Pretty Pennies

What the Uta-michael Kassan divorce says about Hollywood’s new decorum around lavish spending

For many in show business, it’s always been the cost of doing business. “It” being the cash one must pony up to court talent, stimulate new enterprise and keep up the appearance of lush prosperity in a town obsessed with who has what.

That issue was partly at the heart of a messy public split in mid-march between United Talent Agency and Michael Kassan, the CEO of consultancy firm Medialink, which UTA acquired in 2021 for $125 million. In arbitration documents, Kassan says the agency and CEO Jeremy Zimmer tapped him to run a top-shelf client services business, then stripped him of authority and flagrantly ignored contractual stipulations — which included a $1.5 million discretionary fund earmarked for gifts and perks like private air travel. In its own lawsuit against Kassan, UTA says it fired him for cause after an investigation revealed misappropriation of company funds. Kassan maintains that UTA offered him a $10 million severance package topped with a noncompete clause to leave quietly. UTA disputes that any such offer was made.

The standoff made for fantastic power-lunch fodder, but also has top industry players wondering about the optics of spending big to stay on top.

When the news broke, Kassan was described to Variety as the kind of guy who would send someone high-end luxury goods as thanks for a 10-minute phone call. This is hardly a sin, especially for Zimmer, who along with his wife availed himself of private jets and choppers hired by Kassan, three individuals familiar with the CEO say. But in a media landscape nearly leveled by last year’s labor strikes, only just hobbling back from COVID-19, and rife with dystopian levels of consolidation and layoffs?

“It’s increasingly gauche,” one top finance executive specializing in Hollywood and tech deals says of the squabble over such high-flying business tactics.

“Michael Kassan’s termination had nothing to do with spending on clients or hospitality — it is solely about the fact that he stole millions to enrich himself. Kassan abused his position as CEO and his authority to circumvent the company’s standard control processes in order to steal $2.5 million from UTA,” says UTA attorney Bryan Freedman.

Kassan’s attorney Sanford Michelman balks at the accusation, especially as the $2.5 million figure has not been previously recorded in arbitration or lawsuit documents filed by UTA. “The notion that UTA would be surprised by Mr. Kassan buying client gifts is the height of hypocrisy and demonstrates this case is really about Jeremy Zimmer being caught for breaking their contract,” Michelman says.

In 2021, when its staff was still working remotely amid a pandemic surge, UTA made a move on Medialink to “build a more white-glove marketing division,” one source says. The agency already counted clients like Delta Airlines. UTA had long been praised for sticking to its knitting of repping actors, writers and directors, but Zimmer began to feel the pressure to scale up to more illustrious competitors CAA and WME.

“The joke is all the major agencies are incredibly extravagant,” one source familiar with UTA says. “UTA is no different from Medialink — they just don’t create a discretionary budget for these kinds of perks.”

Institutions like the agencies, studios and streamers have always poured it on thick to appease top talent. Courtside seats at the Lakers? Done. A Gulfstream to take a movie star and their friends to Cabo for some R & R? Wheels up. Clearly, some are better at hiding this lavishness than others.

Let’s not forget, talent agents are usually the ones “milking the studios to death” for such gifts, one dealmaker says. In the halcyon days of “Must See TV,” NBC gifted the stars of “Will & Grace” brandnew Porsches after the show’s debut season. In 2015, actor Zoe Saldaña notably complained about perk disparity with her “Star Trek” co-star Chris Pine, saying Paramount Pictures shelled out for Pine to live on a yacht during the film shoot but denied her request for paid child care. These perk packages are usually negotiated in silence, in avoidance of mutually assured PR nightmares, and never more so than in recent months, when “contraction” has become entertainment’s most-spewed buzzword.

The Kassan kerfuffle, and about a million other red flags, indicate that may be the case for some time.

“The joke is all the major agencies are incredibly extravagant. UTA is no different from Medialink.” Source familiar with UTA

On Oct. 7, when the Israel-hamas war broke out, Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir was just one week away from starting principal photography in Bethlehem, 45 miles from Gaza, on “All Before You.”

The Oscar-nominated filmmaker’s long-gestating project reconstructs the 1936 farmer-led revolt against British colonial rule and the influx of Jewish settlements in Palestine that has been at the root of the conflict. The latest outbreak of violence came after a Hamas-led terror attack that left about 1,200 Israelis dead while 250 were taken hostage, with more than 100 believed to still be held by Hamas.

Now Jacir, who is based in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority, is anxiously waiting for a cease-fire that will put an end to the death and destruction and allow her to return and shoot the drama. “It’s more important than ever to tell this largely forgotten story,” she says.

As hopes of reaching a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip flicker, Palestinian directors like Jacir are grappling with despair while questioning how their art can better convey the suffering of Palestinians. Some 31,000 civilians have died as a result of Israeli military operations and starvation since the war began.

“Cinema never really achieves anything immediately,” said Palestinian auteur Elia Souleiman during the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra workshop, held earlier this month in Doha, Qatar, where some of the cease-fire negotiations are taking place.

Paris-based Souleiman is known for the film “Divine Intervention,” which depicts the Israeli-palestinian conflict in surreal tones. At Qumra, he said the time has come to ask what must be done “to take responsibility, and a moral and ethical position, on what films enable us to discuss about genocides, massacres and horrible violence around the world.”

Ending the war is the first priority, says director Lina Soualem, also based in Paris, “to save the people that are still there.” Soualem’s 2023 documentary “Bye Bye Tiberias” delves into how her mother, actor Hiam Abbass, and her family were displaced from Tiberias by the 1948 Arab-israeli war.

“Bye Bye Tiberias,” which launched from Venice and Toronto shortly before the start of the current conflict, “has since taken on an amplified resonance because people are craving human stories coming from Palestine,” Soualem says.

In thinking about what she could do next, “it’s not like I need to show a different Palestine,” she notes. “It’s still about giving back the humanity and the complexity to a people that is not so well represented or that is stigmatized.”

Berlin-based Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari is exploring the Palestinian displacement from another angle. His experimental doc “A Fidai Film” takes its cue from the looting of Beirut’s Palestine Research Center archives during the Israeli army’s 1982 occupation of the Lebanese capital. Some of those materials later resurfaced, and Aljafari uses the found footage to create a narrative documenting successive waves of forced Palestinian emigration. He hopes the film, which will play on the festival circuit, will shed light on the current war.

“The conflict has so many ramifications and so many different reasons,” Aljafari notes. “It’s very complicated to do any kind of reconstruction. But I think any bit that can help is particularly relevant.”

Mohammed Almughanni left Gaza when he was 17 to study film in Poland, where he now lives. He has been shooting “Son of the Streets,” a documentary about a Palestinian teenager who is growing up in a Beirut refugee camp without citizenship.

When the war ends Almughanni plans to return home with his camera.

“Not just to film ashes,” he says. “I want to show the other side of Gaza, which is the beauty of how people live on a daily basis and the culture and so many other things besides the war.”

But of course the war is top of mind for these directors, who are watching the conflict from different parts of the world.

“All of us are like deer caught in the headlights,” says Jacir.

“There are days when I’m completely overwhelmed and frozen,” she adds, “and days when I actually have to stick my head in the sand and not look at all these images. And then there are days where all I can do is look at these images and try to figure out what can we do?

“We’re not passive. We have to do something. It feels helpless, but we are not helpless. I reject that idea.”

“I want to show the other side of Gaza — the beauty of how people live, and the culture.” Mohammed Almughanni, director