The Agent Dance: Carrey Turns Over Soul To CAA
THR reports that as expected, freshly unattached star Jim Carrey didn't need much alone time to recover from the end of his longtime relationship with UTA, already leaping into the outstretched, Armani-clad arms of hated rival CAA, who've made a fun little game out of poaching both their agents and clients over the last year or so. The LA Weekly's Nikki Finke devotes this week's entire column to the big defection, noting that now-former rep Nick Stevens tried to give Endeavor superagent Ari Emanuel tips on where Carrey likes to be tickled, hoping to keep him from winding up between slutty CAA's spread legs, and describing the final, painful moments of Stevens and Carrey's relationship:
Carrey placed that fatal phone call to Stevens on Wednesday morning. The managers told the town they didn't know about it until after the fact. Gold, at the Beverly Hills Hotel for a lunch meeting, paced around the grounds clutching his cell phone as he talked on a conference call to Carrey and Miller about what had just gone down. Defending the firing, the managers told Hollywood that, after his phoner with Carrey, Stevens should have tried to save the client by gathering together all of the resources of UTA for one final Hail Mary pitch. In fact, Season 3's final episode of Entourage showed Ari doing that PowerPoint-and-pleading presentation for Vince and his manager, "E." It didn't work for Ari, and Stevens knew it wouldn't work for him either. In an e-mail sent to Miller and Gold, the agent tore into the managers for sabotaging Carrey's relationship with him and maneuvering the actor out of UTA. Later, to his colleagues, Stevens explained that a final meeting would have been pointless.
Then he sent a note to the remains of Team Carrey, urging everyone to "live and let live." Something like that is bound to turn up in Entourage's Season 4.
While CAA traditionally opts for an ostentatious, loyalty-demonstrating display of baby-gobbling to sell themselves to big-ticket clients like Carrey, we have a feeling that their pitch was a little different this time, instead promising to publicly stab the next studio executive who dares to cancel one of his projects while they dine at the Grill. Sometimes the murder of a full-grown person is just the personal touch an insecure actor needs to know his agents are fully committed to advancing his career.