Anyone Chasing The Newspaper Business Is Making Silent Movies

“Anyone chasing the newspaper business is making silent movies,” said the Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn, Jr. in a recent conversation in which he encouraged the launch of this blog.

And he and his family should known. Goldwyn, Jr., the son of Samuel Goldwyn, is just about the best person to talk to in such a crisis as the one that newspapers are facing today, as he is able to look back at the old days and forward to the Internet-savvy future, “which is something that we are trying to figure out ourselves,” he says. “People have very short attention spans today.”

After a frustrating morning planning my escape from the business altogether, Goldwyn, Jr.’s line seemed to sum up the situation in one: Journalists, the silent movie stars of today, must move into the Talkies’ equivalent of the Blogosphere, or else…

The bureaucracy involved in getting an interview from a studio hadn’t helped. “Hollywood has become too corporate,” I declared, run by “yes men in suits.” (A request to interview Helen Mirren had turned into a series of robotic emails, involving hurdles and referrals that would have topped getting the okay to get into East Berlin.)

“In the old days the studio wouldn’t speak to you without permission” says Goldwyn, Jr. “No one just picked up the phone to Louella Parsons,” he adds, referring to one of Hollywood’s fabled gossip columnists. “In the old days you couldn’t get a story. You had to deal with the publicity office. Things are much freer today.”

We got onto the very nature of the press today when indeed multiple sources abound for information which can often appear on little-known websites in nano-seconds. “Communication is so fast now,” he says. “Information is out there instantly and there is no time to correct it. People are just protecting themselves. Companies are often public and stock can go up and down on a story.”

Indeed. Goldwyn, Jr. reminded me what a tough business this is by referring to his past. “When people interview me they always ask me to tell them anecdotes about the stars of old,” he says. “I always tell them that my father was an independent producer and what I remember is the celebration in our house when he was able to pay back the money he had borrowed to make a film to the bank.”

Goldwyn, Jr.’s words reminded me of another truth uttered by Filippo Timi (Vincere), last year’s best actor winner at the Venice Film Festival, in a recent interview confirming that no one ever escapesthe film business.

“It is like the Coliseum when you wanted to be a slave just to be part of it,” says Timi. “Maybe we can think of the industry like that. All of the people who work in the industry are like slaves to the industry. We all say that we are going to leave but we like it too much.”

For the full Timi interview see: http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100107/ART/701069970

About the Author:

Liza Foreman is a former staff reporter for Variety and The Hollywood Reporter and now writes freelance from Los Angeles and Europe for the NYTimes.com, The International Herald Tribune, The Times, The National and Hollywoodwiretap.com