Soon-Shiong broke the news on Monday during an interview with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show,” saying he wanted to “democratize” the newspaper by taking it public, earning applause from the host and his audience. But as details emerged the following day, it wasn’t so simple.

It turns out that Soon-Shiong — whose meddling in the newsroom and cuts to staffing have made him unpopular and a cause for skepticism among much of his editorial team — is likely mimicking a successful bid to raise capital and go public earlier this year by Newsmax, the ultra-conservative cable news network run by Trump devotee Chris Ruddy and a fan of conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election and Jan. 6.

The announcement is just the latest twist in the topsy-turvy saga of the Los Angeles Times, the hometown paper of the second-largest city in the country, but has been beset by multiple changes in ownership and, in the last several years, waves of layoffs and questions about its editorial integrity — largely set off by Soon-Shiong’s own interference.

“This sounds like just another harebrained scheme from Dr. PSS, this time to mitigate his losses,” said one former senior editor who left a year ago.“He has a habit of announcing or starting things that never happen, such as the eSports venue in El Segundo and a rechargeable zinc-air battery.” 

Even if Soon-Shiong makes good on this promise, there’s little confidence in the newsroom that the results will be positive.

“If this does play out, what people are thinking is most scenarios are not good,” said a newsroom insider. “Some staffers think this is a move to get rid of the union. And if it does happen — who would the buyers be? The concern is you’re going to get investors who don’t care about quality of journalism, but on getting a return on investment – hedge funds, vulture capitalists, maybe even some right wing types who want to push the MAGA envelope.”

Said a recently exited newsroom leader: “I don’t know who would invest in this. It’s very odd. What is the business model you have to offer? What is the path to profit or sustainability? What is the unique value offer? I’m very puzzled.”

This person added: “If you’re losing money, why would I give you money?”

The LA Times is losing money, about $30 million this year, according to two company insiders. (A report earlier this year in Adweek that the newspaper lost $50 million last year was said by those sources to be inflated.) The newspaper laid off more than 20 percent of its newsroom staff last year.

But not making money didn’t stop Newmax from going public.

Newsmax pulled a two-step raise in March of this year, selling 7.5 million Class B Common shares at $10 per share under something called Regulation A, which gives private companies the ability to sell shares to investors without the regulatory requirements of a standard IPO, capped at $75 million.

Ruddy raised the maximum $75 million allowed under the rules. Within the same time frame, Newsmax closed a $225 million private offering of Series B Preferred Stock. It exceeded the initial $150 million goal thanks to participation from over 8,000 accredited investors, according to multiple reports earlier this year.

The private and public capital raises, which offered a “crowd-financed” solution that blended both institutional and retail participation, took the company public without having to do a full IPO. 

Soon-Shiong may well have exactly this maneuver in mind. His Nantworks revealed on Tuesday that he has hired the same investment bank, Digital Offering, to handle the sale. Calls to the CEO of Digital Offering Gordon McBean were not returned by time of publication. The LA Times head of communications responded with an out-of-office email after TheWrap sought comment.

A news release said the billionaire plans to roll the money-losing newspaper into the newly created L.A. Times Next Network, including curated creator platform LAT Next, e-sports and gaming-focused Nant Games, NantStudios Virtual Production and streaming and live-event support company L.A. Times Studios.

The fact that the LA Times is bleeding so much from losses likely won’t matter.

That was the case with Newsmax. In 2024, its revenue rose 26% to $171 million — but its net loss widened to $72.2 million after losing $42 million in 2023. The company also settled a defamation lawsuit in 2024 by electronic voting systems maker Smartmatic for $40 million over its false claims regarding vote alteration and manipulation in the 2020 presidential election.

Nonetheless, the stock is up from its Reg A “IPO” price of $10 per share, and now sells at $14 per share on the NYSE.

According to The Motley Fool, “Newsmax stock is overvalued relative to its growth potential, but it’s attracting short-term traders.”

That may be enough to rescue Soon-Shiong from devastating ongoing losses which he has to cover from his own pocket, monthly. 

Soon-Shiong may be betting that his tack to the right since Donald Trump got elected will benefit his media properties overall. Certainly Trump’s election has been an enormous boon to Fox News, whose ratings have spiked upward, and to Newsmax, which successfully raised hundreds of millions and a long list of right-wing podcasts. Trump’s Truth Social raised money in a 2024 SPAC (special purpose acquisition company) offering and is now listed on the NASDAQ.

What it means for a traditionally non-ideological newspaper is another matter.

Meanwhile at the LA Times, the staff was still processing the news.  

“It could be bad, I think it’s a toss up. We don’t really know,” said one veteran LA Times staffer. “It does seem like he’s doubling down on having the LA Times belong to him. He believes in LAT Next. It’s his baby. He’s not giving up.”

The post Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Plan to Take LA Times Public Follows Newsmax Mini-IPO  appeared first on TheWrap.

The movie launched 100 copycats, set the mold for the post-feminist femme fatale and made a boatload of money in release and forever-after in video and streaming.

But while Eszterhas has been holed up in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, living a post-Hollywood life of faith and family with his wife Naomi (also writing memoirs and such), apparently he’s not quite done. Last week he made a mega-deal to reboot “Basic Instinct” for Amazon-MGM, at a maximum fee of $4 million if the movie gets made. 

WaxWord, who for better or worse has known the writer over many years, spoke to Eszterhas about his dip back into the world of sexy thrillers. 

I’ve interviewed you so many times over the years about all kinds of things, the first time was in your house in Malibu when a new baby was born. And now here you are back with this incredible deal to write a reboot of “Basic Instinct.” So I really wanted to get on the horn with you and understand where did this come from? You’ve not really been in the business of writing thrillers for quite a long time.

Yeah, this is preposterous. The notion that you’re going to pay four million bucks to an 80-year-old f–k of a guy who lives in Cleveland for God’s sakes, right? You’re going to do all that? OK, so they did. Now, the only thing I can say in defense of all this is, for people who are concerned about my age, I’m a huge Mark Twain fan. And then I’m going to paraphrase Twain and say that the rumors about my cinematic impotence are exaggerated and ageist. And I have a co-writer who is a twisted little man who lives somewhere deep inside me – I won’t name where – who’s 29. He was born 29. He will die 29.

I love it. Yeah.

He wrote much of the first “Basic” and he tells me that he is quote “up to write this” and that he will give everyone a wild and cinematic ride. I was very happy to hear my twisted little man say that because it gives me some confidence that we will really do something together.

OK but enough about you. What about the movie?

I can’t talk very much about the storyline at this point because much of it isn’t formed yet. It begins in 2025. The Catherine Trammel character I will write and I hope Sharon [Stone] agrees to do the picture because I thought she was brilliant the first time out.

Yeah.

In my reboot she is not the star of the picture but she is the main co-star of the picture. It’s about the serial killers. It’s about copycats. There’s a demonic element to it that I think will be spooky.

I’ve really not told this story before. The character came when I was in college. I was 18 years old and I met a professor’s wife who was in her mid 30s and we had an affair, and she was beautiful and smart and really well read and outspoken and fiery and funny and totally open about her sexuality. After near the end of the year, she came to me and said we were done, and she broke my heart.

