In Contention

Tag: Variety

  • On In Contention going to Variety

    On August 19, 2005, In Contention was born. (That was 10 years ago today for those keeping score at home.) It was born by accident, to be honest, not at all by design. I landed a gig, then I lost it before it even started, but I had all this material gathered and ready to publish regarding the then-upcoming film awards season. I launched a blog, “In Contention” sounded edgy enough in the space and off she went. (The funny thing is I ended up keeping the first gig after all, but by then this little enterprise had taken on a small life.)

    From there it only grew. We moved out of the Blogger/Blogspot space and into the dot-com realm. We groomed a staff of like minds along the way, at one point notably large for such an outlet, but eventually honed into a tight ship that forged the In Contention identity. It became a remunerative enterprise, humming along in the bizarre but expanding niche world of awards coverage, separate from the independent movie blog ventures that were themselves gaining footing at the time (many of them, interestingly enough, unloading to buyers as of late).

    When HitFix came calling in 2011, it was a fascinating fit. It was an exciting hybrid enterprise — yin and yang. Eventually In Contention was fully acquired by the company and things really settled. But times change. HitFix has new priorities now, and I wish them well. Thankfully the four years of content we produced under that banner will soon be available right here at InContention.com for posterity. That was important to me, that my work — Guy Lodge’s work, Gerard Kennedy’s work, Roth Cornet’s work, Greg Ellwood’s work — live under one umbrella.

    But of further note to you, our readership, is that per the terms of that agreement, I am taking In Contention with me. So while all of the above was its own era, we’re now entering a very new one.

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  • At gunpoint

    Stolen outright from John Lopez’s recent, level-headed write-up of the campaign circus as it stands now.

  • CINEJABBER: For Your Consideration, ‘Die Hard,’ Best Picture

    Catch up with the idea behind these weekend posts here.

    Jeffrey Wells reminded me last weekend of Movieline’s latest restoration effort, i.e. providing scans of back issues and therefore keeping the magazines of the 1990s available and adding a bit of history to the newly designed outlet.  It also reminded me of an idea I had at Variety three years ago when I was writing the trade’s Oscar blog, Red Carpet District.

    Something people don’t know is that there is a small closet of a room (or at least it was a closet at the old digs across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, not sure about the new tower down the street) full of handsomely bound back issues of Variety.  You’re talking decades of the print publication at your fingertips.

    But while it’s fun to go back and read old industry stories and news items, the best part is to grab a latter year volume, say something from December-January or February, and get a load of the for your consideration ads.

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  • No pressure

    Variety

    UPDATE: It gets worse: Joshua Newton quotes Variety president Neil Stiles as saying “No one takes these reviews seriously,” and that the paper plans to cease reviewing altogether this year.

    EARLIER: After firing most of their chief critical staff, just one week after it came to light that they’d suppressed a negative review in order to appease a film’s well-moneyed producers, Variety hasn’t been much of a friend to the struggling art of film criticism lately.

    Amazingly, however, in this NYT take on the situation, the powers that be at the venerable trade paper find ways to make themselves look even worse. I refer to this stunning foot-in-mouth statement from editor Tim Gray, as he attempts to smooth over the Robert Koehler-“Iron Cross” fiasco:

    Of the “Iron Cross” go-round, Mr. Gray said he removed the [Robert Koehler’s] review from the Web after a lawyer for the director and producer, Joshua Newton, objected, but reposted it after viewing the film and deciding to “stand by the review as it was written.”

    The line between church and state, wrote Mr. Gray, remains as firm as in Sime Silverman’s day. “There is no advertising influence or pressure on the editorial independence of our reporting.”

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  • Wow

    Just … wow. From The Wrap:

    Todd McCarthy, who has been writing at Daily Variety for 31 years, was fired on Monday along with two other critics, as the trade elected to cut costs and move to freelance reviews.

    [McCarthy says,] “Everyone’s going to speculate, and all I can say, It’s the end of something. What that is I don’t know. I know what it means for me. I’ve been fiercely and proudly reviewing at full speed since all the cutbacks. I made sure we had no slippage in our festival coverage and film reviewing, I’ve worked hard in recent times to make sure nothing slipped. The reviews have been the most unchanged part of Variety, period. Forever.

