Last night, I was watching my favorite fictional asshole in action, Jeremy Piven, who plays a big-shot Hollywood agent on the HBO show Entourage. Ari pretty much has all the asshole moves mastered, from threats, to insults, to backstabbing, to a perfect hostile glare and shit-eating grin, to shameless lust for power and money, to little moves like the time he grabbed a candy bar from a staff member, took a bite, and threw it in trash, while shouting at her that she was fat.
There was a scene in the episode I saw last night (called "Scared Straight") where — after Ari had been very unhappy with the assistants brought to him by people in HR and had fired one after another. A guy from HR tried, apparently, to calm Ari down by bringing him his favorite breakfast muffin. Ari got pissed-off because it was the wrong flavor and, as pictured above, shoved it in the poor guy's face and fired him on the spot.
This fictional incident was no doubt inspired by a (apparently) real one reported in the Wall Street Journal in an astounding 2005 article called "Bosszilla" about Academy Award winning producer Scott Rudin (Sorry, but WSJ only makes the full article available to subscribers). The incident (and Rudin's legendary firing of assistants) is described in The No Asshole Rule as follows:
The Wall
Street Journal estimated that he went through 250 personal assistants
between 2000 and 2005; Rudin claimed his records show only 119 (but admitted
this estimate excluded assistants who lasted less then two weeks). His ex-assistants told the Journal
that Rudin routinely swore and hollered at them – one said he was fired for
bringing Rudin the wrong breakfast muffin, which Mr. Rudin didn’t recall but
admitted was “entirely possible.”
I love this story because of the description of the fact checking in particular. In The No Asshole Rule, I used the Bosszilla story to argue that, if the reports about Rudin are true, he appears to qualify as as certified asshole.
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