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Jeremy Zimmer #UTA

Jeremy Zimmer reprises his role as Beverly Hills community activist.  Yesterday afternoon Zimmer hosted a demonstration, an invite only demonstration (demonstrators were required to RSVP) in Beverly Hills.  Recruiting a host of Hollywood stars, their star makers and heavy hitting Californian politicians to speak for ‘our creative community’.  For his detractors,  Jeremy flexed his Hollywood muscle.  At the demonstration Jeremy Zimmer ostentatiously spoke out against President Trump and his immigration crack down.

This isn’t the first time Jeremy has thrown himself into the socially active stew.  Jeremy and UTA have a highly publicised yearly event where his staff are required to donate a day or so to help others in… the ‘community’.  Of course, a less fortunate community than the arts community to which Jeremy often refers.  Jeremy Zimmer has his photograph taken with black faces in the other… ‘community’.  Photographs that consequently appear in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.

Jeremy held yesterdays demonstration in lieu of the UTA annual Oscar party.  Was scrapping the UTA Oscar party a HUGE sacrifice for Zimmer?  Um… no.

United Talent Agency is scrapping its annual Oscar party in favor of hosting a rally at its L.A. office and donating to the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been on the frontlines of fighting the President’s executive order targeting travel from Muslim-majority countries.

They made a donation of $250,000 to the ACLU, Peter Eliasberg must be THRILLED.  Think about this.  Zimmer would usually think nothing of spending $250,000 on an Oscar party for his billion dollar clients.  That’s just the tip of the UTA hospitality expenditure iceberg.  Next time you see Jeremy’s grinning face in the Hollywood Reporter holding a basket ball next to a photo-op black boy ask yourself who is really benefiting from this public donation.

“This is a moment that demands our generosity, awareness and restlessness,” wrote UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer to staff. “Our world is a better place for the free exchange of artists, ideas and creative expression. If our nation ceases to be the place where artists the world over can come to express themselves freely, then we cease, in my opinion, to be America.”

As I’ve written before I sat most mornings with Jeremy for the best part of a decade at AA meetings all over Los Angeles.  At those AA meetings I saw the true face of Jeremy Zimmer.  The last time I sat with him at AA… the Palisades Bank 7am meeting, he told me never to come back to AA.  I wasn’t the only one.  I saw him bully many men of whom he didn’t approve… out of AA meetings.  He treats AA like his own personal cult. Understand how terrible that is… those men he made to feel unwelcome (less resilient than me) had no chances left to them.  At AA I heard Jeremy share misogynistic epithets and when things soured between us he was openly homophobic, casually racist.  When non famous black men came to our meeting out of rehab… from west end meetings, Jeremy did not sound like the man we saw yesterday embracing the rhetoric of inclusivity.  He would talk damningly about his wife and fat shame his daughter, his colleagues, his fellow agents.  When Lisa Hallerman left UTA he described her as a cancer… then wished she would die of cancer.

Zimmer joined agents, execs, assistants and other staffers from the Beverly Hills office to spend three hours at Heart of Los Angeles, an organization that provides programs in academics, arts and athletics to underserved youth. UTA has partnered with them in the past for holiday campaigns, employee volunteering and other charitable initiatives.

For all of Jeremy’s community out reach… how many black agents are there at UTA?  How many black execs are there at UTA?  How diverse is UTA?  Do his agents get diversity training or is sending them into the ‘community’ enough?

“As the Oscars draw the world’s attention to our country and our community, we must raise our voices loud and clear: The politics of fear and division do not reflect who we are as a nation, and united we can do better,” said Jeremy Zimmer, CEO of United Talent Agency.

A friend of mine, crewing a new feature asked UTA’s below the line for an inclusive (woman and poc) list for hiring consideration.  The assistant sneered, “Good luck with that.”

It’s ironic to those who know him that he has taken against Trump so badly.  For those who know both of them… they are almost identical.  Jeremy is thin-skinned and vindictive, a spiteful bully riven by alcoholic resentment.  Trump is a dry drunk. Jeremy is like Trump and vice versa.  As for Jeremy’s nascent activism?  As thrilled as the ACLU must be, why didn’t Zimmer step up to the plate sooner?  Why wasn’t he demonstrating and making dramatic flourishes whist Obama was busily deporting millions?  Why didn’t he confront Obama about his silencing of truth tellers? Why didn’t he say anything about for profit prisons or the lamentable ACA?

At his heart Jeremy can’t stand that somebody like Trump has gotten to be president, someone so incredibly similar to Jeremy Zimmer.