A Boffo Newspaper War Gets Hotter in Movieland

The stories tumble across the front pages of Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter one after another, day after day after day, like leaves on a windblown street.

“Rocker Joe Walsh is in final negotiations to . . . “ “Mel Gibson’s Icon Prods. is getting close to a deal that will . . . “ “Mike Myers and Bryan Singer are in negotiations to . . . “ “Al Pacino is in talks to . . . “

What’s the rush? Why do these two papers, which cover the entertainment industry in general and blanket the motion picture industry in particular, feel compelled to report “talks” and “negotiations” on deals that haven’t been made yet--and, in many cases, never will be?

“That’s how you stake your claim to a story,” says Dana Harris, who spent three years at the Hollywood Reporter before joining Variety early last year. “You only want to report it when the negotiations are serious, but no matter who breaks the story on the final deal, if there is a final deal, the one who got the first story on the talks can claim it as ‘their’ story.”

And why is that so important?

Because the daily battle between Variety and the Hollywood Reporter--”the trades,” as they’re known to those who devour them every morning--is “one of the longest-standing, fiercest . . . newspaper wars in this country,” says Rex Weiner, who also worked for both papers and is now president and CEO of DDA Mediatek, a media relations and consulting firm.

“When I first got to Variety,” Weiner says, “I was told, ‘If you get scooped on your beat by the other paper, there will be blood on the floor.’ ”

Today, when fewer than two dozen cities have truly competitive papers, there is no newspaper rivalry quite like the one between Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. The two papers are not only in the same town, they have offices on the same street, less than a mile apart, and they cover the same industry that, year after star-studded year, is a source of endless fascination to people in cities large and small throughout the world.

Variety began publication in 1905 as a weekly vaudeville publication and added Daily Variety in 1933, three years after the Hollywood Reporter started. Daily Variety has the edge in circulation, with 35,035 to the Reporter’s 23,717 as of the last official audit. While the Reporter’s Tuesday international edition circulation is only slightly less than weekly Variety’s--at 33,000 and 36,000, respectively--Variety says its “unduplicated” total daily and weekly circulation of approximately 55,000 is substantially greater than its rival’s.

But two years ago, the Reporter hired an aggressive new editor--Anita Busch, who started in Hollywood as a Reporter reporter and then worked as a Variety editor--and she has made the competition between the two closer and more intense than ever.

Reporters frequently move between the two papers, but the moves are almost always accompanied by a measure of suspicion and hostility. When someone announces he’s going to the competition, he’s usually urged to pack up immediately--under supervision--and get out in a matter of hours, if not less.

Although there are some notable exceptions, many reporters at the trades are young and inexperienced, their pay relatively low, their workload heavy and--now that both publications are online--their deadlines unceasing.

“It’s the hardest job I’ve ever had,” Harris said in a recent interview. “I wrote 11 stories yesterday plus one for weekly Variety and contributed to bits of several others. But I’m lucky to have this job. I feel privileged to do it.”

A Special Impact

Trade reporters feel like consummate insiders in the most glamorous business in the world, and some say they’ve never felt quite the same adrenaline rush, even after they’ve moved on to major daily newspapers, Internet sites and other bigger, better-paying jobs--many of them in the movie business itself.

The trades, it is widely agreed, are a great training ground for virtually any subsequent Hollywood activity, and Weiner echoes many of his Hollywood colleagues when he says, “If you really want to learn about the industry, forget about a job in the mail room at William Morris or being an assistant to some studio executive. Get a staff reporter’s job at one of the trades.”

The trades are not, however, invariably models of journalistic excellence and rectitude. They too often allow themselves to be used by studio spinmeisters, they increasingly seem more interested in being first than in being right, and the picture they present of Hollywood sometimes seems more like the distorted reflection in a fun-house mirror than a true journalistic portrait. If every potential deal they reported were actually consummated, Hollywood alone could fuel an economic boom that would make the 1990s look like the Great Depression. But for all their flaws, the trades are in the trenches every day, reporting stories that are largely dismissed as “inside baseball” by the big dailies and other general-interest news organizations.

Many people in Hollywood read only the trades, says Lynda Obst, an independent producer whose films include “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Contact,” and that gives what they say a special impact; it exacerbates the insularity and sense of self-importance already endemic to the community.

For most of their existence, the trades were regarded as the “Pliable Bibles of Show Biz,” as a 1978 Los Angeles Times headline put it. The story under that headline began with an account of how a Hollywood publicist--eager to find work for an actress coming out of retirement and aware that “the best way to get work in Hollywood is to make it look like you already have work”--once manipulated the Hollywood Reporter into publishing four stories over 10 weeks on his client’s nonexistent role in a nonexistent movie for a nonexistent producer.

