Mailbag for February 16, 2024
Hot for Samberg, Kelce's lyric question, a Best Casting re-do, rat-faced TV people no more, Coyote vs. Acme, editorial urgency, LaineyGossip logo history, sexism killing sequels, and some LG SYW
Dear Squawkers,
You are about to tell me “I told you so” or “OMG Lainey, howwww could you be so late on this?” or “WTF is wrong with you?” And my answer to this is, you are correct. Because Jacek and I, just this week, started watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
I know.
Like I said, you are correct.
I really don’t know what’s wrong with me, because I have watched a few episodes here and there on a flight in past years but I’m that dumb bitch who never picked it up when I got home. And now, over a decade later, the party has wrapped up and we’re out here all like… fuck, we suck. But also, at the same time, not-so-secretly thrilled because we get to enjoy it for the first time all at once. Sarah just told me that “you really should savor it. You only get to discover a show once, this one will never stop delighting you”. So even though we were up our own asses all the years when it was airing, we still don’t lose.
And now I have a very intense, very bad case of the Andy Sambergs. I remember thinking he was super hot when he hosted the Emmys a few years ago, and the Golden Globes with Sandra Oh, basically whenever he presents at an award show but, again, dumb cunt over here with the goldfish mind and it went away …but not anymore. Andy Samberg, if you’re out there, I WANT YOU.
I’ll keep my thirsting short because today’s mailbag is stuffed. It’s a long one this week because Jacek and Emily are jumping in a couple of answers. Hope you enjoy hearing from our behind-the-scenes team members and how hard it is to work with my mess!
Question from Jill: I’m curious about reporters’ questions during press conferences. This week a reporter asked Travis Kelce to finish a Taylor Swift lyric and it strikes me as an example of reporters asking what seem like bad questions that no one actually wants to hear the answer to. What is their motivation for this type of thing? Do they think the questions are clever or is there another goal in mind, like getting a rise out of a person?
Lainey’s Answer:
Was it a bad question? I’m sure some people out there found the answer interesting, like certain Swifties, and the moment would have gotten some traction online. Yes, there is probably some motivation by some reporters to manufacture a viral clip, but I do want to defend my fellow reporters here (even though many sports reporters probably wouldn’t defend entertainment reporters) because athletes are like actors: for every charismatic celebrity there are two dullards. And just because someone is a good actor or a good point guard/linebacker/pitcher/whatever, it doesn’t mean they’re a good interview. The most boring ones, in my opinion, are hockey players. All they ever say is, “We just have to take it one shift at a time and get pucks in deep”. Hockey reporters have to listen to that over and over again, for nine months. It’s brutal.
The sport exception to this, arguably, is motor racing and football, as in worldwide football and not the sport that’s referred to as football in North America. Like I’m not saying these people are Ted Lasso and Roy Kent, but I’ve seen my share of English Premier League press conferences or post game interviews that are complete chaos… and the sport is better for it. As for Formula 1, the culture of that sport is such that everybody is there to dick swing with their million-dollar engines so they too are much more candid in their interviews than other athletes – which is one of the reasons why Drive to Survive is such a success. But again, those sports are exceptions. The media approach for athletes in other sports, including American football, is nowhere near as freewheeling.
To go back to Travis then, from my vantage point as a member of the media, when you do have an athlete who actually has some personality, who is entertaining, and is willing to play along – of course you take advantage of it. That question about the Taylor Swift lyric might not have landed with certain people but that doesn’t mean all the Taylor Swift questions or movie questions or food questions or SNL questions should be off the table. Because also? By the time they get to the Super Bowl, what actually meaningful football questions can he answer?
Hey Travis, how are you all going to handle the 49ers pass rush?
How will you all be able to protect Mahomes against that defensive line?
How are you getting past that secondary?
I mean, this is a competition, right? So, what, he’s going to get up there and read the playbook to the media? This is why you have to get creative during PRE-game media. Because there is strategy involved in American football, perhaps much more so than in almost any other team sport. American football is a set of complicated, preset plays and set pieces that are kept largely secret – which is why teams have been accused of actual spying on opponent practices in the past. In basketball or hockey, where it’s so fluid and quick, yes, a lot of the action is spontaneous and free flowing. That’s not what American football is. But then you’re sending the players to do hundreds of interviews before the game and there’s really only so much actual gameplay etc that they can discuss. Which means you have to find other shit to talk about.
After the game? Sure, after the Super Bowl you can talk about what worked and what didn’t and whatever formations they were surprised by etc. But before the game, there’s not that much football to discuss. And on top of that, if the player who’s at the press conference is dating one of the biggest popstars in the world and he’s such a character himself, why not go for it and see what gold you might get in return? If I were assigned to the Super Bowl, that’s exactly how I would approach it. And while I might not have asked the lyric question, I would definitely have found a way to ask a non-football, borderline silly Taylor Swift question.
Question from Ketri: Just a fun what-if question: what films from past years would you have liked to see win the award for Best Casting if it had existed then?
Sarah’s answer:
THE AVENGERS. This is why the “popular Oscar” thing drives me crazy—a casting Oscar and/or a stunt Oscar are obvious ways to nominate more popular films without lowering the entire institution with a blockbuster award (look at how stupidly that just worked out for the Golden Globes).
