Long Soft on Hollywood, Times Seen as Improving

It was a major embarrassment, one that’s still talked about in Hollywood today, almost a quarter-century later.

The story began in October 1977, when David Begelman was ousted as president of the motion picture division of Columbia Pictures after he had forged tens of thousands of dollars worth of checks, many of them originally made out to actor Cliff Robertson. In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, with the press suddenly energized to ferret out wrongdoing in places high and low, the Begelman case would seem to have been the ideal story for the big hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, to sink its journalistic hooks into.

But The Times published only three short stories--two of them just one paragraph apiece, all buried deep inside the paper--in the first three months after Columbia’s initial announcement of its inquiry into Begelman’s “unauthorized financial transactions.” Only after the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post examined the Begelman case in some detail did The Times publish anything of substance--an edited-down version of the Post story, about one-third the length of the original.

The Times’ treatment of the Begelman story--combined with the overwhelmingly favorable movie reviews by the paper’s longtime critic Charles Champlin and the flattering personality profiles and on-location stories that routinely filled the Sunday Calendar section--gave the paper a long-standing reputation for a kind of benign neglect toward Hollywood. The paper seemed soft on (and not terribly interested in) the movie business. It had no one on its business news staff who covered the movies full-time in those days. Nor did it have a separate daily entertainment section until 1980.

While the paper’s many critics say that its Hollywood coverage is still much less enterprising and imaginative than it should be, virtually all agree that it has improved substantially, especially in the Business section. Indeed, Mark Gill, president of Miramax, Los Angeles, says The Times’ coverage of the movie business is “better than it’s ever been. They have their best group of people, and they break more news, and they really understand the business.”

Historically, most of the news media, The Times included, did not subject Hollywood to rigorous scrutiny--to put it mildly. Peter Bart, editor in chief of Variety, says his paper actively “suppressed” the Begelman story because the editor at the time didn’t think such a story would be “good for the industry.” Most journalists at daily, general-interest publications were equally protective of Hollywood. They were largely captives of studio publicists who gave exclusive stories to favored columnists and withheld or covered up anything even remotely negative. The studios had all the power, and most journalists were happy to cooperate.

The power of the studios began to decline in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, about the same time that the news media--both disenchanted and emboldened by the experiences of Vietnam and Watergate--began to adopt a more aggressive, even adversarial stance in their coverage of everything from politics to business to sports. It took awhile for that approach to reach Hollywood. Premiere magazine, which began publication in 1987, owed much of its early success and controversy to solid, hard-nosed reporting that marked a radical departure from the ethos of the day in entertainment journalism.

Complaints About Times’ Coverage

Despite occasionally solid reporting on Hollywood, the Los Angeles Times long remained part of that ethos. Over the years, a half-dozen of the paper’s entertainment reporters left to go to work in Hollywood, fueling anew complaints about the paper’s protective instincts toward its hometown industry--and, not incidentally, one of its biggest advertisers.

But the problem was more complicated than that. Most of the reporters who wrote about the movies for The Times in those days were critics and feature writers, not news reporters, and the paper was structured in a way that discouraged communication between them and the reporters who did cover the news. Moreover, top editors at the paper never seemed very interested in the movie business, and none lived near or socialized with Hollywood folks.

But in 1989, Shelby Coffey III became editor of The Times. Coffey was interested in the movie business, and he developed personal friendships with Michael Ovitz and Michael Eisner, two of the most powerful men in that world.

Many people in Hollywood and at The Times thought Coffey’s “cozy” relationships with Ovitz and Eisner influenced the paper’s coverage during his nine years as editor, says Terry Press of DreamWorks SKG, and--like the paper’s Begelman gaffe--it’s a subject still bandied about in Hollywood.

Coffey said at the time that he thought it was part of his job to get to know important people in Hollywood, just as it had been part of his job to know important people in Washington when he was a top editor at the Washington Post. He insisted that his Hollywood friendships did not influence the paper’s coverage.

“But there was an appearance problem at least,” says Kim Masters, who has written about Hollywood for several publications and now does so for Vanity Fair and Inside.com.

