When it comes to protecting the Oscar trademark, the motion picture academy is notoriously ferocious, often threatening lawsuits for infringements. Except, maybe, if your name is Graydon Carter and you're the editor of Vanity Fair.
For several years, academy officials overlooked the 18-foot Oscar-shaped topiaries that graced the entrance to Carter's annual awards-night bash at Morton's restaurant in West Hollywood. Considering their crackdowns on others, the academy brass could no longer wink at the infraction as the party reached its fourth year. But the message from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences came not in a roaring lawyer's letter, but on cat's paws.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday July 09, 2004 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 56 words Type of Material: Correction
Graydon Carter -- A subhead on a June 16 Section A article about Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter said the magazine's staff had recently been given a new ethics code. A code of conduct had recently been distributed to staff members of Conde Nast, Vanity Fair's owner, but the company said the code was not new.
"We had been turning a blind eye to the shrubbery that materialized each year outside Morton's in late March," the academy wrote, "in the hope that root borers or an incautiously flipped Cohiba [cigar] would eventually save us the awkwardness of raising the issue with you."
Carter obliged. After all, the man who savaged Hollywood's elite in his days at Spy magazine had by then become far more agreeable. He now was running a publication that glorified celebrities with soft stories and glossy photos. "If you can get that cover, it's the gold standard," Pat Kingsley, Hollywood's most powerful publicist, said of Vanity Fair's sway in the movie world.
In recent years, however, Carter has ventured to the other side of Hollywood's velvet ropes. He has entered into personal business projects with people who have a stake in Vanity Fair's coverage. Despite his many accolades during the last 12 years as editor, Carter and the company that owns his magazine, Conde Nast Publications, are at the center of a controversy over journalistic ethics.
The issue, simmering behind the scenes, erupted after The Times recently reported, among other things, that Carter had demanded and received $100,000 from Universal Pictures. According to sources familiar with the transaction, Carter believed he was owed the money for encouraging his filmmaker friends, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, to read an unpublished manuscript, which would later form the basis of their Oscar-winning "A Beautiful Mind."
Carter is continuing to pursue deals. He's been negotiating, for example, with American Express Co., a frequent Vanity Fair advertiser, to fund a documentary on the life of his writer friend Fran Lebowitz, a contributing editor. "It certainly might happen," said American Express marketing chief John Hayes.
