I stumbled upon this article yesterday… It’s clearly written by a guy who lives in New York, trying to write about Hollywood, but interesting enough.

Call Me

Why Hollywood fears Nikki Finke.

by Tad Friend October 12, 2009

On February 5th, Universal Studios and Imagine Entertainment threw a cocktail party for their film “Frost/Nixon,” hoping to stir up buzz for its Oscars prospects. The event, at Nobu Los Angeles, drew many of the town’s entertainment journalists—a contentious bunch. As the guests snacked on yellowtail sashimi, Sharon Waxman, who the previous week had launched an entertainment-business Web site called The Wrap, fell into conversation with a group that included Brian Grazer, Imagine’s co-chairman. Waxman covered Hollywood for the Times from 2003 to 2007; though her reporting occasioned a number of corrections, she is aggressively self-confident. Turning to Grazer, Waxman made a provocative remark about the reporting of her former close friend and now bitter rival Nikki Finke. “She’s always been nice to me,” Grazer replied, before moving away at warp speed. When Finke later demanded that Waxman explain this exchange—Finke seems to have a Google Alert that pings whenever her work is discussed—Waxman denied that she’d been disparaging, and claimed that Grazer had turned white at the mention of Finke’s name: “Fear in the hearts of giants!”

Finke is fifty-five, and a longtime entertainment-business reporter. She runs the Web site Deadline Hollywood Daily out of her apartment in west Los Angeles; in three and a half years she has made D.H.D. Hollywood’s most dreaded news source. Marrying tabloid instincts to a strong Puritan streak, Finke portrays many of the town’s leaders as jackasses who golf at exclusive preserves, elbow underlings aside to hog the spotlight, downsize those underlings while lining their own pockets, and generally besmirch the fabric of civilization. Jeff Zucker, the C.E.O. and president of NBC Universal, is “one of the most kiss-ass incompetents to run an entertainment company”; Charles and James Dolan, who own Cablevision, are a “clown parade”; and Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, is a “crazy old coot.”

See the rest at The New Yorker.