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Spiky Haired Angeleno Gets Spiked
by Richard Horgan |
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3/22/2007 at 10:16:15 PM |
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It took 13 years, but the life of film producer Brian Grazer is finally imitating the art of his 1994 drama The Paper.
In this somewhat underappreciated movie, New York Sun editor Henry Hackett (Michael Keaton) gets into a fistfight at one point with Alicia Clark (Glenn Close), a hatchet woman working with publisher Bernie White (Robert Duvall), because she wants to keep the presses rolling rather than (expensively) rectify a sensationalistic – and entirely wrong - front page “Gotcha!” crime story. Today at the Los Angeles Times, publisher David Hiller pulled the plug on this Sunday’s typeset Current section, after revelations that the Opinions Editor who had arranged for Grazer to guest edit the Op Ed pages is currently dating a publicist linked to his firm Imagine Entertainment.
That of course is not the main life-imitating-art strand, one that also quickly led to the unfortunate resignation of said Opinions Editor Andres Martinez. No, the relevant parallel between this fake New York newsroom and that actual L.A. newsroom is that both are operating under the strain of severe financial cutbacks, leading to exceedlingly low morale. Word is that snickers began soon after Martinez announced his plans for the Grazer gig, leading to speculation that one rankled faction of employees within the paper took advantage of this week’s appearance-of-conflict revelations to gleefully stick it to another faction.
The newspaper business wasn’t nearly in trouble back in 1994 as it is now, post-Internet. The Tribune Company keeps asking for more cutbacks; honorable Editors keep resigning rather than complying; and an on its way to being revitalized L.A. Times is now instead the object of constant blogosphere derision.
In the movie, The New York Sun’s cross-town rival is the much more respectable New York Sentinel. In reality, the L.A. Times’ archrival remains The New York Times, which has had great success recently in poaching talent from the former because of all the west coast unrest. So what does the Grey Lady think about all this?
To its credit, the Business section piece is suitably demure. But somehow, the last paragraph of the article says it all (the underlines are mine):
Mr. Grazer was the producer of several major movies, including A Beautiful Mind (vs. is the producer of the TV series 24 and a number of 2007 and 2008 movie projects; is... was... does it really make a difference when talking about matters Hollywood?). Mr. Martinez is a former editorial writer for The New York Times. He moved to The Los Angeles Times about two-and-a-half years ago (as in, we can’t really be bothered to have HR look up the exact date, and, dude, what were you thinking!?).
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