Jamie Gold: Not As Agenty As Previously Claimed?
When newly crowned World Series of Poker champion and former agent Jamie Gold expressed trepidation about the fame that would inevitably accompany a win in poker's biggest tournament— the kind of fame he compared to that which makes people think that James Gandolfini possesses Christ-like healing powers—perhaps he also feared that people within the entertainment industry might call bullshit on the resume he'd been providing to the press during his run to the championship. The Defamer Special Correspondent on Onetime Agents Who May Have Bluffed About Their Client Lists offers his perspective on some holes in Gold's backstory:
I speak for the masses. Please stop Jamie Gold, and his millions of lies.
Jamie Gold never represented any of the people he keeps saying he has. Lies, lies, lies. He was an ASSISTANT, and then a very very junior agent at a small agency in the early 1990's who MIGHT have taken messages from some of these people, before forwarding them to their real agent. He is a classic Hollywood liar - other people's successes become his own, and his own failures become somebody else's. He has always had a pathological relationship with the truth...which makes him ideal for poker. Sigh. But have you noted his deranged ramblings about being the basis for the Ari Gold character in Entourage? What would your dancing Ari Emanuel mascot say!? It's really kind of sad, if you think about it; first taste of fame that he says he doesn't want, and he pops off a few corkers that defy credulity.
It's really freaking a lot of us out who have known him over the years, to hear these wild, ridiculous claims in the press; it is also crude that the mainstream media has never checked any of this out, and keeps calling him an ex-talent agent, and citing this long list of stars he has supposedly been instrumental in creating. He's an ex-talent agent like Naomi Campbell is an ex-actress - forgettable, failed and dangerous. He hasn't even managed or been an agent in years and years. To be perfectly blunt, the only REAL celebrity Jamie Gold has ever personally signed and represented was Ron Jeremy. That's right. Ron The Hedgehog Jeremy. Not Jeffrey Wright. Not Lucy Liu, not Melora Walters, not Felicity Huffman, none of them. His agency was more like Talent Agency Waiting Room of the Damned. Think last stop on the downward spiral, and those were his clients. As for being James Gandolfini's rep (an actor he somehow managed to steal when he went solo for one disastrous year), that's a joke; that honor REALLY belonged to his ex-partner, who at that time wisely broke up with Jamie, probably right when he started repping porn stars. Which most of his former theatrical clients did, by the way; seems even they, in the ninth circle of agency rep hell, couldn't bear to be associated with Jamie Gold's Van Nuys Talent Hut.
And as long as we're on the topic, Hollywood, Interrupted reports that after Gold pays off his tournament backers, he might only be walking away with second-place money after all. Once you get past the millions of dollars he'll clear after taxes, this fame stuff really does kind of suck.