The man behind TMZ.com has all the Paris info
Tuesday, June 26th 2007
TMZ.com managing editor Harvey Levin in his California office.
"My head is spinning," admits Harvey Levin, who has skyrocketed up the Hollywood power league as managing editor of TMZ.com, the Web site that's changed the landscape of breaking showbiz news.
After admitting that he initially turned down the "Web site job," the lawyer-turned-investigative-reporter-turned-producer is in his element, having just completed a two-night stint hosting "Larry King Live" and cementing TMZ (which stands for Thirty Mile Zone) as the one-stop source for Paris Hilton's jail debacle.
"You sit at the desk and you look at the microphone and you just think, ‘Wow,'"says Levin of his stint on the show, on which he brought together Paris' lawyer Richard Hutton and a representative of the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, to analyze the fallout from Paris' time in the slammer.
Though Larry will reclaim his chair for the heiress' post-jail tell-all, Levin has his own opinions on the wayward heiress' latest mess.
"The sheriff's department has taken so much heat on this case for doing the right thing, and they were in a dogfight with the judge behind the scenes," ­surmises Levin.
"They were pitted against each other. The sheriff didn't even want to pick her up when the judge told him to bring her from her house arrest to the court, so this has turned the sheriff's department upside down," he adds.
His advice for Hilton?
"She's got to talk about what she reflected on in jail during this whole experience and how it's changed her. Because I think everybody wants to know that she's grown, and she said she's grown up. This is her chance to appear differently," he muses, with uncharacteristic leniency.
"I always saw this as a grandstanding judge who
totally overstepped his bounds. I also thought that the sheriff's department did a really commendable thing," claims Levin, who maintains that TMZ is simply trying to "call it the way we see it."
"It's not like we're in bed with the sheriff's department. I mean, we went after them in the Mel Gibson case a year ago," he adds wryly.
Describing TMZ's Gibson DUI scoop as a "defining moment" for the Web site, the L.A. native reasons that "we're not going after celebrities for sport and we're not in bed with them either because we want to do the next sit-down interview with them. We're just trying to be honest.
"It sounds simplistic, but we're just trying to be authentic.
"I think a lot of celebrities look at the site, and I'm guessing some days they love us and some days they hate us, and that's probably the way it should be."
With his site increasingly setting the news agenda rather than following it, Levin is all too aware that with great power comes great responsibility.
Keen to distance TMZ from the guerrilla tactics allegedly perpetrated by some competitors, Levin says, "We have some strict rules here. We do not break the law, we don't chase people. We don't trespass onto private property. We have kind of a 'yuck' factor - if something doesn't feel right, we don't do it."
Citing two examples, he recalls that "somebody came to us with a video of Heather Locklear [at the height of the Denise Richards scandal], and nobody had seen her for a while. The video was of her walking to her car with one of her kids, and there were a bunch of camera people there. It was in a public area, but the kid looked scared and it felt intrusive, so we didn't run it.
"I had a woman come into my office with the most shocking documents I've ever seen in connection with the Michael Jackson case. I talked to her for five minutes and I realized she'd stolen those documents from a law office that she had worked at. That would have been an unbelievable story, but the documents were ill-gotten and we just turned them away. I think that's just the way to do business."
Keen to point out he's every bit as involved as the rest of his 25 staff members in actual news-gathering, Levin maintains, "I'm in the firing line. It's controlled chaos here. It's a really young staff and it's a staff that's really grown over the last couple of years in terms of experience, and everybody has contacts. I've worked really hard with my contacts and everybody else works theirs, and we help each other and it's very egalitarian."
"I'm an old fart in this process," Levin, 56, chuckles.
Though Levin maintains he'll be heavily involved in the forthcoming TMZ TV show's September launch, don't expect him to follow in the footsteps of the celebrities he covers just yet.
All too aware of the potential pitfalls of fame, he concludes, "I'm getting sick of me on TV, I really am."
(dailynews.com)
