It was a cruel game the producer played with his staff, leaving them to decipher the many degrees of “immediately.” “Scott says, ‘Hang up the fucking phone.’ And I say, ‘Mr. Diller, Scott’s going to have to call you back,’ ” Emauni recalls.
With Diller back on the phone and the rest of the staff trying to avoid making eye contact with their enraged boss, Rudin continued his expletive-filled tirade and walked over to Emauni, stood over him and told him to get out.
“Like, in the time that I worked there, there wasn’t anything really that he could do to disrupt me personally,” he says.
“Scott says, ‘Somebody call the police on him.
Emauni, who is now managing director of LAByrinth Theater Company in New York, continues, “That moment — with Barry Diller on the phone, listening to it and participating in it — has been forefront in my mind of why no celebrity or very few people for that matter are going to come forward and say anything.
In the wake of an April exposé in The Hollywood Reporter that detailed decades of Rudin’s physically and psychologically abusive behavior that sent at least two employees to the hospital, the showbiz titan behind The Social Network and Broadway’s To Kill a Mockingbird quickly vowed to step back from “active participation” in his projects.
“It goes way beyond the physical.
Perhaps even more significant, the Oscar-winning producer of No Country for Old Men benefited from a complicity machine comprising billionaire benefactors, boldfaced names and powerful news organizations that downplayed or ignored his behavior and forestalled his reckoning.
Says Josh Arnon, who worked for Rudin from October 2018 to August 2019: “Everyone, including the people at A24, were aware.
Rudin, back in the 1980s as a 20-something executive at 20th Century Fox, already had a reputation, both as a wunderkind with a knack for talent relationships and for driving underlings to despair.
You kiss up and kick down, and I don’t care how successful we might become as a team, it wouldn’t be worth the damage done by you to staff and their psyches,’ ” the Walking Dead producer says.
For decades, Rudin anecdotes were passed around Hollywood parties like mushroom canapes, occasionally surfacing in a profile that focused on his genius and with enfant terrible framing.
For Coplan, who was vp at Scott Rudin Productions from 1998 to 1999, the truth was more personal and would require greater explanation.
Back in 1998, Rudin and Coplan were huddled in the backseat of a town car after leaving the Hollywood Hills home of composer and lyricist Marc Shaiman, a frequent Rudin collaborator.
“He starts screaming at me to get out of the car, and I was like, ‘Fine, pull over, and I’ll get out,’ ” recalls Coplan, now a film professor and published author.
According to the dozens of former staffers whom THR spoke to for this piece, forcing passengers out of his car became one of Rudin’s go-to moves.
During a May 20 panel for Anita Hill’s Hollywood Commission that was reported widely, Coles relayed a chilling anecdote: The day before THR‘s story broke, as it already was circulating widely around agency circles due to a mysterious leak, an anonymous person called in a false murder-suicide threat at Coles’ West Hollywood home.
Coles tells THR that he hired a private investigator to get a copy of the audio of the 911 call but thus far has been unsuccessful.
One reason employees have been loath to discuss Rudin’s bullying was the fear of breaking their nondisclosure agreements.
“He would have punched so many holes in the wall that at a certain point Paramount just said, ‘We are not paying for this anymore.’ So the only thing left to do was get giant plants to put in front of the holes in the wall, and there were so many plants, and at a certain point it literally felt like you were dropped into a Vietnam war movie,” says Eaton, now a children’s book author.
And now he’s trying to prevent me from even collecting a minimum income to live on while I scramble to find another industry to work in? That’s why people don’t talk about him.
And a comeback doesn’t seem far-fetched given that he remains repped by WME and there has been little in the way of criticism from industry heavyweights, with the exception of Michael Chabon .
Calls to Rudin’s longtime collaborators like Aaron Sorkin, the Coen brothers and Wes Anderson have been met with “no comment,” even as more disturbing revelations surfaced, including that former assistant Kevin Graham-Caso developed a severe anxiety disorder after enduring psychologically torturous conditions under Rudin and took his life last year.
“I’m disappointed that even after Scott Rudin’s horrific abuse of his employees was explicitly and heart-wrenchingly detailed by survivors and those who love them, people continue to cover for this monster,” David Graham-Caso says.
In April, Diller told New York City digital news platform The City that Rudin would continue to advise on performances on Little Island — the public space on the Hudson River funded by the IAC chairman and his wife, Diane von Furstenberg, that opened May 21.
And back in April 2018, Rudin, Diller and Geffen quietly formed a company called Danish San Juan LLC for their ownership stake in a planned West Side Story revival on Broadway.
Within the Broadway community, speculation is rampant that Rudin will continue to profit from the projects from which he “stepped back” because of the arrangements with Diller and Geffen.
“I have never been to Scott Rudin’s office in my life,” Geffen tells THR.
Even with powerful backers, Rudin needed to make a showing of stepping away from his many upcoming projects as calls were mounting for him to exit his most high-profile Broadway production on the horizon, a $17 million revival of The Music Man, starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster.
His right-hand man of a dozen years, Eli Bush, will continue producing The Lehman Trilogy, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and West Side Story.
Tara Vaughan, another former assistant who worked at Scott Rudin Productions in 2018 — a particularly volatile period in which, according to another insider, Rudin burned through 89 assistants — says she witnessed physical abuse and experienced verbal lashings.
If Rudin was afraid of being outed in the press for any kind of toxicity, like so many of his compatriots — beginning with fellow industry titan Harvey Weinstein in October 2017 — he never showed that fear in the office.
Likewise, Arnon, who worked for Rudin alongside several of the THR whistleblowers, says he talked for hours with a New York Times correspondent for an exposé “that never came to pass.” He adds, “I was not told at the time why it was killed.” A piece eventually ran about 16 months later, after THR‘s story and New York magazine’s follow-up.
For years, ad agency SpotCo handled Rudin’s full-page spreads, but the relationship frayed when SpotCo sued Rudin in 2020 for $6.3 million for unpaid pre-pandemic work on eight shows.
When SpotCo relayed to him from the ad department of The New York Times that the section was already set for that Sunday, he ‘responded all’ to an email with, ‘Tell that cunt to do as I say or I will never advertise in the Times again,’ ” says Temkin.
His films have earned 151 Oscar nominations and 23 wins, and Rudin himself has earned 17 individual Tony Awards .
“There have been times when he’s laid into someone while a celebrity was in the room,” he says.
Ultimately, the complicity machine behind Rudin may play a role in his ability to return to an industry that has looked the other way as scores of his broken staffers continue to struggle with self-esteem and anxiety.
According to his team, Wes Anderson, who has made seven movies with the producer, will not be answering any questions about Rudin as he promotes his new movie debuting at Cannes, The French Dispatch.