Brooks Barnes - FishbowlLA

THR Gets a New York Times Love Letter

Richard Horgan — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 18:30:20 +0000

The word of the day is “etiolated.” Put to excellent use by Brooks Barnes in his New York Times snapshot of the resurgent Hollywood Reporter:

As recently as 2010, The Reporter would have had a hard time persuading its own etiolated staff to gather for a party, much less marquee stars. The trade newspaper, founded in 1930, was bleeding from layoffs, vanishing advertisers and ferociously competitive entertainment industry blogs. It had become what moviedom dreads most: a has-been.

Indeed, there was no Spago mojo coursing through that sickly, weakened staff. It was a gang that Snoop Dogg, the DJ at the February 4 event from which Barnes leads, might have deemed distinctly lacking in ”shizzle.”

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In This Star Wars Reporting Episode, Much of the Deserved Credit Gets Lost

Richard Horgan — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 12:45:27 +0000

The biggest Hollywood film scoop of this young year was posted Thursday at 1:33 p.m PT on TheWrap. While a number of Lucas Shaw‘s peers were immediate and effusive with Twitter praise, large chunks of the pick-up coverage about J.J. Abrams being tapped to direct the next-generation installment of Star Wars failed to credit TheWrap and this hard-working media reporter.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world in the trenches of THR, Variety, TheWrap and Deadline, with each being guilty at various times of co-opting film scoops by “confirming,” referencing same-subsequent “documents obtained”, slapping on a questionable EXCLUSIVE and so on. But a scoop of the magnitude of Shaw’s should have been exempt from the usual ticky-tack catch-up tricks.

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Machinima Makes Good Use of Halo Series

Richard Horgan — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 08:30:40 +0000

This Thanksgiving may not be the happiest of holiday seasons for executives connected to IGN, Spike TV and other enterprises trying to consistently attract the 18-to-34 male demo.

Per a report by New York Times LA correspondent Brooks Barnes, that segment of the viewing audience has largely decamped to other intersections of video games and Internet content. As a result, Hollywood-headquartered Machinima recently hit another 18-to-34 male bullseye with a little help from Microsoft:

Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn, which cost Microsoft $10 million to make and was meant to promote the release of Halo 4 on Xbox, has been viewed about 27 million times [on Machinima]; four related videos delivered 9.2 million additional views.

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Tech Writer Corroborates Bleak Hollywood View

Richard Horgan — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 10:00:26 +0000

At the end of her chilling New York Times Op Ed, author and screenwriter Hilary De Vries wrote that she would be thinking of her departed residential neighbors while watching the Oscars Sunday night. In the piece, she recounted how a female writer-director and a pair of soap opera actors on her block have recently been separately foreclosed on by the Great Recession.

In response to De Vries, CNET media and entertainment columnist Greg Sandoval cautions that Hollywood’s DVD cash cow has been permanently put out to pasture. He also reminds that there is now a firmly entrenched public view about the digital media space, reflected by the recent defeats of the PIPA and SOPA bills:

I’m not trying to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I grew up in Los Angeles. I have family and friends who make their living in the film sector. I’ve also covered tech for more than a decade, and what’s happening to the film industry now is something I’ve seen happen to media before.

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Ghost Protocol Buzz Makes Tom Cruise Look Like a Genius

Richard Horgan — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:30:53 +0000

Critics who have seen the IMAX version of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol opening Friday are gushing all over Facebook and Twitter.

Which leads FishbowlLA to congratulate Tom Cruise on his very wise and prescient decision to offer The Incredibles and Ratatouille writer-director Brad Bird (pictured) a live action shot. Per a recent Bird interview conducted by New York Times reporter Brooks Barnes at Skywalker Ranch:

Mr. Bird got this gig largely because of Mr. Cruise. He called Mr. Bird shortly after The Incredibles was released. “His composition and storytelling was absolutely wonderful, and I said, ‘If you ever want to direct live action, please, please direct me,’” Mr. Cruise said by telephone from Tokyo. Mr. Bird was charmed. But he went on his way, pursuing an ambitious live-action project about the wild and woolly scene in San Francisco just before the 1906 earthquake.

