal clusters. A butterfly flaps its wings over China, and suddenly everyone decides that the next big thing is a mad bomber, an erupting volcano, or a nostalgic look at disco.

You might think that mankind’s collective imagination could churn up dozens of fictional ways to track a tornado, but there seems to be only one. When Stephen Kessler sued Michael Crichton for Twister, he was upset because his script about tornado chasers, Catch the Wind, had placed a data-collection device called Toto II in the whirlwind’s path, just like Twister’s data-collecting Dorothy. Not such a coincidence, the defense pointed out: years earlier two other writers had written a script called Twister involving a device called Toto, and all the Oz puns had originated with a device used by real tornado chasers that is called, um, Toto.

In the Sister Act trial, the producer, Scott Rudin, testified that the credited writer Paul Rudnick’s idea was not really novel, and Rudnick acknowledges that “the idea of a nun, or someone in disguise, has been used many, many times before.” He continues, “Plus, after my script had been rewritten by half of Southern California, I’d used a pseudonym on the film, so being sued for authorship under those circumstances was sort of hilarious.” Still, Rudnick stresses the gulf between an idea and its expression: “Yes, they also had a nun,” he says. “But a nun is not a story or a character. A nun is a noun.”

And once you have a nun, certain scenes and associations necessarily follow. The Sister Act plaintiffs highlighted the fact that both their screenplay and the movie likened nuns to penguins and contained the phrase “God works in mysterious ways.” Those aren’t scenes à faire, exactly, but any screenwriter who didn’t include them in a nun comedy would be criminally incompetent. What these suits’ lists of similarities reveal is that the human brain is hardwired to write scenes that hurry toward predictable surprise.

Two characters who can’t stand each other invariably wind up handcuffed together in a rolling boxcar or a shuffling chain gang. An innocent schnook arriving at an airport must within ten seconds pick up the identical-but-drug-filled suitcase. After the tomboyish girl next door dresses up for the prom, the boy can only look flustered and say, “Why, Miranda, you’re, you’re . . . beautiful!” Snooty matrons gigglingly confide, as soon as they are within earshot of loud funk music, that all they really want to do is “boogie down” or “knock boots.” When hard-bitten military men see an alien spacecraft, they ease off their glasses to peer more closely—and to allow us to register the childlike wonder in their eyes. And heroes who have only moments in which to defuse a ticking bomb rip off the casing to discover the statutory red wire and blue wire—another explosive device crafted, apparently, by the Acme Company for Wile E. Coyote.

Underlying such scenarios, by Hollywood legend, are a mere seven basic stories. Or maybe eight. (Or, as the Supreme Court of California once determined in an excess of hairsplitting, thirty-six.) One legendary core story is “the buddy movie”; another is “ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances”; a third is “boy meets girl, girl hates boy, boy woos girl.” But no one can quite agree on what, precisely, the others are (is Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America “fish out of water” or “lord in disguise”?) or on who thought up the list in the first place (Aristotle? Simpson and Bruckheimer?).

In truth, no one in Hollywood seems to care enough to nail those answers down, since all that matters is what type of story the last hit was. “It’s an industry that tries so hard to copy success,” Martin Garbus says. “You know there are a lot of people out there writing Wag the Dog II, and when Wag the Dog II comes out everyone’s going to sue, saying, ‘Hey! That was my idea!’” Perhaps, but not anymore. As long ago as 1945, a federal judge admonished that most copyright suits were premised “partly upon a wholly erroneous understanding of the extent of copyright protection; and partly upon that obsessive conviction, so common among authors and composers, that all similarities between their works and any others which appear later must inevitably be ascribed to plagiarism.”

But while the studios may win the copyright battle, they aren’t exonerated from the charge of laziness in the first degree. The courts seem to have the same feeling upon viewing the plots and characters in evidence that we have upon trailing out of the Cineplex: Haven’t we seen this before? One court wrote, with an Olympian weariness that is otherwise found only among film critics, “The common use of such stock . . . merely reminds us that in Hollywood, as in the life of men generally, there is only rarely anything new under the sun.” Which is a steal from Ecclesiastes—but tweaked just enough to be original.

