Daily Variety – Inside Variety’s 120th Anniversary Issue: How We Tackled 12 Decades of Hollywood’s Highs and Lows

On today’s episode, we dive into the creation of Variety’s 120th anniversary issue with deputy editor Trish Deitch and design director Ted Keller. The two discuss how we tackled 12 decades of showbiz history – and why the discovery of a long-forgotten photo of Liberace and Michael Jackson sparked joy in the newsroom.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Welcome to Daily Variety, your daily dose of news and
analysis for entertainment industry insiders. It's Wednesday, December seventeenth, twenty
twenty five. I'm your host, Cynthia Littleton. I am co
editor in chief of Variety alongside Ramin Setuda. I'm in
LA he's in New York, and Righty has reporters around
the world covering the business of entertainment. In today's episode,

(00:31):
we'll hear from Variety's Trish Teach and Ted Keller about
the making of our one hundred and twentieth anniversary issue.
It's a blockbuster issue in print and online, and these
two were the engines that corralled the stories and the
staff and the research to make it all happen. But
before we get to that, here are a few headlines
just in this morning that you need to know. Here's

(00:54):
another seismic jolt for Hollywood. Academy Awards are moving to YouTube.
In twenty twenty nine, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences announced the deal that sent jaws dropping this morning.
NBC Universal was really angling for the oscars, so you know,
YouTube must have made the Academy some offer. We'll be
reporting on that and bring you updates at Variety dot com.

(01:17):
This is a big one. In other big news to
Brothers is telling Paramount, We're just not that into you.
The Warner Brothers Discovery board has reaffirmed that it wants
to merge with Netflix. It is not swayed by Paramount's offer. Paramount, meanwhile,
has said it's not going higher than its existing thirty
dollars share bid. So at some point somebody's going to

(01:38):
blink or Netflix is going to buy Warner Brothers and HBO.
There was a lot of interesting back and forth between
Paramounts David Ellison and Warner Brothers David Zoslov in another
huge SEC filing that was released first thing Wednesday morning.
My colleague Todd Spangler got up early to comb through
it to write the backstory that you need to read.

(01:58):
It's on Variety dot com right now. And speaking of
Netflix again, the streamer continues to add to its podcast menu.
It has struck a deal with Barstools Sports for video
rights to three of Barstool's top podcasts, including Pardon My Take.
All of these stories and so much more can be
found on Variety dot com right now. And now it's

(02:23):
time for conversations with Friday journalists about news and trends
in show business. Today we're joined by two stalwarts of
Variety's operation, Deputy editor Trish Ditch and design director Ted Keller.
These two were the heroes of getting Variety's Fabulous on
twentieth anniversary issue to the finish line. You can find
it online, where we have a nifty Variety one twenty

(02:45):
digital hub built out for all the content. The Variety
one twenty package was a labor of love for a
large group of us, and as you'll hear in the
conversation that follows, it also wouldn't have happened without the
talents of Executive editor Brent Lang and Creative director Haley Kluji.
Trish Diech and Ted Keller, thank you so much for
joining me. Nice for you two and Brent Lang, our

(03:09):
executive editor, were the engines of our one hundred and
twentieth anniversary package. We knew that this important anniversary was coming,
and YouTube took the reins and made it happen. You
two really hunkered down, looked across time and figured out, Okay,
how are we going to slice one hundred and twenty
years into digestible components where we can do stories that

(03:33):
illuminate eras of the entertainment business. This package is a
celebration of variety, but it's really a look at the
history and the eras of the business we cover, looking
at Hollywood through the lens of what we covered and
what mattered to us. And that's a really important distinction
that gives this package even more weight. So with enormous thanks,

(03:57):
my first question to both of you to trish Ted.
Once we determined what we wanted to do, where did
you start to start assembling the package that was ultimately
published on December.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
Tenth Somewhere we decided that we were going to do
it by decade, and I think it was Haley, our
art director, who laid out the first decade and said,
I think you can do four stories, four tiny stories
two hundred fifty wards each or so by decade. So
I went back to Brent Lang, who's a genius when