And the cop character — I was a police reporter and met a cop who’d been involved in three or four shootings. I liked him. We were drinking buddies, but I realized through the course of our relationship that he liked pulling the trigger.

Okay, so flash forward nearly 20 years. About four or five months of thinking about it, I went off to to Hawaii by myself, let the sun beat me up… That’s how it evolved and that’s how it became “Basic Instinct.” I don’t know how in the creative process you meet two people, they influence your life, you think about them and they get swirled around together somehow.

The woman with whom I had the affair when the movie came out sent me a note and she said, ‘I saw Basic Instinct I loved it, and then she added, ‘I think about you, too. Thank you.’

Oh, that’s really great. She got it. She saw herself.

Yeah, that’s how it came about.

When we were talking earlier you said the film will be anti-woke. In your mind what does that mean — “anti-woke”?

It means that dialogue-wise she will be open about her sexuality, character-wise she will be raunchy at times, funny, iconoclastic and all of those things.

So what are your thoughts generally about jumping back into a controversial topic and the environment that we’re in right now?

In terms of the woke culture, I think that there is a segment of the population that’s had it with woke culture. But then there’s also a huge segment that hasn’t. I don’t believe in woke and I don’t believe in being politically correct because I think it’s not the truth, and I like the truth spoken.

The absurdities come when a woman who is sexual and open about her sexuality, you know, the culture that that I grew up in would describe that woman as a nymphomaniac. If a man did the same thing he would be a stud. And then this moves into religion in my mind as well because there are some faiths — including the one that I officially belong to — that are totally sexist. Women aren’t allowed to be priests.

Well, why the hell not? You know, by what justice are they not allowed to be priests? They can be nuns, they can be assistants and all of that. Those things are wrong and in my mind there are things that should be changed even in terms of religion.

Let me talk to you about Trump because I think it relates to this. Yes I liked Trump and I like some of the things that Trump does, but I’m very concerned about the immigrant situation. I’m concerned about going after not just MS13 but immigrants who’ve been here 10 years illegally and then the whole campaign with that. The whole Epstein thing has blown up in the past couple of years. If I were a journalist — and I don’t understand why this hasn’t happened — I would ask the president at a press conference specifically if he went to that island and specifically if and when he went to that island, he had sexual relations with underage women. No one’s asked that question bluntly. And I think that question has to be asked because it it relates to everything about our president and who he is and all of that.

What’s your time frame getting a draft?

Three months. But I think it’ll be much less than that. I’m guessing it’ll be a month and a half or two months. At night, I wake up and I hear lines of dialogue.

I’m sorry. You’re talking about the guy inside.

Of course, he’s speaking in gibberish, part-Hungarian part-English. But I get it.

So, you think you’ll have a draft within a couple months?

Yes. Yes, I do. I used to be a Hungarian refugee kid, but I moved a centimeter. Now I’m a Cleveland guy.

Well, you know what? That’s one thing we share since, as you know, I come from Cleveland, too. And that goes pretty deep somewhere. So, thank you. God bless.

This interview was edited for length and clarity. 

The post Joe Eszterhas on Rebooting ‘Basic Instinct,’ Going Anti-Woke and His Wavering Trump Support | Exclusive appeared first on TheWrap.

Not about how she betrayed the bedrock principles of media ownership in settling with the Trump administration over a specious lawsuit involving “60 Minutes.” True, a mountain of editorials, tweets and official statements from non-profits and politicians are excoriating her for weakening the First Amendment and empowering a presidential bully. 

But that’s not the conversation that’s happening privately on the Upper East side of New York or in the wealthy enclave of LA’s Beverly Park where her father Sumner once lived. 

In those circles they are saying that she was just managing an unfortunate set of circumstances. That the non-executive chairwoman and controlling shareholder of Paramount Global — forced to swallow her dignity and write a $16 million check — was a treacherous settlement hurdle in order to win FCC approval for the sale of Paramount Global to Skydance Media, backed by another billionaire Larry Ellison. 

They’re saying that because they all know it could happen to them next. She did what needed to be done, they argue.

It isn’t only Barry Diller who believes that. But, in typical fashion, he said the quiet part out loud. He told Maureen Dowd it’s understandable to “bend the knee if there’s a guillotine at your head.”

And the rest of those in journalism who will be the target of his next nonsense, multi-billion-dollar lawsuit — well, not her problem. 

This is a reality other billionaires and centi-millionaires understand. “She really doesn’t have a choice,” one media honcho said to me recently at a dinner party, more “poor Shari” in tone than “what the hell?” I’ve now heard this repeated enough to know it’s the wagons of the wealthy being circled. 

But having covered this transaction for a year and seen all the signals indicating that a “deal” would be required, this fight was over before it began.

Unlucky, she was backed into a corner. About two years ago she made the agonizing decision to sell the company her father bought, built, split, merged and grew into the Viacom powerhouse as the decline of legacy entertainment companies built on cable and broadcast assets became inexorable.

Redstone dithered for months over making a deal as the share price dropped. Shareholders were grumbling. Her executives were told to institute deep cuts, even as their own future job stability looked unlikely. 

And then, fatefully, came the “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Harris, a fairly straightforward interview which Trump claimed was fraudulently edited to hurt his election chances. Lawyers near-uniformly said this was nonsense. 

What did it matter? The lawsuit was leverage. 

Privately, Redstone believes that the storm will pass, that CBS News will survive and that too much is being made of the matter. It’s not that she doesn’t care, but is it really so irredeemable, one individual close to her has told me.

An individual close to the network said that the fact that there was no apology with the settlement made it a win. Corporations settle lawsuits all the time, this individual said. 

Still, in May, all seven correspondents from “60 Minutes” pleaded with Paramount to “put up a fierce and unrelenting fight” against the $20 billion lawsuit.

Now those who toil in the trenches of media, even such celebrities as “60 Minutes” staple Lesley Stahl, cannot do much but complain (she did) or quit (the head of CBS News Wendy McMahon left last month over this.)

The notion that Redstone take a stand — as the AP has done in suing for access to the Oval Office, as the Times did in standing by its reporting on the settlement talks last week despite yet another Trump threat — does not enter the conversation. After all, the magnates argue, the Walt Disney Company did what was necessary in settling its own Trump lawsuit against ABC over a George Stephanopulos interview for $15 million. 

Now at least we have a market price for media companies buying off Trump: average cost $15-$16 mill. 

Redstone is not on the guest list for the annual Allen & Co retreat this year, an event she rarely misses.

But if she does show up, she’ll be among friends, the billionaires who understand the tough choices required of the poor little media moguls in the age of Trump.

The post Shari Redstone Did Her Best … for a Billionaire appeared first on TheWrap.

The nannies will not come out of the house. He said: “It’s like Anne Frank or something.”

The nannies in this town are mostly Hispanic and like so many other Latinos doing important jobs in our community, they’re now living in a state of terror. Because ICE agents will pick up anyone with brown skin, regardless of whether they are legal or not, and sometimes even if they are American. It doesn’t seem to matter. 