Many other publicists told similar tales in those days of “planting the trades” with tales designed to make them or their clients look good. One publicist was so successful that when he realized he’d created so much buzz for his fictitious movie that he’d have to invite critics to its premiere, he planted one final story: the producer had been killed in a plane crash before filming had been completed.

The trades have long been seen as extensions of the studios’ marketing departments--or, at the very least, as protectors of the industry’s collective image. Several years ago, when the American Film Institute released a list of the 100 best movies of all time and a reporter at the Reporter decided it would be interesting to assemble a list of the 100 worst movies of all time, Sherry Lansing, chairwoman of Paramount Pictures, told Robert Dowling, publisher of the Reporter, that she thought such a story would be “mean-spirited.”

“No one tries to make a bad movie,” she recalls telling him. “Great talents try daring, difficult things and sometimes they fall on their ass. What’s to be gained by rubbing somebody’s nose in it like that?”

Dowling agreed. The “100 worst” story was never written.

Many in Hollywood still see the trades as part of the industry, not autonomous chroniclers of it. The trades are, after all, largely dependent on studio advertising dollars for their survival, and it is not unknown for reporters for the trades to try selling scripts to the very studios they’re covering. But both trades have become more independent in recent years, and less susceptible to publishing outright fantasy, and Busch says she’s fired reporters when she found they had conflicts of interest with their sources and subjects.

Studio executives get angry at the trades periodically for negative reviews, skeptical stories or what they consider premature reports on negotiations in progress. Such stories, they say, can adversely affect the negotiations--driving prices up, discouraging competition or offending potential participants.

Some studios will tell the trades they’re “in conversations” with an actress on several scripts, trying to discourage other producers from even contacting that actress, Obst says. “If you read the trades, you’d think Gwyneth Paltrow was booked for the next three years,” she said late last year. “I have a script for her, but if I believed all those announcements, I would move on to another actress.”

Trades Depend on Industry Ads

Because the trades are read so widely and so avidly, their stories may have even more impact if they’re not premature--if they accurately report a deal gone sour. A top star or director will read that another star or director has rejected a certain movie and will decide he’s not interested in being second choice.

The trades are both a bulletin board and an echo chamber for the industry. Academy Award nominations were announced Tuesday, and by the time the winners are named on March 25, the studios will probably have spent more than $10 million on full-page “For Your Consideration” ads designed to persuade voters in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that their movies, actors and behind-the-camera personnel deserve Oscars this year. Full-page ads intended to pay tribute, show appreciation and stoke egos are routinely run even for awards of much lesser stature: “Artisan Entertainment proudly congratulates Ellen Burstyn on receiving the Video Software Dealers Assn. Career Achievement Award.”

Studio executives, producers, agents and lawyers use the trades to trumpet triumphs and undermine competitors, and the trades also serve as a tip service for all the other media covering Hollywood--especially now that both papers have Web sites and e-mail alerts and are picked up by traditional wire services and other Web sites.

Having, in effect, larger megaphones has made both papers more determined than ever to be first, and that mind-set often results in less-than-thorough reporting.

“You don’t really want to make that many phone calls if you have something you think is exclusive,” says Michael Fleming, a longtime and widely respected Variety reporter. “There are plenty of people in Hollywood who are duplicitous and will tell the competition what you’re working on. You want to try to be accurate, but you have to keep that in mind.”

Publicists and Hollywood executives often try to exploit the competition between the two papers by offering exclusives to one or the other and asking for a promise of prominent--preferably Page 1--display in exchange. Editors at both papers vigorously deny making such deals, but trade reporters and the people who deal with them say there are subtle code words and phrases--”I’ll do my best,” “I’ll take care of you,” “I’ll try to get you good placement”--that both sides clearly understand.

Variety, with its larger format, has more opportunity to prominently showcase stories, and this is but one reason that it has long been the dominant Hollywood trade paper. Famous for headlines like “Hix Nix Stix Pix” and stories that feature its special lingo--studio executives don’t quit, they “ankle”--Variety became both stronger competitively and, in many ways, more professional journalistically after Peter Bart became editor in chief in 1989.

Bart, 68, a graduate of Swarthmore and the London School of Economics, is the author of five books and--more important--he had been a Wall Street Journal and New York Times reporter and an executive at Paramount Pictures and MGM/United Artists before he came to Variety. A smart, demanding, strong-willed boss, he has also attracted controversy.

