Category Archives: Hollywood

Nikki Finke: A Life in Deadline Hollywood

Nikki Finke (1953-2022) reshaped American entertainment journalism. She founded Deadline Hollywood, a digital publication that changed how studio executives, agents, producers, and reporters followed industry news. Combative and independent, she challenged the long dominance of the established trade papers, Variety … Continue reading

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Liza by the Curb

I came to Los Angeles in March 1994. The job listings ran to acting and modeling, so I gave it a go. I lived out of my car. I took classes at night and worked as an extra by day. … Continue reading

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Mulholland Drive

David Lynch (1946–2025) turned sixty on January 20, 2006. The party sat in a restaurant near La Cienega and Melrose, the kind of room where the lighting flatters everyone and the valet knows which cars to bring around first. A … Continue reading

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Legends of the Fall (1994)

Tristan kneels in the mud of a forward trench in France and opens his brother with a knife. Samuel is dead, his face still soft with the surprise of it, and Tristan cuts the heart out of the chest and … Continue reading

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The Man at the Door

On Christmas Eve of 2006, Greg Whiteley (b. 1969) climbed the steps of a cabin in Park City, Utah, a camera in his hand, and knocked. He did not know whether the family inside would wave him in or send … Continue reading

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The Man on the Floor: Peter Berg and the Cinema of Competence

Peter Berg (b. 1964) works as a director, producer, writer, and actor. His films and television share a subject. He studies how organizations function under pressure, what happens when systems fail, and why some men keep doing their jobs while … Continue reading

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The City of Private Rooms

Los Angeles in 2026 holds a set of overlapping prestige worlds, each with its own gatekeepers, its own real estate, its own theory of why its members deserve the room. The most powerful figures sit in several of these worlds … Continue reading

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Harry Knowles and the Birth of Networked Fandom

Harry Knowles (b. 1971) is an American film commentator, internet entrepreneur, and founder of the website Ain’t It Cool News. He stands at the transition from twentieth-century entertainment journalism to digitally networked fan culture. Through his site he showed that … Continue reading

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David Poland and the Reinvention of Entertainment Journalism

David Poland (b. 1964) is a transitional figure in American entertainment journalism. He occupies the unsettled ground between the declining authority of the twentieth-century trade press and the rise of decentralized digital commentary. Across more than three decades he moved … Continue reading

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Amy Wallace and the Migration of Elite Journalists

Amy Wallace (b. 1962) belongs to the generation of American long-form journalists who came up through the metropolitan newspaper system, moved into the prestige magazine world, and later turned to collaborative nonfiction. Her career traces a larger shift in American … Continue reading

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