Premiere
(1987–2007)
Name: Matt Haber
My Title(s) Are/Were: Owner
I Work(ed) at These Magazines: Entertainment Weekly, The Village Voice, The New York Observer, The Atlantic, Inc., Alta Journal, Gazetteer SF
My Magazine Career: Continues!
Magazine I Miss: Premiere
I Miss It Because: In my memory, everything about Premiere was huge: oversized pages, full-bleed photos, long stories. This was a glossy monthly magazine about Hollywood that, at its best, looked beyond blockbusters and treated moviemaking as an art form.
Looking back, I can see that like a lot of its contemporaries (Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, People, etc.), Premiere's coverage was probably shaped by studios, publicists, and the sort of 'celebrity wrangling' that would make even the steeliest editor buckle, but there was real love for the movies on every page. As a precocious teen obsessed with David Lynch and Spike Lee, I learned everything I knew about the “real” Hollywood in its pages.
These days, when I do read profiles of celebs or the vanishingly rare profile of a filmmaker, I can almost sense the carefully managed access, the months of negotiations it took to render this piece of marketing disguised as journalism promoting the newest multi-platform, IP-driven, blah, blah, blah. Sure, the covers were glossy and probably employed some state of the art airbrushing, but Premiere always took Hollywood seriously while keeping a sense of humor about it.
There's really nothing like it on the (few remaining) newsstands, but with so much “content” coming out every week, we need it more than ever. As Norma Desmond might say, “Hollywood is still big. It's the coverage that got small.”