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NYT Takes Some Shots at Variety

Richard Horgan — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:00:11 +0000

“Can a movie database help save Variety?”

So begins Brooks Barnes‘ New York Times piece about the trade’s launch of a new paid service called FlixTracker, first reported by Fast Company.

The folks at Variety would of course counter that their publication does not need saving, and that the paywall is working out just fine. But the tone of the NYT piece is most definitely skeptical, continuing straight through into paragraph two:

The venerable trade newspaper is a shadow of its former self, eclipsed in the Hollywood media hierarchy by feisty blogs (principally Deadline.com) and starved of ad revenue by cost-cutting studios. Neil Stiles, president of the Variety Group, is nevertheless optimistic that its fortunes will improve–he said in an interview, for instance, that he expected Oscar-related ad sales to be “very, very marginally up.” But it’s tough going.

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Pair of Extra Executives Go After the ‘Haters’

Richard Horgan — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 08:45:34 +0000

New York Times showbiz correspondent Brooks Barnes has a preview of H8R, the CW half-hour reality show debuting Wednesday. Created by Extra producers Lisa Gregorisch-Dempsey and Jeremy Spiegel, and hosted by their program’s on-air personality Mario Lopez, it all sounds rather contrived.

On each episode, a pair of celebrities are shown videotaped rants made by someone who “hates” them and then track down those people for a “surprise” encounter. There’s no doubt the underlying issue here is serious, but nothing in Barnes’ piece suggests the show will come close to a strange bit of family gravitas linkage involving Gregorisch-Dempsey:

One of her cousins is Glenn Berman, the New Jersey judge presiding over the trial of Dharun Ravi, who is accused of secretly taping his Rutgers University roommate [Tyler Clementi] having an intimate encounter with another man and streaming the images online. The roommate committed suicide a few days later.

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New York Times Debates Pros and Cons of Comic-Con

Richard Horgan — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 09:15:49 +0000

What to make of the upcoming absence from Comic-Con 2011 in San Diego of Warner Bros., Disney, Dreamworks, The Weinstein Co., and possibly even Marvel Entertainment? That’s the question New York Times reporters Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply tackled in a Sunday piece bound to be chewed over today by a thousand and one movie blogs.

Thanks to the ridiculously high expectations of attendees and this group’s ability to go ape on social media about any disappointment with previewed blockbuster and comic book movie elements, Comic-Con has become an extremely tricky PR proposition. The reporters wonder whether the absence of some of the big studios has anything to do with last year’s push-and-pull, which overwhelmed Sucker Punch, TRON: Legacy, Buried, and a certain Michael Cera flick:

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was the big alarm. That Universal movie was the belle of last year’s convention, and the studio spent heavily to make it so, draping the entire side of a skyscraper with an ad, for instance. Released just three weeks after the convention, Scott Pilgrim fizzled and the $60 million movie sold just $32 million in tickets.

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Mary Hart Gets Ready to Say Goodbye

Richard Horgan — Fri, 20 May 2011 10:15:01 +0000

There’s a whole lot of Mary Hart love being shown in the media this week ahead of her final appearance tonight on Entertainment Tonight. And she deserves every bit of it.

Hart is the Johnny Carson of the entertainment TV news magazine world, retiring at the top of her personal game after 29 years on the air. Joining her for an ET send-off taped yesterday were a number of her former male co-hosts, including the best one of them all, John Tesh. Those two had major on-air chemistry, the kind that LA TV station execs dream of when envisioning ideal local news anchor pairings. The latest crowning tributes include one from Brooks Barnes of the New York Times:

“Without Mary, ET starts to look like what it is–kind of dear and not particularly edgy,” said Martin Kaplan, the director of the Norman Lear Center for the study of entertainment and society at the University of Southern California. “I don’t know how large the cultural niche is for dear in a Perez Hilton, TMZ, Gawker world.”

