The Official "Behind The Scenes" TV/Movie Thread

[Otomofan]

It's super gossipy. I actually did a write up of the whole story for some friends on another forum.

If anyone really wants to hear it, send me a PM.

Jmek...check your inbox! And buckle up, cause it's LONG...and I use a lot of foul language, but it seems the filters caught most of it.

 

[Wor-Gar]

For a comedian who condemned others for their foul-mouthed shows, Bill Cosby had the foulest mouth of all behind the scenes...

Of course, that issue pales to others...

 

[Otomofan]

My favorite Cosby legend is that when he was in the green room waiting to go on Letterman or something, he would make a young staff member sit with him as he ate a bowl of curry and stared at her without talking.

I think Rogan told that on his podcast. That's so bizarre and specific I want to believe it's real. Next-level creeper.

Wait....I found the original article, published by nydailynews in 2014:

“He’d include as a request, before he arrived, that the young girls, interns and assistants, all had to gather around in the green room backstage and sit down and watch him eat curry,” our stunned source explains. “No one would say anything, and he would sit silently eating and make us watch and want us to watch.”

While our source adds that everyone hated the odd preshow ritual, they were asked by producers to do it because “that’s what he (Cosby) wanted.”

Yeeeeesh.

 

[Wor-Gar]

THAT is weird.

 

[GhostBeard]

My favorite Cosby legend is that when he was in the green room waiting to go on Letterman or something, he would make a young staff member sit with him as he ate a bowl of curry and stared at her without talking.

I think Rogan told that on his podcast. That's so bizarre and specific I want to believe it's real. Next-level creeper.

Wait....I found the original article, published by nydailynews in 2014:

“He’d include as a request, before he arrived, that the young girls, interns and assistants, all had to gather around in the green room backstage and sit down and watch him eat curry,” our stunned source explains. “No one would say anything, and he would sit silently eating and make us watch and want us to watch.”

While our source adds that everyone hated the odd preshow ritual, they were asked by producers to do it because “that’s what he (Cosby) wanted.”

Yeeeeesh.

Gilbert Gottfried Cosby Story

 

[MeatHookGekko]

You’re The Worst Is the Best Show We Have About Depression

.....You’re The Worst. Created by Stephen Falk and now in its fourth season....is an exploration of debilitating mental illness masquerading as romantic comedy. Falk, who worked on Jenji Cohan’s Orange is the New Black and Weeds before striking out on his own....Falk, on the other hand, took this formula and twisted it. He took stock characters that we have seen on TV a hundred times—the young, attractive, city-dwelling couple who meet at a wedding and then dance around each other until they finally commit—and loaded them down with the big stigmas; he saddles his Sam and Diane with buckets of paranoid neuroses and self-sabotaging impulses. In You’re The Worst, the Ross-and-Rachel characters aren’t just lovesick, they have actual illnesses, with actual consequences. Jimmy Shive-Overly (Chris Geere) is a British novelist living in a beautiful Los Angeles bungalow he bought with his first book advance. He pushes narcissism to a critical level; when the series begins, he is living with a housemate, a military veteran with PTSD named Edgar (Desmin Borges) who makes Jimmy’s breakfast and runs his errands without even so much as a thank you. The object of Jimmy’s affection, Gretchen (Aya Cash), is a music publicist with clinical depression who masks the void with drugs, alcohol, and *** with strangers. Her best friend, Lindsay (Kether Donohue, the hands-down best comic actress on cable right now), begins the show as desperately unhappy in her marriage to a doughy pushover but unable to leave, as she never bothered to learn basic adult behaviors. (Later, after she leaves her husband, she spends an entire episode trying to figure out how to pay her electricity bill.)

....Together, the gang feels like X-men of modern mental illness. They all function well enough to drink mimosas and quip over brunch, but they each struggle to thrive as day-to-day as humans in the wider world. Jimmy cannot finish his second novel. Gretchen cannot allow herself to love someone and chooses instead to harm those who try to approach her with affection. Edgar is still haunted by the ghosts of what he did in the war. And Lindsay cannot seem to age past petulant adolescence, forever stuck in a teenage tantrum about what she deserves but cannot have.... In one interview, Cash recalled asking Falk about Gretchen’s state of mind: “So we’re doing a comedy and in every episode, she cries in her car?” ....In season two, Gretchen admits to Jimmy, with whom she’s living after burning down her own apartment (she had her vibrator plugged into Christmas lights and the whole place went up in flames), that her blue funk is more than just a passing phase. “Here is an interesting thing that you don’t know about me. I am clinically depressed!” she says, her eyes raccoon-like with dark kohl. “I’m sorry I never told you, it slipped my mind. And who knows, with the right attitude, this could be a really fun adventure for everyone!”.....“I’m mad at you because you think you can fix me,” she spits at him. “You can’t fix me, Jimmy. I don’t need to be fixed.” But then, she decides to put on a brave smile and soldier onwards. The viewer is left nervously giggling, terrified of what Gretchen may do next....

