FEBRUARY 14, 2014

MIA VS. WOODY ALL OVER AGAINHollywood (and Oscar voters) take sides as new mud slings

48 hours on the roller coaster of highs, disbelief, self-described bouts of paranoia and inspirational

breakthroughs with the writer-director whom Jennifer Lawrence describes as ‘pure creativity’

David O. RussellWildImagination

The of

PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN GENIUS, WOES, HARROWING END

OR THE INDUSTRY’S MOST IMPORTANT

players, the convivial yet conservative Grill on the Alley — which turned 30 on Jan. 31 — rep-resents a still point in the churning world of entertainment. The throwback 4,600-square-foot Beverly Hills restaurant, half a block

from Rodeo Drive, with its white-jacketed servers and menu of un-ironic classics (calf ’s liver, anyone?), is lit daily with stars, from Amy Adams to Anthony Hopkins. But it’s the dealmakers ringing the room’s infamously difficult-to-claim booths that have enshrined it as one of the business’ ulti-mate midday meccas, ranked No. 4 in THR’s most recent annual Power Lunch survey. To celebrate The Grill’s anniversary, two dozen regulars — including Jeffrey Katzenberg, Dick Wolf, Brian Grazer and Bob Daly — tell its story, from why they love their booths and how they avoid letting guests pay for their tabs to what Ron Meyer finds the “least appealing” thing about the place.

The Grill, first colonized by a klatch of top William Morris men (Norman Brokaw, Fred Westheimer) and still very much a boy’s club, now has been around long enough to see its share of Ozymandias-like leaders come and go. There was the late Sony chief John Calley, who jokingly requested tables away from the agent “hard hats.” And, then, of course, there was Michael Ovitz, who after a tiff with the Palm deemed The Grill CAA’s “corporate cafeteria,” though he was known to skip the pretense of eating there,

simply stalking the room to check out who was meeting with whom. (These days, says an insider, “He wouldn’t come around here.”) Three decades on, 9562 Dayton Way — an address Grill co-founder and CEO Bob Spivak made up by fooling the city of Beverly Hills’ building department with a letter he sent to a mailbox he hammered onto his just-leased property — remains, along with the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge, an enduring pantheon of Hollywood dealmaking. “You have to work your way into The Grill,” notes producer Al Ruddy gravely. Observes manager Will Ward: “When you’re a kid and first going to lunches with your boss and walk into the room and see Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch — these mythical creatures who transcend even a studio head — there’s just not very many restaurants that have that.”

BOB SPIVAK The idea of The Grill was to update and upgrade the tra-ditional American grills — Musso & Frank in Hollywood, Tadich in San Francisco, Toots Shor’s in New York — and to do it in an era when

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER | 79

WME TV head Rick Rosen (right) and

his client Dick Wolf, TV producing titan (Law

& Order SVU, Chicago P.D.) and novelist

(The Execution), were photographed

Jan. 31 at table No. 101. Says Rosen, “It’s a

commissary — a very expensive commissary

with better food.”

Your Deal Happen ed Here

As The Grill on the Alley turns 30, two dozen regulars, from Ron Meyer to Jeffrey Katzenberg, dish on status-conferring booths, the rare celebrities who can ‘hush’ the room and why there’s no valet parking BY Gary Baum

F

PHOTOGRAPHED BY Austin Hargrave

people were not used to straightforward and honest anymore.DICK WOLF writer-producer I remember Toots Shor’s. The room was laid out in a remarkably similar way. There was a hierarchy of tables going around.RON MEYER vice chair, nbcuniversal As soon as it opened, I started going. It has this fabulous ambiance. If they were trying to create a Tadich Grill, they completely succeeded. When my office was nearby during the CAA days, I went there almost every day. Even though I now have to drive quite a ways, I still try to get there once a week.JOHN BURNHAM partner, icm I was working at William Morris at the time it opened. It was like three blocks, so you could be there in two minutes. They filled a certain void: an old-fashioned kind of restaurant, the guys in the white jackets.SPIVAK It began with the William Morris guys. Norman Brokaw, Walt Zifkin, Mike Simpson, Fred Westheimer, John Burnham — they were always in. But the three key regular guests early on who really gave the restaurant credibility were the lawyer Ed Hookstratten, whose clients

80 | THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER | 02.14.14 www.thr.com | THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER | 81PHOTOGRAPHED BY Austin HargraveILLUSTRATION BY Todd Detwiler

Who’s Sitting Where: The

Ultimate Test of Power

It takes industry stature plus long-standing patronage to score one of The Grill’s 14 most-coveted tables — all booths. Junior agents,

please make your way to the center of the room, aka Siberia

Gonyea was photographed Jan. 31 at The Grill’s host stand.

