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Elvis Mitchell never fit in at the New York Tmes, writes Carl Swanson in a New York magazine piece. The paper had to bring in a freelance editor to help Mitchell with his copy, he was always getting offers to work in Hollywood, and he never gave up his 213 area code cell phone. Nonetheless, Page Six reports today that NYT Editor Bill Keller has been on the phone to Mitchell trying to get him to come back. The NY Post item quotes Swanson's New York piece, which observes about the film reviewer who appears to have done his final NYT review:
Mitchell, over six feet, with two-foot-long dreads (which he tends with Kiehl’s products), robed in Costume National and Helmut Lang, will never be your average be-khaki’d Timesman. He’s bigger than life, or at least bigger than most print journalists, a road show of pop-culture exuberance who makes the rounds of TV shows, film festivals, and lecture appointments, hobnobbing with stars and industry figures. He always seemed to be looking for something better...Mitchell is known for his opportunism as much as his talent, and he has a great ability to generate opportunities for himself. Often too many, to the point where it could be an editing adventure to track him down to get him to file...
A good example was in 1992, when Mitchell was recruited to a development job at Paramount Pictures by his friend Brandon Tartikoff. He was fired six months later after Paramount decided that the job conflicted with his reviewing duties on NPR’s “Weekend Edition.”...He’d earned a reputation for not staying on a job too long—he never even showed up to a gig at the Los Angeles Times. (He says he was never officially hired.) When he got a job offer at a studio within the first year of his starting at the Times, many Times people, to his surprise, said to him, “We figured you weren’t going to be a lifer.”...
He had a bad habit of not turning in his expenses until they’d run up gigantically, and kept popping up in the gossip columns and in the trades being considered for jobs in the industry he was covering, including being in the running at Sony Pictures (because of his friendship with its chairwoman, Amy Pascal, who is married to Bernie Weinraub, an L.A.-based Times entertainment reporter) and to be the head of Warner Independent Films. He denied both stories, but a source close to him says that he’s been up for at least two industry jobs as well as the editorship of Billboard since he arrived at the Times.
Oh, and he also reviewed movies...and continues his weekly KCRW show, "The Treatment."
* Also: Gawker has Monday's memo from Steve Erlanger naming A.O. Scott chief film critic of the New York Times.
Previously on L.A. Observed: Elvis leaving the NYT building?