Hollywood Reporters and Gatsby Envy

By Nikki Finke, LA Weekly. Posted February 4, 2005.

Rarely has one article caused such a commotion on both coasts as journalist Bernie Weinraub's goodbye to the Hollywood beat in The New York Times on Sunday. It was as if narrator Nick Carraway were given space in The Paper of Record to write honestly about the swell set, only this time he surprises us by revealing that he longed for the green light of status and money as much as Jay Gatsby did. Yet, as an ink-stained wretch and damned proud of it, I've got to say, Huh?

First, let me fully disclose that I won't be attacking my pal Bernie personally over what is a beautifully written, though emotionally befuddled, look back at his 14 years inside and outside the entertainment business. (I'm especially sad that he revealed that incident in which he fell asleep during an interview with Jim Carrey, because I used it to blackmail him almost daily.) But for days now, my answering machine and e-mail have been filled with "What did you think of it?" messages, so I feel compelled to publicly examine Bernie's 2,800-word tale of his Hollywood-style seduction.

And what oozes from it is the gunky notion that a journalist wanted to live like the people he covered here. And he isn't alone. The studio and network parking lots are filled with the Porsches and BMWs of reporters and critics who jumped the fence (though, to Bernie's credit, marrying a mogulette instead of writing your way into The Good Life remains a novel route, nonetheless). How abnormal I must be then. Because, clearly, I'm missing what appear to be the essential chromosomes composing the entertainment-biz reporters' DNA: the Hollywood Envy gene.

As Weinraub writes, when he arrived here to start the gig, "I was struck almost immediately by the prevalence of money, and the crazy economic gap between journalists and the people they covered. It was like dropping into Marie Antoinette's France." But doesn't anyone remember that Ol' Mary was decapitated in the end? And that Gatsby got a bullet in the back as well? That's exactly why I don't lust after the trappings of Tinseltown: Everybody's success and the conspicuous consumption that accompanies it bear too high a psychic price tag.

It's because the fame and fortune are so fleeting for people in this town that they make such bigger-than-life grabs for the pomp and power. It's the job of the journalist to see the cushy life or crazy money here for exactly what it is: compensation for the fact that, at any moment, Hollywood types can fail in the most publicly cruel and humiliating ways possible. Sure, they have spectacular moves in their high-wire acts, but they also take spectacular falls. For perspective, consider that every Monday morning, the CEOs at Coke and Pepsi don't suffer the media announcing the numbers of bottles of soda they sold over the weekend, while Hollywood CEOs know their mothers back in Brooklyn have heard the weekend box-office receipts on the Today show. How it must feel to be Jonathan Dolgen these days: One minute, The Bad Cop at Paramount is the toast of the town for his cost cutting while also producing a string of profitable pics, and the next he's a total turkey for cutting costs too deeply and producing a series of loser movies. Or, God forbid, Michael Ovitz, since bets are being taken at well-situated tables inside the Grill on just how much longer it will be before he puts a gun to his head and pulls the trigger.

Their private lives are public fodder. Forget, for a sec, about the stars. For years, Bob Daly deliberately denied himself a seat on the Time Warner board just so no one would know the vulgar excess of his compensation as co-head of Warner Bros. Yet newspapers got hold of his divorce papers anyway and revealed every dollar to the world. We journalists know who uses penis pumps, and who gets blowjobs under the desk and who interrupts meetings to be serviced by a hooker. We're like the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg staring down at them, only it's not "God sees everything" but now also tabloid-trending magazines and snarky blogs. We're what Nick opines "is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men." For chrissakes, that icon Johnny Carson wrestled with Hollywood's most omnipresent devilry, that of massive insecurity caused by the constant hyperscrutiny. Here the comedian had all the money, all the prestige and hardly any enemies (except ex-wives), yet after he retired he turned down offers not because he didn't want a second chapter but, sadly, because of vanity: he told intimates that, because of age and illness and corpulence, he "no longer looked like what people remembered."

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