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Everything you need to know about storytelling, in 5 minutes

Tommy Tomlinson — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:27:21 +0000

I spoke to the Public Relations Society of America’s Charlotte chapter on Wednesday. They’re a good group. Sometimes I speak off the top of my head at this sort of thing, but this time I actually wrote out some thoughts, so I thought I’d post them in the spirit of Austin Kleon’s “show your work” idea. If you do any kind of storytelling for a living, these are probably basic ideas … but maybe not.

Tomlinson

Thanks for having me here today. I want this to be more of a conversation than a speech. I don’t need much time for a speech, because today I’m going to teach you everything you need to know about storytelling in five minutes.

But first I want to tell you a little story.

My wife (Alix Felsing, Storyboard’s copyeditor) has this uncanny gift for finding the worst possible movie on TV at any given moment. The other night she landed on the SyFy channel, on this movie called Collision Earth.

I’m gonna try to come up with a quick synopsis that does this movie justice.

The event that gets the action going is a solar flare so powerful that it knocks the planet Mercury out of its orbit and sends it hurtling toward Earth. This would be bad.

Along with knocking Mercury out of its orbit, somehow this solar flare also magnetized Mercury, so as it heads for Earth, cars and stuff start flying into the air to meet it.

There’s ONE scientist who knows how to fix this. In fact he has built this giant battering ram in space for just this situation. But for reasons I never did quite follow, this scientist was fired from NASA years before, and his giant battering ram was unfinished and left out in space to rot, and now, of course, NOBODY WILL LISTEN TO HIM.

It just so happens that this disgraced scientist’s wife is an astronaut whose spacecraft is — you won’t believe this — orbiting Mercury. But the solar flare hit the ship so hard that a little while later, the other astronaut on board keels over and dies.

So he’s on the ground trying to save Earth, and she’s up in space trying to save Earth, and they’re actually talking to each other via ham radio — I don’t even wanna get into how THAT happened.

There’s not nearly enough time to tell you all the ways this movie is ludicrous, so I’ll give you just two:

One, this giant magnetized planet that’s flying toward us is just sucking cars off the earth, EXCEPT when the disgraced scientist needs a car to get somewhere; then his car stays on the ground just fine, even as other cars are being sucked off the planet right in front of him.

And two, this astronaut up there, when she needs to move around the spaceship, she doesn’t float through the capsule in zero gravity … she just gets up and walks around like she’s at the mall.

I have only scratched the surface of how stupid on every level this movie is. But we watched the damn thing all the way to the end. When it was over, I looked at my wife and said, “Why did we do that?” But the truth is, I knew why.

And here’s where I tell you everything you need to know about storytelling in five minutes.

First, I’m gonna draw three objects.

This is a sympathetic character. It’s probably someone you like, but at the very least it’s someone you’re emotionally invested in. You care what happens to this person.

This is a hurdle. It’s an obstacle of some kind — could be a bad guy, could be a physical challenge, could be some sort of internal emotional demon.

And this is the pot of gold — some kind of goal, some kind of reward, physical or emotional or whatever.

A story is the journey of this character you care about, confronting and dealing with this obstacle, to reach this pot of gold.

In addition to these three pictures, you need to answer two questions:

1. What’s the story about?

2. What’s it REALLY about?

Here’s what I mean. What the story’s about is literally what happens in the narrative — who this character is, what goal he or she is trying to reach, what obstacle is in the way. The unique set of facts.

What the story’s REALLY about is a way of saying, what’s the point? What’s the universal meaning that someone should draw from this story? What’s the lesson?

When you think about it that way, you’ll find that you end up with a second obstacle and a second goal.

Think about the first Rocky movie. What’s it about? It’s about a no-name boxer in Philly (sympathetic character) who gets a chance to fight the champ (obstacle) and goes the distance (pot of gold).

He doesn’t win the fight — they saved that for Rocky II. The goal isn’t always the ultimate prize. Sometimes the goal is completing the journey. Proving you can go the distance is a worthy goal in itself.

But what’s the movie REALLY about? In a larger sense, the obstacle is not Apollo Creed. The obstacle is Rocky’s own self-doubt. The goal is making something of himself, not just out of pride but so he can prove himself to Paulie and feel worthy of Adrian’s love.

Why is that second layer of meaning important? Because not everybody is a professional boxer. But all of us have doubted ourselves and had other people doubt us. All of us have had the universal feeling of knowing that going the distance is a victory in itself.

That’s what makes stories matter: when you read or watch or hear a story about a total stranger, in a completely different world, and you recognize that story as your own.

Stories connect us as human beings. In fact, they’re part of what MAKES us human beings.

Of course, I’ve oversimplified a lot here today. Most good stories are dense and complicated, with many characters and lots of obstacles and elusive goals. Sometimes they jump around in time and space. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what they’re really about.

But this basic framework — these three pictures, those two questions — lie at the heart of it all. If you don’t have them all, you might have something, but you don’t have a story.

Why did we stay up way too late to watch the end of that stupid movie? Because for all they got wrong, they got the heart of it right. They made us care about this goofy disgraced scientist and his walking-on-the-floor-of-the-spaceship astronaut wife.

The story was about saving Earth. But it was really about love, and the amazing things two people can accomplish when they believe in each other. They can move mountains — not just mountains, but whole planets.

So when the astronaut used her husband’s space battering ram to knock Mercury out of our path like a giant galactic cue ball, I went to bed happy and satisfied.

Because I was reminded, once again, that a good story can save us all.

Tommy Tomlinson is a staff writer for Sports on Earth and writes the Liner Notes column for Storyboard. He has written for Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine, Garden & Gun, Our State magazine, and others. He was a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for his Charlotte Observer columns, and The Week named him the best local columnist in America. This piece was reprinted from his blog.

Writing a tornado narrative, with Esquire’s Luke Dittrich

Paige Williams — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:58:27 +0000

The news out of Moore, Okla., couldn’t help remind us of the historic tornado in Joplin, Mo., and of one narrative in particular: Luke Dittrich’s National Magazine Award-winning Esquire piece on how a group of strangers survived by crowding into a convenience store cooler. The scenario, which happened two years ago yesterday, was echoed this week at Plaza Towers Elementary, where 70 to 80 children survived by taking cover with their teachers in a bathroom. Dittrich visited the Nieman Foundation last year to talk about his piece, “Heavenly Father!…,” as part of the Nieman Narrative speaker series. Dittrich’s story was so strong partly because he recognized the opportunity for narrative. From a gargantuan topic (tornado), he extracted Story (what happened to a specific set of people caught in a specific shared circumstance). The piece works because it contains the key narrative elements, including:

Arc. The story has a natural beginning, middle, and end. The people went into the cooler, helped each other survive, and then returned to their lives. Dittrich, in his Nieman talk:

courtesy Esquire

I was drawn to the cooler because it’s so tightly focused – it’s a very tight space with a bunch of people crammed inside, in the dark. I liked the idea of simplifying it as much as possible. The thing that made it easier was the fact that there weren’t two dozen disconnected individuals in there; there were maybe six or seven smaller units. My biggest fear was that (readers) were gonna lose track of who’s who. Approaching it as family units or as friend units, or as people who were helping each other, helped me try to keep it as comprehensible as possible.

Characters. Strong narratives usually depend on a strong leading character or characters—someone who faces a challenge and then either surmounts it or fails. Dittrich tracked down every person from the cooler and then:

I first tell them to just give me a little backstory – who are ya and what do you do? How long have you been around here? Where do you come from? In this case I had them start with what happened as best they could remember from the moment they woke up that morning to the end of the day, and to just walk me through every single thing they could remember about that day.

Dittrich

Detail/description. Dittrich went so far as to have the people from the Fastrip cooler sketch out everyone’s places as best they could recollect, to better “see” the scene and to make sure the details lined up:

I got anybody that could to sketch out who was around them. When I got them finally together at the site of the Fastrip I got them to arrange themselves as they were, as they were crouched down and draped over each other, so I could picture it in my head.

To read the whole conversation with Dittrich, about the tornado and other stories, go here.

Annotation Tuesday! Amy Wallace and one of “the most despised and feared” men in Hollywood

Paige Williams — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:27:05 +0000

When Amy Wallace profiled then-Variety editor Peter Bart for Los Angeles magazine, she took on issues of access, personality, misdirection, industry politics, journalism and retaliation. To write about a guy who’s been called “the most hated man in Hollywood” demands guts and patience. To pull it off as she did requires a certain tact and grace. Wallace, an expert on the psychology of Hollywood, lifts the veil for us here in this installment of “Annotation Tuesday!” by taking us line by line through “Hollywood’s Information Man,” which is as much about how journalists cover the filmmaking industry as it’s about how Bart operated about town.

Green

Our guest annotator is Elon Green, who writes for The Awl and contributes to Longform.org. His comments are in blue, Wallace’s in green. He starts us off with a couple of questions for Wallace:

Storyboard: Not long ago, you told us, “A profile seeks to capture the essence—the point—of the person being profiled, and that is done, often, through narrative.” Does the narrative become more important when, as is the case with Peter Bart, the essence seems so elusive?

Amy Wallace: I guess so, though a more important distinction in this story was that the narrative was double-barreled. There were the stories about Bart moving through the world of Hollywood. But there were also the stories that detailed my personal interactions with Bart. As I searched for the essence of Bart, I realized—and this realization came during the writing process, late in the game—that he was a man who wielded enormous power in Hollywood in large part because his essence was elusive. He refused to be pegged. He wore many hats, and never failed to exploit the advantages that came with that shape-shifting ability. And, importantly, I realized that I had a lot of first-person experience with him that had allowed me to witness the way he wielded power—by exerting it on me. This was at a time when it seemed every profile in Vanity Fair started with the writer detailing what they had eaten for lunch during an interview with Meg Ryan, and for that reason I resisted appearing in the piece for a long time. But then I realized that the way Bart was working me was a window into how he worked everyone. And once I realized that, punctuating the piece with our conversations really made sense.

Amy Wallace

This story is now 12 years old. What were you like back then? How do you imagine Bart saw you?

I was 38 then, so I wasn’t a kid. I had a lot of experience as a newspaper reporter. But I think one key thing that defined the way Bart saw me was that I had left newspapers to become a full-time magazine writer. I was shifting gears and trying to excel in a new form. And he already wrote for magazines—he had a regular column in GQ. He knew that, if he wished, he could help me break into national magazines and directly said as much (it’s in the piece). The power dynamic—him established, me striving—was key to the way he interacted with me.

“Hollywood’s Information Man“
By Amy Wallace
Los Angeles magazine
9.1.01

Peter Bart is on the phone, and he’s threatening to sue.

“I really take umbrage at the gotcha nature of your interrogation,” he says. His voice is taut. I can’t see his knees, but I’m sure at least one is twitching. not a write-around. Was the Los Angeles magazine name a help or a hindrance in persuading Bart to cooperate? And was access necessary?/eg Access was key to this story, and I explicitly told Bart that I wouldn’t do the piece without it. My original idea for the story was that the world of Hollywood’s trade papers fascinated me and I thought Bart was a great main character through which to tell that story. He was smart, had worked inside and outside the studios, had been a journalist and written books–through him I would pull back the curtain and explain the odd symbiotic role the trades played then in the town they supposedly merely covered. I met with Bart for lunch and told him I wanted to write “a New Yorker-style profile” of him. I said I wanted him to think about it overnight and not tell me until the next day, because if he said yes, I could guarantee he was going to get sick of me. I told him I was going to read every word he’d ever written (not a small task), show up at every public event he headlined, and be a fly on the wall in as many situations as he would allow. The next morning he called and said, “Let’s do it.” As for the twitching knee detail—I ended up spending so much time with Bart in so many circumstances that I felt certain about the knee twitching. This was an important beginning because it not only said that I’d met him/spent time with him, it signaled to readers that I’d spent SO much time with him that I felt that I knew him well. Whatever was coming, it was going to be a deeply reported piece./aw

Bart, the editor-in-chief of Variety, the entertainment industry’s dominant newspaper, is accustomed to being in charge. Studio heads woo him; strivers kiss his ass. Everyone wants his insight and his wisdom—or prominent placement in Variety’s big, glossy pages. In his weekly column, “The Back Lot,” he alternately strokes and scolds moguls and movie stars, addressing them by their first names. When Bart telephones the powerful, he is put right through. Now he’s calling me.

“I think to plunk documents out of context,” he says, “on people whose lives are as busy as yours or mine is a little unfair. This is not consistent with the access and cooperation I have afforded you.”

Over several months I have encountered a dizzying variety of Peters. I have spent many hours with Charming Peter, who is smart, funny, fierce. I have gotten to know Judgmental Peter, who loves to size up others. I’ve met Crude Peter, Brilliant Peter, Hypocritical Peter, Loyal Peter.

Bart calls himself “Zelig-like.” A setter of rules who hates to follow them, a lover of labels who resents being characterized, a seeker of the truth who doesn’t always tell it, Bart believes he is immune to the conflicts that derail lesser men. It’s one of the things that place him among the most despised and feared people in Hollywood. I listen to him speaking now. It’s a Peter I’ve never met.

“When you’re in public life, people attack you,” Intimidating Peter tells me. “But I’m taken aback by a bogus document suddenly being slammed on the desk. I’ll send you a note saying I will sue you, which I sure as hell will.” He never sent me that note, though we did have a phone conversation after the piece appeared. But I’ll get to that later. As I said in response to your opening questions, when I realized that Bart’s interactions with me were relevant and revelatory, I started to look for ways to use them. And it occurred to me that they could become the scaffolding for the piece./aw
IF YOU ARE A DOCTOR OR A GROCER or an airline pilot with no ties to the business that produces America’s number-one export—entertainment—you probably have never heard of Peter Bart. But if you are among the 70,000 people in Los Angeles, New York, and around the world who can’t start the day without knowing which big-name movie director just got a two-picture deal, Bart is an institution. But I’m going to make you./eg Thanks. Yes, this was key to the piece. Bart was a huge power broker in Hollywood, but most people outside of the entertainment business had never heard of him. I had to make a case for why they should read 13,000 words./aw

Over nearly four decades in Los Angeles he’s been a reporter for The New York Times, an executive at three movie studios, an independent film producer, a screenwriter, and an author of both novels and nonfiction. For the past dozen years he has been the editor of and most influential columnist at Daily Variety and Weekly Variety, the sister publications whose zippy headlines, who’s-in-who’s-out reporting, and largely anonymous sources routinely make and break reputations. In clout-conscious Hollywood, that makes Bart not just an observer but a player.

