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

It’s hard to argue with the selection of Janice Min for this week’s LA Weekly issue celebrating “the most interesting people” in Los Angeles. The name-brand editorial director has completely re-invigorated a moribund Hollywood trade, showed Jay Penske the way with her weekly glossy print edition and essentially steered clear of Nikki Finke‘s core beat.

So much so that a New York Post story today about the contract renewal status of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter mentions Min as a logical successor. Here’s a taste from Gendy Alimurung‘s LA Weekly profile of the “tiny, friendly” 43-year-old:

The new Hollywood Reporter launched in November 2010, a scant four months after Min took charge. The compressed schedule forced her to think clearly, she believes. Sometimes too much time muddles your thinking. The proof is in the numbers: Online traffic is up 800 percent. More importantly, revenue is up 50 percent.

Read more

It was to be called Beverly Hills Entertainment Week. But the 2012 event never happened and according to reports late last night on Deadline and TheWrap, past and present regimes of Variety are tangled up in the 90210 details.

Variety Media LLC is claiming in an April 29 LA Superior Court complaint that a $500,000 event sponsorship deal set up previously at Variety with Beverly Hills Media Group was fraudulent. In addition, the trade’s new ownership alleges that because the sponsorship deal was never properly disclosed during due diligence for the PMC-Variety deal, they are now on the hook for a penalty.

The defendants, in a counter-claim filed Tuesday, insist they tried to set up a meeting with Penske during the Variety acquisition process but were denied.* From Sharon Waxman‘s report:

The complaint accuses the unnamed “executive officer” of Variety of engaging in a “fraudulent, self-dealing transaction while the assets of Variety were being marketed for sale for the purpose of diverting substantial revenues generated by Variety…”

Read more

We’ve attended many Digital Hollywood’s and similar conferences over the years. For the life of us, we cannot remember another time when editorial representatives from all four Hollywood trades participated in the same panel discussion.

The May day confluence will occur tomorrow afternoon at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey. Moderating “The New Digital Age of the Hollywood Trade Press” will be Rick Markovitz, president of Weissman/Markovitz Communications. And participating:

- Andrew Wallenstein, editor-in-chief, digital, Variety
- Chis Krewson, editor, THR.com, The Hollywood Reporter
- Dominic Patten, reporter, Deadline Hollywood
- Joseph Kapsch, deputy managing editor, TheWrap

Read more

This one is definitely a shocker. Stacey Farish, publisher of TheWrap, has jumped to Variety/Deadline owner PMC.

From this afternoon’s brief Deadline announcement:

Effective immediately, she leaves and becomes publisher of Deadline’s print magazine Awardsline as well as vice president of PMC Entertainment. She will be working with Nic Paul, the senior vice president of PMC Entertainment ad sales…

“Hiring Stacey demonstrates PMC’s commitment to the rapid growth of Deadline as one of the most dynamic companies to watch in the digital media arena,” said PMC founder and CEO Jay Penske.

Read more

Three weeks into PMC’s relaunch of Variety, two articles of note have involved actors from opposite ends of the film-TV spectrum.

For Issue No. 1 (April 2), Steve Challogan visited a massive $25 million residential property in Holmby Hills flip-renovated by Jeremy Renner and business partner Kristoffer Winters. Actually, make that just Winters. It’s only at the very end of the piece that readers are clearly told that “Renner, it should be noted, doesn’t have a financial stake in this property, but was present during the remodeling when he wasn’t busy shooting the latest Bourne movie.” Nevertheless, the piece is a great glimpse past the usually forbidding hedges of westside mega-manses.

In this week’s April 16 issue, TV critic Brian Lowry takes stock of the resurgent guest star careers of familiar faces like former Simon & Simon star Gerald McRaney:

McRaney describes himself as “sort of a gypsy at heart” who is having the time of his life flitting from playing a Warren Buffett-like billionaire to a drunken ex-cop to a seedy criminal. When asked about down time between roles, he says, “I consider anything after two weeks not to be a vacation, but unemployment.”

Read more

There are already two items up today at “Behind the Screen,” a new hollywoodreporter.com blog being curated by contributing editor Caroyln Giardina. The first post explains how a collective of filmmakers documented the delivery of space shuttle Endeavor to downtown’s California Science Center and the second teases Jon Landau‘s upcoming Tech Summit keynote.

From today’s announcement:

“Behind the Screen” is dedicated to covering the talent and technology behind the magic of Hollywood – from key players to the disruptive technologies behind films, TV and mobile content. The blog will hone in on how changing technology impacts the way movies and TV shows are produced and edited by covering advances in visual effects, sound, editing and cinematography, digital cinema and animation technologies.

Read more

If you’d told us 18 months ago that all four Hollywood trade publications would be flush in the spring of 2013 and raring to (still) go at each other, we would have laughed the way Nikki Finke does when someone brings up the name Jeff Sneider. But lo and behold, that is indeed the case, with the former Variety film reporter today tipping these unlikely scales.

Sneider has rejoined his old outlet TheWrap, moving to the same general geographical neighborhood that his former Variety editor Josh Dickey will soon be occupying for TMZ purposes. (Sneider back at TheWrap… Dickey at TMZ… OK, that may actually be more surprising than what we just referenced above.) From Sharon Waxman’s announcement:

“I once acknowledged that ‘second chances are rare in this business,’ and I’m grateful to TheWrap for believing in me and offering me this exciting opportunity,” Sneider said. “I’ve been impressed with how TheWrap has grown since I’ve been away and I look forward to returning to this top-notch team of entertainment journalists.”

Read more

From a PR standpoint, it’s been a strange week for PMC.

On Tuesday, Jay Penske’s operation rolled out a new weekly edition of Variety. But for a variety of reasons (pun intended, sorry), the launch yielded not nearly the boffo media splash it should have.

Now, at the end of a Passover/Good Friday week’s close, there is news of the settlement of a contentious IP theft lawsuit filed by PMC against Hollywood Reporter parent-parent company Prometheus Global Media. In this case, perhaps PMC was readying a big Cesar Chavez Day press release. But instead, Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz this afternoon got to the court documents first, followed by TheWrap’s Lucas Shaw:

When PMC filed the suit, it was seeking more than $5 million in damages, accusing THR of lifting source code from PMC’s site TVLine.com. The two parties settled on $162,500 as well as some other pieces that have not been made public, according to an individual with knowledge of the suit.

Read more