Brad Grey's Performance Less Than Golden

IT MAY ALL SOUND TERRIBLY PETTY, and make no mistake about it — it is. But all this BS is what Hollywood uses as the yardstick to measure the character of its moguls. No one in town forgets that Geffen took Dreamgirls from a Broadway show to Hollywood over a 25-year span. So, David said from the outset of the pic’s awards campaign that he didn’t want to go onstage himself. At the Golden Globes, his pal and Dreamgirls’ producer, Larry Mark, made the walk to the podium. Whereas Grey is Brad Come Lately to the Dreamgirls project, since it was green-lighted by DreamWorks before Paramount even began negotiating to buy the studio. Maybe this wouldn’t matter so much now if it didn’t follow the kinda crummy, sometimes brutal behavior Grey exhibited from the moment he took over. (And that of his subordinate Berman, considered a bitch on wheels by agents, managers, producers, screenwriters and talent, who all retaliated by complaining nonstop to the press about her until she was fired last week.) Grey wasn’t this way when he was still a talent manager: He was viewed as an ambitious but nice guy content to stay behind the scenes, even praised for subtlety and humility. No more. Take what happened to Donald DeLine, one of Hollywood’s most popular veteran executives: As Paramount’s production chief, he was on a London trip when a reporter called to ask how it felt to be replaced by Gail Berman. DeLine said the journalist must be mistaken — but soon found out that he had, in fact, been axed. It was an unnecessary public humiliation.

Now it’s Grey’s turn to be humiliated. With all those lips flapping about his boorish Golden Globes behavior. And all those news stories wondering when, not if, he’ll be fired. (Though I happen to think he’ll stick around for a while.) And Grey himself? He shrugs it off and goes about his business without changing one iota. For example: He actually had the nerve recently to battle hard for credit as one of the producers of the Academy Award contender The Departed, even though it’s a Warner movie and considered direct competition with Dreamgirls and Babel for Best Picture. When the producers didn’t back him, he fumed. Yeah, poor Brad only has that lousy studio job to fall back on. What’s that compared to the priceless value of more awards-season face time?