There are two keys to success in Hollywood: relationships and information. Bart traffics in both. He lunches almost every day with a studio chief, a marketing executive, a top manager or talent agency head, an entertainment lawyer or lobbyist. In the course of just a few weeks earlier this year he dined with screenwriter William Goldman; Ron Meyer, president of Universal Studios; Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Warner Bros. president of worldwide production; Michael Ovitz, CEO of Artists Management Group; Mike De Luca, former New Line president of production (and now production chief at DreamWorks SKG); Mike Medavoy, chairman of Phoenix Pictures; Tom Sherak, partner at Revolution Studios; Rob Friedman, vice chairman at Paramount Pictures; John McLean, executive director of the Writers Guild of America; Don Marron, chairman of PaineWebber; and Skip Brittenham, a partner in the entertainment law firm Ziffren, Brittenham, Branca & Fischer. Yes./aw

These meals aren’t interviews, according to Bart, but meetings between equals. After all, in his 17 years as an executive, most prominently at Paramount Pictures, Bart was one of them. He likes to think he still is. “Some people say I owe Joe Roth a lot,” Bart says of the former Disney chief who now runs Revolution Studios. “But I don’t. Joe Roth owes me. I gave him his first job. “(While Bart was president of Lorimar Film Company, Roth produced the 1979 dud Americathon, but it was Roth’s fourth film, not his first.) The decision-making was less about cataloguing untruths and more about exploring Bart’s fundamental belief that he was the expert on his own truth at any given moment. It is often said that Los Angeles is a place people come to reinvent themselves. Bart had embraced that idea with gusto, not only by working in many different capacities in and out of the biz, but also by asserting various identities, whichever one fit best in whatever situation he placed himself in./aw

“The same with John Calley,” Bart says of the head of Sony Pictures. Bart has known Calley since the late 1960s, when Bart says Calley pitched him Catch-22. Bart calls Calley “the country gentleman”—a vaguely catty reference to Calley’s decision to leave the world of moviemaking for 13 years, only to return in 1993 as president of MGM/United Artists. I asked Bart to explain it, and he did./aw “I owe John Calley a lot? John Calley owes me,” he says, asserting that a positive column he wrote made Calley a contender for the post. “I think I was very important in getting him his job at MGM.”

In his weekly Variety column and in bimonthly pieces in GQ, Bart speaks as one who knows Hollywood and everyone in it. His vocabulary is a mix of the colloquial (he refers often to “the rules,” “the game,” “the fat cats,” “the old farts,” “the suits”) and the arcane. Rare is the attractive woman whom Bart does not label “lissome.” Most notably, in a town infamous for air kisses and false praise, Bart often writes what he means. DreamWorks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg is “hyperactive,” while a conversation with Sandy Litvack, a former top executive at Disney, is “akin to poking one’s head in an oven.” Producer Brian Grazer and director Ron Howard “exude about as much charisma as Wal-Mart managers,” while George Lucas is “simply so rich and mythologized that no one professes to be able to interact with [him] on a normal human level.”

“Perhaps,” Bart wrote last year in a column addressed to Robert Redford, “there’s something in your … head that says ‘I’m a star, I take up a lot of ego space; my movies should, too.’” He’s made the same complaint to Warren Beatty, whom he calls the priapic prince. Bart has written several columns about Beatty’s filmmaking and womanizing—even going so far as to describe the sounds the actor-director-write-producer supposedly makes during “moments of sexual congress.”

“You have to understand, if Peter is criticizing or praising you, the thing that’s solid about it is this is a guy who knows our business,” says Harvey Weinstein, Miramax’s disheveled cofounder, whom Bart has called a slob more than once. “He said my shirt looked like I was a refugee from a food fight. He calls me roly-poly. But this guy put The Godfather into production! It’s my favorite movie of all time. So even if I’m mad at him, I can’t be mad at him.”

Peter Guber, former chairman of Sony Pictures, goes further. “Peter is riding in the general’s car—Variety is the general’s car. And you salute the general’s car even when the general’s not in it,” Guber says. “I say to him, ‘Never let go of this job, because the wolves will attack. People are kept at bay by your power.’ It’s a tremendous platform and weapon, and people view it as such. So he’s feared and respected—or respected and feared—depending on the person.”

Besides, says Sherry Lansing, chair of Paramount Pictures, “Peter has the power to affect the way people think.” you’ve said, is to conduct secondaries “ideally before I sit down with the subject.” And how has your interview style/technique changed since this piece was written? /eg I conducted these interviews during the months I spent talking to Bart. This was a situation in which no one spoke to me until they’d gotten Bart’s permission to do so—and made sure he was participating in the piece. So I couldn’t fish around beforehand. Also, just to clarify my statement (which you quote accurately) that I like to do secondary interviews first—mostly I think that’s important for celebrity interviews, when you are only going to get limited time with the person and are unlikely to be allowed to follow up. In those situations, where you’re only going to get one face-to-face, I find it’s very helpful to have talked to secondary sources first, because 1) those people often give you great insights that help you frame better questions and 2) being able to tell James Franco that you’ve already talked to the director of his next movie makes Franco (or whoever) feel like you’re at least trying hard to get things right/taking him seriously. Anyway, I don’t know that my interview style/technique has changed enormously. My basic technique is: Be prepared. Read/watch/know everything you can before you go in./aw

That power derives in large part from his position at Variety, the Industry’s 96-year-old broadsheet that doesn’t just cover entertainment news but helps make it. It is Hollywood’s prime bulletin board—what one marketing consultant likens to “a high school newspaper that everyone has a tremendous need to see their names in.” It’s not just an ego thing. In a world built on illusions, being mentioned in Variety lends legitimacy. It makes you seem real. In Hollywood, seeming is believing. Many profiles—the best ones, I think—are a window into a world that the reader has never considered before. I make a point of looking for stories like that. Another example would be my Wired profile of Dr. Paul Offit, which also was a portrait of the anti-vaccine movement that he works so hard to counter./aw

When Variety reports that Leonardo DiCaprio is in talks to star in a film, for example, savvy readers know chances are good that someone is merely floating DiCaprio’s name. Why? To turn up the heat on Matt Damon, say, or some other foot-dragging actor the movie studio really wants to sign. Agents and publicists often complain that Variety writes about deals before they’re done. But those same people plant stories in Variety all the time in hopes of clinching a deal or killing someone else’s. It was well known in Hollywood, but not outside of Hollywood. In fact, I’d say an interesting thing about the way this piece was received within the entertainment business was that the reaction on many fronts was not, “Wow, I never knew that!” but more, “Wow, we all know that happens/Bart does that/etc…, but nobody ever SAYS so in public!” This story in many ways was hiding in plain sight. Many people around town knew about the “bombshells” I reported. But no one ever had made them public before./aw

Here, pecking order determines more than just who gets a table with an ocean view. The perception of who’s on top determines which projects are produced, who will work on them, and how much money they’ll make. More than any other entity, Variety reflects and informs Hollywood’s collective consciousness. Readers don’t just parse the information on its pages; they dissect what stories are where, who is quoted up high, who is relegated to beyond the jump. With its trademark “slanguage,” Variety helps its subscribers keep score—an essential service in a town obsessed with rank. Whether you’ve “ankled” (quit) or been “upped” (promoted) at a “praisery” (public relations firm), a “diskery” (record company), or a “tenpercentery” (talent agency), if the story runs on Variety’s front, it means you matter. By extension, Bart matters to you.

In 1997 Emilio Estevez, the actor-director, was so distressed by Bart’s dismissal of his film The War at Home that he fired off a two-page letter that was widely distributed around town. The letter was intended to diminish Bart, but its vitriol only confirmed Bart’s central place in the Industry.

“In you, I see a failed movie producer, hiding behind the protective veil of your post… It is sad and pathetic,” Estevez wrote. He urged Bart to “1. Simply not see my films. 2. Drop dead sometime soon. 3. Go fuck yourself.” He signed off with this: “Enjoy life from your bully pulpit, little man.”

Not for nothing did one top executive in town famously dub Bart “the most hated man in Hollywood.” For not only does Bart control the Industry’s bible, but by virtue of his station he always gets something that everyone—in and out of Hollywood—desperately wants: the last word. That’s unintentional. I’ve never thought of that./aw

***

“I have Peter Bart for you.”

The silken voice of Bart’s assistant could not be more different from his own, which is slightly nasal, rapid-fire. His accent is so hard to place and his delivery at times so oddly paced that some have speculated, half seriously, that he modeled it after Al Pacino’s staccato in The Godfather. Honestly, I can’t remember. But whether he did or not, it’s telling that people gossip about the possibility that he did./aw

This is Condescending Peter calling, as he often does, to talk trash about other journalists. “Did you read Patrick Goldstein’s column today? What was he talking about? You know who’s running out of ideas? Goldstein,” he’ll say, referring to the Los Angeles Times’s movie columnist. When Charles Fleming, a former Variety reporter, writes an opinion piece in the Times about the ethical dilemmas of the Hollywood press corps, Bart sniffs, “This story epitomizes him. It’s like a blur. A lot of undeveloped ideas.”

Today his target is Variety’s archrival, The Hollywood Reporter. “Poor little George Christy,” Bart says, referring to the Reporter’s gossip columnist. “I’m all for exposes, but George Christy? The level of small-time stuff he does, I mean, who cares?” Christy is being investigated for accepting expensive gifts and movie credits—which qualified him for Screen Actors Guild health benefits—from the people he writes about. When the Reporter’s own labor writer, David Robb, filed a piece on Christy, its publisher refused to run it. Robb and Anita M. Busch, the trade paper’s editor, resigned in protest.

Bart, however, sees the Christy affair as an indictment not so much of a journalist allegedly on the take but of the editor and the reporter who fought to reveal it. Both Robb and Busch once worked at Variety. It’s hard to tell whom he loathes more.

“It’s a fascinating implosion,” Bart says gleefully. “It reminds me of when Robert Altman directed a picture–this was when he was drinking. At a certain point he would turn on his main characters and make them into hideous creatures. That’s what Dave Robb and Anita Busch would have done here, too, but I wouldn’t have it, and I fired them.”

Actually, he did no such thing. Variety’s personnel department confirms Robb’s and Busch’s assertions that they both resigned. Fortune profile of Steve Florio, whom Elkind and Florio unmask as a serial fabulist. How concerned were you that readers would eventually dismiss everything that came out of Bart’s mouth?/eg I wasn’t concerned one way or another. First of all, he didn’t dissemble about everything. He just liked to tell the most dramatic story—as we say at one point in the piece, he likes to be at the red-hot center. And if that meant exaggerating, so be it. That was my impression./aw

***

IT’S OSCAR EVE, and Peter Bart has just arrived at his third party in less than 24 hours. “I could use a drink,” he tells his wife, as some of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars preen before him: Julia, Russell, Kevin.

Owlish in round spectacles, with tufts of thinning black and gray hair, Bart is five feet nine inches tall I think I asked him. And I’m 5’10”, so I have a pretty good take on whether 5’9” rings true./aw and has the trim, tanned physique of a tennis player. He looks for a moment as if he is standing at the edge of a pool, weighing whether to get wet. Actors tend to bore him, so it’s not the press of famous flesh that’s making him thirsty. Bart, who is 69 years old, has a complicated relationship with the industry. Never are his conflicts more glaring than during Hollywood’s High Holy Days—Academy Awards time—when the movie business celebrates and contemplates itself.

Before Bart can order a vodka martini, however, he is spotted by Bill Maher, who steps up and gives him a nudge. “Well,” the host of TV’s Politically Incorrect says with gusto, “if it isn’t Hollywood’s top fucking information man!”

Having worn many hats during his long career, Bart delights these days in wearing several at once. When he wants to attend a Writers Guild of America meeting that is closed to the press, he dusts off his screenwriter credentials. (He claims to be the only editor who is an active voting member of the WGA. It’s been so long that I have to admit that I can’t recall precisely, but: We fact-checked this piece, as we do every piece at Los Angeles, with utmost care. Given that, and given what I know of the magazine’s research editor Eric Mercado, I would guess that this was impossible to prove or disprove.)/aw When he wants to cast a vote for Best Picture, he activates “the part of me that’s an Academy voter.” (His Academy membership is a holdover from his years as a producer.) When he wants to collect a speaking fee, he turns into a paid adviser, giving tips—to cite one recent example—to the film division of cable network HBO.

“I have lived a split-level life in Hollywood,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1999 book, The Gross: The Hits, the Flops–the Summer That Ate Hollywood. But he will commit to neither one. His “dualities,” as he calls them, Big question. When it comes to this piece, I think I’ve already shed some light above. But in every piece, there are themes that emerge and must be wrestled with. How do you do that? You gather all your reporting, you read it over, looking for echoes. You spend a lot of time thinking about what seemed to resonate most in the moment. There’s no magic to it. You put in the time and think./aw are not liabilities but the keys to his success. “I enjoy the fact that my relationships with people have so many different colorations,” Bart says. “I’ve never thought of myself as just a whatever-I-was. I always think it’s fun to try and reinvent yourself.”

On the weekend of the Academy Awards ceremony, Bart’s many identities come out to play. Three days of self-congratulatory events unfold like so many garish, pungent flowers. Some on the A-list grumble about the chaos of Oscar-party fever—the long waits for valet parking, the glut of hors d’oeuvres—but those who are not invited are so mortified about what their omission implies that some leave town to save face. The main way that the piece has become utterly dated is that the trades are no longer as powerful as they were then. Variety is trying to reboot at the moment and the Hollywood Reporter is a glossy vehicle for luxury advertising (that actually caters brilliantly to this same insecurity I describe here, by celebrating power-brokers and putting their pictures on high-quality paper). What hasn’t changed at all is the you’re-only-as-good-as-your-last-project mentality. What hasn’t changed is how being perceived as successful is half the battle. And the fear–the fear hasn’t changed. If anything, as new ways of consuming entertainment have threatened the revenue streams of traditional Hollywood, it’s only grown./AW

Variety’s top man doesn’t have to worry. It all begins with Friday night’s annual celebration at the Beverly Hills mansion of agent-to-the-stars Ed Limato. The dinner is a magnet for Oscar nominees as well as Limato’s top-drawer clients. The embossed invitations are hard to come by, and the media are, officially, not welcome. Bart is an exception. This year, as every year, he RSVP’d yes.

Saturday afternoon, literary agent Bob Bookman throws a garden party for screenwriters and agents at his Hancock Park home. Bart makes an appearance. Then he stops home, dons a cobalt blue dress shirt and black blazer—the dark-on-dark uniform of Hollywood’s male elite—and heads back to Beverly Hills for Miramax’s bash at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I was at the Miramax party, but not at Bookman’s beforehand. Bart told me he’d stopped home to change. There’s no substitute for being with your subject. As much as you can be until you feel you’ve figured them out./aw The event is known for skits that spoof the Oscar contenders, and to gain entrance the media must agree to leave all spoofing off the record. For Bart the restriction is moot: He never carries a reporter’s notebook.