Ultimately what I am asking is, did Law Enforcement ever find anything at either the Birmingham Abortion Clinic or the Atlanta Park crime scenes that would have given them a lead to Rudolph, even if the two witnesses had never jotted down his tag #? Yes, I realize once they had his name, and searched his home, they tied him to the case. I am asking 'what if' they had not gotten his name in Birmingham.

This is a very long read from 2005 but a fantastic window into the world of working a Hollywood Desk in the mid 2000's. I wonder of Scott ever chilled out. Anyone know ?

Boss-Zilla!

Movie producer Scott Rudin may be the most feared boss in Hollywood. But the young and ambitious line up for a chance to work for him.
By KATE KELLY and MERISSA MARR
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 24, 2005; Page A1

On his way out of the office for a childhood friend's funeral last year, 27-year-old Jon Silk scrambled to handle one final task for his boss, movie producer Scott Rudin. Mr. Silk presented an elaborate chart laying out Mr. Rudin's options for attending theater productions during a coming trip to London.

What happened next helps explain why Mr. Rudin holds the unofficial crown of Hollywood's most feared boss. Unable to make sense of the chart, the producer of films such as "The Truman Show" and "The Hours" went nuclear on his grieving assistant. "Learn to communicate!" he screamed, hurling a stack of papers across the room and telling him to get out. When Mr. Silk slammed the door behind him, Mr. Rudin canned the assistant and demanded he surrender his cellphone and identification badge.

"I think you're really fired," another assistant mouthed in a hushed tone to Mr. Silk.

The outburst would be the stuff of legend in almost any workplace. But in Mr. Rudin's office, caustic rants, shrieking threats and impulsive firings are routine. Mr. Rudin hires the young and ambitious who flock to the movie industry, testing their mettle in an intense environment. When they can't meet his exacting standards -- from translating obscure French art journals to tracking vacationing directors in the Himalayas -- he is quick to hit the eject button.

The result is a revolving door that never stops spinning. The precise number of assistants who have worked for Mr. Rudin in the past five years is hard to pin down, but some assistants peg it at 250 or more. Mr. Rudin says his insurance records show he has had 119 assistants over that period, but those records don't include assistants who were fired during a two-week trial period.

All parties agree that the tenures can be short -- and tumultuous. By his own account, Mr. Rudin once ordered an assistant out of a rental car for being late, telling him: "You're fired, get out, take a taxi wherever you're going." He says he fired a legally blind assistant more than once "not because he was blind, but because he wasn't good enough at the job," then rehired him because he felt guilty seeing the man standing at the bus stop outside his window. Another former assistant says he was dismissed for bringing the wrong breakfast muffin. Mr. Rudin doesn't recall that, but says it is "entirely possible."

Mr. Rudin acknowledges there is a "hard-scrabble environment" in his offices in New York and Los Angeles. "The thin-skinned guys don't like it," says the 47-year-old producer. "The thick-skinned people...understand that I'm working as hard as them." He describes his management style as "a cross between Attila the Hun and Miss Jean Brodie."

In Hollywood, where assistants do everything from answering the phone to buying birthday presents and dropping the kids off at summer camp, working for Mr. Rudin is a coveted position. The pay is exceptionally good -- ranging from $75,000 to $150,000 -- and staffers sometimes get to rub elbows with A-list talent. Those who survive often land plum jobs later. It has become a modern equivalent of the William Morris Agency's mailroom or a gig as a page at the NBC studios -- a proving ground for would-be moguls. Hyped on caffeine and eager to please, the assistants compromise their health, self-esteem and personal lives in an attempt to break into one of the world's most Darwinian businesses.

Tough bosses are a rite of passage in any career. Generations of parents counsel their children that the most demanding boss may also be the one who teaches them the most, preparing them for the rigors of the workplace. Among the lessons learned at the feet of Mr. Rudin: "Fear is a great motivator," says Derek Evans, a former assistant, now a senior executive at Spyglass Entertainment.

