On doing investigative journalism at Premiere

The July 1998 Première art­icle “Flirting With Disaster,” which was ref­er­enced the oth­er day in an incred­ibly brave and true piece for Indiewire by Liz Manne, can be found here. Thank you to Stephen Saito for sav­ing me the trouble of abus­ing my own scan­ner. Below is a small account of how that piece, and anoth­er, came to be. 

I guess it was some time in the sum­mer of 1997 when Jim Meigs, the then-editor-in-chief of Première, told me there was an invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ist with whom he wanted me to work. John Connolly had once been a detect­ive with the NYPD, and dur­ing the hey­day of Spy magazine had done a lot of the dig­ging for inside-Hollywood columns penned by the of course fic­ti­tious “Celia Brady.” The piece Jim handed me was some­thing John had done about Michael Viner, a pro­du­cer and pub­lish­er and, from the sound of it, a fairly shady guy. I was a little wary of the piece for two reas­ons. One, I did not think that Première’s read­er­ship would give a rat’s ass about Viner, and two, there seemed to have been some per­son­al anim­us between author and sub­ject. Connolly’s piece was upfront about it, but I still didn’t like it. I felt a little burned after hav­ing taken over a piece about a heroin-addicted act­or and learned months after pub­lic­a­tion that its author had been some com­bin­a­tion of per­son­al assist­ant and NA spon­sor to the guy.

One day John came up to the office. If we were gonna be a team, we made a very odd couple. John like myself is a broad-shouldered Irish guy (well, half-Irish in my case) but he was a quint­es­sen­tial old-school man of a cer­tain world. Florid of com­plex­ion, always crisply dressed in a blazer over a cashmere tur­tle­neck or some such thing, well-groomed, ever car­ry­ing a dis­creet hint of after­shave. Whereas I was a slouchy cigarette-dangling-from-the-lip quasi-dirtbag who thought that hav­ing edited the National Magazine Award-nominated “David Lynch Keeps His Head” by David Foster Wallace entitled me to come to work in my Tex Avery t‑shirt two or three days out of the week. (Daniel Filipacchi—the chair­man of Première’s own­er Hachette-Filipacchi and the man who intro­duced Chantal Goya to Jean-Luc Godard—did eye that t‑shirt with amused admir­a­tion in the elev­at­or one day, I think. Tex Avery was big in France.)

When John pitched New Line, he opened with a story in which, on a “trust-building” cattle-drive exer­cise dur­ing a cor­por­ate retreat, one exec­ut­ive (he’s named in the art­icle) decided to ditch the activ­ity and go back to the resort with a bunch of col­leagues and trip out on mush­rooms. And I told John, “I’m sorry, and I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but if I had been one of the people on that cattle drive, I would have been right behind him on the way to the van. You’re going to have to come up with some­thing better.”

And so he did. Quite a bit. All this happened, as we bragged in our dis­play copy, over the course of eight months. Eight months that were some­times exhil­ar­at­ing, some­times dis­pir­it­ing. Personally, they were mostly miser­able. I remem­ber say­ing to Jim very early in the pro­cess, “I don’t know if I’m cut out for this.” And he said, “This is journ­al­ism. Do you want to do it?” Leaving aside a detailed exam­in­a­tion of “want,” I assented.

I can’t actu­ally go into much detail on the pro­cess, even to this day. All through it, though, we had amaz­ing sup­port from two women at the top of Hachette’s leg­al team. This was kind of sur­pris­ing. Hachette’s CEO at the time was still David Pecker. At the time Pecker was not highly inves­ted in invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ism, to say the least. The Editorial Director was the late Jean-Louis Ginibre, who I wouldn’t call dis­cour­aging, but who also often gave the impres­sion that he’d rather be in Philadelphia, where he housed his 30,000-LP jazz record col­lec­tion. And who could blame him. And I think at the time Hachette’s deduct­ible in a libel or defam­a­tion law­suit was some­thing like $500,000, an amount the com­pany was not eager to spend on such an endeavor. And yet. The company’s General Counsel, Catherine Flickinger, and her second in com­mand, Kathy Daniels, were incred­ibly help­ful in map­ping out what we needed to do to pro­tect ourselves and most import­antly our sources, most of who ended up being anonymous.

Eventually we star­ted hav­ing these very heated meet­ing with pub­li­cists and law­yers from New Line, object­ing to many things, includ­ing what they termed Connolly’s “when did you stop beat­ing your wife” line of ques­tion­ing. There I sat with my dangling cigar­ette and Tex Avery t‑shirt star­ing down these guys in very expens­ive suits with a “you fuck­ing die!” glare. What a schmuck. One of the pub­li­cists, after one such meet­ing, told me that I was per­son­ally going to hear from a law­yer, a par­tic­u­lar one, but that I shouldn’t worry, because this law­yer was “the nicest guy you’d ever meet.” Somehow this did not sound very reas­sur­ing. Later I found out that this law­yer, now invari­ably referred to by me as “the nicest law­yer I’m ever going to meet,” was the hus­band of a cous­in of the woman I was dat­ing at the time. This turned out to be a genu­ine coin­cid­ence, but still. In any event, I nev­er met the guy. I often won­der just how nice he was.

