GANGING UP ON MIKE

LETTER FROM L.A

When Mike Myers decided he would rather pull out of a movie than accept a $21.5 million payday, Hollywood got angry. In lawsuits seeking $35 million from the man who invented Austin Powers, the executives seemed intent on taking away his creative mojo. The battle ended, but it lit a bonfire of anger and resentment that's still burning

KIM MASTERS

It was one of those Hollywood heavyweight events—a fight between Oscar de la Hoya and Shane Mosley at the Staples arena in downtown Los Angeles. There in the crowd that June night were DreamWorks founders Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, escorting actor Mike Myers and his wife, Robin Ruzan.

DreamWorks was flying very publicly to the defense of Myers, who was in an extraordinary position. In a shocking move, Universal Studios had sued the man who had brought Wayne Campbell and Austin Powers into the popular culture. Weeks before filming was to start, Myers had balked at making a movie based on one of his well-known characters, the somber German performance artist Dieter. Nothing was more ironic than the fact that Universal—so talent-friendly that other studio chiefs resented its openhanded deals— would be the one to pull the trigger, suing Myers for breach of contract, hoping to recoup the $5 million it claimed it had lost in preproduction costs.

Producer Brian Grazer, who was supposed to oversee the Dieter film, had come to watch the fight, too, along with his partner at Imagine Entertainment, Ron Howard. Grazer and Howard had stood to make millions from the now jeopardized Dieter movie. Grazer thought he had gone beyond the extra mile to accommodate Myers, hiring the talent he wanted, helping him renegotiate his fee several times—from $7.5 million to $10 million to $12 million and higher as it became clear that the Austin Powers sequel had powered Myers to a whole new level of stardom. Eventually, the studio agreed to up the price to $21 million for the Dieter movie. Grazerknown for his high-energy enthusiasm— was the one to proclaim, "I'm happy to be the guy who gets to pay him the big dollars."

After all that, according to an Imagine source, Myers visited Grazer at his home in March, looking for even more money to compensate him further as co-writer and star of the planned film. Grazer offered to shell out an additional $500,000 from his and Howard's fee if that would close the deal. Myers—now looking at a $21.5 million payday—accepted. He allegedly told Grazer that, with the money issue settled, he'd walk down the red carpet at Academy Awards time and tell the world that the Dieter project was his next movie. And that's exactly what he did.

When it came to talent-friendliness, Grazer had helped write the book. As a founding partner of Imagine, he gave and he received. Imagine produced many huge hits (The Nutty Professor, Apollo 13) as well as some misses (Far and Away), which were distributed through an exceptionally generous deal with Universal. That deal was in the middle of a difficult renegotiation. In fact, Grazer and Katzenberg had talked seriously about merging DreamWorks and Imagine. But the talks had ground to a halt.

So there they all were, ringside: Grazer, Myers, Katzenberg, and Spielberg. It made sense. Myers was the lead voice in an upcoming DreamWorks animated movie, Shrek, so Katzenberg had reason to protect him. Grazer didn't see Myers at first. He greeted Katzenberg and his family, and then Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw. At that point, Grazer realized that Myers was next in line. It was awkward, with the lawsuit hanging over the Myers project. But Grazer decided to be polite.

To his horror, Myers stared at him coldly and barely returned his handshake. Worse, Myers's wife fixed him with an icy look and declined to extend her hand at all. After all he'd been through with the star, Grazer couldn't believe that he was being snubbed. His anger turned to rage.

However close the sides may have been to a settlement—and there is dispute on that point—positions subsequently hardened. So Imagine sued Myers for $30 million in estimated lost profits, and Myers countersued Universal for $20 million, charging fraud and defamation. To cap it off, Myers hired private investigator Anthony Pellicano in what was seen as an unsubtle threat to dredge up unpleasantness about his adversaries.

No one could remember anything like it. To many in the industry, this fight was far more exciting than what had happened between de la Hoya and Mosley. Better yet, some in the long line of agents, lawyers, managers, executives, and filmmakers who have been in ruptured relationships with Myers saw the whole ugly episode as proof of the existence of a higher power.

"He must be going through hell right now," mused Wayne's World director Penelope Spheeris as the fight raged on. "I believe in Karma_I truly do believe in nature balancing things out."

