Project Runway was a big hit on the Bravo network. But Weinstein decided to move the show to Lifetime, which agreed to up his cut to around $1 million per episode. He also screwed Bravo by lining up sponsors for the show on his own, which precluded the network from selling ads to other companies in the same categories. Weinstein even ended up favoring a Wal-Mart placement on the show over a Macy's one, proving he wasn't in it for taste.

Still, the show is a hit, and a cash cow. Project Runway has been successful enough to demand that fashion magazines like Elle and Marie Claire pay for the privilege of being featured on the show. Hardcore media hardball.

And a treasure trove of new evidence dug out of Weinstein's trash can by the Village Voice's Tony Ortega shows that the mogul himself is closely involved in the show's sponsorship choices. An email from a former Weinstein Co. employee shows the calculating negotiation process:

"I wish there was more time. Twc [The Weinstein Company] has already gone to great lengths with new partner at lifetime to not only secure both categories for you but also to be flexible toward loreal in coming up with an alternative for you on their packaging of [seasons] six + seven. Unfortunately, due to filming of season five and tresemme's feeling that they are being iced out of season 6, there just is not more time to give. As you know, season five commences in days...twc is now at risk that tresemme will pull out of season 5, which puts twc at risk for 1.1m [$1.1 million]. Carol is welcome to call hw [Harvey Weinstein] or me, but the deadline has to remain at close of business tuesday for loreal to decide on hair category for [Project Runway]/models for season 6 and structure of [seasons] 7/8. I would additionally say that the whole reason we are to this point is a result of the relationship! Without the relationship and the history, l'oreal would not have the opportunity to even engage in the opportunity to obtain the hair category."

Good thing they have such a good relationship! Or this sponsorship thing would really be nasty. And here's how much the company is expected to cough up to Weinstein in order to have its goop featured on the faaabulous production:

"Hw - if you get a call from carol hamilton it will be regarding [Project Runway] season 6 and beyond. I've imposed a tuesday, close of business deadline for them to commit to hair category in addition to make up. They have two choices: 1) Take both hair and make up for [$2 million] plus [$1 million] to twc (no split) for season 6 and [$2 million] for hair and makeup for season 7 plus [$1 million] to twc for a total of [$6 million]. 2) Commit to season 6 only for [$2 million] hair/make up plus [$1 million] to twc] and then by 3rd episode must pick up both season 7 + 8 for a total of [$8 million] (but must take additional [$1 million] to twc regardless) They have asked for additional time and I have declined that citing tresemme and season 5 which starts shooting shortly. Call me if you have questions. Best, lori"

A mogul's life: not so different from a used car salesman. Buy now! There's a guy on his way here right this minute to take it off my hands if you don't want it.....

[VV; pic via NY Mag]

The city has shut down all but two bathhouses and every known sex club in Manhattan, as well as citing bars, clubs, and private parties where inspectors find any men-on-men action. The few entrepreneurs still out there complain about apathy and different priorities among younger gay men.

"These things are ending because people don't want them anymore," [naughty-party organizer Daniel Nardicio] says. "People are spoiled, petulant, uninteresting. I've been throwing outrageous parties again and again for years, but the only time I was busted was at the Slide."

Other theories posited for the steep decline of raunchy sex parties: gays fighting for their right to marry and serve openly in the military rather than party, coming out is "easier than ever" (is it??), and gays are not as "marginalized" in society.

Maybe everyone should spend the next few years working on their careers, until the pendulum inevitably swings back in the other direction.

Village Voice

[Village Voice cover outtake by Nikola Tamindzic of Home of the Vain]

"[T]he Voice is now FIFTH in terms of ad sales amongst the entire chain," the insider tells us. "We used to be first, and now we are FIFTH. Kansas City['s The Pitch] does better than the Voice in ad sales. The [New Times] has proven over and over and over that when they go into anything other than secondary markets, they fail because they apply their boneheaded editorial strategy to the big papers, ignoring what actually worked for those cities. That's why San Francisco was their biggest money loser, because they didn't seem to get that no one wanted their cookie cutter philosophy in such an individualist town."