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Brooks Barnes Gets Seacrest Scoop

Richard Horgan — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 08:45:46 +0000

Just how expansive are the powers of 35-year-old mogul Ryan Seacrest becoming? According to New York Times media reporter Brooks Barnes, the pixie king of all media’s new $60 million contract extension with Clear Channel includes provisions that will give him a level of control over who advertises on his radio shows, as well as permission to squeeze in his own “marketing partners.”

Is this a conflict of interest? No more so really than AT&T handling the phones for American Idol and Seacrest getting a great minutes deal on his iPhone. Barnes has more juicy info about the new deal:

Mr. Seacrest will also create a joint venture with the company to explore the creation of a record label, music publishing business and live concert series, according to the people with knowledge of its details, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

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NYT Documents the Decline of Variety

Tina Dupuy — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:01:10 +0000

New York Times’ Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes write about the history and plight of the entertainment business’ oldest trade Variety:

In a more detailed interview, Neil Stiles, Variety’s president, said his paper was profitable but declined to disclose financial figures for the operation, which has been owned since 1987 by Reed Elsevier. He said Variety had suffered a year-to-year ad revenue decline less severe than the estimates of 50 percent or more that have been heard in Hollywood.

But Martin Kaplan had the best quote:

“Traditionally, the trades have offered gossip, casting announcements, advance reviews and hopefully a little news,” he said. “Go through that list and ask what’s left. It’s all widely available elsewhere.”

Whole piece is here.

Previously on FBLA:

Todd McCarthy and David Rooney Out at Variety

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WGA Strike: Truth and Fiction in the NYT

Kate — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 09:23:23 +0000

Brooks Barnes, the NYT’s guy in LA, is once again ever so wrong. Dancing With The Stars is a union show.

And his quoted source, Deborah Blum, hasn’t had a writing credit since 1999, and that one just might not be a union gig.

Jennifer Pozer tries to explain the differences in the Huffington Post, but gets a little tangled. Yes, reality shows have “writers” who are usually credited as story producers. The WGA does not represent them, and doesn’t have any contracts with the production companies that employ them.

Many reality writers are rather bitter at the WGA’s mismanagement of the short lived strike of the writers of America’s Next Top Model. Some reality story producers are WGA members, and either can’t get hired in episodic or sitcoms or like the reality genre. Plenty of picketers are of an older generation, and thus the residuals issue means a lot–especially as they can’t get hired in the notoriously agist world of TV writing.

Brian Stelter, late of mb.com, blogs about the fate of talk show guests, but he means only late-night talk. Some day-time talk shows use WGA writers, like Dr. Phil, The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Others, like the Oprah Winfrey Show or Disney-ABC’s Live With Regis and Kelly do not.

ET and The Insider writers labor under separate WGA news contracts. So do writers on NBC Universal’s Access Hollywood, which will continue.

(photo by The Associated Press)

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WGA Members to NYT Writer Brook Barnes: Wise Up!

Kate — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 10:17:02 +0000

Remember when FBLA suggested that New York writers were clueless about LA and show biz? Our point is proved again, thanks to Brooks Barnes of the New York Times. Writing about the upcoming WGA vs. AMPTP residuals smack-down, he’s wrong about nearly everything. To wit:

Movie script writers get an upfront payment, now at least $1 million for a major film, according to studio executives.

Su-u-u-re they do,sonny.

And also:

Under their proposal, unveiled with unexpected zest in early July by Barry M. Meyer, chief executive of Warner Brothers Entertainment, so-called creative employees would get residual checks only after the studios have recouped their basic costs.

In Hollywood, studios almost never recoup “basic costs”. And this guy’s a business writer?

Craig Mazin and his readers and David Poland take this guy apart. And they hate his name.

Barnes, who joined the NYT from the Wall Street Journal, is a Montanan by birth, and perhaps he just got all dazzled by those flashy show biz types. Or he’s an idiot.

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