Other films deserving of a casting trophy in no particular order: John Wick, Top Gun: Maverick, Bridesmaids, If Beale Street Could Talk, Crazy Rich Asians, Spotlight, any of Tarantino’s movies, any of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies, any Coen Brothers movie, any version of Little Women, Emma., Mad Max: Fury Road, Dune, Step Brothers, After Yang—and that’s just recent(ish) stuff off the top of my head.
Question from Myra: You can pass over this question if it doesn't make any sense. Has there been this switch to make influencers and reality shows more aspirational, and to make movies and television shows more relatable? I think about the casting of everyday-looking people in Succession, the new Mr and Mrs Smith, the recent Marvel movies. Then when I look at my Instagram feed, or watch any of the reality shows like Love is Blind and The Real Housewives, everyone looks like a supermodel or Hollywood celebrity and are dressed to the nines. I know this is a general statement and there are always exceptions, I'm just referring to general trends. Do you notice this too or am I imagining things?
Lainey’s Answer:
I can’t say I’ve noticed this. Now that you mention it, though, I will set a radar for it in my head going forward and see if something pings.
But your question reminds me of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler hosting the Golden Globes in 2013. Near the beginning of the opening monologue, Amy delivered this line:
“Only at the Golden Globes do the beautiful people of film rub shoulders with the rat-faced people of television.”
That was a joke but not really a joke because for a long time this was the stereotype: movie stars are glamourous and television stars are, as you said above, “relatable”. Amy’s joke revealed that that stereotype was upheld by the stars themselves.
This, of course, is no longer the case in the age of premium/platinum television as more and more movie stars are working in TV, so it’s an interesting observation and I’m not sure if this is exactly what you’re asking but are we, the audience, getting to the point where if you see someone who’s all made up and all dressed up, you identify them as an influencer or reality star whereas if someone is more casual, you ID them as an actor – and that’s become how we differentiate? Not sure I have a verdict for you there but back in the day, whenever I would go to a Hollywood party, the people who were NOTICEABLE were often NOT the famous people. The famous people kept to the corner.
However, with the rise of the influencer and the reality show stars, at these parties, the influencers and the Housewives are definitely still the most noticeable, but they’re often also the most famous. As in people get wayyyyyy more excited to see them there than they do the award-winning actor in the indie movie or the prestige television show.
And what’s ironic about that is that you could have an influencer with 50 million followers, more people watching their tutorials or silly videos than the combined audience of so many actors in films and television, and they still want to achieve traditional fame. That’s the power of legacy media, even though they say it’s dying. That’s why I get so frustrated when executives and marketing people and producers keep chasing digital fame and attention. All the digital stars want to be old school film and tv stars – so why aren’t we protecting those industries?!
Question from Alix: For Sarah - in regards to WBD potentially wiping out Coyote vs. Acme...if they did this & the film ceased to exist then could the writers, producers etc recreate it with another studio? They shouldn’t have to & I understand your point about WBD business practices but I’m curious about this from a business and a copyright perspective.
Sarah’s answer:
The copyright perspective is they can’t do it. Warner Bros. Discovery holds the copyright and trademark for the Looney Tunes, with the exception of the oldest animated shorts, mostly produced by Leon Schlesinger pre-1932. “Bosko’s Holiday”, for instance, is public domain. Warner Bros. has historically not been as diligent about protecting their copyrights as Disney (who have gone to the Supreme Court multiple times over it), but the question specifically for Coyote vs. Acme is that that script is copyright protected, even if they destroy the final product. The script is still registered with the WGA, so you couldn’t reproduce it elsewhere, even if specific Looney Tunes characters are in the public domain, which not all of them are.
It’s really an awful situation when a studio can tank an entire completed project like this, depriving everyone involved of credits for their CVs—AND THE REVENUE CONTRIBUTIONS TO HEALTHCARE AND PENSION PLANS—and still ensure no one else can make it, either. That’s why the time to say “no” to movies is in the development phase, when the script can go into turnaround and someone else can pick it up and give it a go. The solution to cutting your production budget is to cut production, not delete films from existence for, essentially, pennies on the dollar of what you’d get from even a mid-theatrical release.
Question from JC: A little Laineygossip BTS (behind the scenes, not BTS sorry) question -- when a chat section is going crazy with tons of comments on something that happened over the weekend or overnight and the conversation is getting out of hand (multiple threads, etc), do you feel any extra pressure to get a post out on the site? Or get your planned post on the Squawk up before the conversation dribbles out or the moment has passed? Or does it inspire you to attack the post in a different editorial light based on where we are taking the conversation? Are you ever like, "oh they really aren't getting it, can't wait for them to read my take"?
Lainey’s Answer:
If there’s a big story that’s popping off – like Celine Dion and Taylor Swift – and I know people will be talking about it, I do not check The Squawk and I try not to read social media opinion while I’m writing. Of course I’ll scan social media to lay out a fact (for example: people are mad at X because of this, and I’ll include a tweet of someone who is mad at X) but beyond that, using the example above, I have an ego about this kind of thing and I do not want whatever I’m trying to say to be influenced by anyone else.