He pushes through a ring of admirers who surround the night’s host, Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein. Barrel-shaped and garrulous, Weinstein is one of Bart’s favorite sources. He is also a principal in Miramax/Talk Books, and he has bid to publish Bart’s books. Bart and Weinstein shake hands, but there are others waiting, and Bart backs away. “There’s something kind of primitive about him,” Bart says. He means it as a compliment. I could just tell by the twinkle in his eyes when he said it. “Primitive” was an Alpha-male quality, and one that he prized. Also, I knew they liked each other./aw

Bart scans the crowd and heads straight for movie producer David Brown, whose many films range from Jaws to last year’s Chocolat. Brown contributed a blurb to the jacket of Bart’s most recent book, calling it “must reading for all who care.” Bart greets Brown warmly, then maneuvers toward producer-director Irwin Winkler. Their friendship dates to the 1970s, when Bart—then vice president of production at Paramount Pictures—set up Winkler’s movie The Gambler. A quick hello, a pat on the shoulder, and Bart keeps moving. Near a buffet table piled with crab cakes and Peking duck, he makes a lunch date with Ted Field, a music and film mogul to whom Bart gave his first break in the movie business. It was the early ’80s, and Bart was senior vice president of production at MGM.

“When I was at MGM I said to Ted, ‘Why don’t you get a picture going? Here’s an idea. If you want it, it’s yours,’” Bart says, explaining how he sold Field a treatment that he had written with his youngest daughter, Dilys. The treatment became the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds, and the sale helped pay Dilys’s way through Stanford University.

Completing his first lap around the room, Bart returns to his table, nods fondly at his wife, and finally takes a few sips of vodka. Steadicam Copa shot in Goodfellas./eg By the time Nigel Sinclair, cochairman of the British film company Intermedia, stops by to pay his respects, Bart is coiled less tightly. So, as he often does, he launches into a ribald tale from one of his past lives. In this one a panicky crew member calls Bart from the set of the 1972 movie The Getaway to say that the film’s two stars are having an affair. What made this report especially juicy at the time: One of them, Ali MacGraw, was married to Bart’s friend and then boss at Paramount, Robert Evans.

“I was the guy who got the phone call: ‘Ali went into Steve McQueen’s trailer 24 hours ago, and they haven’t come out. What should we do?’” Bart says, enjoying the story he has dined out on for 30 years. “I said, ‘Take a hint from this.’ And I hung up.” said, ”If we had our druthers, we journalists would always want to encounter our celebrity subjects in an environment they would naturally be in.” Is this it, for Bart? And does that philosophy of immersion extend to profiles of noncelebrities?/eg I would argue that Bart—though powerful in his rarefied world—WAS a noncelebrity, which is precisely why I could spend as much time with him as I did. Celebrities rarely let you spend more than a few days at most in their presence. But even when the time is limited, it’s always better to meet your subject in a place where they actually spend time when you’re not there. And when you can see how they interact with people in their world, even better./aw

***

Mentor Peter I was having a long conversation with my friend J.R. Moehringer about the story, and I was nattering on about all the different scenarios I’d seen him in and I must’ve said something like, “There’s Condescending Peter and Bossy Peter and Flattering Peter and…” We both went silent and then: BAM! He and I have talked about that moment for years as one of the great “Your peanut butter is in my chocolate/your chocolate is in my peanut butter” moments (that’s an archaic Reese’s Cup ad, for those of you who don’t recall it). It was enormously satisfying and fun and underscores another piece of advice about striving for greatness in magazine writing: Develop a great panel of advisers./aw is at Le Dome, telling me what to eat.

He’s invited me to lunch at the frumpy power restaurant on the Sunset Strip. If you’d ever been at Le Dome – or at the Plaza Hotel in NYC before they renovated and made condos, for that matter—you would have reached immediately for frumpy. It just fit./aw With a flourish he orders us each a chicken burger with mixed greens—the favorite meal, he says, of his own mentor, Robert Evans. “There’s no bun, so it’s the Atkin’s diet,” he tells me. “Not that you or I are in dire need of diets. You look like a jock.”

Then he offers a career advice. “I’d like to see you do books. You are a disciplined writer, and for someone who can write and be disciplined about it, doing books and magazine articles is a wonderful thing. That’s why I like writing for GQ every other month. I would love to see you do that sort of thing,” he says, taking a bite. “The New Yorker is looking for someone. Everybody is.”

For a moment I find myself basking in Mentor Peter’s regard. Then Withholding Peter takes over, delivering a critique of the magazine for which I actually work. “The last issue—I really liked it, but I wonder if it’s a little overdesigned. Where are the big stories you want to read? Having said that, I liked the energy. But even your last story was just … THERE. I wish you guys nothing but the best,” he says, chewing slowly. “I just hope your magazine succeeds.” No, he wasn’t resistant. I was his biographer. I followed up on every story he told, I read not just every column he’d ever written but even his novel about Mormons, I was calling around town asking everyone who mattered to weigh in. I think if that kind of attention matters to you, you might feel you were getting something out of it./aw

***

BART’S 17 YEARS INSIDE THE MOVIEMAKING MACHINE is the foundation on which he’s built the rest of his career. His management style stems from it. His books and columns draw credibility from it. More than anything else, it confirmed his belief in a credo he’d had drummed into him since childhood: Self-invention is the route to power.

“I was raised with one adamant dictum: Don’t allow yourself to be imprisoned in any socioeconomic category, religious category, ethnic category, whatever,” Bart says one afternoon. We are sitting in the peach-colored living room of his home in Fremont Place, the Mid Wilshire enclave that was one of Los Angeles’s first gated communities. The eight-bedroom house used to belong to Harry Cohn, the producer and movie-studio founder whom Bart likes to call “the mean-spirited czar of Columbia.” Bart and his wife Yes, but not in depth. After the story ran, however, I heard from Bart’s ex-wife—the mother of his children. More on this later./aw have refurbished Cohn’s screening room to its original 1920s splendor, and he delights in referring to a separate alcove as “Harry’s phone room.” But there’s another commonality that Bart does not wish to talk about. Cohn, like many of Hollywood’s founding fathers, was Jewish. When I ask Bart about his own ethnicity, he turns elusive. It’s peculiar, to say the least. Well, it WAS peculiar, the way he refused to talk about what to most people is just their boilerplate origin-story. He simply refused to do it./aw Of all American industries, Hollywood has historically been a place where Jews have not only achieved acceptance but thrived. But following his parents’ dictum, Bart keeps his ancestry a secret.

Here are a few things Bart would tell me about his upbringing: Peter Benton Bart was born in 1932 and raised on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His only brother is six years older. His parents were public-school teachers who had immigrated to the United States, though their son won’t say from where. (“They were very Americanized,” he says.) The elder Barts were fiercely irreligious and ferociously anticommunist. (“They told me if I was caught playing with a communist, they wouldn’t feed me.”) For reasons he never understood, they served Chinese food “morning, noon, and night.” (“They weren’t the kind of people you sat down with and said, “Tell me the origins of this fetish.’”) Meaning, he never knew why they had a fetish for Chinese food. He was painting the picture of an eccentric upbringing that taught him not to ever do what was expected of you./aw Although not wealthy, the family enjoyed some luxuries: a nanny, private schooling for the kids, and a vacation home in Martha’s Vineyard.

Here are a few things Bart wouldn’t tell me: Both his parents were born in Austria. His mother, whose maiden name was Clara Ginsberg, arrived at Ellis Island in 1914. Her passenger record includes this notation: “Ethnicity: Austria (Hebrew).” There is no record of a Max S. Bart entering the United States through Ellis Island. Bart’s father may have traveled under another name. But there is a listing for a Moses Bart, which was the name of Bart’s paternal grandfather. Moses came to America in 1913, when he was 57 years old. His ethnicity: “Austria, Hebrew.” I found these documents online, after much searching. What was fascinating to me here was not whether or not he was Jewish—because whatever he was didn’t matter one way or another—but that he would go to such lengths to deny a simple truth. Because, it seems, he was adamant that no one should be able to define him by anything other than the elements he chose to accentuate./aw

Bart has kept even his closest friends confused about his past. “He was brought up a Quaker, wasn’t he?” asks Evans. It’s an honest mistake. You can’t spend more than an hour with Bart without hearing about his attending Friends Seminary and Swarthmore College—both Quaker institutions.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Bart says of his religious heritage, as one of his knees begins bouncing up and down. Yep./aw “I resent people’s militancy on these issues. Everyone wants to peg everyone else because everyone is predictable. And I’m not.”

Over several months he will volunteer that he has never once dated a Jewish girl, the letter from Duffie Bart, aka Dorothy Callman, Bart’s ex-wife. She wrote: “My name is Dorothy Callman. I am Jewish. We dated for three years, were married for close to twenty.”/aw never attended a seder, and has been inside a synagogue only once, for the bar mitzvah of then-agent Michael Ovitz’s son. (“I wanted to see what one was like.”) “Listen, I got berated by the vice president in charge of business affairs at Paramount,” he says, “because I did not take off Jewish holidays. And I was affronted. I basically told him to mind his own damned business.”

At one point he tries to explain his discomfort by comparing himself to his longtime assistant, a light-skinned black woman: “She struggles with this, too. She feels she’s a black person. But she’s about as black as Felix [Bart's Siamese cat]. I feel she is a bit victimized by, again, that need to identify with some subculture that will help you.

“You talk to a lot of the better-educated, wealthy black people. You know, they’re not very black. The big distinction is between the people they call ‘niggers’—who are the ghetto blacks, who can’t even speak, can’t get a job, and bury themselves in black-itude—and those people who are better looking, better educated, smarter, and who own the world: the black middle class,” he says. “A lot of people in Hollywood—let’s say if they happen to be Jewish people who come from Brooklyn—they are most comfortable with those people. Which is fine. It just doesn’t happen to describe me.”

A few minutes later he asks, “Can you and I make a deal about this whole thing about religion? I would love it if we could dodge it in some way that you don’t think is dishonest.” He will repeat this request more than once. Yes, I agree. I remember, as he was beginning his analysis of black people, looking down at my cassette recorder, with its big red light shining brightly to indicate it was on. And I thought: He knows I’m recording this. This is one of the most formal interviews we’ve done (as opposed to me following him around or sitting in on a meeting). What is he thinking??/aw

***

Pundit Peter is in my living room, on television.

When network news shows need someone to speak for Hollywood—on the impact of possible strikes, for example, or Washington’s campaign against violent entertainment—they often turn to Bart. Tonight the man Bill Maher introduces as a “former big-time studio honcho prexy” is making his second appearance on Politically Incorrect.

The show is an ideal forum for Bart. He loves a good sword fight. Dapper in a black dress shirt and beige suit, Bart fences with Monica Crowley, a political commentator for Fox News, and actors Martin Short and Alec Baldwin, the topic: Richard Nixon. “Nixon was famous for being a self-made man who only admired self-made men,” Maher says. “What do you think Nixon would have thought of George W. Bush?”

“He would have said he was a patrician nothing,” Bart says. Then Bart assesses his fellow panelists and proclaims, “I’m the only Republican here.” Only Bart gets to say what Bart is./aw Bart, too, prides himself on being self-made. He’s also self-made-up. He’s been a registered Democrat since 1994.

***

BART DESCRIBES HIS CHILDHOOD as “annoyingly happy,” except there was a definite imperative to perform. My parents never said, ‘This report card isn’t good enough.’ But you weren’t supposed to fuck up.” Bart attended the academically rigorous Swarthmore, where he succeeded upperclassman Victor Navasky, now the publisher of The Nation, as editor of the college newspaper. Bart majored in politics, did a brief stint as a copyboy at The New York Times, and then had a fellowship at the London School of Economics. He was hired by The Wall Street Journal in 1956. A few years later he returned to The New York Times as a reporter to cover advertising and the media.

He married a publicist named Dorothy Callman in 1961, and their first daughter, Colby, was born a year later. In 1964 Bart was made a national correspondent in Los Angeles. That’s when he first met a former actor named Robert Evans. In 1966, a few months after Bart’s second daughter, Dilys, was born, he wrote a profile of Evans for the Times that portrayed him as a tireless producer, an elegant operator. The very next day, on the basis of the article, Charles Bluhdorn, who had recently bought Paramount Pictures, hired Evans as a vice president; Evans had yet to make his first picture. In 1967, when Evans rose to become Paramount’s youngest-ever production chief, he hired Bart as his number two. Together they decided what movies would get made. I’d written a lengthy profile of Robert Evans for the Los Angeles Times not long before this piece, so I knew Evans. I interviewed him for this piece, too. But this story is something of a legend. It’s been told before./aw

They were an unlikely pair. Movie-star handsome, Evans was a wheeler-dealer with a passion for filmmaking and a seductive personal style. Bart was college educated, East Coast, intense. He trumped others with his command of the facts. Evans understood actors’ fragile, self-absorbed psyches, but he didn’t like to read. Bart read everything and wasn’t afraid to say what he liked. Each man saw in the other something he did not see in himself. As I recall, Evans—usually full of bravado and a quote machine—was guarded with me about Bart. He confirmed things I asked about, but didn’t push the story much further./aw

More than three decades later Bart remains loyal to Evans, who has weathered a cocaine conviction, the murder of a business partner, and persistent money troubles. Although still widely considered an invaluable sounding board—for years Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Robert Towne have sought his advice—Evans, now 71, hasn’t produced a hit film in more than 20 years. He spends much of his time rattling around his overgrown French Regency estate that was once Greta Garbo’s Beverly Hills hideaway. Bart, though, still believes in him.

“Turn him loose on somebody and, I’ll tell you, it’s amazing,” Bart will say today, The implication is that he says this kind of thing a lot./aw admitting that part of him still longs for when he and Evans worked side by side. Alone neither enjoyed the same success. When Evans signed a new production deal with Paramount in 1991, Bart ran a banner headline on Variety’s front page along with a story about Evans’s “comeback.” But the comeback never materialized. Sometimes, Bart says, “I feel a little bit guilty. I feel like if we became a team again, we could get things done.”

