From Final Cut (Steven Bach, 1985) p285-6
Still, Albeck had promised to do interviews after he had been in office one year and had something to talk about, and the three years he had agreed to serve as president were more than half over now in late summer of 1979, when he agreed to his first – and only – major press interview. That agreement had been extracted only after considerable cajoling and mock-desperate pleading by Hy Smith. Some of the desperation was kidding on the square. Ad-pub people, for all the manipulating of news they are imagined to do, are easily intimidated by the press because their jobs often depend on the cold black print they assiduously court but can rarely control, though their own habit of hype sometimes persuades them they do. Because the press is dependent on information for its functioning, an uneasy alliance exists between publicists and reporters, the character of which ranges from backscratching to backstabbing, on both sides.
The Hollywood movie press has, of course, been notorious for its friendliness and malleability since even before the formation of United Artists in 1919. This remains particularly true in the international movie press, as the Cannes Film Festival proves annually, as do the fortunes of certain substantially endowed starlets (financially and otherwise), whose success at press management has handily outstripped that of, say, Ron Ziegler or Jody Powell.
But the changes wrought in American life by the Washington Post and “Woodstein” were everywhere evident by 1979, even among the movie press people, who had seen All the President’s Men (or actually read it) and were preternaturally paranoid about being scooped on important business stories. “See what the boys in the back room will have” took on new meaning for much of the press, particularly the Los Angeles Times. which had either ignored or badly underestimated the importance and public interest in the year-old David Begelman forgery and embezzlement scandal at Columbia Pictures. The Times had admitted having been “uncertain how to handle” the Begelman story, an uncertainty not shared by the Washington Post (again) or the Wall Street Journal, both of which covered the story fully and soberly, though this did not make it “big news.” David McClintick, who covered it for the Journal and subsequently wrote the best-selling Indecent Exposure about the case, credited Liz Smith, popular columnist for New York’s Daily News (and, to a lesser extent, Walter Cronkite on CBS), with making the story a media event. The power of the popular press remains formidable.
As Hollywood’s (and Begelman’s) most important, most widely read hometown newspaper, the Los Angeles Times was further compromised by the sympathetic and humane assessment of its sympathetic and humane (and widely respected) arts editor, Charles Champlin, who termed the case “a crimeless crime” with “a culprit who doubles as a victim.”
Many in Hollywood thought this view rather too compassionate and openly questioned the Times’ seriousness about Hollywood news. As a consequence, the paper had embarked on a laudable and vigorous pursuit of “hard” news, covering the business, rather than the show. This policy was applauded politely but not without misgivings by professional publicity people like Hy Smith, growing daily more fretful about Heaven’s Gate, sensing its potential to become a story harmful not only to the picture’s public and box office images but to management as well, for the official UA policy was to “protect” the picture even at management’s expense. The Los Angeles Times had long been asking to do an in-depth UA business story, and Smith implored Albeck to cooperate before Heaven’s Gate “hit the fan,” as Hy put it. Albeck agreed.
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