Using e-mail to get tips, upstart Hollywood reporter Matt Drudge is hoping to become the Walter Winchell of the Internet
By SCOTT SHUGER
When, earlier this year, President Clinton invited 30 top media executives to the White House for a discussion of television violence and how the "V-chip" might help control it, the mainstream media treated the event with the solemnity the "Industry" loves to hear directed towards itself -- as if it was a cross between the Nobel Prize ceremonies and the World War III peace accords. The Drudge Report took a slightly different approach: "One network heavy was punch drunk at Thursday's V-Chip summit at the White House. His breath roared of booze...."
It's the kind of no-holds-barred reporting that Matt Drudge, whose sole previous media job was managing the CBS-TV gift shop in Studio City, hopes will someday make him the Walter Winchell of the Internet.
A one-man office -- publisher, editor, reporter, and writer -- the 28-year-old Drudge e-mails the Report to more than 3,000 subscribers, including newsgroups, bulletin boards and radio stations which make his material available to thousands of non-paying customers, every couple of nights. A subscription costs $10 a year. A no-cost sample is available.
Although there are other Web sites that cover parts of Drudge's turf, like the Hollywood gossip site "Mr. Showbiz" and Hot Wired's politics column "Netizen," The Drudge Report is the only one that unites Tinseltown reporting with a tough political slant. Plus, he produces many more scoops. Drudge is beginning to break out into the media mainstream: He's been mentioned in the New York Times and has started guesting on talk radio.
Not bad for a guy who just barely graduated high school and didn't go to college, but had wanted to somehow get into the media world ever since he was a paper boy back in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
Like any good dirt-digger's, Drudge's answering machine and in-box are regularly stocked with tabloid-fodder scandal. But what he calls "bedroom stuff" excites him much less than the "train wrecks" that happen when Hollywood, Washington and big business collide.
Most mornings, he doesn't have to go very far to find them. In his dorky high school chess club attire, his horn rims perpetually askew, Drudge scans 20 newspapers a day on his computer screen. His home phone and e-mail provide the majority of the tips he gets -- from a senior television executive and a make-up girl one day, a congressional aide the next (often as not, subscribers).
Drudge has discovered that the anonymity of e-mail makes it a gossip column source par excellence. It "pulls together a network of whispers," he explains. "I get quick eyewitness reports from movie sets, news rooms, Congress and anywhere ... all without being concerned about exposing an identity." As a result, although Drudge occasionally visits the set of a TV show or attends a premiere, he is able to compile The Drudge Report while sticking pretty close to the Packard Bell and three 27-inch Sanyos that dominate his sparsely furnished and decorated (pictures of Socks The Cat and John McLaughlin adorn the walls) $600-a-month apartment just up the hill from the Frederick's on Hollywood Boulevard. "It's a rinky-dink operation," Drudge says, between Max Headroom chuckles. "Around the world in 8 RAM."
But on the Internet, size doesn't matter. Almost from the time he started a little over a year ago, Drudge has been breaking stories. An e-note from a reader -- he gets about 300 a day -- stating that "Connie Chung's just been fired -- she just doesn't know it yet" enabled Drudge to break that story six days before the regular media. And thanks to accounts from attendees at studio screenings, Drudge confidently predicted well ahead of time that "The Bridges of Madison County" would be a hit (some executives openly wept, his source said), and that the much-touted Tarantino-and-friends "Four Rooms" would be a bomb. Drudge relied on screening leaks and a National Weather Service source who indicated that, despite the absence of official pronouncements, we would be in for a very active tornado season, to predict months ahead of time that "Twister" would do major business.
"The main point of this," says Drudge, "is the opportunity to go to a big audience unfiltered." A good example: The studios use as much of the weekend as possible to work up any spin required to paper over Friday's flops, but a source at one of the big talent agencies gets the box office numbers to Drudge for his mid-Saturday release -- a day ahead of the wire services.
A phone tip led to Drudge reporting that Whitewater investigators would question Steven Spielberg about Hillary Clinton's billing records -- because Spielberg had been a White House guest during the time they suddenly reappeared there. And more than six months before NBC announced that it was going into the all-news channel business with Microsoft, it was Drudge who first wrote about the possibility and in light of it, questioned the propriety of the network's fawning special on Bill Gates.
That's just another salvo in what Drudge views as a never-ending war against powerful, even evil forces. "This town's so locked in--you've got 'Hard Copy' and 'Entertainment Tonight' who are allegiant to Paramount, and 'Extra,' which is Warner Brothers. There's not one person writing out here besides me that doesn't really write for a studio, not one. Maybe you could say Variety, but they need the ads."
Perhaps that's why it wasn't Variety reporting that the director of "Strictly Ballroom" is filming a Generation Y version of "Romeo and Juliet" (to be distributed by Fox) in which 17-year-old actress Claire Danes will do fully nude scenes. Drudge noted that the production was moved from its planned location in Florida to Mexico and Canada. Was this, wondered Drudge, the impact of NAFTA? "Or perhaps an effort to evade American child pornography laws."
Drudge consistently seems to be the first to find this kind of story. Just the other day, he reported that the producers of "Babe," who made the movie in part to encourage vegetarian sensibilities, were furious at the choice of the chief sponsor for the movie's pay-per-view run: McDonald's.
All this comes wrapped in linguistic fun. Drudge is liable to present an item about the possible remake of "I Love Lucy" as a Saturday morning cartoon under a label like "Break," "Alert," "Flash," or "Code Red." And he has a word for the relentless Hollywood cycle of hype and thud that he chronicles: "anticipointment." Through it all though, there's one word no Drudge Report has ever contained: "cyber."
Matt Drudge can be reached at drudge@lainet.com
Scott Shuger is a Los Angeles writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and other national and local publications. His e-mail address is sshuger@aol.com