    What a sour note to follow the Oscars with. How Variety can call itself the leading trade voice in the business and not retain a staff film critic is something I don’t quite understand, but there you have it. Commiserations all round.

  • It’s baaaack

    Remember when Variety was outed for yanking that negative review of “Iron Cross” because the film purchased a $400,000 phase one Oscar campaign from the trade?  Well, they’ve quietly slipped it back online.

    UPDATE: And now it turns out the film’s director, Joshua Newton, has grown balls big enough to consider a lawsuit against Variety for publishing the review.  Have filmmakers just lost their freaking MIND this season?

  • The price of Variety

    Roy Scheider in Iron CrossEver heard of “Iron Cross?” Don’t blame yourself if you haven’t: a Nazi revenge drama from freshman director Joshua Newton, opening in theaters next week, it appears to be notable principally for being the last film of the late Roy Scheider.

    Newton, however, had such high hopes for the film that he talked investors into a $400,000 ad campaign in Variety, enough to buy daily For Your Consideration ads in the trade paper from November to the end of nomination voting in January. Following this, Variety itself selected the film for its screening series aimed at Academy members, alongside far more illustrious awards contenders.

    Must be good, right? Well, Variety’s own critic Robert Koehler didn’t think so in his damning review of the film, which he denounced as “preposterous” and “hackneyed,” among other choice adjectives. A slightly embarrassing result for a film the paper had previously boosted, but as Gawker’s John Cook reports, Variety solved the problem quite easily — by removing Koehler’s review from their website altogether, after “Iron Cross”‘s producers complained.

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  • Renner, Stuhlbarg, Waltz among Variety’s 10 Actors to Watch

    Jeremy RennerVariety’s annual list of 10 Actors to Watch may occasionally raise questions of what constitutes a career “breakthrough” — particularly in the case of established actors who those in the know have been watching all along.

    Still, it always makes for interesting reading, not least because, in some cases, it highlights names that Variety’s editors expect to show up in the coming awards season. Last year’s list featured four actors (Melissa Leo, Viola Davis, Taraji P. Henson and Michael Shannon) who ultimately wound up in the Oscar circle. This year’s list looks unlikely to match that number (nor does it match the feminine bent of last year’s crop), but there’s some undeniably worthy talent in there:

    Laz Alonso
    Maggie Grace
    Tom Hardy
    Nicholas Hoult
    Rachelle Lefevre
    Jeremy Renner
    Alia Shawkat
    Emma Stone
    Michael Stuhlbarg
    Christoph Waltz

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  • Thompson shifts to indieWIRE this weekend

    Anne ThompsonA couple of weeks ago the news dropped that Anne Thompson would be pulling up the stakes on her Thompson on Hollywood Variety blog and shifting it over to indieWIRE.

    My immediate reaction was that the fit was better.  Thompson always seemed like an outsider at Variety, an awkward figment of a newer, fresher approach to journalism than that outlet has been willing to fully embrace.

    I’ve known Anne a couple of years now and have come to consider her a good friend in a business more full of “business associates” than actual confidants.  I wished her the best when the news fell and again today, as Eugene Hernandez announces the “new” Thompson on Hollywood and Anne herself writes up her final post under the Variety masthead, I’d like to do so again.

    It’s an exciting get for indieWIRE, a good bunch of guys who understand the business the way Anne does.

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  • Variety.com gets a new design

    Hmm.  I dig the new revamp but it seems reminiscent of…something:

    Variety.com

    HollywoodReporter.com

  • Changes at Variety

    Congrats to Tim Gray, who will be stepping up to take vacating editor-in-chief Peter Bart’s job at Variety.  Bart “will assume a new role as vice president and editorial director of Variety,” this staff article reports.  “[He] will continue to contribute his weekly column as well as his blog and serve as Variety’s ambassador in public venues, on television, on the web and at industry events.”

  • Blah, blah, blah

    UPDATE: I’ve been on a plane and then in a bed for the last however many hours, so I’ve come to the table late on this.  But Finke has responded in full and dropped the bomb that Variety wanted to buy Deadline Hollywood Daily, takes some cheap shots at Anne Thompson, etc.  No more posts on this from my end because it’s all so…pathetic.