Evans says Bart has not changed at all since Paramount. “He was always frank,” he says. “Always combative. He wasn’t a fence straddler. He was a bit sarcastic. Biting. He always had an inner pleasure in ruffling feathers.” In person. Went to his fantastic/crazy house in Beverly Hills./aw

The film industry was in the toilet when the former actor and his journalist sidekick took over at the studio. They faced enormous pressure to turn things around. Bart knew little about movies, but he was well suited to the job. Whether as a child of demanding parents or as a reporter meeting daily deadlines, he had learned how to thrive under stress: Do your homework and stand your ground.

“The head of distribution comes in one day and sees me watching the dailies of Paper Moon. He says, ‘This movie is in black and white?” Bart recalls of the Depression-era story that would pair the father-daughter team of Ryan and Tatum O’Neal. Bart had discovered the book on which the movie was based and had approved its being shot in black and white—not the usual recipe for commercial success. “I said, ‘No, no, it’s in color. I’m just watching dailies in black and white. Don’t worry.’ And we finished the movie. These are the lessons of selective deviousness.” This was one of those stories that was difficult to check. But by this point I think readers get the idea: it’s probably mostly true, but Bart likes to tell a great story./aw

Then as now, Bart was exacting. “In the go-go days of the ’70s, when everybody was running around smoking a joint or trying to look like they were, Peter was a little more buttoned down,” remembers Irwin Winkler. “He was thoughtful, well read—almost like a boarding school headmaster.”

One day while driving to work with Evans, Bart championed a project so eccentric that it could have cost them their jobs. “We needed to get some hits going, and Peter was telling me about a script he’d read the previous night,” Evans remembers. “He said, ‘It’s about an 18-year-old boy who falls in love with an 80-year-old woman.’ I said, ‘Stop the car. Are you crazy? He says, ‘When you get to your office, lock yourself in the bathroom and read the script. And if you think I’m wrong, I’m wrong.’” The script became the cult film Harold and Maude.

Evans and Bart (along with chief corporate officer Stanley Jaffe, president Frank Yablans, and others) presided over the resuscitation of Paramount. Marrying an extraordinary generation of young directors—Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, Peter Bogdanovich—with commercial topics, they helped change the very notion of the Hollywood film. As Peter Biskind writes in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the ’70s were a golden age for moviemaking, “the last time Hollywood produced a body of risky, high-quality work–as opposed to the errant masterpiece–work that was character- rather than plot-driven, that defied traditional narrative conventions … that broke the taboos of language and behavior, that dared to end unhappily.” Much of that work came out of Paramount: Rosemary’s Baby; Goodbye, Columbus; Love Story; The Godfather; Don’t Look Now; Chinatown; The Godfather II; The Conversation. Kit Rachlis, who was then the editor-in-chief of Los Angeles and the brilliant man who edited this piece, was a big believer in the power of lists. Here and in the previous accounting of who Bart lunched with over a two week period, the idea was that the sheer weight of the details would make the point better than our characterization of them. It’s an old-school New Yorker-ish technique./aw

Bart had left journalism in his mid thirties because he was weary, he says, “of writing about people who were doing things. I wanted to try doing something myself.” His timing was perfect. In those days a junior production executive could have impact. Evans says it was Bart who acquired The Godfather and who suggested that Coppola direct it; Bart would later convince a reluctant Coppola to make The Godfather II. “In the ’60s and ’70s, studio business was conducted in an offhand, even anarchic, style,” Bart has written. “The mood of that era was to thumb your nose at the rules.” He fit right in.

Bart was building relationships with Hollywood’s future power players. Jeff Berg, now the head of International Creative Management, was a young agent when they met in 1970. Berg used to come over and read Bart’s daughters bedtime stories. That bond has helped make peace on the countless occasions since then when the two have stopped speaking.

“He has a very bitter wit, which is an acquired taste,” says Berg. “He is very quick to call his friends to task as well as his foes. When you get nailed in Variety you try to kiss it off, but it’s part of the fossil record. Still, he never apologizes. What he’ll do is say ‘I haven’t heard from you in a year or so. Why don’t we have a drink?’”

Whether Bart’s rough edges played a part in his departure from Paramount in 1974 is a matter of debate. There has been speculation that he was forced out when Barry Diller was installed as the studio’s new chief. Bart denies this, and Evans also pooh-poohs it, saying Bart left to head up an independent film production company and finally make the kind of big money that had eluded him at Paramount. Whatever the truth, Bart likes to poke at Diller. At dinner parties and in his Variety column, he has told and retold a story (that both Evans and Diller have denied) about Charles Bluhdorn, the owner of Paramount Pictures, trying to marry off Diller so nobody would believe the persistent rumor that he was gay.

“Diller has always had one of the easiest rides with the press,” Bart will say I disagree. The hope is to convey not that I’m a psychic but that this is the kind of thing, if you spend hours with Bart, you will hear again and again./aw with a mixture of disdain and awe. “People will go up and ask him something, and he’ll say ‘That’s a stupid question.’ And their reaction is ‘He’s such a smart man.’” Bart has a different assessment: “He treats everyone like shit.”

***

Evasive Peter is ducking the press.

He’s flown to New York City to host “The Front Row,” a business symposium that Variety holds each year to make money and boost its profile. This year’s lineup includes Diller, now CEO of USA Networks; News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch; Sony Corp. CEO Howard Stringer; and Viacom president Mel Karmazin, with Bill Clinton delivering the keynote. Bart is both point man and emcee.

“I feel like I’m the producer of some B movie,” he says. So when Credit Suisse First Boston, the investment bank cosponsoring the event, suddenly gets cold feet about being affiliated with Clinton (and removes all signage bearing its name from the conference venue), Bart does damage control. It’s a good story—a prominent bank, active in the entertainment industry, distancing itself from the former president. But the story won’t break in Variety. Bart makes sure of that.

“You feel like a shit, playing hide-and-seek with the press,” Bart says, on the eve of the symposium. He spends the day avoiding the few journalists who have gotten wind of the brouhaha. “It’s hard when you can’t be completely candid. But in this case, I think that’s probably the best course.” I just found it fascinating that even as he was editor of a trade paper, even as he insisted on calling Variety a newspaper (thus giving it more credibility as a serious journalistic product), he could easily switch gears/hats and evade the press./aw

***

ON A FRIDAY MORNING BART SITS IN HIS WINDOW-lined office on the first floor of the Variety building on Wilshire Boulevard. A French-language poster of Islands in the Stream, a movie he produced in 1977, fills one wall, while another wall displays the grip-and-grin photos you see in the offices of politicians: Bart with director Steven Spielberg, lobbyist Jack Valenti, celebrity lawyer Robert Shapiro. On his desk there is no computer, just an electric typewriter. On a bookshelf sits one of those kitschy fake grenades mounted on a plaque. COMPLAINT DEPT., it reads. TAKE A NUMBER.

Bart motions executive editor Elizabeth Guider and managing editor Timothy M. Gray toward a circular table. It’s time to talk headlines. I don’t recall exactly how far along I was, but this was one of the things I specifically asked for at the beginning of reporting the piece because, as I’ve said, I thought the piece was really a window into the peculiar animal that was a trade paper, and Bart was just my main character in that piece. Obviously, what my reporting later revealed turned this into a very different story in the end. But this was likely quite early on, as I was getting to know Bart./aw

Variety’s pun-filled headlines are famously deft and often hilarious—“Sticks Nix Hick Pix,” from 1935, is considered the classic—and Bart understands they are central to the paper’s appeal. A few weeks after he arrived at Variety in 1989, he got people talking by topping a story about a feud between playwright David Hare and New York Times theater critic Frank Rich with this bombshell: “Ruffled Hare Airs Rich Bitch.” Nearly 12 years later, while he leaves much of the day-to-day editing of Variety to others, he still weighs in on front-page headlines.

Bart sometimes writes the heads himself, as he did for a recent piece about teen movies’ waning box office receipts: “No Pop in Zit Pix.” But the soft-spoken Tim Gray is Bart’s ace in the headline hole. It was Gray, for example, who wrote “Ovitz No Govitz at MCA” (for a story about the agent not becoming MCA’s chairman). For the grossest of these (“Movies Get a Bad Case of the Runs”) Bart has coined a term: “secretional headlines.”

“We are now in the post-secretional period,” Bart says, grinning. “It ended after we described some relationship as ‘warm and runny.’”
Guider frowns. “It was awful,” she says.

“It’s a Britishism,” protests Bart. “It’s not lewd.”

Today’s challenge is a story about 20th Century Fox’s decision to premiere director Baz Luhrmann’s movie musical Moulin Rouge at the Cannes Film Festival. There are a lot of elements—the studio’s gamble, the festival, the painter Toulouse-Lautrec—and Gray has assembled a list of contenders that seek to hit them all: “The Thin ‘Rouge’ Line,” “Schmooze and ‘Rouge,’” “Cannes: Le Trek for Lautrec,” and “Bed, Baz, and Beyond.”

“Only someone truly demented would write ‘Bed, Baz, and Beyond,’” Bart says approvingly, scanning the list. “But shouldn’t we say something a little more explanatory?”

“Riviera’s Risk with ‘Rouge’?” Gray offers.

“Fox’s Riviera Risk,” Bart counters.

“‘Moulin’ Not Foolin’ Around?” asks Gray.

Bart gets up and goes to his typewriter, pounds the keys, and rips out a page. He hands the sheet to Guider, who reads aloud: “Will Frogs Flog Fox on Riv?” Everybody laughs. By meeting’s end the headline has been reworked ten times. “Fox Takes Risk on the Riviera,” it says. “‘Rouge’ schmooze cues renewed rapport between H’w’d, Cannes.” Absolutely, everybody was on best behavior and being supremely witty. But even still, you got a glimpse into how they interacted and how the decisions got made./aw

In meetings like these and as a public speaker, Bart is irresistible. He takes control of a room, interweaving economic analysis, authoritative opinions, and barbs. At this year’s Festival of Books at UCLA, he appeared on a panel moderated by Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times’s chief movie critic. When Turan asked Bart what he’d most like to change about Hollywood, Bart responded, “I think that film critics should dress better.” Amid hoots of laughter from both the audience and the rumpled Turan, Bart then got serious.

“What the present moment in Hollywood history shows is that the system is not working either artistically or financially,” he said, singling out two films as proof. “Town & Country just opened to a sterling $ 3 million, which is the price of the movie’s catering bill. Driven is so lame, Stallone’s likeness isn’t even featured on the poster. This is corporate Hollywood. And I do have a certain fondness for that epoch when movies were made because of a director’s passion, not because McDonald’s or a toy company or German [financiers] were interested.” Yes, the great thing was that I had both./aw

Bart gets Hollywood. Even those he’s treated harshly say it’s true. “He’s knowledgeable enough about film to go right to the heart of the matter every time,” says Dan Cox, a longtime Variety reporter whom Bart fired earlier this year. “That’s what Peter is brilliant at.”
As a teenager Bart dreamed of being Somerset Maugham, “traveling the world and writing short stories and novels about extraordinary people and situations.” In many ways, Variety gave him his wish. As its editor—a job that pays him about $500,000 a year including bonuses, plus a green BMW convertible and a lavish expense account—he has become Hollywood’s informal ambassador to the world. He travels frequently: to Australia for a speaking tour; to Italy, in part to research a GQ article about director Martin Scorsese; and almost every May, to France to attend the Cannes Film Festival. He is currently completing a book of short stories, one of which–”Dangerous Company: In Hollywood, Getting Laid Can Be a Career Breaker”—appeared in GQ this summer. His fourth nonfiction book, an anecdotal guide to the movie business written with his good friend, producer Peter Guber, will be published by Putnam in March.

For all Bart’s past lives, this one most suits him. “Peter has the best job he’s ever had, for Peter,” says Variety publisher Charles Koones.

When Variety first came calling, Bart had returned to writing—the lowest rung in Hollywood. In the years since he left Paramount he’d gone back and forth between producing movies, writing novels and screenplays, and serving as an executive at Lorimar and MGM. In 1989 he completed Fade Out: The Calamitous Final Days of MGM. Lively and caustic, the book skewered many of Bart’s colleagues and would become a best-seller. Around the same time, Reed Elsevier, a Dutch company that had bought Variety, was looking for a new editor. Its headhunter saw in Bart the perfect hybrid, while Bart—then 57, ancient by Hollywood standards—saw a chance to reinvent himself once again.

“They wanted someone with lots of experience in both journalism and the Industry,” he says. “The headhunter gave them a list with only one name on it: mine.” (Actually, there was another name on the list: Caroline Miller, now the editor-in-chief of New York magazine.)

***

Controlling Peter is checking up on me.

“I hear you’re calling all sorts of strange people. I mean, Jerry Weintraub?” he asks. Weintraub, a movie producer and a former colleague at MGM, is not one of Bart’s favorite people. “The last time I saw a movie with Jerry Weintraub,” Bart wrote in a Variety column earlier this year, “he arrived with a bottle of Stolichnaya. ‘How did you like the movie?’ I asked him during final credits. ‘What movie?’ he replied.”

Two months after that column appeared, I left a message for Weintraub. The next morning Weintraub called Bart, and now Bart is on the phone to me. “We have never gotten along,” he says. “If you’re trying to find a non-fan club, I think he would be it.”

Bart predicts that Weintraub will not speak to me. Sure enough, Weintraub’s publicist soon calls to say his client is much too busy to talk. That’s odd, I say, since his client found time to call Bart. Also, I was taking notes as we talked, but I was only writing down what he said, so while I remembered what I said, I didn’t have it verbatim./aw

A few hours later Weintraub’s gravelly voice is in my ear. “I didn’t want you to think I wouldn’t call back,” he says, adding that he has nothing to say. What, I ask, is Bart’s reputation in the Industry?

“I have no idea,” he replies. “I’m 63 years old. I’ve been doing this for 43 years. You think you’re going to get me to talk about something I don’t want to talk about?”

Why, then, did he call Bart?

“That’s my business,” he barks.

When told of this exchange, Bart sums up Weintraub this way: “He’s definitely in the life-is-too-short category.”

***

BART WAS HIRED TO RUN Weekly Variety out of New York in 1989. The publication was losing $3 million a year. Circulation had dropped from 52,000 in 1980 to less than 29,000. The Hollywood Reporter was competing both for scoops and for advertising dollars.

Bart’s impact was felt immediately. He upgraded from newsprint to glossy paper, changed the color of the logo, and set about dismantling the old staff and assembling the new. Nearly two years later Bart was put in charge of Daily Variety as well. He merged the staffs and returned to Los Angeles.