When a reporter asked Myers last year about his reputation for be ing difficult on movie sets, he just laughed it off. "I am the Brando of comedy, the De Niro of comedy," Myers said. "I can't wait to tell the missus." But if that came as news to the missus, she may officially have been the last person on planet Hollywood to get the word.

Mike Myers is a rare comedic talent, and not just in terms of earning power. (Along with Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler, he is in the select club that can command $20 million per film.) He's also one of the few comedy stars who write their own scripts. From the "We're not worthy" and "No way ... way" of his Wayne's World days to the "Oh, be-have!" and "Yeah, baby!" of the two Austin Powers Films, Myers has been able to slip more phrases into the vernacular than any performer in recent memory. But with that immense capacity to entertain comes a certain talent for trouble, say some people who have worked with him over the years. It's not necessarily that Myers has done anything that other talented comedians haven't done. But in an industry where any excess is tolerated as long as the hits keep coming, Myers seemed to have taken everything to an extreme.

"My mom would say, Michael, you re not funny. Don't even try. It's sad now. It's pathetic. You re unfunny.

Myers and his talent bedevil those who have tangled with him long after the relationship has ended. "I've spent many nights sitting up thinking about that complicated dude," says former producer Rob Fried, who worked with Myers during the making of the 1993 comedy So I Married an Axe Murderer. "We were so close, and so not close."

Myers's defenders argue that his passion for his work and his abilities as a writer and performer add up to a saving grace. "I know you can make a really strong case against Mike because he's clearly frustrated and angered so many people," says Saturday Night Live creator Lome Michaels. "But I also think that it's not coming from any place of malice, and that he only cares about getting it right. People who want to get things off their desk shouldn't work with Mike Myers."

Even Wayne's World director Spheeris, who has her own war stories about Myers, says she wishes him well. "I forgive and I love Mike, and that's the God's truth," she says. "He is so profoundly talented that you've got to put up with some crap."

By now, Myers has established certain elements in his legend. The central fig ure is always his father. A Liverpoolborn sometime encyclopedia salesman and comedy-lover, Eric Myers settled with his wife in the blue-collar Toronto suburb of Scarborough. He was a father who awakened his sons in the middle of the night to watch Monty Python or Peter Sellers comedies. Myers wears his father's salesman-of-the-year ring from 1957 as a wedding band.

In interviews, Myers has said that his older brothers, Peter and Paul, were the funny ones, but Mike was the one who started making commercials at four. Once, his brothers stripped him and threw him into the hallway outside their apartment. For years they called him "Sucky Baby" because he had cried during the movie Yellow Submarine. He got sprung from school to go to auditions. "Eyes and teeth, Michael!" his mother, a trained actress, would exhort him. "Play to the exit lights!" She also told him that he wasn't funny. "My mom would say, 'Michael, you're not funny. Don't even try. It's sad now. It's pathetic. You're unfunny.... All right, everyone in the house step forward who's funny. Not so fast, Michael,'" Myers said in a June 1999 interview on Charlie Rose.

Myers has often depicted his youth as one filled with great hilarity. Occasionally, however, he has hinted at something deeper. When Charlie Rose asked him what he was seeking in life, he replied, "I guess my parents' approval."

To this day, Myers doesn't like to be touched, as his friend Rob Lowe discovered. "He didn't want me hugging on him for five years," Lowe says. Austin Powers co-stars Heather Graham and Kristen Johnston have noted that during love scenes Myers was manifestly uncomfortable. "I have a very entrenched and clear proxemic bubble," he once told an interviewer. "I'm not a hugger."

When Rose asked him how his family affected his self-esteem, Myers almost seemed to rupture. "I have none. Is that not clear?" he said in a comedic tone. "Are you not looking at somebody who is just an open wound? Do you have no sense of anyone's pain.... Oh, I have nothing but pain.... Why do you think I'm out there with the bad teeth and the hairy chest? ... That is the black box of my soul."

Straight out of high school in 1982, he auditioned for Second City's Toronto troupe and was hired by its Canadian touring company. Second City's Toronto-branch founder, Andrew Alexander, says Myers was one of the youngest performers to get a job there. After two years, he went to England. A committed Anglophile, Myers teamed up with a comedian named Neil Mullarkey, who remains a friend. The two toured together and got a regular spot on a children's morning TV show. But in 1986 the family told him that his father didn't seem to be well.

