It's a Wonderful Life?

The Hollywood Reporter’s?Winter of Discontent

The trades’ coverage of Hollywood is usually bloodless. So this month’s bloodbath at The Hollywood Reporter is especially newsworthy. First came content V.P. Matthew King’s voluntary exit (fed up with spreadsheets and bureaucratic bullshit) and editorial director Howard Burns’ involuntary departure (because Hollywood didn’t know who the hell he was). “It’s disturbing because they’re doing it so piecemeal rather than en masse,” a THR insider explained to me after that duo left. “Sort of like picking people off with a shotgun from a water tower rather than gassing them all at once.”

Immediately following Burns’ ousting, insiders were predicting to me that the next head on the chopping block was going to be executive editor Peter Pryor — and it was. “He didn’t have a discernible job description,” another source related. (That was Burns’ problem too.) Also out were international general manager John Burman, music editor Chris Morris (who’s being replaced with free content from sister publication Billboard), Chicago-based contributing editor Diane Mermigas (who I’ve long thought was very savvy, but apparently didn’t write enough to suit the bosses, though she had a swell Sumner Redstone “get” recently) and Calendar editor Selena Templeton (basically an editorial assistant, so her salary couldn’t have made much of a difference). The editorial head chopping caused the usual paranoia among the remaining staff. But it follows yearlong upheavals on the publisher side too. Tony Uphoff replaced Robert Dowling as publisher, but then Uphoff announced his departure from the paper in October after just nine months in the post. The new guy sent from New York is Billboard publisher John Kilcullen.

Once upon a time, the trades used to be cash cows. Dowling turned THR’s million-dollar biz into a $30 mil bonanza, with profit margins in the astronomical 20 percent to 30 percent range. But some of THR’s new problems date back to the loss of Lynne Segall, the well-connected former vice president and associate publisher of The Hollywood Reporter who in June jumped to the Los Angeles Times for the newly created position of V.P. for entertainment advertising. Since then THR ad sales have dropped, and the paper isn’t making its Oscar sales projections. Then again, the paper is known more for its TV than movie coverage, which is still an also-ran to Variety, just as Howard Burns was seen as an also-ran to his Variety counterpart, Peter Bart. As a THR insider told me, “Peter Bart was the sun, and this guy was the flashlight.”