Thompson On Hollywood

New York Times Lays Off 100

Bowing to the inevitable, The New York Times is laying off 100 news staffers. Here's executive editor Bill Keller's letter on the subject.

Gray Lady Airs Tom Cruise's Open Secret

(Posted by Peter Debruge)

In today's NYTimes, Michael Cieply recounts a Tuesday night industry screening of "Tropic Thunder" in which Tom Cruise "brought down the house with his surprise portrayal of a bald, hairy-chested, foulmouthed, dirty-dancing movie mogul of the kind who is only too happy to throw an actor to the wolves when his popularity cools."

Sure sounds funny. Can we assume Cieply caught this screening? Or was the whole "rapturous reaction" fed to him by the person described in this line?

Mr. Stiller, who played Mr. Cruise's obsessive stunt double in a popular Web video (and who is expected to co-star with him in "Hardy Men"), first talked with Mr. Cruise, his friend, about taking a role more than a year ago, according to a person who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid conflict with the film's promotion."

The whole story reads like the kind of "news" you'd expect to encounter on the Web (which got there first back in November), not in the pages of the Gray Lady. And that popular Web video? Cieply's referring to a televised sketch Stiller and Cruise made for the 2000 MTV Movie Awards. Here's a refresher:

L.A. Times Names Stanton as Editor

As times in the newspaper biz remain dicey and both the LAT and NYT face massive staff cuts and layoffs, Russ Stanton is taking over the helm as editor at the LAT. He plans to merge the editorial operations of the print and online editions. Good luck. It wasn't so long ago that many LAT writers labored over long features in the hopes of winning a Pulitzer prize. Now they're fighting for their jobs and the paper's survival. But the LAT brass know that making their online business pay is their only future.

Poland Vents on Old Media vs New Media

Every few months or so, Movie City News' David Poland goes on one of these rants about who's covering the industry on the old and new media side, usually involving swipes at the LAT and NYT Hollywood beat reporters and other rivals on the Internet.

While Poland makes some good points, I often feel that there's an element of envy involved in these outpourings. I agree with him that the LAT should let Claudia Eller loose--but the reasons why they wanted to defang her still exist: they aren't willing to take the inevitable heat from the studios.

I too admire Spout's Karina Longworth, but she is a child of the Internet; she's thriving in her fave milieu after trying to survive in a more conventional day job at Netscape Movies. Gawker Media's Nick Denton should give her the Defamer spot. She's not a witty charmer like Mark Lisanti--she's more of a NY film geek insider-- and there would have to be an adjustment, but she's a gifted blogger, and would bring her own following.

Strike Watch: Winners and Losers

Slate's Kim Masters.

NYT's David Carr.

LAT's Patrick Goldstein.

NYT and EW go to the Oscars

Yes, it's Oscar season and time for the NYT Mag's Oscar issue, dedicated to breakthrough performances. And another set of gorgeous photos (scanned by the kind folks at Livejournal). Here's my fave: James McAvoy. (I hope Atonement does well at the BAFTAs tomorrow.) Here's Lynn Hirschberg's story.

[NYT photo by Ryan McGinley; EW photo by Justin Stephens]

I also loved Ken Tucker's EW cover piece, The Year of the Bad Boys, on the year's two great villains, Anton Chigurh and Daniel Plainview, played of course by Oscar contenders Javier Bardem and Daniel Day Lewis.

Waxman Leaves NYT

Finally, after a six-month book leave, the Sharon Waxman shoe has dropped. The NYT's ex-Hollywood correspondent made a brief comeback with a DreamWorks/NBC scoop. But the word inside the Grey Lady was that the L.A.-based mother of three was destined for the New York Metro desk. Now, she is going indie. When I wrote about her leaving the paper, Waxman insisted that she was not forced off the entertainment beat, that it was her choice. But she wants to keep covering entertainment, clearly. If she joins the Hollywood blogosphere with no holds barred, fasten your seatbelts. On the other hand, it's a crowded niche and she still has to make a living; and she is unlikely to be soliciting studio advertising.

Oscar Watch: Scandal Cheat Sheet

LAT.com is running a photo gallery with deep captions on the provocative subject of Oscar movies tainted by scandal. While it's a sure way to grab online traffic, the stories are attention-grabbing without offering any substance. Is discussion of Keira Knightley's skinniness really going to change her chances of getting an Oscar nom?

As for Kite Runner, distrib Paramount Vantage is still fighting the good fight on the basis of strong exit polls indicating that like the book, The Kite Runner movie plays better to regular folks than to the intelligentsia. Here's some info:

Exit polls last Sunday were 94% top two boxes and 85% definite recommend at a wide sampling from six markets. An avalanche of blowback comments hit the NYT website responding to Manohla Dargis's review. The movie is trying to recover from tough reviews; its rankings on Rottentomatoes are climbing to 69% in the "cream of the crop" group.

The filmmakers are crossing their fingers that the movie expands well into middle markets this weekend.