Myers returned home and rejoined Second City. At 24, he was still childlike in some respects, according to troupe member Bruce Pirrie, and the women in the group had to make sure that he got fed. He also worked with a comic named Dana Andersen, who says he had developed a character who was an avantgarde performance artist called Kurt. As he tells it, Myers asked to perform as Kurt's sidekick, and Dieter was born.

To this day, it rankles Pirrie and Andersen that Myers has repeatedly said the inspiration for Dieter was a German waiter who worked at a Toronto dive. Andersen, now a performer in Edmonton, doesn't believe there was such a waiter. But even if there was, Andersen claims he was the first to utter the phrase "Touch my monkey," which Myers made into a running laugh line for Dieter.

Myers declined to be interviewed for this article, but he did respond to some questions through written statements. He says the Dieter character was inspired by various sources, including a German exchange student he had met in 1981 and an eccentric waiter who said such things as "I love textures. I would love to touch a monkey sometime." Myers adds that he was the one who invited Andersen to create a companion character. "I chose to do Dieter and invited Dana Andersen, who was one of the most talented people I had the pleasure of working with at Second City, to join as Kurt, Dieter's lover."

Andersen disagrees with that account and says he was bothered that Myers has never acknowledged him. "He could have invited us to the set to see Saturday Night Live once he left," Andersen says. "But I was a bridge that was pretty much burnt."

Myers moved on to Second City in Chicago. It was unusual to go from Toronto to the more prestigious Chicago operation. In February 1987, Myers's mother called to tell him that his father had Alzheimer's disease. Later that year, he met Robin Ruzan, an aspiring writer and actress from Queens, New York, whom he would marry in 1993.

"People who want to get things off their desk shouldn't work with Mike Myers," says Lorne Michaels.

His climb continued after Lome Michaels heard about him from a scout. Myers joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 1989, a new member of a strong troupe that included Phil Hartman, Dennis Miller, David Spade, Jan Hooks, and Dana Carvey. At first Myers was quiet and kept to himself, according to a cast member—"very golly, gosh, wide-eyed, can't-believe-I'm-here." Michaels remembers that he was almost instantly successful. "He is a very good writer," Michaels says. "And he knows how to make contact with an audience and, more importantly, how to hold an audience."

He was not, however, a glib natural. Michaels says he was more of "a worker bee, or a nerd." He was a student of theory and labored at his comedy with a daunting intensity.

Like many members of the Saturday Night Live cast, Myers had his eccentricities. He wouldn't enter the building through the main door, walking the long way around Rockefeller Plaza to knock three times on the pole holding the Canadian flag. There was a doorway through which he would not pass. Perhaps none of it seemed so odd, with Chris Farley constantly touching the floor as his own tic. Performing on Saturday Night Live has "a high risk and high humiliation" potential, Michaels says. "People tend to develop some kind of good-luck charm."

Myers wasn't all innocence. A former Saturday Night Live cast member remembers a character called "Fucky" that Myers would perform backstage. He'd drop his trousers and "start humping Jan Hooks or Victoria Jackson—humping aggressively," says this insider. "Finally Victoria said, 'I don't want to see your ass one more time.' ... Jan would say, 'Fucky—don't! Don't, Fucky!' After a while, we tired of seeing his ass." (Farley, who joined the show soon after Myers, thought nothing of strolling into a room completely nude.)

Myers sustained himself on sandwiches—ham, white bread, and mayo—that he kept in a little cooler in his cubicle. His mother phoned after shows to critique his performance. "You must use more of an attack," she would tell him, according to a former Myers colleague. "Be more assertive on the air."

While most spouses sat in the audience when the show was airing, Myers's future wife sat in his cubicle, giving him notes and helping him memorize his lines. "He and Robin are sort of complete," says Michaels. "Most comedians are canvassers. You try out a joke on a lot of people. There's a degree of neediness. But I think Mike ... goes with his and Robin's judgment."

If Myers tended to be private and distrustful, the atmosphere at Saturday Night Live only inflamed that side of his character. "The way Lome brings up his babies is to compete with each other and compete to the death," says Penelope Spheeris, who has known Michaels for many years and produced short films for Saturday Night Live.