Prominent Hollywood figures--major sources and subjects for Variety stories--have thrown parties in his honor, and he’s returned the favor. On Jan. 20--Golden Globes weekend--he was co-host, with two movie industry friends, of a party for the director, star and screenwriter of “Quills.”

Bart is widely seen as playing favorites in the paper--even to the extent of altering stories to reward his friends and punish his enemies. Busch says she left Variety because she objected to Bart’s handling of several stories, and other former reporters and studio executives voice similar criticisms.

“You can get the bias from Peter right away--the ones he likes and the ones he doesn’t like,” says Bill Mechanic, former head of Fox Studios.

Bart vigorously denies these charges. But he clearly sees himself as a player in Hollywood. He’s proud of being “the only journalist who’s a member of the Academy,” and past Variety reporters say it’s not uncommon for him to insist they use information and quotes from his “better” sources instead of their own. Critics say his Variety columns, which periodically take the form of “memos” to various Hollywood VIPs, show that he’d really rather be running a studio again, not a newspaper.

Bart denies this as well, and he’s equally dismissive--or pretends to be--of the newest challenges to Variety’s dominance, the Internet and the resurgent Hollywood Reporter.

“We did it in Variety two months ago,” he says of a recent story on Inside.com. And: “I don’t see the Hollywood Reporter as serious competition at all.”

Variety is still the front-runner by almost any measure--from circulation to impact to the quality of its staff--and Bart tries to play the role of the above-the-fray, seen-it-all, done-it-all eminence grise of Hollywood journalism. But his competitive fires burn almost as brightly as do Busch’s, and he’s clearly troubled by the favorable attention she’s brought to the Reporter.

“How’s your story coming?” he asked in a fax not long after being interviewed for this story. “In case you haven’t wrapped it, take a look today at page one of the Reporter vs. Variety. They lead with a story that ran two days ago prominently in the New York Times and Wall St. Journal. We go with six stories that happen to be ‘news.’ Just a reminder.”

Bart later cited many other examples of stories Variety published before the Reporter, often several on one day. But Busch knows how to wage the fax war as well. When a Times reporter asked her early this year for a list of stories she thought the Reporter had done before--or better than--Variety, she responded with a four-page fax; then, after a follow-up conversation, she sent another list of “recent stories we did first and then they did them weeks later.”

Busch, 39, is ferociously competitive and utterly devoted to her job. She has never married--colleagues and competitors say she’s married to her job, and she doesn’t deny it. That devotion has enabled her to improve the Reporter enormously since becoming its editor.

Busch has often had a role in her paper’s scoops, continuing to tap her enviable source list even as she sits in the editor’s chair.

“Anita’s trusted and respected, and she’s done wonders for the Reporter,” says Paramount Pictures’ Lansing.

Busch Takes a Stand

Busch also took a strong editorial stand last October, a few weeks after the release of the Federal Trade Commission report on violent movies and a few days before “Fight Club” was released. She wrote a column that called the movie “exactly the kind of product that lawmakers should target for being socially irresponsible.”

Dowling says Fox was so upset by that bashing of its movie that it pulled $200,000 worth of ads. Fox denied canceling any advertising--”We were cutting back anyway,” Mechanic says. Regardless, it was “exactly the kind of story--written fearlessly, without an overarching concern for what your advertisers and sources think--that gives the Hollywood Reporter the kind of credibility that a good trade publication needs,” says John Horn, who covers Hollywood for Newsweek.

“Two years ago, I didn’t read the Reporter with any consistency,” Horn says. “Now I read it every day.”

Dowling was Internet-savvy early on--the Hollywood Reporter was available online before there was an actual World Wide Web--and encouraged by him, Busch has pushed hard to get Reporter stories posted on the paper’s Web site quickly, so it can both claim scoops and reap the attendant credit.

One of her first such ventures into cyberspace came one Sunday night in July 1999, just a couple of months after she became editor. She’d returned home from dinner that night and found a message from a good source on her answering machine. The message: “I have something important to tell you.”

Busch called back and got a tip that Robert Daly and Terry Semel were leaving their jobs as co-CEOs of Warner Bros. after 20 years. It was big news--surprising news--in Hollywood.

Busch says she checked the report with another source, asked a reporter at the paper to do likewise, and--since it was several hours past the paper’s deadline for its Monday paper--decided to put it on the Web site rather than wait for Tuesday’s print edition.

