The 2012 Sundance Film Festival’s biggest trade-press story wasn’t a sale or a deal. It was an argument about which trade had filed first on the John Hawkes drama The Surrogate, and the argument was being waged in three-minute windows with timestamps as the only evidence.
Then
Variety had an in-house watchdog blog called BlogDogger, written from inside the building, which made a public hobby of catching Deadline’s reporting in suspect time-stamps. In early January 2012 BlogDogger flagged an Emma Stone project item on Deadline.com that appeared with a 3:00 a.m. PT timestamp identical to a Variety report on the same news. Nikki Finke responded a few days later — without, per Variety film writer Jeff Sneider on Twitter, addressing the time-stamp question — by explaining that Mike Fleming had been working the Stone story for several days and that the duration of his reporting effort justified the byline.
The Sundance round happened later that month. On a Monday night, Sneider and Variety film editor Josh Dickey filed a 7:37 p.m. PT post about the Sundance sale of The Surrogate — the Ben Lewin film starring John Hawkes that ended up doing meaningful business with Fox Searchlight at the festival. The story was followed in short order by similar items at LATimes.com and HollywoodReporter.com. Then a Mike Fleming Deadline item appeared with a time-stamp BlogDogger alleged had been “tweaked” to land just behind THR’s 8:19 p.m. PT third-place post, leaving Deadline in a competitive-looking fourth-but-close.
The Sundance Film Festival itself, according to BlogDogger, contacted Deadline asking that the EXCLUSIVE tag be removed since the story was fourth-in-line and broke no new information. Finke’s reply, also per BlogDogger: a “HOW DARE YOU CONTACT ME” defense citing again that Fleming’s internal time-stamps showed he had been on the story for some while. FishbowlLA followed up directly. Finke gave Horgan two on-record statements: “Another Variety lie. Mike was working on the story for a long while before according to time-stamps. Problem is, Deadline doesn’t read Variety — and neither does anyone else in Hollywood anymore.” And separately: “No one changed any time-stamp. Period. Variety’s anonymous allegation is a malicious fabrication.” A subsequent FBLA interview with Mike Fleming directly is referenced in the post’s update line.
Now
The Surrogate, retitled simply The Sessions for its theatrical release, premiered at Sundance, was acquired by Fox Searchlight, and ended up earning Helen Hunt an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the 2013 ceremony. The story was big enough that it was always going to get covered four ways. The interesting historical artifact is the trade ecosystem’s argument about what first meant in 2012, conducted in time-stamp screenshots.
Mike Fleming is now Co-Editor-in-Chief of Deadline, where he has been one of the title’s defining voices for fifteen years. Josh Dickey has cycled through senior editorial roles at TheWrap, Mashable, and Yahoo Entertainment. Jeff Sneider runs the well-read entertainment newsletter The InSneider, which has built a substantial scoop-driven subscriber base of its own. The BlogDogger column at Variety wound down quietly as PMC’s acquisition of Variety in late 2012 changed the title’s appetite for sustained one-name attacks on a single competitor.
Nikki Finke left Deadline the following year and died in October 2023. The Sundance trade-press dynamic she shaped — minute-level competition, public correction wars, the EXCLUSIVE tag as a contested asset — is mostly gone, partly because PMC now owns Variety, Deadline, and THR, and partly because the locus of scoop journalism in the festival space has migrated to newsletters where the time-stamp is replaced by the send-time and “exclusive” mostly means “first into my subscribers’ inboxes.”
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: January 2012 snapshot