February 4, 2005

I've spend the last week and change dealing with someone close who lost someone closer, their parent. And the time reminds me, as I head back to the L.A. de-basin, about what my mission has been for these last seven and a half years of writing this column and much of the work at MCN too… perspective. There is nothing like a death that really matters to you to offer you perspective… and to offer you perspective on your occasional utter lack of perspective.

The job of a journalist is, I always have felt, to offer truth. But truth is little more than a construct, a notion, in all but a few cases. From the time we are small children, arguing about who started the fight over the red crayon, the illusion of truth is apparent.

After a few days out of the direct maelstrom of our little industry, I have a little better perspective. I am reminded that we are in a moment of previously inconceivable, unrelenting information. As print and television parse out information in smaller and smaller bites while the internet offers an endless number of bytes minute after minute, day after day, information is slowly becoming the silver standard of media.

What was the difference between The New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure Section just five years ago and now? Let's put aside some of Jodi Kantor's more dubious (and her really good) editing choices and look at the bigger picture. The difference is that your local paper really, really sucked on Sunday, with better coverage in the limp, slick pages of Parade than in your actual Arts section. And the New York Times lead the parade… for all of us… including the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune and other majors.

As the internet sped up the world's ability to get information, the New York Times tried to keep up with that. And, in doing so, The Paper of Record first befuddled its own staff of writers, who were trying to straddle the past traditions and the new realities. Then it started adding new writers who were "hip," but not strong enough in the basics to hold the flag for the New York Times. This is not to say all the news is bad, but bear with me on this "big picture" discussion.

I remember my own surprise when I realized, as a young reporter, that breaking cool movie news in a weekly was nearly impossible, because once you called a studio for comment, if the news was cool enough, they would give other publications the greenlight to move forward before your weekly publication date. (It was also quite a shock to realize the amount of real news that was being held back by journalists every week in the name of maintaining certain studio relationships… but that's another column.) But how did John Horn manage to break news in a monthly consistently at Premiere? By being a better journalist…

Breaking information was for pansies. John Horn - and others - broke news… they broke the whole story… they delivered perspective.

And as time went on, I came to realize that this was what The New York Times had always done. The Sunday Arts & Leisure section didn't offer information so much as it offered perspective.

In the last week, there have been two "retirement" stories literally or virtually written by the "retirees," one in the NYT and one in the LAT. Both were journalistic embarrassments, even though both bylines were from near-legends of entertainment journalism, Bernie Weinraub and Kim Masters.

Weinraub signed off himself, in a piece that could have easily been re-titled, as Steven Soderbergh's classic but (unfortunately for a certain book that was just released) sometimes facetious "diary," Getting Away With It or The Further Adventures Of The Luckiest Bastard In The World. I'm not saying that Mr. Weinraub "got away with it." What I'm saying is that this very smart man and once very smart reporter, in trying to offer perspective on his work and life, showed clearly that he still is a while away from any real perspective. His piece read like it was from an all-but-retired HFPA member, his perfect celebrity in tow (his wife) laughing at all the fools who can only whine about him because his one vote of eighty-nine is so valued in the industry that it doesn't matter if he's mocked anymore. He deserved better from himself.

That piece also led to Nikki Finke's self-exposure in her article about why she, too, is above the fray. As with Mr. Weinraub's piece, she exposed more she reveled. And as with Mr. W., this does not make her a bad journalist or a bad person. But what she perceives as a strong, stable base of ego as the support of her work is clearly something far less settled. That struggle is fascinating, as a human study… but I'm not sure it's news.

Kim Masters' exit profile - or is it "love obit?" - on Bumble Ward was a hoot. Here is my full disclosure… I really like Bumble a lot. I don't always know how sincere she is or how utterly full of shit, but that is not a disqualifier for me in relationships with publicists. She has always been interesting to me and interested in me and though, in truth, she really has not been that helpful to me in terms of access to her stable, I like this power chick with the made-up showy name. I do.

That said, Ms. Masters should never have allowed her valuable name to be associated with that kind of puff. And the L.A. Times should not have allowed it to run in their weekday pages. It is a Vanity Fair piece… or a Premiere piece… or at the very best, a Sunday Calendar sidebar to a massive piece about the "real lives" of Hollywood's power brokers or publicists… is it all that great?

But the information that Bumble was out the door - not really that much of a surprise - was more important, apparently, from editorial context… perspective.

Sharon Waxman's new book,"Rebels On The Backlot," also tells us a lot about Sharon. And, truth be told, it has softened my position on some of the deficiencies of her work at the New York Times a bit. Because reading the book, I understand more of who Sharon is as a film industry journalist. She has almost no real perspective. She has always been on the beat as a daily reporter, first with the Washington Post and now with the Times, and the book reads very much like her stories for the papers… the book is the amalgamation of about 250 filed stories on her six selected subjects.