With Myers's "Wayne's World" sketches having developed a strong following, there were plans for a movie version, to be made through Michaels's production deal with Paramount Pictures. Michaels says Myers studied a book on writing screenplays and blocked the story out on index cards in his typical earnest-student manner. Myers also went to the Canyon Ranch spa to prepare for the role and dropped weight so fast that he feared for his health.

On the first day of shooting, in 1991, Michaels remembers, Myers had a meltdown. The set wasn't quite what he may have anticipated. "He had so much invested in what that movie would be like, and when it wasn't like that, he sort of panicked," says Michaels, who was producing the movie. "I walked him around the lot."

Several sources familiar with events say Myers did not want Carvey—who played Garth, Wayne's socially impaired sidekick, on the Saturday Night Live sketches—to participate in Wayne's World at all. But Carvey was hotter at the time, and Paramount insisted. At first, Myers proposed limiting Garth to a cameo. Carvey agreed, but the studio didn't. Brandon Tartikoff, who was running the studio at the time, said Carvey should have about as much screen time as Myers. To make things worse, Carvey was getting $1 million and 10 percent of net profits, with $600,000 and 2.5 percent going to Myers. (Myers received an additional fee as one of the film's co-writers.)

Michaels says he understands how Myers may have become upset and distrustful, especially since both he and Carvey were managed by the BrillsteinGrey Co. "They say [Dana] has got to be paid almost twice as much.... And now you can't get the picture to go without him, and Dana's saying, 'I could do this other movie [instead].' There's a little bit of sibling torture on both sides," says Michaels.

Myers's original screenplay didn't give Carvey much to do. Two weeks before the picture started shooting, Carvey walked off. The studio lured him back by letting him add some scenes for his character. "If you watch the movie, there are these little tacked-on vignettes, because it wasn't integrated from the beginning," says a member of the cast.

Spheeris says the script was a constant work in progress. "I would stand there shooting, and they would hand me pages that required new sets and wardrobe for a scene I was shooting right now," she says. "I would shoot it my way, I would shoot it Mike's way, and I would shoot it Dana's way_They could probably make another movie from the leftover footage."

Myers was becoming upset by what seemed like petty details. Once, Spheeris remembers, he wanted margarine for his bagel, but there was only butter on the set. "He was on [producer] Howard Koch's car phone for hours talking to [his manager] about how we didn't have margarine and he was going to quit." Spheeris assigned her daughter, who was looking to break into show business, the job of being Myers's "snack girl."

"Boy, did she hate me for that," Spheeris says. "But I was doing everything I could to please him. I'm giving him my daughter as a food slave! That's the best I can do, Mike."

hi' I. I VI omeaians are not people, says a high-level studio player. `They look like people, but they are a breed unto themselves."

Michaels, who says he does not remember the butter incident, nonetheless offers an explanation. "When people have to go out and perform," he says, "the thing they say they're worried about is not the thing they're worried about." It wasn't about butter, in other words. It was about the possibility of public failure.

At the time, no doubt, Myers was un der considerable stress. His father died shortly before the film had a successful test screening. Myers continued to work without a break, showing up for Saturday Night Live and toiling over the film. He handed in 11 pages of singlespaced notes detailing changes he wanted in the movie. Neither the studio nor Michaels was willing to follow his suggestions, says Spheeris. "Nobody wanted to alienate Mike, so I was designated to be the hatchet man," Spheeris remembers. "I said, 'O.K., great,' because I didn't want to change it, either. Word came back, 'She can't do Wayne's World 2.' For doing the work and getting it done right, that was my thanks_I had a nervous breakdown by myself for, like, 10 days."

Meanwhile, Myers's mother called after the film opened. According to a story that Myers has told friends, she said to him, "That Dana Carvey sure is funny."

Marty Bauer, who was Myers's agent at the time, saw changes in his client. "On a Friday morning several years ago, he was Mike Myers," Bauer says. "And on Saturday morning after Wayne's World

opened, he was a different person.... Now he had something to protect." Bauer continues: "He's very talented, he's very inventive, but he also runs on fear and to some degree on—what's the safe word for paranoia?"

