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.)
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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.
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.”
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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.
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