In 1997 Emilio Estevez, the actor-director, was so distressed by Bart’s dismissal of his film The War at Home that he fired off a two-page letter that was widely distributed around town. The letter was intended to diminish Bart, but its vitriol only confirmed Bart’s central place in the Industry.

“In you, I see a failed movie producer, hiding behind the protective veil of your post… It is sad and pathetic,” Estevez wrote. He urged Bart to “1. Simply not see my films. 2. Drop dead sometime soon. 3. Go fuck yourself.” He signed off with this: “Enjoy life from your bully pulpit, little man.”

Not for nothing did one top executive in town famously dub Bart “the most hated man in Hollywood.” For not only does Bart control the Industry’s bible, but by virtue of his station he always gets something that everyone–in and out of Hollywood — desperately wants: the last word.

*

“I have Peter Bart for you.”

The silken voice of Bart’s assistant could not be more different from his own, which is slightly nasal, rapid-fire. His accent is so hard to place and his delivery at times so oddly paced that some have speculated, half seriously, that he modeled it after Al Pacino’s staccato in The Godfather.

This is Condescending Peter calling, as he often does, to talk trash about other journalists. “Did you read Patrick Goldstein’s column today? What was he talking about? You know who’s running out of ideas? Goldstein,” he’ll say, referring to the Los Angeles Times’s movie columnist. When Charles Fleming, a former Variety reporter, writes an opinion piece in the Times about the ethical dilemmas of the Hollywood press corps, Bart sniffs, “This story epitomizes him. It’s like a blur. A lot of undeveloped ideas.”

Today his target is Variety’s archrival, The Hollywood Reporter. “Poor little George Christy,” Bart says, referring to the Reporter’s gossip columnist. “I’m all for exposes, but George Christy? The level of small-time stuff he does, I mean, who cares?” Christy is being investigated for accepting expensive gifts and movie credits — which qualified him for Screen Actors Guild health benefits — from the people he writes about. When the Reporter’s own labor writer, David Robb, filed a piece on Christy, its publisher refused to run it. Robb and Anita M. Busch, the trade paper’s editor, resigned in protest.

Bart, however, sees the Christy affair as an indictment not so much of a journalist allegedly on the take but of the editor and the reporter who fought to reveal it. Both Robb and Busch once worked at Variety. It’s hard to tell whom he loathes more.

“It’s a fascinating implosion,” Bart says gleefully. “It reminds me of when Robert Altman directed a picture–this was when he was drinking. At a certain point he would turn on his main characters and make them into hideous creatures. That’s what Dave Robb and Anita Busch would have done here, too, but I wouldn’t have it, and I fired them.”

Actually, he did no such thing. Variety’s personnel department confirms Robb’s and Busch’s assertions that they both resigned.

*

IT’S OSCAR EVE, and Peter Bart has just arrived at his third party in less than 24 hours. “I could use a drink,” he tells his wife, as some of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars preen before him: Julia, Russell, Kevin.

Owlish in round spectacles, with tufts of thinning black and gray hair, Bart is five feet nine inches tall and has the trim, tanned physique of a tennis player. He looks for a moment as if he is standing at the edge of a pool, weighing whether to get wet. Actors tend to bore him, so it’s not the press of famous flesh that’s making him thirsty. Bart, who is 69 years old, has a complicated relationship with the industry Never are his conflicts more glaring than during Hollywood’s High Holy Days — Academy Awards time — when the movie business celebrates and contemplates itself.

Before Bart can order a vodka martini, however, he is spotted by Bill Maher, who steps up and gives him a nudge. “Well,” the host of TV’s Politically Incorrect says with gusto, “if it isn’t Hollywood’s top fucking information man!”

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