celebrity gossip, academic style

Over the course of my comps studying, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “new” mavens of gossip — Perez Hilton, Harvey Levin at TMZ, to some extent Lainey. While these gossips share characteristics with some figures from the past — Perez is the new Hedda Hopper; Levine is the new head of Confidential — there’s no one as ruthless and powerful as some of the columnists of yore. That’s not just nostalgia — those old columnists were published in thousands of outlets (newspapers, weeklies, via radio broadcasts) across the country. Their audience was HUGE. And while Perez garners millions of hits of a day, that’s nothing compared to a nation-wide newspaper audience from the 1940s.

But then there’s Nikki Finke, author and founder of Deadline Hollywood Daily. If you’re not in the industry or media studies, you’ve probably never heard of the name. But as an article in this morning’s New York Times explains,

In the three years since she started Deadline Hollywood Daily, a daily blog about the entertainment business, her combination of old-school skills — she is a relentless reporter — and new-media immediacy has made her a must-click look into the ragingly insecure id of Hollywood.

Among movie executives, the stories of Ms. Finke’s aggressiveness are legion, but they remain mostly unspoken because people fear being the target of one of her withering takedowns.

“I’d prefer not to ever deal with her,” said a senior communications executive at a studio who declined to be identified. Many others declined comment saying, variously, “she gave me a nervous breakdown,” “she terrifies me,” and “there’s no percentage in me saying anything to you about Nikki no matter what it is.”

But they all read her. In a town where people often secretly hope for the worst, Ms. Finke delivers wish fulfillment. During the recent merger of the William Morris and Endeavor agencies, she ridiculed William Morris executives to the point of distraction. She has published network schedules before many people at the network knew what was on them.

Finke is the most powerful journalist in Hollywood right now, and she’s doing it using a combination of “old school” journalism — tons of contacts, always on the phone — and new media immediacy. You can find her site here — I’ve been reading it for several months now, and she indeed breaks stories earlier — and with more, well, panache, than Variety, NYT, or any other industry source.

She’s tremendously powerful — but like many who have successfully wielded power in Hollywood (such as Lew Wasserman, the head of MCA (and then Universal) who parlayed consistent behind-the-scenes manipulation as an agent into becoming head of one of the largest and most successful studios) she is consistently anonymous. The article calls her “hermetic.” There’s only ONE picture of her in the press files, dating to 2006 — an anecdote that again recalls the lore of Lew Wasserman.

She hangs out behind her computer, spends a ton of time on the phone, has a web of reliable informants, and has developed a reputation of fear for herself. People give her things — scoops, schedules, news of firings — because they’re scared to be on the opposite end of one of her posts.

This is of course nothing new. All the old school gossip columnists and early smut mag editors leveraged information and threats in order to receive scoops. They all played favorites — as the article asserts Finke does as well (her favorites, however, aren’t stars — they’re studio heads. And also labor: the site first rose to prominence during her meticulous coverage of the Writer’s Strike. She was firmly and unabashedly on the side of the writers — one of the few power players in Hollywood to do so.) As I mentioned above, she uses the “old style” journalistic tactics of an army of sources and general investigative digging to get what she wants — before starting Deadline Hollywood, she had a long career in journalism.

But she’s also incredibly different, and here’s how:

1.) She is a woman. And she leverages power in Hollywood. Apart from the spectacular Sue Mengers, an agent with ICM in the late ’70s/80s, few women have successfully wielded power in Hollywood. Finke, however, is not only wielding that power but sustaining it — despite attacks on all sides. We might attribute this to her relative anonymity — it’s hard to attack her for her dress, to shoot embarrassing pictures of her, or otherwise humiliate her in the style usually reserved for women when she keeps such a low profile.

2.) She started and remains in control of her own site.

Unlike Parsons or Hopper, who both worked for men — Parsons, in fact, was heavily beholden to William Randolph Hearst. Finke, however, was initially the owner of her own site — it was ‘hosted’ by LA Weekly — and only recently sold to Mail.com, where she will still control her site, presumably with very little oversight. She’s entirely in control of what is published — the words, rhetoric, choice of topic, etc. are completely hers. This is possible, of course, because of new media and blogging technologies — when she decided to go out on her own in a few years ago, she wanted to do it on the cheap — and there are few cheaper ways of reaching a mass audience than the blog. For me, this underlines the ways in which new media technologies do indeed, from time to time, facilitate the rise of non-traditional voices.

3.) She’s not covering celebrities.

If she does, it’s on their salaries. She’s covering INDUSTRY — the traditionally male realm of Hollywood. Salaries, deals, schedules — that’s her bread and butter. Again, transgressing the ‘traditional’ place for female reporters in Hollywood…which might be part of why she so angers so many people. She also has a distinctly ‘masculine’ writing style — she’ll write TOLDJA in all caps whenever one of her speculations/predictions comes true — and the site itself is presented with a particularly masculine aesthetic (bold fonts, neutral colors, very few pictures). She means business. And it has garnered her respect — and fear. The NYT piece describes her style as “thuggish” — and this morning’s post reads:

DHD on Page 1 of The New York Times: The article about DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com by NYT media columnist David Carr for Friday is online. It claims I’m “thuggish”. So thug this: I’ll be back to work on Monday.

4.) She’s no Walter Winchell. She’s better.

The Times pieces opens by comparing Finke to Winchell, who operated as a quasi-gossip-columnist/industry reporter for decades, mostly for Hearst’s New York Evening Graphic and via radio broadcasts, where his trademark staccato delivery became famous. Like Finke, Winchell relied on informants, secrets, alliances, fear — see Neal Gabler’s massive and excellent tome Winchell — but he was also a man, mostly operating out of New York, concerned with celebrity, very publicly known/seen, and a viscous Red-mongerer and ardent supporter of Senator Joe McCarthy.

Finke’s insistent defense of the labor side of the WGA strikes signals a clear opposition to such tactics: she’s not a Commie, but she certainly doesn’t think the place of the press is to root out or destroy the power of labor, especially in the already labor-hobbled Hollywood.

In other words, the comparison is off.

Ramifications:

In many ways, having an industry watch-dog, for lack of a better word, like Nikki Finke is a blessing — it keeps the industry on its toes as to promises, mergers, secrecy, back-stabbing, etc. And as both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter continue with cuts to their print editions and general reporting (and Premiere down to a bare-bones innocuous online site), Nikki Finke has taken up residence in the journalistic vacuum they’ve created. She’s doing it more brazenly than any of the above sources ever dared, but she can afford to — as the article again points out, “Her liabilities in the world of print — a penchant for innuendo and unnamed sources — became assets online. To admirers and detractors, she is the perfect expression of the Web’s original premise, which suggested that a lone obsessive could own the conversation.”

I don’t need to state that the blog, in all of its form, is the ascendant form of journalism. Whether in the form of Huff Post, Perez Hilton, TMZ, or Nikki Finke, it’s increasingly where people in the industry (and from the outside looking in) go to get their news and speculation. What remains to be seen is how such immediate reporting — and the somewhat ‘democratic’ access to authorship — will affect the way business is done in Hollywood.

As I discussed in an earlier blog post, the proliferation of industry info has its benefits and drawbacks — a point heavily debated in the comments section, which I suggest you check out. Nikki Finke — and the spread of her blog, which will certainly become only more widely read following a front page NYT article — is a participant in this selfsame phenomena. She’s not USA Today or Entertainment Tonight, though — she’s making far more important and essential information available, which might lead to a more educated understanding as to the meanings/raminfications of grosses, openings, up-fronts, etc. Right?