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ON A FRIDAY MORNING BART SITS IN HIS WINDOW-lined office on the first floor of the Variety building on Wilshire Boulevard. A French-language poster of Islands in the Stream, a movie he produced in 1977, fills one wall, while another wall displays the grip-and-grin photos you see in the offices of politicians: Bart with director Steven Spielberg, lobbyist Jack Valenti, celebrity lawyer Robert Shapiro. On his desk there is no computer, just an electric typewriter. On a bookshelf sits one of those kitschy fake grenades mounted on a plaque. COMPLAINT DEPT., it reads. TAKE A NUMBER.
Bart motions executive editor Elizabeth Guider and managing editor Timothy M. Gray toward a circular table. It’s time to talk headlines.
Variety’s pun-filled headlines are famously deft and often hilarious — “Sticks Nix Hick Pix,” from 1935, is considered the classic — and Bart understands they are central to the paper’s appeal. A few weeks after he arrived at Variety in 1989, he got people talking by topping a story about a feud between playwright David Hare and New York Times theater critic Frank Rich with this bombshell: “Ruffled Hare Airs Rich Bitch.” Nearly 12 years later, while he leaves much of the day-to-day editing of Variety to others, he still weighs in on front-page headlines.
Bart sometimes writes the heads himself, as he did for a recent piece about teen movies’ waning box office receipts: “No Pop in Zit Pix.” But the soft-spoken Tim Gray is Bart’s ace in the headline hole. It was Gray, for example, who wrote “Ovitz No Govitz at MCA” (for a story about the agent not becoming MCA’s chairman). For the grossest of these (“Movies Get a Bad Case of the Runs”) Bart has coined a term: “secretional headlines.”
“We are now in the post-secretional period,” Bart says, grinning. “It ended after we described some relationship as ‘warm and runny.’”
Guider frowns. “It was awful,” she says.
“It’s a Britishism,” protests Bart. “It’s not lewd.”
Today’s challenge is a story about 20th Century Fox’s decision to premiere director Baz Luhrmann’s movie musical Moulin Rouge at the Cannes Film Festival. There are a lot of elements — the studio’s gamble, the festival, the painter Toulouse-Lautrec — and Gray has assembled a list of contenders that seek to hit them all: “The Thin ‘Rouge’ Line,” “Schmooze and ‘Rouge,’” “Cannes: Le Trek for Lautrec,” and “Bed, Baz, and Beyond.”
“Only someone truly demented would write ‘Bed, Baz, and Beyond,’” Bart says approvingly, scanning the list. “But shouldn’t we say something a little more explanatory?”
“Riviera’s Risk with ‘Rouge’?” Gray offers.
“Fox’s Riviera Risk,” Bart counters.
“‘Moulin’ Not Foolin’ Around?” asks Gray.
Bart gets up and goes to his typewriter, pounds the keys, and rips out a page. He hands the sheet to Guider, who reads aloud: “Will Frogs Flog Fox on Riv?” Everybody laughs. By meeting’s end the headline has been reworked ten times. “Fox Takes Risk on the Riviera,” it says. “‘Rouge’ schmooze cues renewed rapport between H’w'd, Cannes.”
In meetings like these and as a public speaker, Bart is irresistible. He takes control of a room, interweaving economic analysis, authoritative opinions, and barbs. At this year’s Festival of Books at UCLA, he appeared on a panel moderated by Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times’s chief movie critic. When Turan asked Bart what he’d most like to change about Hollywood, Bart responded, “I think that film critics should dress better.” Amid hoots of laughter from both the audience and the rumpled Turan, Bart then got serious.
“What the present moment in Hollywood history shows is that the system is not working either artistically or financially,” he said, singling out two films as proof. “Town & Country just opened to a sterling $ 3 million, which is the price of the movie’s catering bill. Driven is so lame, Stallone’s likeness isn’t even featured on the poster. This is corporate Hollywood. And I do have a certain fondness for that epoch when movies were made because of a director’s passion, not because McDonald’s or a toy company or German [financiers] were interested.”
Bart gets Hollywood. Even those he’s treated harshly say it’s true. “He’s knowledgeable enough about film to go right to the heart of the matter every time,” says Dan Cox, a longtime Variety reporter whom Bart fired earlier this year. “That’s what Peter is brilliant at.”
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