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. 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.”

*

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.”

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. 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.

“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.

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