Beyond the ‘Patriot Games’ Incident at Variety : The Industry: The recent controversy over a movie review at the historic show business journal has put the spotlight on changes made by editorial director Peter Bart.

We shall be glad to print nice things about you if you rate them. Maybe you’ll rate the other kind. We’ll print that also. Whatever you rate, will be what you create. If it’s good, that’s fine. If it’s bad, it’ll be your own fault, so don’t squawk.

--From debut edition of Daily Variety, Sept. 6, 1933

It was a Hollywood business story worthy of front-page treatment.

Carolco Pictures was teetering. Banks were pulling the independent filmmakers’ future production funding until its credit lines were terminated or repaid. Carolco, which had made such box-office hits as “Terminator 2” and “Basic Instinct,” told federal regulators that if it could not find alternate funding, it might be unable to operate as a going concern.

“BANKS YANK CAROLCO FUNDS,” read the headline in the April 24 edition of Daily Variety. “Company won’t get more production coin until credit repaid.”

At Carolco, executives fumed, not about the accuracy of the story, which was based on the company’s own filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but because developments made the filings outdated.

Then Alan Hirschfield’s telephone rang. It was Peter Bart, editorial director of Variety and Daily Variety. The two men had been friends for years, going back to the days when Hirschfield was a young investment banker and Bart was a newspaper reporter.

At the time of the phone call, Hirschfield was a consultant working on Carolco’s restructuring.

“I spoke with Peter and explained the circumstances to him and he was very sympathetic,” Hirschfield said. Bart assured him “we’ll do everything we can to correct this before it hits weekly (Variety).”

In cases like this, newspapers usually respond by running a clarification to the outdated story or by publishing a second story offering a more complete account.

Two days later, Weekly Variety--the daily’s sister publication--ran a far different story. “Carolco sez prod coin will come,” read the upbeat headline, over a story that quoted Carolco Chairman Mario F. Kassar’s assurance that financing would be forthcoming. There was no mention of the SEC filings.

Carolco is not the only filmmaker to appreciate Bart’s intervention.

At Sony Pictures Entertainment, executives received an unsolicited phone call one day from Bart, who informed them that a Variety reporter had filed a story in which a Sony territorial manager had discussed an international administrative restructuring that was in the works.

A source familiar with the call said Bart inquired whether the territory manager’s statements were either premature or inaccurate. Bart told Sony that if the statements were premature “we could hold off” publishing them.

“It was left out of the story,” the source recalled.

Bart claims he does not recall the conversation with Hirschfield, although he has talked to him about “several” stories involving Carolco, and he denies making the call to Sony. “I don’t do things like that,” he said. “My job as editor is not to keep things out of the paper.”

At the age of 60, Peter Benton Bart is a slightly built, Swarthmore-educated New Yorker who commands two of the most venerable trade publications in the entertainment industry. He attends the Cannes Film Festival, dines with Paramount Communications’ Martin Davis and Walt Disney Studios Chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, and has appeared regularly on the “Today” show and CNN’s “Showbiz Today.” There are few powerbrokers in the movie business that he doesn’t know. Some hold him in awe. Others view him with fear. Variety staffers and a number of people in the industry interviewed for this story did not want to be named because they were afraid of retaliation.

In the three years since arriving at Variety, Bart has shaken up the staff, made the writing more accessible, redesigned the publications and redefined what a Variety story is.

He has also become a lightning rod for controversy. To some in the industry, his arrival brought a welcome change in Variety’s attitude toward the business. “I think Peter, if I read him correctly, has defined Variety’s best interests as the best interests of the entertainment industry, and not to be a muckraking organization,” says Hirschfield, who has headed both Columbia Pictures and 20th Century Fox. “But he is going to tell the truth.”

