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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/20\/books\/review\/ari-emanuel-roll-the-calls.html?emc=edit_nn_20260922&nl=the-morning&segment_id=226865",
    "parsed_content": "What to ReadFind Your Next BookFantasyScience FictionThrillersRomanceAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTNonfictionIn \u2018Roll the Calls,\u2019 a Hollywood Power Broker Acts His RageFights, feuds and insults are all in a day\u2019s work for Ari Emanuel, who offers an unvarnished look at his rapacious career in a new memoir.Share full articleAri Emanuel and his wife, the fashion designer Sarah Staudinger, in Venice for Jeff Bezos\u2019 wedding to Lauren Sanchez.Credit...Stefano Rellandini\/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty ImagesBy Alexandra JacobsSept. 20, 2026Buy Book \u25beAmazonApple BooksBarnes & NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshop.orgWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.See more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra m\u00e1s de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de b\u00fasqueda. Add The New York Times on GoogleAgrega The New York Times en Google ROLL THE CALLS: A Memoir, by Ari EmanuelForget the \u201cOdyssey.\u201d In his staccato, profane and vindictive new book, \u201cRoll the Calls,\u201d Ari Emanuel invokes Homer\u2019s prequel, the \u201cIliad,\u201d whose first word is \u201crage.\u201d And \u201cforget\u201d is not the F-word he\u2019d use.Emanuel is a Hollywood superagent \u2014 that term now appropriated by A.I., the imminent industry crusher barely acknowledged in this book\u2019s pages. This is all A.R.I., baby.He\u2019s represented people so famous they\u2019re one-named, like Oprah and the man formerly known as \u201cthe Donald,\u201d and became famous and one-named himself after \u201cEntourage,\u201d the early-aughts HBO series featuring Ari Gold, the scenery-chewing-and-spewing character played by Jeremy Piven.He\u2019s also youngest of the three high-achieving Emanuel brothers (Zeke, the doctor; Rahm, the politician); and his place in the birth order and relative struggles at school, Ari argues here, are what motivated him to become the richest.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cThird rail,\u201d Emanuel tells a therapist nicknamed Dr. Calm, explaining how being treated as stupid sets off his notorious temper. \u201cThe only way I can describe it. Like an electric charge running through me. Zeerp! I lose all control.\u201dIn recent years, showbiz bigwigs like Scott Rudin and Will Smith have been brought low after their own Zeerp! moments: furloughed from their careers and forced to apologize for their behavior.Rage has an image problem. But move over, mindfulness; sayonara to stoicism: \u201cRoll the Calls\u201d wants to rebrand rage as potentially elevating, the way Gordon Gekko made greed good in \u201cWall Street.\u201d\u201cRage might not solve every problem (or any problem), but it sure as hell clarifies the problem,\u201d Emanuel writes, or dictates (nested in his acknowledgments is J.R. Moehringer, the A-list ghostwriter who worked with Prince Harry). \u201cRage brings things to a head.\u201dMy editor has barred me from using any more cutesy portmanteaus, just as Emanuel was once barred from the studio lot at Disney, but I\u2019m going to make like Ari and barrel forth anyway. This may be the world\u2019s first mad-moir. Or \u2026 mad-ifesto.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTRoll the Calls Save to your reading list:Want to readHave readIt\u2019s the story of how a kid with dyslexia and A.D.H.D. rose from licking envelopes for the very literary Robby Lantz, whose clients included James Baldwin and Carson McCullers; to the mailroom and upward at CAA; to cofounding the upstart agency Endeavor; to gobbling up William Morris and IMG. Notably, his jumbo bowl of alphabet soup, under the name TKO Group Holdings, now includes the fight giants U.F.C. and WWE.A wrestler himself in high school after tussling in childhood with his brothers (\u201ctwo violent psychopaths\u201d \u2014 one of the few insults that seem like a joke), Ari has taken this opportunity to pin his opponents to the mat in print.On Barry Diller, after a meeting about Live Nation: \u201cThe dude is just a m\u00e9lange of old farts and bad ideas.\u201d And furthermore: \u201cBORRRR-\u00ading.\u201d\u201cThat glad-handing phony\u201d and \u201cthat [bleeping] putz\u201d are the niceties leveled at Jeffrey Katzenberg.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTAnd to Irving Azoff, after Azoff tried to poach a client: \u201cYou are fundamentally a liar and selfish \u2026 You can lie to other people and think you\u2019ll get away with it. That\u2019s not happening with me. I\u2019m not from this town. My roots are elsewhere and let me tell you something: I don\u2019t forget and won\u2019t forget. I keep grudges for a lifetime.\u201dAnd this was a \u201cside skirmish\u201d!Emanuel\u2019s roots are middle-class Chicago, but also Jerusalem, where his father, Benjamin, who became a pediatrician, was born after his forebears fled the pogroms in Ukraine. The family name was changed from Auerbach in honor of Benjamin\u2019s brother, Emanuel, who was killed by a stray bullet. Ari remembers wetting his pants during a prison attack in the West Bank when he was 7.ImageHe was touring the prison because his mother, Marsha, was friends with the local police chief. She was a civil rights activist and tough cookie \u2014 Ari feels a kinship with Jackson Pollock upon hearing that the painter\u2019s mother was \u201cvolatile\u201d and \u201cwithholding.\u201d She put his bad report cards on the refrigerator alongside those of his better-performing brothers. \u201cShe wasn\u2019t like other moms,\u201d he writes. \u201cShe cursed a lot.\u201dEmanuel had an adopted younger sister with disabilities, Shoshana, but this book is primarily a Battle of the Gods in which we learn little of her, or his relationships with women. Those include a long first marriage to Sarah Hardwick Addington, with whom he has three sons and a daughter; and a second marriage to the much younger designer Sarah Staudinger, whom he refers to by the brand name of her clothing line, Staud.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cYou fired me, Ari, and let me put this in a way you\u2019ll understand,\u201d Staud tells him when he wants her back after, incredibly, making Dr. Calm call her for a break. \u201cIf I let you rehire me, I want a promotion. And equity. Or else I quit.\u201dEmanuel is a talker, not a reader; he gives Rahm the middle finger on a panel after he jokes Ari can\u2019t read anything over 200 pages. \u201cRoll the Calls\u201d is over 400, but goes fast, to Moehringer\u2019s credit, as if it were barked into a voice-memo app and transcribed by a quivering assistant. The iPhone has only accelerated Emanuel\u2019s roll. \u201cI\u2019ll use my teleputer on you like a two-by-four,\u201d he asserts, using the word coined presciently by George Gilder in \u201cLife After Television\u201d (1990).Oh, for 1990, when it was a flex merely to order off-menu at Spago!The storied agent Sam Cohn devoured paper, who knows why. Bill Block popped raw garlic, we learn, to enhance his testosterone. Ari Emanuel? He ingests a daily cup of live worms to address what he calls (without irony) \u201cinflammation,\u201d recommending to an old antagonist, Mike Ovitz \u2014 how they\u2019ve mellowed \u2014 that he do the same.But these days Hollywood is less concerned with \u201chugging it out,\u201d Gold\u2019s signature catchphrase, than with Hugging Face. Will any of us eat lunch in this town again?ROLL THE CALLS: A Memoir | By Ari Emanuel | Knopf | 432 pp. | $35AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
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    "author_name": "Alexandra Jacobs",
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