Press: Trades Blow No Ill Winds

Hollywood’s Variety and Reporter serve a company town

The multitudinous winners made Sunday night’s endless Emmy Awards show even longer by thanking everyone except passersby. But they omitted gratitude to two raffish institutions that have boosted nearly every career in Tinseltown: the entertainment industry’s West Coast-based daily newspapers, Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. Vaunting oneself in “the trades”* is second nature throughout Hollywood. Says one major studio executive: “Ours is a business of hype.” Scarcely a day goes by without an ad, a story or a skillfully planted gossip item about an overnight success, an out-of-town comeback, an agent’s abject gratitude that some hot client continues to employ him. Says cable talk-show host Colin Dangaard: “A publicist in this town would rather have a story about a client in the Hollywood Reporter than in the Wall Street Journal. A lot of people may not get around to reading the Journal. ” By contrast, as Agent Evarts Ziegler points out, “Everybody reads the trades —and early in the day.”

The mystique of influence surrounding Daily Variety (circ. 19,650) and the Hollywood Reporter (circ. 15,551) is all the more impressive given their small readership and narrow focus (Variety covered the war in Lebanon by noting how it had affected the box office at Beirut movie theaters). Moreover, both publications can be fooled into announcing projects that have neither financing, script nor star, nor reasonable likelihood of ever getting them. Admits respected Variety Reporter James Harwood: “We have printed hundreds of titles that were never made.” No one seems to mind. Explains Producer Albert Ruddy (The Godfather, The Cannonball Run): “Everybody will use the trades. You know it’s hype when you do it. But the next day I’ll pick up the trades and see the word is out on some movie, and believe it, even though yesterday I was doing the same thing. Even people in this business get seduced by the trades.”

Some failings of Variety and Hollywood Reporter are common to any trade publication that depends for advertising, and survival, on the very people it covers. Notes Press Agent Gary Kalkin: “The trades exist with the studios’ cooperation. If the studios got together and decided to put the trades out of business, they could do it. So the relationship is to keep each other happy.”

Variety hews more closely to accepted journalistic standards than the Reporter. When Variety moved offices in 1972, outspoken Editor Thomas Pryor literally had a wall constructed between the business and editorial areas to discourage advertising salesmen from trying to influence coverage of their clients. “If you print something worthwhile, you get respected,” says Pryor, 70, editor since 1959. “If you don’t, you become a house organ.” In fact, while both papers yearn to be taken seriously as tough, independent journalistic enterprises (and both have shown grit and knowledge in covering events like the ouster in July of embattled United Artists Chairman David Begelman), Daily Variety, founded in 1933, can more justly claim a tradition of shrewd analysis and lively if eccentric writing. Indeed, the paper and its weekly sister publication originated the technique, now widely imitated by general-interest dailies, of scrutinizing the box-office record of a film in its all-important opening days in order to forecast its ultimate success. But the price of that insider knowledge can be excessive coziness. Entertainment Reporter Dale Pollock of the Los Angeles Times says he was sternly reprimanded in a former job at Variety for picking up the tab for lunch with industry executives. He explains: “The paper said that being taken to lunch was part of my salary.”

Variety, which has 13 full-time reporters, three editors and one columnist, is celebrated, too, for its use of such exotic locutions as “canto” for week, “cleffer” for songwriter, “w.k.” for well known and “ankled” for quit. The paper faithfully records the cross-continent comings and goings of celebrities, and covered one of the great upheavals of the ’70s with the one-line note, “D.C. to L.A.: Richard M. Nixon.”

But at the Reporter, whose eleven columnists consume much of its news hole, normal reportorial standards are more than occasionally ignored. Things began to get better during the 1980-82 tenure of Martin Kent, one of some 20 editors who have moved through the revolving door since Founder William Wilkerson opened the paper on the site of his former haberdashery in 1930. Says a onetime staffer: “Until Kent came, they mostly took press releases and perhaps pencil-edited them a little and slapped them onto the front page. They would not even call to check items out.” Kent departed in June after a power struggle with Managing Editor Cynthia Wilkerson, complicated by the repeated interventions of her mother, Owner Publisher and Editor in Chief Tichi Wilkerson, the founder’s sixth wife. Even so, Cynthia Wilkerson seeks to continue Kent’s improvements.

She still has a long way to go. The Reporter’s night-life writer, George Christy, often requires people giving a party to pay his freelance photographers’ fees in exchange for coverage in his column. The paper’s recording-industry columnist, Dianne Bennett, a former Beverly Hills meter maid who is paid $ 100 or so a week, is known for using her Reporter platform to skewer her enemies, sometimes bending the facts to suit her case. Staffer Hank Grant routinely attributes items to “my studio spy Onda Lotalot” and “New York Spy Luce Lipp” in his daily column. He also wishes “happy birthday” in print to entertainment figures, as in the March 10 greeting to former Studio Executive Newton (“Red”) Jacobs, a leader in civic causes. That salutation was sadly underinformed. Jacobs died on Nov. 6, 1980. —By William A. Henry III.

Reported by Russell Leavitt/Los Angeles

* Besides the dailies, there are three weeklies: Back Stage, emphasizing TV commercial production; Drama-Logue. stressing casting news; and weekly Variety, owned jointly with Daily Variety but published from New York City.