What Just Happened? Peter Bart Changes Job Titles, Film Bloggers Get the Vapors

Phil Nugent — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

When it was announced recently that Peter Bart, who has been editor-in-chief of the trade bible Variety for the past twenty years, has been kicked upstairs--his new position if "vice president and editorial director", from which office her will "report directly to [Reed Business CEO Tad] Smith, assisting him in furthering Variety's editorial mission in print and online and expanding the brand's position in new revenue streams"--all hell broke out on-line. One of those leading the charge was Nikki Finke at her Deadline Hollywood Daily blog, who summed up the changes at Variety this way: "Hollywood can now safely ignore Bart. [Editor Tim] Gray is the guy to suck up to there." Finke and other bloggers have been laughing in the face of the "official" story that Bart had long planned to give up control of the news division this year, and that Gray had long ago been out in place with plans to step in for him when he moved on.

It should be made clear that the bloggers are far from disinterested parties in this. Bart will continue writing his column and maintaining his blog"; as Finke puts it, he'll "be allowed to continue as the 'face' of Variety in public -- which is something Bart cares a lot about." Under Bart's direction, Variety had waged war on bloggers in such articles as Michael Fleming's recent piece on shifting ethical standards in show business journalism in the age of the Internet, which at one point criticized Finke for having once put herself "in the unenviable position of debunking a rumor that she had started." According to Finke, "Bart was one of the staunchest proponents that Variety has to remain a print publication, while others at Reed want to move the trade more (and even completely) into the digital era because of eroding advertising." Putting it that way, Bart sounds like the old-school fogy who's sadly resistant to grasping the new truth that the future is in cyberspace, and his supposed "ouster" is a win for the bloggers' side. "Bart," David Poland has written, "was in the way of the future."

Now Bart himself is fighting back, in the manner of someone who, as a kid, was fed that line by his mother about how the best way to deal with bullies is to just ignore them and who noticed that putting that into practice didn't stop the bread balls from bouncing off the back of his head in the caefteria. Speaking to New York Observer's Matt Haber, Bart insisted, "It's not a very sexy story, and that's why I'm sort of amused by all this speculation about 'behind the scenes' stuff." Bart, who doesn't see himself as having moved that far away from the red hot center of things at Variety--"I still have my office and I still come in everyday. I'll still have opinion about breaking news. I still write a weekly column. I write a blog, there are a lot of interesting plans for the future," has no problem taking criticism: "That's what you're there for. I just think that's part of the territory. If I was never criticized then I'd consider myself a failure because I'd be boring." He claims that's what he does find exasperating about all the speculation about what "really" happened is that it's "so irrelevant, it makes it sound like I'm this 35-year-old kid who lost a power struggle. And I'm 76-years-old and there is no power struggle."

Nathan Lee Loses His Voice

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

When film critic Nathan Lee signed on at The Village Voice in October 2006, he said, in reaction to the staff cuts and other problems then plaguing the paper (even as it was patting itself on the back on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary): "I came into this at a point where the Voice had been bought," he said. "The change was done; it had happened. I'm coming into it afterwards and my sense is, 'What is still valuable here; what can we still do? How can the Voice continue to have a strong, lively, influential and really smart sense of film coverage?' That's what I'm really invested in at this point." The paper turned out to be invested in other things, and now, eighteen months after claiming his first-ever regular staff position ("I've never had health benefits in my entire adult life"), Lee has been let go, from the Voice. Lee's own announcement of the unhappy news reads as follows: "In great Village Voice tradition, I was abruptly laid off today for 'economic reasons.' My employment at the paper ends immediately: someone else, alas, will be tasked with specifying the precise shade of periwinkle frosting atop the cupcakes in My Blueberry Nights. And so I am, as they say, 'looking for work,' though presumably not as a staff film critic as such jobs no longer appear to exist."

Lee, a gifted writer with his own idiosyncratic taste and a brawler's verve, who earned attention for his work in the New York Sun and The New York Times, will surely land on his feet. It's not so clear how much of the Voice's reputation as a vital force in film coverage will be left standing by this latest development. The paper that served as a home base for such writers as Andrew Sarris, Manohla Dargis, and David Edelstein (now keeping house at, respectively, the New York Observer, the New York Times, and New York magazine respectively), still has a living landmark in J. Hoberman (whose thirty-year-career at the Voice is currently serving as the basis for a tribute at the Brooklyn Academy of Music), but the paper had barely recovered from the firing of section editor Dennis Lim and writer Michael Atkinson around the same time as Lee's hiring. Lee's firing may revive talk that the head office (which, make no mistake about it, has also done its best to decimate the other Voice arts sections) has been urging the paper to do more to hype big films and cut back on the more cerebral writing about avant-garde and offbeat fare. As S. T. VanAiresdale has noted, "New York newspapers have now lost four full-time film critics in the last month." If Lee's departure really stings, it may be partly because he's a hot property and also partly because there was a time when you expected better from the Voice.

The Screengrab : new york observer

What Just Happened? Peter Bart Changes Job Titles, Film Bloggers Get the Vapors

Nathan Lee Loses His Voice