Michael Cieply and Alan Citron, two of the reporters who wrote about the movie business for The Times during Coffey’s editorship, agree that his personal relationships did not affect their work or that of their colleagues. But they also agree with the perception that the paper was generally soft on Hollywood during his tenure, and they attribute that to what they and others saw as his seeming discomfort with hard-edged reporting in any arena.

“Shelby was never comfortable with people challenging the status quo,” says Citron, now at RealNetworks.com, a company that delivers audio and video services on the Internet. “He never pressured us to soften any stories or killed any stories, but you never felt that if you hammered someone, you would get an ‘attaboy.’ Tough coverage was tolerated but not rewarded. . . . It seeped into your state of mind.”

Coffey also denied this at the time and, in conversation, would cite examples of aggressive reporting the paper ran under his stewardship--stories on presidential campaign financing, on irregularities in the securities markets, on children living with substance-abusing parents and on allegations that the first Bush administration secretly funneled several billion dollars in loan guarantees and military technology to Saddam Hussein in the years before the Gulf War. But as with criticisms of Coffey’s Hollywood relationships, the view that he was reluctant to champion aggressive reporting was widely held at the paper and in the motion picture industry in particular.

Criticism of The Times’ coverage of Hollywood in the early and mid-1990s increased after the New York Times sent Bernard Weinraub here in 1991 to report on the movie business.

Weinraub, a widely respected veteran journalist, had previously reported from abroad and from Washington for the New York Times, and as he said in a recent interview: “My intent was to cover Hollywood as a fairly exotic country.”

He did just that, especially in his first three or four years. He treated the movies as a serious journalistic beat--asking tough questions, breaking news, spotting trends, examining the culture of Hollywood and often writing stories that exposed Hollywood’s unattractive underbelly. In one of his first stories, he poked fun at celebrities attending a catered banquet on a specially designed sound stage “to dramatize the needs of the poor.”

Weinraub produced story after story that “redefined how things were covered,” says Stephen Rivers, a Hollywood publicist. Gill of Miramax says Weinraub “definitely set the agenda” for other media coverage of Hollywood. Even some Los Angeles Times journalists acknowledged that for several years, Weinraub routinely and single-handedly beat the Los Angeles Times on stories about the movie world.

A Conflict of Interest?

But many in Hollywood think Weinraub began to lose his edge as he got to know people in Hollywood socially--especially after he began dating and then married Amy Pascal, who was named president of Columbia Pictures in December 1996.

Weinraub says he avoided writing about anything that involved Pascal, and he, Pascal and his editors have all denied that their relationship influenced his coverage. Many in Hollywood also defend him against conflict-of-interest charges. But in a community as small as Hollywood, with only seven major studios, it’s difficult, if not virtually impossible, to write about one company without at least indirectly helping or hurting other companies. As with Coffey, appearances--the potential for conflict--proved all-important in an industry built on appearances.

The New York Times ultimately, if only implicitly, acknowledged this in the summer of 1999, when it sent Rick Lyman here to cover the movies and largely shifted Weinraub to the television beat. Weinraub still writes about movie-related issues occasionally, though, as he did last month in a Page 1 story about the possible strike against the industry by the Writers Guild of America. Because the potential strike involves movies and television, Weinraub says he will be covering it for the New York Times, but given his wife’s role in the industry, the same questions about appearances and conflicts are being asked again.

Meanwhile, Lyman has taken a much different approach than Weinraub to the movie beat, writing a lot about new technology and--more recently, in considerable detail--about the process of movie making, the creative people behind the movies and the impact of certain movies on major directors, screenwriters, actors and cinematographers.

Ironically, although Lyman is writing about the very sorts of topics that many in Hollywood say are too often ignored by the nation’s news media, his work has not had anywhere near the impact, or the following, once enjoyed by Weinraub, whose stories had more bite and were often grist for the Hollywood gossip mill.

Today, however, many in Hollywood say the best daily newspaper coverage of Hollywood is not being done by the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times, but by the Wall Street Journal.