Like a reporter on a deadline, if she doesn't get what she needs one way, she finds another way to the information. File it. Want to offer some perspective on the quality of a film… here's what I have heard from three people/sources, so it must be true. File it. A certain former Warner's exec is willing to talk to me about what a genius he is and no one else really wants to discuss The Matrix. File it. Etc, etc, etc.

Of course, all of this can be blamed far more on the editing class than on the reporters. Old fashioned journalism had writers and editors moving up from the lowest part of a paper to the highest. After 15 or 20 years, they became editors if they were good and lucky. After 20 years in a newsroom, you've seen some stuff.

What isn't old-fashioned is the idea that entertainment industry coverage is really news and not just suet for the masses in case they have three minutes left to kill after reading Dondi. So there are very few entertainment editors who have the length and breadth of experience - forget the raw genius - to lead their reporters to their best work. The idea that being a young trendspotter can replace actual knowledge of the industry your staff is covering is, well, sad.

There were once great opportunities that we will not likely see again. Books like "The Studio" and "The Devil's Candy" are not likely to happen again in the risk adverse universe of the film industry anytime soon. Books like Peter Biskind's definitively crappy book on Miramax and Sundance will be the standard while James. B. Stewart's publisher goes public in demanding galleys back from Disney, the subject of his latest book, as though possessing that information is anywhere near as powerful as the perspective the book will hopefully offer.

What I have learned in a decade of doing this is that I don't get to define the truth for others. I can only do my best to be as accurate and as reasonable and as unspun and as honest as I can. I don't always succeed. I sometimes go off on flights of fancy. I can sometimes be overly brutal. Sometimes my notions come off as news and this upsets people on the "wrong side" of a story most of all… they really dig it when I am on their side… no matter how wrong I am. Sometimes the news I break comes across as a notion and this upsets me… but I asked for it. This is the downside and upside of being your own editor.

Soon, one hopes, the major publications will wake up to the power they have and not the power they see slipping away. Here's the news, guys… that power is already gone. No one controls the flow of information anymore. But the flow of perspective… that is a commodity that is not in vogue right now, but is rarer than the rarest diamonds. Mine that, my friends, and the world shall be yours.

And I'll try harder too. Just because I'm on the web doesn't mean that I can't use a big swig of my own medicine.

READER OF THE DAY: C'EST FRENCHIE writes: "I too have a sense that Charles Kaufman's screenplay is better than the movie itself. Yet I can't tell for sure since I've read neither the first draft nor the shooting script (corollary: I can tell a critic doesn't know his job when he blames a movie on his screenplay). I think the feeling surfaces from Kaufman's previous works : a storyline developing inside of a brain, i.e. a visual representation of the intricacies of the brain. Which is also the limit of Kaufman's stories with the central part 'Journey inside a brain' becoming a gimmick of his.

In Gondry's movie, however, the best scenes IMO are the most natural ones about the couple where Carey+Winslet reportedly brought much from their own experiences.

So nothing comes from a bad screenplay, but a bad movie might have started with pretty good stuff drowned in the process. Just imagine Kaufman's script bought to hurry to market a Matrix rip-off...

Anyway it would be a shame if John Logan gets a group ticket to claim the award. I agree with you that The Aviator is not a fantastic movie and I have a sense that the original tilt in the screenplay is a major flaw. The whole structure, spinning inwards on a big braced-up American boy with a true trauma inside, makes Hughes only a sporadically interesting character. Thanks to Di Caprio and some of the foils. But, as a friend pointed out, The Aviator is too pleased with its own Hollywood glossy nostalgia (the geek inside Scorsese is definitely bigger than the director in the effort) and eventually it feels like a poor man's Citizen Kane (quarantine=rosebud). That's what I call the Oedipus-rosebud complex of the bio-pic (remember I wrote you last October it was even there in Kubrick's script for Napoleon?).

As for John Logan, he is a shrewd writer, he knows how to please his bosses and the audience. Thus he really doesn't try to hard to be original. Let alone deep and subtle. Gladiator was for me a terrible story with a common honest American as a hero of the Roman Empire (so a general refuses to be Emperor to grow corn? ah!). Logan is supposed to be the man to thank for this mishmash of Fall of the Roman Empire and the narrative structure of Ben-Hur. "Don't call me Howard Hughes, I'm The Aviator." Two academy noms is already too much for me.

BTW screenplay is really not the fun part of moviemaking."

E-ME: How does information vs. perspective work for you? Clearly, you all have your own perspectives. But do you just want the information and to be left alone or do you prefer perspective from a knowledgeable writer? How does this issue effect your media choices?

 

Sundance Wrap-Up
Sundance Preview Part I
Sundance Preview Part 2

January 3, 2005 - Reflections On A New Year
December 31, 2004 - The Ten Best
December 30, 2004 - The Ten Worst
December 29, 2004 - Movies You Should Have Seen, But Didn't