It’s hard to know what to say at this point about Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood. Most of their copy is either press releases they’ve slapped up on the internet or stories they’ve taken from other places. Finke is a corrosive figure in Hollywood. Her worst behavior has rubbed off on her employees. Earlier this week, they reprinted a press release about Warren Beatty signing to do a comedy at Paramount. This column-Showbiz411–told you it was a Howard Hughes movie. Now Deadline has just wormed its way into that story. I love the fact that they say Beatty is talking to a lot of actors, including Annette Bening. Yes, do they know that Beatty and Bening have been married for 20 years?
What Deadline does is list a bunch of names. When one of them sticks, they declare themselves a winner! It’s hilarious. Yesterday they decided that because Jamie Foxx was listed in one of their stories about Quentin Tarantino‘s “Django Unchained,” he was “theirs.” His was a name “in the mix” with several others.
But I told you on June 13th that Jamie was joining the cast.
I don’t mind giving credit to anyone who’s written about something first. But the whole gestalt of Deadline, The Wrap and The Hollywood Reporter has become incredibly tiresome. They receive the same press releases, reprint them, declare exclusives. They fight over the minutiae of ‘breaking news’ about TV pilots–shows that won’t get made, or sold, or broadcast, featuring actors no one’s ever heard of. Little known executives are switching jobs! Alert the media!
Anyway: Warren Beatty is making his Howard Hughes movie, Jamie Foxx is going to be in the Tarantino film. I told you that. Today Deadline is scooping the following: NALA Sets Steve Carr To Direct Rob Riggle And Thomas Lennon In ‘The Boondoggle’. It’s theirs exclusively. I don’t know what it means, but I’m sure it’s a big deal.
