Rushfield: Nikki Finke RIP
The id of an industry and its insecurity remembered for better and, mostly, worse
This is not a fun one to write, even though I've written thousands of words on the topic in the past and Nikki occupied a fairly sizable estate rent-free in my brain for too many years.
When a life ends, in general, I think you should honor the passing and the grief of those close and try to be positive for a few hours. And it's not like she committed genocide. She never even got anyone fired, although she threatened to do so hourly — mostly to very low-ranking employees.
But in my tiny corner of my at-times dying profession, hers was a consequential life. I don't say she personally changed everything, but she messed some things up for certain. Her legacy has a lot to do with why I started this little newsletter. So some words on what she meant, unfortunately, are in order.
This is the story of a very troubled writer who used the megaphone of “journalism” to work out her insecurities and issues in a hellstorm of performative rage, all while hiding — ailing, agoraphobic, sick — behind an online persona. An OG troll. And this is the story of the industry that enabled that, elevated it and created a monster in its own image. I’d argue no other “real” industry would ever have given such a person oxygen.
If she was an abusive rageaholic, well that's how powerful people are. They've got a lot on their shoulders... we have to cut them some slack. If she lied like other people breathe, well, hey, what's a lie anyway? She was always a journalist trying to play mogul, and for the moguls who empowered her, they took the act as an homage. An unstable but useful vessel; as transactional as they are themselves.
There are those who knew her before she became “Nikki”, who attest she could be kind and considerate and a good friend back when. Nice to hear. Not a side of her I ever witnessed.
The newfound prominence of Deadline brought Nikki into some brand new circles with a much higher level of poohbahs burning up her phone line. And they all called with one great suggestion, “Why don't you write about how everyone hates (insert poohbah’s enemy of the month here).”
The Trump parallels are too easy, and yet, hard to ignore. She didn't try to ban Muslims from entering the country, but if Donald Trump had been an entertainment journalist, you can see how he would have looked a lot like Nikki; the same rage-bloated egomania to hide massive, almost superhuman insecurities and self-hatred, the same not just disregard for truth but the inability to see that truth and integrity are actual things...
And the same willingness to shatter norms because your profession and its standards don't have any meaning in itself — they’re just the nearest tool to make people fear you. And that's all that matters.
THE MOGULS WHO WEAPONIZED HER
Going through the Nikki catalogue… where to begin? You come for the brazen lies, stay for the jaw-dropping self-promotion, and come back after the intermission for the psychotic abuse of her platform to demean others. Conflicts of interest? We've got ’em! Toadying to the powerful? Check!
Nikki's Deadline was one-stop shopping for every violation of journalistic standards and ethics the Columbia Journalism School could imagine. She was the equivalent of a restaurant whose toilets are gushing raw sewage into the kitchen, while also serving meat they fished out of neighboring dumpsters. The Health Department’s letter-grade system collapses in the face of such willful defilement.
So going back... it's hard to overstate if you were pathetic enough to do what I do for a living in the early years of this millennium, how much Nikki wasn't the dominant topic, she was the only topic. (That said, she remained only a minor figure in the world of east coast establishment media. When I wrote about her at Gawker the posts were delighted about in Hollywood, but consistently the lowest traffic posts in the history of the site.)
She lied about things small — she would tweak weekend box office numbers to punish people who hadn't bought ads; changing time stamps to make it look like she broke a story — and things enormous.
Way back, a few blogs and jobs ago, I spent far too much time writing a whole series of posts about her and her influence; my “Nikkileaks” series... lost in the sands of entertainment journalism time, and most of them not even searchable on the web after all these years. My posts on her work earned me regular promises that she would be suing me tomorrow, always tomorrow; but tomorrow never came.
There are plenty of bad journalists in the world, and no shortage of them right here in Hollywood. So why the obsession — and that’s what it was — with one blogger?
