Trades

The most noteworthy element in David Carr‘s summary of the latest Sharon Waxman-Nikki Finke coup de guerre is his claim that Finke’s contract does not, as reported elsewhere, allow her to opt out starting this month. Rather, the New York Times media columnist says Finke’s obligations to PMC run through 2016 and that it is only next year, 2014, that an opt-out clause can be exercised.

Carr also details his efforts to check in with Finke to get her version of the past week’s events. That portion of the article begins as follows:

I buckled up and sent an e-mail to Ms. Finke, and in a subsequent phone call she did not disappoint. After chewing me out for 15 minutes over a four-year-old story she didn’t like, she turned to the matter at hand.

Read more

The headline for this particular TIME op-ed asks a great question: “What’s Next for Hollywood’s Most Feared Reporter?” Unfortunately, there’s not much in the article itself about where Nikki Finke might ostensibly Toldja! from next.

Article author Gary Susman, a veteran entertainment journalist who has written for Moviefone, Entertainment Weekly and People, winds his way to a tacit conclusion drawn by several others since Sharon Waxman fired a shot across the bow of HMS Deadline on Sunday night. Namely, that Finke could opt out of her Penske contract any day now and re-incorporate as a standalone blogger.

One place Finke will definitely not be going is Manka Bros. Studios, an entirely fictitious operation overseen by Warner Bros. business development executive John Perry. But that didn’t stop Perry from alter-ego blogging a June 3 job offer.

Read more

Sharon Waxman has now famously reported that Nikki Finke is already fired. Joe Flint and Dawn Chmielewski responded in the LA Times with the sourced information that Finke can opt out of her PMC/Deadline contract starting this month.

Either way, we have spent a bit of time today thinking where Finke might go next. One of our recurring thoughts was BuzzFeed.

Think about it. A great majority of Finke’s writing would fit right in with BuzzFeed’s numerical-countdown article format and matching headlines. For example, her Deadline riposte this morning (“Nikki Finke to Sharon Waxman: Just Stop It“) could have very dynamically instead been turned into “17 Reasons Why Sharon Waxman Will Never Win a Pulitzer.” (We’re not sure why, but 17 seems to be one of BuzzFeed’s favorite of all numbers.)

Read more

Long before the Jay Penske deal, Nikki Finke was of course already at it.

Today on HuffPost Live, writer-director Kevin Smith chimed in re: the whole Sharon Waxman mess by recalling a tussle with Finke in the summer of 2006. She wrote that Clerks 2 was “well on its way to more failure,” prompting Smith to respond and Finke to post anew on July 26:

I’ve edited out the jejune personal attacks. But because I’m always in favor of a dialogue based on the merits or demerits of my editorializing, I’m honored to give director Kevin Smith his say…

Read more

Unless, that is, Contact Music knows something we don’t. Namely, that Finke has already bolted from PMC for a new stealth enterprise and is quickly having second thoughts there.

Read more

Sharon Waxman may not be completely useless to Nikki Finke after all.

In the reader comments to Waxman’s Sunday night article heard around the Hollywood world, Finke got a job offer this morning from the New York City Star. The New York City what?

The URL newyorkcitystar.com rolls over to the organization’s Twitter page. And that’s where this whole job offer gets really hilarious, from a west coast point of view:

Hyperlocal News for the five boroughs of New York City. NewYorkCityStar.com is in development.

Read more

Sunday, bombshell Sunday.

At 6:45 p.m. PT tonight, Sharon Waxman posted an article titled “SHOCKER: Jay Penske Fires Nikki Finke from Deadline Hollywood.” She has since updated her article with information also contained in a DHD denial shared at 7:46 p.m. by Mike Fleming.

It’s not so much what Fleming writes but rather the internal emails he references. One was sent by Jay Penske to Waxman and the other to staff from PMC  head of communications Lauren Guillion. The latter communication ends with this:

It is sad when a rival business feels the need to fabricate stories to create traffic and notoriety. Due to the defamatory and disparaging nature of some of the completely inaccurate statements made by Waxman, PMC has turned this matter over to our attorneys.

Read more

We were definitely stunned this morning when we saw the following headline parked at the top of Yahoo’s front-page Entertainment news scroll:

Although the front page outlet-tag credits only Variety, the article is actually from the Hollywood trade’s satire partner Hollywood & Swine. The four-paragraph item was fed to Yahoo on Saturday and republished minus the framing disclaimer, fooling some readers, puzzling others and offending many more:

Read more

No, we’re not talking about Justin Chang and Peter Debruge. That would be huge and… somewhat nonsensical.

Still, for Hollywood trade watchers, the defection from Variety to The Hollywood Reporter of international freelance reviewers Jonathan Holland (based in Madrid) and Boyd van Hoiej (Paris, Luxembourg) would seem to suggest that there’s concern on their part about the future of their beat. A rep for THR tells us that van Hoiej is already at Cannes, and that both will immediately start contributing to the efforts crowned of course by another Variety alum, Todd McCarthy.

Holland, who focuses mainly on Spanish and Latin American films, has also written for The Guardian and Conde Nast’s Traveller. He separately penned the 1994 novel The Escape Artist.

Read more

The bigger picture here is that Deadline fudged some previously published information. They are certainly not alone on the Internet in that regard. But a trade that consistently likes to trumpet its superiority should, we think, be opting for sweeter correction music (redlining, a footnote,…).

The following sentence is no longer part of Pete Hammond‘s May 15 Deadline coverage of the opening night party at the Cannes Film Festival for The Great Gatsby. It was shortened, rewritten and made parenthetical not long after the item went live with this:

Clearly there seems to be a group of pseudo-critics who like to try and take down a movie, and this [The Great Gatsby] was a target, even though some of them (I am talking about you, The Wrap) obviously had never read the book.

Read more