For more than a decade, infamous Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke revealed the film industry’s hottest scoops, graduating in 2006 from LA Weekly column writer to founder of her own Deadline blog. Now the little-seen reporter is to embark on a new venture publishing fictional stories about the eccentricities of the American movie industry, HollywoodDementia.com.
Finke’s new site will feature creative writing by journalists, including herself, with experience of Hollywood’s inside stories. The grande dame of spiky film industry news and comment, who sold Deadline in 2009 and was later ousted as editor, says it will go online by the end of next month.
“My website will present short stories, novellas and novel excerpts written by Hollywood insiders like myself,” wrote Finke. “After 30 years as a journalist, I’m now going to expose the hard truths and gritty reality of showbiz through creative writing. In fiction, I can be more honest than just sticking to facts.”
She continued: “I want to create a fiction forum not just for my own work but for all the creative writing talent which Hollywood attracts but rarely nurtures. I will run the website as well as write for it and market each fictional story to my 265,000+ Twitter followers.”
Finke, who cited F Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, Michael Tolkin and Bruce Wagner as examples of “knowledgeable writers [who] tackled showbiz in short fiction”, plans to charge site users $1 per story they read rather than depending on traditional advertising revenue. The site’s name, she said, referred to the tendency of people who had lived and worked in Hollywood for too long to develop “deterioration of intellectual faculties, such as memory, concentration, and judgment, sometimes accompanied by emotional disturbance and personality changes” which she said caused them to “be unable to think clearly or to understand what is real and what is not real”.
It is not the first time Finke has attempted to relaunch herself. She began blogging again via Nikkifinke.com last year, promising to build the new site into a new must-visit Hollywood portal. But regular posts swiftly petered out amid suspicions the reporter might be legally prohibited from setting up a rival site – Finke has previously accused new Deadline owner Jay Penske of using lawyers to try and muzzle her – and older posts have now been removed from the internet.
• This article was amended on 25 May to clarify the nature of Nikki Finke’s professional role.