Faced with Mr. Rudin's attacks, assistants can either go running for the next bus home or suck it up and stick it out. After his own humiliation, Mr. Silk chose the latter. When Mr. Rudin cooled down a couple of days later, Mr. Silk -- who took ulcer medication during his employment there -- accepted an offer to try again.

"I definitely wanted to go back," he says. "My plan was that if I could make it six months, I would have my pick of jobs." Mr. Rudin says he doesn't recall the details of firing and rehiring Mr. Silk, but says he is "crazy about" Mr. Silk and was happy to recommend him for other jobs. Mr. Silk is now a creative executive for Gold Circle Films, which produced "My Big Fat Greek Wedding."

Indeed, the movie business is populated with successful Rudin proteges -- including DreamWorks SKG production head Adam Goodman and Craig Perry, producer of the "American Pie" movies. It's an unspoken quid pro quo: The assistant dukes it out for six months or a year, and Mr. Rudin opens doors afterward.

"I attribute an enormous amount of whatever success I've been able to attain directly because of how I saw him operate," says Mr. Perry. "Does he yell? Sure. Do I yell? Sure."

Typically in their early 20s, the assistants, most of whom are men, usually come directly from college. Some hail from top-tier institutions -- including Duke, Johns Hopkins and Harvard -- but Mr. Rudin isn't impressed by fancy degrees. "The more money they grow up with, the better the school, the quicker they wash out," he says.

Some assistants have a year or two of experience at production companies in New York or L.A., but these days most are referred through an informal network of Rudin alumni. Says one former staffer: "You get a call [from another assistant] on Friday afternoon, saying 'Hey, Rudin just fired another assistant, can you start Monday?' "

Most crucial is an ability to take heat from Day One. When Mr. Evans was an L.A.-based assistant in 1995, he recalls reviewing a list of important calls with Mr. Rudin over the phone -- and mispronouncing director Alan Pakula's last name. (He said "PACK-yoo-lah" instead of the correct "pah-COOL-ah.") Hearing the error, Mr. Rudin "went crazy on me," says Mr. Evans. The producer fired him immediately, telling him "to get out of the office, off the lot, leave Hollywood, Los Angeles and California, getting louder each time," says Mr. Evans.

He fled to the Paramount Pictures commissary, where he cooled his heels for six hours before getting the beeper message "911" from another assistant, which meant to return to the office. (A "411" message meant to call.)

After being rehired -- as many staffers are -- Mr. Evans added pronunciation details to a stack of 500 flashcards he had already made with names and phone numbers of important Rudin contacts. "I had to go back and make sure I wrote down phonetically the difficult ones," he says. Mr. Rudin says the flashcards were his idea. "You can't sound like you don't have a clue who you're calling," he says he told Mr. Evans.

A native of Baldwin, N.Y., on Long Island, Mr. Rudin didn't attend college, instead learning the industry under his own set of taskmasters. He worked for the late movie and TV producer Edgar Scherick, who Mr. Rudin says often complained he was "surrounded by mediocrity." As a teen in the 1970s, Mr. Rudin worked for Broadway producers, including the late Kermit Bloomgarden, producer of "Death of a Salesman," who instructed him to pick tomato bugs off plants on his apartment terrace. Mr. Rudin says he was sometimes required to haul Mr. Bloomgarden's false leg to Harlem for repairs -- on the bus, since the producer wouldn't spring for cab fare.

"Whatever I've asked anybody to do, I've never removed any of my limbs," Mr. Rudin says.

In a business where rising costs and corporate consolidation have squeezed out many independent producers, Mr. Rudin puts out as many as eight pictures a year. Last year, his films varied from family fare like "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" to the sex drama "Closer" and a remake of "The Manchurian Candidate."

At the moment, he has roughly 50 movies in development, including adaptations of the novel "The Corrections," the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" and a film about three Mississippi boys who embarked on a shot-by-shot remake of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in the 1980s.

