Nikki Finke to Launch Site of 'Fictional Short Stories About Showbiz'

Nikki Finke, Hollywood’s elusive écriveuse (yes I know that’s bad French), reemerged Monday morning with a new website, new attitude, and new headshot. After leaving Deadline (the site she founded) in 2013, Finke launched NikkiFinke.com, her much-hyped next chapter that was less Deadline 2.0 and more Infrequently Updated Personal Blog. It didn’t last. But now she’s returned with comeback No. 2: Hollywood Dementia.

Nikki did her best to explain the “innovative website” on NikkiFinke.com:

What is it? Here’s my definition: Hollywood Dementia: noun. Deterioration of intellectual faculties, such as memory, concentration, and judgment, sometimes accompanied by emotional disturbance and personality changes, resulting from an organic disease or a disorder of the brain acquired while working in the entertainment industry that causes someone to be unable to think clearly or to understand what is real and what is not real.

Because that paragraph didn’t explain much of anything, she continued:

My website will present short stories, novellas and novel excerpts written by Hollywood insiders like myself. After 30 years as a journalist, I’m now going to expose the hard truths and gritty reality of showbiz through creative writing. In fiction, I can be more honest than just sticking to facts. The stories which I and others write won’t depict any actual Hollywood person or event. But they will marry artifice with verisimilitude into original content creation.

Finke will “[charge] readers $1 for each post” and pay writers “from the proceeds once a month.” She also doesn’t care if it gets “little traffic” or no advertisers because this is her passion project – a way to promote personal work and “nurture” the kind of writing Hollywood doesn’t normally care about. I’m fully expecting juicy stories about Don Cruise, Larvae Blindstein, Crease Blitherspoon, and Shmattshew ShmcShconaugshey.

Finke hopes to launch Hollywood Dementia “by the end of June.” Here’s hoping she doesn’t forget.