With their faces obscured, no warrants and no identification, ICE is showing up at the Home Depot. They’re showing up at parks. Car washes. Restaurants. Schools. Colin’s wife is a pediatrician and ICE agents have come into her medical office looking for patients and staff, he said. The other day, Hispanic staff crowded into an examination room and huddled there when agents showed up because ICE is not allowed in the exam rooms.

Not yet anyway. 

This is the kind of insanity and terror that’s being spread in our city. According to the Department of Homeland Security, over 1,600 immigrants have been detained in Southern California over a period of more than two weeks as of June 25th. This equates to roughly 101 arrests per day.

In a quest to punish a Democratic majority city – nearly half Latino by last count — and in an obsession to meet made-up quotas to deport undocumented immigrants, the Trump administration has set Los Angeles on edge.

His intent to terrorize our city is working. My local car wash on Sepulveda is closed. The owner said he needs to protect his labor force.

Now the latest is we have ICE wannabes. Local television KTLA reported that on Friday an LA man was arrested for impersonating a federal agent. He had a loaded gun, fake documents, cop gear and a blinking light on his car. No biggie. 

“People are staying home. It does feel very scary out there right now,” said immigration attorney Jaclyn Granet, who works closely with entertainment clients. 

“It’s incredibly disturbing to witness as a human and also as an immigrant attorney, who works with foreign talent,” she told me. “I support the idea that America is better when we have a global community within our borders. It really feels like this program of mass ICE raids and mass detention is extremely short-sighted… If you’re raiding the farms, the restaurants – how long does it take until a restaurant has to close, or we don’t have this crop or that crop?”

A lawyer friend of mine said she was in Van Nuys on Friday picking up boxes from a storage place and talked to a group of Hispanic men who find work outside the store. They were scared, they told her. “They’re afraid to go out for work right now,” said this friend who did not want to be named. “Their families are staying in their home.”

Her housekeeper, who is legal, said people are afraid to leave their houses. Her client told her that her nanny, like Colin’s, won’t leave the house. “Even if they’re legal they’re afraid to take the kids to the park, afraid to take them to school. This is affecting not just the undocumented, it’s affecting people who are legal who have brown skin,” she said. 

ICE is operating aggressively all over – from the wealthy west side where many undocumented folks work, to the working class section on the east where many live. If you’re going to Gelson’s watch out. You might see men pull up in one SUV, or several, armed to the hilt and dressed in combat gear surround a young woman no more than 100 lbs or so. That was in Ladera Heights.

Here is a video of a full-on military raid–military uniforms, night vision goggles, rifles – descending on a home in Huntington Park where they unceremoniously blast open the door and then we see a young mother with child and toddler in her arms being escorted out. 

The overkill is the point. 

Colin comes from the fifth generation American family of Chinese origin. He said his family first came here to build the railroads back in the 1800s. His father now lives in South Carolina and is a Trumper. He recalled the discrimination his parents felt, especially during the Second World War (even though they are not Japanese). We both shared our immigrant backgrounds — mine from Ukrainian and Polish descent only two generations in — and wondered aloud: It’s not that hard to imagine the descendants of today’s terrorized Latino population in 20 years from now marveling at the criminality, the inhumanity and the deliberate aggression.

And we all wonder what can be done. For the moment, it seems, not very much.

“Do I think that this level of force is necessary? Absolutely not,” said Granet. “That is part of the chaos and scare tactics meant to be communicated through these raids. Part of Trump’s plan is to create chaos.” 

Scenes from ICE terrorizing civilians in LA:

The post ICE in LA Sets Hollywood Summer on Edge as Latino Workers Hide: ‘It’s Like Anne Frank’ appeared first on TheWrap.

Sure, say Zaslav’s peers, decoupling the streaming and content-producing side from the declining linear world makes sense now. NBCUniversal just did the same, spinning off its cable channels into a new entity, Versant. Lionsgate has just separated streamer Starz from its studio. 

But Zaslav only arrived in Hollywood a hot minute ago, bringing a vision of creating a 21st-century Hollywood studio with barely enough time to buy the Beverly Hills digs of producer Robert Evans, get a convertible Rolls-Royce and hang out at the Polo Lounge.  

What was the point, after all, of combining Warner Bros. with Discovery in order to create streaming scale to compete with Netflix and Disney+ in 2022, if only to unwind the whole thing three years later with a 60% drop in the Warner share price? 

“This whole thing was a waste of time,” said one openly-disgusted media executive, one of several who spoke to WaxWord. “They lost tremendous shareholder value. It was a failure.” This executive added: “It’s a deal that never had a shot and shouldn’t have been done. But they’ve also done a terrible job running the company.”

“The cable bundle has been rotting the business for the past eight years,” said another top media executive, who also declined to be named. “For him [Zaslav] and [shareholder John] Malone — as much Malone as Zaslav — they were trying to exit Discovery.” 

And doing so bought more time, at the expense of WBD employees, who have already experienced several rounds of layoffs and face heightened uncertainty now. 

Spinning out the cable channels “is a huge problem off his plate. It gives it to Gunnar [Wiedenfels, WBD’s CFO],” said yet a third top media executive. “Everyone is doing it — Lionsgate, Comcast, now Warner Bros. and the last person who’ll figure it out is [Disney CEO] Bob Iger.”

Doing the AT&T deal in 2022 may not have helped Warner, but it helped Zaslav. “He’s still at the table. If he hadn’t done the deal, he’d own Scripps and Discovery, and those things are the great disappearing act,” said this executive. “So he paid way too much, but he’s still at the table. In the end, for him, it was great. For the shareholders, it’s a disaster.”

The overpayment is what has made Zaslav’s challenge particularly daunting, saddling the company with a stunning amount of debt that is now down to $37 billion for a company with a $26 billion market cap. The spinoff will require another $17.5 billion loan. 

But Warner executives, not surprisingly, see it differently. In his call with analysts on Monday, Zaslav observed that he’d grown the Max streaming service – despite renaming it three different times – to a global content force. 

“When we formed WBD, HBO Max was largely a domestic streaming service that lacked scale, basic technological proficiencies and a differentiated content strategy, as well as losing more than $2 billion,” he said. “We remain on track to surpass 150 million subscribers by the end of 2026 and to deliver at least $1.3 billion in Adjusted EBITDA this year.”

The company reported 122 million streaming subscribers in Q1, including 57 million domestically. 

But Zaslav’s missteps have been well documented:  renaming HBO Max to Max (they’ve reverted); betting that HBO Max and Discovery+ subscribers would cross over and enjoy each other’s content (they didn’t); figuring that no one would really care if he shelved a couple of completed movies (the creative community had a new Big Bad at the studios).

And one former HBO executive reflected the concern among those who toiled at the premium network: “It is another (sad) attempt to salvage a sinking ship,” said this individual. “I have spoken with a few of my former surviving colleagues from the ‘glory’ days and they are quite concerned that this is another nothing-burger that gets press and does not move the needle as a long-term strategy. They are concerned about cuts and the devaluation of their work.”

But perhaps the most salient outcome of the split announced on Monday is the likelihood that both Warner Bros. and the Turner cable properties will become targets for M&A, as each becomes small enough to attract an acquirer once the split happens next year. 

