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.
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.”)
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.”
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,” 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.”
“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.
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