Painful reading ... Variety. Photograph: David Sillitoe
Willie Clark: You know Sol Burton died last week? Al Lewis : Where? Clark: In Variety! Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys (1972)
Variety, the self-styled "showbusiness bible", is still perhaps the best source of information about the film industry, and no other publication covers film festivals so thoroughly, reviewing almost everything. Pity then that it is unreadable.
This is nothing new. Varietyese has been criticised for almost all of the magazine's existence. In the 1930s, the notorious headline Sticks Nix Hick Pix was deemed amusing, but the linguistic joke, if that is what it was intended to be, has now worn thin. Yet Variety continues to relish its reputation for "slanguage" like this: "The rookie self-destribbed indie pic, helmed and lensed by Alan Smithee, is geared for upscale fest auds and urban markets, particularly in Euro zones west and east. But the protags are too high-hat for wider BO appeal. Most perfs are boffo and tech contributions are on the money."
This sort of writing not only degrades film criticism and demeans reviewers but debases the English language. However, I see perfectly sober people picking up Variety and reading it. I know some Variety reviewers personally and they are, on the whole, perfectly intelligent, articulate people. But they are forced to write in that puerile prose. If I was asked to write for Variety, which I never have and now never will be, I would refuse. As Judy Holliday says in It Should Happen to You, "The world is divided into two kinds of people, those that will do anything for money and those that will do almost anything for money."
Variety is now 102 years old. And it looks it. Despite being a little glossier, not much has changed in layout and language in a hundred years. Isn't it time Variety started to allow more variety in its reviews, which all stick to the magazine's language codes and follow the same format. The opening paragraph briefly gives a summary of the film's content and commercial potential, which is followed by the body of the review, and a sentence to sum up, usually ending with a nod to the "tech" aspects. I urge its writers to go on strike for more textual flexibility. I can see the headline now: Hax Nix Variety Lingo.