...If this season of You’re The Worst is difficult to love, it is because there is a tinge of morality to the whole affair. The show, which for so long soared along on the fragile edge of tenderness and judgment, is trying to land, perhaps to prepare us for the endgame. The characters are all fully miserable, and they are each trying to root out the causes and answer for them. They are asking out loud what is wrong with them, and yet they keep making the same mistakes.....You’re The Worst is the best show that we have about depression, but it also may end up being the most depressing. We all want a happy ending, but right now, neither Gretchen nor Jimmy look to be heading for one....

You’re The Worst Is the Best Show We Have About Depression

 

[MeatHookGekko]

Dark, Depressing You’re the Worst Is Actually TV’s Most Optimistic Comedy

When You’re the Worst premiered in 2014, it was much easier to slot the occasionally toxic love story of Gretchen (Aya Cash) and Jimmy (Chris Geere) into a certain category. Here were clever people being deliciously mean to those around them, just like the sniping characters on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The League, Seinfeld, or a series You’re the Worst pre-dated: Difficult People. But as the dysfunctional rom-com entered its second season, it did something wholly unexpected by actually exploring the inner pain of its female lead, Gretchen, and confronting a truth that those other shows ignore: people who lash out at others are usually angriest at themselves.

Samira Wiley of Orange Is the New Black fame as been cast to play Gretchen’s new therapist and while their relationship is a complicated one (par for the course on this show), there is a real potential for character growth in this plot line. “We wanted Gretchen to deal with her depression, or at least start to take the first baby steps, and that includes medication and therapy,” Falk explained. And while Season 2 spent plenty of time on Gretchen and her clinical depression, Season 3 checks back in on what Falk calls the “unfinished business” of veteran Edgar (Desmin Borges) and his PTSD. ...That brings us back to therapy—and, for one half of the couple, a serious and profound personal loss. All heavy subjects for a comedy, but one that the show always balances with the clever familiarity of recurring jokes like Sunday Funday, Trash Juice, or “New Phone Who Dis?.” And like it does with every other TV trope, You’re the Worst finds a way to put a fresh spin on the therapy plot line. “Immediately, in conceiving of that [therapist] character, you go right away to a certain type—a mother figure, or for Gretchen, a good person to battle,” says Falk. "And I then immediately thought, ‘Okay, let's not do that then. Let's not have a middle-aged white women.‘ We thought a young therapist still trying to get her feet wet, but has inherent talent, and then we thought of Samira.”

Falk met Wiley when he wrote the backstory for her character, Poussey, on an episode of Orange Is the New Black. And after getting a heads-up that her character wouldn’t be returning to that show in Season 5, Falk wrote the character with Samira in mind. That casting and off-beat character conceit allowed the show another opportunity to once again do something few straight rom-coms find time to do: put a premium on the relationships between two women. Though exaggerated, the relationships between Lindsay and Gretchen, Becca and Lindsay, and now Gretchen and her therapist are rare and authentic. They’re seldom defined in the context of male characters. In other words, You’re the Worst often passes the Bechdel Test effortlessly, with flying colors.....

But Falk shrugs off any praise in the gender-equality department. “I think I’ve always just, as a human being, been more attuned to women,” Falk says. “I like women just as a species; I like them better than men. I find them more interesting, their struggles more complicated and more fun to write. I remember being very aware at a very early age as a theater student at NYU of just how crappy most two-women scenes were. Mostly male playwrights were getting published back in the 90s, but through history of theater, and most of the scenes with women were just talking about dudes. I found that really boring.”

But with meaty, complicated plots for both Chris Geere and Desmin Borges in Season 3, Falk has ensured that all his players have something deeper to work with this year. What started as a comical examination of self-destruction and cruelty has somehow morphed into one of the most touchingly human and dramatic relationship arcs on television. In its third season, You’re the Worst continues to buck definition and hold up a realistic mirror to all of us—one that says, in the most therapeutic way possible, that even the worst of us deserve a shot at, if not love, then at least mental health.

