Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American magazine owned by Penske Media Corporation. It was founded by Sime Silverman in New York City in 1905 as a weekly newspaper reporting on theater and vaudeville. In 1933, Daily Variety was launched, based in Los Angeles, to cover the motion-picture industry. Variety's website features entertainment news, reviews, box office results, plus a credits database, production charts and film calendar.
Editor-in-Chief
Ramin Setoodeh (co-editor)
Cynthia Littleton (co-editor)
Weekly
Michelle Sobrino-Stearns (CEO & Group Publisher)
Dea Lawrence (COO/CMO)
85,300
Weekly:
December 16, 1905 in New York City
Dailies:
1933 in Los Angeles
1998 in New York City
United States
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
English
Culture[edit]
For much of its existence, Variety's writers and columnists have used a jargon called slanguage[57] or Varietyese (a form of headlinese) that refers especially to the movie industry, and has largely been adopted and imitated by other writers in the industry. The language initially reflected that spoken by the actors during the early days of the newspaper.[10]
Such terms as "boffo", "payola", and "striptease" are attributed to the magazine.[58]
In 1934, founder Sime Silverman headed a list in Time magazine of the "ten modern Americans who have done most to keep American jargon alive".[59]
According to The Boston Globe, the Oxford English Dictionary cites Variety as the earliest source for about two dozen terms, including "show biz" (1945).[60] In 2005, Welcome Books published The Hollywood Dictionary by Timothy M. Gray and J. C. Suares, which defines nearly 200 of these terms.
One of its popular headlines was during the Wall Street Crash of 1929: "Wall St. Lays An Egg".[61] The most famous was "Sticks Nix Hick Pix"[62][63] (the movie-prop version renders it as "Stix nix hix pix!" in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Michael Curtiz's musical–biographical film about George M. Cohan starring James Cagney).
In 2012, Rizzoli Books published Variety: An Illustrated History of the World from the Most Important Magazine in Hollywood by Gray. The book covers Variety's coverage of hundreds of world events, from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, through Arab Spring in 2012, and argues that the entertainment industry needs to stay aware of changes in politics and tastes since those changes will affect their audiences. In a foreword to the book, Martin Scorsese calls Variety "the single most formidable trade publication ever" and says that the book's content "makes you feel not only like a witness to history, but part of it too."
In 2013, Variety staffers tallied more than 200 uses of weekly or Daily Variety in TV shows and films, ranging from I Love Lucy to Entourage.
In 2016, Variety endorsed Hillary Clinton for President of the United States, marking the first time the publication endorsed a candidate for elected office in its 111-year history.[64]
Office locations[edit]
Variety's first offices were in the Knickerbocker Theatre located at 1396 Broadway on 38th and Broadway in New York. Later it moved to 1536 Broadway at the 45th and Broadway corner until Loew's acquired the site to build the Loew's State Theatre.[5] In 1909, Variety set up its first overseas office in London.[65]
In 1920, Sime Silverman purchased an old brownstone building around the corner at 154 West 46th Street in New York, which became the Variety headquarters until 1987, when the publication was purchased.[66] Under the new management of Cahners Publishing, the New York headquarters of the Weekly Variety was relocated to the corner of 32nd Street and Park Avenue South.[66] Five years later, it was downgraded to a section of one floor in a building housing other Cahner's publications on West 18th Street, until the majority of operations were moved to Los Angeles.
When Daily Variety started in 1933, its offices were in various buildings near Hollywood Blvd. and Sunset Blvd. In 1972, Syd Silverman purchased a building at 1400 North Cahuenga Blvd. which housed the Daily's offices until 1988, after which its new corporate owners and new publisher, Arthur Anderman, moved them to a building on the Miracle Mile on Wilshire Boulevard.
In late 2008, Variety moved its Los Angeles offices to 5900 Wilshire, a 31-story office building on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile area.[67][68] The building was dubbed the Variety Building because a red, illuminated "Variety" sign graced the top of the building.[67]
In 2013, PMC, the parent company of Variety, announced plans to move Variety's offices to their new corporate headquarters at 11175 Santa Monica Blvd. in Westwood.[67] There, Variety shares the 9-story building with parent company PMC, Variety Intelligence Platform, and PMC's other media brands, including Deadline.com, Rolling Stone, Vibe, Billboard, Robb Report and the West Coast offices of WWD and Footwear News.[69]
Content[edit]
Film reviews[edit]
On January 19, 1907, Variety published what is considered the first film review in history. Two reviews written by Sime Silverman were published: Pathe's comedy short An Exciting Honeymoon and Edison Studios' western short The Life of a Cowboy directed by Edwin S. Porter.[70][71] Variety discontinued reviews of films between March 1911 until January 1913[72] as they were convinced by a film producer, believed to be George Kleine, that they were wasting space criticizing moving pictures and others had suggested that favorable reviews brought too strong a demand for certain pictures to the exclusion of others.[73] Despite the gap, Variety is still the longest unbroken source of film criticism in existence.[72]
In 1930 Variety also started publishing a summary of miniature reviews for the films reviewed that week[74] and in 1951 the editors decided to position the capsules on top of the reviews,[75] a tradition retained today.
Film reviewers[edit]
Writing reviews was a side job for Variety staff, most of whom were hired to be reporters and not film or theatre critics. Many of the publication's reviewers identified their work with four-letter pen names ("sigs") rather than with their full names. The practice stopped in August 1991.[76] Those abbreviated names include the following:[7]
Variety Insight[edit]
Variety established its data and research division, Variety Insight, in 2011 when it acquired entertainment data company, TVtracker.com.[115] Its film database was announced in December 2011 as FlixTracker, but was later folded into Variety Insight. Variety positioned the subscription service as an alternative to crowd-sourced websites, such as the IMDb.[116] The database uses Variety's existing relationships with the studios to get information. The New York Observer identified the main competitor as Baseline StudioSystems.[115] In 2014, Variety Insight added Vscore, a measure of actors' cachet and bankability.[117] In 2015, it partnered with ScriptNoted, a social media website for film scripts.[118]
Variety Australia[edit]
Variety Australia is a website owned by Brag Media, published under license from Variety Media, LLC. It covers film, TV and music around the world, but with a special focus on the Australian and New Zealand industries. The main writer is Vivienne Kelly.[119]