Go West, Publishing Synergist

Be still, my heart. In a statement released last week, publisher Judith Regan announced that she was planning to relocate her imprint ReganBooks from Manhattan to Los Angeles by the end of 2005. For anyone unfamiliar with Regan’s work, she’s responsible for ushering talents as diverse as Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh and Tommy Franks into print; among her successes are adult-film actress Jenna Jameson’s “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star,” and Jose Canseco’s steroid-enhanced memoir “Juiced.”

It’s hardly literary fare, but then, Regan has always had something other than literature on her mind. In recent years, she’s hosted a cable TV talk show, and she currently serves as executive producer of A&E;’s “Growing Up Gotti,” a reality series that brings new meaning to the phrase “mob hit.”

The Regan move marks the first time in memory that a major New York publisher has pulled up roots and headed to Los Angeles. ReganBooks, a division of HarperCollins -- which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. -- releases 100 or so titles annually; its authors regularly make national bestseller lists. If nothing else, its move indicates how technological innovation allows any kind of business to be done anywhere, even in an industry as hidebound as publishing, long the nearly exclusive province of New York.

Still, for all Regan’s shift may say about the zeitgeist, it’s important to keep a balanced point of view. The New York Times may have put the story on the front page, but this is hardly a development on the order of, say, the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn, or “The Tonight Show” moving west. Rather, it’s a matter of water finding its own level, of a savvy publisher going where the money is.

Regan was among the first book executives to understand synergy, the notion that what’s content for one is content for all. Besides her producing credit on “Growing Up Gotti,” she parlayed “Porn Star” into VH1’s “Jenna Jameson’s Confessions,” and she has vowed never again to be caught without subsidiary rights (having published the novel “Wicked” without them before it became a hit Broadway musical). In the end, then, her decision to come to California is simply the most visible manifestation of a sad, conglomerate truth: There is too little difference any longer between publishers and Hollywood studios.

Regan, however, has more up her sleeve than merely business. According to the Times “she also said she intended to bring a different idea of culture to Southern California,” a “sort of salon” with a bookstore and cafe and a space for writers and entertainment executives to meet.

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that there are already dozens of bookstore/cafes in Los Angeles, Regan’s comment is revelatory. Since when is culture defined by executives and writers taking meetings? And what about the artists and thinkers who have been working here for decades, creating Southern California culture not because it’s synergistic but because this is where they’ve made their lives?

No, these are the views of someone who confuses L.A. with Hollywood, who thinks culture is synonymous with big budget blockbusters and the aesthetics of the bottom line. She’ll fit right in with the studios, which have never truly recognized the city beyond their walls.

Ever since Los Angeles emerged as part of the American imagination, people have arrived from elsewhere to tell us how we fail to measure up. In the 1920s, D. H. Lawrence called the city “silly -- much motoring, me rather tired and vague with it.” A generation later, Truman Capote dismissed it as a landscape “where all seems transient, ephemeral, there is no general pattern to the population, and nothing is intended -- this street, that house, mushrooms of accident, and a crack in the wall, which might somewhere else have charm, only strikes an ugly note prophesying doom.”

Both were wrong, of course, although the stereotypes linger still. Culture, such stereotypes suggest, belongs to places like New York or London, places with a more hierarchical sense of history. As for L.A. and Angelenos, we should feel grateful to be educated, to be shown the error of our ways. It would be amusing if it weren’t so condescending.

I can’t wait -- can you? -- to hear Jose Canseco, reading live at Cafe Regan.