Newspapers & magazines This article is more than 22 years oldOff the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush...
This article is more than 22 years oldDuncan Campbell on a very Hollywood scandalIt was a great life, or rather The Great Life. But as of last week it has come, temporarily at least, to a halt, and its ending has stirred a fierce debate about reporting on show business and celebrities and the ethics of the Hollywood press.
For the past 26 years, George Christy's column, The Great Life, was a fixture in the Hollywood Reporter, which, along with Variety, daily catalogues the business of film and television from its headquarters in Los Angeles. Christy's role was to provide reports on premieres and parties, gentle, unmalicious showbiz gossip, the froth on the cappuccino of Hollywood social life, the schmooze rather than the news. It is a style of reporting with a history as old as Hollywood itself with some of its former, less benign practitioners, such as Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, becoming as famous as the stars they wrote about.
The genial, bow-tied Christy might have happily continued covering the swell parties in Beverly Hills until his retirement had it not been for one of his colleagues at the Reporter, David Robb, who had been the labour reporter at Variety until he joined Hollywood Reporter in 1992.
Robb started looking into allegations of what appeared to be unethical behaviour on Christy's part. His investigation focused on a number of issues, one of which concerned the small parts that Christy had been given in movies. People who have roles in films are entitled to the health and pension benefits of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), dependent on the number of films in which they have performed. Robb's inquiries seemed to indicate that Christy was going to receive benefits to which he might not be entitled and was also benefiting from the largesse of studios who might profit from friendly mentions in his column.
In April, the story was ready to run with the backing of the paper's editor, Anita Busch, who had already won a reputation for not being cowed by studio pressure. But Hollywood Reporter publisher, Robert J Dowling, was angry at what he called Robb's "rogue" investigation of which he had been unaware. He spiked it. Robb, Busch and executive film editor Beth Laski all resigned in protest. The film media had a field day. Dowling responded in the HR at the beginning of May saying that "this paper has never backed away from a legitimate story, no matter how controversial" and describing Robb and Busch's behaviour as "incomprehen sible. It was clear to me that Busch and Robb had personal agendas that ultimately led to a glaring lack of objectivity in their investigation." Dowling accused the rest of the media of distorting the story into one about ethics because it was a "sexy" subject.
Robb duly ran his investigation on the media news website, Inside.com, introducing it thus: "Investigating a colleague at your own newspaper can be hazardous to your job. I should know. It cost me mine." The Great Life continued to be lived in the pages of the Hollywood Reporter - until last weekend when the paper announced that the column was "on hold" while an "internal review" was carried out by both the publication and SAG. "When both parties have resolved these matters we will then decide on what course of action to take," says Lynda Miller for HR. "We believe in protecting the due process rights of all of our employees." At the end of last week it was reported that a federal grand jury is looking in to the pension plan allegations.
Christy himself says he is confident that the hiatus will be brief. "I'm taking a short leave of absence, I'm looking forward to working [on the column] again soon." As regards suggestions that he had received gifts from the studios, he insists that he never accepted anything inappropriate. "This is a gift-giving industry. People are thoughtful in Hollywood and appreciative. I've had bottles of wine or champagne or baskets of fruit and flowers. Good Lord, I'm not alone." Asked whether there were guidelines for what was acceptable, Christy says, "We have our own intelligent guidelines." The suggestion, made by Robb, that he had received Armani suits was "ridiculous". So why had his colleagues wanted to investigate him? "That's a long story that I will one day tell you."
But that was far from the end of the controversy. As one leading film writer in LA puts it: "This is much bigger than George Christy. This is about the whole business of coverage and access. It's also about the junket press - the people who get wined and dined and flown to Hawaii and given bags of goodies and five or 10 minutes with a star in exchange for a quid pro quo, the people who provide blurbs that you see on the ads for the most god-awful films." Charles Fleming, who teaches entertainment reporting at the University of Southern California, wrote in the LA Times: "Why is a minor player like Christy publicly reprimanded when scores of entertainment writers, editors and columnists who routinely exchange journalistic independence for access to Hollywood power are left unscathed?"
