Surprise, Guy Fieri Is a Total Dick

David Page, the man who created “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives” and produced the first 11 seasons with his Page Productions company, sued Food Network for breach of contract after star Guy Fieri refused to work with Page. Food Network filed a counter-suit, claiming that Page — an abrasive individual himself — ruined the work environment by “mistreating staff and others working on the series.

Page and Food Network have since settled, and the only thing we can do now is bask in Page’s account of what a churlish, self-centered, homophobic retard Guy Fieri is. Try to survive this paragraph from City Pages’ article on Page and Fieri.

As his star power grew, Fieri stopped returning Page’s phone calls. When NBC hired Fieri to film the primetime game show Minute to Win It, Guy started canceling shoots with Page. A posse of friends—a bawdy band of homeboys with names like Gorilla, Kleetus, and Dirty P.—trailed Guy everywhere, and his manager, Tom Nelson, took to calling himself “the consigliore.” The group became known as the Garlic Mafia, and Fieri styled himself as the mob boss.

Guhhhhhh… so… douchey.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more:

“You have to protect Guy from all of his poop jokes,” Page says. “Anytime any woman mentioned ‘cream,’ Guy went into a sexual riff. When cutting the show, you had to tell the editors to watch Guy’s eye line, because it’s always on breasts.”

Understandable, perhaps, though hardly professional.

Fieri also needed protection from homosexuals, or at least advance warning. Early in the show’s run, Page got a phone call from Fieri, who’d just walked out of a restaurant in a huff.

“Guy had decided that the two men running the restaurant were life partners,” Page remembers. “He said, ‘You can’t send me to talk to gay people without warning! Those people weird me out!’”

From then on, show researchers were required to note any indications of homosexuality detected during pre-interviews. (Fieri declined to comment for this story through his spokespeople.)

I’m not surprised Fieri declined to comment. The reporter who called was probably gay.

[After stiffing Page on the first best-selling Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives book] When the second book was commissioned, Fieri approached Page to ask for access to some of the show’s research material. That led to an “uncomfortable discussion” over compensation, Page claims.

“They were demanding tremendous research from my people, and pictures, but they didn’t want to pay for them,” Page says. “Guy said to me: ‘You know, it’s true: Jews are cheap.’”

Yeah, that’s a pretty low blow. But in the grand scheme of things, his hair and sunglasses are a lot more offensive than his comments about Jews.