However, his harshest critics contend that Bart, who spent two decades in the movie business, has compromised the journalistic integrity that Variety and Daily Variety fought for years to maintain. For some, the final straw came only weeks after the Carolco story, when Daily Variety published a review of “Patriot Games,” the $40-million Harrison Ford thriller upon which Paramount Pictures had pinned much of its summer box-office hopes.

In his review, veteran critic Joseph McBride wrote that the movie--based on a Tom Clancy novel about an Irish Republican Army splinter group--was “fascistic” and “blatantly anti-Irish.” In an unusually harsh review, he lambasted virtually everything about the film.

Paramount was outraged and pulled its advertising.

Bart, who said he had not seen the review prior to publication, sent a note of apology for the review to Martin Davis, the chairman and chief executive of Paramount Communications Inc., saying that McBride “was, to put it in a word, unprofessional.” The note added: “As for the reviewing question, he will not review any more Paramount films.” The note was then leaked to the New York Times.

Bart has declined to discuss the incident in detail, saying employer-employee privacy issues prevent him from commenting. He simply characterized his note as “a bit of friendly jousting” with Davis, whom he has known since 1966.

The leaked note hit Daily Variety like a bombshell. Staffers were enraged with Bart, believing he had sided with his old friends in the industry.

McBride later discovered he had been removed as reviewer of “A League of Their Own,” a major summer release from Columbia Pictures. McBride said he had been assigned to review the movie before the flap erupted over “Patriot Games,” but then was informed by managing editor Jonathan Taylor that film review editor Todd McCarthy would write the review of “League.”

When the July schedule of assignments came out, McBride found he was given three films to review--but they were all children’s movies (“Honey, I Blew Up the Kid,” “Mom and Dad Save the World” and “Bebe’s Kids”).

“It seems an element of punishment,” McBride said.

In July, 1989, in a move that startled Hollywood, Bart was named editor of Variety.

Bart had been located by corporate head hunters for Cahners Publishing Co. of Newton, Mass., a division of Reed Publishing Inc., a London-based conglomerate. Reed puts out such trade publications as American Baby, Restaurants & Institutions, Pollution Engineering, Furniture Today, Drinks International and Modern Materials Handling. And, since 1987, it also has published Variety and Daily Variety.

Cahners had purchased Variety from the longtime owners, the Silverman family, for about$60 million. Variety Inc. Chairman Syd Silverman’s grandfather, Sime, founded the trade in 1905 after an editor for the New York Morning Telegraph told Sime, a reviewer, that he could not pan an act that was buying an ad.

“My grandfather said if the review doesn’t run, I don’t work here,” said Syd Silverman. “So he borrowed $2,500 from his father-in-law and started Variety.” From then on, Variety always tried to avoid coziness with the industry it covered. In 1933, a daily edition was born.

For decades, Variety had a reputation of tough, no-nonsense reporting on Hollywood. It and the Hollywood Reporter were the only publications in town devoted solely to entertainment news.

Bart often wrote about Hollywood as a Los Angeles-based reporter for the New York Times in the mid-’60s. An assignment brought him into contact with actor-producer Robert Evans, about whom he wrote a flattering story for the paper’s Arts & Leisure section. The story portrayed Evans as an aggressive producer who roamed the country looking for good scripts. It caught the attention of Charles Bluhdorn, owner of Gulf & Western, which had purchased Paramount Pictures. Bluhdorn made Evans head of European production and sent him to London.

There, Evans found himself inundated with so many scripts--”most of them esoteric things”--that he turned to his friend at the New York Times for assistance.

“I began calling Peter every night from London, every morning, asking him to help me, to give me his opinions.”

When Evans returned to Los Angeles, Bluhdorn asked him to run Paramount and Evans, in turn, hired Bart, who soon became his right-hand man. “I believe in a word spelled L-O-Y-A-L-T-Y,” Evans said.

The late ‘60s and early ‘70s were a golden time for both men and Paramount, which released such films as “The Godfather,” “Chinatown,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Love Story.”

