In March 2011, Nikki Finke published a Deadline.com item alleging that The Hollywood Reporter had pulled material from an Alex Ben Block business story about Summit Entertainment in exchange for a Jodie Foster interview tied to The Beaver. The accusation was the kind of access-quid-pro-quo claim that trades occasionally make about one another. The Deadline.com comment section, even Finke’s own moderators were noting, didn’t entirely take her side.
Then
The piece in question was a March 8 THR business story by Alex Ben Block on a $750 million Summit Entertainment refinancing deal. Finke’s allegation was that THR had agreed to remove specific information about executive payouts — Summit co-chairman Patrick Wachsberger and COO Bob Hayward reportedly receiving $30 million each, co-chairman Rob Friedman getting $7 million — in exchange for an interview with Jodie Foster for THR’s The Beaver coverage cycle.
The first wave of Deadline reader comments, which Finke moderated, was unusually skeptical of her framing. As one commenter under the handle “Tulse Luper” put it, executive payouts in major corporate refinancings happen all the time, and the question whether $30 million and $7 million payouts in a $750 million deal were unusual enough to warrant lead-graph placement was not obvious. The original FishbowlLA framing landed in the same place: the underlying business news in Block’s piece was real; whether the editorial decision to play it down constituted access journalism or routine prioritization was the disputed point.
THR did not formally respond to the allegation at the time. The Jodie Foster interview ran on the THR cover. The deal closed. The Beaver came out in May 2011.
Now
The Beaver, directed by Jodie Foster and starring Mel Gibson, opened in May 2011 to a soft commercial reception, with the marketing campaign substantially complicated by the public domestic-violence and audio-recording controversies surrounding Gibson during the same period. The film’s box-office trajectory was the kind of award-season-pitch-meets-PR-crisis case study that subsequent press coverage has cited.
Summit Entertainment was acquired by Lionsgate in January 2012 — less than a year after the FishbowlLA piece — in a deal that effectively folded Summit’s Twilight franchise and broader film slate into the Lionsgate corporate structure. Wachsberger transitioned into a senior role at Lionsgate Motion Picture Group post-merger. Friedman moved into producing work. The executive-payout numbers in Block’s original story turned out to be roughly representative of what private-equity-style executive compensation in a $750 million refinancing typically looks like.
Nikki Finke left Deadline in 2013 and died in October 2023. Alex Ben Block continued as a senior business writer at THR for years; THR is now a PMC title, inside the same corporate building as Deadline. The “access-for-access” dynamic the 2011 dispute surfaced has not gone away, but the public adversarial framing — one trade accusing another on the front page — has, as both Deadline and THR now report into the same publisher.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: March 2011 snapshot