The Journalism of Adoration

Last month’s uproar at The Hollywood Reporter played like Hollywood melodrama. Crusading reporter David Robb uncovered what he saw as clearcut ethical breaches by a fellow employee. So he wrote about it. His publisher, Robert J. Dowling, spiked the story. Robb resigned in protest. Two top editors left in solidarity. Robb’s muckraking story was put out on Inside.com, giving his former employer the black eye it deserved. The villain in the drama, gossip columnist George Christy, who Robb alleged had been given movie parts--complete with Screen Actors Guild health benefits--and received valuable favors and expensive gifts from subjects of his column, was properly vilified.

The Hollywood press corps expressed smug satisfaction. Justice had been done. Journalistic integrity was restored. But absent from the media coverage of the imbroglio was a larger question: What’s wrong with the relationship between the studios and the media? Why is it such a cozy, fawning, symbiotic mess? Why is a minor player like Christy publicly reprimanded when scores of entertainment writers, editors and columnists who routinely exchange journalistic independence for access to Hollywood power are left unscathed?

The problem may seem most acute at the town’s two trade papers, The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety. At those publications, the lines between reader, advertiser and story subject blur. The subject of this week’s Securities and Exchange Commission investigation may be the subject of next week’s “special section” advertorial pull-out. Investigative reporting is awkward. Trade reporters are often pressured to exchange “placement” for “exclusivity.” If a reporter won’t promise front-page placement--or favorable treatment--the executive or publicist takes the “exclusive” to the competition.

The blurring of traditional journalistic practices isn’t reserved for the trades. While there are many excellent and highly ethical journalists covering Hollywood at every level, there are also many who compromise themselves. Newspaper and TV reporters covering the industry routinely participate in junkets aimed at promoting new films, receiving airfare, hotel rooms, free meals and fat “goody bags.” Though some newspapers, including this one, ban such arrangements, they are the mainstay of small-and middle-market entertainment reporting. In exchange, the junketeers promise--and in some cases actually sign documents promising--to ask the stars only about the movie being released, and to refrain from any negative criticism of the movie. Reporters who violate the rules are banned from future junkets--invitation-only affairs that often provide the only access to a film’s stars.

At the monthly magazines, editors routinely assign celebrity profiles to writers who have close relations with the stars or their publicists. Magazine editors ask writers which publicists they are “friendly” with, or which stars the writers can “deliver.” In their eagerness for access to stars--whose stories attract readers and whose faces sell magazine covers--editors allow publicists to dictate when and where a story will run, which photographer and writer will be hired, which quotes from the star can be used, which of the star’s friends can be interviewed and which questions or subjects will not be allowed. Over the years, reporters have been told not to ask Arnold Schwarzenegger about his father’s Nazi past, or Tom Cruise about allegations of his homosexuality, or Jodie Foster or Brooke Shields or Steven Spielberg about the men who stalked them. Other forbidden topics might be a pending court case, an arrest on drug charges or a previous movie flop. Some publicists force reporters to submit their interview questions in writing before the interview is granted--and then monitor the interview to be sure these are the only questions asked. Reporters who won’t play ball stop getting the assignments.

They also stop getting the perks. Hollywood lunches and an audience with Hollywood power players can be intoxicating. The inside view of a movie studio or a star’s life can be fascinating. The holiday largesse includes treats in cashmere and leather and trinkets from Tiffany, Cristal, Godiva and Sony. Nice reporters get nice gifts. Others don’t. Anita Busch, Robb’s editor, once received a bottle of MSG from then-superagent Michael Ovitz. He was unhappy with a story Busch wrote and knew she was seriously allergic to the stuff.

Men and women who cover the Hollywood beat are routinely offered jobs inside the industry. Some of the best succumb. I know of more than a dozen Hollywood correspondents who traded in journalism for producing or writing gigs.

As a result, the Hollywood press does not get much respect. Reporters are either partners or patsies. One studio head said to me, without embarrassment, “I think of the Hollywood press as an extension of my marketing department, but because I don’t actually pay them I can’t always tell them what to write.” Another studio head riled a few trade journalists when he said of them, “You’re not real reporters. Why do you insist on acting like you are?”

Hollywood has always had friendly relations with its press. Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper manipulated a few moguls, and the lurid tabloids of the 1940s and 1950s ran alarming stories of marital infidelity and reefer madness, but in the main Hollywood reporters were traditionally as protective of their subjects as the Washington press corps was of the White House. The public did not read about the sexual escapades of Presidents Kennedy or Johnson, nor about Spencer Tracy’s alcoholism or Rock Hudson’s homosexuality or Judy Garland’s drug addiction. It was bad for business --for everyone’s business.

That changed. Just as the Washington press, enraged by governmental lying about Vietnam, took a toughnew approach in its reporting, so did the Hollywood press start taking itself seriously. The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, the New York Times, Premiere and others joined the Los Angeles Times and the trades in newly aggressive coverage of the industry. This resulted in thrilling reporting on David Begelman’s check forging and Michael Cimino’s cost overruns and the comical budget-busters that were “Waterworld” and “Last Action Hero.” Whole careers were made chronicling the backlot exploits of executives like Peter Guber, Don Simpson, Barry Diller, Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

By the 1990s, though, the pendulum of power began to swing away from the press. “Entertainment Tonight” and “Access Hollywood” needed pictures, not scoops, to tell their stories. The arrival of Entertainment Weekly, US Weekly and others increased the competition for celebrity covers among the magazines. The celebrity market became a seller’s market. An editorial willingness to eschew news in exchange for access to stars created a daunting phalanx of smart, aggressive, agile publicists who rose to meet the challenge of prying editorial control away from the editors. Power publicist Pat Kingsley’s firm insisted that her client Tom Hanks would not sit for a Newsweek cover photo to promote his film “Philadelphia”--unless her other client, “Philadelphia” costar Denzel Washington, was also in the cover shot. (She held her ground, though it cost her clients the cover story.) In many cases, editors say, Kingsley and her kind call the shots.

Should any of this matter? It does if you’re an investor in a publicly held Hollywood company, or if you were conned into seeing “All The Pretty Horses” by all those pretty Penelope Cruz magazine covers.

Besides, the trend could be spreading. In January, Laura Bush reportedly raged off-camera at NBC’s Katie Couric, claiming Couric “violated pre-established ground rules” by asking questions about Bush’s stance on abortion. If NBC really agreed to ground rules, for an interview with the First Lady, then what’s next? President Bush refusing to discuss his views on abortion, or the budget, or the CIA? With a press corps as complicit as Hollywood’s, it could happen.