During these years, Bart got to know all the key players in the movie business. When he left Paramount, he headed a production company set up by Los Angeles businessman Max Palevsky, then became president of Lorimar Film Co. and finally went to MGM/UA, where he served as senior vice president. Bart chronicled his days at that studio in a book titled “Fade Out: The Calamitous Final Days at MGM.”

Before joining Variety, Bart was co-producer on a film titled “Young Men With Unlimited Capital,” about the two men who organized the Woodstock festival. Warner Bros. said the film is still in development, but it is in a “dormant stage.” Bart said he dropped all ties to the project once he became Weekly Variety editor in 1989. Warner Bros. said he settled his deal as producer in March, 1991, but could provide no details of the settlement.

Also in March, 1991, Cahners made Bart editor of Daily Variety along with the weekly. As editor of Variety, Bart is a far more powerful player and enjoys an entree to Hollywood’s inner circle that eluded him when he worked in the industry.

But the Variety he took over was of a different era. The newsroom was a throwback to “The Front Page” era. Before Cahners bought it, movie reviews going back decades were kept on 3-by-5 cards, stories were batted out on 30-year-old Remington typewriters and one senior TV reporter was known for removing his teeth on deadline and placing them on his desk.

“When I arrived,” Bart said, “there was almost no editing (at the weekly). The material basically went from the typewriter to the paper intact. . . . No one assigned stories and no one ever said that terrible sentence: ‘Give us a better lead.’ That was unheard of.”

After a series of firings, Bart set about hiring reporters who fit his image of what a Variety reporter should be: someone who is 30-ish, bright, good-looking, hip and writes smart. Bart angered traditionalists by doing away with “sigs,” the abbreviated signatures of Variety critics that historically ran at the end of their reviews. Although he likes snappy headlines, he removed Variety “slanguage” from the stories. He added a gossip column called “Buzz” and instituted a “Missing Persons” column (now called “Lost and Found”), which chronicled the whereabouts of one-time movers and shakers.

But with the changes, Bart said, came a “cultural clash” between staffers who had been with Variety for years and did things one way, and those who were trying to take a new direction.

Reporters say they found themselves in competition with Bart because of his access to Hollywood insiders. And once Bart got involved in the reporting of a story, he would challenge his reporters’ sources, often saying “my sources say that’s b.s.”

In January, 1991, for instance, a reporter for weekly Variety in London wrote that with its creditors at the gates, publishing tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. appeared to be “on the ropes and taking a beating.”

Bart said his sources on Wall Street didn’t think the company’s position was that tenuous, so he called up Murdoch, got him to talk, and wrote a column under the headline: “Rupert on Rebound.”

Bart said no one from News Corp. had called “demanding or screaming” for him to retract the London story. “I just felt it would be neat if I could get in to see Rupert Murdoch,” Bart said. “He wasn’t talking to anybody. He was totally, for a year, just out of it. So I called Rupert and I talked to him and I managed to get a story, which I think was a good story.”

But a source at News Corp. said that the company did indeed complain about the London story and that Murdoch told him that Barry Diller had arranged the meeting with Bart.

Bart’s column is one of the most avidly read features in weekly Variety. Some readers within the industry say that while it can be entertaining, more often than not Bart uses the column to shine the spotlight on himself, defend the status quo in Hollywood or take potshots.

Bart once accused Time magazine’s film critic Richard Schickel of protecting the careers of actors Warren Beatty and Robert Redford because they were his friends. There was one slight problem. Schickel didn’t know Beatty. Schickel said he knew Redford in the 1960s and early 1970s but that in the intervening years, “We’ve drifted apart.”

Whether Bart sometimes invents scenes for his column is also a matter of some debate.

One Bart column that raised eyebrows in Hollywood concerned Diller. It appeared last March just after Diller resigned as head of 20th Century Fox. Bart used the resignation to tell a strange tale about having dinner one night with Bluhdorn, the late Gulf & Western chief.

