Nikki Finke — the shadowy and powerful figure behind Deadline.com, who trades tiny chunks of her soul to Satan for scoops — is a horrible person. This is not debatable. If you need some background on that, just peruse the Filmdrunk archives here, here, or here. She also thinks attractive women are not capable of being funny, and I personally, also think she makes up studio quotes for her box-office reports. We could probably spend a few hours discussing the terrible things she’s done and written during her career, but Nikki Finke news only appeals to a certain kind of reader who gives a sh*t about inside baseball, so I’ll skip it and get straight to the point.
Two stories concerning Nikki Finke came out today. First of all, Defamer is reporting that Finke’s feud with Sharon Waxman, who runs The Wrap (which is kind of like the straight-to-DVD version of Deadline, no offense), came to another head after John Landgraf — the President of FX, and maybe the greatest television executive on the planet — agreed to do a panel hosted by Waxman. Waxman and Finke hate each other. Like, hate. Finke hates Waxman so much that according to Defamer, which has some pretty good evidence to support the assertion, Finke will refuse to ever mention FX on her blog again. In fact, apparently, she’s even gone back and scrubbed FX’s name from a post.
That’s pretty bold, and it suggests that Finke hates Waxman so much that she’d be willing to shoot herself in the foot over a petty beef with a rival. It’s difficult, after all, to cover the television industry without mentioning FX since it’s one of the four or five television networks remaining that actually matters.
It’s unclear, however, whether this policy will follow Finke outside of Deadline.com, which is important since, according to the NY Post, Finke is allegedly angling to either take her site back from the man who bought her out, Jay Penske, or start her own blog, NikkiFinke.com. Finke and Penske’s falling out was actually reported first several months ago by … Sharon Waxman, when Waxman incorrectly reported that Penske had fired Finke. That is apparently not true, but ever since Penske purchased Variety (a former Finke rival), Finke allegedly has been feeling the shaft. She allegedly feels that the resources are not being properly allocated. So, now she wants to bolt, although I have to imagine she has some kind of non-compete that will prevent this in the short term.
HOW DOES THIS AFFECT YOU? It doesn’t really. It’s just a bunch of rich, bratty assholes bickering over who gets a studio press release first so that they can be the first to report casting news so that sites like ours will link back to their slightly modified press releases, which is good for their egos. The egos of wealthy people is really what the Internet was built upon, wasn’t it?
