New York, Feb. 28, 2014
Add music impresario Clive Davis to the long line of Hollywood executives who say it was Variety that introduced them to The Biz.
In his recent autobiography “The Soundtrack of My Life,” Davis writes: “In the early 1950s, Harvard made me begin to wonder whether I was cut out for the law… Interestingly, though, I took a copyright course that required us to subscribe to Variety,’ the bible of the entertainment business. The paper had its own jargon and perhaps it was never going to win any literary prizes, but the writing in it was very lively, and I found myself drawn to all the statistics about hit movies and TV shows… At the very least, my devoted reading of Variety provided welcome relief from my law books—and an intriguing harbinger of things to come.”