Making Big Bucks in Magazines Is Easy—and Fun!

In January, FishbowlNY attempted to crack the complex economics of Vanity Fair‘s writer-payment system:

We don’t know how much Peter Biskind gets paid to write for Vanity Fair. Or Fran Lebowitz. Or Sebastian Junger. Or Michael Wolff. But we can guess.

Admirable guesstimates of contributors’ individual salaries followed.

Well, guess no more: A Read More

Winter Clearance! Jailed Celebrities,’Nam Reruns, Disney

It’s too late to complain about winter, too early to ridicule the annual deluge of Hamptons real-estate articles (which should begin to appear any second now), and-alas-nobody has bought my idea for the ultimate reality-TV series: America’s Most Wanted Idol , a.k.a. Survivor, the Celebrity Cell Block Edition , starring MichaelJackson,MarthaStewart,James Brown, Diana Ross, Courtney Read More

One From the Spleen: Coppola Battles Biskind on the High Seas

There was more than shuffleboard to hold the interest of the film-industry crew that was invited aboard the 330-foot, 45-room yacht that New Line Cinema chairman Robert Shaye had chartered. The Transom hears that an angry Francis Ford Coppola injected the high-seas idyll with a few moments of tension when he became rather aggressive with Read More

70′s Sadness: Back Again to Badlands

It didn’t seem like a good omen at first, what the video store clerk said. I’d gone to my local Blockbuster to rent a copy of Badlands , the legendary Terrence Malick debut, because I’d been whipped into a frenzy of nostalgia and curiosity about the classics of 70′s cinema by Peter Biskind’s forthcoming book Read More