Movie executives and journalists alike praise Tom King’s “Hollywood Journal”--a weekly column on the movie business--and the work of several other Journal reporters, especially Bruce Orwall, who wrote last year about the financial problems plaguing movie theater chains, a would-be movie mogul named Elie Samaha, a new strategy of releasing U.S. movies abroad earlier than ever, and the transformation of Music Corp. of America to MCA/Universal and then to Vivendi-owned Universal.

“The Journal is the one I figure I better watch to see what they’re doing,” says Masters of Inside.com.

But the Los Angeles Times remains Hollywood’s local metropolitan daily, and it’s The Times’ coverage that continues to come in for the most scrutiny and, in some quarters, the most criticism.

“We’ve picked up a lot of readers for weekly Variety over the years because the L.A. Times has put out a truly mediocre Calendar section,” says Variety’s Bart. “You never see anything in Calendar that makes you say, ‘Boy, that’s really ahead of the news.’ . . . There’s no interesting sensibility that governs that section.”

Bart’s comments could perhaps be dismissed as a rival’s sour grapes were they not echoed by so many other journalists and movie executives--and by reporters and editors at The Times. Although Oscar Garza, editor of daily Calendar, and Kelly Scott, editor of Sunday Calendar, defend their sections, Garza acknowledges that providing the resources necessary to do a better job “wasn’t the highest priority” under the paper’s previous management.

“Hollywood is a tremendously important beat,” says Kenneth Turan, film critic for The Times. “Movies are a major local employer and a reflection of many things in our entire society. But in the past, we did not have enough respect for the beat to put our best reporters on it.”

Changes and Page 1

That is changing, and nowhere is the change more visible than on the front page of the paper.

In 1980, The Times published only seven Page 1 stories involving the movies--and three of those stories involved the 94-day strike by the Screen Actors Guild. In 1990, the paper put only three movie stories on Page 1. But there were 21 such stories on Page 1 last year.

“It’s a big change from the days when The Times didn’t really cover Hollywood well at all,” says Tom Pollock, former president of Universal Pictures and now an independent producer.

Patrick Goldstein, a movie reporter and, since last fall, a weekly Calendar columnist as well, is particularly well-regarded in Hollywood, as is much of the coverage that appears under the Business section’s “Company Town” rubric--mostly stories by James Bates and, especially, Claudia Eller.

The Business staff has produced a number of exclusive stories and inside looks at the way Hollywood operates, among them stories about Joe Roth leaving the Walt Disney Co.; about Disney’s “cautious growth strategy”; about internal disagreements in the Screen Actors Guild during the six-month strike last year against the advertising industry; and about the scandal involving Dana Giacchetto, investment advisor to many stars, who was sentenced last week to 57 months in federal prison.

An Eller-Bates story last December on director Steven Spielberg’s attempt to build a 27,000-square-foot indoor riding ring in Brentwood for his wife, over the objections of nearby residents, triggered widespread comment, and a week later, Spielberg withdrew his zoning application for the ring.

Richard Natale, who produces the paper’s weekly Company Town Film Profit Report, among other stories, calls Eller “a pit bull with an unbeatable Rolodex,” and her sources--the movers and shakers of Hollywood--offer similar testaments to her tenacity.

“She’s so aggressive and fearless, and she seems to really know what’s going on,” says Brian Grazer, co-chairman of Imagine Films Entertainment.

Even Eller’s competitors have high regard for her reporting skills.

“I dreaded coming to work every day because I had to compete with Claudia,” says Anita Busch, now the editor of the Hollywood Reporter, who covered movies for the Reporter when Eller had the same job at Variety, before she came to The Times in 1993.

But Eller is also one of the most controversial reporters in Hollywood--feared as well as fearless, prone to “badgering and bludgeoning” her sources when she deems it necessary, as she readily acknowledges.

Eller initially declined to be interviewed for this series of stories. “I never give interviews,” she said. She changed her mind several weeks later--on Tuesday, after the first two articles in the series had been published. She said she would talk on two conditions--that one of her editors be present for the interview and that she be allowed to approve or veto before publication the use of any direct quotations to be attributed to her.

