By PETER BESAS

We were pleased to hear from an old mugg, Art Woodstone, who worked on 46th Street as a reporter until 1963 and is now living in Huntington, Connecticut. Since 1963 was before my own stint with Variety, I never had the pleasure of meeting Art, who worked side by side in the TV section with George Rosen from 1953 to 1963. Art writes that between Bill Greeley and himself they must have cost the paper thousands of dollars in advertising revenue due to some of the hard-hitting copy they produced on their typewriters, which sometimes involved advertisers. Yes, that was how the OLD Variety worked, before the corporates made it “advertiser friendly”.

Art asks about the whereabouts of Jesse Gross, Len Traube, Hy Hollinger, Fred Hift.We cued him in on that side, mentioning that Hy is still going strong at the Hollywood Reporter in LA. He asked us about “Inside Variety” and I told him where to get a copy, and I wrote him about the big 100th Anni party that Syd sponsored in 2005 at Sardi’s. Mort Bryer was kind enough to send him a copy of the Album.

Art writes:

“I’ve lived and traveled the last 10 years in obscurity, so I should have grown accustomed to being ignored. But, as all writers have egos, or they wouldn’t be writers, I miss seeing my name in print. Anyway, I await notes or calls from old friends, especially the old skeptics, the ones who produced some of the hottest, toughest stories printed in the first 60 years of the Weekly. Tell them that nostalgia has overtaken me and the older I get the more I seek out old, dear colleagues.

“They can reach me via the Internet at pblawie@att.net or by phone 203-402-0613. I’ll be in and out til late August.”

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By MORTON BRYER.

Morry Roth, an old mugg and former bureau chief of Variety’s Chitown office, has gone to his reward. He ran what I considered to be one of the paper’s “friendly” offices. I first eyeballed him when he came into the 46th Street headquarters to be interviewed by Abel and Syd, sometime in the 60’s. I was struck by his close resemblance to the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis ( I’m an old student of that period ). Spitting image, I would say. Odd, for a man who was quite “liberal”.
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Ex mugg and film scribe Harlan Jacobson will again be winging to the Croisette in his yearly trek as film critic and founder of his and wife Susan’s “Talk Cinema” operation, which screens indie and foreign features for select audiences in cities such as New York, Chicago, Dallas, Scottsdale (Az.), Washington, D.C., Palo Alto (Calif.) and the Twin Cities.
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