Like big fish out of water

Vanity Fair columnist Dominick Dunne ate in a restaurant where the salad dressing came in plastic packets and, for a minute or two, no one knew who he was.

Hollywood has come to Georgetown, Del. The suit filed by Walt Disney Co. stockholders trying to recoup $200 million in payments and interest tied to the exit package given to Ovitz when he left the company in 1996 is finally being heard. It's hard to tell who's the most disoriented -- the 5,000 residents of the tranquil and historic Sussex County seat who cannot imagine why photographers and TV cameramen are hanging around the Chancery Courthouse to film a bunch of lawyers and taking up perfectly good parking spaces, or the West Coast and New York litigants struggling to cope in a town with only one restaurant, no juice bar, no gym and a coffeehouse that closes at 1 p.m.

What is clear is that the celebrity of Hollywood Power Players has limits, and those limits do not extend into lower Delaware. "Who is he again?" a photographer up from Baltimore asked after he dutifully shot Ovitz entering the courtroom. Reporters attempting to gauge the local reaction to the proceedings found themselves explaining the basic nature of the case and who exactly Disney Chief Executive Michael Eisner is. "I did hear Sidney Poitier might be in town," said Debi Marker, a waitress at Smith's, the town's lone sit-down restaurant. (The actor was a Disney director when Ovitz was president.) "That would be interesting."

Delaware, the self-proclaimed First State, has two electoral college votes, no sales tax and a reputation for very good scrapple. It is also the state in which many Fortune 500 companies, including Disney, choose to incorporate. If the Disney case had been heard a year ago, testimony would have occurred in Wilmington. Via train, Wilmington is just over an hour from New York and Washington. But last May, a new Chancery Court building opened on the Georgetown Circle and, since William B. Chandler III, chief judge of the state's Court of Chancery, lives nearby, this is where he decided to hold the trial. So lawyers and witnesses on both sides of the Disney debate found themselves two hours from any major airport, walking past half a dozen historic red brick buildings that, with their patriotic bunting and ornate weather vanes, could have been transported directly from Disneyland's Main Street USA.

Inside the courtroom, which is so small there is room for only seven reporters, Ovitz defended his performance during his 15-month tenure at Disney in testimony that rang with Hollywoodese -- CAA had been devoted to "packaging the talent," cable pioneer Geraldine Laybourne was a "good get" for Disney, and relationships with everyone from former President Bush to the mayor of Shanghai were solidified in "a terrific meeting," a "wonderful meeting," "a really great meeting." Money? Well money was not the point. "I took a million-dollar salary, which in this country is a lot of money but in the entertainment industry isn't even a base salary. So it wasn't about money; I didn't even think about it."