Intro for August 7, 2026

Dear Gossips,

Here’s a blast from the past, Nikki Finke resurfaced this week. Not literally, as she passed away in 2022, but the specter of her long-rumored fictionalized telling of Hollywood tales has emerged from the shadows and is being shopped for publication by her estate.

It’s crazy to think back twenty years to the power Nikki Finke wielded from her blog, Deadline.com. Today, we know Deadline as an entertainment industry trade, one of the “big three” owned by Penske Media. Back then, though, it was Nikki’s blog where she regularly posted scorched-earth takes and well-sourced if always unnamed gossip about the film industry. She was rarely seen in public, had like two photos of her on the internet—one from the 1970s—and was, for a moment, genuinely feared for her ability to blow apart backroom deals and spill what the kids today call tea about the most powerful men in Hollywood.

Finke sold Deadline to Penske in 2009, left altogether in 2013, and in 2014 and 2015 launched two different sites to contain her writing post-Deadline, but they never amounted to much. One site, HollywoodDementia.com, was supposed to feature short fiction, teased as thinly veiled reveals about Hollywood and its power brokers. (HollywoodDementia.com is today run by someone else and contains a lot of listicles and “celebrity net worth” posts. It hasn’t updated once this year.)

She also teased a novel, again implied to be a barely-fictional telling of tales, but it never materialized. In her last years, as social media and a new generation rose—and the power brokers she once challenged all but killed legitimate entertainment journalism—Nikki Finke all but faded from the spotlight. She only ran Deadline independently for three years, was gone from the site she founded entirely in seven years, and by the end of the 2010s, the media landscape was so different she was a specter of a previous era. The days of “Deadline Hollywood” as an LA Weekly column are practically the ancient texts of celebrity gossip at this point, and Nikki Finke sits on a shelf alongside Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons.

Finke’s book, titled Pay or Play, is being shopped by a mystery person from whatever amounts to Finke’s estate. She has a sister, though personal details about Finke were always deliberately vague and she enjoyed cultivating her low profile—and her ability to haunt film executives from the shadows. I just don’t know what the interest will be in Finke’s tome twenty years after Deadline’s heyday.

As someone who remembers her LA Weekly column, and when she transitioned to posting online, part of the pioneering class of bloggers that includes Lainey, it would be interesting to ME, but explaining to a twenty-something how revolutionary it was for a legitimate journalist to post every day online makes me tired. It will be interesting to see if anyone bites on Finke’s book, but even by the time of her death four years ago, she had been out of the spotlight for a long time. And what do her exposes matter now, when no one who was in charge in 2013 is still around today? Nikki Finke’s unpublished work has gone from potentially incendiary gossip bomb to idle curiosity.

Live long and gossip,

Sarah