“Anyone who thinks that Warner-HBO thing is going to continue as an independent company is missing what’s going on here,” said the second executive. “That thing is extremely attractive. It’s small enough in net value for any of those [streamers] – Netflix, Amazon, Disney – to buy it. Which they will.”

The third executive agreed. “This is just setting everyone up for the next M&A dance,” he said. “We know these things trade for 12-15x EBITDA, and they get sold 15-30x. That’s what Amazon paid for MGM. But none of that is going to happen when you’re dragging along a dead body. How do you get ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ and cut the dead corpse loose?” 

This executive argued that ultimately Disney will need to do the same with its linear properties, including ABC and ESPN.

Merging Warner with Discovery “was a huge miscalculation, but was it any more a miscalculation than Iger made in buying Fox? He spent $71 billion for a bunch of cable assets. Both these guys thought they were buying a studio with a bunch of IP and linear was coming along. But it turned out the linear fell off a cliff.” 

Warner vehemently disputed that its version of SpinCo would be a “dead body,” and said that Wiedenfels was committed to investing further. 

“There is a misperception that our Global Networks is the same bad bank as Versant is,” said a Warner executive. “It’s definitively different and set up to have a chance to do well, stretch its wings, see what it can do. It’s global. It has digital assets. We didn’t cleave off a favorite network like Bravo – they’re all going. And it will have up to a 20% stake in the streaming and studios.”  

The first executive strongly disagreed, arguing that CNN faces a particularly dire future. “It’s a really bad day for CNN. The two biggest brands on that side of the equation are TNT and CNN. [TNT] now goes forward without the NBA. And CNN has been incredibly diminished.” 

Historians will argue over whether the pivotal moment for a glorious legacy brand like Warner Bros. was the $85 billion sale to AT&T in 2018. It took only three years for AT&T to then pivot and spin out that asset in the merger with Discovery led by Zaslav. 

All three top executives said that move merely staved off the inevitable outcome on Monday, resulting from the linear decline that most Hollywood legacy studios failed to predict.  

“All of them together missed the one fact, which is obvious here: The white walkers were coming,” said the second executive. “The fact that you’re following the Starks, the Lanisters, whoever – who cares? That was all going to happen.” 

WBD stock closed down 29 cents on Monday, to $9.53.

Lucas Manfredi contributed to this article.

The post Moguls Take Aim at Zaslav’s Vision of WBD as Company Splits: ‘It Was a Failure’ appeared first on TheWrap.

“How to Lose Your Mother,” on sale this week, explores her complex relationship with her famous mother, the novelist Erica Jong, and navigating her encroaching dementia. In a candid conversation with WaxWord, Jong-Fast reflects on her childhood, her mother’s alcoholism, the impact of her mother’s fame and her own teenaged addiction and subsequent sobriety. 

“That’s the thing about parents that’s so hard — for me anyway,” she says. “As soon as you they start to go, you realize that it is over, right? … I had tried for years and years and years and she just couldn’t, for whatever reason. It was just too hard for her, to get clarity and apologize.”

The transcript below is edited for clarity and length:  

Sharon Waxman: When did it occur to you to write a book about you and your mom and your relationship, since you’ve been living with this relationship your entire life? Did it feel like something that needed to come out at some point?

Molly Jong-Fast: Yes, I have this mother who is famous to some people, but mostly not anymore. It was more like I just wanted to tell the story of what I saw growing up and about people getting unfamous, and what that looked like. Also, I wanted to tell the story of, it’s OK to not be able to be everything you want for your parents. 

I think if you’re a person looking for a celebrity memoir, you will be very disappointed, because no one involved in it is particularly famous. But if you’re a person that’s looking for a story about what it’s like to not be able to do it all in midlife and what it’s like when things don’t go the way you hoped, then that, I think, is the story of this book. It’s like how to survive an emergency.

I was very inspired by Joan Didion and “The Year of Magical Thinking.” And that was meant to be a foray into that. Is it a daughter’s memoir? I don’t know. I mean, like, I’m her daughter, but it’s really about trying to take care of your parents.

Well, sure, but there’s that extra layer that is very poignant. I think that’s also what makes the book special — ultimately, you grew up in your childhood with a really famous mother, and then that fame faded. So talk a little bit about what it was like growing up as the daughter of Erica Jong. 

That was, yeah, that was exciting. My mother was not a great mother. But I don’t think of my childhood as being particularly hard. I mean, my mom was an alcoholic, and I’m sober since I was 19, so I’m not necessarily better than she is, but that’s certainly an element that’s — my kids are not going to [follow] my alcoholism.

One of the things my mother did, which was amazing, was she had just a deep belief in my talent for seemingly no reason. Like she would always say, “You are very brilliant.” And I’d be like, you know, I’m failing out of third grade so … And she’d be like, “I know you’re brilliant …”

So I do think one of the things my mother did was she really, really, really made me believe that I was talented. And you know, that is both good and bad.

So at what age would you say you were when you said, “I have to take what life’s given me and decide how I want the rest of my life to go.”

It’s I think in my 30s, because I was doing weird stuff, like sending my kids to the schools I went to, you know, just trying to play it out, trying to fix it. And at some point I was like, “They’re not me. I’m not them. There is no world in which we go back and make this right.” It just has to be over. And that’s the thing about parents that’s so hard — for me anyway. The idea that it would be over, and that there would be no other chance. And this is something people talk a lot about with dementia, as soon as they start to go, you realize that it is over, right?

And in some ways, we were never going to be able to, because I had tried for years and years and years and she just couldn’t, for whatever reason. It was just too hard for her, to get clarity and apologize. You know, I made amends to her, like a million times, but I never really got to — 

Do you apologize to her? 

Oh, endlessly, for the things I put her through. Because even if she was not perfect, you know, we all have a role in our [lives]. I certainly made her worry. I mean, I had my own part in that relationship. I just wanted to make my side of the street clean. I needed her to be able to hear me. One of the things that’s cool about being sober is I just need to be able to ask for forgiveness in these kind of fraught relationships. 

As a writer I got very stuck on this idea that she is now in a groundhog day scenario where everything is kind of not real, but real. But, you know, she just is sort of running out her days in this place filled with other people who are also running out their days.

It really struck me the whole last section of the book where you’re talking about taking care of your mom after you’ve had to put her into an assisted living facility. You say many times: I am a bad daughter. You say it over and over again.

I think it’s more like we feel that way. I think a lot of us feel that way, and that was how I feel … That year I was so stuck in my head about, like, oh my God, half of my life is over. I mean, that did not even occur to me. You know, as someone who was a teenage alcoholic, I didn’t think I would get to midlife, let alone now be obsessed with aging.

I want to flip it on you, because now — guess what? — you’re famous. People come up to you on the street. Like I actually ran into you on the street last week, and people seek you out, in a way, not because you’re the daughter of Erica Jong at all, because of what you created. How do you relate to that? 

Yeah, I mean, what’s nice about having some notoriety as you’re a little bit older is that you just — I know what it’s like to publish a book and have nobody give a f–k, right? Done that. And I know what it’s like to pitch 15 pieces, and I know what it’s like to pitch a piece, write the piece, have the editor be like, “Can you do this? Can you do that?” Change it all. And then being like, “We’re sorry.” I’ve just been through a lot of rejection. And I still go through a lot of rejection, which is fine. But I have a lot of good perspective on that. 

