In a Christmas Day 2011 blurb, Nikki Finke announced that Brian Brooks — the longtime New York-based managing editor of Indiewire — was joining Deadline.com as its LA-based film editor, starting just in time to cover Sundance 2012 alongside Mike Fleming. The hire was the start of Deadline’s serious independent-film desk.
Then
The hiring pattern was distinctive. Finke had taken to announcing big Deadline hires on holidays — the previous one had been a Thanksgiving Day post about hiring two HollywoodWiretap.com veterans (Kinsey Lowe and Nancy Tartaglione, the latter of whom would become a Deadline mainstay). The Christmas Day 2011 announcement on Brooks fit the pattern: timed for slow-news-day visibility, locked in before competitors could react.
Brooks had been at Indiewire for a long stretch, where editor-in-chief Dana Harris had been running the indie-film coverage operation that Brooks was now leaving. Deadline’s plan was for Brooks to come to Los Angeles, base out of the West Coast operation, and own the indie-and-festival beat — which in 2012 meant Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, Berlin, the smaller domestic festivals, plus the year-round indie distribution news cycle.
The original FishbowlLA framing identified the broader strategic stakes: Deadline was systematically taking talent from competitors. Indiewire, which had been the dominant indie-film online publication for years, was now losing its senior managing editor. The Sundance 2012 deadline was the proof point — Brooks would be on the ground in Park City in three weeks covering the festival under the Deadline banner.
Now
Brian Brooks’s run at Deadline was substantial but eventually wound down. He continued at Deadline through the rest of the early-to-mid 2010s before moving on to roles at the Quad Cinema in New York and back into independent-film exhibition and editorial work. He has remained a presence in the indie-film press throughout, including ongoing contributions to indie-cinema publications.
Indiewire under Dana Harris weathered the Brooks departure and remained one of the central independent-film publications across the next decade. Indiewire was eventually acquired by Penske Media Corporation — the same PMC that owns Deadline — as part of PMC’s continued consolidation of the entertainment-press ecosystem, putting Indiewire and Deadline in the same corporate house several years after the 2011 hire that drained one to staff the other.
The Sundance 2012 coverage that Brooks landed at Deadline in time for did, in fact, produce the kind of trade-press impact the Christmas-Day announcement was aiming at. The festival has gotten quieter as a market in subsequent years — the streaming-acquisition era changed the math on indie distribution — but the indie-film desk Deadline built around Brooks’s hire remained a structural part of the publication.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: January 2012 snapshot