Wayne's World went on to gross more than $120 million.

By all accounts, Myers still regards his next film, the 1993 comedy So I Married an Axe Murderer, as one of the traumatic events of his professional life. But if he suffered, so did those around him. He took an immediate dislike to director Tommy Schlamme, now executive producer and frequent director of The West Wing, and declared him "anti-comedy." Schlamme, who in fact lacked experience, tried desperately but unsuccessfully to accommodate the star and was finally reduced to tears, according to a friend and a filmmaker on the iet. (Schlamme denies weeping.) y the end, Myers refused to sit the editing room if Schlamme s present.

So I Married an Axe Murderer had been conceived as a satire on paranoia, of all things, and fear of marriage. As on Wayne's World, Myers labored over the script. "Literally, he would be sitting in his trailer writing the scenes, and the other actors wouldn't have had the benefit of a half-hour with their lines before they shot the scenes," says someone who worked on the movie. "He was always upset, always angry. But as incredibly difficult as he was—and he was like a child the whole time—I believe that, on many levels, Mike was right. He understood his audience."

The picture faltered at the box office, grossing less than $12 million—something that seems to haunt him to this day. "He has no worse nightmare than being back where he was with Axe Murderersays one of his former representatives. "That's what so much of this is driven by."

After So I Married an Axe Murderer, Myers went to work on what should have been a sure thing, the second Wayne's World. But there was trouble from the start. " Wayne's World 2 got complicated," Michaels says. "Nobody got paid for Wayne's World, but everybody got well paid for Wayne's World 2. Everything had changed. We were no longer in a state of grace."

The tension between Myers and Carvey grew. Carvey learned that Kim Basinger wanted to play his love interest. Myers opposed the idea. "We don't want any stars," he said. But Carvey soon learned that Myers had been pursuing Madonna and Demi Moore as a match for Wayne. There was a loud argument.

Myers wanted to base his Wayne's World 2 script on the classic 1949 Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico. Believing that Paramount could secure the rights to the film, he went to work on a script in which Wayne got his own country.

Just a few weeks before the film was supposed to shoot, Paramount's legal department determined that the movie couldn't be made, because it didn't have the rights to the film.

In a written statement, Myers says that executives at Paramount and Lome Michaels's production company had agreed to work on acquiring the rights to Passport to Pimlico. While he was writing the script, there was a changing of the guard at the studio. "Evidently," Myers says, "the ball somehow got dropped and the rights were never obtained."

Newly appointed studio chief Sherry Lansing, caught off guard by the developments on Wayne's World 2, called a meeting with Myers and his representatives. "Sherry is sitting on her throne and Mike is sitting on the couch and he starts to rock, almost like a rabbi davening," says one eyewitness. Over and over again, Myers petulantly declared, "I can't do it. I can't do it. You can't make me."

Lansing has a famously cajoling manner. She is feminine and smiling, with two little heart-shaped pendants dangling from a chain around her neck. But there is another side to Lansing, and Myers was calling it forth. One participant in the meeting remembers what happened next: "She stretched out a talon and said, 'Let me be very fucking clear. [Paramount Studios C.E.O.] Stanley Jaffe is sitting in a room in New York right now with 15 fucking lawyers. And we've got a hundred-page lawsuit ready to file. You're making this movie, and if you don't make this movie, we're going to sue.' I swear to God, Mike curled up in a fetal position—tried to cocoon himself inside his shirt. We were all white. Like, women really speak this way in public? Of course, she was absolutely right."

Perhaps in those days, before Austin Powers was a household name, the star was more easily intimidated. But maybe Myers was right, too. He helped to crank out another script with the husband-andwife writing team of Bonnie and Terry Turner in which Wayne and Garth organize a Woodstock-like music festival. Wayne's World 2 grossed less than $50 million.

"He is so pro~ounaiy talented that you've got to put up with some crap," says director Penelope Spheeris.

In the wake of the second Wayne's World, Myers split with his agent, Marty Bauer, as well as his longtime manager, Mark Gurvitz, and his lawyer, Alan Hergott. By his account, he elected to take a sabbatical and travel in Europe. But one of his former representatives also says Myers was ice-cold. "Hollywood thought he was a one-trick pony," Bauer says.