(04:30):
it comes to film history and variety history. He just
he really understands it, and we discussed what four stories
per decade should we choose For one hundred and twenty years.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
This was a rare opportunity where we knew the date
far out and we knew. We also knew that we
weren't going to have competitive pressures. Nobody was going to
beat us to celebrating Varieties one twentieth anniversary. So listeners,
when I tell you it was a beautiful thing to
be because it was genuine discovery, it was intellectual curiosity.
It was all good things, and I just wish we

(05:06):
could bottle it and put it into every issue. But
this one is very special. The stories are short, and
some of them are big landmark moments like the launch
of CNN and all news broadcasting, and some of them
are much more subtle, but they're telling moments for the
era in which they occur. Did either of you have

(05:26):
moments where you learned things that you were just so
fascinated by? Was this an educational process for both of you?

Speaker 3 (05:33):
It very much was for me. And some of the
discussions early on were, particularly when Variety was not in Hollywood,
was how do we handle those first few decades where
it's vaudeville and what are we going to use to
visualize that? And it was a big discussion, and it
just happened as I was kind of digging through. I'm
a moderate Marx Brothers fan, but I remember that they

(05:53):
were like a kid singing act at some point, and
I couldn't remember the name, and finally I conjured it
up in my head, and we are We'll find a
nineteen oh five picture of a version of the Marx
brothers as children. That was a thing that said, Okay,
we can find a way to tell these stories visually.
It just may not be the obvious way. We think.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
Tricia to tell us a little bit more about the
spirit of telling these stories in such short bites and
the challenge of that. Having written a couple of the entries,
I do know Mark Twain was right, it's harder to
write short.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
We did base the tone of this on the back pages,
which people won't see unless they get the print magazine,
because it's not online. And they're very beautifully written, and
they're deep, and they're contextual, and they're a little bit poetic.
They tell stories that most people don't know about things
in history that happened. The heads are poetic. So Ted said,

(06:47):
it was like a tuning fork went off, and all
the writers got that same pitch, because the tone of
these stories all have that like they're brilliant.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
The sixteinc They.

Speaker 2 (06:59):
Are kind of storytelling and poetic at the same time,
and everyone just got it, you know, And it was
really fun for me, who edits a lot of these
people's writing to see them work in that two hundred
and fifty word or so word length, and each story
was assigned to someone who was particularly interested in this topic.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
Trish, you cast the writers for each piece so well
because you know the writers and you know what they're into,
and what I love is variety is nothing if not authoritative,
and these pieces are all once you read these two
hundred and fifty ish words, you really know something about
that subject. We've been planning this one hundred and twentieth
anniversary issue for a long time, but as the way

(07:43):
of these things, journalism can be a very unpredictable business,
and despite our best laid plans, we had to scramble
because Netflix and Warner Brothers and HBO and Paramount decided
to go at it over the sale process. And so
the week that we had planned to have our anniversary issue,
there was a huge, huge, pretty much an earthquake in Hollywood,

(08:07):
and we knew that we could not be so tone
deaf as to ignore that. So back to Hailey, Klugey
came up with the idea of doing a double cover,
so our front cover was devoted to the news of
the moment, Netflix, HBO, Warner Brothers, David Ellison trying to
crash the party, a good old stew of what's going on.

(08:27):
But then you flip it over and on the back
page there is our beautiful one hundred and twentieth cover
that everybody worked so hard on. It killed us to
think that, oh my gosh, we're going to have to
not put this on the cover after working so hard,
but we came up with the solution. When this was
published on Wednesday, when we pulled these out of the boxes,
I walked around the office hugging this issue because I

(08:50):
love it so much, because I feel like it encapsulates
the best of what variety is. We're telling you about
what's coming. We are helping people interpret incredibly disruptive times,
including a consolidation that is utterly changing the face of Hollywood.
But we also can look back and help people interpret
the past with great authority and incredible writing.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
I also felt like I fell in love with my colleagues.
I have to say through this piece, I really did.
It was such a labor of love for them to
write these pieces. I was cracking a whip and calling
them constantly and asking them.