Well, in many ways, the place that Nikki claimed she was occupying was exactly what the world needed. Nikki’s Deadline reign happened in the years after the roaring ’90s — when the flamboyant sagas of the Ovitzes and Eisners and Gubers had given way to a duller, grayer sort of business, with the still ample supplies of monstrous behavior kept behind the curtain.
The trades of that era had followed suit, answering the duller times with duller reporting, plodding, self-important — like the industry itself was becoming — and like the industry itself, oblivious to the rise of a much more restless source of information that was springing up on these newfangled computers, of all places.
Her first great insight was to see the state of the trades for what it was and to realize that they were just sitting there waiting for someone to drive a freight train right through the fearful paper tiger they had become. Fair enough — why should 21st-century readers have to wait until the next morning to find out that someone had switched agents or sold a script to Sony? Or truthfully, to just rewrite press releases dutifully doled out on the beat in a transaction where ad dollars (of varying sums) were paid in exchange?
Her second great insight in gathering these micro-scoops was that they didn't have to be right; they just had to keep coming. If they were wrong, you'd correct it later. Or not, who would remember after all? Or care that some story from three weeks ago they couldn't even remember didn't pan out?
Her third great insight was that you could be wrong 10,000 times a day, but you can never be boring (again, Trump). And the two things could go together, because in the pursuit of micro-scoops you flay alive those who didn't give them to you.
During her very public jihad against Jay Penske, she went on, “I think Deadline is very bland and boring, and doesn't tell the truth about Hollywood anymore.”
And from all that, everything else sprang. Once you're running a journalistic operation where truth and accuracy is no longer your calling card, the doors open to a lot of behavior. And this is where the outrage of Nikki came in.
The blog shot to center stage with her vocal championing of the most hardline writer’s position during the writers strike. Suddenly the long time gossip monger was the tribune of the people, vexer of the powerful. And who wouldn't like that?
Problem is — while Nikki had a fearlessness to a point, afflicting the comfortable was never quite her agenda. The newfound prominence of Deadline brought Nikki into some brand-new circles with a much higher level of poobahs burning up her phone line. And they all called with one great suggestion, “Why don't you write about how everyone hates (insert poohbahs enemy of the month here).”
Rumored sources bandied about, those on speed-dial, were said to be Ari Emanuel and Ron Meyer, among others.
So in theory she was taking on some powerful people, but it was always with the protection and support of even more powerful people. Afflict the slightly less comfortable on the behalf of the extremely comfortable, was her true motto. And as much as she would heap scorn on the designated enemies, she would also take time-outs to lavish the sorts of praise upon her sources that would make their own mothers’ blush.
Here's my personal favorite of the genre, her piece demanding the Tribune Company sell the LA Times to David Geffen (in the end, after playing white knight statesman, the mogul never submitted an actual bid.) Some excerpts:
No one outgames Geffen. Everyone in Hollywood knows that...I’m told Geffen is starting to plan what he intends to do at the paper once it’s his. Here’s what he’s saying to friends: He’ll pour money into more hires. He plans to staff — more like stuff — the paper with name writers and journalism stars. (Of course, he’ll raid The New York Times, where Frank Rich and his wife, Alex Witchel, are his good friends and occasional overnight guests. So are Nora Ephron and Nick Pileggi. So are a lot of literati.) He’ll demand quality... Besides, look at the lengths he’s going to make the paper his. First, there are all those recent art sales he’s making. True, he’s timed it to the top of the art market, but the hundreds of millions of dollars he’s getting could be going into his war chest to buy the LA Times. Even if Burkle and Broad beat him to the first bid, Geffen is well positioned to get what he wants...
Et cetera.
I used to wonder why she was so careless, so shamelessly carrying someone's water to the point where it all but outed her source... until I realized: that was the point. She wants you to know she's carrying their water because she wants you to know this big strong important person talks to her... that's what it's all about.