Does that mean you appreciate having notoriety or fame, or does that mean that you have a different perspective? You know it’s going to go away someday, because you saw it go away with your mom.

I know it’ll go away, but I also really appreciate it. It’s funny because I did this interview with Jay McInerney for the book, for Interview, and he was saying he’s not as famous as he used to be. Isn’t that interesting? Like, not a judgment. So what I think will happen, what I hope will happen, because I’m sober, is that when I’m less … notable, notorious, notorious, notable, notable, or notorious, I guess you’re notable. I’ll hopefully spend more time with the dogs and the husband. That’s what I was going to say, with the dogs and the husband and I’ll watch more TV.

That’s a very positive spin, because, yes, all that’s true, but you’re also in the middle of really intense political discussions that make you a target of criticism. 

That stuff is a little scary, and this is one of the gifts of my childhood. Growing up, my mother had this really scary stalker, and it made me very careful about safety, because we had had this guy who really was quite scary. Like, he would come physically to our house and he would sit in our driveway.

How are you feeling right now about the state of things? I mean, you know, this interview will be seen for, you know, weeks and months and maybe years to come. But right now, we are five months into the Trump presidency, eight zillion lawsuits back and forth every five minutes, something Trump does gets shut down by the courts, and three minutes after that, the Supreme Court says, “No, it’s OK.” Go ahead, throw everybody out of the country, or, you know, let the children starve in Africa — whatever. And also I am feeling it very much, being aware that the media is under attack in a very specific, sustained and focused way. 

This a good question. So yes, and I have to say, like, for me, I’m very happy with having a book and getting to talk on television. But it is a really dark time in media and and, you know, just to watch the difference between what the business was like in 2016 where we had all these outlets and all this fulsome coverage. Now we have four or five outlets. People on the left are sometimes mad at mainstream newspapers. But if we did not have the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, we would not know what this administration is doing, so I thank God every day. 

So let me just say I was really surprised. I thought Harris was going to win. Actually, I’m most proud of the columns that I wrote about how I got stuff wrong during the election cycle, because I felt like I was one of the very few people who did that. I really do think like I owe my readers accountability and I owe myself that right. 

And now there is this new phase of like, the Democratic Party all covered up for Biden. Do you have a position on this kind of self-flagellation over whether we were lied to, and all of that about Biden and his age. What’s your opinion? 

So I think two things. One, I think that getting old is not a conspiracy. I think getting old — as someone who has just written a book about having an elderly parent —  getting old is getting old. Sometimes they’re good, and sometimes they’re not so good. I mean, my dad does not have dementia, but he is old, and sometimes he is sharp as a tack, and sometimes he’s [out] of it. Do I think that Biden should have run again? No. Do I think that there was a conspiracy? No.

Voters were like, “He’s too old.” I mean, that’s the thing, it’s not a cover-up. If the polling is, you know, 60, 58% of all voters saying he’s too old, that’s not a cover-up. That’s just they thought he was too old. So what should have happened is that in the midterms, that Biden should have said, “We’re going to do a full primary process,” but the calculus he was making was that incumbency was worth more, being a shaky incumbent would work better than doing a primary process. And, you know, I think it was 50/50. It turned out going on — it’s a lot of the hindsight, perfect hindsight, great. 

My readers do not want another 10 news cycles about whether or not Biden’s advisors made the wrong choice. They obviously made the wrong choice because he lost. So I personally am not involved in this. I don’t want to say anything bad, but it in my mind is not the number one most pressing problem, right? Because we are being disappeared by ICE. So that would be my top worry. 

Molly, thank you so much for chatting about your new book, “How to Lose Your Mother,” which is out June 10. Can your mom read the book? Will she read the book? 

I think she will read it — or she will think she’s read it, which is as good as reading it. 

The post Molly Jong-Fast on Mom Erica Jong, Dementia, Sobriety and Joe Biden appeared first on TheWrap.

The play coincides with our current reality: CBS News is currently being bullied by our government. The play is at the Winter Garden on 51st Street. Paramount headquarters is on 44th Street; CBS News is on 57th Street. And Trump Tower is on 56th. That’s a mighty small fishbowl for the future of democracy and a free press. 

The question is, will real life turn out differently from the play? 

“Good Night, and Good Luck,” about legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow challenging the Red-baiting terror of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, parallels the dilemma facing Paramount’s controlling shareholder Shari Redstone. She is under pressure from the journalists at CBS News because she is seeking to settle a specious, $20 billion lawsuit from President Trump over CBS News’s “60 Minutes’” editing of an interview with Kamala Harris last year. 

The lawsuit is a bully tactic to get Redstone to cave to Trump as she waits for FCC approval of her pending deal to sell Paramount to Skydance Media for $8 billion.

McCarthy used bully tactics too, like smearing Murrow’s reputation by claiming falsely that he had Communist ties, and by pressuring CBS President Bill Paley to get Murrow to back down. 

Like Redstone, Paley wavered.  

Reprising the project he directed as a film in 2005, Clooney is telling a fable for our times and issuing a warning. Murrow was one of a few household names in America at that time who had the credibility to take on McCarthy as the power-hungry Senator demanded that friends and family members rat each other out in public hearings on Communism and our military. He ruined the careers and reputations of those who came in his cross-hairs. 

McCarthy was not president, but he was arguably as powerful in his day as the power-hungry Trump is in ours. And there is another tie: political operative Roy Cohn, who trained and counseled Trump in the art of lying and manipulation — a relationship detailed in the recent movie “The Apprentice” — was McCarthy’s chief counsel during those 1954 hearings, and assisted investigations of suspected communists.

Bill Paley, the just-as-legendary head of CBS who built the company into a media powerhouse from 1928 to 1946 and beyond, moved “See It Now” to a time slot far out of prime time, where fewer were likely to see it. He didn’t fire Murrow. And unlike the recent resignations at “60 Minutes” and CBS News, Murrow didn’t give in. 

The play is a reminder that the boundaries of our democracy have been tested before. (My colleague Brian Lowry has written about yet another challenge CBS faced over airing an expose of the tobacco industry on “60 Minutes” while a merger with Westinghouse hung in the balance.) Freedoms were strained mightily – lives were ruined, in the play one staffer takes his own life – but overall our democracy held. CBS News lived to fight another day. And McCarthy had his downfall. 

But not without principled warriors like Murrow and his producer Fred Friendly who were prepared to pay the price when the risks were high – drawing McCarthy’s counterpunch, losing nervous advertisers, alienating viewers. They joked about leaving the country.

Last month Redstone reportedly asked her CEO George Cheeks if “60 Minutes” could avoid reporting on the Trump administration until her Skydance merger was done. Despite the resignations at the news division, it does not appear that “60 Minutes” has done so. 

She might do well to remember Murrow’s words, spoken solemnly by Clooney to an audience this weekend and night after night during this Broadway run: 

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”

Murrow’s reports contributed to a turning point, the infamous moment when the senator was publicly called out during a hearing – “McCarthy, have you no sense of decency?” – which led to an investigation and vote of censure by his colleagues. 

