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Nikki Finke announced this morning that she is launching HollywoodDementia.com, a site devoted to short fiction about the movie business, by insiders she selects. "After 30 years as a journalist, I’m now going to expose the hard truths and gritty reality of showbiz through creative writing," Finke posts. "In fiction, I can be more honest than just sticking to facts." It will be a pay site — a dollar for each post you read, she says. Finke also posts, without comment, a new photograph she says was taken this year. Remember, when she was running the Hollywood reporting and analysis site Deadline, there were some lame attempts to smoke out a current photo of Finke.
From the announcement:
Not since F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara and more recently Michael Tolkin and Bruce Wagner have knowledgeable writers tackled showbiz in short fiction or succeeded in getting paid for it. Now add my name to the list about to try that – and I invite Hollywood movie and TV writers, executives, journalists, critics and authors to join me.
I’m starting an innovative website called HollywoodDementia.com. What is it? Here’s my definition: Hollywood Dementia: noun. Deterioration of intellectual faculties, such as memory, concentration, and judgment, sometimes accompanied by emotional disturbance and personality changes, resulting from an organic disease or a disorder of the brain acquired while working in the entertainment industry that causes someone to be unable to think clearly or to understand what is real and what is not real.My website will present short stories, novellas and novel excerpts written by Hollywood insiders like myself....The stories which I and others write won’t depict any actual Hollywood person or event. But they will marry artifice with verisimilitude into original content creation….
I don’t care if the site gets little traffic or The Powers That Be ever advertise. Instead, I’m setting up a TinyPass paywall and charging readers $1 for each post and paying writers from the proceeds once a month.
The photo of Finke is by Jen Rosenstein.