“I like the booths on the right. Barry Diller and David Geffen like the left side. The way it’s designed, it kind of pleases everybody.” Grazer

Bernie YurmanManager

Freddy DeMannProducer

Arnold Kopelson Producer

Fred Silverman Producer

David GeffenMogul

Craig JacobsonAttorney, Hansen

Jacobson

Clint EastwoodActor

Howard WestProducer

George Shapiro Producer

Rick RosenTV head, WME

Jeffrey KatzenbergCEO, DreamWorks

Animation

“Devil’s Island”The largest table at The Grill, it was

given this name by late manager Bernie Brillstein

as it rotates between large

parties.

Burt SugarmanProducer

Al RuddyProducer

Howard KleinManager

At The Grill, a power lunch isn’t a power lunch without a proper perch. “You don’t want to be in anything but a booth,” says ICM Partners’ John Burnham. And a large part of the restaurant’s success is its horseshoe layout, with 14 booths surrounding a central Siberia of 25 tables, meaning a third of the house is prime seating.

Maitre d’ Pamela Gonyea bestows the prized square footage by one key metric: loyalty. (There are no standing reservations.) “I find myself counting to 14, and then I count back,” she says. “You can feel awful, but I’m not afraid of somebody yelling at me. It’s like, ‘OK, bring it on.’ It is what it is. Sometimes I can’t get you a booth. It’s physics.”

Some prefer the four conspicu-ous round tables in the rear, with the best sight lines. “It’s out in the open,” explains producer Fred Silverman, approvingly. Adds producer Arnold Kopelson: “I’ve had the same table for 30 years now. It’s right in the center. I have a commanding view of the place.”

The late Bernie Brillstein used to sit at a booth next to Kopelson; now Brillstein’s daughter, Resolution agent Leigh Brillstein, often takes the table and keeps an extra place setting out in his honor. Brillstein nicknamed the largest corner rear booth (No. 133) “Devil’s Island” since no regulars claim it. Gonyea assigns the table, which can seat seven, to random larger groups.

side? “I like the booths on the right,” says Brian Grazer. “Barry Diller and David Geffen like the left side. The way it’s designed, it kind of pleases every-body.” It’s “force of habit,” observes Resolution agent Adam Kanter, who sits on the right. “It’s like you’re lining up on the football field, and you’re the wide receiver on that side of the field as opposed to the other,” he says. “It’s just where you go.”

For most booth dwellers, the

The smaller booths along the side walls are just as prime, often pre-ferred for their comparative privacy. “Some people just want to be seen,” explains Gonyea. “Others, they go: ‘We don’t care if we see anybody. In fact, we’d rather not see anybody!’ ” While Silverman finds the side booths, which front on a narrow aisle, “a little claustrophobic,” others like AFI chair Bob Daly “just like the privacy.”

As for the east side versus the west

geography doesn’t much matter — as long as you’re in one, you’re shielded away to get business done. “Even though it’s a big room, there’s a kind of intimacy,” says director Walter Hill. Daly agrees. “The thing that’s great about The Grill, in addition to the food, is that you can have a private conver-sation in the booths,” he says. “You’re not on top of someone. The person at the next table, you can’t hear them. That’s the privacy level.”

Which is why Gonyea has learned a clever way in recent years to upsell the relatively more discreet set of regular tables partitioned off from the center of the room by a high divider and immediately adjoin the booths along the east and west walls. She’s now mar-keting them as booth-adjacent. “Steve Shapiro” — co-founder of top realty firm Westside Estate Agency — “heard me tell somebody that one day, and he just about died laughing.” — G.B.

formal, and it just wasn’t me,” says the effervescent Detroit native. “Here, it felt like I came home. This is considered fine dining, but it’s not stuffy at all.” She has become attuned to the politics of the room: “When I have booths from different agencies, I’ll put a buffer with an entertainment lawyer — a Bruce Ramer or a Skip Brittenham.” And she has developed an innate sense of the exact limits of the space: “You have to know

everything about the room, down to which tables have smaller bases at the bottom, for a few extra inches to maneuver for extra seating. I’ve spent time as a flight attendant, so I’m really good at packing.” The Grill’s booth-dwelling power players universally sing her praises, from manager John Carrabino (“We all love her, how she handles her-self with grace under pressure”) to Brian Grazer (“Pam makes everybody feel so comfortable and special and important”). Then again, how could they not love her? After all, come 1 o’clock, she’s the one with the real power. — G.B.

