Nikki Finke Didn’t Write a Memoir

News that Nikki Finke had left behind a memoir — and that her estate was seeking a publisher — had half of Hollywood hyperventilating into their Erewhon shopping bags last week. It proved that even from beyond the grave, the late Deadline founder, who spent years terrorizing studio executives with her incendiary scoops, could still send shivers down the industry’s spine, especially with the prospect of a posthumous tell-all that, as one tabloid put it, “promised to spill the tea on the town’s titans.”

Except it turns out there is no terrifying tell-all, no score-settling, tea-spilling memoir at all. Finke had indeed spent decades working on a manuscript before her death, at 68, in 2022. But what she was writing couldn’t have been less ominous if it were a pop-up book.

It was a history of CAA during the 1980s.

The mix-up is understandable. When entertainment reporter Matt Hamilton broke the story about the manuscript on Aug.  5 for the digital news startup L.A. Material, he never called it a memoir. He described it only as “her telling of Hollywood history, particularly the rise of talent agencies like Creative Artists Agency.” But that was ambiguous enough for some overeager follow-up reports to mistake the book for the kill-and-tell that many had always assumed Finke would eventually write. After all, nobody had a more poisonous pen than the woman Kevin Smith once called “the most dangerous cat lady on the planet.”

But the fact is, the famously reclusive Finke, who spent much of her time holed up in her West Los Angeles apartment, showed little interest in sharing her life story, at least not her life in Hollywood. She had nothing to do with Tilda, the failed 2010 HBO pilot transparently based on her — with Diane Keaton playing a feared and loathed Hollywood blogger — and claimed to be offended by the portrayal.

About the closest she ever came to putting herself into the narrative was in 2016 — seven years after selling Deadline to Penske Media, The Hollywood Reporter’s publisher, and retiring from covering the entertainment business — when she began posting thinly fictionalized short stories about the industry on a blog she weirdly called Hollywood Dementia.

The CAA book, though, was a project Finke returned to again and again over the course of her long, colorful career — even if she never seemed able to finish it. She began tapping it out in the 1990s, before she’d fully built her reputation as a Hollywood blogger. Sources close to Finke say it was always conceived as a straightforward, Neal Gabler-style history of the agenting world of the 1980s, although early versions focused mostly on the rise of Michael Ovitz at CAA (“The Man Who Wanted Everything” was its working title at one point).

A publishing deal with Dial fell apart for unknown reasons in 1996, but 10 years later, the book got picked up by Jonathan Karp at Twelve, a unit of Hachette — until that, too, fell apart when Finke blew her deadline. Four years later, in 2010, Karp would try again from his new perch at Simon & Schuster. But again, Finke failed to deliver a completed manuscript, and the project got dropped.

Exactly why Finke, who had lightning-fast fingers when it came to pushing the publish button back when she was running Deadline, dithered so much on her CAA book is something only her analyst, assuming she had one, would know. But the long delays chipped away at the project’s potential value, as the once-towering figures her book focused on, Ovitz and his onetime partner Ron Meyer, began over time shrinking in Hollywood’s rearview mirror (or, in Ovitz’s case, scooping Finke’s book by publishing his own dishy memoir — as did James Andrew Miller with Powerhouse, his 784-page doorstop detailing CAA’s origin story).

CAA’s founding partners, including Michael Ovitz (center) and Ron Meyer (far right), circa 1978.

Alan Berliner/Fairchild Publishing/PMC

Indeed, today, 40 years on, it’s difficult to imagine there’s a huge marketplace for a meticulously reported history chronicling the partnership disputes, executive jockeying and internecine C-suite battles consuming the agency business back during the Reagan administration. Even in the unlikely event that the book does somehow contain new bombshell revelations that have been kept quiet for decades — you know, the sort of stuff that might make it worth publishing — the fact that Finke is no longer alive ironically makes it more problematic for publishers.

“It’s hard to do a legal read when the person who collected the information is not around,” notes one publishing pro.

Still, there is some good news for Finke’s estate. Because buried somewhere in a file cabinet or packing crate along with the rest of her effects, there likely is an outline and maybe even some pages for the one memoir she actually did contemplate writing. Sources close to Finke say that she sometimes talked about penning a first-person book detailing her experiences long before she came to Hollywood, when she was a young foreign correspondent covering Moscow for The Associated Press in the 1970s, during the height of the Cold War.

Nikki Finke versus the Russians. Now that’s a publishable memoir.