Variety (magazine)
Variety is a weekly
magazine for the entertainment industry. It has been published since
1905, starting by covering
vaudeville with offices in New York, then opening a Los Angeles bureau in the 1930s by
Sime Silverman.
It publishes three paper editions and a Web site.
Variety is a tabloid glossy newspaper published weekly and is delivered nationally and internationally with a broad coverage of movies, television, theater, music, and technology, written for entertainment executives.
Daily Variety is the name of the
Los Angeles, California-based
Hollywood and
Broadway daily newspaper.
Daily Variety Gotham, started in 1998, is the name of the
New York City edition of the newspaper. This edition gives a priority focus to East Coast show business news and is produced earlier in the evening than the Los Angeles version so it can be delivered to New York offices the following morning.
A significant portion of Variety's revenue comes during the movie award season leading up to the
Academy Awards. During this time, large numbers of colorful, full-page "For Your Consideration" ads inflate the size of
Variety to double or triple its usual page count. These ads are Hollywood's attempt to reach other Hollywood professionals who will be voting in the many awards given out in the early part of the year.
For much of its existence,
Variety's writers and columnists have used a
jargon called
slanguage a.k.a. varietyese that refers especially to the movie industry, and has largely been adopted and imitated by other writers in the industry. Such terms as "boffo box-office biz," "sitcom," and "sex appeal" are attributed to the influence of the magazine, though its attempt to popularize "infobahn" as a synonym for "information superhighway" never caught on. Its most famous headline,
"Sticks Nix Hick Pix" [
1] was made popularâ€"although the
movie prop renders it as "Stix nix hix flix!"â€"by
Michael Curtiz'
musical-
biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy where
James Cagney is explaining it to some kids. Translated it means that rural audiences were not attending rural-themed films. Its headline after the stock market crash of
1929 is also famous: "Wall St. Lays An Egg". The popular 1990s animated series
Animaniacs celebrated Variety's "slanguage" in a song called "Variety Speak." [
2], [
3]
Daily Variety's down-the-street competitor,
The Hollywood Reporter, avoids showbizzy headlines in favor of a contemporary newspaper reporting style, and without bastardizing the English language. The papers have a long history of bad blood, but editorial talent migrates between them.
The magazine is owned by
Reed Business Information, a division of
Reed Elsevier. Its editor-in-chief is
Peter Bart, who worked previously at
Paramount Studios and
The New York Times.
Circulation hovers around 31,622 for the daily editions, and 30,800 for the weekly edition (
Audit Bureau of Circulations, March 31, 2005).
The
internet version of
Variety is Variety.com, and it was one of the first online newspapers to charge for access when it launched in 1998.
*
Variety.com website*
Variety's slanguage dictionary*
Variety's self-described history*
description by the Parisian Bibliothèque du film*
article from Le Monde about Variety's 100th anniversary