Bart absolutely refuses to call Variety a trade paper, even though it gets 90 percent of its ad revenue from the Industry. It is, he asserts, a newspaper—“a vivid chronicle of our pop culture.” Bart has made Variety more global, more sophisticated, more fun to read. Today the paper embraces the flail scope of the entertainment economy, from tech news to broadcasting and cable, from magazines to books, from movies to theater. Its critics—particularly Todd McCarthy, who reviews films—are well respected, and it has Washington correspondents, a London office, and writers stationed around the world. Variety is much-diminished and McCarthy is gone after 31 years. It’s a different world./eg Indeed. An entirely different world. Except, as I note, for the insecurity. Hollywood remains rife with it./aw

Bart has become one of those people everyone loves to psychoanalyze, partly because he lives to be in the red-hot center and is so willing to offend. You can see it in his frequent, lecturing “Memo To” columns, in which he gives unsolicited advice to the likes of Robin Williams (“Robin—enough of the message stuff”) and Leonardo DiCaprio (“Go to college, Leo”). You can see it, too, in the way he runs Variety.

Staffers praise him for hating all the right things: lawyers, committees, focus groups—anything that obstructs Variety’s (and his own) ability to act quickly, on instinct. But he also brings the imperious manner of a studio exec into Variety’s newsroom. He walks out of meetings in the middle, without explanation. He has nicknames—many of them unflattering—for everyone. Years ago Bart emptied a wastebasket on a reporter’s head. (“That was very calculated,” he says. “I knew it was the only way to get his attention.”) I heard it from someone else, then asked Bart about it. That was his response./aw

Max Alexander, a former editor for Weekly Variety in New York, moved to Los Angeles at Bart’s behest, first to be managing editor and then executive editor. Alexander calls Bart “probably the smartest person I’ve ever worked for.” But Bart was always restless. Alexander remembers visiting the Barts at their rented English Tudor house in Benedict Canyon—a low-slung hunting lodge of a place. “It was all furnished in chintz fabric,” says Alexander, “with beautiful wraparound sofas that matched the drapes. There were hunting scenes and tapestries. It had a medieval feel to it.” A year later the Barts moved to another house nearby, “a contemporary, Mies van der Rohe kind of house. Now it was Barcelona chairs, chrome, glass, swatches of color by painters who’d committed suicide. I asked, ‘What happened to the tapestries? Peter waved his hand and laughed and said, ‘It was just time for a change,’ and I realized this is the essence of this man. He likes to suddenly sweep the table clean.” I know. I love this guy’s cinematic memory. He painted the scene for me./aw

Stephen West can attest to that. In 1991 Bart hired West away from the Los Angeles Times, where he was assistant business editor. After five years as Daily Variety’s executive editor, West was summoned without warning to Bart’s office and told his job had been eliminated.

“There’s the good Peter and there’s the bad Peter,” That gets to my earlier point about, when you’re sitting down to write/figure out themes in a piece, re-read all your stuff. Often, if you pay attention, there are clues to be found in what’s repeated./aw says West, now media editor at Bloomberg News in San Francisco. He still admires Bart, despite what he wryly calls his own “public execution.” “Peter really is like Mao Tse-tung, in that he loves perpetual revolution. He’s never satisfied. Even when things are running well, he wants to change it.”

The scenario would be played out again and again. Bart, who is known to address his male staffers with the paternal “my boy,” would eventually turn on nearly all of them. Paying homage to director Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues, staffers coined a term for the inevitable moment when Bart would blow: “M’Boy Better Blues.” I talked to so many Variety employees past and present that I ended up keeping a chart of which details each of them could confirm. We used nothing that we didn’t have multiple sources for. The reason: I knew Bart was a firebrand who rubbed some people the wrong way and I didn’t want to just traffic in revenge stories. I wanted to show the real him, and I devised a system by which I needed to hear a particular detail at least two and preferably three times, from separate people, before I used it./aw

“If someone said, ‘Peter would like to see you in his office,’ you’d walk in not knowing if you were going to get your ass kissed, your head handed to you on a plate, or an invitation to dinner,” says one former Variety writer. “It’s a management technique—so when it’s time to crack the whip, everybody is already ready to flinch.”

Bart so relishes flouting political correctness that he lets loose on everyone: the French, Germans, blacks, Jews, lawyers, agents, actors, publicists, feminists, fat people. A gay man says that Bart asked him about his health during a job interview. Another former Variety reporter heard Bart say, “I’m not hiring any more fags, because they get sick and die.” According to more than half a dozen people, he peppers meetings at Variety with derogatory terms: fags, bitches, cunts, Nips. Meticulous. I’m pretty organized and anal retentive when it comes to research and sourcing, but Eric Mercado was a true collaborator in terms of triple-checking and running down other sources I hadn’t had. He caught a few things, as I recall, before publication. Of course, we also had a lawyer read it (after Bart started making threatening noises). We felt very confident about all our facts before we went to press./aw

Yet Bart, as always, is confounding. In contrast to the comments people attribute to him—which he denies making—staffers say he has treated ailing gay employees well. During his tenure Variety has begun acknowledging longtime companions in obituaries of gay people. Bart has promoted women and tried, with limited success, to diversify Variety’s mostly white staff.

“Is Peter homophobic? Possibly. Racist? Possibly. Misogynistic? Possibly,” says one former Variety employee who knows him well. “But most of the stuff that gets traced to him isn’t about that. It’s about his desperate need to draw fire and rile stuff up. He can’t bear to be ignored even for a minute.”

***

Bart hates to take notes.

“I don’t like to,” he says. “I just find when you take out a notebook, it just changes the atmosphere.” Nevertheless, in his column he frequently quotes conversations he has had with Hollywood figures. The quotes, which he also inserts in reporters’ stories, are nearly always unattributed. He often dictates them off the top of his head, which may explain why some of Variety’s anonymous sources sound a lot like Inventive Peter.

Bart favors the terms fat cats and suits. So do a fair number of people who sound off in his columns. He loves to use damned, as in “You know damned well he intends to deliver for his clients.” When run through Bart’s typewriter, lots of people around town start cussing just like that, from “a senior marketing official at Paramount” to “one major agent” to “one of the town’s top lawyers.”

Read enough of Bart’s work and you begin to hear the echo. Days, nights, weekends, for months. I immersed./aw In his own voice he will write, “It’s all about those statuettes, stupid,” or “It’s all about the waivers from SAG.” A few months later he’ll quote one “candid” CEO (“It’s all about intimidation”) or “the production chief of one major [studio]” (“It’s all about money”).

“I have,” he says, “an incredible memory.” By putting “he says” in the middle as opposed to at the end you’re hearing a judgment? I don’t think that was intended. It was more a rhythm thing—the last line of a section, it wanted to end on him, not me. And it just sounded better./aw

***

IF PETER BART HAS A MOTTO, IT IS this: “I know now there is no one thing that is true. It is all true.” The words are Hemingway’s, from his novel Islands in the Stream. Once Bart quoted them in a column, adding, “Now there’s a manifesto for you.”
Not always because, as I’ve said, I didn’t set out to write this kind of a piece. When I began, I didn’t know Bart had peddled a script, for example. I didn’t think of this as investigative as much as explanatory—using Bart to explain the role of the trades. But the further I went, the more his personal choices became the story, both because they were brazen but also because they said so much about how Hollywood works./aw Everyone knows that in Hollywood people lie as a matter of course, exaggerating their accomplishments, minimizing their failures. They don’t fret about it. Building up one’s own buzz is part of doing business—a means to an end. What Makes Sammy Run?./eg Bart is notable, though, because he is editor of the industry’s most important publication, so his fibs, amplifications, and outright lies masquerade as candor./aw

“I have covered … wars,” he recently asserted in a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times. When pressed, though, he admits he hasn’t. He frequently refers to his time as “a young kid studio executive,” even though he was 35 when he got his first studio job and 53 when he left his last one. One publicist recalls Bart calling her angrily after she asked for a correction to a Variety article. “I ran three studios,” yelled the man who did no such thing, “and I will not be dictated to by a fucking flack!”

One former colleague says Bart had a term for the kind of embellishment he practices: “novelizing.” Another who remains fond of Bart says, “His relationship to the truth is very plastic. I’d go on interviews with him and he’d write something and I’d think, ‘Were we in the same room?’ He’s just a storyteller. The narrative needs are more immediate to his imagination than what actually happened.”
Bart’s philosophy permeates Variety. There’s the way he praises friends, associates, and even his own movies without acknowledging his involvement. He’ll call Richard Heller “a scrupulous New York practitioner” without noting that Heller has been his lawyer for 25 years. Ronda Gomez is “one of the town’s veteran literary agents.” She was also his assistant at Paramount Pictures. Michelle Manning, president of production at Paramount, is “one of the sharper young executives in town.” A year before he wrote that, Manning also bought the movie rights to a Bart project, but he doesn’t mention that. If a reporter or an editor at a major daily newspaper flaunted the basic rules of journalism the way Bart does, they’d be shown the door.

Most people in show business deceive to gain advantage—to downplay their cost overruns, say, or to boost their salaries. Bart, too, misrepresents for strategic advantage, but he also lies for no apparent reason. The Godfather made doesn’t need to pretend to have been a war correspondent./eg Yes, exactly. It suggests that once you get in the habit, lying becomes second nature./aw Consider what happened when we discussed the infamous Patriot Games incident of 1992, when Variety film critic Joe McBride wrote a blistering review of Paramount Pictures’ Tom Clancy adaptation. The studio, apoplectic over the review’s potential dampening of interest among overseas exhibitors, pulled its advertising from Variety. Bart got mad, but not at the studio. He decreed that McBride would no longer review Paramount films.

The New York Times wrote a story about the McBride dustup that said Variety staffers were aghast that their boss would curry favor with Paramount. The article quoted from a private apology that Bart had sent to Martin S. Davis, the studio’s then chairman and CEO. “Marty Davis and I have known each other for 25 years,” Bart told the Times. “I simply dropped him a friendly note.”
Nine years later, however, when I first ask Bart about the note, he insists it never existed. “I never wrote any,” he says, adding that he disliked Davis intensely, so “the idea that I would contact these people was bizarre.” How to explain the Times story, written by veteran reporter Bernard Weinraub? “It was a reminder to me about the nastiness of journalists toward each other,” Bart says, shaking his head.

A few weeks later I obtained a copy of the letter. Bart’s lie didn’t make sense. Had he forgotten that it was typed by his own secretary on Variety stationery? (Bart’s secretary at the time had a couple of well-known idiosyncrasies—using a double dash in phone numbers, spelling out fax with spaces between the letters—both of which are in evidence.) For obvious reasons, I can’t say who I did or didn’t talk to in this section./aw Did he really think that he could alter the “fossil record,” to borrow Jeff Berg’s phrase, and rewrite history?

When I presented a copy of the letter to Bart—the first of two occasions that he would later denounce as “gotcha” journalism—he declared it “blatantly bogus.” The one in the lede./aw He disputed the signature. He suggested the letterhead had been faked. “Editorial director, Variety Inc.?” he said, reading the words under his name. “I don’t ever remember having that title.” (Variety’s masthead from that period shows that, in fact, he did.) “I agree with the contents of the letter,” he said after perusing it for a minute, “but I didn’t write it.”

Later he would call me to clarify. Even if he had written the letter, he said, “that incident is not relevant to me, only because it never recurred. I’d think it was interesting if it were a syndrome. But since it’s a stand-alone…” It sounded like an acknowledgment, sort of. His voice trailed off.

What was more striking than Bart’s dissembling, however, was a part of the letter that The New York Times hadn’t seen fit to quote. In one paragraph, it captures how Bart perceives his place in Hollywood: “I know that you and Stanley [Jaffe] feel that Variety has developed an anti-Paramount tilt in its coverage. This distresses me—we go back together many years and I personally feel a keen sense of camaraderie. Clearly you feel, however, that the ‘old comrades’ aren’t taking care of each other. If that’s your feeling, you and Stanley deserve better and I intend to take personal charge of this situation to set it right.”

“Taking care of each other”—that is Bart’s defining editorial principle. That doesn’t mean he rolls over, necessarily. If he thinks a top executive needs a kick in the pants, he’s happy to administer it. But he’s no adversary. He’s more like a teammate, or even a coach. He may be editor-in-chief of Variety, but he is still one of them.

People who have worked with Bart say he would call his favorite sources—Guber, Ovitz, Weinstein, Evans, producer Arnon Milchan—and vet stories that mentioned them, letting them make adjustments. When confronted by the reporters whose bylines topped the altered stories, Bart would say he got better information after deadline. “This is my paper,” one remembers him saying. “I’ll do as I please.”

Bart has internalized Hollywood’s A-list mentality, mistaking the highest-placed source for the best source, even when the higher-up has much to gain by what they’re leaking. When Milchan was negotiating to take his production company from Warner Bros. to 20th Century Fox, for example, the reporters working the story established that Warner Bros. had capped its offer at $ 100 million. Bart added another knowledgeable source, who put the number at $130 million. The source, the reporters were shocked to learn, was Milchan, whose bargaining position was sure to be strengthened by the $30 million boost.

“It might have been,” Bart says, “that I just called him and asked him what the number was.” But didn’t that help Milchan? “People like that, they don’t need my help. They’re doing fine. And let’s be pragmatic. You can’t use a newspaper to help your friends. You’ll end up getting fired.”

In almost the next breath, though, Bart says friendship does guide him. He recalls visiting Guber’s office one day when Guber was chairman of Sony. “The purpose of my mission was to yell at him. You don’t like to see a friend messing up,” Bart says. “I was telling him among other things how badly he was handling the press and how he was not being confrontative enough with the problems at Sony. It had nothing to do with reporting. No notes were taken. It had nothing to do with journalism.” Bart insists, however, that despite offering such counsel, he directed his reporters to grill Guber’s regime as they would any other.

“Is Guber a friend of mine? Certainly. I have never denied that,” Bart says. “Was he an effective president of Sony? No.” Those who attended a gala tribute to Bart at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in 1997, meanwhile, remember that Guber began the roast with this joke: “Will everyone here who owes Peter a favor for having killed a negative story please remain seated?” The room–filled with Hollywood’s heaviest hitters—erupted in laughter. Everybody stayed in their seats. I got the story from people who were in the audience —it was a full house. That’s why we attributed it to them./aw

***

Nervous Peter has questions.

The magazine’s fact checker has just spent the day going over the story with him, and he wants to discuss a few things with me. “When we entered into this thing, I said to you, ‘When I write about people, I don’t write about religious beliefs or sexual orientation,’” he says. “I honestly felt you would respect that.” I remind him that all along I have told him that the profile would take into account his history.

“What concerns me is if you are characterizing me as a runaway Jew,” he says. “It’s not that I don’t acknowledge it. I just don’t talk about it. It’s not a part of my life. Isn’t this the equivalent of outing someone?” he asks.

