As Hurricane Ian roared through Florida last week, I was thinking of Nikki Finke, who had moved to the state four years ago but now was living under hospice care in Boca Raton, the result of a long…
online to Deadline turf and reducing their daily print editions to weekly magazines. Now ironically they are all run by Penske Media, which first bought Deadline in June 2009. Could we ever have imagined such a scenario just a little over a decade ago? It is almost like she was Joe Hardy inmaking a deal with the devil for one memorable and improbable winning baseball season.
She started Deadline Hollywood Daily, its original name, as a quicker way to break news than in her then weekly newspaper column, buying the URL DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com for $14, but not intending to be a disruptor or internet journalist. It just kinda worked out that way.in 2016 : “Back then, the trades were slow to embrace the idea that trees no longer had to die for a media outlet to be influential.
I love that line. Finke was indeed a duck that took to the water of the internet in a way we hadn’t seen up to that point, at least in Hollywood. But in some ways she was also a throwback to the Walter Winchell era with all those pet phrases, UPDATE, EXCLUSIVE, R.I.P. for obits, and of course TOLDJA! It was all soNikki. It even led to Oscar winner Bill Condon among others creating an unauthorized HBO pilot,starring Diane Keaton as a thinly veiled version of Finke.
She also had an air of mystery about her which is always good for a Hollywood career, but she consistently denied she was a recluse, instead chalking it up to her insane work ethic. Still the fact is I worked directly with her for four years before she left and onlydid I ever meet her in person, and that was in her final year at Deadline. She invited me and my wife Madelyn to her apartment on Doheny Drive for dinner . To my mind this was akin to meeting Garbo.
Last week as that hurricane was hitting Florida I dropped her an email to see if she was okay, but also knowing she was nearing the end. I didn’t hear back but I am hoping someone might have read it to her. I wanted to thank her for always keeping a promise she once made to me when finally — after an August of endless back and forth — I signed on to leave thefor the then not-so-sure-thing of Deadline as its awards columnist.
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