It's the disease of certain trade journalists, the all-consuming thirst of the powerless to feel powerful. It's a combination of the desperation that comes from covering an industry where so much is unknown and unknowable — even the people who run the place don't understand it — and being that close to (but still not part of) the people with so much of... everything. Self-puffery and self-aggrandizement, it turns out, are not just for insecure executives.
There is no higher duty for journalists than protecting your sources. People trust you with their careers, their reputation, their livelihood, and you give your word that you'll go to jail to protect them — there's nothing above that.
But for so many that slams into the even higher demand — to let as many people as possible know what amazing incredible big shots you talk to and hang out with. Nikki wasn't the first (nor the last) to fall prey to that hunger, but she gave it free rein like nobody before.
She lied about things small — she would tweak weekend box office numbers to punish people who hadn't bought ads; changing time stamps to make it look like she broke a story — and things enormous.
All the talk today about her as a trailblazer — she knocked down some walls in journalism, basically to a faster, more opinionated newsroom, but the other thing her that she really really REALLY hated was any woman who was successful in Hollywood: female journalists, but also female executives in the business.
There are no stories in existence of her ever lifting a finger to help a female journalist (or a male journalist, probably). She would never miss a chance to take the hatchet to a female journalist. Trump-like, if she could invent a semi-plausible (but not actually true) attack line, no bile would go unspewed.
No one leaped quicker to tear down any female exec who got anywhere in the nastiest, most personal terms.
Again, my favorite of the genre, this piece about Lauren Zalaznick:
Ever since the NBC Universal-Comcast merger was announced last year, the obnoxious Lauren Zalaznick has been lobbying for a bigger role within the combined company.... “She’s the girl who never got asked to the prom in high school, and now she’s trying to make everybody believe she’s Prom Queen,” one agent disses her... The upshot is that the publicity-hungry Zalaznick is just embarrassing herself... Another problem for Zalaznick is that she’s not well-liked inside the company except by the bosses she brown-nosed.
And then this kicker, that is of course the tell:
I hope a special hell is reserved for female showbiz execs who degrade their own sex like this.
Note in the quote above, one of Nikki’s signatures, the anonymous quote with an ad hominem attack on Nikki’s target, coming from someone whom... we just had to take her word for it that that person existed and said what she claimed they said.
Of course, Nikki isn't the first hell-raising vicious columnist in Hollywood history. And her predecessors of the Golden Age may have been even more brazenly corrupt that she was.
An interesting artifact: this 1989 piece written by Finke (and Michael Cieply) while she was still working a day job at the L.A. Times, about Celia Brady, Spy magazine's pseudonymous columnist then causing a stir with her caustic pieces. One can see a lightbulb going on in Nikki’s head as she writes:
Still, those Hollywood types who are reading Brady -- or the multiple Bradys --are doing so avidly and/or angrily. “I laugh along with everybody else. It’s fun to make fun of powerful people,” says the president of one talent agency.
Just as clearly, Hollywood is churning with a certain amount of fear of being ridiculed by Brady and Spy. “Please don’t mention my name,” says the same agent. “I have this nightmare that I’ll be the only agent quoted in your story, and they’ll come after me.”
(Some of the journalistic set seem to share the apprehension. “If you write about (Celia Brady), they’ll come after you next. . . . And forget my name,” warns one Vanity Fair staffer, who claims to know “exactly” who the columnist is.)
But none of her predecessors were armed with a doomsday device like the one that fell into the hands of Finke: the internet. (Worth nothing: the above story put Spy’s readership at the time, all print, at 13,000.)
The examples of nastiness, mendacity and pettiness you could stack to the moon:
The attack on Mark Shmuger on the occasion of his firing that ended “because, readers, I hate Shmuger, really detest the putz”
The time when Dawn Hudson gave her first interview to the newly ascendant THR and not six hours later Nikki goes berserk, attacking AMPAS for not letting Sasha Baron Cohen present an Oscar in the character of whatever Paramount film (see above tweet) films) he was promoting (a good decision). “The prospect of Baron Cohen’s Red Carpet walk was the closest thing to drama.”
