In case it wasn’t already painfully obvious that the gestating HBO comedy “Tilda” was a not-so-thinly veiled take on blogger Nikki Finke, THR, Esq. have gotten their hands on the script and have pretty much confirmed that it’s a well, thinly-veiled take on Finke (check out these mature journalistic posts from yesterday and today, quality work).
Just to recap, Nikki Finke is the notoriously vicious and reclusive founder and editor of media site Deadline Hollywood that earns its bread and butter by dishing dirt on execs and stars. While they do break movie news, the site spends just as much time taking down talent and rivals as recent pieces on The Wrap and Bradley Cooper more than illustrate. The site will also routinely delete comments that point out their mistakes (as this writer’s comment was after it pointed out that a Mike Fleming “exclusive” was actually scooped by Variety the previous day) and complain about not being credited, while routinely ignoring the work of everyone else. So really, your typical day in Hollywood.
Anyway, regardless of what you think of her, Finke is as fascinating as she is mysterious. For a reporter that has such a loud opinion, Finke is rarely seen around Hollywood. What is know about her is culled from a recent profile in New Yorker and an interview in the New York Times and that seems to have served the basis for the script obtained by THR, Esq.
The similarities between what is revealed in those articles and what is found in the script are too close to be ignored. Her age and looks (about 55 with long blonde hair) are mirrored identically in the description of Tilda that Diane Keaton is currently circling. Details about her life — how she was fired from the New York Post and at one point had to sell her car to pay off her bills — have also found their way into the script. In “Tilda,” the lead character was fired from Newsweek and had to sell her car to pay back taxes. In the New Yorker, Finke is described as somewhat of a hermit, not leaving the house because “she finds it uncomfortable to run into the people she has vilified” while in the script, Tilda says “I just find it uncomfortable to run into the people I write about.” Even specific quotes are lifted nearly verbatim with Finke telling the New York Times, ”I’m not mean, I just write mean” while in the script Tilda says, “People think I’m mean but I’m not. I just write mean.”
All that said, there are some differences. In “Tilda,” the titular character is a pot smoking, wine drinker, who sleeps with her IT guy and invites her sources to party with her at her house (Finke would never do this let alone interact with the public). However, while HBO previously got the OK from real life power agent Ari Emanuel in basing “Entourage” agent Ari Gold off of him, word is HBO hasn’t yet knocked on Finke’s door and it doesn’t seem like they plan to.
The legal question remains if general audiences will realize that Tilda is based on someone real. Our guess? Probably not. We would be if you went up to the average “Entourage” viewer and asked him who Ari Gold was based off of, they would have no clue. As for Finke and her Deadline crew, only inside baseball movie nerds like ourselves and colleagues frequent the site. Again, the general public probably won’t make the connection.
That being said, we could very easily see Finke raising a very calculated (and possibly legal) stink about this. She would love the publicity (and site traffic) that would be bring. As for us, the show frankly sounds pretty hilarious and we’d give it a whirl. Hopefully, it will make up for the total trainwreck that was the last season of “Entourage.”