In the slush piles of Hollywood, alongside the unread manuscripts, screenplays, and movie treatments, lie the newest issues of GQ, Esquire, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Texas Monthly, among other publications. Directors, producers, and TV and film executives have become some of the most avid readers of narrative journalism, and increasingly they are expressing their admiration in the universal language — money.

Perhaps this development was precipitated by the public’s fascination with "true" stories rather than fictional ones. Maybe it was rooted in movie studios’ hunger, in a competitive environment, for original narratives peopled with compelling characters. But whatever the cause, the movement of ideas from magazines — and to a lesser extent, newspapers — to the movies, once a languid trickle, is now a flowing stream. And though the benefits of luxuriating in Hollywood’s waters continue to lure journalists and media organizations alike, there are some dangerous currents.

Journalism’s Hollywood connection goes back a few years. Before 1996, when Disney hired Premiere magazine editor Susan Lyne as a magazine scout and instructed her to buy articles for future film purposes, a movie studio or production company occasionally would purchase an option on a magazine article. The option, which generally lasted for a year, seldom exceeded five or six thousand dollars.

But with Lyne and others mining the landscape, the money began to get serious. In 1997, Columbia-Tri-Star agreed to pay Mike Sager $1.6 million for his GQ article about Janet Cooke, the disgraced Washington Post reporter (and Sager’s former girlfriend), who won and then lost a Pulitzer Prize for her phony story. Then, this past June, Miramax Films elevated synergy to the institutional level when it hired Tina Brown to create a magazine, not yet named, with the express purpose of generating ideas for its movie division.

Now, a new wrinkle: Some publications are themselves hiring Hollywood talent agencies like the William Morris Agency, International Creative Management (ICM), and Creative Arts Agency (CAA), to represent them in the hunt for the wealth, exposure, and "buzz" that accrue when their stories are sold. Others hope that an agent will enable them to assert greater control over the "afterlife" of their own material.

Texas Monthly has enjoyed the advantages of agency representation for years — at least fifteen, according to editor Gregory Curtis. "We want to have people who know how to sell these properties," he says. "I’m not sure we’d have any movie deals without them." In the last three years alone, seven Texas Monthly articles have been optioned, and two have made it to television.

William Morris has represented Texas Monthly since 1992, and Curtis feels that his magazine has profited on many levels from its ongoing relationship with agencies. "To have representation gave us the kind of visibility we wouldn’t have otherwise," he says. "And our writers get an extra paycheck." So does the magazine: staff writers keep 75 percent of revenues from movie deals; free-lancers keep 50 percent. This leaves anything from $1,500 to $250,000 or more for the magazine. Texas Monthly’s executive vice president of operations, Marsha Cook, prefers to focus on an ancillary benefit of all this visibility — brand extension: the ability to spin off additional products from a recognizable name.

Then there is brand protection. Reader’s Digest signed in August with CAA. Yet for editor Christopher Willcox, the motive for his deal with the talent agency was mainly to protect his magazine’s name. "We don’t want a movie to carry the Reader’s Digest brand unless it is carried out with the same attention to taste, detail, and fact as we do," he says. A savvy agent, he adds, can insure a degree of quality control through negotiation.

Fears that projects won’t meet expectations are sometimes justified. When HBO was unable to reach an agreement with Texas Monthly for Mimi Swartz’s 1995 article about the inventors of breast implant surgery, it simply fictionalized the story and made the film without the magazine or its agents at William Morris. The resulting film, with Friends star David Schwimmer, was "not something we would want to associate with us," says Lisa Lawrence, the magazine’s public relations manager. "The nugget came from us and then it spun off into another whole ball of wax."

Motivated by these and other concerns, The New York Times felt compelled to articulate a Hollywood policy to its own writers after a flood of interest in Times articles from studios and production companies. The paper announced in a memo to the staff dated July 21 that the company "is exploring the possibility of engaging our own representative or agent, who would represent the Times’s interests — financial, ethical, and otherwise — in any discussions involving a writer or a writer’s agent, and a filmmaker."

The author of the memo, Bill Schmidt, head of news administration, envisions "an anti-agent" rather than an agent, one who would protect the paper’s reputation instead of seeking deals. "Our concerns are largely ethical, and deal with avoiding any conflicts of interest," he says.

Schmidt worries about the danger of complications when Times reporters take on consultative roles with studios or production companies. For example, a studio might request that a reporter turn over notes and documents from a story, he says: "If a prosecuting attorney approached one of our reporters with such a request, it would cause an uproar. We would be especially craven if we did it for money."

Schmidt also fears the public’s perception of deals between the newspaper and a film studio. "How do you know whether or not someone with an interest in a movie project might try to plant the story in the Times, and then use the story as a hook to get a production deal? It might lead to speculation about our objectivity."

David Fishman, a consultant who represented Condé Nast during discussions earlier this year with ICM, says it was precisely this sort of fear that convinced his client not to sign exclusively with any one agency. "We talked about opening up a pipeline for Condé Nast magazines, about fostering relationships with people in Hollywood so the right people were reading our magazines," he says. "But if you have a relationship with just ICM, you create difficulties for magazines with celebrity content like GQ and Vanity Fair. If we were an ICM shop, it would get ticklish when we wanted to feature a celebrity represented by another agency. And we didn’t want to leave room for any notion of journalistic impropriety."

Though his magazine profits from selling its articles, Texas Monthly’s Curtis insists this has no impact on editorial decisions. Says he: "Everybody understands that a magazine exists for its readers."

How do the writers, who for years have traded dances with both editors and agents, feel about all this? "The money is great," says Sager. And scripts that come out of good magazine articles can mean better movies, says Marie Brenner, a writer-at-large for Vanity Fair. Her piece on tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand was bought by Disney. It is now in production as a movie, with Russell Crowe as Wigand, Al Pacino as 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, and Christopher Plummer as Mike Wallace.

But Brenner admits that the Hollywood connection could affect the content. "Are you doing an article because it might sell, or because it is journalistically sound?" she asks. "This worries me, what an editor chooses to assign." When asked to describe the juncture between journalism and Hollywood, Brenner envisions "the big story meeting in the sky. Think of it: editors, reporters, and indies pumping up the narrative, e-mailing two-sentence synopses to Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington. It makes me laugh. I may even put this idea in development."

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