The notion of junkets - publicity events when teams of journalists are given brief access to the stars of an upcoming movie - is a topical subject. Disney pushed the boat out last month - literally - for specially favoured hacks, sending them off to Hawaii for the premiere of Pearl Harbor on board the USS John C Stennis. It was, as Howard Rosenberg of the LA Times described it, parodying President Roosevelt's reaction to the 1941 bombing, "a junket that will live in infamy . . . Thanks to these swarming hordes of shameless junketeers, TV and radio buzz over Disney's $150m movie crescendoed deafeningly this week just in time for its opening." Had the $5m spent on the lavish premiere and surrounding publicity "bought" favourable media coverage?
Reporting Hollywood has always been a delicate business. In the old days, the relationship between stars and showbiz reporters was symbiotic and mainly - but not always - friendly. Scandals, sexual orientation, marital problems might be hinted at but in general the lines between privacy and prurience remained in place.
However, gossip columnists could also wield enormous power. The two most famous were the great rivals, Hopper and Parsons. Hopper's column ran from 1928 for nearly 30 years. Like Christy, she played herself in movies - in films such as Sunset Boulevard and The Oscar - although she had already had a substantial career as an actress before her gossip career began. So powerful was she, both as a journalist and a Hollywood fixer and socialite, that she described her home as "the house that fear built".
Parsons, who was syndicated by the Hearst group and died in 1972, also wielded great influence - as she demonstrated in her book, Tell it to Louella - and she too appeared in a number of movies. In his portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s, City of Nets, Otto Freidrich wrote: "It is impossible now to realise the power once exercised by Mrs Parsons and her rival Hedda Hopper but in the 1940s these two vain and ignorant women tyrannised Hollywood."
Peter Bart, the editor-in-chief of Variety and a former studio executive himself, says that in the wake of the Christy affair, the water has been muddied because people are not making a distinction between the "celebrity journalism" of covering the stars and premieres and the "business journalism" which examines the studios and productions. On the celebrity issue, Bart, the author of Who Killed Hollywood?, says that there was certainly a tension over the power now wielded by publicists who controlled access and that the mood had changed dramatically since he first arrived in LA in 1966 as a young New York Times correspondent. "The access [to stars] you had then was incredible," he says. "Sometimes you couldn't get rid of them!"
That has changed and, with the current media frenzy for celebrity, studio publicists now routinely play publication off against publication and lay down ground rules for questions to be asked. To most actors, giving interviews is a chore that is contractually required of them. They are usually asked the same predictable questions by people whose knowledge of them extends to an often inaccurate pile of cuttings and who may then seek to psychoanalyse them on the basis of a 20-minute chat in a hotel room. Most feel that if they are being interviewed about a new film they should not necessarily be obliged to talk about their sexuality or their relationship with their parents. Hence some of the stipulations about what questions are off-limits.
It is in these muddy waters that the Hollywood press swims. Bart believes that standards can be set. "None of our people go on junkets, none of them went to Hawaii for the opening of Pearl Harbor," he says. On the question of gifts, Bart's "rule of thumb" is that "anything worth $100 or more is not acceptable". He does not feel that free "doughnuts and cookies and flowers" could buy anyone.
Bart doesn't think that the studios are any less subject to scrutiny in their business dealings than before. "I don't believe that a tacit censorship is imposed. I have never killed a story because of advertising." For both Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, keeping a credibility within the industry is vital. While both sell in the 30,000s daily, and more for their international weekly editions, they have an influence far beyond their circulation. Bart points out that "Hollywood is now corporate" - which means that many studios are part-owned by companies that have their own publications and broadcasting operations which can ensure decent publicity for their product. Pressures are subtle. Studios withdraw advertising from publications that they feel are too negative about their films. And, as in every form of journalism, friendly coverage opens many doors - it's just that more people are anxious to see what lies behind the doors in Hollywood.
One of the most entertaining tales of Hollywood reporting over the last few years was that of Tom Kummer, who freelanced for the German press from LA. Weary of the publicity process, he invented his own interviews with celebrities. When finally rumbled last year and sacked over over a bogus interview with Courtney Love, he defended his practice as "borderline journalism", saying he was doing the stars a favour by making the interviews more interesting than they would have been in reality. The Christy affair has brought to light a different boundary, the often fuzzy border between journalism and publicity. It has raised once again the question of whether reporting Hollywood is really such a Great Life.
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