Angelina Jolie a minimally talented spoiled brat, says producer in hacked Sony e-mail

Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie was branded a "minimally talented spoiled brat" in an e-mail exchange that has been disclosed after a hacking attack on Sony Pictures. -- PHOTO: REUTERS
Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie was branded a "minimally talented spoiled brat" in an e-mail exchange that has been disclosed after a hacking attack on Sony Pictures. -- PHOTO: REUTERS

New York - Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie was branded a "minimally talented spoiled brat" in an e-mail exchange that has been disclosed after a hacking attack on Sony Pictures.

On Wednesday, e-mails published by Gawker website revealed a nasty battle over a planned Steve Jobs biopic, Jobs, scripted by Academy Award winner Aaron Sorkin, said the New York Times. Oscar-winning producer Scott Rudin (No Country For Old Men, 2007) was displeased that director David Fincher, whom he wanted for the movie, was being pulled by Jolie to direct her in another Sony film, a remake of Cleopatra.

Rudin pressured Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal to push back Cleopatra in an e-mail in February.

According to Gawker, Rudin wrote: "What the hell are you talking about? Who's threatening you? There is no movie of Cleopatra to be made (and how that is a bad thing given the insanity and rampaging spoiled ego of this woman and the cost of the movie is beyond me) and if you won't tell her that you do not like the script - which, let me remind you, SHE DOESN'T EITHER - this will just spin even further out in Crazyland but let me tell you I have zero appetite for the indulgence of spoiled brats and I will tell her this myself if you don't."

In another e-mail, he asked Pascal not to involve herself in Jolie's "pointless drama", said Gawker.

"If you engage in this again, we will end up losing Fincher on the one we want him to do and will be stuck with shoving him onto a movie with no script that, underneath it all, you know in your heart and your brain should never be made," he wrote.

He called Jolie's project "a $180m ego bath that we both know will be the career-defining debacle for us both".

He wrote: "I'm not destroying my career over a minimally talented spoiled brat who thought nothing of shoving this off her plate for eighteen months so she could go direct a movie. I have no desire to be making a movie with her, or anybody, that she runs and that we don't. She's a camp event and a celebrity and that's all and the last thing anybody needs is to make a giant bomb with her that any fool could see coming."

In the end, Sony pulled out of Jobs, after actor Christian Bale departed from the project.

Salaries of Sony's top executives and unpublished scripts are among the company secrets that have been spilled after the cyber attack on Nov 24.

In another e-mail published by Gawker, Rudin poured cold water on Pascal's idea to wait for financing from producer Megan Ellison (American Hustle, 2013), daughter of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison.

He called Ellison "this bipolar 28 year old lunatic who hasn't returned your call in 3 days". "Maybe if she likes you and if she took her meds, there's some vague chance you can start this movie in ten weeks?" he wrote.

Ellison responded on Twitter: "Bipolar 28 year old lunatic..? I always thought of myself more as eccentric."

A spokesman for Jolie, who has directed a new movie, Unbroken, said she had no comment, reported the Times.

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