“But we waited until we were sure it was past The [L.A.] Times’ deadline, too,” she says with a smile, “so they couldn’t get it in their paper either.”

Both the Reporter and Variety sometimes deliberately withhold exclusives from their Web sites for fear that the other paper (or The Times) will see it in time to put it in the next day’s paper, but the Reporter posted its exclusive Warner story, and the next day, news media around the world quoted the paper’s Web exclusive.

The battle between the trades is exacerbated by an aggressive third party, Inside.com, which was launched last spring as a Web site specializing in virtually nonstop coverage of entertainment, the media and technology. Last fall, it added a print magazine as well; the new issue of the magazine features a tough eight-page cover story on the problems and problematic future of the movie business.

Inside.com has hired several highly regarded journalists, some of them veterans of Variety and the Los Angeles Times, and immediately began posting exclusive stories at almost any hour of the day.

Most of Inside.com’s exclusives--many of which involve litigation or personnel changes--are of interest largely to insiders, and while that is the site’s primary audience, there is considerable conjecture about whether there are enough of them to make the venture profitable. Inside.com executives originally spoke of needing 50,000 to 100,000 subscribers; that’s far more than either Daily Variety or the Hollywood Reporter has. But Michael Hirschorn, co-chairman and editor in chief of Inside.com, says that by covering “technology and digital issues [as well as entertainment], you expand the potential numbers exponentially.”

He will not, however, say how many subscribers the site now has. Deanna Brown, chief executive of Inside.com’s parent company, Powerful Media, has acknowledged that Inside.com did not reach the 30,000-subscriber level she had expected last year. (Variety has run into its own problems with a new venture. Its monthly magazine eV, launched last fall to provide coverage of the entertainment business and the digital economy, ceased independent publication last week and is now scheduled to appear as a monthly section in Variety.)

Many people seriously involved in the movie business say they check Inside.com every day, sometimes several times a day, and while it hasn’t had a significant impact yet on the business, it has made journalists covering Hollywood for other news organizations aware that “news doesn’t stop at a certain time--it’s not 9 to 6, Monday through Friday,” as James Bates of the Los Angeles Times put it.

Web Competition Especially Fierce

In particular, Inside.com and other Web sites have helped push the trade papers into updating their own Web sites more quickly and more frequently in an effort to remain the preferred news sources for true Hollywood insiders.

The Reporter, whose online presence preceded Variety’s, has moved aggressively onto the Internet, and its “Hollywood Reporter East” edition that began last October is available exclusively by e-mail. Dowling, the Reporter publisher, says 3,300 people have signed up for Hollywood Reporter East, which is currently free but which he says will gradually convert to paid subscription, “probably beginning next month.”

The edition is only about five pages a day, which makes it far less complete than Variety’s 2-year-old, full-size, ink-on-paper “Gotham edition” printed on the East Coast. Charles Koones, the publisher of Variety, says it’s distributed to about 10,000 readers.

But because “Hollywood Reporter East” is distributed electronically, it has later deadlines than Variety’s “Gotham edition,” and it gives the Reporter its first true East Coast presence. It’s another weapon in the Reporter’s strongest-ever challenge to Variety--a challenge that most people in Hollywood say has considerably narrowed the once-substantial gap between the two papers.

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Jacci Cenacveira and Vicki Gallay of The Times’ editorial library assisted with the research on this series.

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A Rivalry With Legs

Began publication

Daily Variety: 1933*

Hollywood Reporter: 1930

*

Circulation

Daily Variety: 35,035

Hollywood Reporter: 23,717

*

Editor

Daily Variety: Peter Bart

Hollywood Reporter: Anita Busch

*

Publisher

Daily Variety: Charles Koones

Hollywood Reporter: Robert Dowling

*

Published by

Daily Variety: Cahners Business Information

Hollywood Reporter: BPI Communications

*

Web Site

Daily Variety: Variety.com

Hollywood Reporter: Hollywoodreporter.com

*Weekly Variety began publication in 1905

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About This Series

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Part 1: Increased journalistic competition and changes in the movie business have resulted in Hollywood coverage dominated by stories on box-office grosses and budget overruns--often based on unreliable numbers--and on which studio executive is in, out, up or down. *

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Today: In Hollywood, lying is a way of life. There’s a natural cultural clash between a movie industry based on creating fantasy and the journalistic institutions that seek to report reality.

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Part 3: The battle between Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter is unique among American newspaper wars, and it’s growing more intense.

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Part 4: The Times is Hollywood’s major hometown paper. How well does it cover the city’s (and the world’s) most glamorous industry?