Dark, Depressing You’re the Worst Is Actually TV’s Most Optimistic Comedy

 

[Otomofan]

I really enjoyed the first season. I thought it kinda went into the crapper after that. Still love the theme song and keep it in rotation to this day.

 

[MeatHookGekko]

 

[Otomofan]

Apparently the band pronounces it "Sloth Rust."

I thought it was "Slo Thrust."

I like my way better.

 

[MeatHookGekko]

There are two sides to this story. You need experience and you need to make contacts and network. But you also can get trapped very easily as pure "cannon fodder" and as a disposable element in the industry.

 

[MeatHookGekko]

 

[MeatHookGekko]

The Truth About Being A Hollywood Assistant: My Time Working For Dennis Lehane

....Five years later, I started for working for Dennis Lehane, and took a massive step towards that goal....Dennis Lehane was one of my favorite authors. He wrote the books Gone Baby Gone, Live By Night, and Shutter Island, to name a few. At the time, he was plunging deeper into the film and TV world, and I became his writer’s assistant. It was my opportunity to learn from someone who was one of the best at the craft....But if you want to be a television writer, it’s plum. It’s one of the few types of jobs for writers with a clear path: writer’s assistant is a stepping stone to staff writer, to eventually becoming a showrunner. Plus, the staff writer salary is a dramatic step up for anyone grinding it out as a Hollywood assistant....Everyone scrambles to land the writer’s assistant job, and openings don’t just pop up on Craigslist....

Before working for Dennis, I worked at a literary management company. Dennis’s manager was one of my 3 bosses. As a Hollywood assistant, 75% of the job was rolling calls and servicing clients, so over the years, Dennis and I had built a little rapport. He wouldn’t know me from his Starbucks barista, but we chatted about the merits of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones.He had written on a season of The Wire, and just joined Boardwalk Empire for season 4. They brought him in to rewrite a script stuck at Fox called Deep Blue Goodbye, and he was also attached to the Silk Road story, days after the story broke. Like I said. He was the rocketship, and I wanted aboard.

I read everything he wrote. Not just the books. Every unproduced TV script. Each draft. His short stories. His play adaptation of his own short story. The adaptations by other writers of his short stories. I stayed late at work and studied every one of his film or television deals. I knew every option price, when every extension payment was due, and the exercise prices. I could tell you what the bestseller bonuses looked like, and to the dollar, what he’d get paid for every draft of his TV pilot script. I combed through 7 pages of Google results and read every interview after every release of every book and movie, until I could tell you where his love for reading came from (his mother took him to the Boston Public Library when he was a kid) and that he’s allergic to wine (sorry France). Then I watched all his keynote talks on Youtube.

He didn’t need a personal assistant in LA, he said. But he was interested in the research help as a writer’s assistant. “How could you perform research for me and still do your job for Amy?” he asked. “I work fast so I usually need fast responses to my research questions.” I threw up a hail mary and told him I’d quit and work for free for three months. “Dude, don’t quit your job, that’s crazy. We’ll try out the research. Work me into your lunch hour,” he said. Would I have worked for Dennis for free? 100%. But I gambled on the fact he’d appreciate the gusto, and would let me do it on the side. The gamble got my foot into the door. Over the next 9 months, I researched. How would a doctor in the 1940’s treat seizures? How about migraines? How does an EMT treat someone who attempted suicide? I looked into military-grade firearms, yachts, playgrounds in Santa Monica (3 different projects, all unrelated).

Within a few months we had a pilot that seemed 95% greenlight for a straight-to-series show at Hulu. Dennis called me from Germany and told me that in the deal, I was attached to him — in other words, he was going to be the showrunner and I’d be the showrunner’s assistant. We actually had a long conversation about the best way to proceed with my career. He asked me, if a show went, would I want to be a showrunner’s assistant or a writer’s assistant? More inside baseball: Showrunner’s assistant reports directly to the showrunner, writer’s assistant is responsible for taking notes in the room. Typically, the showrunner’s assistant’s salary is better than a writer’s assistant salary. “The writer’s assistant position is terrible,” he said. “It’ll look good on your resume but you’re better off working for me. You’ll learn more. As the writer’s assistant, you don’t talk. You’re going to meet a lot more people as showrunner’s assistant, too.” To this day, I appreciate that Dennis took the time to take me under his wing.