We made a rather bad stra­tegic error at the end of the pro­cess. There was one anec­dote that we had defin­it­ively nailed in terms of sourcing even though the sub­jects of the story were not its sources. It was about a New Line exec­ut­ive lay­ing a hand on a well-known act­or, female, who was devel­op­ing a pro­ject to pro­duce and star in at the stu­dio. We thought, why not ask the act­or to com­ment on the story. After all, this fig­ure was well known as someone doing good work in mak­ing the industry more female-forward, etc. Surely she will want to get on board with this. So we faxed the para­graph with the anec­dote to her, care of her man­ager. Within ten minutes there were three phone calls, one from man­ager, one from agent, one from law­yer, all say­ing that if we prin­ted the story we’d be sued sev­en ways from Sunday or whatever the phrase is. So, the anec­dote went. Which was a pain in the ass because we were already in gal­leys and had to change the lay­out. That wasn’t the only reas­on. For a really long time I was really irrit­ated at the act­or, and it’s only been in recent years that I accep­ted that in extend­ing the oppor­tun­ity to com­ment, we were also extend­ing the oppor­tun­ity to shut it down, and she had very legit­im­ate reas­ons to do so.

As Liz Manne’s excel­lent piece on her own exper­i­ence of sexu­al har­ass­ment at New Line points out, when the piece was pub­lished, Première was sub­jec­ted to a lot of tsk-tsking from industry “insiders” such as Peter Bart and David Poland, quib­bling with the sourcing of the story, bemoan­ing the fact that we were going after “mav­er­icks,” and a lot of oth­er bull­shit. Poland, to his cred­it, has expressed his regret over cer­tain of his com­ments; I don’t expect to hear any­thing from Bart, who the record shows was also inves­ted in pro­tect­ing that oth­er mav­er­ick, Harvey Weinstein. I nev­er liked that guy. Bart, I mean. I nev­er liked Harvey either, and was delighted that he stopped know­ing who I was after I wrote that, with The Cider House Rules, he was cre­at­ing a new “cinema du Papa.”

At the time of the New Line piece, though, Harvey was very happy. As has been poin­ted out else­where, Harvey had a byline on a piece in the same issue in which the New Line story appeared—one in which he bemoaned the use of anonym­ous sources in film journ­al­ism, for Christ’s sake. I hon­estly have no idea how this schedul­ing glitch came to be. I believe, though, that  it was the last time Harvey’s byline appeared in Première. In any event, rumor had it that he had pho­to­cop­ies of both his own piece and the New Line story on his desk as the magazine hit news­stands, and he glee­fully passed out both to vis­it­ors to his office. I thought that was gross.

Because the piece did not res­ult in a lawsuit—on account of, you know, every god­damn thing in it being abso­lutely true—John was feel­ing feisty and sug­ges­ted he and I team up on a Miramax piece next. I don’t think I was par­tic­u­larly eager to put myself through what would have been an even more pain­ful pro­cess, but I knew it was a salut­ary idea any­way. John spent a large amount of his own money hir­ing a private detect­ive to track a poten­tial source, a sexu­al assault vic­tim, halfway around the world. When John finally con­tac­ted her, she insisted her encounter with Harvey had been entirely consensual.

In the mean­time some­thing else had happened. New Line did not sue us, but they black­balled us. The com­pany had always made the kind of movies that appealed to our core read­er­ship, the entirety of which would soon become con­trib­ut­ors to Ain’t It Cool News (not really, sorry), and now New Line was going to deny us, with extreme pre­ju­dice, access to those movies. The stu­dio would soon go into pro­duc­tion on the Lord of the Rings movies, to give you some idea of our problem.

Now obvi­ously the indi­vidu­al tal­ents work­ing on these movies would want out cov­er­age, and would afford us forms of dir­ect access, but the whole pro­cess was made much more dif­fi­cult when you had the stu­dio against you. We had to ask ourselves wheth­er we could live up to the oth­er aspects of the magazine’s man­date if both New Line AND Miramax were refus­ing to play ball with us. It wasn’t a mat­ter of advertising—we were not very pro­act­ive with respect to advert­ising from stu­di­os at that time. But as we were mak­ing our morality-versus-business cal­cu­la­tions, John’s trail went cold. 

Jim Meigs was let go as EOC in late 2000, and his suc­cessor, Michael Solomon, was eager to make a big splash with his debut issue, so he brought John C. back, and put us to work on a piece about Arnold Schwarzenegger. We had about four weeks to do what we took eight months to do with the New Line story, but we cre­ated a sol­id, unpleas­ant por­trait of a phil­an­der­er and ass-grabber (and worse) that again was not chal­lenged in a court of law. (We were inad­vert­ently helped out a great deal by Mr. Schwarzenegger’s leg­al rep­res­ent­a­tion, which early on in the pro­cess faxed us a cease and desist let­ter that laid out in great detail all the things they would hold us liable for if we prin­ted them. So we didn’t print them. Genius.) The reac­tion to that story only bolstered the cyn­icism I felt after the New Line story not only did not end sexu­al har­ass­ment in Hollywood, but was spun to make Première look like the bad guys for print­ing it. A bevy of Schwarzenegger’s cronies and col­leagues, includ­ing Linda Hamilton, Rita Wilson, and James Cameron, wrote in with testi­mo­ni­als about what a great guy the future Governor of California was. The mul­ti­valent fal­lout from Schwarzenegger’s divorce from Maria Shriver all but veri­fied everything in the story (we had ink­lings about the ille­git­im­ate child story, but no sol­id trail)—and not many people cared any­more, at that.

The thing was this: people did not only think highly of Schwarzenegger, they had an invest­ment IN think­ing highly of him. Michael Solomon did not know it at the time, but rather than mak­ing a big splash, he had laid out the first nail of his coffin. The boys upstairs, to a one, were very “Why are we going after Ah-nuld?” It just didn’t sit right with them. Michael did not last a year at the magazine, and after he left, the word was handed down that John Connolly (whom Michael and I were cul­tiv­at­ing for non-scandalous work, too; he did a rather lovely piece on the last days of Mae West for us, and a funny Robert Evans pro­file too) was no longer going hang a shingle at Première.