Oscar-Winning Ad: ‘Big Star Lived Here!’ : ‘The trades’: Want to rent a rustic writer’s retreat <i> never </i> lived in by Richard Gere and just vacated by a big-name director? Check the realty ads in the Hollywood trade papers.
One of the best ways to take a city’s measure is through the real estate classifieds. Sifting through the hyperbole and maddening abbreviations (N/S tns. cts., anyone?) often reveals, with brutal accuracy, a town’s unwritten social credo, its de facto class borders, as well as the aspirations of its citizens and their economic health.
Nowhere is this truer than in Los Angeles, in which where you live is challenged only by what you drive as a measure of status and station. And in a town dominated by the entertainment industry, it’s fitting that some of the most telling, and weirdly amusing, real estate classifieds appear in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. Real estate ads in “the trades” often betray a show-biz bent as aggressive--and loopy--as a screenwriter pitching “Die Hard IX” to a jaded producer:
“If Trigger Had Found This Place, He’d Have Left Roy!” “Nr. Fox and Sony.” “Walk to Studios.” “Looking near CBS?” “Ask about our special for SAG-AFTRA members.” “Tara in West Hollywood.” “TV Exec Moves to Connecticut--Must Lease Now!” “Big Producer Sez ‘Sell My Bel-Air Lot.’ ”
There are ads that tag all of the bases on the status infield and end up sounding positively surreal: “This perfect location with its Scottsdale-like business district is sought after by Hollywood celebrities, writers and artists as well as discerning horse owners.”
There’s even reverse snobbery. “Richard Gere,” sniffed an ad for a Hollywood apartment building, “Does Not Live Here.”
“No where else would you find ‘Richard Gere Does Not Live Here,’ ” said Mark Wood, a real estate advertising account manager at Daily Variety. “That’s typical of the flavor of the ads in the entertainment trades.”
Why advertise real estate in the trades? Their circulation in California--21,315 for Daily Variety; 19,000 for the Hollywood Reporter, according to 1992 Audit Bureau of Circulation figures--is minuscule compared to mainstream publications, such as the one you are reading. But, as both trade papers never tire of pointing out, they boast rarefied clientele.
Daily Variety’s supercharged promotional copy promises “the power players who shape, influence and direct the entertainment industry.” The average Daily Variety reader, according to Daily Variety, is 43 years old, earns $299,500 and owns a home with a $622,400 market value; 62% of their readers fly first class, 44% drive a Jaguar, Mercedes, Porsche, BMW or Lexus.
The Hollywood Reporter, of course, has a somewhat different spin. “I will tell you where we differ from Daily Variety,” declared Lynne Segall, the Hollywood Reporter’s associate publisher. “We keep hearing from the brokers that the higher priced the property, the better the response is from the Reporter.”
The paper’s audience research, she said, shows that “the Reporter has a little higher readership with executives, directors, producers.” Then Segall drops the bomb. “I think Daily Variety has high readership with lots of actors and actresses,” she says, adding parenthetically that lots of actors and actresses don’t make lots of money.
“A portion of our readers are talent, but over 65% of them are management at corporations,” countered Catherine Silver, Variety’s North American sales director. “Our readers are the upper echelon of Los Angeles. Their income level is a documented fact.”
Both papers have partisans, although not necessarily for reasons that make killer copy in the media kit. “I prefer the format of the Reporter,” said Stephen Shapiro, a Beverly Hills realtor. “It doesn’t come folded in half.” And, he said, “I think everybody reads both of them.”
“I get incredible clients by going with Variety,” said Lenore Rice, manager of the Wilshire Villa, a Westwood apartment building that reserves 10% of its units for the short-term rentals favored by the film industry.
Both Rice and Shapiro have had luck with show-biz styled ad copy. An ad for the Wilshire Villa in Daily Variety featured the headline: “The Nominee’s Home Away From Home!” and a lengthy list of past tenants, including “Olympia Dukakis (Super Star)” and “Alice Cooper (rock star).”
“I tried ‘Oscar’s Home Away From Home’ but the Academy Award people told me I couldn’t do that,” Rice said. “I said, ‘Come on, my brother-in-law’s name is Oscar.’ ” Rice eventually settled for the “Nominee” come-on. “That little word helps,” she said. “That’s what industry people are looking for. They want to be where the winners are. And we’ve had lots of those.”
Shapiro found success with headlines in the give-it-to-me-in-seven-words-or-less style of studio buccaneers. “It makes for good reading,” he said with a shrug. His firm’s Hollywood Reporter ad for a $3-million “authentic hacienda” in Bel-Air, for example, was: “Famous Director Relocates to New York.” The approach, Shapiro said, was “surprisingly effective. We showed (the house) to 10 people in a couple of hours. Two of them showed up with the ad in their hands.”
Tuesday, when weekend film grosses are reported, and Friday, a traditionally strong day for classifieds, are the days of heaviest real estate advertising. “Tuesday,” said Daily Variety’s Mark Wood. “Box office day. Very high readership.”
Rooting out the serendipitous-sounding ads that seem to appear only in the trades is a favorite sport of devoted readers. Who among the faithful hasn’t wondered about the “Hansel & Gretel cottages built by Charlie Chaplin for stars to live in while filming his movies” that crop up every few months in both papers?
Those who actually answer the ads are directed to a gated lot on Formosa Street south of Sunset Boulevard. Winsome-looking stucco cottages framed with serpentine rust-painted timbers open onto a cobblestone courtyard. An enormous rubber tree shades the east end of the compound. Aaron Knudson, a music student in Hollywood who trades his carpentry skills for rent, gives a tour. “Check out that stove,” he said proudly, pointing to a Silent-Era number that could have been used in “The Kid.” “Tenants say it boils water faster than a modern one.”
According to Larry Davis, who owns and is restoring the structures, Chaplin crony Douglas Fairbanks is a former tenant, along with Rudolph Valentino and Judy Garland.
