Awash in Entertainment : Media: Entertainment magazines are booming, reflecting the public’s appetite for TV and film news.

When the first issue of Time Warner Inc.’s Entertainment Weekly hits the newsstands next month, it will find a bit less elbow room than expected.

Time’s planners faced almost an open field six years ago as they began testing the idea of a national consumer magazine devoted exclusively to entertainment.

Then came Premiere, the glossy movie monthly introduced by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in 1987. It worked. And suddenly Time Warner’s new magazine looks less like a groundbreaker than part of a mini-boom in entertainment news ventures.

In recent months, both Movieline and Hollywood Magazine--a pair of youngish, limited-circulation entertainment magazines--have revamped their formats and begun serious campaigns to crack what their owners believe is a growing market for sophisticated writing about movies, television and the glamorous rough-and-tumble that goes into the making of both.

Hollywood’s traditional trade papers, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, are meanwhile being pushed by new owners to find a broader audience for their inside-the-business reports. And even as Premiere promotes itself with a series of specials on Murdoch’s Fox television network, Fox is also building an entertainment news staff that may launch a daily, half-hour TV show that will supposedly dig deeper into Hollywood than Paramount’s popular but soft-edged “Entertainment Tonight.”

“Amazing, isn’t it? Suddenly, there’s a lot out there,” said Premiere Editor Susan Lyne, whose own publication was initially considered a risky bet because of its high production costs and narrow focus on movies.

The magazine has paid circulation of about 450,000, up from 250,000 when it was launched, and recently posted a 22.4% increase in advertising rates. Lyne said she expects to turn a profit as early as this year, despite the heavy costs imposed by the magazine’s large format, high-quality paper and heavy use of color photography.

While acknowledging that Premiere has pointed the way for some potentially tough competitors, Lyne noted that Entertainment Weekly and others may actually help her publication with ad buyers. “(The boom) is creating a category. Now we’re not the only kid on the block, trying to explain ourselves to advertisers,” Lyne said.

All the new ventures reflect a growing conviction that videocassettes and cable TV have created a permanent appetite for large amounts of screen entertainment and that baby boomers, as they age, will only get hungrier for new levels of information about the movies and shows they watch.

Not everyone is a believer, however. Connecticut-based magazine consultant James Kobak points out the heavy dose of entertainment coverage in publications ranging from US--which began calling itself “The Entertainment Magazine” last year, having evolved from a People-like human-interest magazine--to supermarket tabloids and former countercultural mainstays such as Rolling Stone and even Mother Jones.

This may already amount to a show business news glut, Kobak says: “For years, they had fan magazines. They all disappeared. It’ll probably be more than anybody can handle at some point.”

Fan magazines such as Modern Screen and Silver Screen flourished in the 1950s and 1960s but faded as their mainstay, star gossip, was usurped by the supermarket tabloids.

Now, however, there is at least some evidence that a new generation of screen fans--more attuned to directors’ styles and the nuances of set design than the dirt on modern-day Liz-and-Dick-style liaisons--can provide an intense and demographically desirable readership. According to Premiere’s market research, that magazine’s typical reader is about 30 years old and spends an unusually long 1 3/4 hours with each issue. Entertainment Weekly expects its median reader to be 38 years old and, thus, a prime target for automotive, fashion, liquor and jewelry advertisers.

“They’re older than you would think. I believe 72% went to college and 80% are employed, which is spectacular,” Jeff Jarvis, Entertainment Weekly’s 35-year-old managing editor, said of the 600,000 initial readers his magazine expects to attract with a marketing push that is getting under way.

Time Warner said it expects to spend about $30 million to launch the new weekly, which hopes to sidestep the problems that led to the rapid demise of Time’s TV-Cable Week in 1983. The cable magazine was handicapped by an awkward distribution system that worked through cable operators. According to Jarvis, a former TV critic for People, the new magazine will depend only on Time Warner’s time-tested distribution system and will hold editorial costs down by concentrating heavily on reviews rather than expensive reporting. In his words: “Critics are cacti. They don’t need a lot of care and watering.”

Entertainment Weekly is unusual in that it will treat books, music, movies and TV as equal offerings on the entertainment smorgasbord, thus reaching for a broader readership than other new ventures. The company has targeted a circulation of 2 million as its eventual goal.

