From `it' read to has-been

"Somehow, when we were covering [the making of] 'Titanic,' it was a huge deal that the budget went north of $200 million," recalled Nancy Griffin, onetime deputy editor who is now West Coast editor of AARP the Magazine. "But now it seems like fatigue has set in. I heard recently that 'Spider-Man 3' cost a huge amount, but I don't know if anybody can get all exercised."

In a pre-Internet world, Premiere would often break stories. "It's amazing to imagine, but if a director was fired off a project or if something became an 'Alan Smithee' film [a term used to describe a director who has his name removed from the credits] ... you'd only read about it first in Premiere," said Chris Connelly, a former editor at Premiere who today works as a correspondent for ESPN and contributing correspondent for ABC's "20/20" and was last seen providing celebrity-laden red-carpet and backstage commentary at the Oscars.

Connelly credits Lyne with changing the way movie magazines wrote about the industry. Up to that point, movie magazines were designed for readers to imagine they were movie stars or dating movie stars. "The magazine came up with a fantasy zone that could be expanded. You could be the director, the development person, you could be the agent."

The Hollywood power list is now a popular staple at movie publications, but they copied it from Premiere. Being ranked on Premiere's annual power list was so coveted that publicists threw fits if their clients were left off -- or ranked too low. John H. Richardson, now a writer at large for Esquire, was on the team that compiled those early power lists at Premiere.

"The first couple of years it was a big deal," Richardson recalled. "It was hilarious because we would go around and meet every studio head and we'd buy them a ridiculous amount of sushi. We had lunch with Ovitz in his private little dining room at CAA at a time when [lunching with him] was supposed to make your head spin. And we'd lunch with Peter Guber in his private dining room at Sony attended by his personal chef. People would scramble to get on the power list. It got us tremendous access in terms of gossip and what is going on."

It's all about power

Things got so crazy that one time, Richardson recalled, "a very successful producer asked me, 'What would you do if somebody offered you $50,000 to be higher on the list?' "