Speaker 3 (09:30):
For the work.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
And it was really hard, and the writers worked really
so hard on this. I can't believe what talent we
have on this staff and somehow putting it all together,
because I think there were thirteen or fourteen writers, including you, Cynthia,
who did pretty much all our business blurbs in this piece,
and it carries such weight.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
Another thing that makes me absolutely swoon is we have
a page devoted to Variety's beloved slanguage, the zany and
zingy terminology that we used for years and years. We
still do. We sprinkle it in, although less in the
Internet age, and there were a lot of words that

(10:10):
have gone into the lexicon, like soap opera, like sitcom,
like DJ as a synonym for disc jockey, many others
that we invented in our pages. Because especially in the thirties, forties, fifties,
there were no rules. We did what we wanted. We
made up words, we made up nicknames for studios, we

(10:31):
made up nicknames for countries, like the French. The French
were the Gauls, the Germans were the Teutons and just
crazy stuff. When I plugged in in the mid nineties,
the paper was thick with those words. Again, in the
internet era, when not everybody was behind the velvet rope
and understood it, we kind of had to ease up.
But it still exists. I never wanted to be like

(10:52):
a dead language. We have a full page of our
slanguage terms, and one of our terrific designers, Alisa Gau,
came up with some great illustrations to bring some just
some levity and some visuals that really do help define
the words, especially for the uninitiated, and those illustrations just
add that extra little pop and it is fantastic. Okay,

(11:15):
My last question for you too, after spending so much
time looking back in the past, is there an era
or a time or a year that you if you
could time travel, is there an era or a moment
or a personality that you'd like to meet after spending
after steeping yourselves in history, I will volunteer. I would
love to go back to New York of nineteen oh five.

(11:37):
I would love to see New York in that era.
I would love to go to a vaudeville theater.

Speaker 2 (11:42):
I didn't realize that Hollywood moved from New York to
Los Angeles. You told me because the weather was better,
which I thought was fascinating.

Speaker 1 (11:52):
More sunlight, more ability.

Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yes, yes, exactly, I would like to go. I would
like to be around to have watched that transition. I
think that's really fun fascinating.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
It's a bit of a funny answer, but it was.
There was again that process of the discovery. We talked
about that. Originally we thought the closer to quote unquote
now we got the least space we devote to the decades.
But and you'd say, Okay, we'll get more space to
this nineteen seventies because so much happened then. But then
you look at the nineteen eighties and it's just crazy town.

(12:22):
I mean everything from like Michael Jackson's Viller to sex
size and videotape to everything in between that in that decade.
And it's true with the nineties as well. But I
found myself going like, wow, these were bananas just to
kind of go and be in that moment like fresh,
I can't imagine what you like. And that's why photo
memory was of course, like Michael Jackson, three weeks after

(12:43):
Filler hit number one at a Dreamgirls opening party in
Culver City with none other than Liberachi's fantastic.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
Yes, I remember you came rushing out and saying, like
this photo, this is it. I have found it, this
is the eighties. Michael Jackson and Liberal ROI, Oh my god,
thank you both so much for the pure joy of
this issue.

Speaker 3 (13:05):
Thanks, thank you.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
As we close out today's episode, here's a few things
we're watching for. My colleague, Chris Wilman will be sitting
down with Lady Gaga on Thursday night at the Grammy
Museum in Downtown LA. The Grammy Museum is hosting a
screening of Gaga's latest concert tour movie, Lady Gaga in
Harlequin Live, one night only. Can't wait to hear from
Chris Howikos. We love to hear from our listeners, so

(13:33):
please send thoughts, gripes, and other feedback about Daily Variety
and other Variety podcasts to podcasts at Variety dot com.
Before we go, Congrats to Jeff Sausnow he's been promoted
to president of Raprise Records, and he'll also continue in
his role as executive vice president of A and R
for Warner Records. Saucenow first joined the Warner Brothers Group

(13:55):
in twenty twelve. Thanks for listening. This episode was written
and reported by me Cynthia Littleton, with contributions from Trish
Ditch and Ted Keller Stick SNICKT hick picks. Please leave
us a review at the podcast platform of your choice,
and please tune in tomorrow for another episode of Daily Variety,
and don't forget to tell us what you think at
podcasts at Variety dot com. Thanks