    EARLIER: This is going to be going on for a while, but you might as well stay up to date.

    After the trinity attack on blogdom (and Nikki Finke specifically), David Poland finds irony in Variety’s anemic ad revenue while Kim Masters can’t contain the estrogen (nor pass up the chance to promote one of her old books) in a recent Daily Beast article.  Poland then lands this money shot on Masters today:

    Masters , like Finke before her blog, is without full employment as a journalist and is writing this piece as a freelancer for another blog that aspires to trafficking in gossip as “breaking news.” Slamming Variety instead of reporting on whether the accusations are factual fits the profile of the person she is defending.

    Patrick Goldstein, by the way, has responded to the weekend’s pieces at The Big Picture.  Like I said, it’s going to get ugly.  Let’s hope we can make it about the movies again real soon.

  • Waiting on the blog-o-rage

    BloggingI’ve been kinda, sorta keeping up with some Twittered reactions to the recent blogger smack downs by Cynthia Littleton, Michael Fleming and editor-in-chief Peter Bart, but curiously, no reaction from the peanut gallery…yet.  It’s a lazy Sunday, after all.

    In a nutshell, it seems with this trinity Variety has called for us all to get along.  The usual names are brought up in connection to incessant, unbearable cyber-squabbling: Jeff Wells, David Poland, Nikki Finke, Patrick Goldstein.  Sharon Waxman’s name is tossed into the hat as well, but why can’t anyone just say it?  Finke and the traffic she has generated as a result of questionable (and certainly grating) practices has put the fear into industry professionals and competetive journalists.  She is the 21st Century bad apple and she’s spoiling the bunch.

    Sadly, some smart people seem to consistently be taking her lead when it comes to sand box tactics.  If smart, longtime journalists like Goldstein and Waxman are being pulled down to her level, what can we expect of other naturally competitive and snarky writers?

    I’m in no position to stand on a soap box so I won’t.  I’ve been in my fair share of online spats and felt stupid afterwards.  Usually my bone of contention will stem from a beef on a writer’s representation of a film, hardly a fight for it’s own sake or a competitive drive to amp up the hits.  But I do hate what Finke is and has been doing and it should be brought up in a certain light.

    All of that said, I think Variety is putting itself in a precarious position by unleashing three editorials on this issue in the same day, one of them from an old media type who is widely (and wrongly) known as “hating” bloggers.  So far, no reaction, but I expect it to come soon.  And I don’t think it’ll be pretty.

    (A few greatest hits from the three pieces after the jump.  And click the pic for a larger version, by the way.)

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  • Variety ponders the season at the mid-way point

    We’ve already been over what a thin year it’s been so far for Oscar candidates – or good films at all, for that matter. Now Variety has come to the same conclusion. In his mid-year awards-season study, Timothy M. Gray goes so far as to say that “the past six months have offered fewer potential contenders than any January-June period in memory,” and wonders if we’re seeing a return to the days when the Oscars were dominated by winter releases from the majors.

    Indeed, Gray only finds one title from the first-half of the year that he thinks has main category potential: Overture Films’ “The Visitor,” the prospects of which I discussed extensively yesterday. I’m not sure I’d boil down an entire half-year to a sole film (“In Bruges,” anyone?), but I agree that “The Visitor” has a real campaigning advantage:

    Keep an eye on Overture’s “The Visitor”: Lead actor Richard Jenkins has rightly earned awards buzz, but the film has many other virtues (Thomas McCarthy’s script and direction, the other performances, etc.). McCarthy, a talented actor in his own right, has crafted an actors’ movie — a character study with current-event concerns — that will play well on DVD, so late-year mailings could pay off.

    (Indeed, the more I think about the film’s position in the awards derby, the more it reminds me of a certain tiny spring release from last year: “Away From Her.”

    Looking forward into the rest of 2008, Gray ends up pondering most of the same questionmarks that we all are, including the following questions:

    Will the early buzz sustain for Disney-Pixar’s “Wall-E” and WB’s “The Dark Knight” and Heath Ledger?

    What effect will the Clint Eastwood double whammy — November’s “Changeling” and the December bow of Warner Bros.-Village Roadshow’s “Gran Torino,” in which he stars as well as directs — have on kudos? Similarly, Scott Rudin, who was in the winner’s circle with “No Country,” has two December openers — but will he have a third with “The Reader,” whose opening date is not yet set?