Prototypical white internet rap guy Tom Breihan of the Village Voice, analyzing a crappy new Lil Wayne video just yesterday:

The song's video is a typically glossy and show-offy affair, but I like how its garden-variety surreal plotline meshes with its airy track. As it opens, we see Wayne and Static getting ready to go out; both of them, for whatever reason, decide to wear disheveled, tore-up tuxes. A stretch Hummer pulls up outside, and they're happily surprised that it's full of video chicks. But as the song's chorus kicks in, Wayne doesn't waste much time partying with the video chicks. Instead, he opts to change into a completely different outfit and then climb onto the Hummer's roof, where he plays a fiery butt-rock guitar solo as the truck rolls in slo-mo down the Vegas strip. As gratuitous music-video melodrama goes, this reminds me of Slash walking out of Axl's desert-church wedding to play a fiery butt-rock guitar solo, a scene that may have even been Wayne's inspiration here. And I love the way that blinking whirlwind of lights creeps past him; he looks like he's being suspended in space while the world explodes around him.

Mmm hmm. Here's former Voice white internet rap guy/ fabricator Nick Sylvester, flirting with jumping off the "Wayne train":

Julianne wrote a great piece on Lil Wayne today, worth reading because it is most likely about you, the hyperfingered blogskimming danceremixing motherfucker who hasn't listened to any one song the last six months more than six times, except maybe "Young Folks." The general buzz is that Wayne is all-pleasure anymore, one moneyshot after the next, something like a rapping Girl Talk. He writes lyrics with their repurposing in mind, ready to be quoted out of context, which they happen to be from the outset. He chases tangents because he knows we're not listening; maybe he isn't either?

Am I jumping off the Wayne train? No but I feel like Drought 3 is a dare and I don't expect many people to take Wayne up. Here's a guy who can say whatever the fuck he wants on a track, free-associative, ADHD, "lyrical" or whatever, and most times it will hit really really hard, every two-bars something to take back home, a fount of one-liners that coincides with our embarrassingly short attention spans. Maybe you write these lines down in a moleskine, in a section called "@lyrics" using GTD, or maybe you have a sweet blog that needs a headline to go with an mp3 once in a while—maybe the line ends up there, cleverness by association, etc.

And here's the London crowd that apparently forgot to bring their moleskine to record Wayne's wisdom; bottle flies about 1:30 in.

* In an earlier piece, we described Michael Musto as frog-like. He prefers to be known as "owl-like". Our apologies.

The trailer:

"Rogues Do It From Behind:"

The series is apparently doing well even in this scary new world of amateur porn, falling budgets, and a customer base that refuses to pay money when they can watch everything for free on Megarotic.com. It's expensively produced, and looks surprisingly catchy. I mean it's still not exactly network-ready cinematography, and there's no real swordplay (which would have taken the series from "weirdly good" to "weirdly epic"), but it plays off the Warcraft world so well that, unlike every other porn spoof ever, it actually could appeal to fans of the original. Even if these fans are the sort who jerk off over their headset mics to a dancing orc after a cave raid.

"[They were] looking for different, supposedly "cutting edge creative types" to promote in a massive ad campaign... and it involved having your picture in every major magazine for a whole year, every issue, for an entire year, so this is like the Judy Holliday movie where she was a billboard of herself, but on a larger scale. And they wanted me, and asked me to submit a press kit, just to see me, I guess."

"[I sent them] a picture... of me in this big hoop dress. But not looking female at all, I mean, I wasn't in drag, I was just standing there with my bicycle, in a hoop dress, looking kind of clownish. But I included it because I thought I should be true to myself and present the full picture of me...."

"And they told me I had been chosen, we were all set to go forward with the photo shoot, and it never happened. Everyone else got their photo shoot and got their massive exposure, for a full year, and I found out a year later, that the reason I had been bumped from this incredible campaign, of supposedly cutting edge people, was that the Italian folks who ran the company were offended by the picture of me in the dress..."

I had to sit there, and watch, for a year and watch this campaign explode knowing that if I'd only withheld that one clipping, I probably would have been in the campaign. The whole thing felt like a movie...

The best thing I could have done/would have done would have been to soft-peddle my subversive side in the campaign, and get bigger in the mainstream and that would have resulted in a higher profile. I should have tempered my subversive youth in order to go more public. I never learned. [Huffington Post]

TOPLESS CLUBS

Reduce libido sex drive in the topless clubs. Ending the need to full fill sexual satisfaction through prostitution and sexual penetration. In turn providing a social cultural cure against AIDS and STD'S. G-Men

A. Masturbation law in topless clubs repealed; with regulation. Man must not ex pose him self and secretion must be confined inside clothes.