132

128

129

133

127

131 130

126 101 102

Jerry Bruckheimer Producer

Bob DalyChairman, American

Film Institute

105

Brad GreyChairman and CEO,

Paramount

Brian GrazerCo-founder, Imagine

Entertainment

104

Patrick WhitesellCo-CEO, WME

Ari EmanuelCo-CEO, WME

103

John Carrabino Manager

Anthony Hopkins Actor

106

Queen among kings, Pamela Gonyeaallots L.A.’s most precious midday real estate

The Maitre d’

P AMELA GONYEA, THE GRILL ON the Alley’s lunchtime maitre dame, is the take-no-guff gal at the center of the industry’s reigning boys’ club. She wields ultimate control over

the bestowal of the room’s coveted tables. Gonyea — sister of NPR White House correspondent Don Gonyea (he’s the fifth and she’s the sixth of nine children) — has worked in the restaurant business all her life, arriving at The Grill nearly 13 years ago from the Beverly Wilshire hotel restaurant that was replaced by Cut. “It was so

included Tom Brokaw and Vin Scully, and the business manager Jerry Breslauer, who had Steven Spielberg and Bruce Springsteen, plus Dick Carroll, a Beverly Hills clothier who brought in Fred Astaire.HOWARD WEST producer The restaurant was, and still is, walking dis-tance from my office. That was the first attraction. ‘Oh, new restaurant. What is it? Alley on the Grill? That’s a dumb name.’ Turned out to be very smart.PETER BENEDEK founding partner, uta A lot of what drew people there in the beginning was having it on the alley. There was something about it being on the alley — something interesting and cool. People in L.A. like something about it feeling East Coast, just like people in New York like how Michael’s feels a little West Coast.SPIVAK We wouldn’t have done that location if we couldn’t have gotten the alley entrance. It’s mid-block on Wilshire, a very fast street, and there’s no stopping until 7 o’clock. The location had been three or four restaurants in the previous five years.BOB BOOKMAN agent, paradigm I remember going to the failed Japanese

restaurant with the entrance on Wilshire that was there before it. I think it was called Tokyo.SPIVAK I went to the building department and asked to place the entrance on the alley. They wouldn’t let me due to an ordinance against businesses opening onto an alley that they had in place. So I pulled maps and realized I had less than an inch of Dayton frontage and went to a hardware store, bought a mailbox and painted 9562 Dayton on it. Just made that address up. Then I went to the post office, mailed myself a letter, got it delivered and showed the canceled stamp to the building department. They approved it!ARNOLD KOPELSON producer We call it the commissary. Everyone comes in there. So I know who’s coming and what deals are being made.ADAM KANTER agent, resolution Commissary describes it perfectly. But the difference is that at a commissary, you know a few people; at The Grill, you know everyone.WALTER HILL director-producer You run into people there — people you actually want to meet.W

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IRWIN WINKLER producer You see friends and you see some people who aren’t friends — and you walk quickly past them on the way to your booth.WOLF You know vaguely where people are going to be. You literally avoid one half of the room if you don’t want to see people. It’s a little bit like the Wimbledon ladder, but a lot of people have been in the same place for a long time. PAMELA GONYEA maitre d’, the grill Awards season, there’s a moment when people are campaigning. Sometimes I will tell whoever is seating some-body to walk them up the side so they can go past certain people. I’ll tell the host, “Take your time,” so they can stop and talk.RANDALL EMMETT producer In a transitory business, it creates an anchor. There’s a warmth in there of the business coming together. I can’t tell you how many times you see people who you haven’t seen in a while. It’s a crossroads of the world.DALY chairman, afi Mondays are especially big because the other restau-rants, like e. baldi, are closed.

“Pammy’s a truly genuine person. In a city where that’s not always in great supply, I think that serves her really well.” –NPR’s Don Gonyea, her brother

PHOTOGRAPHED BY Joe Pugliese

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HILL John Calley was always there in his MGM/UA and Sony days, when he was driving in from Santa Monica and Culver City. He was willing to commute a pretty good distance for his hash.MOSKO When I went with Calley, they would give him a booth and he’d say, “Don’t put me over with the hard hats,” meaning the agents.NEUFELD Calley used to have a driver when he was the chairman of Sony. I’m just a civilian who walks the block from Via Rodeo.MEYER The least appealing thing about The Grill is parking.DALY There’s no valet. You have to park down the street at Via Rodeo. If they had valet parking, it’d be perfect — from a convenience standpoint. But I have a driver, so I’m spoiled. It doesn’t bother me at all.BENEDEK These days, I can’t walk there anymore. It’s a little too far from the UTA office, so it requires some planning. But I try to go once a week. Yet they treat me as if I were there three times a week.GRAZER You can be gone for months, on location, and you come back and they remember your table. It’s a steady constant, not a variable.EMMETT They all know you by your first name. They know what you’re working on, your projects and the birth of your children.RICK ROSEN tv head, wme It’s probably hard to get a job here as a waiter. There’s no turnover.DALY It’s the same people. I know all the waiters. They know you. They know your preferences.BOOKMAN Some of those waiters have been there forever. It’s like, “Oh, my God, you’re still here?” Their expressions never change. At The Grill, the actors are in the seats, not serving you.KOPELSON They are not breaking in the people.

