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An Oscar Night in Hollywood Jimmy Miller -- The Player from Pittsburgh Sunday, March 26, 2000 By Gene Collier, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. -- The phone bleeeeps in the offices of The Gold Miller Co. on Sunset Boulevard every, oh, 15 seconds.
"Gold Miller, can you hold?"
Who's calling?
"Everybody and his mother," says Jimmy Miller. "This is one of the busiest times. TV shows are being written and picked up. Movies are going into production for next summer. It takes a whole year to get 'em ready."
"Gold Miller, can you hold?"
But who, really, is calling? Or is the easier question, who isn't?
"Rick Rockwell called me," Miller says.
Rick Rockwell? What did he want?
"Haven't gotten back to him yet. I didn't talk to him through the whole ['Who Wants To Marry a Multi-Millionaire?'] thing, but he always called me from time to time anyway just to say hello. We go back to the comedy days in Pittsburgh."
"Gold Miller, can you hold?"
This whole business goes back to the comedy days in Pittsburgh. Jimmy Miller. His partner Eric Gold. His brother Dennis. The Pittsburgh Comedy Club. The first sparks of highly combustible entertainment careers. All a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Can there be a place any different from that than this?
Oscar Week in Tinseltahn.
We are sitting in the management office that delivered unto Hollywood the first $20 million per picture contract, Gold Miller's deal for Jim Carrey, that singular talent and Oscar's most conspicuous snubbee, who remains the foundation of a partnership with some 60 clients. This is where Gold Miller made Jennifer Lopez the first Latina actress with a $1 million contract.
"Gold Miller, can you hold?"
"You gotta watch what you wish for, because sometimes you get it," the 42-year-old Miller says as he takes his station behind his desk for what's looking like a killer day. "I don't want to come off like the stupid guy who's making a good living and hanging out with stars and doesn't appreciate what he has. I clearly appreciate it, but there's big stress to it.
"Look, this is my day."
He buries his head in his hands.
"This is my day."
His typical day is essentially an elaborate, specialized ballet that begins when his assistant, Kate Feeney, strides into the sprawling office with a Rolodex the size of a snow tire. Kate's been with the company two years. She's burned out, she says, from the phone.
Audience can share Meredith Vieira's view from the red carpet
Kate, in jeans and tennis shoes, has a phone and an ear piece and sits on a small sofa behind a glass coffee table and the Rolodex. Miller, in dark slacks and an open-collared oxford shirt, sits or stands at his desk nearly 30 feet away, with a phone and an ear piece. Between them the office evokes a kind of dual shrine to Carrey and to Roberto Clemente. There is a Clemente afghan and Clemente prints on the walls. There is framed art of Forbes Field and of Ralph Kiner and mounted snapshots of Miller at the Park House on the North Side with his 'Burgh buds. When he takes a break at lunchtime, he will scour eBay for Clemente memorabilia.
To his left and her right, Los Angeles languishes beyond the office glass in the brilliant spring sunlight. They cannot enjoy it. This may as well be Ice Station Zebra.
"Gold Miller, can you hold?"
The ballet begins. They work from identical printouts containing the names of people Miller must call, should call, will call, might call. Across the hall, Gold's assistant will do it solo. Gold is out. He's in Arizona at a screening. Miller starts by calling out a name. "OK ... Adam Goodman." Feeney dials.
"I have Jimmy Miller."
While Miller talks, Feeney fields incoming calls.
"Jimmy Miller's office. Oh, hi, Scott."
Scott Sassa, West Coast president, NBC.
While Miller talks with Sassa, Kate dials Richard Green.
"Richard Green," Miller says when he's through with Sassa. "What am I calling Richard Green about?"
Jimmy and Kate can and do volley like this for hours, but they are interrupted today by Ana Gasteyer, one of the stars of "Saturday Night Live," who appears in the doorway and asks about using the conference room to go over "the treatments."
"I'm an idiot," Miller yips. "I forgot about that. I screwed up."
Gasteyer looks at the visitor.
"Put that in your article," she says.
Done. But the fact is that Jimmy Miller and Eric Gold have screwed up very, very infrequently in this business, and yet they learn constantly. Among the more recent revelations: You can't win in any public discussion of how or why Carrey won't be at the Shrine Auditorium tonight as a best actor nominee. Of why he's been passed over despite consecutive moving performances in "The Truman Show" and "Man on the Moon," the latter a chilling, dead-on rendering of the late, bizarre, enigmatic comedian Andy Kaufman.
