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Within a year or so it had found its niche and its audience, though this was seemingly accomplished by putting Christian Slater on the cover of every other issue. The trajectory of the actor's career mirrors, perhaps, the success of the early Details formula. Truman left to become editorial director of Condé Nast and a succession of editors tried to duplicate his success with decidedly mixed results in the eight years since.

Golin makes a nod to the magazine's checkered past in his initial editor's note, ID'ing himself as "#5-in-Chief" (as in fifth editor and leave your hat on). It's a cheeky move, the first of many, and it's plain he wants humor to be paramount in Details. How funny you actually find it will depend on your taste (and perhaps your age). Questions of male identity haunt even the fluffiest pieces. A colorful spread featuring cereal boxes from around the world notes that Russia's Grech "bills itself as 'a real breakfast for real men,' [though] a photo on the back of the box shows a father sweetly playing with his child. Hmmm."

Meaning real men don't play with their children? Or play with them "sweetly"? Susan Faludi could have a field day with this stuff -- and, in fact does, writing about the plight of Details and the Maxim influence in her new book on men, "Stiffed." More troubling are some of the columns that seem edited into oblivion. Golin worked under Bonnie Fuller, formerly of Cosmo and now at Glamour, and her style of strip-mining copy (no big words, little background, no math) seems to have stuck with him. (In the interest of disclosure let me say that my wife worked at Glamour before Fuller and left after her arrival.) A column by Stephanie Dolgoff (the next Anka?) describes her attempts to find a guy to experiment with her using "a Viagra-like cream" for women. Would naming the cream be so hard? And a column by actor Bruce McCulloch (essentially a long promo for his new movie, "Dog Park," which he directed and stars in) refers to Kids in the Hall without first establishing he had been in the Canadian comedy troupe. Careless editing, or a deliberate assumption on the new editor's part that readers don't want to be slowed down by, well, details, no matter how salient?

There are meatier pieces, including a hair-raising feature on hepatitis C in Hollywood and another on the difficulties of selling a house someone was murdered in. And "50 Things We Learned from the Movies" ("In France a Quarter Pounder is called a Royale with cheese," and so on) is exactly the kind of trivia fest some young readers crave, all in short, bite-sized bits. Whether these were in the works when Golin came and represent the old Details or this is the kind of mix he's looking for remains to be seen. The much vaunted redesign (courtesy Rhonda Rubinstein) doesn't seem that radical, though the features are more distinctive (a big bonus for those of us who look at so many magazines that we don't want to need a map to find the editorial). The tagline "For Men" has been restored to the cover, just in case there was any doubt. And despite the cover, featuring Milla Jovovich in a see-through slip, you'll find precious little cleavage in this issue.

Which you certainly can't say about the October Maxim. From the nearly-nude Melissa Joan Hart on the cover (who sprawls provocatively over an eight-page photo feature/interview inside) to the panty-wrestling Jaime Pressly and Tia Carrere (together in their undies for the first time!) to the pictures of Alison Armitage in her see-through underpants (she's the star of "Acapulco H.E.A.T" and, no, I'd never heard of it either), Maxim knows what its boys like. Columns are sensationalistic (the dangers of pro-sports betting) and the regular service section (entitled "Grinder Torture Test") is downright manic. Chainsaws are tested on sides of beef and sofas in the October issue, while hiking boots are offered to a Rottweiler named Bruno for the chomp test.

The overall effect is like Argosy on acid. That may be just what Brit-import Soutar is looking for. It's hard to take the whole thing seriously (and it would certainly be a mistake to), but no one's ever going to confuse it with GQ. "The phrase we came up with is, 'Maxim is the magazine that says it's OK to be a guy,'" Soutar told the Los Angeles Times in May. He's hired Steve Perrine (late of Men's Health) and Steve Kaminsky (Men's Journal) to make it American. (Are chain saws even legal in the U.K.?)

A lot of the writing seems clichéd and amateurish to me but that too may improve. When asked about the decline of the lads' mags, Soutar called it "a timely reminder that we need to keep evolving," and perhaps that evolution will include better stories. (The big investigative piece here concerns the death of a member of Iron Butterfly.) The problem with editing either of these magazines is identifying the audience and then keeping it. According to Soutar, the dilemma of males in their 20s is "when part of you wants to settle down and get a mortgage but part of you thinks your mates are more important and you want to shag anything that moves." That's a tough one, OK. But when your days of shagging anything are through, what are you going to read?

It may just be that magazines like Maxim and Details will have an ever-changing readership, with new lads rising to replace the old. Like the brides-to-be who start picking up Brides and the new parents who subscribe to Parenting for a few years, their audiences may be more ephemeral than the titles themselves.

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Dining Out on Rupert

In his review Wednesday of the midtown Manhattan restaurant Beacon, New York Post food critic Steve Cuozzo wrote, "A high-ranking New York magazine editor, at the banquette next to me at Beacon, is comparing the corporate cultures of two media giants: It's like Jeane Kirkpatrick said: Time Warner is authoritarian, but Disney is totalitarian."

Call it shoddy note-taking, selective listening or plain old censorship but that New York magazine editor was a guest of mine at that lunch and I happened to be taping him. What he really said was, "It's like Jeane Kirkpatrick's distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian governments. Rupert Murdoch and Time Warner are authoritarian -- loyalty, blah blah blah. But Disney is totalitarian. Everything has to serve the prime directive ..."

Does the exclusion of Murdoch's name have anything to do with his owning the Post? What an authoritarian concept.
salon.com | Oct. 1, 1999

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