Our noting earlier of a rumor that CAA assistants were now being made to park in a life-size Connect 4 board on the bottommost level of the Death Star parking structure brings us this report from an operative directly affected by the new policy:

As if life wasn't hard enough for the Stormtrooping underclass aboard the CAA Death Star—one moment, they're required to spend an afternoon with their foot wedged beneath their boss's wobbly Aeron chair, the next, they're returning a baby coldcuts platter to Jerry's for not having "enough girl meat"—Deadline Hollywood Daily reports the agency's assistants are now subjected to this:

Our item yesterday about the rumored C-word contretemps between CAA agent Dan Aloni and Fox Atomic exec Debbie Liebling — which we heard led to a unilateral CAA ban from the Fox lot — drew quite a bit of interest from all involved. Make that "everyone but CAA," rather, which had Nikki Finke do its dirty work for them. Variety even accused us of "an exceptional Internet smear campaign" — before pulling its story down minutes later. But we'll get to that in a moment. First things first: After the jump, a studio "denial"!

Some guys really know how to turn on the charm. Take CAA agent Dan Aloni for example, who reps directors Christopher Nolan, Michel Gondry and Tom Shadyac (among others) and who we hear recently talked his way right off the Fox lot after a tiff with Fox Atomic production boss Debbie Liebling. It seems everything was going just fine until Aloni bellowed something about Liebling being "a stupid fucking cunt" — which was enough for Peter Chernin himself to reportedly ban all of CAA from the lot until the Death Star gets its loose cannon in line. But we also hear that might take a while. Why?

An eagle-eyed Defamer operative caught a wonderful if short-lived revision at CAA's Wikipedia page this morning, when, for 30 precious minutes, the agency's storied history of talent relations included colluding with Joe and Ashlee Simpson to rip off her song "My Model":

Were you, like us, rendered an incapacitated, drooling mess after trying to slog through Variety's report on the agency-defection madness currently gripping the screenwriting trade? Perhaps you are simply a visual learner, in which case we've drafted for you a handy pictorial guide to the recent comings and goings of the Bedhopping Six. (We managed to find photos of all them, save the Google Image-shy husband-wife team of Cormac and Marianne Wibberley, the National Treasure writers instead represented by Nicolas Cage wielding a torch inside Mt. Rushmore's Teddy Roosevelt nostril.)

Cash money, not equity, is what powers the entertainment industry. Especially when it comes to talent. In a possibly apocryphal but illustrative anecdote, legendary bluesman Albert King reportedly refused to leave the stage until he had cash in hand from the concert promoter, presumably because he'd been cheated out of so many deals in the past. Studio accounting has an only slightly better reputation than that of the music industry when it comes to being, ahem, creative. Hence it's no surprise that when negotiating venture funding for Funny Or Die, Will Ferrell reportedly wanted to know what his upfront payout would be, according to Sequoia Capital's Mark Kvamme in comments to the New York Times. Which is one reason why private equity efforts to fund traditional film and television production have yet to pan out. Better to get your money upfront and walk away in case the project is a disaster. So how is Valley money changing Hollywood business models?

If Robert De Niro's appearance at last night's Meryl Streep tribute in New York is any indication, all those haters who ridiculed the actor's agency switch last week might have another thing coming. To wit: De Niro killed. In a cruise-ship comic kind of way, perhaps, and filing through a fistful of index-carded one-liners, but still. This guy may yet pull down $20 million a picture if his timing keeps up, and he wasted no time soliciting his former co-star Streep to join him — if only someone at CAA would return his calls. Zing! Catch our exclusive video and a few more outtakes from De Niro's repertoire after the jump.

Seeing as the L.A. Times wouldn't rush any story it couldn't retract in disgrace a few weeks later, John Horn took his sweet time pounding out today's analysis of all the dramatic agency-hopping exploits over the last week-and-a-half. There's a little bit of a long view, here, however, and it's decidedly ugly; for starters, could industry volatility force CAA reps to endure the horrors of — gulp — business class? Or worse?

As we put this week to bed, it's time to reflect, project, deflect and genuflect on the week that was...
· Big week for Gorgeous George Clooney. His passion project, Leatherheads,
disappointed at the box office (twice!), he was on the receiving end of a threatening phone call and his sand-loving girlfriend turned his bachelor pad into Yankee Candle outlet. Ah, who are we kidding? He can still pull digits with the best of 'em.
· Ellen Page butched it up on Leno and may (or may not!) have dissed Hanoi Jane.
· Certainly, Tom Cruise has had better weeks. MGM tried to spin Valkyrie's second release date pushback as a B.O. ploy, but we knew better.
· Artie Lange and Charlton Heston both had shitty weeks, too. Artie resigned from the Howard Stern Show and Charlton, well, he died.
· The hackiest hack that ever hacked, Uwe Boll, found himself on the wrong end of an online petition that might just end his career (fingers crossed!). Howevs, he was able to leverage the power of the internet to fight back ... twice!
· It was Musical Chairs week at Hollywood's biggest talent agencies. Bob DeNiro bolted from CAA (spurring a hilarious poison pen post from the Death Star), Nick Stevens led one of "the biggest agent migrations in years" when he bolted from UTA to Endeavor and a finch with a mean streak wreaked havoc at CAA shortly after Ashton Kutcher became the agency's newest client.
· Teri Hatcher and Clint Black learned that they're both better off sticking with their day jobs.
· After publicly (and somewhat shadily) announcing that he and his wife were victims of an alleged extortion attempt by his nanny, Rob Lowe displayed the keen ability to turn an adjective into a noun when he coined the term "false terribles."