That broad approach is precisely opposite to the tack taken by Movieline, a Los Angeles-based movie magazine that converted to paid circulation and went national late last year, following its launch four years ago as a hand-out distributed through theaters and video stores. “Our motto is, ‘Movies are a way of life,’ ” said owner Anne Volokh, a Russian emigre who was once a film reviewer in the Soviet Union and started the magazine after helping her family build a computer software business here.

The retooled Movieline, which claims a paid circulation of 100,000, intends to focus directly on film, but with more sass than Premiere. “Since Michael Jackson is Diana Ross, he should play ‘Deena’ in the movie version of Dreamgirls,” opined a Movieline story on film casting.

Hollywood, another Los Angeles-based regional magazine, meanwhile moved to nationwide distribution in November, after it was purchased by Aviation News Corp. The magazine has been reaching for its own brand of irreverence under Editor Stephen Silverman, a longtime film writer for the New York Post.

“Unlike some publications, we’re not edited by the publicists,” Silverman said of his magazine, which mixes stories about film economics with others about fashions, art, paternity suits, bald-headed stars and anything else that relates, even peripherally, to entertainment culture.

According to insiders at Fox Inc., which is owned by Murdoch’s News Corp., that company similarly hopes to bring editorial detachment to the expanding entertainment news coverage at its Los Angeles TV station, KTTV Channel 11. And it may launch a half-hour daily show for all of the Fox stations as early as this year. The show is expected to be less ambitious in terms of budget and production values than “Entertainment Tonight” but somewhat harder-hitting.

Fox Chairman Barry Diller said he doesn’t have any target date for launching the half-hour program. “It will grow out. I don’t know where and when. . . . But for us not to have the best entertainment news in the world out of Los Angeles would be wrong,” Diller said.

The Fox chief said he expects to deal with any potential conflicts between his roles as a network and studio executive and as the primary architect of Fox’s entertainment news coverage with the “discipline” he learned at Paramount, where he oversaw both “Entertainment Tonight” and one of Hollywood’s biggest studios. “I’ve always been comfortable with my ability to put on and take off a hat,” Diller noted.

Despite such expansion, however, Hollywood news isn’t necessarily an easy sell. One new venture, a recently launched Billboard Publications Inc. news wire, furnishes same-day access to stories written for Billboard, the Hollywood Reporter and American Film. (All three were purchased by Boston’s Affiliated Publications, owner of the Boston Globe, within the past two years.) But so far, the news wire counts only the Sacramento Bee, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and about 10 other newspapers among its subscribers. About a dozen more are testing the service.

“We’re finding that people are very attracted by the concept of an every-day entertainment news wire, but they have different needs. . . . If what we write about is interesting to a reader in Ohio, it might not be interesting to a studio chief,” said Hollywood Reporter President Robert Dowling. The news wire, which initially relied on reports from the company’s show business trade papers, is now adding its own reporters to play more heavily into consumer interests.

While competitor Variety has no immediate plan to launch a consumer service or publication, it has explored the possibility of publishing on a daily rather than weekly schedule in New York with support from British-based Reed International PLC, which bought the paper through its Cahners Publishing Co. subsidiary in 1987.

At the same time, Peter Bart, a former New York Times reporter and Hollywood executive who became editor of the weekly paper late last year, has been campaigning, in his words, to make “Variety more accessible to civilians.”

In one editorial foray aimed at least partly toward “civilians,” Bart’s Variety captured attention in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere by airing a bitter feud between playwright David Hare and New York Times theater critic Frank Rich under the headline, “Ruffled Hare Airs Rich Bitch.”

“People want to see the inside of everything,” Bart said of his paper’s new direction. “This is like sports journalism. There was a time when people just wanted to see the game. Now they want to know the salaries, the strategies, everything. This is not evanescent. It’s here to stay.”

Attention-hungry Hollywood apparently hopes Bart and the others are correct.

“As far as real entertainment reporting, we love it,” said Pat Kingsley, a veteran publicist for Hollywood films and stars. “The more sensational stuff, we don’t care for. As for the rest . . . the more, the merrier.”