HOLLYWOOD, INTERRUPTED: Agents, Moguls, and Movies.
His son Roy was hired as a CAA assistant agent, working for Richard Lovett, one of Ovitz’s hard-nosed taskmasters. Probably not a hard job to find when your dad is Frank Price, but from that point on he made his own way. Roy Price did a stint as a consultant at the ultra-elite McKinsey & Company, and like many others, sought to find profitable connections between entertainment and digital media. Amazon hired him away, and he created and ran Amazon Studios for them. For nearly ten years he guided its unbelievably rapid expansion, pioneering and making history, as his father did.
Then, over one weekend, he was ousted, over what is widely agreed to be one of the weakest #metoo cases in Hollywood. It seems hard to believe, but it was over telling a couple of jokes, teasing a producer of one of his Amazon shows, at a party at Comic-Con. He did tell the jokes—there are witnesses—and he had been drinking. Prim, buttoned-up Amazon looked into the incident and chose to ignore it. Two years later, he was abruptly fired for it, the man who more than anyone else built the streaming business.
Last year, three years after Roy Price left Amazon, even the Los Angeles Times (never less than woke) was moved to publish a moderately sympathetic account of what happened.
“Many who knew and worked with Price…said that although they found the behavior attributed to him inappropriate, they were troubled by his treatment. They questioned the timing of his exit, two years after he was investigated…Some also wondered whether the punishment fit the crime. “It haunts me. It was so unfair,” said a former Amazon executive, who declined to be identified because the person remains under a nondisclosure agreement.”
(Re Amazon’s NDA: So much for Democracy Dies in Darkness, eh, Jeff?)
This happened between 2015 and 2017. Besides the arrival of #metoo, the ostensible reason, was there anything else that might have affected Amazon’s attitude? Frank Price, then 86, joined (ACF founder) Lionel Chetwynd’s Hollywood GOP committee for the arts in 2016. The trade papers made a splash of the fact that Price donated to the Republicans, as in previous presidential elections, but now it was getting to be different.
I don’t know for certain that resenting Frank Price for his politics played any role, conscious or not, in why his son was canceled. I have no proof. But I do know this: In Hollywood, that’s all it would take.
Read the whole thing.