New Line was the only studio willing to make his next project, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.

Those who worked on the picture say Myers was as challenging as ever. He often became agitated even though the filmmakers made sure to have a cooler filled with lunchmeat on hand at all times, and even though they hired a production assistant to point an air-conditioning tube at Myers whenever he wasn't on-camera. Myers once became extremely upset, for example, because a grip looked him in the eye when he was rehearsing a line and didn't laugh.

According to director Jay Roach, shooting on both Austin Powers movies was a joyous experience. Myers was "the jolly creative genius," he says. "He's like a director's dream." Roach thinks the environment worked well, in part, because he smoothed off the rough edges. "I created an environment and surrounded him with people who make him feel comfortable enough to take risks." The way to make it work with Myers, he says, is not that complicated. "Just have somebody there all the time to help him out. That way he doesn't have to break focus. It's like keeping a magic carpet off the ground.... Don't underestimate the positive effect of a great environment where anything is available at any time that anybody might need who's in front of the camera."

When Dana Carvey saw Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, he was shocked. The movie's villain, Dr. Evil, seemed to be almost a precise rendition of an impression of Lome Michaels that Carvey had done for years backstage at Saturday Night Live. Many cast members mimicked Michaels. But Dr. Evil, according to several familiar with the situation, was the Carvey version—down to the pinkie on the mouth.

Former Saturday Night Live cast member Jon Lovitz asked Myers if he was doing Carvey's impression of Michaels with Dr. Evil. Myers denied it. "I have no desire to say anything negative about Mike," says Lovitz. "Did we all imitate Lome? Yes. Were we all doing Dana's imitation of Lome? Yes. That's just the way it was. Did Lome stick the pinkie in his mouth? Once in a while. But that was really Dana.... Look at Saturday Night. Who was the impressionist on the show? Dana."

Those familiar with Carvey's feelings on the matter say he would have appreciated some acknowledgment. None came.

Myers addressed Dr. Evil in his written statements: "There's one thing you learn when you get to Saturday Night Live: Everybody does an impression of Lome Michaels. Dana had one, as did Phil Hartman and pretty much everybody including the receptionist. [Former cast member] Mark McKinney did his version of Lome [in Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy] and Bill Murray did his in Scrooged. The truth is, Austin Powers and Dr. Evil were bom out of my love for James Bond movies, and Dr. Evil is an homage to the great characters created by Donald Pleasence, mixed in with a little bit of Lome."

Carvey got another glimpse of Myers's creative process when the two toured England to promote Wayne's World. A reporter had asked Myers whether his Saturday Night Live character Simon, a little boy who sat in a tub and liked to make "drawerings," was based on a British cartoon made by Thames Television called Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings. Until then, apparently, none of his Saturday Night Live colleagues had been aware of the inspiration for the Simon character. Myers now acknowledges that the Simon character is indeed "an homage" to the Brit ish cartoon. "In fact," he says, "we would say it's brought to you by the BBC, and the music is exactly the music used from the show." He adds that what he did with Simon was tantamount to what fellow Saturday Night Live player Eddie Murphy did with Mister Rogers in his "Mister Robinson's Neighborhood" sketches.

After Austin Powe,y: Internation al Man of Mystery wrapped, Myers was back in business with new representation. He hired David O'Connor of the Creative Artists Agency, as well as manager Erwin Stoff and law yer Bruce Ramer, who has long repre sented Steven Spielberg.

Despite the success of the film, Myers broke with the respected producers Suzanne and Jennifer Todd. Emma Chasin, an executive at Myers's production company, puts it this way: "I don't think they were really there for him in a producer way. Mike had to work really hard to get the movie noticed." The Todds decline to comment other than to say that they made a production deal with New Line on the strength of their work on the film.

Next, Myers made a run at serious films. "Mike, in his heart of hearts, wanted to make The 400 Blows," says Michaels. Instead, he played Studio 54 club owner Steve Rubell in 54—the tale of the legendary Manhattan nightclub. By several accounts, it was another unpleasant experience, not to mention a box-office disaster. He also made the unreleased Pete's Meteor, a small coming-of-age drama, in Ireland. "He did those two movies in an effort to say, 'I want to be a real actor,'" says one of his former representatives. "That was something he soured on very quickly because he realized he could never subjugate himself to a director and a producer and give up control."