No such exit ramp seems open to us at this time. It is hard to imagine censure or public shame being effective today. Trump simply has no shame, and leads a cowed and paralyzed Republican Party and Congress. 

At the Winter Garden, the audience cheered and cheered at the drop of the curtain. To them, the stakes were clear and the path once guaranteed in our Constitution necessary. But there is no Murrow-hero coming to save us.

The current deadline for the Paramount-Skydance deal is July 6, though an extension is possible. 

I wonder if Shari Redstone has seen “Good Night, and Good Luck.” 

Editor’s Note: The play “Good Night, and Good Luck” will be televised on June 7.

The post Shari Redstone’s Standoff With Trump Is Playing Live on Broadway Stage in ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’  appeared first on TheWrap.

Growing cultural power has been a long term goal of all the Gulf states – Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar. But it has been a start-and-stop process. The UAE and Qatar have been bringing Western museums, universities and movie production to the Gulf region for the better part of 15 years, with mixed success. And in Qatar’s case, media has been a major focus of its investment in global influence with Al Jazeera. 

This week the checkbooks are out to woo movie production.  

A Qatari delegation was taking meetings on the Croisette to promote film production from Hollywood, which seems hard to fathom since the country is so tiny. Hollywood agents I spoke to expressed skepticism, but they were curious enough to check it out. 

Saudi Arabia has a sprawling space on the beach in the global village where they are eagerly promoting its movie industry. I stopped in and found the space packed, with a man in a Bedouin dress pouring Arabic coffee from an elaborate pitcher. The Saudi Film Commission “is establishing national strategy to support and foster the long-term growth of a sustainable Saudi film industry and cultural sector” according to a glossy handout. They were promoting a 7,000-foot new production facility and up to 40 percent rebates on production (consistent with other countries).

The Gulf states have money in near-endless abundance. But they have come up against cultural barriers to their ambitions. Saudi Arabia, which has been opening up its rigid Islamic-run society, still allows the death penalty for homosexuality. And while the abysmal state of women’s rights has improved somewhat since 2019, women still have very few rights in Saudi Arabia compared to Western countries. A woman can now drive, and she can travel and work. But even with those improvements, Saudi Arabia is still 126th out of 146 countries on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Index of 2024.

Meanwhile, Qatar, a complex power player with ties to Hamas and Iran, sees itself on the rise. It welcomed the U.S. President last week and has just committed $500 billion to the U.S. across many sectors, including military.

Qatar also does not permit homosexuality.

Clearly a lot of Hollywood (Ari Emanuel, Jay Penske, for example) is happy to scoop up cash and build relationships in the Gulf. But not everyone is comfortable. I spoke to one major producer who smirked when I asked if he would make movies there. “No,” he said. “Because my parents raised me to have principles.” And I know one Hollywood ex-mogul hired as a consultant who told the Qataris that its LGBTQ intolerance would be a non-starter for working with the entertainment industry. 

How you intend to create a thriving cultural and entertainment economy without fundamental freedom of expression is a mystery to me. The films playing in Cannes challenge authority, tell stories of corruption, depict the social chaos that deliberate misinformation has sowed and exposes inequalities of class, gender and race around the world. 

This will continue to be a hurdle for serious filmmakers and other storytellers choosing to do their work in the Gulf.  

A New Platform for Indie Film

I met the founders of the embryonic distribution platform for independent film. Flink, cofounded by Irish filmmaker Richie Smyth and finance executive Kevin Omeallan, aims at solving the problem of distribution for independently financed movies. 

The two, along with their head of content Lisa McLaughlin, said they were spurred to accelerate their plans after reading TheWrap’s coverage from Sundance about the shrinking (actually, shrunken) distribution options for independent film from the major studios, reflected in the weak sales from the festival. It’s a crisis for independent film – which they see as an opportunity. 

Their solution: self-distribution on a streaming platform. 

“The idea is to empower filmmakers in terms of distribution,” said Omeallan. 

Said Smyth: “We’ve been working on the concept for the last number of years from an indie film perspective. But we read about Sundance and we saw the urgency in terms of what is going on.” 

Here’s how it works: a filmmaker uploads their film to the platform and chooses what to charge for a viewer to download to stream or buy. The user creates a log-in and can build a library for independent movies on Flink. The system uses Blockchain technology to give filmmakers visibility into their payments (which are in actual currency).

Flink will eventually take a small commission on the film rental or sale. They hope to scoop up a lot of films from festivals like Sundance and Cannes, where too many properties go unsold. 

Presuming the tech all works, it seemed to me that discoverability would be a huge issue for film lovers who’d log on and not know the filmmakers. But what do I know?  

I asked a veteran industry executive who recently ran not only cable channels but built several streaming services, and now advises companies on strategy.

He was skeptical. “There’s no precedent for that model to work, unfortunately,” the executive said. “Festivals are a false positive. When you’re there, the energy is high, it’s a community experience, it’s not like going to the movies at home.” He pointed to any number of tiny streaming platforms that haven’t scaled, including Fandor or even Vimeo, which conceivably could mimic this idea. 

The Flink group is undeterred. The company is in Beta, and fundraising with a planned substantive launch later this year. 

The Women ‘Aren’t Muted Anymore’

It’s been eye-opening to see the female stories at the festival this year, venturing deep into interior lives, talking about the unspeakable and the transgressive.

Kristen Stewart’s moving film “The Chronology of Water” is a kind of filmed tone poem translated from the memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch about sexual abuse by her father, her journey as a writer and her ultimate ability to heal. The film is unabashed about women’s sexual needs and desires.

When I interviewed Stewart at our lounge this weekend, the actress and director was definitive about the subject’s relevance to her and other women:

“Even if you don’t have the specific relationship to abuse that this woman does, if you have been walking around the Earth with a female body for the last, you know, right now, being told to shut the f–k up is pervasive. It’s just a fact,” she said. “I think there are certain pieces of work that allow you to exist, all of a sudden you go, ‘Wow, f–k me. That is a mirror.’”

She added: “I didn’t want to make a movie about the things that happened to this woman. I wanted to make a movie about what we can do to the things that happened to us.”

Then Lynne Ramsay brought “Die, My Love” to the festival, with Jennifer Lawrence playing a young mother who cannot find the ground beneath her feet after having a baby. Robert Pattinson plays her loving husband who nonetheless has no idea how to help her as she goes further and further off the rails. The film is also unabashed about women’s sexual needs and desires.

Interestingly, male critics told me they felt somewhat awkward reviewing these deeply personal subjects to women. I can see why.

How perfect, then, to cross paths with the legend Sissy Spacek, who plays Jennifer Lawrence’s mother-in-law in “Die, My Love.” Her presence on screen is brief but grounding; she represents the journey all mothers travel and offers Lawrence grace.

Spacek was on her way home after coming for the premiere. I pointed out how confident the messaging was from these women filmmakers and their lead actresses. Spacek smiled and nodded. “It’s because women’s voices aren’t muted anymore,” she said.

The post Letter From Cannes: Arabian Gulf Money, an Indie Film Start-Up and Women Speak Frankly appeared first on TheWrap.