I tell him I don’t equate revealing a person’s homosexuality with saying his parents were Austrian Jews.

He then changes course. “Do me one favor,” he says. “To avoid me being blackballed, quote me saying, ‘I have no problem saying my ethnicity is Jewish.’ Otherwise you’re going to get me into trouble with all these people.”

When I tell him I can do that, but that I’m sure my editor will insist that we put the quote in context, making it clear that it came after a call from a fact checker, he snaps: “Is he some kind of professional Jew, too?” Not much. The story was already mostly done. It was as if he were confirming the emphasis I’d already placed on these themes. Putting this in was like adding a coda./aw

***

IT HAS LONG BEEN RUMORED—but never proved—that the editor of Variety writes scripts on the side. Bart has always denied this, but people still whisper. Earlier this year The Hollywood Reporter’s David Robb, who has never hidden his antipathy for his former boss, wrote an article about it.

In March, after Bart attended a Writers Guild meeting that was closed to the press and then published a report on Variety’s front page, Robb investigated why Bart was still an active guild member. He discovered that to remain active, Bart had to have sold a script within the past four years. Robb thought he’d found what to Bart’s enemies amounts to the Holy Grail: proof that Bart was engaging in journalism’s most serious conflict of interest—profiting from those you cover.

Robb, however, never laid his hands on the offending script. If he had, he might have been disappointed. According to Bart, the script he sold within the last four years was Nobody’s Children, a drama about a gang of gypsy thieves that he wrote in the early ’80s. Bart says the transaction that kept him active in the WGA was merely the extension of a preexisting option—one that was entered into long before he came to Variety.

“Dave has this fascination, trying to prove that I am still writing and selling scripts,” Bart says, adding that these days the mere act of reading a script makes him physically ill. When it comes to screenplays, he says, his “entire oeuvre” was written before he got to Variety. “I’m not writing or selling scripts. I don’t even want to write and sell scripts. But Dave is still trying to find another script.”
For the record, Variety has a policy that prevents its reporters from being seduced by Hollywood while they are covering it. As Bart explained it to me, “You cannot shop a script while you’re writing for us. Obviously it’s different if you write a book or a novel and it sells to a movie studio. I have no problem with that, except I’m not going to write the script. I don’t think the line is that blurry.”
Things were about to get blurrier, though. One night I came home and found that a manila envelope had been forced through my mail slot. Inside was a 108-page script. Let me put it this way: The script appeared, shoved through my mail slot. My responsibility was to confirm that it was for real. I did that with Bart himself. Bart, then, was my source./aw

By this point I had heard many accounts of how Bart had earned people’s enmity. Even if I took them all at face value, which I didn’t, these stories never implied that Bart was a dimwit. In a town full of blowhards, where money is often a substitute for intelligence, Bart is considered supremely—if sometimes vengefully—bright. But, as I was about to discover, he was not bright enough to compensate for his Achilles’ heel: his loyalty to his friend and mentor, Robert Evans.

In 1998 Variety reported that Michelle Manning at Paramount Pictures had acquired the rights to a novel written by Bart. The novel was called Power Play, and the plan was for Evans to develop it. It was set in Las Vegas and focused on a power struggle between established casino owners and Indian tribes. Bart had used a pseudonym, the article said, “to avoid any potential conflict of interest.”
I’d read all of Bart’s novels but had never heard of Power Play. When I first asked Bart about it, he said, “It’s not a novel. It’s a novella. It needs work. I never finished it.” When I asked to read it, he told me he had no idea where it was. “I did it to try to help Bob out. And Bob never did anything with it,” he said, referring to Evans.

So no script was ever written? “Not to my knowledge,” he said. “In the old days I’d have swung into action, gotten a director assigned, gotten it off the ground. But I don’t do that for a living anymore. And it’s not what I should do.”

Then the script arrived. It was called Crossroaders, but it was the same story as Power Play. Its title page read: “By Leslie Cox”—the maiden name of Bart’s current wife—“Based on the novel by Peter Bart. September, 1996.”

I call Bart and arrange for a final interview. Over several months I had come to know many Peters, but when he welcomes me to his office I don’t know which one to expect. I tell Bart I have a copy of the 1996 script he wrote. “The script I wrote,” he repeats, neither confirming nor denying. I look into the face of the man with the incredible memory. It is blank. But one knee starts jiggling, and he fiddles idly with the band of his watch.

“Boy, you got me. Did I write a script? Now I’m facing memory loss,” he says, as I pull a copy of Crossroaders out of my bag. He looks it over. “Let’s just say this is a script that has Leslie’s name on it. What does that indicate? Therefore—therefore, what?”

I repeat that I know he wrote it. “I may have written this,” he says. But, I counter, you said you hate writing scripts. “I do. Maybe this taught me never to do it again. I’d love to read this. Is it any good?”

Persuasive Peter, Argumentative Peter, Smooth Peter—they’re all here, and they’re taking turns. “You know something? In all honesty, I do not remember writing this,” he says. “I guess it was written to work out the novel. That would be my answer.”

Bart summons his assistant to look for the novella—the one he told me he couldn’t locate. She beelines for a cabinet behind his chair and retrieves a slim bound volume with a navy blue cover. She hands it to him. The search takes less than 20 seconds. I had it on tape./aw

“This is an 86-page novel,” he says. “This was what was bought. It was the only thing that was ever submitted to Paramount.” He admits that he probably spent a weekend transforming the Crossroaders script into the wisp of a novel he holds in his hand. I look at the novel’s cover page, which displays not the pseudonym the Variety article had promised but the words “By Peter Bart.” When I tell him the whole thing looks like an elaborate way of circumventing the rules, effectively selling a script by ginning up a novel, he objects.

“I don’t think it looks that way,” he says. “If you’re saying therefore that I wrote and marketed the script, you can say it, but I would deny it. I contend to you that a novel was written of this, and that’s what Bob bought. There’s no rule that says you can’t write a script that no one sees.”

Except, of course, that Evans—the man developing the project—did see the script. “I’m sure Bob has,” he says, but I’ll tell you about Bob.” He laughs. “Bob having it is like the crypt.”

As the interview winds up, Bart is almost playful. He jokes that I’m a “troublemaker” and “mean.” “It’s really scary,” he says, “when you start remembering things about me that I don’t remember.” This, like all my face-to-face interviews with him, was recorded./aw

***

The next morning Litigious Peter picks up the phone. He’s still at home. His voice is tight and angry. He accuses me of using material stolen from his files. He feels betrayed that I gave him no warning. The details of why he wrote a screenplay as a warm-up for a novella are coming back to him, he says, though “vaguely.” “I’m glad I did it that way,” he says. “The book sure is lean.

“One thing I’m not is self-destructive,” he says. “To break my own rules is just stupid. I was trying to get Bob’s career going.” He pauses. “I would appreciate it if you could tell me how you’re going to handle this, so I can send to the magazine this legal document that will say I will sue you.”

A week later Conflicted Peter calls.

“I haven’t heard from my nemesis for a while. Have you given up on this project, I hope?” he says, his voice almost warm. “I must say, I’m still a little nettled.”

Despite his better judgment, he has more to say. “It’s always a favor that kills you. No one ever did see that fucking script. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have done it. I will guarantee you that I will never do it again.”

***

IN HIS CROSSROADERS SCRIPT, Bart sets a key scene at a press conference in Las Vegas’s most decadent gambling casino. The casino’s owner takes a few questions from the assembled media, then invites them to do some gambling—on him. The offer prompts this ethical debate:

FIRST REPORTER (to a colleague): The son-of-a-bitch has no shame. I mean, he’s prepared to buy out the entire press corps if necessary.

SECOND REPORTER: He’s an asshole. (A pause.) On the other hand, since it’s on the house, I don’t think fifteen minutes at the Money Wheel will compromise my scruples. Yes. And now, my memory of the brief phone call Bart placed to me after the story appeared. He said something like, “How could you do this to me?” I said something like, “Do what?” Him (again, I don’t have this on tape, this is from memory): “You made me look like a racist.” Me: “I think that we worked hard to make clear that you like to flaunt political correctness and are an equal opportunity offender.” Then I went on to say that we had worked very hard to triple-check everything in the piece and that if there were an error, all he had to do was tell me and we would correct it. He never asked for a correction./aw

As so often happens with Bart, there is a duality. Both reporters are him.

Work the problem: Story regret

Paige Williams — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:18:48 +0000

Our “Work the problem” series continues with a psychological situation that every writer faces:

How do you make peace with stories you wish you’d done differently?

Fielding this one is Esquire legend Tom Junod, who lightly revisited his controversial 2007 Angelina Jolie profile this week after Jolie revealed, in an op-ed piece in Tuesday’s New York Times, news about a preventative double mastectomy. Looking at the hindsight issue more generally, Junod tells Storyboard:

I don’t really go in for self-flagellation. Or, rather: I flagellate myself so enthusiastically while writing my stories that I don’t have the time or the energy to flagellate myself once they’re done. In general, I don’t divide stories into Good and Bad or Perfect and Imperfect—I divide them as Finished and Unfinished. The Finished stories are just that—stories that seemed to settle into final form before they were shipped to the printer. The Unfinished stories are the stories that were, in some way, taken away from me before they were finalized. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t work hard at them and (Esquire editor) David (Granger) didn’t devote his full attention to them; there’s nothing I’ve published in Esquire that hasn’t been gone over, by everyone, 10 or 20 times.

Unfinished stories are just stories that fall away from some Platonic ideal of what they might have been. In general, however, I’ve written so many more Unfinished stories than Finished ones—which is to say, I’ve written so many more stories that bear the marks of violent struggle, and were delivered by Caesarean rather than naturally. I’m quite aware when stories are coming easily and when they’re not, and when they’re not, I walk around with a rather low opinion of myself. But a writer is like a quarterback or a relief pitcher: You have to be able to put the bad throws behind you, or you can’t do the job.

I don’t flagellate myself because I’m aware that it would be crippling to flagellate myself, and the one thing I know beyond anything else is that I can’t afford to cripple myself. The other thing I know is that an Unfinished story is not necessarily a bad one, and neither is a story that shows itself to be born in struggle (see Leonardo DiCaprio). Hell, even “bad” stories are not necessarily bad ones. I remember walking into a dinner party after Slate called the Angelina profile the Worst Celebrity Profile of All Time. My arrival was greeted with silence; people did not know what to say. So I brought it up, not just to ease the tension but also because I was, like my editor, perversely proud of being so honored, knowing that you can’t hope to write the Best Celebrity Profile of All Time unless you are absolutely prepared to write the Worst. I’m not in this business because I expect to be admired but rather because I want the freedom to say what I want to say and get some kind of reaction for saying it, so if I can’t enjoy the fact that Slate devoted 2,500 words to the Angelina profile then I’ve lost something of myself that I desperately need to preserve in order to write the way I want to write. The great vice of journalism in the age of social media is not its recklessness but rather its headlong rush for respectability—its self-conscious desire to please an audience of peers rather than an audience of readers—and the first step towards respectability is regret.

Several years ago, I interviewed Gong Show host Chuck Barris and he told me that anyone who says they don’t have any regrets is either a liar or a psychopath. And he’s right—but only about life. Not about journalism. As a journalist, I don’t just (metaphorically) sing “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” after I write my stories. I make myself sing it, even though it’s a damned hard song to sing.

For “Work the problem” archives, go here. Got a narrative issue you’d like help resolving? Email us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org and we’ll try to get you an expert answer.

Live chat: the Washington Post’s “The Prophets of Oak Ridge”

Paige Williams — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:55:28 +0000

Welcome to the Notable Narrative live chat with the Washington Post‘s Dan Zak, author of “The Prophets of Oak Ridge,” the saga of three peace activists, including an 82-year-old nun, who breached security at the U.S. nuclear-weapons facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Also joining us is David Beard, the Post‘s director of digital content. We chose “Prophets” as our latest Notable Narrative for its storytelling and online presentation, which as of this week includes an e-book. You can read about that here. Jump in anytime with your questions—the Post team will start answering them at 11 a.m.

Notable Narrative: “The Prophets of Oak Ridge”

Paige Williams — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:18:27 +0000

Our latest Notable Narrative: “The Prophets of Oak Ridge,” Dan Zak’s 9,448-word Washington Post project—and, as of this morning, e-book—about a house painter, a drifter and an 82-year-old nun who breached the perimeter at the Y-12 National Security Complex, which produces nuclear weapons in East Tennessee. We’ll be hosting a live chat with Zak about the multimedia project this Thursday at 11 a.m., so please join us. David Beard, the Post‘s director of digital content, will also be with us, to talk about what the staff learned from producing two big digital projects back to back.

Photo by Linda Davidson, courtesy Washington Post

The story: The activists wanted to make their point with fence cutters, graffiti, protest songs, and the thawed blood of a colleague who died in 2008 but hoped to “join” one last mission. Zak tells their story but also that of Oak Ridge, Tenn., built by the federal government as a bomb-making town. “Though you haven’t needed a badge to get into the town since 1949, Oak Ridge’s soul hasn’t changed,” he writes. “It’s still a company town, and the company is the government, and the business is bombs.” The facility housed “enough radioactive material to fuel over 10,000 nuclear bombs, which would end civilization many times over,” material used in warheads renovation programs that could take 25 years and cost $20 billion. The activists, who were convicted last week of injuring the national defense and damaging government property, each took different paths into custody. There’s riveting writing in Zak’s tale—

The lights of the Antichrist flickered through the trees.

The drifter prayed.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. For all the glory is yours, and on the last day Jesus will come like this, like a thief in the night, and the warmongering United States will fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy by beating its swords into plowshares.

He had duct-taped the head of his flashlight to reduce the beam to a sliver. On the downward slope of Pine Ridge, he moved in front of the nun, clearing branches and stones from her path. He was just a frail earthen vessel, he believed, but she was a daughter of God. He was her bodyguard.

On his head was a construction hat painted light blue, with “UN” marked on the front. On his breath was the stink of Top brand tobacco. In their backpacks, he and the nun carried twine, matches, candles, a Bible, three hammers, six cans of spray paint, three protest banners, copies of a letter they wished to deliver to Y-12 employees and two emblems of sustenance — a packet of cucumber seeds and a fresh-baked loaf of bread with a cross molded into the top.

And six baby bottles of human blood.

—and the presentation is beautiful, clean and striking. The Post ran the story on its website magazine style. Illustrations depicted the break-in, and still photos and a slideshow worked as secondary art. The 14 chapter titles alone tell a story: “Mission,” “‘…and the Earth Will Shake’” and “Sabotage.” Have a read, and join us back here on Thursday, to talk about how this project came together.

