F. Scott Fitzgerald declared, in his posthumous Hollywood novel The Last Tycoon, that there are no second acts in American lives. Jeff Shell, now felled from his presidency of Paramount, is living proof.
The catalyst for his departure is R.J. Cipriani, who amid a $150 million legal dispute with Shell over a stymied TV pitch, made the scorched-earth decision to publicize documentation showing that the executive had been indiscreet about in-progress dealmaking at the public company, allegedly violating SEC disclosure rules. In its statement about Shell’s departure, Paramount noted, “The facts demonstrated that these allegations do not establish a securities law violation.”
Shell’s fight with Cipriani, a notorious provocateur, may have been the proximate cause for his undoing. But he couldn’t survive it because he was already arguably the odd man out within Paramount when the scandal emerged in February.
At the outset of a call with
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