Peter Bart on Variety: In Hollywood, babe, its still the bible!

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Peter Bart was on CNN’s ‘Reliable Sources’ on Sunday morning, though judging from his interview with the show’s host, Howard Kurtz, Bart is not exactly the most reliable source on the planet. Even though Variety is virtually ad-free these days, except for its special sections, Bart insisted, with a straight face, that ‘I think Hollywood, more than ever, regards Variety as the bible. Just reduced to crass terms of numbers, about 77% of the advertising market in the business goes to Variety, so I think it’s more predominant than ever.’ (The show’s transcript is here.)

Even though he was recently kicked upstairs, giving way to editor Tim Gray, Bart continues to take shots at various bloggers, myself included, claiming we don’t check our facts and--how’s this for a whopper--blames us for driving all the movie stars underground. As he nostalgically puts it, when he was at the New York Times, back in the 1960s, ‘I’d call a Paul Newman or a Steve McQueen and say, you know, let’s hang. I would like to do a story about you. And you’d get a dinner, you’d get a weekend.’

Ah, the glory days, when you could hang with movie stars for a weekend. It must’ve been a blast! Of course, what Bart doesn’t get around to mentioning is that if you did a tough story on a star, you’d have your access cut off faster than one of those race cars Newman used to drive. To his credit, Kurtz didn’t exactly swallow all this malarkey without a couple of burps. At one point in the program, he actually put up a quote from one of my posts about Variety, where I dissected the trade paper’s ‘cozy reportage about the industry, with its sunny take on box-office returns and a front page filled with fanciful renderings of movie projects that would almost surely never end up being made.’

Is that true, Kurtz asked? Instead of answering the question, Bart attacked me, claiming I was ‘irritated’ now that I was a blogger as well as a columnist for The Times. (For the record, I enthusiastically volunteered to start this blog, believing that blogs are the best way for newspapers to survive in the new media universe.) Instead of letting Bart dissemble, Kurtz asked him to answer the question. Bart’s response: ‘It’s just absolutely ridiculous.... We give the stories about who’s getting laid off and which company’s going under. And most of our coverage in the past year has been dark. Here’s the difference. We actually do the unthinkable. We check the facts before we run them.’

Actually, at Variety, the unthinkable would be to ever see a hard-hitting story on the industry that wasn’t filled with the trade’s customary assemblage of qualifiers and anonymous quotes. If I ever see a tough, hard-nosed piece on the business, I’ll be the first to offer Bart a standing ovation.

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