In Rudin Productions' New York office near Times Square, his time is surgically managed by five assistants, who are classified by duty. The executive assistant, or "No. 1" in Rudin shorthand, manages the schedule and travels with the boss. That position, the highest-paid, is now held by a 22-year-old. The second-ranking assistant occupies the "hot seat," manning phones and helping Mr. Rudin hunt down people he wants to speak with and dodge the ones he doesn't. The third-ranking assistant handles "documents," including faxes and emails. No. 4 keeps an eye on Mr. Rudin's personal business and three homes, in New York City, Quogue, Long Island, and Washington, Conn. A fifth keeps tabs on the theater and art worlds, informing him of new shows and upcoming exhibitions, although that spot is currently vacant. Yet another assistant handles telephones and errands in L.A.

The assistants' tasks are by turns glamorous and mundane. On occasional Saturdays, the weekend's on-call assistant -- a rotating position -- has stood outside a Times Square theater, waiting with tickets in case Mr. Rudin wanted to attend a show. (If he didn't show up, the assistant could use them). Former assistants say they have handled chores such as returning videotapes, dropping off dry-cleaning and picking up rotisserie chicken. But they can also find themselves in Hollywood meetings with the likes of Nicole Kidman, Jude Law or Jim Carrey.

For the hot-seat assistant, the day starts with a 6:00 a.m. run to Mr. Rudin's apartment in the San Remo building on Manhattan's Central Park West, where he lives with his partner of seven years, John Barlow, founder of a New York public-relations firm that focuses on Broadway shows. There, the aide retrieves the boss's list of outstanding phone calls, often 30 pages long, which Mr. Rudin has annotated during the night. Given Mr. Rudin's dealings in London, New York and Los Angeles, calls must be prioritized according to time zone and urgency.

Mr. Rudin usually arrives at work around 6:30 a.m., at which time the hot-seat assistant begins dialing. His company has just 18 employees and since Mr. Rudin involves himself in nearly every aspect of a production, from securing adaptation rights to marketing the finished product, the volume of calls is heavy. He says he makes or receives about 400 in an average day.

Mr. Rudin says he is "regularly shocked by the lack of cultural knowledge" in his work force. He once asked an assistant to get a DVD of the 1952 film "The Member of the Wedding," but when he mentioned the name of the director, the staffer didn't recognize it. Mr. Rudin says he asked the young man: "Your parents paid for you to go to college and you don't know who Fred Zinnemann is?" Mr. Zinnemann also directed "Oklahoma!," "High Noon" and "The Day of the Jackal."

The producer -- who once forced an underling to tape a sign defining the word "anticipate" in huge letters above his desk -- says that when he asks follow-up questions about work, assistants often look back at him "like I'm speaking Urdu." He tells them, "When I ask you these questions, have an answer ready. Then I would think you're intelligent."

He is also known for a wicked sense of humor: When one assistant routinely sported ink-stained shirt pockets, Mr. Rudin bought him a half-dozen expensive dress shirts at Bergdorf Goodman, which he then had an intern spot with ink blotches.

The atmosphere drives assistants to perform remarkable tasks. In May 2004, for instance, director Stephen Daldry was climbing in the Himalayas when Mr. Rudin became desperate to show him a new screenplay. After an assistant got the pages into the director's hands in Nepal, Mr. Daldry says he later asked Mr. Rudin in amazement, "How did you find me?" (An assistant got Mr. Daldry's office to say where he was vacationing, then hired a specialty courier service to take the script to Kathmandu.)

In 1992, L.A.-based assistant Adam Schroeder was asked to deliver an offer to author Terry McMillan, whose best-seller "Waiting to Exhale" was the subject of a bidding war. Mr. Schroeder says he flew to San Francisco on the Fourth of July, then drove to her suburban home, where she answered the door in a bathrobe. Even after Mr. Schroeder helped the writer's little boy search for a lost rabbit, Mr. Rudin didn't get the film rights. The loss didn't get Mr. Schroeder fired. He now operates his own production outfit in Hollywood. Ms. McMillan declined to comment.

Other times when things go wrong, Mr. Rudin lets loose. Former assistants say he sometimes vents his anger by throwing phones and office supplies, prompting assistants to take precautions. Some feared Mr. Rudin might hurl an easily accessible framed picture on his desk, so they surreptitiously moved it out of his reach. Others measured Mr. Rudin's phone cord so they could keep the appropriate distance. "The rookies often stood too close," remembers Mr. Evans.

