A new post on Patrick Goldstein’s blog calls out Nikki Finke — sigh, this again? Wait, it’s a good call — for her weaselly attempts to take credit for calling the news of David Slade as the new “Eclipse” director, meanwhile ignoring her original (conveniently forgetting it?) report where she loudly claimed (and boasted) that Juan Antonio Bayona was going to direct the third “Twilight” film.
All this fuss over Bayona and apparently, at least according to Goldstein, [he] “didn’t even want the gig.”
But super sleuth Bill Wyman (no, not the Rolling Stones bassist), an excellent music journo, with a near unimpeachable sense of ethics in this game (you outta take note), basically noticed all Finke’s “TOLDJA!” nonsense and promptly dug around for the way she tried to hid her tracks over at his Hitsville blog (when even music journalists are starting to notice her willfully dubious and questionable reporting, you know it’s a problem).
Wyman says, “On Nikki Finke’s blog, history changes as fast as she can rewrite it.” What she does — which is definitely a problem in blog world — is to tweak perception to make her readers think she’s always on point and first. She “went back to change her original item to make herself look better without telling readers,” he writes. Wyman writes long, but Goldstein condenses his post well.
As Wyman explains, the first two sentences of Finke’s original post read: “I can confirm that Summit Entertainment is telling Hollywood privately that Juan Antonio Bayona will direct ‘Eclipse.’ It’s a very out-of-the-box choice for the 3rd movie in the ‘Twilight Saga’ series of Stephenie Meyer vampire novels being hurried to the big screen by the start-up studio.” But now, if you search out the post in her archives, the first sentence is followed by two new sentences: “I’m not saying he’s been offered the job or hired, which in Hollywood involves deal memos, signed contracts, and the like. Just that the studio execs Wednesday night passed the word he’s the guy.”
Back pedal much, Nikki? Only when you’re all of a sudden unsure of yourself. If you’re like us, you’re generally sick of the juvenile internecine blog feuding between adult movie bloggers and we try to stay away from it and not report it of late (though Movieline and Vulture, who both have a cheeky, playful sense in their editorial and writing have done a pretty good job of covering if you’re interested), cause it’s generally giving ink to idiots, but Wyman is very on point here; it’s not to be ignored and Finke’s angles should be transparent to all. She can do great work, but generally, her emotional instability gets the best of her.
Why do people well into their 40s (if not older) continue to act like fucking children?