It’s natural for studio co-founder and CEO Tom Quinn to think about capitalizing on the moment, plot to expand his arthouse success and see his small but mighty endeavor financially headed in the direction of his rival A24, last valued at $3.5 billion. 

But in a sign of complicated times for M&A in general and arthouse studios in particular, Neon remains in a nether space, with a valuation bankers and dealmakers put at only $200-$250 million.

A deal to sell the studio to Criterion owner Steven Rales fell apart two years ago, according to two insiders on the deal. Mega-producer Peter Chernin has met with Neon’s owner Dan Friedkin in recent months but has not advanced on a proposal to buy, TheWrap has learned. Most recently, Ron Meyer, the former Universal studio chief and CAA co-founder, has proposed a strategy to grow the studio, but thus far hasn’t raised the funding to buy, according to two individuals with knowledge. 

“It’s a great, undervalued asset,” said one individual who has shown interest in the company. “Neon has a great opportunity to compete with A24.”

Part of the issue may be the distant relations between CEO Quinn, the public face of Neon, and Dan Friedkin, its eclectic billionaire owner. Friedkin’s $8 billion fortune stems from Toyota dealerships, but he has many other interests. He owns the Italian soccer club Roma and the Liverpool-based team Everton. He is also a co-founder of the production company 30West and in 2018 bought the majority stake in Neon. Friedkin also flies planes — he flew a vintage Spitfire in Chris Nolan’s WWII film, “Dunkirk” — and directed a film in 2017, “Chasing Vermeer.” 

An individual with knowledge of both men told TheWrap the two do not speak. “I don’t know Tom Quinn and he annoys me,’” a business associate said Friedkin told him late last year.  

A Neon insider noted that Friedkin’s son Ryan is the main partner to Quinn on the movie business. But neither Friedkin attended this year’s Academy Awards.

Ryan and Dan Friedkin did not respond to requests for comment. Quinn declined to be interviewed for this story, as did Neon. Chernin and Meyer both declined to comment. 

Quinn has achieved something quite remarkable in a short time, making bold acquisition choices and betting big on long shots and winning. He drove the campaign for “Parasite,” the Korean-language drama by Bong Joon-ho that few believed could win Best Picture, and “Anora,” a sex-soaked caper that was probably even more unlikely to go the distance. This year the horror movie “Longlegs” was a surprise hit.

But achieving solid profitability has been challenging, and it’s unclear if Neon is profitable as a company. Neon itself is private and declined to comment on the matter, but an insider noted that 2024 was the company’s best year financially thus far.

One potentially interested investor said it is not. “It fundamentally doesn’t make money,” this person said. “They will report anywhere from 0-$10 million in annual EBITDA. Conversely, they seem to need $30-40 million in fresh cash every year. So it’s not cash flow positive, they need money to keep financing the next one.”

The Neon insider disputed the profit figures and said the studio has become more profitable.

A Hollywood dealmaker with knowledge of the company observed that the issue is not so much the company’s finances as the market for M&A.

“I think they [the Friedkins] would sell it,” the dealmaker said. “The issue is, you’re having a great company moment, but that’s not matching up with a great market moment.” 

Said another potential investor: “People are afraid of the movie business, and Donald Trump has put everyone on ’tilt.'”

A prestige play

What Neon would bring any acquirer is undisputed prestige. Founded in 2017 by Quinn and Alamo Drafthouse czar Tim League, Quinn had formerly run Radius, a forward-thinking division of the Weinstein Company that had released Bong Joon-ho’s “Snowpiercer” after Harvey Weinstein had demanded cuts (and Bong refused) and turned David Robert Mitchell’s “It Follows” into something of a cult sensation. That movie made $23 million on a budget of less than $1.5 million. The sequel begins shooting later this year. 

Quinn’s good taste and commitment to supporting the filmmaker’s vision was established.

By the end of 2017, Neon had made their first splashy acquisition — the Margot Robbie-led “I, Tonya,” about Tonya Harding. The film’s rights had once been held by Miramax, but following the company going back for sale, a bidding war broke out, with Netflix, Annapurna, CBS Films and more. Neon ultimately prevailed, paying $5 million and guaranteeing an awards-timed theatrical run.

Their next big breakthrough would come in 2019, when Quinn secured the domestic rights to Bong’s “Parasite” after reading the screenplay and months before it would premiere at Cannes and capture the Palme d’Or.

Bong’s previous films had been obsessively coveted by cineastes but hadn’t made much of an impact in America. His movie before “Parasite” was “Okja,” an expensive international production that premiered directly on Netflix. But “Parasite,” based on early word-of-mouth and rapturous critical response, became a genuine phenomenon. In America, where Neon was distributing the film, it made $53 million. It made $199 million for its global distributor Miky Lee’s CJ Entertainment, totalling a worldwide box office of over $253 million.

“Looking at Neon’s original and witty marketing campaigns, I can feel the energy that comes with being a young company and a young distributor,” Bong said at the time. What’s more — it was an Academy Awards powerhouse, winning four statues, including Best Picture (the first non-English language film to ever do so), Best Director (for Bong) and Best International Feature Film.

But even with a Best Picture win under its belt and the kind of international hit that other smaller distributors would envy, Neon aspired to capture the hearts and minds of film fanatics in the same way that A24 did. Founded a handful of years before Neon, A24 had ascended to a rarified space. Its films were hits and critical darlings — A24 won “Best Picture” with “Moonlight” in 2017. 

What’s more, through a combination of canny marketing and an unstoppable merchandising arm, A24 had become a brand for passionate moviegoers. “An A24 Movie” became shorthand for something edgy, unpredictable and arty (but not too arty). Just as a new Marvel movie would be something you made a point to see opening weekend, so too was a new A24 movie.

This clearly bothered Quinn and the team at Neon.

In 2023, Neon hired A24’s Alexandra Altschuler as vice president of media and Don Wilcox as vice president of marketing. And they started upping their merchandising arm, with new items added to their online store (you can get a T-shirt with the “scholar’s rock” from “Parasite” right now). Neon also partnered with the Criterion Collection, the world’s coolest and perhaps most important home entertainment company, to release a handful of their films.

Of the company’s claims to fame, the biggest is that they have released the past five Palme d’Or winners consecutively – after “Parasite,” there was “Titane” (2021), “Triangle of Sadness” (2022), “Anatomy of a Fall” (2023) and “Anora” (2024). Last year, Quinn said of the Palme, “The award means a lot. To audiences here who are looking for the absolute most adventurous, forward-looking cinema available, that award represents it because these films have delivered, and they’ve been major Oscar contenders.”

But that interest doesn’t always translate to box office gold. Domestically “Titane” earned just $1.4 million; “Triangle of Sadness” made less than $5 million. “Anatomy of a Fall” earned a little more than $5 million. And “Anora,” another Best Picture Oscar winner for the company, had a rocky road to profitability. The film took in a little more than $20 million at the domestic box office, making it the second lowest-grossing Best Picture winner, unadjusted for inflation, since “The Hurt Locker.” Some of these movies have made much more overseas, but Neon is an American producer-distributor — though they have recently launched an international sales division led by Kristen Figeroid. Again, they are following in A24’s footsteps by selling direct to market.