Oscar Watch: The Bagger is Back

The NYT has rebooted its annual Oscar blog for the second time. It makes no sense to me to build up all that loyal traffic and then toss it away between seasons, but in any case, media columnist David Carr is back in his Carpetbagger guise, sticking his mic at celebs on red carpets and blogging with abandon. (One hopes that some of the stream of verbiage that hit his blog today was stored in advance.) In preparation for his relaunch, Carr has presumably been lining up events and happenings and folks to interview for Oscar tidbits. He admits that he can no longer plausibly play the wet-eared outsider, but will Oscar-watch like a seasoned pro.

NYT Cover Story: Hollywood Goes West

The NYT Mag goes Western:

A.O. Scott.

Lynn Hirschberg on Daniel Day Lewis and The Coens.

U of Texas's Thomas Schatz on western history.

Walter Salles on the road movie as western.

Media Watch: The Future of Newspapers

The always intelligent Tim Rutten provides the kind of in-depth analysis the LAT will need more of, it seems, as newspapers chart their future.

The NYT has a spiffy new moderne newsroom that looks a lot like Mike Ovitz's old offices at AMG.

Rupert Murdoch has The Grey Lady in his sights.

Writers Strike: NYT's Barnes Eats What's Fed to Him

Now that The New York Times has moved Michael Cieply to the Hollywood beat, Lorne Manly is editing the movie coverage out of New York. Youthful Brooks Barnes is here covering the negotiations between the Writers Guild and the studios. Here's The Artful Writer's thoughtful dissection of Barnes' piece on the talks, which also struck me as naive. Barnes seemed to accept a lot of info from the studios and didn't comprehend how much he was being manipulated. Of course, this response is very much from the screenwriter's point-of-view. I was struck by Barnes' breathless assertion that most writers make $1 million, and by his positioning the current residuals structure as being created back in the ancient 50s. Of course the studios want to throw it out!

Errol Morris: Reading the Truth in Photos

You can easily get lost in filmmaker Errol Morris's website. He makes Oscar-winning docus (The Fog of War), 30-second commercials on beer and bacon, and those extraordinarily brief but entertaining Oscar shorts. Here's my column on last year's Oscar short, and here's a more recent NYT Morris blog on truth and context in photographs.

NYT: Waxman May Move to Metro

Gawker reports that NYT Hollywood reporter Sharon Waxman, currently on leave researching her book on antiquities in Cairo (she's blogging at waxword.net), will not return to the Hollywood beat (as I already reported), but will take a post on the NYT Metro Desk in Manhattan:

We hear that Hollywood reporter Sharon Waxman, who's been based in Los Angeles for years (before her stint at the Times, she wrote for the Washington Post from the West Coast), will definitely be joining Joe "Private Dancer" Sexton's Metro desk when her book leave is over later this year. (Until now, Sexton had not committed to taking her on.) We've heard (from a single source) that Waxman will be on the religion beat. Her current editor, Culture honcho Sam Sifton, said he wouldn't comment on personnel matters, to us "or to anyone else." Waxman responded via email from Cairo, where she is doing research on her book: "I have no comment because Gawker has not shown itself to function by accepted journalistic rules."

Sifton inherited Waxman when he took over Culture at the Times; she was hired by Jodi Kantor, then the editor of Arts & Leisure, and Jodi's then-boss, Steve Erlanger, in October 2003.

Let's see if Waxman responds to my email--it's late night in Egypt now. That story about David O. Russell accusing her of using material from her book Rebels on the Backlot in her NYT story continues to live on the Internet; in fact the NYT story was about a newer movie not in her book, I Heart Huckabees.

New York Times Live Blogs; TMZ Breaks Hilton News

I have long believed that live-blogging is where media coverage is going. It's about posting a story online as fast as possible, then adding reporting, context, analysis. The day the James Cameron Avatar story broke, I did a quick version for the Hollywood Reporter website in advance of the Fox news release going wide; I did a longer story without Cameron quotes for the web. Then I got my Cameron phone interview and added the quotes to the web story. Then I wrote a definitive piece for the next day's THR which was posted online too.

Up at Sundance I posted the breaking news being reported by me and our two reporters on my blog, then sent the stories simultaneously to the online staff and to our editor for the paper. Needless to say, the days when we're that focused and constantly churning material are exhausting. At last year's Comic-Con in San Diego, another reporter and I live-blogged with our portable computers from Hall H, breaking news on Bryan Singer announcing a Superman sequel, among other things. We took our own pictures and posted them. Over the weekend, we didn't post to our paper's online site (most newspapers have not yet adapted to the realities of a 24/7 global news cycle); another reporter was covering the convention for the newspaper and posted a wrap story Sunday for Monday's paper, which went online Sunday night. For Variety, this year Marc Graser and I will be blogging from Comic-Con.

More and more, breaking news goes up on blogs and online immediately. There is no room for lag time. Bragging rights go to the online first break. All newspapers exist both online and in paper form, and the two are very different beasts, with different needs. How blogs fit into that is another matter. We have an entire newsroom devoted to daily breaking news. Some blogs react and comment, others break news too. TMZ.com functions as a constantly updating website, with video etc. It's not invested in blogs. If TMZ had wanted to compete with the trades, it could have. But it's doing too well in the celeb world, where the big traffic is. Paris Hilton gets a get-out-of-jail-free card? That's money, baby.