How’s it going with The Big Round Table and other narrative ventures, Michael Shapiro?

Paige Williams — Fri, 10 May 2013 15:46:11 +0000

As if longtime Columbia J-school professor Michael Shapiro didn’t already have enough to do, with Big Round Table launching in September: Yesterday he put 17 of his students’ stories online in a pay-what-you want experiment. Project Wordsworth runs for the next week. The idea intrigues us* and we’re interested to see what will happen. As of this morning Project Wordsworth had seen 5,000 page views and the writers, Shapiro said, had earned more than $1,000. Excerpts from a few of the stories:

W.125th to 99 Madison Avenue: 30 minutes on the 1 and N trains according to Google, which was five minutes off. Apparently, Google doesn’t account for 4 inch heels in their walking and transfer time estimations. Seat: Yes. Ambiance: 4. Time in transit: 35 minutes. The OpenData NYC meet-up was hosted at ThoughtWorks, one of the many Manhattan tech start-ups indistinguishable from each other with their fridges full of beers and vague mission statements. ThoughtWorks was unusual only in that its offices were in Midtown rather than the downtown corridor of the original “Silicon Alley.” (from “The Little Blue Book: The Worlds of Commuting Obsessives,” by Madeline K.B. Ross)

Sitting on a plastic bed in the in-patient/out-patient wing of the Weinberg Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins with an IV connected to a catheter that had been implanted in my chest, things were looking up. It was 2008 and I was 28 years old, and due to a recent battery of high-dose chemotherapy that had left me with maybe one white blood cell, which I’d named Melvin, I had to wear one of those surgeon’s masks at all times to keep the world’s germs out of my face. Here I was, if you can imagine, bald and eyebrowless with a paper mask over my mouth, a tube coming out of my chest, the picture of cancer, and things were looking up. Scans showed that the cancer (along with just about every other cell in my body) was disappearing. (from “Healing Me Harshly,” by Keith Collins)

Kathryn Denning spends a lot of time studying scientists who think about aliens. Denning, an anthropologist at York University in Canada, is fascinated by the idea of The Other in relation to humans. Her recent research has focused on how scientists think about the evolution of intelligence in relation to hypothetical extraterrestrials, ethical difficulties and the future of the human colonization of Space. A big reason we’re so drawn to space, she told me, is “its importance in traditional culture.” We all share the experience of looking up at the stars and trying to make sense of it all. “It tends to get intertwined with the heavens and Heaven and we think of it as a place of revelations and knowledge and dreams,” Denning said. (from “Cosmic Postcards: The Adventures of an Armchair Astronaut,” by Kamakshi Ayyar)

In the days and months that followed I replayed the incident in my head over and over again. It seemed so unreal that I often questioned whether what I saw actually happened or if I dreamed it all up. What always made it real again was not the image of a man jumping but the memory of the jolt the train made as it ran over his body. I needed to know who this man was. I looked in the newspapers but found very little. I learned that his name was Dwight Brown and that he was 27 years old. He lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Then the trail dried up. It was as if this man’s trace of life vanished. I thought if I could find more about this man, meet his family and friends, I would be able to make sense of that morning. (from “The Witness,” by Mary Ann Georgantopoulos)

Shapiro also gave us a status report on his larger project, The Big Round Table, a Kickstarter-funded web-based publisher of longform narrative that attempts to crowd-curate storytelling by bypassing the “gatekeepers” of publishing and posting what readers say they want to read. Stories get greenlighted by a cooperative of journalists “committed to the future of big narrative ambitious nonfiction” based on the first 1,000 words. Writers earn $1 of every sale. We talked to Shapiro last night by email. Here’s some of the discussion:

Storyboard: You went big with the pitch: “There is a revolution taking place in journalism. With it have come possibilities for writers who despaired of ever finding a way to make a living at their craft. Writers are now freed from the constraints of convention in telling their stories and from the commercial needs of editors and publishers, who determine what tales get told. That, in turn, means a new era of creativity for authors of narrative nonfiction—new writers, new stories, new audiences waiting for a friend to say, Here’s a story you’ll want to read. The Big Roundtable is more than a digital publishing platform; it is a movement, one that we believe can expand the possibilities for writers, and readers.” Where’d this idea come from?

Shapiro: It came from, how best to put it, 35 years of writing for a living—in newspapers, magazines, and books, and seeing how the publishing world felt as it were shrinking, while all around it, the world was expanding. Believe me, I felt the pinch. There was ever more pressure, especially when it came to books, to come up with ideas that were sure to sell. Well, how is anyone supposed to know what will sell, other than genre fiction? At the same time, magazines were feeling ever more predictable, and had been for years. For several years I was a judge at the National Magazine Awards, and found ever more that while the stories I was reading while not bad, seldom lifted off the page. The writing had become so formulaic, so safe—anecdotal lede, nut graf, quote from eminent sociologist. It was ever harder to find a story that you sensed a writer needed to tell. And we all know the difference. We know what it is like writing a story that burns inside of us, and a story that is, well, interesting. The result was a landscape of predictability. Why were journalists, smart and eager journalists, constrained, when writers of creative fiction were freer to experiment and push? What happened to the New Journalism revolution? I cannot believe it peaked a generation ago. Where was the surprise?

You had a $5,000 Kickstarter goal and took in nearly $19,219, from 220 backers. Who gave, and why?

People we know—God bless them. And a lot of people we’d never heard of who contributed generously and who sometimes wrote to say, Hey, cool idea. I have a story. Can I send it along? The answer was, and is, always yes. (Pitches should go to TheBRTable@gmail.com.)

“Now everyone can be a writer and a publisher,” you said in your campaign. Please explain.

I suspect every writer falls asleep and dreams that come the dawn they will become the next Amanda Hocking, that from the acorn of a few sales via Amazon to friends will spring the mighty oak of best-sellerism. Pretty to think so, no? The problem isn’t one of production or dissemination; no one needs a publisher to print and sell. The problem is audience. How do you find one, and make people feel as if their lives will be lessened if they don’t read your work?

But hold on: There’s still a gatekeeper aspect, because BRT ultimately decides which stories move forward. No?

Shapiro

Yes. But. The gatekeeper is not me. Lord knows if it were me there would be a surfeit of baseball stories. Who is to say that my taste, or any other individual’s tastes, is superior? I may be skilled at seeing where a story slips and can be improved. But I enjoy no monopoly on taste, and nor does anyone else. And so, we’re experimenting, yes experimenting because in a venture like the BRT we are in a permanent state of beta, with the idea that if you ask a small group of readers what they think about a story, you improve the chances of achieving that rarest and most sought after quality in a story: surprise. In an early—call it alpha—version of the experiment, we asked people to read full drafts. Huge mistake. Because presented with a story, writers cannot help but take out their red pens and try to fix things. So, we wondered what would happen if we asked those same people to read, say, the first 1,000 words. Takes five minutes. You can do it on your phone waiting for your tall soy latte. All we asked was: Do you want to read more, or no thanks? Quick response, and much more useful. It told us whether the story had an audience. Why 1,000 words? Because—and here, I am drawing more on experience than data—if you can nail the first 1,000 words of a story, the odds are good that you’re on your way.

Curation is the thing right now—Longreads, Longform.org, etc. You describe the project as a platform “through which writers of nonfiction stories too long for most magazines, and too short for most publishers, can find their readers,” but that also describes, sort of, platforms like Byliner and, to some extent, Kindle Singles, which publishes stories too long for a magazine and too short for a book. How does BRT differ from those?

All our content is original. Byliner does some original work, but mostly curated; they’ve been very kind about curating my stuff. I know David Blum, who edits Kindle Singles, and think he is a very smart editor. But in the end, David, talented as he is, is the gatekeeper. We’re trying something different.

The idea is that a happy reader will (and can) share the story with three friends, which is encouraged through the BRT model. The sharing aspect seems central to this concept. Why the sharing?

Think about it: When you choose what you read for pleasure is on the basis of a) a review, b) something you heard or read about, or c) because a friend, not a Facebook friend but a living breathing want-to-get-dinner-this-week friend, said, You Have to Read This! I’ve asked this question many times to many different groups of people over the past year and the answer always comes up C. It is all about sharing. The question is, How do you replicate that moment at scale? That, in the end, is what this is all about. Again, it is all about increasing the chances of finding under your nose a story that is surprising.

Writers will make $1 per sale. How will you handle the operational transparency aspect with writers? How will writers know precisely how well their work is doing and whether they’re getting their fair share?

We will do so contractually—no writer should ever for a moment think, Jeez, these guys aren’t being straight with me. That would be bad on so many levels.

You use the term “nonfiction novella,” the kind of language that makes a lot of people nervous. What does that term mean, from BRT’s perspective?

It means too long for most magazines and too short for a conventional book. Say, 5,000 to 30,000 words. Loosely. There are so many times I wished I had more space—and I have written 17,000-word magazine stories. I also can look at my books and think, you know, I think this would have been perfect at 40,000. If my publisher reads this they will not be pleased. Sorry fellas.

Where does this project live? Looks like you’ve got Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter covered.

It lives on the Internet because we live in a world where it is ever clearer that the Internet—and by this I mean the great amorphous amalgam of feeds and inboxes—decides what shall thrive. There is a terrific book by the sociologist Duncan Watts called Six Degrees—as in, yes, six degrees of separation—that captures as well as anything I’ve read the science of social networks. Watts is a pal of Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed and HuffPost fame, and they take different views of network creation. Peretti, a born optimist, believes that it is possible to tweak a budding network into something larger. Duncan takes a less sunny view. I fall someplace in between but veer toward Jonah. The Internet feels to me like a lava lamp, bubbling around, waiting for someone or something to tip it and get all that action flowing a certain way. Does this analogy make me sound like a Dead Head?

Yes. In a good way. The first story runs in August. What’s in the lineup? Can you give us some idea of the first few pieces?

Some great ones, and I will do so as cryptically as I can, so that people might think, “cool:” Inside the Albanian Mob; My Weekend at Adolf’s; How Disco Never Died; The Mother of Creedmoor; Of Inmates, Fire, and Death; The Miracle on Molokai. And those are but a few.

Generally speaking, are BRT stories those that got rejected elsewhere?

Maybe. We look at the stories as stories. We don’t ask them to come with a CV.

It can be hard enough getting phone calls returned when you’re on staff, but when you’re working without an institution attached to your project, how do you represent yourself? How would you advise a prospective BRT author to identify herself?

I am a writer with a story to tell. Here it is. Our promise is that people will read the first 1,000 words.

Will the authors report/write the whole piece on spec and then hope the thing flies with readers? So much of great storytelling depends on the reporting. You need to report enough to write a great top, since readers will green light the piece (or not) based on the first 1,000 words, but that puts writers working without a net. Say you spend three months reporting enough just to get a great opening, but then nobody bites. That’s three months you just spent, for nothing. Or no?

Out there, as I write, I know, just know, that there are all these wonderful writers with stories burning in their notebooks who are thinking, “There is more to this story than 700 words.” Maybe the New Yorker? The Times magazine? Maybe. But the odds aren’t good. I know this because I have been that writer and I wanted to tell that story and yes, I wanted to be paid for it. But I needed to tell it. And to put my money where my mouth is, I’m working on one now for the BRT. I really need to tell this one. No advance.

Who is your envisioned audience?

Ah, that is the $64,000 question. We have an incredible story in which a woman recounts her banker father slowly drinking himself to death. (Trust me, you cannot put this one down.) Is that only for an audience of children of alcoholics? Or will others, for whom this bears no direct connection to their lives, nonetheless see in the story a quality that speaks to them, that surprises them?

Who will edit the stories? Will there be fact checkers? Copyeditors? How will the actual editorial process work?

We have my all time favorite editor working with us, Mike Hoyt, the longtime editor of Columbia Journalism Review. Best hands, as they say, in the business. If we don’t have terrific stories, and yes fact-checked stories, we are nowhere. But it is not Mike’s job to choose. It is his job to lift those stories, with the author.

You have a stated goal of studying “how people find, read, fall in love with a share stories” and becoming “the research lab of the longform revival” by gathering data that “will at long last illuminate what happens when one friend feels compelled to share a story with another.” There’s a longform revival?

Don’t you think so? Look at all these ventures—Atavist, Longform, Longreads, to say nothing of these heretofore impossible to imagine stories in the Times and elsewhere.

We like “longform” without the hyphen. Looks like you do too.

Cleaner, no?

You’ve said a paid staff will produce BRT. Paid how? Who’s on the masthead?

We have some money from Kickstarter and hope to start getting more—grants, we hope. We have a small staff: Mike, me; our product manager is a journalism school grad, Anna Hiatt. We’re being assisted by Rashmi Raman, who is our engineer, Anna Codrea-Rado, who manages the audiences and our designer, Eleonore Hamelin.

You’ll sell directly from the BRT website rather than through a distributor like Amazon. Why?

Because Amazon does not share all its data. And we want, need, to be able to see and test and iterate.

Whom do you envision as your typical writer?

The writer with a story he or she is burning to tell. Really, it is that simple.

The goal is to understand how readers find, read and fall in love with work, and share it. Assuming you figure that out, what next?

Heaven knows. We’re making this up as we go along. I am learning what it means to be involved in a startup.

(*having had some experience with it ourselves)

Why Charles Ramsey’s interview is great (and it’s okay* to think so)

Paige Williams — Thu, 09 May 2013 15:05:57 +0000

Everybody loved the Charles Ramsey interviews on freeing Amanda Berry, one of three young women abducted in Cleveland a decade ago and apparently held captive all this time. Then of course, people hated it. Or some did, anyway, raising questions about the meme of the “hilarious black neighbor.” Until details about the story had time to emerge—what went on in that house, and how such secrets went undetected for so long—all the attention was on Ramsey, and his unfiltered recounting of the excitement on Seymour Street. You’ve seen the video and heard the audio, but here it is in text form:

“Yeah, hey bro,” Ramsey told the dispatcher. “I’m at 2207 Seymour. West 25th. Check this out—I just came from McDonald’s, right? So I’m on my porch eating my little food, right? This broad is trying to break out the fucking house next door to me, so there’s a bunch of people on the street right now and shit. So we’re like, ‘What’s wrong? What’s the problem?’ She’s like, ‘This motherfucker done kidnapped me and my daughter…’ She say her name is Linda Berry or some shit. I don’t know who the fuck that is, I just moved over here, bro.”

“Sir, sir,” said the male dispatcher. “…You have to calm down and slow down. Is she still in the street?”

“Seymour Avenue,” Ramsey said.

“Is she still in the street or where did she go?”

“Yeah I’m looking at her right now. She’s calling y’all! She’s on the other phone.”