Or making a deal to make a “Deadline Game” with Paramount (again, Paramount, in the Brad Grey/Rob Moore era), which happened to be her most favorite source back then, its most tawdry era.
We could go on all day.
And yet. I come back to a conversation I had with a writer friend about Nikki at her height. I was protesting all the usual objections — she's a liar, she's corrupt — all of which, he shrugged off.
“But she's entertaining,” he said.
“How can you take her seriously writing about the business? Can't you see she has no idea what she's talking about?” I pleaded.
“Do you think we take any of you seriously or think any of you have an idea what you're talking about?” he responded, hitting much too close to home.
Whenever I slide towards the danger of taking myself too seriously in this profession (doesn't happen more than 10 times a day), I remember the above, and therein the positive we can take away from Nikki’s legacy.
ENDING ON A WHIMPER
We all can get very very very serious in our discussion of the least serious profession on earth — that inverse ratio is probably not a coincidence. Certainly no one took herself more seriously than Nikki, but she had the imagination to make a story out of all this, to create characters, to stir things up and keep things interesting. The story of entertainment is not gray, dutiful marching towards the quarterly earnings report — it is wild, colorful characters doing completely ridiculous things, and if you can't capture life's rich pageant that way, then you should wonder how accurately you're representing the true experience of an industry whose business is entertainment.
Those are lessons her colleagues at the Penske publications have pretty much completely forgotten, as, since her scorched-earth departure, the devotion to micro-scoops and announcement wrangling has swallowed just about everything else.
Even in Nikki’s time, the announcement beast got so far out of the box, that the raging, feces-throwing Nikki became an anachronism while still on the payroll, leading her to publicly declare:
She went on, “I think Deadline is very bland and boring, and doesn't tell the truth about Hollywood anymore.”
And nine years later, here we are.
She got lots of scoops in her day. She certainly did, such as they were.
And for many beat journalists there’s nothing higher than being the person to break the news of some script deal, or someone getting fired.
I get it. I love to be the first to tell friends that Pearl Harbor was just bombed or that Sony is cutting back its housekeeping deals or whatever. It’s basic human instinct to which we in the news business are especially susceptible.
I'll refer back to the old saw, widely attributed to George Orwell but whose authorship is in fact, unclear: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations.”
And reporting something five minutes before the official announcement doesn't count as something someone doesn't want printed. Being slightly earlier than they would have liked doesn't change the nature of the work.
Yes, we here at The Ankler dive into this now and then. It's a fun little game. But when you start to mistake that for the beating heart of journalism…
The tragedy for Nikki is that this part of her legacy is what really had an impact; what shook up the trade world and it’s never fully recovered from. The other part — the wild story Nikki created out of this show, complete in her version with fabrications, vengeance, toadying and all the rest — that part has pretty much disappeared beneath the waves already.
It’s hard to imagine how a post-#MeToo, post-bullying (ish), Hollywood might co-exist with a still-publishing Finke and her careless and cruel writing style. Indeed, she proved too much even for her own bottom-line boss. Meanwhile, all her big deal sources, her senior-level hit men and women, the ones who gleefully almost did a show based on her, Tilda, at HBO, seemed to run for the exits once Nikki was no longer useful to them, as her various post-Penske enterprises never quite achieved lift-off.
And this tweet from Huffington Post, with the accompanying picture, mistaking the very much alive and vibrant Tina Brown for Nikki Finke — says it all. Out of sight, out of mind.
Nikki Finke certainly never found much peace in this lifetime. May she find some now beyond the vale...
And yet as editor of Hollywood Dementia she responded very fast to submissions and it was always a good experience. She published a number of my short stories and her edits were reasonable and presented in a respectful way.
So many people are planning to piss on her grave, that plot of land will never suffer any sort of drought