\n\tBut 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 \u2014 with Diane Keaton playing a feared and loathed Hollywood blogger \u2014 and claimed to be offended by the portrayal. <\/p>\n
\n\tAbout the closest she ever came to putting herself into the narrative was in 2016 \u2014 seven years after selling Deadline to Penske Media, The Hollywood Reporter\u2019s publisher, and retiring from covering the entertainment business \u2014 when she began posting thinly fictionalized short stories about the industry on a blog she weirdly called Hollywood Dementia.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe CAA book, though, was a project Finke returned to again and again over the course of her long, colorful career \u2014 even if she never seemed able to finish it. She began tapping it out in the 1990s, before she\u2019d 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 (\u201cThe Man Who Wanted Everything\u201d was its working title at one point). <\/p>\n
\n\tA 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tExactly 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\u2019s potential value, as the once-towering figures her book focused on, Ovitz and his onetime partner Ron Meyer,\u00a0 began over time shrinking in Hollywood\u2019s rearview mirror (or, in Ovitz\u2019s case, scooping Finke\u2019s book by publishing his own dishy memoir \u2014 as did James Andrew Miller with Powerhouse, his 784-page doorstop detailing CAA\u2019s origin story).\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tCAA\u2019s founding partners, including Michael Ovitz (center) and Ron Meyer (far right), circa 1978.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAlan Berliner\/Fairchild Publishing\/PMC<\/p>\n
\n\tIndeed, today, 40 years on, it\u2019s difficult to imagine there\u2019s 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 \u2014 you know, the sort of stuff that might make it worth publishing \u2014 the fact that Finke is no longer alive ironically makes it more problematic for publishers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s hard to do a legal read when the person who collected the information is not around,\u201d notes one publishing pro.<\/p>\n
\n\tStill, there is some good news for Finke\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tNikki Finke versus the Russians. Now that\u2019s a publishable memoir.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tNikki Finke covered Moscow for The Associated Press in the 1970s.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy<\/p>\n