Some accounts place Robert De Niro's recent defection from CAA to Endeavor as a move at least a decade in the making. That inevitability didn't lessen the sting for an anonymous CAA operative, however, who chimed at Deadline Hollywood Daily on Thursday with a poetic reality check entitled, "Why Did Bobby Leave Us?"

Robert De Niro shuffled through Endeavor's busy revolving door Wednesday in the agency's third high-profile move of the week, marking the end of the Oscar-winner's long tenure at CAA. The addition comes days after Ashton Kutcher fled Endeavor for the confines of CAA, and nearly a week after the seismic defection of comedy power broker Nick Stevens and two partners from UTA. As Variety's Michael Fleming notes, De Niro "hit his payday stride" with his $18 million turn in Meet the Fockers; the move sets him up for continued forays into safe, tightly packaged middlebrow humor franchises that will secure his legacy as a shell of the standard-bearing American legend we grew up with. Bon voyage, Bob. [Variety]

It's a story as old as Hollywood itself: An attractive actor who's done everything he can to get himself into the spotlight just can't get the roles he wants. Is it because his acting isn't quite up to par? Of course not... It's because his agent sucks!

In another case of life imitating art, The Death Star is under attack! By Hitchcockian birds of prey, no less!

Rumblings from the inner sanctum of the CAA Death Star hint that co-pilots Kevin Huvane and Bryan Lourd are taking an early lunch today to plot an legal attack of wonderfully (if predictably) bloodthirsty ferocity. Their target: Who else? CAA emperor emeritus Michael Ovitz, whose misadventures with Anthony Pellicano upon returning to the agent game almost 10 years ago reportedly involved wiretapping the old joint for a not-so-subtle stab at talent poaching:

A disturbance in the Vince Vaughn-management force yesterday sent ripples across the universe; within minutes, the CAA Death Star had dispatched two TIE fighters to snatch up the free-floating superstar—just as they did with former UTA clients Jim Carrey and Will Ferrell. One lunchtime pitch session, catered by Zankou Baby, was all it took to convince Vaughn he had found a new family among the Dark Lords of the CAA Sith. [Variety]

Breaking! More news from the front lines of what some are already calling the Great CAA Egg Roll Fire of 2008. Another reader reports: "Ironically, I am told the egg roll caught fire in the microwave. HR removed all CAA's toaster ovens months ago...(wait for it), 'fire hazard,' they said. Is no one safe?" Clearly, the carefully calibrated CAA microwaves, set to cook a fresh baby to perfection in its own steamer bag with a mere two clicks of the potato button, as a commenter once pointed out, were not equipped to handle something as small as an egg roll. Developing...

Sometimes, all it takes is something relatively insignificant—say, the firing of two proton torpedoes down a thermal exhaust port that leads directly to a reactor core, or an overcooked chinese appetizer—to fell the seemingly invulnerable. This just in from a Defamer operative stationed in the vicinity of the CAA Death Star: "Not sure if you heard, but apparently the caa bldg. was evacuated because someone burnt an egg roll in a toaster oven and it set off the fire alarm." We encourage further eyewitness accounts of the burnt-egg-roll carnage (and baby-flavored dipping sauces) that brought operations at Hollywood's most powerful institution to a grinding halt.

Life behind the gleaming walls of the CAA Death Star, it should hardly surprise you to hear, is not all baby-buffets and games: Being the most powerful agenting force in the universe means that daily, high-stakes deals negotiated by employees with Vader-sized ambitions will occasionally require the building to fold in on itself and munch on one of its own. Which is precisely what happened to TV packager Michael Camacho after getting his hands a little to deeply inside the Oprahphagus. From Deadline Hollywood Daily:

This is what happens when onetime mailroom trainees eff with The Oprah. Will they never learn? Nikki Finke is spreading the news about a hotshot CAA agent named Michael Camacho who thought he'd out-Oprah Ms. Winfrey by engineering the deal for OWN, her new TV network and then finagling a way to run it himself. Naturally, he is now in very very small pieces buried somewhere in Chicago with Oprah's other victims-erm, former business partners. [Deadline Hollywood]