The Ari-Irving email slugfest

HEAVYWEIGHT SLUGFEST: You can bet Nikki Finke was salivating when she caught wind of a snarky, zinger-filled email exchange between suddenly warring old pals Irving Azoff and Ari Emanuel—because, as the gossip columnist well knows, and as she put it in the lead of her Tuesday column on Deadline Hollywood, “Few things satisfy more than a fiery Hollywood feud.” She then got down to the nitty-gritty: “The email war erupted between the two entertainment executives Friday, the same day as a Financial Times article was published about how well Live Nation Entertainment is doing in 2013 after music manager Azoff resigned and where WME co-founder Emanuel is on the board. It doesn’t help that Azoff’s son works for CAA as an agent, or that Azoff is reputedly using his position as an advisory board member of IMG to lend help to CAA’s designs on that sports company which WME also wants. The surprise here is that Emanuel usually sends one- or two-word-only email messages. But Azoff loves all communications technology, even infamously micro-blogging on Twitter to spar with Live Nation critics when he ran the company.” Finke hadn’t actually read the emails when she broke the news, but her source quoted a bit of the back and forth. “Irving tried to be nice and, well, Ari was Ari,” the source told her. “They kept going back and forth. Such silliness from Ari about what a ‘piece of shit’ Irving was, and then Irving saying, ‘I forgive you for being an asshole.’ Ari telling him, ‘You’re a lying piece of shit,’ and Irving replying, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ It was so ridiculous.” (6/26a)