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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Free Nikki! & The Semantics Of Cash

The joke behind the story that Nikki Finke might get paid a consulting fee on Tilda because it’s soooo Nikki is that the big question is whether she can cover HBO if she does the deal.
The bigger question is whether we could, if she does this deal, make the very reasonable conclusion that one of Nikki’s 5 primary operators, Ari Emanuel, who is packaging the show, is now, essentially, paying Nikki for services rendered and services to come in benefit of WME.
For that matter, her attorney, according to THR, is Tal Vigderson, who also has producing ambitions and a history with such talent as the exec producers of 24. He also worked with a number of Simpsons producers and others on the twice-failed web comedy/animation start-up Icebox.com, partnering with Gary Levine, who was formerly Executive Vice President, Creative Affairs at Warner Brothers Television, Steve Stanford, formerly of New Media at ICM, and Howard Gordon and John Collier, both of whom have extensive television credits.
But of course, the biggest conflict of interest is that HBO is Time-Warner and Time-Warner is Warner Bros and Nikki is already in bed with WB production chief and hopeful Horn-of-the-future Jeff Robinov. Now his company will be paying her too.
This is not to say that every relationship leads to bias or that it is easy to escape corporate parents who create unwished-for conflicts of interests when all the party in question wanted was a to make a living. In such a small media universe, conflicts must be proven by action, not simply inferred by relationship.
But I digress…
Crazy Nikki Finke is in the gossip game. Virtually every story she runs is something someone has asked her to write. Every story is a relationship with someone being worked over to both sides’ mutual benefit.
The only actual difference between Nikki being paid by HBO as “a consultant” and her cashing a check from every studio that she runs stories for is… well… the semantics of cash.
Nikki has, for the decade-plus that I have known and dealt with her, traded in ego first and money a distant third or fourth. She doesn’t really care about anything she writes – now more than ever – so much as the fact that a studio chief hops to and answers her e-mails or calls like a trained monkey… that she can abuse highly paid, highly regarded staff members of companies like toilet paper during a gastric disorder… that she can convince herself of her own importance even though she has not actually done a single positive thing for a single person – other, perhaps, than Diane English, whose film she intimidated WB into releasing more widely – in all of her years of work (even though WGA hardliners still think her support meant something as they went through a strike that got them nowhere.)
So I say, “Free Nikki!”
Who cares whether HBO pays her? Who cares who does what for her when? She is bought and paid for already, just in the perception of power, not cash. And for Nikki, that is worth more than money. Of course, she’ll cry in her bathroom, afraid to expose herself to the closed curtains of her living room windows, when the show airs. But she’ll write about how she controlled Bill Condon. And she’ll take the Big Win, which is that she was willing and capable of intimidating HBO into paying her.
And journalists who once thrived on the ego of writing for Mainstream Media will try to hide the drool sloshing out of both sides of their mouths, seeing someone who seems to be self-empowered at the same time their former outlets’ slides into bankruptcy and other obscurity utterly emasculates their perception of their own power and creates blinders to all the standards they once claimed to hold dear.
For Nikki, conflict of interest is a given. Her work starts and ends there. Everyone of any significance knows it. And none of them want to say it on the record because they fear her. Same old high school crap. No one has the guts (or the sense of honor) to tell Carrie that she’s not really a popular homecoming queen and that once they get a good laugh, they’d just as soon soak her in blood for a bigger laugh. Part of this is the sick culture of enjoying shredding someone privately while building them up to their face. Part of it is just gutlessness. But a big part of it is that they all still operate under the delusion that Nikki can set the room on fire with a thought.
And the truth is, Nikki can… because the stakes are so low. In this town, screaming and leveraging are very powerful tools. No one in the world, including Wall Street, could give two fucks about Nikki Finke calling someone names or attacking them on a blog. Carl Icahn is not reading Nikki Finke to determine what to do next, no matter how desperately the LGFers feed her intel in hope of changing public perception of their fight. But the most powerful men and women in this town are its thinnest-skinned, most-broken children. With few exceptions, they too have screamed and leveraged their way into getting others to think they know best. And in one or two cases, they do. (Those people know who they are. And those who think I am talking about them in the pejorative are proving my point about their fear.) In more cases than not, they are the best upward managers on the planet, first and last.
So please… let’s not encumber a breathing conflict of interest by pretending that something would change with a check cut by a studio.
Besides, you don’t want the truth. You can’t handle the truth. it’s not nearly as fun as the lies.

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4 Responses to “Free Nikki! & The Semantics Of Cash”

  1. Foamy Squirrel says:

    I don’t think anyone’s ever accused Nikki of being unbiased – heck, her entire value proposition to readers is that she’s going to come down HARD against one side. I’m pretty sure she’s not worried about whether readers will think she’s gossiping about HBO in a balanced manner.
    She’s more Bill O’Reilly than Walter Cronkite – opinions on news, rather than reporting the news itself. (And, yes, I’m sure someone can substitute O’Reilly for another prominent Fox contributor…)

  2. LYT says:

    I hope Nikki persuades them to do a Comic-Con related episode.

  3. a_loco says:

    ^ LOL
    Do you think she could convince them to let you play your fictional alter ego?

  4. Foamy Squirrel says:

    I sent in my 5 bottle tops and still haven’t received my free Nikki.
    Please explain.

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