Variety’s Scribes: Wordplay Wizards

Next time you watch your favorite sitcom or soap opera or read about the latest media mogul, remember to credit Variety.

For most of the 20th century, Variety (born 1905) has not only filtered words and phrases like “sitcom,” “soap opera,” “mogul,” “emcee” and “deejay” into the vernacular, but also created some of the most colorful and inimitable headlines in journalism.

In 1929, the day after thecataclysmic stock market crash, the trade paper’s banner read, “Wall Street Lays an Egg.” Forty years later, when the first man landed on the moon, the paper proclaimed “Greatest Show Off Earth.”

Variety’s terse, attention-grabbing headlines aim for the perfect balance of wit and vulgarity, observes its editor, Jonathan Taylor. And after all, what is showbiz (another term coined by Variety) without a little shameless exhibitionism?

A few years ago, when Universal Pictures head Frank Price lost his job after the release of the disastrous “Howard the Duck,” Variety’s banner screamed “Duck Cooks Price’s Goose.” In 1995, when Michael Ovitz’s negotiations to take over the top executive slot at MCA/Universal fell apart, Variety playfully exhorted “Ovitz No Govitz at MCA.” And when former Disney senior executive Jeffrey Katzenberg left the studio in 1994 after 10 years, his departure was heralded with the headline “Katz-and-Mouse Game Over.”

Like all memorable Variety headlines, they had “snap, crackle and pop,” says the paper’s editor in chief and vice president, Peter Bart, a former journalist turned industry executive turned editor. “The headline should make you want to read the story,” he says, “even if the headline doesn’t in any way remotely suggest what the story is about.”

It’s meant as a joke. But not completely. Bart could have been referring to the vintage “Sticks Nix Hick Pix,” an arcane 1935 headline that accompanied a story about rural moviegoers’ antipathy toward corny films. Such obtuse, tongue-tying proclamations, however, were the product of an earlier era in the paper’s history.

When the trade publication was launched in New York five years into the new century by Sime Silverman, the vivid language reflected its vaudevillian roots. The paper’s unschooled reporters were right out of Damon Runyan, spouting the argot of the Great White Way. Terms like “hoofer” (dancer), “tuner” (Broadway musical) and “whodunit” (a mystery) made their way from the burlesque and vaudeville houses onto the front pages of Variety.

Part of Variety’s trademark linguistic style was also born of necessity, explains Bart. Variety’s front page was chockablock with as many as a dozen stories, often no longer than one to three paragraphs in length. And each required a headline, which had to be crammed into the confined space. That is how such abbreviations as “nix” (to reject) or “f/x” (special effects) were invented or at least popularized.

Since then, the paper’s coverage has expanded to every area of entertainment, most prominently the film and television industries. Variety’s weekly edition (which moved to Los Angeles in the early ‘90s) now focuses less on breaking news than on analysis and a closer examination of the news presented in the paper’s two daily editions (one on the West Coast, and the recent Gotham edition out of New York).

“Our readership has become much more sophisticated, and we’re mindful of having to write up to them,” says Taylor. Also, about a third of the weekly edition’s readership is overseas, so the headlines in general as well as Variety-ese have become a bit more straightforward. “English is already their second language,” says Bart. “We don’t want to make it any more confusing.”

Variety still publishes the occasional head-scratcher. The day after Asian manufacturing giant Matsushita purchased MCA/Universal, the paper’s banner was in Japanese. Lew Wasserman, the company’s then-chairman, phoned Bart at home early that morning and barked, “I bet you think I don’t know what that means. But I do.” The literal translation was “Buyer Beware,” a headline as pin-pricking as it was prophetic. The Japanese manufacturer, befuddled by the unpredictability of the cyclical nature of the entertainment industry, sold MCA to Seagram’s a few years later.

Mischief is another hallmark of Variety’s headlines, the senior editors admit, with a chortle. One of Taylor’s favorite knee-slappers accompanied a story about how Kim Basinger lost a lawsuit to the producers of “Boxing Helena.” The headline read: “ ‘Helena’ Costs Kim Arm and a Leg.” Not so funny, unless you know that Basinger was sued for reneging on an agreement to star as a limbless prisoner of obsessive love in the film (the decision was later reversed).

Timothy Gray, one of Variety’s news editors and the world’s tallest imp, is one of the paper’s most prominent headline pranksters, the creator of the memorable Frank Price and Ovitz headlines, among others. Taylor, Bart, news editors Gray and Kinsey Lowe and one or two other regulars are the ringleaders at the daily afternoon sessions at which headline suggestions are batted about. “Sometimes they come to us right away, other times we have to sweat them out,” says Bart. One that rolled right off Bart’s tongue was “Lizards Eat Arnold’s Lunch,” referring to how “Jurassic Park” trounced Schwarzenegger’s “The Last Action Hero” at the box office.

The Variety newsroom, which is rarely sedate, can sometimes resemble the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as the daily deadlines approach (this reporter was once a Variety staff member and still contributes to the publication on occasion). The headline meetings serve as a safety valve, allowing for some good-natured volleying.

Gray shows up at meetings for Variety’s weekly edition “with about five ideas for heads.” Four are usually serious and the fifth is mostly for their own amusement.

Skirting the abyss of bad taste, the editors say they rarely fall in. But every so often they can’t help themselves. And that’s how the recent below-the-belt pun about the world soccer finals materialized in black and white on weekly Variety’s front page: “Jocks Itchy Over Costly Cup.”

Even when the editors attempt to elevate the headlines, they sometimes run awry. In trying to concoct a respectful introduction to their obituary of theatrical legend Helen Hayes, the editors decided that “Helen Hayes Dead at 82” lacked the requisite poetry, Taylor recalls. After much deliberation, they went with “Curtain Falls on Helen Hayes.”

“The next morning when we read it, we were horrified,” says Taylor. “What were we thinking?”

Gray, however, is not so rueful. He’s still smarting from the rejection of his clever turn of phrase when Lucille Ball died: “Ball Now in God’s Court.’ “How often do you get to invoke Judgment Day in a Variety headline?” he asks, perhaps seriously, perhaps not.

The origin of the more memorable recent headlines is easier to trace than the precise derivation of Variety’s celebrated slanguage. For example, the word “biopic,” though it sounds like an eye disorder, means a biographical film. When did Variety first coin the word? And when did it first cross over to consumer journals? The current editors don’t recall.

“The only one I know, because I was working here at the time, was that the late David J. Fox [who went on to be a Calendar editor and reporter] created the word ‘chop socky’ [martial arts] film.” Another former staff member, Tom Bierbaum, coined the phrase “sweat cassette.” (It refers to celebrity exercise videos.)

Not only have words like “reissue” (a film released again after its original theatrical run), “scribe” (writer) and “ink” (to sign a contract) crept into popular usage here, but Variety’s slanguage seems to have even made a dent on foreign shores. Gray recently received a letter from a Danish instructor who regularly uses Variety as an aid in her English class.

“The only word she didn’t understand was ‘helmer,’ ” says Gray. “It means a director, literally to be at the helm. . . . I couldn’t help but think, ‘That was the only word that stumped her?’ ”