Hollywood Quaking as Finke Turns to Fiction

As part of an agreement with Jay Penske, the owner of Variety and Women’s Wear Daily, over the purchase of Deadline Hollywood, the web site she began in 2006, lifelong journalist Nikki Finke can’t report on the entertainment industry for something like a decade. But it seems that Finke found a loophole: she’s going to write fiction about the entertainment industry.

When it begins publishing later this year, Hollywood Dementia, will charge readers between one and three dollars for access to a story. From the New York Times:

 “There is a lot of truth in fiction,” she said. “There are things I am going to be able to say in fiction that I can’t say in journalism right now.” She said there was an appetite on both sides and cited creative people in Hollywood who have no forum to air their stories on the industry, for fear of losing work, and readers who ate up the sometimes salacious details revealed by the hacked Sony emails. She has begun writing stories for the site, though she declined to reveal details about them. She has also been contacting other writers and said she has gathered dozens of potential contributors. In Hollywood, said Patrick Goldstein, a former Los Angeles Times film industry columnist who has known Ms. Finke for decades, people are “scared of their own shadows.” “I would say that everyone is secretly full of trepidation about what Nikki’s new site will be like,” he said. “Will it be literary short stories, or will it be fiction as a thin disguise for the truth?” 

The full piece is here.