| SITTING BEHIND HIS
DESK AT HIS COMPANY, CHAMPION Entertainment, Tommy Mottola is surrounded by platinum
records and hunting paraphernalia. Intricately painted duck decoys and glossy Hall and
Oates photos. "I like to hunt," Mottola says. "But I always eat what I
kill. I don't believe in shooting it if you're not going to eat it." Mottola smiles.
He knows this sounds vaguely dangerous, and he likes the edge. "You've probably heard
stories about me:" he says with a certain mysterious glee. "Some of them are
true. Some of them aren't." There are Mottola
stories - lots of stories - about Mottola's outrageous business dealings. Hall and Oates
once wrote a song about their manager. The lyrics went, "You're a patent leather
lover/With your Gucci-Pucci pointed shoes/And you're swearing on your mother/That 'all
this can be yours'/Sign on the line on the line sign on the line." |
Mottola loved the
song - "I thought it was true, and I thought it was great" - and it fueled the
myth. "We know he's crazy," says John Oates. "That's a given. But it's okay
to be crazy as long as you deliver." And Mottola does deliver. At least most of the
time. Occasionally, he's become too extreme. Gone too far. Like the time he was
renegotiating Hall and Oates' RCA deal and suggested "as a sweetener, that RCA should
throw in a couple of Rolls-Royces. I specified red Corniche convertibles." The cars
never materialized, but a contract did. "I have this thing inside me," Mottola
explains proudly, "that say's, 'Ask for it. 'What's the big deal?' They had this one
little hit, 'Kiss on My List; when I went into RCA and asked for $13 million. My own
lawyer was telling me I was crazy. I said, 'I don't care. We're doing it.' We sat down and
I said $13 million, and they all fell off their chairs. As it turned out, it was RCA's
golden opportunity. Hall and Oates are their banner artists." (They didn't get the
$13 million, though.) |
Daryl Hall and John Oates
German Website