While the latter condition is not uncommon in Hollywood, Eller was the only person interviewed for this series who asked that someone else be present for an interview.

Eller’s detractors--movie executives and journalists alike--complain that she uses her stories to flatter her favorites and denigrate those who have incurred her displeasure.

Eller is said to be especially partial to Roth, now head of Revolution Studios.

“Everyone talks about it--everyone,” says Press, head of marketing for DreamWorks SKG, who has clashed with Eller on more than one occasion.

‘Nothing but Truth’

Roth readily acknowledges that Eller is favorably disposed toward him. “She should be,” hesays. “I’ve done nothing but tell her the truth. I’ve helped her out with stories. I’ve been there when she needed me. . . . Why shouldn’t it be a positive relationship?”

Eller essentially agrees--and points out that Roth generally enjoys good press almost everywhere, largely because of his accessibility and on-the-record candor. Besides, developing friends and favorites is a common hazard for reporters who cover any beat for as long as Eller has been in Hollywood, where she began her reporting career in 1983. Eller’s critics are more troubled by some of the negative stories she’s written.

David Poland, writing on the Internet last fall, accused her of going out of her way to turn a story about the box office disappointment of “Almost Famous” into “an attack piece” on its director, Cameron Crowe. Eller, relying on unidentified sources, said relations were strained between Crowe and DreamWorks SKG, which financed and released the movie, and she said Crowe was so pained that he “refuses to come to the phone now to discuss” the film.

Poland said the only reason he could think of for Eller’s story was that “Crowe didn’t return Eller’s phone call.”

Eller denies that. She says she had “numerous sources” on the story and stands by its accuracy. Subsequent denials of any friction by Crowe and the studio were “spin control, damage control,” she says.

Even before the “Almost Famous” story, DreamWorks executives thought Eller had frequently treated them unfairly. DreamWorks was especially upset by her story last summer, also based on unidentified sources, that said Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of three DreamWorks partners, had used “his trademark lack of subtlety . . . working overtime cozying up to Jean-Marie Messier, whose French company Vivendi” was about to take over Seagram Co., which owns Universal, the studio that releases DreamWorks’ movies.

Eller’s story said “one onlooker” had noted that at a party after the premiere of “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps,” Katzenberg had “snatched the empty seat next to Messier at his table, and for at least half an hour at the height of the open-air party for 4,000 guests, dominated the Frenchman’s attention.”

Hollywood is a town where appearances often mean more than reality, and where the appearance of being powerful--of being courted, not doing the courting--is all-important, and Katzenberg and Ron Meyer, president and chief operating officer of Universal, insist that Katzenberg did not initiate contact with Messier. Katzenberg, they say, was simply responding to Meyer’s request that he “help take care of Messier for a while” during the party.

“There was zero truth to Jeffrey climbing all over Messier,” Meyer says. “I took Messier and his wife and daughter to the premiere, along with my wife and daughter, and when his daughter wanted a picture of Eddie Murphy, I asked Jeffrey to take Messier there for the picture. I was one of the hosts for the evening, and I left Messier there with Jeffrey. He did me a favor. “

Eller says she had “at least 10 sources on that story”--none of whom was willing to speak on the record. But she says her story was accurate. “I don’t have any axes to grind,” she says.

Although Katzenberg has complained to many that Eller has treated him badly in several stories since he joined DreamWorks, Dick Cook, chairman of the Walt Disney Motion Picture Group, says she was accused of being “very, very favorable to Jeffrey” when Katzenberg was at Disney and spoke to her often.

“Claudia is a tough one,” Cook says, “but she’s pretty evenhanded about it. You may get a fabulous piece written one month and three months later, if you didn’t deliver the goods or if you didn’t do whatever it was you were purporting to do, you can rest assured that she’s going to be right there knocking you down a few pegs.”

Eller says she also wrote some stories that Katzenberg didn’t like when he was at Disney, but she’s written “more tough pieces . . . that were warranted” on him since he went to DreamWorks, and Katzenberg hasn’t liked that. “He wants to control the press,” she says, and reporters who don’t write what he wants get “shut out.”

