New Day For Endeavor Kind Of Like the Old Days, Minus the Conference-Room Orgies

A sweeping profile of Endeavor hit The NY Times on Sunday, placing the agency’s arduous climb to power in a welcome new perspective. By virtually all accounts, ETA has “grown up” — from a puckish, oversexed boys club to a puckish, oversexed employer of Jodie Foster’s rumoured lesbian paramour (and more than a half-dozen female partners, up from zero just a few years ago). But despite all Ari Emanuel’s progressive brio, he still can’t outrun CAA or his own choppy past — Michael Ovitz gets a fun body-blow in by the eighth paragraph, Ari not-so-strenuously deflects those nagging sale and/or merger rumours, and, for those who missed it, there’s a recap of Endeavor’s somewhat experimental sexual/ethnic chemistry:

In April 2002, an agent named Sandra Epstein sued Endeavor, alleging, among other things, sexual harassment and pointing out that at one point she had been the lone woman among a dozen male agents. …

Mr. Emanuel, the filings said, allowed a friend to operate a pornographic Web site out of the agency’s quarters. Also, according to Ms. Epstein’s filings, Mr. Emanuel made antigay and racist remarks — accusations he disputed at the time.

Ms. Epstein said Mr. Emanuel blocked her from sending a script about the Navy Seals to the actor Wesley Snipes. “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” the agent was reported in the papers to have said. “Everyone knows that blacks don’t swim.”

It’s all good now, reports the Times’s Michael Cieply, and thank God: We’d hate to see CAA get too far ahead when it comes to classiness.

• Agents Replaying a Hollywood Drama [NYT]