John Koblin did his heroic best to explain What It All Means: The accelerating decline of Variety, the rise of celebrity Twitters; the enduring but increasingly preposterous hope of the Los Angeles Times, the swagger of self-made blog bigfoot Nikki Finke; the "clubby" world of pre-internet Tinseltown reporting, the ambitions of upstart blogger Sharon Waxm—

"I do think it's kind of surprising that Sharon Waxman even has a blog," [former LA/NY Times reporter Anita] Busch told us. "I think she's even one of the worst journalists I've ever encountered."

Uhhh...

"Her site is getting no traffic and is inaccurate and boring..." Finke said.

OK, well, maybe we could get back to a constructive dialog about how the economic misfortunes of movie studios have maybe accelerated the decline of printed med...

[Variety's Brian] Lowry, in a blog post singling out [LA Times' Patrick] Goldstein, calls him lazy, petulant and a weak reporter. "Now you have this blog, ‘The Big Picture,' so I'm thrilled to see... you squeeze out more than 800 words a week," wrote Mr. Lowry.

Right. We'll skip right over the discussion of economic viability amid the decimation of advertising revenue in the print-to-online transition, then, and just ask if anyone else want to hurl some fecal m...

"The way [Finke] twists things and the way she always manages to bend the facts-and I put facts in quotes-is in a way that suits her..." Ms. Waxman... added. "People around Hollywood are terrified of her."

Alright, fine, bottom line: In case the example of New York wasn't clear enough, Los Angeles media also illustrate how technology and fragmentation are reviving the old tradition of feuding. As longtime Variety kingpin Peter Bart explains to Koblin, we're going back to the 1930s, when Louella Parsons competed ruthlessly with former friend Hedda Hopper to dominate Hollywood gossip. Everyone is at one another's throats.

No, the Waxman-Finke rivalry isn't exactly hot news, but the point is that more of these little squabbles are erupting all the time, if only because there are so many would-be media alpha dogs in this period of flux, before the inevitable consolidations and shakeouts that make life boring again.

Seeking a final bit of illumination on that, we excitedly emailed Koblin's piece to a media source who quickly replied, "I thought only Hollywood bloggers cared about feuds created entirely to bait traffic, but I totally forgot about the New York Observer!"

Oh, my.

Then again, what did we expect? Welcome to the future. It's kinda bitchy!

[NY Observer]

(Illustration via)

The LA Times's Carla Hall, meanwhile, has courtroom sketches:

Before the verdicts were read, Pellicano seemed at ease, grinning and scanning the room. But when he realized the jury had found him guilty, he crossed his arms, took his glasses off and looked around with a blank expression. A woman on the jury dabbed her eyes with a tissue.

We cried a little, too, for all the potential laid waste in this clusterfuck of justice: The potential for Anita Busch's comeback after Pellicano's dead-fish threat and wiretaps ended her career. The potential for Busch-destroyer Michael Ovitz to get a shovel in the back of the neck after slithering off the witness stand. The potential for the bottomless filth of Scary Hollywood Lawyer Bert Fields' testimony, which never came. The potential for "Mr. Pellicano," as he was forced to refer to himself as his own counsel, to just say, "Yeah, fuck it. Put me away; let's all go home." Or the potential for us to give half a shit this was even happening, day after drawn-out day, even under the threat of mistrial.

Pellicano is indeed going home — like "federal prison" home, up to 10 years' worth, we hear. He'd be 74 when he got out, with a few years left to enjoy the fruits of keeping his mouth shut: A couple well-scrubbed dollars trickling in now and then from grateful clients to whom he's anything but the footnote the rest of us will know. At the end of the day — especially today — we struggle to care but somehow wish there was more, as if it was all just about to get good.

Alas, the end is as good as it gets, when we can at last peel away the "alleged" and say yeah, the fucker did it. Finally. And good riddance.

[Photo Credit: LAT]

Under stern cross-examination by Pellicano, who was wearing green prison drab and white sneakers, Busch became emotional again.