But more than the research, I fell in love with the status of the role. I loved that people who clamored for Dennis’s attention — publishers, agents, producers, journalists — thought of me as an extension of him. If they wanted to get his ear (or on his calendar or call sheet) they had to go through me. Before I worked for him, I was another baby writer clawing up the mountain. Afterwards, I was “Dennis’s guy.” That opened a lot more doors. Unfortunately, the reality of being “Dennis’s guy” was far less glamorous than the idea of it.

In the beginning of your assistant career, it’s a privilege to be a part of the Hollywood machine. It doesn’t matter that you’re a cog, or less than a cog — the washer holding the cog in place — you’re still part of it. You play a role in the engine that grinds up stories and plasters them onto screens. It doesn’t matter that you don’t have a life, don’t make money and have no real responsibility… you were in the movie business. That enthusiasm is enough fuel for the first 2 years. After that, you’re on fumes. You feel like you’ve paid your dues, and you’re ready to see the tiniest upward movement in your career. If it doesn’t come, the “go-get-em” attitude becomes “it’ll-still-be-there-tomorrow.” And the veneer of Hollywood glamour starts to fade.

By the time I worked for Dennis, I was into Year 4 in Hollywood. I didn’t realize it, but I wasn’t that “amazing assistant” anymore. That’s the person I promised Dennis, and I wasn’t delivering. At the end of 2014, I got offered an opportunity to work at a startup. On one hand, it was completely outside of entertainment, and it took me far, far away from my goal of ever writing for television. Perhaps that’s how my Hollywood career ends, with a whimper instead of a roar, a cautionary tale for those not quite ready to sacrifice it all for a shot at the silver screen. But part of me thinks, perhaps not.

The Truth About Being a Hollywood Assistant: My Time Working for Dennis Lehane

 

[MeatHookGekko]

 

[MeatHookGekko]

The story of Notre Dame icon Rudy Ruettiger? It's almost too good to be true

.....From former walk-ons like Baker Mayfield and Dabo Swinney to random people who stop him on the street to tell him how much his story means to them, Rudy motivates people. He makes them believe. But for everyone he inspires, there are also the people and headlines attempting to tear him down.....They are the ones who told Rudy he would never attend Notre Dame. Then they told him he would never survive there as a football walk-on, or that a 5-foot-6 tackling dummy would ever actually dress for a game, let alone play. After his 27 seconds of glory against Georgia Tech in 1975, they said he was insane for thinking all of the above would ever make it to the silver screen. And now, a quarter century after "Rudy" was in theaters, they are still here. They question his true role in Notre Dame's unparalleled college football history and constantly challenge him to defend the truthfulness of the film that bears his name.....

...."Rudy" was not the No. 1 film at the box office in 1993. It ranked 69th, and with a take of $22.7 million ($40.3 million adjusted for inflation), it wasn't even the highest-grossing college football film of the year (albeit by a scant $282K to James Caan's "The Program"). But over the past 25 years, "Rudy" has evolved well past being a sports movie. It's a pop culture pillar that, like its namesake at a Notre Dame practice, refuses to go away....."Rudy" has been a one-man stage show on Broadway; orchestras perform the movie score live while the film plays behind them; it even has been used to sell fried chicken. Rudy has written two books. He won a regional Emmy for the 2017 documentary "Rudy Ruettiger: The Walk-On," which is still being streamed. He spends his entire year on and off airplanes to visit schools, make corporate speeches, sign autographs and tackle the occasional life-coaching gig. And that KFC ad? That's the real Ruettiger playing the part of the father, imploring Sean Astin, who plays Rudy in the original film, "You can't be Colonel Sanders. You're Rudy!"

....Rudy signs Notre Dame helmets in his garage. In addition to autographs, he spends his year visiting schools, making corporate speeches and even doing a little life coaching..... In 2012, when Notre Dame football celebrated its 125th anniversary, only a small handful of former players were asked to speak on the program's behalf. Among them were Montana, fellow NFL legends Tim Brown and Jerome Bettis ... and, yes, Rudy Ruettiger....Some find it very irritating....."It's a movie, remember ... not all that's true," Montana said on "The Dan Patrick Show," igniting headlines from "Entertainment Tonight" to TMZ. "The crowd wasn't chanting ..... nobody threw in their jerseys." Montana added that when Rudy was carried off the field, his teammates were "kind of playing around. I won't say as a joke, but playing around. He worked his butt off to get where he was ... but not any harder than anybody else." (Montana declined ESPN's interview requests for this story.)

....On Nov. 8, 1975, Notre Dame coach Dan Devine put walk-on Rudy Ruettiger (45) in for the last play of the game. Ruettiger sacked Georgia Tech quarterback Rudy Allen as time expired and was carried off the field by teammates. ....He later went to work at the local power plant. One day, Rudy and his friend Siskel were called to fix a jam in the plant's coal delivery system. Siskel got there ahead of Rudy and didn't want to wait for help. When the conveyor cranked back to life, it carried Siskel through 10 coal crushers. He died while Rudy tried to administer mouth-to-mouth....."I will never forget that taste and that smell," he says now. "They were taking him away and I was standing there, covered in his blood, with that taste still in my mouth. Then I heard a voice as clear as you talking to me right now. You call it whatever you want. My gut, my conscious, God. All it said was, 'Leave.' So I walked right out that damn door, packed my stuff and I headed to South Bend."

....He sold insurance and Amway, and then sold cars, until the guy who ran the dealership said Rudy was too focused on making a movie to sell cars. So he then started mowing lawns. He says he would host cookouts at his South Bend condo, where Notre Dame players, past and present, coaches and anyone would stop by. They'd drink beer and Rudy would tell them all -- again -- about how he had seen "Rocky" in the movie theater nearly one year to the day after his sack against Georgia Tech and, "Damn it, Coach, I'm gonna make a movie about my story because it can inspire people just like Sly Stallone did."

...."Rudy attacks everything in his life, every conversation, every meeting, every business deal, with the same fire that he attacked me in practice every day," DiNardo says, laughing. "Some people don't know how to handle him. So they push back. I suppose if it makes them feel better to tell people he lived in the basketball arena next to Notre Dame Stadium and not in the stadium itself, well, good for them....

Rudy Ruettiger, Notre Dame and the life that launched 1,000 stories

 

[MeatHookGekko]

In the movie, Rudy is portrayed as having largely gone into the steel industry after graduating high school. In reality, he served four years in the U.S. Navy as a yeoman on a communications ship, which is never mentioned.

In real life, Dan Devine was very supportive of Rudy and elected to put him in the game on his own. Because Devine considered Rudy a friend, he volunteered to play a villain in order to get the film greenlit.

Many of the priests and miscellaneous Notre Dame employees in the movie are actual Notre Dame employees.

The crowd scene when Rudy is cheering in the stands is a real game between Notre Dame and Penn State, which was played in the snow during the 1992 season. You can even see fans with Penn State hats sitting around Rudy.

While Rudy's real-life service in the U.S. Navy is not mentioned in the film, the military duffel bag he carries in numerous scenes is stenciled with his name and "U.S.N."

On Aug. 23, 1948, Daniel Ruettiger was born in Joliet, Illinois as the third child out of 14 in his family. At Joliet Catholic Academy, he was a standout cornerback in both his junior and senior seasons, leading his team in tackles both years. On paper, Rudy's statistics may have been considered a decent recruit for college football programs. However, there was one glaring weakness about the young teenager. Rudy stood merely 5'6" and weighed 165 pounds soaking wet.

Ara Parseghian promised Rudy that he would dress in his final season at Notre Dame. However, he hadn't promised that he would still be in South Bend. He stepped down following the end of the 1974 season. Dan Devine, the former coach of the Green Bay Packers, took over for Parseghian and became Rudy's head coach in his last season....On Nov. 8, 1975, Devine decided that Rudy was going to dress for the first and last time of his football career.....he saw action in two plays. The first, he was stopped and unable to get to the Yellow Jackets' quarterback, Rudy Allen.....However, on the second play, Rudy broke through the line full of 300-pounders and brought Allen down to the ground for the final play of the game. After an uproar in the crowd .....Rudy was lifted onto the shoulders of his teammates and carried off the field.

Cameo
Daniel 'Rudy' Ruettiger: In the final six minutes of the film, the real-life Rudy as a Notre Dame fan sitting in the football stands. While the crowd is shouting "Rudy, Rudy," the camera points to the crowd then cuts to a close-up of Rudy's "father" and "brother." Daniel 'Rudy' Ruettiger can be seen to the left of his "father" (Ned Beatty). Rudy is wearing a plaid driving cap and a dark coat with a white fur collar. Later during the cheering, his father turns and playfully bats at the real Rudy.

Theodore Hesburgh, Edmund Joyce: In the middle of the film, during the scene in which Father Cavanaugh speaks to Rudy in the Basilica, Notre Dame President Emeritus Father Theodore Hesburgh and Edmund (Ned) Joyce, Hesburgh's Vice-President, makes a cameo appearance. They are seen at the beginning of the scene walking in the Basilica to the right side of Father Cavanaugh's character. Father Hesburgh was President when the real Rudy Ruettiger attended Notre Dame. The Joyce Athletic and Convocation Center, on the Notre Dame Campus, was named after Ned Joyce.

 

[MeatHookGekko]

 

[MeatHookGekko]

 

[MeatHookGekko]

How Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav Became Public Enemy Number One in Hollywood

...... It must have been quite a shock to the captain of industry—standing at the lectern at his alma matter, resplendent in his red-and-black graduation regalia—when he realized the Boston University Class of 2023 was booing him. David Zaslav, president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, was delivering the commencement address, recalling how the late General Electric CEO Jack Welch once told him, “If you want to be successful, you’re going to have to figure out how to get along with everyone—and that includes difficult people.”....But instead of listening to his pearls of wisdom, the students were heckling him. Others had turned their backs to the stage. Now more were chanting, “Pay your writers,” as Zaslav, a studio head, was one of the oft-invoked villains of the striking Writers Guild of America.
He tried to press on with his story, continuing to quote Welch: “Some people will be looking for a fight.” The booing continued....

...... Zaslav later issued a statement thanking BU for the invitation, and insisting, “as I have often said, I am immensely supportive of writers and hope the strike is resolved soon and in a way that they feel recognizes their value.” But he had been humiliated, openly and unapologetically, and while he was duly kowtowed after the fact—BU President Robert Brown publicly apologized for the incident, blaming it on “cancel culture”—he must’ve wondered, somewhere in the back of his mind, how it had come to this.....In a relatively short period of time, David Zaslav has become perhaps the most hated man in Hollywood. Few people who weren’t industry insiders even knew his name two years ago, when Discovery merged with WarnerMedia to become Warner Bros. Discovery. Zaszlav had been CEO of Discovery Communications since 2006, where he oversaw the transition from, in his words, “no longer a cable company, (but) a content company.” What that meant, from a viewer’s perspective, was Discovery’s transition from educational programming to reality slop—which is, of course, a much more lucrative business model....

......In his (slight) defense, there were considerable challenges awaiting the CEO of the new Warner Bros. Discovery conglomerate, whomever that might have been. Warner Bros. had, like most motion picture studios, struggled considerably during the pandemic. Their decision to simultaneously stream their entire 2021 theatrical slate on the HBOMax streaming service upset other filmmakers, including those whose films were impacted by it (and theatrical chains as well). One example? Christopher Nolan, who’s enormously profitable relationship with WB began back in 2002, was so pissed that he took his new film Oppenheimer to Universal out of frustration by the company’s poor handling of his 2020 feature Tenet.....In retrospect, the right person for the job of healing those wounds and reestablishing relationships with filmmakers might not have been the guy best known for shepherding the likes of Naked and Afraid, Dr. Pimple Popper, and My 600-lb Life. And, to be fair, figures from the world of reality TV are often seen with suspicion, if not outright snobbery, by those responsible for scripted fare. But Zaslav did himself no favors, and did little to blur that binary, when announcing the merger of the HBOMax and Discovery streaming services in a quarterly earnings call—which included a much-derided infographic deeming HBOMax’s scripted programming as “male skew,” “appointment viewing,” and “lean in”, while Discovery’s unscripted shows were “female skew” “comfort viewing,” and thus ”lean back” .....

....... More distressingly, in that same call, Zaslav announced that two nearly completed films that had been greenlit and produced under the previous regime for streaming on HBOMax—the DC superhero story Batgirl and the family sequel Scoob! Holiday Haunt—would not be distributed on the platform or released in theaters. Instead, they would be essentially wiped from existence and used as a tax-write down.....Eagle-eyed subscribers subsequently noted that several other Max originals, including the Seth Rogen comedy An American Pickle and Robert Zemeckis’s remake of The Witches, had been quietly removed from the service, in a further attempt to save money. The service proceeded to remove several dozen series from its library, from HBO originals like Westworld and Vinyl to family programming like The Not-Too-Late Show with Elmo to animated series like Infinity Train. Even episodes of Sesame Street weren’t safe. Several other streaming services, including Paramount+, Starz, Showtime, Disney+ and Hulu, have followed suit, disappearing their underperforming originals for tax purposes, creating giant swaths of shockingly recent yet bafflingly “lost” media......

.....That backlash, however, was nothing compared to what happened recently. In mid-June, Warner Bros Discovery cut loose five of the most senior executives (“the people who’ve been the architect of the brand for decades,” according to one insider) at Turner Classic Movies, the cable network beloved among cinephiles—and high-profile filmmakers. Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson quickly released a statement, noting, “Turner Classic Movies has always been more than just a channel. It is truly a precious resource of cinema, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And while it has never been a financial juggernaut, it has always been a profitable endeavor since its inception.” And while they insisted Zaslav had assured them “that TCM and classic cinema are very important to him,” subsequent reporting indicated that TCM’s staff had been cut from 90 employees to a skeletal 20....

......Nearly lost in the hullabaloo was yet another of the company’s exhaustive attempts to squeeze a profit from its assets: a $500 million deal to sell around half of their film and TV-music library. In a perhaps too-good-to-be-true detail, the sale would reportedly include “As Time Goes By” from Casablanca—the musical fanfare that plays before every Warner Bros. feature film.....Barely a month ago, Graydon Carter was hosting a party in Zaslav’s honor at Cannes, all but crowning him as the heir apparent to Jack Warner. But there’s a crucial difference between Zaslav and the old-school moguls he’s attempting to emulate: They loved movies, and cared about filmmakers. Zaslav sees movies as “content,” sees filmmakers as “content creators,” and is only interested in maintaining, preserving, and presenting “content” that can make him and his stockholders a quick buck. Anything that doesn’t, he’ll happily gut. He’s closer to Logan Roy than Jack Warner and there is a genuine, understandable fear that his bean-counting represents not just shrugging indifference but outright hostility to cinema and its rich history.....

https://www.gq.com/story/david-zaslav-warner-bros-discovery-ceo


*****

What's interesting is GQ pulled this story not long after publishing it online.

 

[MeatHookGekko]

GQ Editor Who Pulled Critical David Zaslav Story Is Producing Movie for Warner Bros.

..... On July 3, GQ.com rolled out a hot-take story titled “How Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav Became Public Enemy Number One in Hollywood.” The piece, which was written by freelance film critic Jason Bailey and slammed Zaslav as a Logan Roy-esque mogul, quickly disappeared from GQ’s website, while a new, more friendly version popped up with a separate URL. That version, too, vanished not long after, leaving readers puzzled.....

...... But did a GQ editor’s relationship with Warner Bros. play a role in the softening and ultimate removal of the story? ....GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch is producing a movie at Warner Bros. titled “The Great Chinese Art Heist,” which is based on a 2018 GQ article by Alex W. Palmer. Jon M. Chu (“Crazy Rich Asians”) is attached to direct and produce the film, which chronicles an audacious European museum crime wave that targeted Chinese antiquities. The project already has a script in place by Ken Cheng, Jessica Gao and Jimmy O. Yang. Sources say Welch was involved in the discussions surrounding the removal of Bailey’s initial story and made the call to pull the revamped story, which ran some 500 words shorter than the published version. Those same sources say Warner Bros. Discovery complained about the initial story to two GQ editors, one of whom was Welch.....

......A representative for GQ said, “A piece published by GQ on Monday was not properly edited before going live. After a revision was published, the writer of the piece asked to have their byline removed, at which point GQ decided to unpublish the piece in question. GQ regrets the editorial error that led to a story being published before it was ready.”....But a spokesperson for Warner Bros. Discovery offered a slightly different take......“The freelance reporter made no attempt to reach out to Warner Bros Discovery to fact-check the substance of the piece before publishing — a standard practice for any reputable news outlet,” the spokesperson said. “As is also standard practice, we contacted the outlet and asked that numerous inaccuracies be corrected. In the process of doing so, the editors ultimately decided to pull the piece.”.....Still, removing an entire story from a news outlet’s website would constitute an extreme action and is almost never done, except in the most egregious cases of journalistic malpractice. Even then, an editor’s note would typically appear when readers clicked on an excised story with an explanation of why it was killed.....

https://variety.com/2023/film/news/gq-editor-david-zaslav-story-producing-movie-warner-bros