Several representatives and filmmakers who have worked with Myers say he always measured himself against Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey, resenting that they made $20 million merely for acting in a movie while Myers was writing and creating characters as well. And Carrey and Sandler have also proved that they can go beyond playing comedic characters. Producer Hawk Koch, whose credits include the first Wayne's World, suggests that might also trouble Myers. "A lot of actors think, You like me, as opposed to: You like Wayne or Austin Powers," he says. "But when he did play a straight character, it didn't work."

"I surrounded him with people who make him feel comfortable enough to take risks," says director Jay Roach.

Myers went back to pure comedy with the hit 1999 sequel Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. A week after it opened, Myers told the assistant to his manager, Erwin Stoff, that he wanted to meet with Stoff that day. The assistant said Stoff was on a plane to New York. And as the tale is told, Myers asked, "Can't he have the plane turned around?" Stoff returned his client's call from the plane and said, "I don't have that arrangement with American Airlines." The relationship was effectively over. Since then, Myers has also parted company with lawyer Bruce Ramer.

The Dieter debacle came in the midst of a simmering Hollywood summer, when there was no stability to be found in any corner of the town. Universal was in perhaps the hottest seat, since it was about to be acquired by Vivendi.

For Universal president Ron Meyer, this was hardly the time to lose a potential franchise film, which the Dieter project seemed to be. Universal was convinced that the script worked. David Hasselhoff had been hired to play himself. The plot: livid that Dieter's show, Sprockets, has surpassed Baywatch in Germany's TV ratings, Hasselhoff kidnaps Dieter's pet monkey and flees to Hollywood. Production designer Bo Welch had been hired to make his directorial debut.

In May, Myers, who had been working on the script, tested some his Dieter material, including 10 original songs, in two shows at the Viper Room and Cafe Largo in L.A. The audiences didn't respond well. "He was sort of at the end of his rope," says Chasin. "The script wasn't working for him, and the character wasn't, he felt, likable." A read-through in his offices further convinced him that the project was in trouble.

An executive who had worked on an earlier Myers hit said the actor had no one to make him feel protected. There wasn't somebody on the inside of the movie who could talk him through his anxiety," he says. There's no more Erwin Stoff. He left Marty Bauer and Mark Gurvitz. Brian Grazer—he's a mogul. He's not going to sit with him.... This is not meeting. It's not a dinner. It's not a basket of flowers or a case of wine or even a car. You just can't move it off your desk with this guy."

Universal had already pushed back production by three weeks. Now there were only five weeks to go before shooting. A cast and crew numbering 200 had been hired. Universal would later claim that it had already sunk $5 million into the project. Myers decided to meet in person with the Universal brass to tell them that he couldn't proceed as scheduled. He and the colleagues accompanying him were formally dressed. Universal head Ron Meyer was annoyed. "What did they do, rent suits?" he later asked a friend. (Indeed, Myers had a way of quoting Nietzsche and speaking in maxims that irritated Meyer—and Grazer too. For example, he would end meetings by clasping his palms together, bowing, and saying, "I honor your truth.")

Myers began to read from notes about his reasons for not wanting to do the film as written. One Universal executive who was present says Meyer then told him, "I expect you to do this movie."

"You shouldn't assume that," Myers replied. "I don't think the character grows enough."

"This character doesn't have to grow," the studio chief replied. "This is a firstclass script."

"I can't find a solution," Myers said.

The Universal side says the meeting broke inconclusively. After that, say insiders at the studio, communications with the Myers camp broke down.

But Chasin says the Universal team did not seem to hear what Myers had said in the meeting. "I cannot tell you how many times we said, 'This is a delay, not a denial,'" she says. When Myers left the meeting, he thought it had gone well.

The studio felt that it had given in to Myers's every request. "He wanted office space in a special place," says a top executive. "He got the director he wanted, the cast he wanted, the production people he wanted. Every single demand, we met." Chasin says Myers—who had script approval—was working in good faith. But she adds, "Universal knew that Mike had written script approval, and they got letters from Mike's lawyer saying ... he had not given approval, in writing, yet...

I don't think [Universal] may have taken it all that seriously. They thought, He's the writer, he can fix it."

