I try not to get involved in inter-blog fighting, but there’s a rumble happening right now that’s just a little too weird to ignore. I’m trying to follow all of this based on Kate Coe and Mayrav Saar’s coverage at FishbowlLA. I’m still a little fuzzy as to how Fishbowl got involved, but they’ve been publishing an email back-and-forth between film bloggers Nikki Finke, David Poland and Jeffrey Wells that’s shaping up to be the cattiest thing I’ve ever seen.
It looks like it all started when Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere sent an email to Nikki Finke, to “congratulate” her for winning an LA Press Club award. The email started out like this:
Congrats — good for you, good work, hats off. That said, I have to say I’m detecting a culture of clubbiness among the winners. I get the feeling they’ve all hung and schmoozed with each other (or with LAPC board members) all year at various drinky LAPC gatherings.
Finke responded (all lower and uppercase hers):
your email wound up in my spam folder. i’ve never socialized with one member of the LA Press Club. i’ve never even met a single member. no one i know belongs to the LA Press Club. my understanding from my own newspaper is that the club itself does NOT judge the entries. i was told they send out the entries to another major press club who judges it.
Then David Poland got involved, sending an email (to Finke? to Saar?) seconding Wells’ “congratulations”. It read in part:
Considering the lame field of people who were entered in the contest, Nikki had to win. [...] Congrats! One-eyed woman, kingdom of the blind, etc; you are truly the queen of the local newspaper movie gossips!!!
Poland and Wells are clearly just getting catty because they, Finke’s fellow L.A.-based entertainment journalists, were both ignored by the Press Club. At some point, Finke apparently sent an email to the LA Press Club, complaining that other local bloggers were trying to slander their awards. FishbowlLA then published two missives from members of the club, both strenuously denying any kind of voting irregularities, and emphasizing that Finke couldn’t have gotten “drinky” with the voters, because each press club’s awards are decided by press club members in other towns. Cue David Poland:
If I was a judge in some other city and got a dozen (if that) submissions on film, I would certainly think Nikki the most entertaining by a landslide… so long as you don’t know the film business, which judges from other cities do not…Enjoy your award, Nikki. You’re the most popular car wreck in town not directed by Michael Bay. Now, go back to beating up Terry Semel on your gossip blog because some idiot friend of yours is jealous of him and doesn’t realize that Yahoo! was near death when he took over and that he is the only reason the company is at all competitive with Google.
This, apparently, was too much for Wells, who mentioned on his own site earlier this week that Poland gives him a “I’m looking at you but I don’t see you because you don’t exist” look” whenever they meet.
I realized some years ago that the only action I could take that would truly satisfy you as far as my HE jottings were concerned would be to drink hemlock or do a swan dive in front of a moving bus. All I know is, you could have been a little nicer about this.
Where’s this torrid little skerfuffle gonna go next? I know two things to be true: 1) when Saar sums it all up by saying, “This is the equivalent of watching other people’s parents fight,” she’s* totally right; and 2) The HE commenter who says he’d cast Russell Crowe and James Gandolfini as Wells and Poland in the movie of this is on to something. How about Gena Rowlands as Nikki Finke?
*added an “s” in order to connote the appropriate gender.
Interesting. David Poland, who is not crazy about Iron Man (”I just wanted a character who actually dealt with the obvious demons that he overcomes… and not just another really, really cool suit of CG armor”) posits that the fact that other critics are crazy about the film (it’s currently at 86% on Rotten Tomatoes) might be a sign that it’s not going to connect with audiences:
