By George McQuade
West Coast Correspondent
"Relationships are critical when it comes to getting
a good story and photo placement in Variety,"
said the magazine's photo editor Lisa Weinstein, at an Entertainment
Publicists Professional Society and International Cinematographers
Guild meeting in Hollywood.
Variety, which began running pictures in 1988, "has
a whole archive of mug files, and the most important thing
publicists can do is update me with their client's photos
that the client likes as often as they can," said Weinstein.
She warned that editors under tight deadlines often pull outdated
photos from the collection.
Lisa Weinstein
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Weinstein told the publicists to forget the hats and sun
glasses, and send her a picture as a high resolution .jpeg.
"When you send me an 8X10 inch photo it needs to be a
minimum of 200 DPI, or 5x7 inch image I want 300 DPI, because
I'm going to crop it and sometimes it gets blown out.
"If you send me a picture that is an 8X10 and the guy's
head small on a lot of background, I need that picture to
be really high resolution and it has to be color," she
explained.
Weinstein spoke of a recent situation when Variety wanted
to side-by-side pictures on the cover. The editors received
a good color shot, but the other in black and white. The publicist
refused to send another color photo, so the pictures were
killed.
"It was unfortunate for the story, the paper and the
guy. And of course the next day we got a call asking why [we]
didn't run the photo? And within 24 hours we had a new color
photo, but the story was gone," she explained.
Weinstein decides what photos to run, but not which stories
will have photos on publication. Bad pictures sometimes run
because editors are desperate to fill space, she said.
Wants
invite
Variety doesn't use freelancers very often, but it sometimes
hires Getty photographers to cover events. It wants to be
invited to events, and Weinstein is turned off by publicists
who send her pictures from last weekend. "It's too late
because it is old news. We want to know at least a week in
advance or at least a couple of days and we want to send our
own photographer," she said.
Weinstein says Variety runs pictures of people "interacting
with each other." Her advice: forget mugshots, and don't
look for a photo credit unless it's a news story.
Many publicists send photos to the "Photo bin"
which is [email protected].
Weinstein highly recommends that publicists identify in the
subject line what story the photo is for, and send three to
five photos.
In addition, she recommends you copy her, too at: [email protected].
The reason is because Weinstein bounces back and fourth between
two accounts.
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