RUDDY It runs like a clock.GONYEA At other places, like Providence and Melisse, the service is a quieter tone — they’re doing ballet. We’re tap-dancing.KATZENBERG They do a fantastic job of getting you in and getting you out.KANTER They don’t know how to say “no,” or “we can’t do that.”STEVE OLIVER, server for 27 years For any request, the answer is, “Yes — what’s the question?”KATZENBERG The Grill has become Hollywood’s clubhouse. Thank goodness there are still some traditions and institu-tions out there that never age.HILL It’s aged into itself over the years. Time has burnished it a bit, all to the good.BOOKMAN The change has always been subtle there. It has stayed rel-evant by being comforting.ROSEN It hasn’t changed much over the years. I don’t really want it to.SHAPIRO It’s like a great marriage: If it’s working, you love it more every day. There’s so much warmth there.WEST We had The Brown Derby. We had Chasen’s. We had Morton’s. They all disappeared. What we have left is The Grill. As I speak, I’m going to The Grill today with a client.BOOKMAN It’s one of those ineffable things: If you plan to open that kind of restaurant, it won’t work. You can’t “brand” it, to use that dreadful word. But you can get lucky.

WEST When you’re there, you’re on the curve, picking up on who’s being hired and fired, that dialogue. It’s a center for information, confiding in each other.AL RUDDY producer It’s not a celebrity restaurant. They come, but they’re brought. The room is full of no-bullshit business types. Your Jake Blooms.SPIVAK There are very few people who get “the hush” in The Grill, where people just grow quiet when they walk in. One is Springsteen. Another is Baryshnikov. Then there’s Ali. And Reagan got the biggest hush of all.GEORGE SHAPIRO producer One of my favorite experiences used to be sit-ting in one of the far booths every six weeks or so with Bernie Brillstein. Bernie would be in the middle between Howie [West] and I. We would talk about everything, right on back to the mailroom.STEVE MOSKO president, sony pictures television Howard and George and I had a lot of lunches together talking about Seinfeld. The full syndication history and the millions discussed at those tables will always be memorable to me. Howard would always order a bowl of soup and a shrimp cocktail. George would always ask about 50 questions of the waiter and then order the fish of the day. I’d get a salad. Then there’d be a big fight over who would pay.GONYEA People attempt to pick up each others’ tabs — at their table or across the room. Waiters have to get my approval. There are people where no one picks up their check. They don’t want anybody to pay for them. I would have to ask permission, and sometimes I know just not to ask. I’ll tell the person who wants to pay, ‘I’m so sorry, but he’s really strict about making sure he pays his own check.’ There are a handful who insist the check be presented to the desk because there’s no chance that the other person is going to grab it at the table because then it’s awkward for them.WARD co-founder, roar You know you’re going to run into at least two agency heads, two senior partners at major law firms and one or two studio heads on any given weekday.GRAZER co-founder, imagine entertainment 1984, the year it opened, was the year Ron [Howard] and I released Splash, which paralleled in some ways the year we were able to actually get a booth in a place like The Grill.DOUG WALD manager, anonymous content I’ve been going for about 20 years. I’d started a management company, working out of a teeny-tiny office in Beverly Hills a 30-second walk away, and I decided to try to make The Grill my place because that’s where the action was. They took me under their wing. Even though I wasn’t a big shot, they treated you like you were. It was definitely a strategy: Let me put myself in the room with all the players.RUDDY When I first came, there were the Ed Hookstrattens and the old network guys who owned the restaurant. So I was happy to be expected after a period of time, delighted to get a table at 1:30 or 2 o’clock. The day after I got my Academy Award for Million Dollar Baby, I came to have lunch. And all the guys at the restaurant started clapping — Walter Mirisch and all of the others. It’s like a club.MEYER There’s very much a community feeling to the place. But people don’t intrude. The way it’s designed, you’re not very exposed. You say hello and then you move on. It’s not a meeting place for meeting people randomly. You go there to do what you have to do.KATZENBERG CEO, dreamworks animation You’re always going to be able to get a half-dozen phone calls returned as a bonus to your visit.SPIVAK Unbeknown to me when I started The Grill, the Hollywood indus-try eats lunch at 1 o’clock. The world eats lunch at 12 o’clock. I figured out real, real fast that you could only take so many reservations at 12:30, and 1, and 1:30, because of course those tables don’t turn around with exact regularity. There was a big demand. Most of them I would say I’m booked and I would push them. But there was the group that you couldn’t push, and I had to learn real fast who they were. It was kind of a monster. That was survival.