Building a library

If there’s an actual superstar in the Neon fold, it’s Osgood Perkins.

Perkins, the son of actor Anthony Perkins and model Berry Berenson, is a one-of-a-kind talent, making discerning genre movies that are as different from one another as they are parts of a cohesive whole. His first feature, “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” was released, barely, by A24. And the two movies that followed were put out by Netflix and United Artists’ Orion imprint.

Last year, though, Neon and Perkins teamed on “Longlegs,” a throwback 1990s serial killer thriller with an occult twist. The marketing was ingenious, never revealing the title character, played by Nicolas Cage under gobs of make-up. Audiences would have to pay to see his transformation.

The film wound up being Neon’s highest-grossing film domestically with $74.3 million and the highest-grossing independent film of the year. Earlier this year, Neon released Perkins’ “The Monkey,” based on the short story by Stephen King and produced by “The Conjuring” mastermind James Wan. It was another hit, grossing nearly $40 million in the United States. His next film, “Keeper,” opens on Oct. 3 via Neon.

Neon might long for the kind of breakout horror hits that A24 regularly delivers, but even their most commercial efforts, like the three films that make up the “X” trilogy (2022’s “X” and “Pearl” and 2024’s “MaXXXine”), made less domestically than “The Monkey.” And that’s combined.

The Neon library comprises about 100 films. Beyond the Palme d’Or winners, there are beloved documentaries (“Moonage Daydream,” “Flee,” “Fire of Love”), some legacy projects from genuine auteurs (Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence,” David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future,” Michael Mann’s “Ferrari”) and gems from up-and-coming filmmakers (Daniel Goldhaber’s “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” Tilman Singer’s “Cuckoo,” Duke Johnson’s live-action debut “The Actor”).

The promise is there. But a good coach has to bring in some more wins. Maybe then they can finally crush their longstanding rival A24 and Quinn can translate those successes into profit. And then, should the M&A climate look more favorable, a sale could be in order.

The post Neon Picks Oscar Winners, Builds a Library and Looks Primed for a Takeover – Why Hasn’t It Found a Buyer? | Exclusive appeared first on TheWrap.

“I’ve been fighting racism and antisemitism for a long time, but after Oct. 7, it became my life,” the executive chairwoman of Paramount Global said at a screening for a heart-rending new documentary, “Children of October 7,” airing on Paramount+ and one of her networks, MTV. “It became the most important thing that I can do with my time — that I can teach my children, that I can bring people together to not just watch this movie but to share this with people they know, to tell the truth, to tell the stories.”

Noble words. Noble intentions. But if Redstone is not careful, her efforts will backfire. She will fail both at combating antisemitism and at preserving the credibility of her CBS News division. 

She’s already done significant harm. What many who are angry with Redstone in the wake of “60 Minutes’” chief Bill Owen’s resignation this week do not understand is that her frustration and alleged “interference” in CBS News is rooted less in a knee-jerk response to Donald Trump’s naked bullying and more in her concern over coverage of Israel and antisemitism. 

Redstone broke with her news division last fall, when CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil was disciplined for asking pointed questions of Ta-Nehisi Coates over his new book about the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Black intellectual admitted that he was not interested in exploring the Israeli side of the conflict, but felt Palestinians were treated like Black Americans under Jim Crow; Dokoupil said his views “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.”

After internal criticism of Dokoupil, a CBS News review of the interview found that it “failed to meet the organization’s editorial standards,” as TheWrap then reported, wagging a finger over the journalist’s questioning without saying precisely what was wrong with it. “We will still hold people accountable. But we will do so objectively, which means checking our biases and opinions at the door,” said CBS News executive Adrienne Roark in her statement to the staff. The implication was that Dokoupil was biased. 

In a rare move two days later, Redstone broke publicly with her news team to disagree. “I think they made a mistake here,” she said. “I frankly think Tony did a great job with that interview.” And she added that Paramount’s three co-CEOs agreed with her: “I think we all agree that this was not handled correctly and we all agree that something needs to be done.”

Something was done, after another bump over Israel in January. “60 Minutes” aired a segment about Gaza in which former State Department officials discussed the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s push against Hamas. The segment was accused of failing to point out the terrorist nature of Hamas; the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called the segment “a biased and one-sided piece.”

The blowback came as Redstone was on a plane on her way back from Israel. Within 48 hours co-CEO George Cheeks had placed former CBS News President Susan Zirinsky as a new “executive editor,” overseeing standards and journalistic practices, reviewing “highly complex, sensitive issues like the war in the Middle East,” as Cheeks said in a memo sent to CBS News staffers.

Roark, meanwhile, exited the company in February. 

In the midst of all this hangs the deal for Redstone to sell Paramount Global to Skydance, backed by billionaire Larry Ellison, which has been pending federal approval since last July. Since winning the election, Trump has determined to bring the media to heel, and took aim at the biggest broadcast target with the most exquisite point of vulnerability: CBS News. 

He sued for $10 billion, and then upped it to $20 billion, over an absurd allegation that CBS had deceptively edited an interview with then-candidate Kamala Harris. The lawsuit, as everyone who knows anything about fair news practices and the mechanics of TV news recognizes, is nonsense. 

But it is leverage. And Trump likes leverage. 

It is this pressure – Redstone’s need to settle this lawsuit, while her news leaders like Owens have refused to apologize, retract or admit error – that led to his resignation, citing “interference” from corporate. 

This is a lose-lose situation. If Redstone caves to Trump she may get her Paramount deal, but at what cost? She undermines CBS News, a key asset. She damages the credibility of the organization, chases out talent and loses the trust of her news division. 

“The lawsuit is baseless,” keened a top CBS News executive, who is normally a supporter of Redstone, speaking on background. “What makes it so difficult – to capitulate and settle when the lawsuit is baseless – is this puts the corporation in a horrible position.”

This person continued: “Maybe Shari doesn’t appreciate the depth of destruction of the First Amendment in settling… You’re blinded by things. There’s no doubt she understands that everyone in the news division feels capitulating is such a serious blow to the First Amendment.”

But — has anyone said this directly to Shari Redstone? I don’t think anyone has. Instead she’s clearly leaning toward giving in.  

“We might be in a position — if we can reach a reasonable settlement —  we might have to do that,” an individual close to Redstone told me. “As a news organization, having this litigation makes it impossible to function as a company over time.”

That’s nonsense. Of course Paramount Global can litigate a federal lawsuit over time and still function in its news division. It’s the company sale that is at stake if Trump doesn’t get what he wants. 

So Shari, if no one at CBS or Paramount will tell you, I will: your fears over antisemitism, your concerns over the tilt against Israel in news coverage, are real. They are legitimate. They are valid. But they are not a reason to betray your news organization and give in to Donald Trump. That will only hurt your company, hurt freedom of the press and harm the legacy of CBS News built over decades. 

Fight for your freedom and the right of those at CBS News — and for all of us — to report, to criticize, to challenge and, sometimes, to mess up. That is the fractured beauty of this thing we cling to called democracy. For your children and grandchildren, I hope you choose courage.  

The post Letter to Shari Redstone: You’re Conflating the Antisemitism Fight With Press Freedom, and You Will Lose Both  appeared first on TheWrap.