He gives up. So you pick somebody. From the altweekly's website:

"If we’ve learned anything in the last year, it’s that a vast number of New Yorkers believe they have what it takes to be a sex columnist. And so, rather than picking one from the surprisingly large pool of potential weekly contributors, we’ve chosen instead to open up the process—and, in the end, let the readers decide."

"While Christian says that the art at the New York galleries he critiques is in a separate sphere from the type of art that would appear in the fairs, we don’t want to put a reviewer in a situation that calls for an ethical juggling act. Since Christian has made it clear that he will continue to fill out the terms of his art-fair contract, we wish him great success, thank him for the excellent work he has done, and feel disappointment that he will cease writing for us."

Sources say Ortega was none too pleased by the revelation; according to one, Viveros-Faune was "working the phones" last night, spreading the word that he was getting some serious flak. We give the Voice plenty of flak ourselves, but we're impressed with how promptly they dealt with this one.

Previously: 'Voice' Art Critic Takes Heat For Conflict Of Interest

The intersection of the arts world and the journalism world is a tricky place. More so, or at least more often, than movie and book critics, reviewers of the arts tend to have had an academic or professional background in the industry. Viveros-Faune's predecessor, the brilliant Jerry Saltz, was the sole advisor for the 1995 Whitney Biennial, but then again, that was a nonprofit undertaking.

It's not all that hard to see why newspapers rely on critics with proven industry experience; Joe Schmo editor can usually (usally!) decipher if a book reviewer has no idea what he's talking about—if an editor isn't up on his art history, monitoring that critic is a bit thornier.

"I told my editor, so he knows, and of course I hope the paper is not going to care much." Huh! I'd wager the paper is going to care much—enough to look into the critic's work so far and to set down some guidelines for the future.

Previously: Kelly Kreth Bares Junk In Trunk For Hunk Paul Janka

"If you got a strong sense of dèja vu when reading Michael Isikoff's "The Qatari Connection" in this week's Newsweek, it may be because you read Wayne Barrett's "Rudy's Ties to a Terror Sheik" in last week's Voice," reads an annoyed post up this morning on the Voice's daily blog.

New York magazine's Daily Intel is criticizing Isikoff for using quotes similar to those in Barrett's story; in particular, the Voice says, comments made by former CIA agent Robert Baer. Over at the Observer, newly-minted media editor Zach Roth asked Isikoff what the deal was. "The truth is I was aware of, and done reporting on all this, before the Village Voice piece," Isikoff replied in an email. "No intention to slight Wayne Barrett who was generously credited in our cover story on Rudy last week."

We rang Barrett up today to find out how slighted he actually felt. As it turns out, the answer is not at all, which is somewhat surprising in and of itself: In March, Barrett spent several hours speaking to Newsweek for a cover story on Giuliani and was furious when the piece mentioned the discussion only in passing.

"I don't have any quarrel with what Isikoff did," Barrett told us. "I've never spoken to the man in my life, and he's a fine journalist. If he says he was working on the story, then I accept it. He advanced the story, and that's the name of the game." Putting aside competition for the sake of the bigger picture? What means this?

"News stories are building blocks; I didn't invent this story," Barrett said. "I think I added greatly to it. That's what happened with news stories, people build on them."

As for the Baer quotes used in Isikoff's story, they actually bear more resemblance to a Thursday ABC.com blog post, written by Marcus Baram, who at one point interned for Barrett at the Voice. Baer is a consultant for ABC News, which pretty much rounds out this little media nexus.

In other Giuliani news, Vanity Fair's investigative piece (Disclosure: written by my brother) is online.

Earlier: 'Voice' And 'Vanity Fair' Are Tag Teaming Rudy Giuliani

In both June and September, Vanity Fair ran pieces detailing, respectively, Rudy's nutty nature and how everyone hates his wife. VF is set to roll out another story on the Republican frontrunner in January (In the interest of full disclosure, said piece was written by my brother, Michael Shnayerson. Who also has a book coming out in January!)

Back in May, when Barrett wrote a story about some murkiness surrounding Giuliani's acceptance of four diamond World Series Yankees rings, Giuliani flipped his shit just a little. "I really would caution you that in the case of that particular reporter, he's got such an obsession that he just about never gets his facts right," Giuliani said of Barrett in response to campaign trail questions about the story. "This reporter sticks pins in a doll of me every night."

