William Wilkerson - The Hollywood Reporter

The Hollywood Reporter

It began as a riches-to-rags story. In late October 1929, he bumped into a Wall Street chum who advised him to play the market at rock bottom. Wilkerson sold his half-interest in the Manhattan trade paper for $20,000 and borrowed an additional $25,000. On Black Tuesday, October 29, Wilkerson walked into the New York Stock Exchange at ten in the morning with the intention of doubling his money and hightailing it to California. Forty-Five minutes later the market crashed and a dazed Wilkerson wandered out of the building without a dime to his name. Undaunted, he packed his wife, his mother and their few belongings and motored cross-country to Hollywood. There, on July 26, 1930, he formed the Wilkerson Daily Corporation.

Wilkerson published the first issue of the Hollywood Reporter on September 3, 1930. This daily magazine reported on movies, studios and personalities in an outrageously candid style. Through its outspoken pages Wilkerson became one of the town's most colorful and controversial figures. He began each issue with a self-penned editorial entitled "Tradeviews," which exposed corrupt studio practices. "Tradeviews" went on to become one of the most widely read daily columns in the industry. The upstart publisher also employed hard-ball tactics to solicit advertising. Studios were literally blackmailed into giving their support. If they refused, he ordered a complete editorial blackout on all their material - from press releases to film reviews. The corporate moguls eventually banded together to deal with The Reporter. They refused Wilkerson all advertising support and deprived him of news from their studios. They even hired extra employees to burn The Hollywood Reporter when it was delivered every morning at their front gates. At the height of the battle, his reporters were barred from every lot in town. Wilkerson told them to climb over the studio walls and sift through executives' garbage. These tactics produced a flood of incriminating news, which Wilkerson cheerfully printed. The Reporter, by now fondly referred to as "the industry bible," gained national prominence. Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt had the paper airmailed daily to his desk at the White House. By 1936, The Hollywood Reporter had become something even the most prescient studio heads never anticipated - a power that rivaled their own.