Mr. Rudin says he's thrown things "occasionally, but very rarely."

Under such pressure, assistants feel compelled to push themselves. Connor Price, who was the No. 1 assistant for a time last year, spent a sick day at home alternately vomiting and giving instructions to his co-workers, until Mr. Rudin finally told them to stop calling. Mr. Price might have had reason to be nervous. Shortly after being hired, he came across a note in which another assistant wrote to Mr. Rudin: "Regarding Connor Price: I know your first impressions weren't great. In fact, you called this guy an idiot."

Adam Rosenberg, who spent six months working for Mr. Rudin last year, was petrified after the boss found fault with an art-journal piece he had translated from French. Mr. Rosenberg couldn't define what specific words meant in English. "What are you doing? I don't want you messing around," he says Mr. Rudin reprimanded. "He gave me a lecture about not paying attention."

To set things right, Mr. Rosenberg got to the office at 5:30 the next morning and called the article's French author for a literal translation. When Mr. Rudin -- who doesn't speak French -- called in, Mr. Rosenberg recited the piece word-for-word. He recalls Mr. Rudin's response: "OK," followed by a hang-up. Mr. Rudin says, "He did get points for speaking French."

The prize for surviving Mr. Rudin's hazing is a first-hand education in being a Hollywood shark. The producer, for example, tries to make sure business associates owe him a call -- rather than the other way around -- by having his assistants call contacts at times when they're unlikely to answer, leaving messages instead. At one time Terry Press, head of marketing at DreamWorks, had a nighttime voicemail greeting that said: "If you're anyone other than Scott Rudin's office, please leave a message."

"We have been guilty of dumping calls occasionally," Mr. Rudin concedes.

Working for Mr. Rudin also offers access to the sort of high-level Hollywood executives unseen by most starting assistants. As a young grunt working for the producer in the early 1990s, Brandon Camp met actor Tim Robbins and Sherry Lansing, then Paramount's studio chief.

He notes Mr. Rudin's knack for finding movie fodder, sometimes when still in manuscript form. "He'll say, 'This book is going to be an incredible hit,' and everybody says, 'Well, maybe'...and the book turns out to be 'The Firm,' " says Mr. Camp. The Rudin-produced movie version of the John Grisham thriller made more than $150 million at theU.S. box office.

Mr. Rudin credits his young staffers with providing him with some helpful tips. Years ago, it was an assistant who first drew his attention to the below-the-radar movie "Bottle Rocket" -- the directorial debut of Wes Anderson, now one of Mr. Rudin's favorite creative minds. "You cannot overestimate the contribution that they make, being 22-year-old guys who like movies and music and bands," he says.

Mr. Rudin tries to ease life for his staff with generous compensation and occasional gifts. "It's bad enough I'm sure that they feel emotionally exploited," he says. "I don't want them to feel commercially exploited as well." Perks have ranged from the week-long Nantucket vacation he purchased for onetime assistant Kevin Walsh to the Mini Cooper he gave Mark Roybal, a former assistant soon to be named the company's president, as a wedding gift.

Rudin alums have a powerful bond. At Mr. Roybal's wedding two years ago, 13 former assistants attended, as well as the producer himself. Some have gone into business together, like movie producers Lars Knudsen and Beau Flynn. Once a year Derek Skaletsky, who worked for Mr. Rudin in the late 1990s and now works for a children's haircut franchise near Boston, gets together with a half-dozen old Rudin Productions buddies for a steak dinner.

"Everybody in Hollywood tries to be tough, but not many people have the game," says Mr. Skaletsky. "Rudin's got it."

This is in regard to the nameless musicians who back up a marquee performer. I realize there is a minimum scale but surely that goes out the window when money becomes flush. While I realize certain acts pay scale and it's a take it or leave it situation, if Keith Urban or Carrie Underwood (or whoever) really likes their drummer and doesn't want them to go away, what would you expect that musician to make?