Well probably not actually, but Barrett definitely does have a hard-on for the man; the Voice's veteran staff reporter has devoted two books and 22 less-than-admiring stories on Giuliani since 9/11. No word yet as to whether The Weekly Standard or The American Spectator have any comeback pieces up their sleeves.

The younger McDarrah apparently maintained an address until his incarceration at the Greenwich Village home of his father, who remained an active participant in day-to-day operations at the Voice. Father and son even wrote several books together, centered around the senior McDarrah's photographs, including one on the Beat Generation and another on the history of Gay Pride.

Obituaries of Fred McDarrah ran in hundreds of newspapers across the country this week, and we're having trouble finding a single one that mentioned the connection between the two McDarrahs. We do find it awfully quaint that the New York Times' obit identifies McDarrah as survived by, among others, his son "Timothy, of Loretto, Pa., and New York City." Loretta, PA is the location of the Federal Correctional Institution where McDarrah is inmate #53256-054.

What a neat clusterfuck! We're sure there's a chatroom somewhere on the web, maybe "DSBRD LWYRS 4 LUV," where they can go spend some time with former Duke-case-handling D.A. Mike Nifong.

Jack Shafer, who once worked for Lacey and Larkin and maintains a favorable opinion of the two, waggled his finger in Arizona's direction: "Never pick a fight with people who buy their whiskey by the truckload, their ink by the tanker, and their pixels at wholesale."

This morning, the state's largest newspaper, the Arizona Republic, went to court to ask that all filings in the case be unsealed. Their Sunday editorial explained that they're often "leery of New Times' style of free-for-all journalism. But, in this appalling overreach of government intrusion, both the New Times and the public were grievously wronged."

Reports in the New-Times over more than a decade have detailed Arpaio's backroom dealings, his mistreatment of prisoners under his watch and his general scuminess. Prisoners at his county jail get only two meals a day, must wear pink underwear, and live in tents outside the jail where they work seven days a week in chain gangs, digging graves for the indigent.

An investigation by county prosecutors into the paper's reporting began when New-Times published Arpaio's home address on its website in 2004. A little-known Arizona statute dictates that it's legal to publish the home address of a law enforcement agent in print, or on the radio or television, just not on the Internet; when the print article was uploaded to the New-Times website, prosecutors pounced.

Lacey and Larkin's "first joint byline" in 40 years of working together came after the two decided the special prosecutor leading the investigation was operating outside ethical boundaries—according to Lacey and Larkin's piece, he had made ex parte advances toward the judge and subpoenaed "all documents" related to the paper's stories, as well as analytical information on the Internet activities of the paper's entire web audience, including IP addresses and "contents of electronic shopping carts." All you people who've bought that bestselling "How To Assassinate a Maricopa County Sheriff" are in big trouble now!

"In our deliberations, we faced the obvious: A grand jury investigation is a fearsome thing; a tainted grand jury is a tipping point," Lacey and Larkin write. "We intend now to break the silence and resist." They did so with the 5,000-word piece and were answered with a night in jail; they were released early this morning on $500 bonds.

New Times was born out of Kent State rage, and we're pretty sure Lacey and Larkin, while not wild about the whole jail thing, are kind of loving fighting the man again, though Lacey had enough decorum (shocking, really) to tell off reporters outside the jail: "The problem is that it takes me being arrested for you guys to show up. This is a story we're all involved in. Those subpoenas are what you should be writing about."

The Village Voice's editor, Tony Ortega, knows something about Sheriff Joe Arpaio; while a reporter at the Phoenix New-Times, he investigated the sheriff's abuse of prisoners, and had this to say about his bosses' arrests: "I hope that, whatever other journalists think about the Voice or VVM, they can see that this represents one of the worst abuses of a newspaper's first amendment rights in memory," he told us. Gotta say, we can't disagree with that. Update: Ortega weighs in with his own thoughts on the Voice's website.

Earlier: Village Voice Media Executive Editor Released From Jail and Vows to Fight [VV]

*My former employer

We suspect editor Tony Ortega (Disclosure: a former colleague, who is, I think, not terrible at his job) realized that most of the people who'd contributed BONYC pieces over the last few months had either left or been fired since? Might make for a bit of an awkward staff meeting following publication!

Word has it that pieces from Mara Altman, Adamma Ince, Deborah Kolben, Sean Bosler, Tricia Romano, Keisha Franklin and Laura Conaway make up most of the issue, though you won't find their names anywhere in it.

Pleased to Meet Me [VV]