"I was scared 24/7 for my life," she said. "I didn't know how I was going to survive financially. I thought (the book) would be the way to do it, but I realized it was not the right way. It was a big mistake. After the threats and everything happened to me, I couldn't focus. Because of the wiretap, my sources fell away. I struggled to be a journalist, but I couldn't continue. I couldn't see a future, I saw everything slipping away. I didn't know what I was going to do."

At this point Busch couldn't speak and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. "It was a relentless attack, Mr. Pellicano, as you know."

The judge wasn't having any of that. Nor, alas, will he have any more of Ovitz slithering out of a criminal courtroom; as Allison Hope Weiner noted late Wednesday at The Huffington Post, California's statute of limitations put an end to that hope:

A source close to the case (who didn't want to be identified because they believe that Mr. Ovitz should have been charged) happened to mention that the statute runs out today on any charges in connection with Mr. Ovitz's alleged wiretapping of his enemies (including Ms. Busch). So, the good news for Mr. Ovitz is that unless he committed perjury today during his testimony today, he's in the clear.

However, Busch's civil case against Ovitz still has a future pending the outcome of the Pellicano verdict, and there's always that hovering rumor of CAA's Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane laying waste to their former boss with a civil charge of their own. God's spokespeople, meanwhile, declined comment on the status of Ovitz's pending damnation, suggesting the potential civil verdicts would eventually influence the temperature of his eternity. We can hardly wait.

• Busch, Pellicano face off [Variety]
• Ovitz in the Spotlight and in the Clear... [The Huffington Post]

· Anita Busch is the reporter whose snooping into the dealings of axe-shredding blackbelt and energy beverage purveyor Steven Segal she claims led to colorful threats on her life, and set Pellicano's house of cards a-tumbling. (Soon to be dramatized in Starz!'s gripping true-crime drama, The Car, The Fish, and The Rose.) In assessing the NY Times's recent Busch profile, Deadline Hollywood Daily insists there's no there there, rattling off a series of "inexplicably"s and missed opportunities that flew clear over our heads. Michael Ovitz's name is evoked, however, and that's never a good thing. (Seagal, meanwhile, vigorously maintains his innocence, and would like his career back now KTHXBAI.) [Deadline Hollywood Daily]
· The recorder becomes the recorded, as once again Pellicano's own audio tapes are used to bury him. Last time, it was when he pledged to his "honey" Chris Rock that he'd "blacken this [rapist-accusing] girl up for you left and right." This time, Pellicano was blasted throughout the courtroom telling attorney Peter Knect that his client, Bilal Baroody, owed Pellicano's client, Universal head Ron Meyer, $300,000, sweetly adding the sentiment, "His life is about to change exponentially unless he pays this money back." (What—no flowers or fish?) [HuffPo]
· Then, Rollerball producer Charles Roven took the stand. Another tape was played: "The jury heard Mr. Pellicano tell director John McTiernan...that he was in the middle of wiretapping Mr. Roven...Mr. Pellicano made a pitch to McTiernan, asking him to come help out and listen to the calls so he could figure out what was important in Mr. Roven's conversations. Mr. McTiernan replied that he was a bit too busy, but suggested sending his then girlfriend..." There's ltos more where that came from over at HuffPo. [HuffPo]

Ms. Busch's discovery of the tap on her phones, prosecutors say, led to another search of Mr. Pellicano's offices and a new phase of the investigation — one that metastasized into racketeering and other charges against him and more than a dozen accused co-conspirators.

It also cost Ms. Busch dearly. First, she said, she called news informants and friends and told them that their confidentiality had been compromised. Some deserted her, she said. One man broke down, she related, saying he was scared for his life.

"It was, literally, watching your career disappear in front of your eyes, and you can't do anything about it," Ms. Busch said.

The story goes on to note how Busch still drives the same car Pellicano allegedly visited in 2002, though she occasionally starts it "from across the street, just in case." Also: " [U]nable to find permanent employment, Ms. Busch does research, marketing and other odd jobs." Unswerving blog optimists that we are, surely there must be an outlet for someone of Anita Busch's talents, tastes and hard-driving style. I mean, if we can (possibly) cure Patrick Swayze, can't we find this woman a URL somewhere? Denton, are you listening?

• Journalist in Pellicano Case Will Get Her Day in Court [NYT]