Infamous blogger’s posthumous book terrifies Hollywood bigwigs — but who’s behind it?

Hollywood was shaken yesterday when word spread that a posthumous book by feared firebrand columnist Nikki Finke is being shopped — with reactions ranging from PTSD to piqued interest.

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But will the mysterious manuscript — which was delayed for years — ever see the light of day? And who’s really behind the push to publish now? The story’s as thorny as Finke’s reputation, we found out.

On Wednesday, upstart newsletter LA Material broke the news that Finke’s estate was selling her Hollywood memoir. The famed scribe had sparked fear and loathing in Hollywood’s C-suites during her reign as the doyenne of Deadline.

“I think the story is who is trying to do this and why now?” says a rep whose clients regularly tussled with Finke, while a high-level publishing insider enthused, “Sounds intriguing. Could definitely be a thing. But I wonder who’s repping it?”

According to LA Material, a woman named Connie Su, described as a “longtime friend” of the Hollywood chronicler, “has been entrusted by the estate to help shop the book around to those interested in publishing it.”

But the story noted that Su only met Finke, “around 2015, when both attended a Wellesley College alumnae event in Culver City,” and that Finke, who graduated from Wellesley 34 years before Su, became a “mentor” to the young woman, who worked in neither journalism nor Hollywood.

“Not a chance,” says one former close associate of the famed writer. “Nicki never went out, never mind to a random Wellesley mixer. That’s a total joke.”

We reached out to Su on Wednesday for more information about her role as the unlikely custodian of a manuscript that would presumably rock the town.

“Thanks for reaching out. I can speak next week. Out of town this week. Thank you!” Su texted. When we mentioned our story was running the next day, we never heard back. (Finke herself famously said she worked 20 hours a day, after all!)

The book, which had been in the works for decades and promised to spill the tea on the town’s titans, became a sticking point between Finke and her billionaire boss Jay Penske a year after the media mogul bought Finke’s digital blog, Deadline Hollywood.

Sources tell Page Six Hollywood that Penske attempted to strong-arm Finke over a series of projects she had in the works that included the HBO series “Tilda,” which would star Diane Keaton as the journalist who brought the town’s most powerful to their knees, plus a video game at Paramount(!) and the memoir.

In an email exchange between the two dated June 9, 2010, Penske told Finke that the projects posed an ethical and contractual violation, sources told us. Finke pushed back hard, arguing that she did not cover Simon & Schuster, the tome’s high-powered would-be publisher. “Now, please do NOT lecture me about journalism ethics, especially when you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Finke snapped.

Rights to the book remained at Simon & Schuster until 2014, when things devolved further between Finke and Penske. The two became locked in a legal battle before a settlement was reached. Shortly thereafter, Finke mysteriously pulled back the book and returned the advance, even after literary lion Jonathan Karp had touted the tome to the New York Times.

One source who was familiar with the back-and-forth at the time says Penske “owns all the rights” to the book. A rep for Penske did not respond to a request for comment. Karp also did not comment. 

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Another source who enjoyed a collegial relationship with Finke over the decades says the book represented a passion project that was meant to punctuate her career as the ultimate Hollywood mogul whisperer/destroyer. The source was unnerved that someone is attempting to revive this book four years after Finke’s death.

“How will her legacy be protected? Who is going to rewrite this book?” the source asked. “I feel I want to protect Nikki in this situation to tell you the truth.”

(All this is dovetailing against the backdrop of another imminent bombshell book by an outspoken Hollywood habitue: Ari Emanuel’s forthcoming memoir “Roll the Calls.” A source tells us that Finke features in Emanuel’s book, out Sept. 22 from Knopf. “Ari Emanuel’s book has some great stories about how during the merger talks of WME and Endeavor he was leaking everything to Nikki to get the upper hand while pretending to be upset about it,” mused a source familiar with Emanuel’s manuscript. A rep for WME did not get back to us.)

Many others who read the LA Material article found Su’s inclusion in the mystery project to be odd. As far as Finke’s heirs, she did have relatives including two nieces. We reached out to both to ask if they were aware of — or condoned — the project. Neither responded as of press time. Others questioned why the estate wouldn’t simply enlist a literary agent.

William Briggs, a partner at top law firm Venable, repped Finke during parts of the Deadline drama. He says he was unaware that she had an estate, or who the executors might be. “I will say that my time with Nikki was a blessing because she gave me insights into others in the entertainment industry that I had not had before,” Briggs told us. “She was a very impactful person when she was alive and at the zenith of her career. I think she was a force for good in terms of letting others take a peek behind the industry curtain and see what was really going on.”

But any memoir by the woman the Times once called “The Most Hated Reporter in Hollywood”  is also being met around town with a heavy dose of skepticism among her former subjects. On one hand, Finke is credited with revolutionizing how aggressively journalists cover the industry, but some suggest that she played fast and loose to service her own needs and those of her sources. “How can there be a memoir from someone who made up so many of the details of her own life?” asks one veteran executive who lived through the Finke era.

Among Finke’s biggest targets were CAA co-founder Michael Ovitz and onetime Disney boss Michael Eisner. (The long buried book was even once called in the ’90s, according to LA Material, “The Man Who Wanted Everything: Michael Ovitz and the Dark Dreams of Hollywood.” But Finke was allegedly worried about being sued, LA Material reported.)

The volume’s latest iteration is now called, “Hubris,” and a pal and former LA Times staff writer, Diane Haithman, has helped edit it, LA Material reported, describing the tome as a “juicy history of a bygone, freewheeling town.” The report said that the book includes tales of “Hollywood titans from the 1980s and 1990s, including executives like Ron Meyer, Michael Eisner, and Brandon Tartikoff, along with legendary talent agent Sue Mengers,” plus, “Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford and Kevin Costner.”

(Ovitz told LA Material of the alleged book project: “Don’t know anything about it.” Some of the famous names mentioned, like Mengers, Newman and Tartikoff, are long gone, while Redford died last year.)

A day after Finke’s death, another of her biggest targets, former friend and colleague Sharon Waxman of TheWrap, penned a piece titled, “The Tortured Life of Nikki Finke: Best Friend, Worst Enemy – and Made for the Internet.” She wrote of Finke and her famed feuds: “Editors found her difficult to manage and she had made enemies of Michael Ovitz, Michael Eisner and many others in the industry who went over her head to push back on her aggressive coverage.”

Another Finke target, “Mallrats” director Kevin Smith, once called Finke, “the most dangerous cat lady on the planet.”

Richard Rushfield of The Ankler wrote when Finke died: “She lied about things small — she would tweak weekend box office numbers to punish people who hadn’t bought ads; changing time stamps to make it look like she broke a story — and things enormous.” But he added that in her day, “Nikki wasn’t the dominant topic, she was the only topic.”

Her fictionalized HBO series, “Tilda,” also never saw the light of day. HBO shot a pilot but decided against moving forward. Perhaps Finke’s memoir will enjoy a better fate. Says the source whose clients tussled with Finke: “If it’s Nikki from beyond the grave and wanted to have her last laugh, that’s fine. But she was someone who was a voice for a select few in the industry. The question is: Who is driving this?”

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