Bart said Bluhdorn wanted to marry off Diller to help Diller’s career and that Bluhdorn arranged lavish parties for Diller and his hoped-for bride-to-be, Diane Von Furstenberg, in order to push the marriage scheme.

“Barry is going to get married,” Bart quoted Bluhdorn as telling him. “I have found just the right woman for him. I want him to settle down. . . .”

“That’s bizarre!” Bart said he replied. “An arranged marriage!”

Some have questioned whether the events Bart described ever occurred. Bart insists they did. “I think the point I was making . . . was simply that Charlie was basically applauding Barry’s contributions to the business.”

When asked about the column, Diller said: “The events he ascribed to Charlie Bluhdorn didn’t happen.”

Bob Evans echoed Diller. “It didn’t happen. If he (Bart) said that, he’s wrong. . . . By the way, (Bart) wasn’t even friends with Barry Diller then.”

Another column bore a resemblance in places to a story in the New York Times. Last April 13, he wrote a column datelined Grand Cayman, British West Indies. In it, he talked about how the Cayman Islands had become a haven for U.S. tax-dodgers. Among the similarities to a March 29 New York Times story:

TIMES: The 548 banking outposts here--a who’s who of global banking--hold assets of some$400 billion, a fivefold jump in the past decade, placing it just behind Switzerland as an international banking center.

BART: It’s the home of some 548 banks or banking outposts, admitting to assets of well over$400 billion, second only to Switzerland.

TIMES: When Federal agents arrested the investment banker Dennis B. Levine in 1986, no one was surprised that days before he had visited the Caymans to set up a dummy corporation and open a bank account, where he hoped to deposit $10 million in insider stock-trading profits. When Lt. Col. Oliver L. North needed a money-collecting front company in the arms-for-hostages caper known as the Iran-Contra affair, it was set up in the Cayman Islands.

BART: Dennis Levine of insider trading fame was a frequent visitor before his arrest. Ollie North loved the place.

TIMES: “If a guy walks in here with one, two or three gold neck chains, forget it.”

BART: “No one wearing three gold chains can come in here and expect to do business,” huffs one bank official, who becomes a little vague about potential customers wearing only two chains.

Bart said he read the newspaper article, but claimed the column “didn’t bear any relationship to the New York Times story.”

“There are a limited amount of things you can say about a tiny island and the statistics are the same.”

Still, the issue that creates the most controversy for Bart is his ties to Hollywood and his critics point to an event last summer that seemed to symbolize those connections.

On July 15, 1991, Variety published a front-page story disclosing that Robert Evans, after a decade-long hiatus, was making a comeback at Paramount Pictures, the studio he headed 20 years earlier.

The story, written by reporter Charles Fleming, was dramatic in tone: “Reveling in the moment at his Beverly Hills home, under an apocalyptic, eclipse-darkened sky, Evans said, ‘I spent my entire adult life at Paramount and I’ve been waiting for this for more than a decade. . . . This feels like coming home.’ ”

On Aug. 8, Evans and ICM Chairman Jeff Berg threw a big bash for Bart at Evans’ Beverly Hills estate attended by various Hollywood bigwigs and journalists.

Evans said the party was not intended to honor Bart, but merely a night when journalists and film people could remember “we worked together to make our industry more well known to the world.”

The producer said Fleming even helped him organize the event. “He worked with me day and night putting the party together,” Evans said.

“I did go up to Evans’ house a couple of times and consult with him on how to reach people,” Fleming said. “I didn’t actually do any of the inviting.”

Evans said while some journalists may think Bart is too cozy with Hollywood, the movie industry never really thought he left the world of journalism.

“I don’t think he ever felt comfortable in Hollywood,” Evans said. “Basically, he has always been a journalist. . . . As many journalists I know, I think he enjoyed tweaking the anger of the big shots rather than the small ones. That’s part of his journalist’s idiosyncrasy. He ticked off everybody.”