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Yesterday's lengthy LAT profile of nice-guy producer Mark Gordon reminded us again of how low the bar for Hollywood sainthood is set; if you can somehow find success in the industry without assembling your underlings each afternoon for a round of brutal beatings with a burlap sack full of unsolicited screenplays and you don't turn up dead underneath a pile of high-priced call girls, get ready for your halo fitting:

An unlikely attitude for an emperor. But that's exactly what friends and colleagues fall all over themselves to point out — the thing, they say, that sets Gordon apart."The miraculous thing about Mark," says screenwriter Margaret Nagle, "is that he's successful without being a jerk. Which in this town is pretty rare."

Nagle saw both sides of Gordon's personality three years ago when she brought him a project she wanted to produce, a biopic about the years Franklin Roosevelt had spent recuperating from polio at a spa in Warm Springs, Ga.

Gordon loved the idea and encouraged Nagle to write it rather than produce it. "I had never written a script before," Nagle says, "but I thought about it and said, 'OK, will you give me some money?' And he laughed, and said no. Because he's an unbelievably nice man, but he's also a very good businessman."

Insert a Harvey Weinstein, Joel Silver, or Scott Rudin into the above story, and the end result of "no" would likely be unchanged, but the anecdote may have instead been wheezily delivered by a former screenwriter wistfully recalling the last moments before his windpipe was crushed by someone with a less civil approach to rejection.