    Benicio Del Toro won Cannes’ actor award for Steven Soderbergh’s “Che,” but will it find a U.S. distrib this year and, if so, in what form will the two-part film be released?

    And then there are … other questions. In the last few years, the song category has been dominated by tunes that were production numbers (as opposed to those end-credit or background songs). So does this bode well for Disney’s “High School Musical 3” and Focus’ “Hamlet 2”? (If the song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” can win, there may be hope for the latter pic’s “Rock Me Sexy Jesus.”)

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  • Question of the day

    Do webmasters really think that a boycott is going to be a blip on Variety’s radar?

  • Fascinating stuff

    Completely off topic, but one of the projects I’ve been working on here at The Times has been the vast archive the paper is collecting online, assembling more than two hundred years of reportage, slowly but surely, for web consumption.

    You can learn first hand information about the Jack the Ripper killings of 1888 on one page, for instance, or read an exclusive column from Albert Einstein published after astronomer Arthur Eddington proved the physicist’s then 14-year-old theory of relativity in 1919 during a solar exclipse.

    It struck me that a publication like Variety, with nearly 100 years of specific entertainment news reporting and analysis, ought to look into something like this.  They’ve got a daunting backlog of issues, hard bound in a room just outside the news room (and believe me, it can be fascinating to go back and look at Best Picture FYC ads for, say, “Predator 2” — seriously).  But a system that puts generations of industry reportage at the click of a button would be fantastic.

    Just a thought.

  • Great idea

    I was glad to see yesterday that Peter Bart has launched a daily blog at Variety. Hearing all those overblown and uneducated declarations that Bart “hates the internet” has been taxing in my time as an adjunct employee of the trade (and I’m the first to admit I’ve been one of the voices in the crowd in the past). But the truth is, Peter has always had a more progressive view of the Web than people seemed to think. That’s always the impression I got, in any case.

    This decision is a step in the right direction.

  • Whew…

    I’m sure I’m not the only one who heaved a sigh of relief after reading some of the reviews of Woody Allen’s latest, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” which recently premiered out of competition at Cannes. The consensus appears to be that the film, while unlikely to enter the canon of his greatest, is an attractive, frothy entertainment.

    In his Variety review, Todd McCarthy puts it thus:

    “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” is a sexy, funny divertissement that passes as enjoyably as an idle summer’s afternoon in the titular Spanish city … pic offers potent romantic fantasy elements for men and women and a cast that should produce the best commercial returns for a Woody Allen film since “Match Point.”

    McCarthy is particularly enamoured of Penelope Cruz’s performance, deeming her to be “dynamite” in the film, and extending the Anna Magnani comparisons that we first started hearing when “Volver” emerged two years ago.

    Happily, The Hollywood Reporter’s Kirk Honeycutt is equally enthusiastic about the film, and is most impressed by its Spanish stars:

    The film belongs to Bardem and Cruz. This is a Spanish version of “Private Lives,” a couple that cannot live apart or together, whose love will always burst into fiery combat. Their scenes are some of the funniest Allen has ever put on film, and the culmination of this love/hate tango is not to be missed.

    I had a good feeling about this project from the get-go, but then I admit I’m one of those die-hard Allen supporters who maintains that “Melinda and Melinda” is a misunderstood almost-great, and tried his damnedest to find something – anything – to like about “Hollywood Ending.” So I’m thrilled to learn that this is likely to be one of those Allen treats I can enjoy guilt-free, without having to construct a defence case for it afterwards.

    As for awards prospects, after those notices, I’m going to go ahead and put Cruz on the lower rungs of my ladder of Best Supporting Actress contenders. Woody’s films have long been good to women in this category, and while the competition looks crowded this year, a slight but appealing performance from a well-liked star is often the one left standing when the bigger guns misfire. As for Allen himself, any film of his that is generally given at least a B+ by the critics is a contender for a Best Original Screenplay nomination, so I’m going to plunge in and put him on my list. What can I say? The sun’s out (at last) in London, one of my favourite auteurs appears to be back on track, and I’m in a generous mood.