Press: Split Personality

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A Franco-American Look

The logo is the same, and so is the commitment to pictures. Occasionally it flashes the informality and common touch of its popular predecessor. But in many respects the new Look, back this week after seven years, is a magazine with a split personality. As if to emphasize the fact, the first issue is being sold under two different covers. Look East, distributed as far as the Rockies, features the late Nelson Rockefeller, while Patricia Hearst smiles from the cover of Look West.

The new Look is the gamble and brainchild of Daniel Filipacchi, 51, former disc jockey and news photographer who is now the successful publisher of Paris Match. His original intent was a $1 weekly with outsized 9-in. by 12-in. pages. But fearing that the magazine's $25 million bankroll (Filipacchi put up 51%, six French partners the rest) might be exhausted before the new venture got on its feet, he decided to lower the publishing frequency to twice a month and raise the price to $1.25. At the outset Look expects to sell 600,000 copies, less than one-tenth the 6.5 million total the old Look had when it folded. If things go according to plan, readership will swell to 1.5 million in three years, and the magazine will break into the black in 1983.

Based in New York, Look's editorial staff is a kind of Franco-American spaghetti: partly Parisian designers and layout people, partly veteran U.S. journalists acquired from places like TIME, the Village Voice and the Washington Post.

Though Filipacchi now spends two-thirds of his time in the U.S. and participates in all major editorial and business decisions, the man most in charge is Editor and President Robert Gutwillig, 47, a graduate of Playboy Enterprises with ten years in serious book publishing (World Publishing). "We're oriented toward middle-class Middle America," insists Gutwillig. "You won't see our editors hanging out at Elaine's." The hirings, firings and strategy shifts that kept the staff in turmoil before the first issue appeared may well continue. "This is not art," says Gutwillig firmly. "This is commerce."

The inaugural issue is mainly no table for the influence of Paris Match, a firm faith in black and white photographs as well as color, and an emphasis on energy and human interest rather than elegance of design. It contains a previously unpublished, 17-year-old interview with Marilyn Monroe and some all too predictable pictures of the likes of Brooke Shields and Princess Caroline (after all, the word cliche means photograph in French). The most dramatic journalistic coup is a picture essay using exclusive photographs taken in Jonestown just before the mass suicide. A colorful jab at conspicuous consumption in Beverly Hills is reminiscent of the original Look, and so is a story about a do-it-yourself home-building school in Maine.

We're trying to put together a magazine that can be both read and skimmed," says Gutwillig. Though the editors show a deft touch with short text blocks, few readers are going to be able to skim the three longish articles offered: a 5,400-word account by Syndicated Columnist Robert Novak of his November interview with China's Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing, as well as the two cover stories on Rockefeller and Hearst.