Myers's current attorney, Martin Singer, blames Universal for wanting to rush the project—in part because of pressure to please the new bosses at Vivendi. "Somebody wanted to get a May 2001 release date," he says. "It wasn't an issue of getting the movie done—it was an issue of getting the movie done right away."

But Universal disagrees. "If he had just asked for a postponement, come on, do you think the lawsuit would have happened?" asks one Universal insider. "We're not in the business of suing people."

Myers argues that his own sacrifice shows that he acted in good faith when he pulled out of the Dieter film. "I couldn't accept $20 million and knowingly go into principal photography with a script that still needed work and had major flaws in the second act," he says.

Grazer was clearly astonished to have ended up in this war. But once he decided to sue, the gloves were off. In court papers, he accused Myers of engaging in "expressions of inexcusable bigotry."

At dinner at his home on a July night, Jeffrey Katzenberg pointed out to Universal's Ron Meyer that pursuing this battle was not in anyone's interest. He suggested that all the parties write up a list of their requirements.

It wasn't easy. As the settlement talks dragged on, the Myers camp was blaming Grazer and, surprisingly, his famously affable partner, Ron Howard, for refusing to bend. Howard was tougher than Grazer, some said. The outlines of a settlement seemed logical: Universal would make Mike Myers's next film in partnership with DreamWorks, shielding Myers from having to work with his adversaries; Imagine would still nominally produce the film and get its cut of the gross.

The challenge for Mike Myers is to try to figure out where he fits in Hollywood, given his standards," says agent Cynthia Shelton-Droke.

The settlement talks blew up countless times, but finally a deal was struck. Nobody wanted to wage the war. In early August, the parties signed off on an agreement along the obvious lines. Dieter was dead. Myers had a year to write a new film with a new character. If he elected to do another film first, Imagine could opt to take a profit participation in that movie (as long as that movie was not a third Austin Powers installment). And if Myers were to make a movie with another studio first, he would have to pay a sum to Universal to offset the studio's losses on the Dieter film.

To a very large degree, working with any comedian is madness. "Comedians are not people," says a high-level studio player. "They look like people, but they are a breed unto themselves. They're angry, they're irresistibly drawn to the abnormalities in the culture. They are really, really difficult people. Jim Carrey's no day at the beach. Ask [Carrey's manager] Jim Miller about sitting on the tarmac for four and a half hours convincing him to go to Venice for the film festival. Trust me, Adam Sandler's no day at the beach. ... Chris Farley was maniacal and out of control and full of rage They're not people. There's no governor on these guys."

Lome Michaels, who has probably worked with more truly gifted comedians than anyone else in the world, sums it up this way: "It's been an experience of mine that quite often talent and character don't reside in the same place. And the talent is of more interest to me."

Talent is certainly interesting to Hollywood, but some who have worked with Myers say talent isn't always enough. It is a testament to how much anger former associates feel toward Myers that several say they feel no sympathy whatever for Myers's profound grief over his father's death. One filmmaker who worked with him says, "He literally told me the story of his father dying a thousand times. Never, ever once did he know that I lost my father 10 years ago. Wouldn't ask and doesn't care."

Dieter may be gone, but is Myers damaged as a star? A lot depends on what he does next. His former agent Marty Bauer thinks Myers can easily recover. "He may destroy himself," Bauer says. "But he won't if they think they can make money off of him. Those powerful enemies will turn around and work with him—if they think it can help their cause."

At the root of it all, perhaps, is the tension between the industry and the talent. Some say that Universal was too hungry to get the film moving, and that Myers actually saved the studio money by averting a disaster. Agent Cynthia SheltonDroke, who represented Myers before he had made his big-screen debut, says Myers is right to distrust the system and stand up for what he believes. "He's a perfect example of how artists get crucified for putting their work first," she says. "When somebody creates almost a language that a whole generation identifies with, that's an artist.... The challenge for Mike Myers is to really try to figure out where he fits in Hollywood, given his creative standards."

But Lome Michaels has a slightly different take about artistic purity in the movie business. "If you play piano in a brothel, you really can't say, 'I'm just in it for the music,"' he says. "No matter how high-minded you are, you have to reconcile yourself to the marketplace."