Lew Wasserman Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Martin Scorsese accepted the PGA’s David O. Selznick Achievement Award tonight and took the Hollywood & Highland Ovation Ballroom down memory lane — about 60 years ago, when he accepted a PGA award for his student film, It’s Not Just You, Murray!, at the ripe age of 22 years old.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor Herman “Hy” Levine, a 48-year veteran of the film industry who rose through the marketing ranks at Universal and Disney, died Dec. 27 in Rockville, Md. after suffering from pancreatic cancer.

Herman (Hy) Levine, who had a nearly 50-year career in the film industry and worked with Lew Wasserman, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Dick Cook, and many other prominent executives, has died at 87.

Tatiana Siegel 2024 can’t come fast enough. When the clock strikes midnight on Jan. 1, Hollywood will close the book on arguably the most tumultuous 12 months in a generation, with the town roiled by devastating strikes, the implosion of the superhero movie and deep divisions on everything from AI to Israel.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer Casey Wasserman’s eponymous sports and music management company has closed a deal to acquire the longstanding talent representation and production shop Brillstein Entertainment Partners. Wasserman formally announced the transaction on Monday alongside Brillstein Co-CEOs Cynthia Pett and Jon Liebman.

Back when Casey Wasserman’s bespectacled grandfather Lew Wasserman was Hollywood’s top power broker, he was known to step in to clear up labor stalemates with a sense of fairness and the authority to get cooler heads to prevail. His grandson, whose music/sports powerhouse firm just acquired Brillstein Entertainment Partners, learned a lot from his famed grandfather, and believes he’d have a plan to solve the current AMPTP battle with WGA and SAG-AFTRA, and that he would not have let it get this far, with thousands not getting a paycheck for over five months. Hopefully the resumption of talks this week will bring the kind of resolve Wasserman describes, even if there is so much mistrust between the sides that there is no leader whose word carried the weight that Wasserman’s did back in the day.

Sports and music representation powerhouse Wasserman has finalized its acquisition of Brillstein Entertainment Partners, the venerable Hollywood management and production company. Terms were not disclosed. Deadline exclusively revealed the acquisition talks back in February.

Hollywood is at a crossroads and the 160,000 actors that make up SAG-AFTRA are seemingly in the driver’s seat.

Deadline reported, with Wasserman identified as a frontrunner at the time.Casey Wasserman, who is the grandson of media mogul Lew Wasserman, founded the Los Angeles-based sports marketing and talent management company in 1998. In 2021, the firm launched Wasserman Music after completing a year-long negotiation to acquire Paradigm Talent Agency’s music assets.

EXCLUSIVE: Brillstein Entertainment Partners is exploring a sale of its venerable management/production company. Several are circling, but sources said Casey Wasserman has emerged as a frontrunner to bring BEP into the fold alongside his formidable sports and music divisions.

Carson Burton Bill Robinson, a veteran talent agent who represented the likes of Robert Duvall, Alan Arkin and Carol Burnett, died on Aug. 6 in Malibu after a long illness, his family announced. He was 93 years old.“I knew Bill for many, many years…since 1959,” Burnett said.

David Zaslav is a busy man, but I think he would benefit from a meeting with Alfred Hitchcock. They had this in common: Facing cycles of disruption, each decided to call a “time out” to gain perspective and design new strategies.

The Motion Picture & Television Fund on Friday said it will continue its yearlong centennial celebration with “100 Years of Hollywood: A Celebration of Service,” an event June 18 in West Hollywood that will feature musical performances and tributes. Jodie Foster, Harry Northup, Yvette Nicole Brown and more are set to appear at the event at The Lot at Formosa, along with musical guests set to include Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, Tori Kelly, and Chloe Arnold’s Syncopated Ladies.

Jonah Hill has joined an upcoming limited series which will see him portray legendary “Hollywood Fixer” Sidney Korshak.

EXCLUSIVE: Jonah Hill and William Monahan are teaming on a limited series that will tell the complicated story of Hollywood fixer Sidney Korshak and Lew Wasserman, the MCA chairman who was the most powerful man in Hollywood. Hill will play Korshak and Monahan will create the series. The package will be shopped shortly. The aim is for it to have the epic sweep of Scorsese films like The Irishman and The Departed, the latter of which won Monahan the Academy Award.

EXCLUSIVE: The story of how three young men from the Midwest – Ronald Reagan, Lew Wasserman, and Sidney Korshak – became the most powerful man in the world, most powerful executive in Hollywood and the most powerful lawyer in the country – is being explored in a new podcast documentary series.

Casey Wasserman today unveiled Wasserman Music, an amalgamation of his existing business that has been bolstered by the acquisition of Paradigm Talent Agency’s North American live music representation business. The deal has been in the works for a while.

Dale Sheets, a television pioneer and a manager for some of the top names in music, died on Monday in Los Angeles of heart failure at age 91. His death was confirmed by longtime family friend and former business associate Rob Wilcox.

By Dominic Patten

Casey Wasserman, the sports and entertainment entrepreneur who is the grandson of legendary talent agency mogul Lew Wasserman, is in talks to acquire the music assets of Paradigm agency, which has been hard hit by the coronavirus lockdown.