They went on for a bit, with Ramsey getting frustrated and the dramatic tension (hello, narrative) rising. A short while later the TV news crews arrived, and Ramsey’s story got longer and more detailed, with discrepancies:

I went to McDonald’s and I’m at home and I hear this, ‘Help, let me out!’ This girl screaming. Now we don’t have that on our street because everybody on this street knows each other, so when you hear something like that you come running to see what’s going on. I thought it was a kid got attacked by a pit bull. And I looked at that girl and I said, ‘You look familiar!’ And I’m prying the door open and she’s trying to get out, and she climbed through the bottom of it and soon as she got out she said, ‘My name is Amanda Berry, call the police.’

You heard screaming? the reporter asked.

I heard screaming. I’m eating my McDonald’s. I come outside and I see this girl going nuts, trying to get out of her house, so I go on the porch and she says, ‘Help me get out, I’ve been in here a long time,’ so I figured it was a domestic violence dispute so I opened the door and we can’t get in that way because…a body can’t fit through, only your hand. So we kicked the bottom and she comes out with a little girl and she says, ‘Call 911. My name is Amanda Berry.’ When she told me, it didn’t register until I got to calling 911… I thought this girl was dead, you know what I mean? And she got on the phone and she said, ‘Yes, this is me…’

And when did you see Gina?

About five minutes after the police got here. See, that girl Amanda told the police, ‘I ain’t just the only one, it’s some more girls up in that house.’ So they went up there 30, 40 deep, and when they came out it was just astonishing because I thought they were gonna come up with nothing.

How long you lived here?

I been here a year! I barbecue with this dude. We eat ribs and whatnot, and listen to salsa music.

And you had no indication?

Not a clue that that girl was in that house, or that anybody else was in there against their will. Because how he is, he just comes out to his back yard, plays with the dogs, tinkering with his cars and motorcycles, goes back in the house. He’s somebody that you look at and look away because he’s not doing nothing but the average stuff. There’s nothing exciting about him. Well, until today.

What was the reaction on the girls’ faces? I can’t imagine…

Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway. Either she’s homeless or she got problems. That’s the only reason she’s running to a black man.

[The interview over, Ramsey flashed the thumbs-up.]

Why this is great and people love it: First, true originals mesmerize. Unfiltered, unmanaged, Ramsey was authentically who he is. Second, he told a story. His account of the escape is straight up narrative. The elements are there: a compelling character with an original voice (“Yeah, hey, bro…check this out;” “so they went up there 30, 40 deep;” “We eat ribs and whatnot”); there’s a clear structure (chronological), dialogue (which is key), and the aforementioned dramatic tension; it’s got what Tom Wolfe calls status details—food from McDonald’s, assumptions about a pit bull attack and a domestic violence dispute. And then the underdog hero utters a Hemingway’s-iceberg line of dialogue:

“Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms.”

So the story becomes transcendent.

If you’re writing the long-ball narrative you wouldn’t want to omit what happened next, which was that Ramsey, inevitably, went viral. Why? Did the public love him for his storytelling skills? His authenticity? His gutsy instincts? Yep. And was that okay? Absolutely. There was nothing, on Day 1, not to love. This was “a wonderfully vibrant interview with a man who helped kick down a door and rescue three women and a child,” said Neely Tucker, a veteran Washington Post reporter and author of Love in the Driest Season, when we informally polled a few journalists on the topic. “It was precise, exciting, emotional, visually telling, and told with great pacing and narrative detail. All in two minutes, live, on camera. Anybody who’s bothered that the narrator is black and probably not rich is saying more about themselves than him.”

*Things got tricky when the inevitable autotune opportunists and meme-weavers bundled Ramsey with the viral videos of other crime-scene witnesses, all of whom happened to be black. The personal you-go-dude! feelings for Ramsey, conflated with images of expressive stylists like Antoine Dodson, morphed into something else. Not ugly, exactly, but ugly adjacent, if you took the view that the meme-drivers were laughing at, not with. Ramsey moved “from bystander and guy on the scene into ‘Internet object of affection,’” as Justin Ellis, an assistant editor of Nieman Journalism Lab, one of Storyboard’s sister publications, puts it. “I don’t know if that’s just the Internet chugging along or if there’s something else to blame. People want to celebrate him, which is great, but it’s hard to ignore the familiar trappings/scenario of ‘black person achieves Internet fame through local TV,’ which can feel exploitive at times and condescending or even casually racist at others.”

A narrative that already contained those trace elements of race/class (“pretty white girl;” “black man’s arms”) now had an overlay of social media influence, triggering confusion (was it not okay to like this guy’s interview?) and raising coverage questions: How will—or should—this aspect of the story be presented in the long view, or even in the short one? We asked other colleagues and here’s what they said:

Greg Moore

I have not watched a lot of the Internet stuff having fun with Charles Ramsey’s manner and I don’t plan to. I am from Cleveland and I know lots of people like Ramsey. On the street, he is likely being lauded for “keeping it real.” And part of the fascination with him is his originality and lack of self-consciousness. That’s partly why he could do what he did in saving those three women. He was on ABC’s Good Morning America this morning talking about the case, grappling for the right word here and there and sometimes clearly not understanding the question. But there was no mistaking his meaning and his grit when he did. Lamenting that he had shared ribs with the alleged perpetrator and even tried to salsa dance to some of his music, he ruefully noted something like this: If I had known what was going on in that house, don’t you think we’d be having a different interview right now? With Ramsey, you darn tootin’. Sometime people have to laugh to keep from crying. That’s a little bit of what is going on. This stuff is so bad and we are so relieved. But we all need to be listening to what this brave man is saying and not how he says it. I don’t think the reaction is so much racist as it reflects the lack of real familiarity with the strata of America. There are lots of people who talk like Ramsey and are damn funny, too. And there are many I grew up with who don’t play; who do the right thing and are fearless. Simple applause for Ramsey should be enough. He is a genuine hero, quirks and all. McDonald’s needs to put him in a commercial and one of those public-minded dental clinics should give him some new choppers for free. That’s the best way to show gratitude for such courage and community mindedness. And it is okay to chuckle at the unvarnished way he puts things? (Because it is really nervous laughter about how little we know about real people living real lives in communities across America). If we really understood his world, we’d know he is just keeping it real. And we are damn lucky he is. — Greg Moore, editor of the Denver Post, and Pulitzer Prize board member

Callie Crossley

First, of course, so glad he did what he did. Having said that, I wondered why a lot of the response to him has been all about the “funny” delivery. Have to say I’ve seen it before in portrayals of black men who happen into the middle of a breaking story—Antoine Dodson a prime example. For a while he was all the rage in pop culture, even garnering a record contract. But in his case and in Charles’ the serious substance of what they were saying got subsumed by their mannerisms and affect. I’m fascinated—not in a good way—by the fact that Charles’ commentary about race in Cleveland has stopped being reported as part of the story. “I knew something was wrong when a little pretty ran into a black man’s arms”—that’s pretty deep, and I think should have inspired journalists to ask him to explain what he meant. I’ve only heard one report focusing on this piece of the story, and I can’t remember if it was a TV or radio story. The piece picked up on his statement and went on to talk about the deep racial divide in Cleveland. But, that is the ONLY report I’ve seen dealing with it. As I see it, this is another example of journalists who are reluctant to pursue a legitimate racial angle to a story, even if it is a part of the main character’s story. And of course there is a class angle here. Reporters are also not so comfortable dealing with that issue. By the way, in the black blogosphere, a lot of folks are referencing In Living Color‘s satirical sketch: Reporters arrive on the scene of a breaking story and there are two witnesses, one a black professional in a suit and tie and another a black woman in what we used to call a housecoat, with curlers in her hair, and not in great command of the King’s English. Of course all of the reporters rushed past the guy and went to her for a “colorful” recitation of the events that had transpired. This is not exactly the same scenario in Charles Ramsey’s case—he was the only witness—but you get my drift. — Callie Crossley, host of the WGBH Radio show “Under the Radar.” Friday night at 7:30, Crossley will lead a Basic Black discussion called “What Can We Learn from Charles Ramsey?” It airs on WGBH-TV, Channel 2 in the Boston area.

Meanwhile, the Cleveland narrative unfolded. When Anderson Cooper spoke to Ramsey about all this, Ramsey said, “It’s about cojones. It’s about cojones, on this planet.” Cooper then asked whether he hoped to receive the FBI reward for helping free the women. “I tell you what you do,” Ramsey said instantly. “Give it to them.”

“Why’s this so good?” No. 77: Danny and the carjackers

Paige Williams — Tue, 07 May 2013 15:49:08 +0000

One of the most riveting stories to emerge from the Boston Marathon bombing coverage was the Boston Globe piece, by Eric Moskowitz, about “Danny,” the young Chinese entrepreneur who spent more than an hour with the bombers in his carjacked Mercedes, trying to figure out how to escape. The story was relatively short, at 2,183 words, and read even faster because Moskowitz kept a tight focus on narrative action. A passage:

@GlobeMoskowitz

With Tamerlan driving now, Danny in the passenger seat, and Dzhokhar behind Danny, they stopped in Watertown Center so Dzhokhar could withdraw money from the Bank of America ATM using Danny’s card. Danny, shivering from fear but claiming to be cold, asked for his jacket. Guarded by just one brother, Danny wondered if this was his chance, but he saw around him only locked storefronts. A police car drove by, lights off.

Tamerlan agreed to retrieve Danny’s jacket from the back seat. Danny unbuckled, put on the jacket, then tried to buckle the seat belt behind him to make an escape easier. “Don’t do that,” Tamerlan said, studying him. “Don’t be stupid.”

Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark broke down the story’s strengths beautifully in a recent post. Three highlights:

It begins, like the ancient epics, in medias res—in the middle of things.

“The 26-year-old Chinese entrepreneur had just pulled his new Mercedes to the curb on Brighton Avenue to answer a text when an old sedan swerved behind him, slamming on the brakes. A man in dark clothes got out and approached the passenger window. It was nearly 11 p.m. last Thursday.” (I can’t help feel a digital-age irony here, that Danny drives into mortal danger by doing the right thing — pulling over to text.)

Clark, speaking at a Nieman Narrative Journalism conference

The construction of narrative journalism depends upon certain strategies associated traditionally with fiction, and we get all of them here: scene, dialogue, character details, point of view. The fact that the events tick-tock in a block of time (about 90 minutes) and inside the confines of an automobile, create what classical critics might call a unity of time, place and action that intensifies the experience of the reader.

This story should remind us of how rarely dialogue appears in breaking news, with reporters depending more often on quotes gathered after the fact. Even though he is using a single source (the bombers being unavailable, one dead, one arrested), the writer chooses to re-create the dialogue in the car based on Danny’s recollection. I count at least 12 paragraphs containing dialogue such as: “Don’t look at me!” Tamerlan shouted at one point. “Do you remember my face?” / “No, no, I don’t remember anything,” [Danny] said.

For more installments of “Why’s this so good?” go here.

Prize stories, Part 2: A National Magazine Award for Pamela Colloff

Paige Williams — Fri, 03 May 2013 15:18:33 +0000

Storytelling prize season wound down last night with the presentation of the National Magazine Awards, the Pulitzers of the American magazine world. Texas Monthly’s Pamela Colloff took the “Ellie” for her two-part narrative series on a man wrongly imprisoned for 25 years in the violent death of his wife. “The Innocent Man” topped stories from Byliner, GQ, Mother Jones, The New Yorker and Wired, in a category tweaked, this year, to combine feature and profile writing. (Texas Monthly also won for Public Interest, with a Mimi Swartz story on women’s health. You can find the full list of winners and finalists here.)

Left to right: Swartz, Colloff and fact checker David Moorman at last night’s festivities, courtesy the @TexasMonthly Twitter feed.

Colloff recently annotated “The Innocent Man” for Storyboard, as part of our growing Annotation Tuesday! series. Here’s a snippet from Part 1, with Storyboard’s comments in green and Colloff’s in blue:

A running gag between them involved Michael calling out, “Bitch, get me a beer!” I’m using a detail that later is cast in a very dark light by the prosecution, but I’m presenting it here as Michael and Christine saw it, which was as just a joke. A lot of the media coverage following Michael’s 2011 exoneration made him appear almost saintly, because he did not want revenge and he handled his wrongful incarceration with such grace. But that’s not who he was back in 1986. I wanted people to see his rough edges and his imperfections so that he would be a real person. Also, I wanted to provide some context for the way that investigators in the case saw him. His crudeness was, I think, part of what led investigators to think he was capable of violence. As for where this detail came from, the marigolds came from the trial transcript, and I asked Michael about it in more detail, which is when he explained their placement in the yard./pc —something they had once overheard a friend of a friend shout at his girlfriend. Christine would respond by telling Michael to go screw himself. “He teased her a lot, and he would go right up to the line of what was acceptable, and sometimes he went over it,” Gersky said. Referring to an attractive friend of theirs who stopped by the house one day wearing shorts, he told Christine, “Now, that’s the way you should look.” A friend of Christine’s told me this and our tireless fact-checker, David Moorman, ran it past Michael before publication./pc

And from Part 2:

“When I got here, they used to put all new arrivals in the field force,” Michael Excellent question. I always wrestle with whether or not to refer to a protagonist by his/her first or last name. In this case, there were practical reasons to go with his first name. Christine had the same last name, so it ended up being an easy decision. (Calling him “Morton” and her “Christine” seemed awfully weird.) But generally speaking I like the immediacy of using someone’s first name, when it’s appropriate./pc wrote, referring to inmates who were assigned to work on the prison farm. That had been three years earlier. Now 47, he was too old to be doing hard physical labor all day long, he told Garcia. His face had settled into the softer contours of middle age, and his sandy blond hair was going gray. “Try to imagine twenty to forty men,” he continued, “shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, swinging their [hoes] in unison and chopping weeds that are, I swear to God, six to ten feet high. Or, on the bad days, working in a huge irrigation ditch, skinning the banks down to bare earth I know! I get a lot of letters from prison, and I can assure you that none of them sound like this./pc and then dragging the chopped-up vegetation back up the banks. It’s long, hard, backbreaking work.

A few other Colloff favorites from the Storyboard files:

-Her piece “‘Why’s this so good?’ No. 65: David Grann and the death row prisoner.” In our ongoing series, Colloff wrote about Grann’s treatment of the questionable case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas for killing his children.

-Her chat with Storyboard about her story on a mother convicted of killing her son with salt.

-Her piece about the innocence of death row inmate Anthony Graves, which we included in a “What we’re reading” post.

Congratulations, Pam, and thank you for your work!