Forgive, Forget, or Fire

May 12, 2007 — -- A businessman gets drunk, hits his girlfriend in a parking lot, and loses his job.

In most places that would be the end of the story. But Hollywood isn't most places and Chris Albrecht, the former CEO of HBO and the man often credited with reinventing cable television, isn't most businessmen.

Albrecht made headlines last week when police outside the MGM Grand in Las Vegas arrested him after reportedly seeing him fighting with his girlfriend in the parking lot.

Within days, the media had uncovered a 1991 case that HBO settled for $400,000, in which Albrecht allegedly choked another woman who was both a subordinate and former girlfriend.

Two days after the incident in Las Vegas, Albrecht resigned as the cable network's CEO.

The media loves a disgraced celebrity. Albrecht, though himself not a household name, was the man behind so many household names — "The Sopranos," "Sex and the City," "Six Feet Under" — and people jumped on the story of an executive whose wealth and power had seemingly led him to drink and act with abandon.

Yesterday, Ari Emanuel, a friend of Albrecht and the inspiration for the agent Ari Gold character on the HBO series "Entourage," published a piece on the liberal news site, Huffington Post, defending his friend. In it, Emanuel called out the Hollywood press for chastising Albrecht, a man whose trespasses — at least in Emanuel's opinion — were mild, compared to what passes for forgivable in Tinseltown.

"Chris Albrecht is my friend, and I'm appalled at the way he has been treated by the press. He is an alcoholic who fell off the wagon and made a terrible mistake. No one is arguing that," Emanuel wrote on the Web site.

"Ours has traditionally been a very forgiving culture. If Hollywood is going to give Mel Gibson a second chance, and sports fans are going to cheer on stars like Jason Kidd, Latrell Sprewell, and Stephen Jackson — who have made similar mistakes — why not Chris Albrecht?"

So, why not Chris Albrecht?

Contrition in Hollywood these days is as formulaic as some of the movies produced there. Apologize, make a show out of entering rehab, and maybe meet with representatives of whatever group you managed to offend.