Critical explanations have ranged from the allegation that Carrey is "self-aggrandizing" (oh, yeah, you never see that in this town) to, as the Los Angeles Daily News contended, Carrey "just hasn't played a convincing human character yet."
Carrey's management team objected only when the New York Post suggested that its client wasn't nominated for "Man on the Moon" because he "whined" so much about not being nominated for "The Truman Show."
That complaint resulted in an item in Liz Smith's column about Gold Miller whining about Carrey not whining.
"So you can't win," Miller said. "Last year, Jim was cool with it, but this year, he was really disappointed. But he won't talk about it."
A request to interview Carrey for this story was turned down. His most incisive public comment, delivered in good humor at another awards ceremony, has been that he thinks of Academy members as "hard-working, conscientious individuals who are trying to destroy me."
"Gold Miller, can you hold?"
Carrey's next movie, "Me, Myself, and Irene," is again a straight comedy. It debuts June 23, and his maniacally costumed performance as The Grinch That Stole Christmas is due at the holidays. It is here that Carrey's career remains carefully blueprinted. Carrey, Gold and Miller have known each other more than a decade. Miller met Carrey on the Los Angeles comedy club circuit and began booking his club dates. Gold met Carrey in 1989 on the show "In Living Color," which Gold produced. Carrey was looking for professional management, and Miller and Gold decided to do it together.
" 'Me, Myself, and Irene' has [market] tested right off the map," says Miller. "It goes back to his roots. But after Grinch, there's not a lot doing for him. It's an easy thing in this town to get a script and just sit on it, but Jim doesn't like that at all. There's too much pressure to it. You're sitting on somebody's work. A lot of people have no trouble doing that, but Jim won't."
Kate tells Miller she's going to lunch. He looks stunned.
"I didn't think it would be a problem," she says. "I'm serious. Between 1 and 2, I'm outta here. I've got to return a rental car."
"Did you tell me that?" he says.
"I didn't think it would be a problem."
"OK," he says, "I'll go to the bathroom."
When she returns, there will be another frenetic, extended volley of intense communication, and it will be marked by the amazing absence of what you'd regard as standard Hollywood rhetoric, read bull, plus a distinct dearth of butt-kissing. It's a point of some pride in the Gold Miller office that they've deployed in this bizarre political climate a hallowed Pittsburgh method: no bull.
"If anything, that's even more true now than it's ever been," Miller says. "Not to make everybody out here to be crazy political agenda freaks, I mean a lot of people out here have really cut through the crap. Well, let me take that back -- there aren't a lot of people who've cut through the crap. But the agenda thing, the little white lie thing, the misinformation thing, I'm not smart enough and neither is Eric to keep all that in the air. We just can't think ahead that many spaces. It's one thing out here to do that in the business side, but if you get into that with your clients, it's death."
The precise industry death he's working hard to postpone today is the premature demise of NBC's "Freaks and Geeks," the critically acclaimed show that's looking like it won't be picked up for next season. (It has since been "pulled indefinitely" from the schedule.) Executive producer Judd Apatow is a Gold Miller client.
"Gold Miller, can you hold?"
"I've got to get home for dinner more," Miller says.
At home are 7-year-old Sam, 9-month-old Gracie and wife Cheryl, none of whom figure to be impressed beyond words if Jimmy Miller can find a new home for "Freaks and Geeks" or if he brings Carrey around to swim with Sam in the pool.
"Jon Stewart wished Sam a happy birthday on the air one night," Miller says. "Sam was excited, but he stays pretty on the level. He likes to go to Kennywood with me in the summer. I still have my Pirates season tickets. I'm going back for Point Park's commencement [he's the speaker].
"The thing is, I didn't aspire to do any of this. I didn't know any of it existed. You think you know. You watch the Academy Awards. But you don't really know. All of a sudden you're in the middle of it, and it's all very exciting, but you have to maintain a real detachment from it at the same time because it's so different. It's mind-numbing. I'm dumbfounded sometimes.
"I find myself in a tiny room, the green room at the Conan O'Brien show, and I'm there with Jim Carrey and Conan and Tony Bennett. And I'm pitching this comedy sketch idea to Tony Bennett, and he says, as he would, 'Yeah, cool.' It's just so different from what I ever thought my life was going to be. And that's something that needs constant adjustment."
"Gold Miller, can you hold?"
Miller walks to the window, earpiece still in place, and he looks to the east like he's trying to see 2,500 miles.
"You can get lost, you know? You can tell yourself, 'Because I hang with these people, I am one of them.' But you can't do that. You'll lose yourself, and that's what a lot of people in this town do."
"Gold Miller, can you hold?"
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