What did he do? He left it in anyway, and delivered the edit to Fox, which then edited it out. "It's still a sore point," MacFarlane says. "It's still this wound that has never quite healed that says, 'We don't value you quite as much,' which I can't imagine is true, but ..."
The thought trails off and, perhaps realising that it's best not to follow this logic, he turns a corner. "To be fair to Fox -- for the most part, creatively they have been a very easy company to work with. This was kind of a rare lapse in judgment."
MacFarlane's contract hiatus didn't just buy him leverage with Fox; it was an expansion opportunity. While the studio was noodling on the deal, MacFarlane's management team went out and signed him up with Google. The resulting Cavalcade Of Cartoon Comedy is outside the bounds of the Fox relationship. "In a completely perfect world," Dana Walden, chairman of 20th Century Fox Television, has said, "he wouldn't be able to do that."
He did. The idea stemmed from conversations between MacFarlane's lawyer and agent and representatives of Media Rights Capital, an LA-based multimedia financier. Loosely tied to the talent agency Endeavor (which reps MacFarlane, naturally), MRC partners with content creators -- whether that's director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu on Babel; or Sacha Baron Cohen on his next film, Bruno; or MacFarlane -- giving them funding and a share in ownership, plus creative control.
Image: Seth MacFarlane at the premiere of Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade Of Cartoon Comedy | Photograph: Charley Gallay/ Getty Images
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