In March 2013, PMC announced that Variety, Deadline, and its other web publications would soon be sharing the same Westwood high-rise at 11175 Santa Monica Boulevard. The Twitter wisecracks comparing it to a reality show were predictable. One floor of the new lease included a full video production studio and three green-screen rooms.
Then
The PMC consolidation move was the physical-real-estate version of the corporate consolidation that had been playing out in business filings since October 2012. Variety and Deadline had been competitors for years — and now they would be down the hall from each other in a Westwood office building. The video-production buildout — full studio, three green-screen rooms — signaled PMC’s intention to expand into video as a core editorial format alongside print and digital.
The original FishbowlLA framing leaned into the comedy of the situation. The trade-press rivalries that had been characterized by public-correspondence wars, Twitter exchanges, and BlogDogger-style watchdog features were now going to be happening across shared kitchen space and elevator banks. Imagine Mike Fleming working a Deadline scoop while a Variety film editor was on the floor below trying to match it. The dynamics would be unsustainable in the form they had taken before the acquisition.
PMC’s choice of Westwood — rather than the longstanding LA-trade-press home base on Wilshire — was itself a corporate-strategy signal: the company was building a new physical brand identity, not inheriting the existing trades’ geography.
Now
The Westwood PMC offices have been the company’s LA headquarters across the entire decade since the 2013 move. PMC’s eventual acquisition of The Hollywood Reporter in 2020 added THR to the same building structure (some PMC properties operate from satellite spaces, but the Westwood core has remained the corporate center).
The video-production studio buildout that the original 2013 framing flagged turned out to be substantially prescient. PMC’s video operation across Variety and Deadline has grown into a substantial business — awards-season interviews, screening Q&As, live event programming, and the various premium-subscription video products the trades now offer. The “reality show” comedy framing the Twitter wisecracks were using actually undersold the production-side investment PMC was making.
Mike Fleming Jr. is now Co-Editor-in-Chief of Deadline. Variety’s editorial leadership has been through multiple transitions across the decade. The Variety/Deadline editorial-rivalry framing the original post leaned into has been functionally retired by corporate management — both trades have specialized into different coverage niches under PMC’s portfolio strategy. The physical cohabitation that was a punchline in 2013 is now just one of the structural facts of the consolidated entertainment-trade press.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: March 2013 snapshot