Katzenberg has indeed cut Eller off. He no longer speaks to her at all.

Why not? What’s changed?

He attributes his largely favorable treatment while at Disney to the company’s success and to his having become a valuable source for Eller in the course of fulfilling his obligation to speak to the media as a top executive at a public company. At DreamWorks, which is a private company, he feels no such obligation, and he thinks Eller has punished him in print for his unwillingness to cooperate.

Best Work Can ‘Earn Enemies’

Corie Brown, assistant Business editor for entertainment news, praises Eller and says of her critics, “If you do a decent job, some people will get mad at you. . . . You generally earn your enemies with your best work.”

Brown was hired away from Newsweek last year in one of the earliest of several moves the paper has made in the past year, under new editors, to improve its Hollywood coverage. As part of that effort, Eller gave up her twice-weekly column to devote herself to longer stories on the movie business.

Last summer, the paper named Glenn Bunting, a veteran investigative reporter and editor, to the position of deputy Business editor for entertainment and technology. He has since brought to his staff from the paper’s Metro staff an investigative reporter who is concentrating on the entertainment industry and an editor who joins Brown in supervising the Business section’s entertainment coverage.

Cooperation between the Calendar and Business sections--the feature and news sides of the paper--is now much better than it once was. Editors for the two sections have weekly meetings to discuss coverage.

But these changes notwithstanding, many in Hollywood say the paper’s overall movie coverage is still not as strong as it should be, especially in the Calendar section. The Times responded belatedly and only briefly last fall, for example, to the controversy that erupted over actor Gary Oldman’s charges that his movie “The Contender” was reedited to suit the political views of its studio bosses--charges that the studio and the director denied.

Even Roth says The Times’ movie coverage is actually “weaker than it used to be in terms of [its] general interest in movies” and is too often “consumed with the minutiae of movies.”

The Times does not have one editor supervising and coordinating all movie coverage throughout the paper--a position that Eller says is “absolutely imperative.”

Although there are currently no plans for such an editor, the paper has created several other new positions designed to address longstanding shortcomings--the lack of a reporter in New York working full time on the Wall Street side of the business and of a reporter in Washington working full time on the relationship between Congress, the regulatory agencies and Hollywood.

This month, The Times added an entertainment writer to its Washington bureau, assigned a second reporter there to devote half her time to entertainment features and appointed an editor to supervise entertainment and technology coverage in the bureau.

The previous absence of such personnel may help explain why, when the Federal Trade Commission released its report in September accusing movie makers, as well as purveyors of music and video games, of “pervasive and aggressive marketing” of violent entertainment to children as young as 12, it was the Washington Post that broke the story. Two weeks later, it was the New York Times that published the first account of confidential studio marketing documents that showed “some of the biggest companies in Hollywood routinely recruited scores of teenagers and children as young as 9 to evaluate story concepts, commercials, theatrical trailers and rough cuts for R-rated movies.”

John Carroll, the editor of The Times, and Dean Baquet, the managing editor--the paper’s top two editors, both on the job less than a year--are “convinced that we have some ways to go in terms of adequately covering Hollywood,” Garza says, and they have pledged more new resources to help get the job done. Even critics of the paper say its coverage has improved noticeably in recent months. But given The Times’ position as the major paper in the entertainment capital of the world, Carroll and Baquet have told the editors in charge of entertainment coverage that The Times should “own this area of coverage in the country.”

Newspapers in Detroit “eat, drink and sleep auto news,” Bunting says. “Correspondents based in Washington, California, Europe and elsewhere [for those papers] all know what the No. 1 story is, and it’s in the paper every day. That’s not the way the Los Angeles Times has treated the entertainment industry, but that’s what we want to do now.”

*

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

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Movie Mogul Ousted, Times Muffs Story

When David Begelman was ousted from Columbia Pictures in 1977, the Los Angeles Times did not give it as timely or as prominent coverage as other major newspapers did, and that contributed significantly to the paper’s longstanding reputation for weak coverage of Hollywood.

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About This Series

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

Part 2: 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.

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

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.