GONYEA I remember coming before I worked here, and we had to be out of the booth by 1 for the 1 o’clock hit, which is very typical of something that might happen with me now, telling people, “We need it back by 1!” So I remember thinking: “I better figure out what I want to order!”FRED SPECKTOR agent, caa I think I have a stressful job, but imagine tak-ing reservations there for all of these high-powered people.RUDDY You can have an intelligent, cloistered business conversation — and that more than anything else is the appeal. It’s great food and a quiet zone if you want to talk about a deal or resolve a tenuous situation.MACE NEUFELD producer So many of the other restaurants, the music is blasting and there isn’t proper sound-proofing.KOPELSON You can hear each other and you don’t have to lean forward.MEYER Another important thing is that they honor reservations.SPECKTOR Seldom do you have to wait more than two or three minutes. But if I had to wait a few minutes, which I detest, I’d do it there.GONYEA They know that you’re in a bind. They’re just like, “Oh my gosh, what happened today? There are so many people here.” I’m like, “I know!” And I just fan myself with my checks up there.WINKLER For all the talk about who sits where, people wouldn’t be

going there if the food wasn’t great. And it is great, traditional food. It’s not high Asian fusion or French classical food. It’s very American — Cobb salad to a piece of fish.SPIVAK The single biggest-selling item is the Cobb salad, today since the beginning. Ours is the tradi-tional Cobb. Same recipe, same salad that Bob Cobb made at the Brown Derby.JOHN SOLA founding chef and executive vp operations, the grill When Bob hired me, we would go out to places like Musso & Frank and the Derby and the Apple Pan, just to see the simplicity of it. At the time, there were all of these fancy restaurants with very little on the plate, lots of moves but not a lot of substance. He wanted to look to 30 or 40 years prior, things like liver-and-onions and top-line dishes — dishes like what became our Dover sole.SPIVAK We wouldn’t put anything on the menu that was trendy at all. At least for the first 10 years. Then we started to realize that there were some items creeping in to American cuisine, becoming classic preparations themselves, and so we opened up the doors to black-ened fish. Then a Chinese chicken salad. More recently, a seared sashimi.KANTER If you’re a picky eater, they’ll tailor it to you.GONYEA We try really hard. Ari Emanuel had been vegan. I started carrying some tofu in the kitchen. We got wraps, and we tried it. I said, “Look, we’ll make it work.” He’ll do a whole-wheat wrap with greens.

I personally go buy tofu from the grocery store to make sure we have it. He hasn’t been doing it as much lately, but for a while it was enough that I wanted to be sure we had something for him. Grilled tofu and bal-samic glaze on a nice salad. It was great, and he was very happy. Sumner Redstone likes diet cranberry, so we make sure we have that too.SOLA With the fish, before we were parmesan-crusting with mustard butter. Now it’s a lot of pan-searing over a bed of spinach or avocado with lime or lemon juice. Lighter and cleaner. Times change. Doctors’ orders.FRED SILVERMAN producer They used to serve planked steak: chopped meat on a plank, surrounded by mashed potatoes. That was in my heavier days. As you grow older, you become more conscious of your weight. That’s where the soft-shell crabs come in.KOPELSON When the stone crabs are in season, I feel like I’m back in Florida.SOLA We developed a corned beef hash that came out of doing a Reuben. That dish was a staple. Now people are starting to eat healthier, so we’re doing chicken hashes.RUDDY That chicken hash, you can’t find it anywhere in the world. I mean, give me a break — have that with a Bloody Mary for lunch and you’re set for the week.

From left: Grill regular Katzenberg was

photographed with his DreamWorks

Animation Croods directors Chris Sanders and Kirk DeMicco at his regular table No. 127 on Jan. 15 by Joe Pugliese.

Jokes DeMicco, “As a onetime assistant

at William Morris, I’ve made reservations

here more often than I’ve eaten here.”

Most popular at lunch: The Grill’s pan-fried Dover sole ($44.75)

and classic Cobb salad ($21.50).