However those posts do take me longer and that’s where the pressure is: time. When I know that people are gossiping about a huge development, I want that post to be near the top of the site order for the day. But starting the day out with a thousand-word post that takes me sometimes a couple of hours to write weighs on me because it’s such a time crunch. The content itself, though, is rarely affected by the conversation that’s happening here. At least not on the day.
Once I finish the post and it goes up, as you know, I’ll chime in here on the conversations and I might reference what I’ve observed in these conversations in the next post for the follow-up. But my first go at it, like when the gossip is fresh, is always meant to be just my take. If there is an occasion where it’s not my take and the idea was put into my head by someone else, there is always a credit and I think (hope?) you’ve seen that on the site, when I’ll say “X emailed me and floated this as an idea” or I might put a “thank you X” at the bottom if the person does not want to be credited. That also applies to the other writers on the site – if it’s Sarah who brought something to my attention or texted me with an observation, or Maria, or Kathleen, or Duana, I try to be quite diligent about making sure you know it comes from them. I guess I’m like Taylor Swift that way, ha, in that writing and idea credits are important to me – in case you didn’t notice my annoying as fuck gloating over Zendaya co-chairing the Met Gala – so I’m always trying to make sure I credit others when it’s theirs. If you ever notice that I’ve missed one, please let me know.
Sarah’s answer:
First, I have to butt in about Andy Samberg. He and his wife, musician Joanna Newsom, own one of the last great Art Deco estates standing in LA—Moorcrest, a house so important, it has its own Wikipedia page. They bought it a decade ago (Brooklyn Nine-Nine money at work), and that’s the last time anyone has seen inside it (listing photos here). Without being uptight about it, Andy protects his privacy. For instance, no one knows his daughter’s name, a secret he’s kept for years. But that also means he’s not showing off his fabulous house. I’m not joking—I have one (1) Google alert and it’s for AD Open Door in the hopes that someday they feature Moorcrest. I am DYING to see it. Rumor has it the Samberg-Newsom renovation is SPECTACULAR.
Anyway, like Lainey, I don’t read comments here or anywhere before I write something, unless it’s part of my research into a topic, and then I will always link back to the source. Credit is important! I have seen sites and writers I love go in bizarre directions chasing the approval of their commenters, it becomes a demented feedback loop every time, and I love y’all but I am not ready to Thelma and Louise with you off a context cliff.
Question from Miss Mellie: The old “blind item” banner in the newsletter made curious: Who did your graphics? Both the LG logo and the chicken for The Squawk?
Jacek’s Answer:
The very first logo (“the Smoking Lady”) was done by our first developer’s brother who was in graphic design at the time (back in 2003). When we updated the cigarette to be the martini glass, I made that modification myself in Photoshop, as well as integrating it into the current/new LaineyGossip word mark where the martini lady lives in one of the O’s in Gossip. For those who were around and can remember, the first version of “LaineyGossip.com” was all in the same font as the “Lainey” is today. Having done all that, it was pretty easy to just throw the blindfold on the updated logo for the blind item graphic.
As for The Squawk, I came up with the original idea for the chicken popping through the Q in Squawk to stay consistent with our current LaineyGossip logo, but we hired a graphic designer to draw us a less aggressive chicken, which was originally kind of a rooster-looking character that gave some obnoxious Foghorn Leghorn (from Looney Tunes) vibes. She also gave us some variations of the fonts to land on and we chose what you see today. The colours were a little bit different than the blue and red, which Sarah suggested we change back to stay consistent with LG.
Question from Rachel T: Spy came up in my HBO max feed, so of course I watched it— why was there no sequel to Spy? Or to The Heat? To Bridesmaids? Is the answer just Hollywood sexism plus short sightedness? Any other movies the LG team wishes we had sequels to?
Sarah’s answer:
Is the answer just Hollywood sexism plus short sightedness?
Yes.
Longer answer: Comedy sequels are generally a bad idea, and every movie you named is a comedy. Spy does lend itself to a franchise, because there are plenty of spy movie tropes to parody, but at the same time, Spy is so good, and hits all the highlights of the genre, so a sequel would inevitably feel like a parody of itself. What I think Hollywood should do in the case of hit comedies is not greenlight sequels—but give that creative team more money to do something else. Think about Adam McKay and Will Ferrell’s run in the 2000s: Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, The Other Guys. Every one is a banger, no sequels. When they did sequelize, it was Anchorman 2, which isn’t a disaster but also isn’t great.
Similarly, Bridesmaids has no sequel, but Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo did get to write another movie together, and gave us Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar. I’m not worried about funny ladies not getting sequels, I worry about them getting more MONEY. My issue with what happens next when women have a hit comedy is that there is so often no follow-up. McKay and Ferrell cranked out movies like clockwork every two years throughout the 2000s—there was no shortage of funding for them. But it took Wiig and Mumolo ELEVEN YEARS to make Barb and Star. That’s too long, given how big of a hit Bridesmaids was.
Question from Lara D:
After reading the comments from Jacek in this week’s mailbag- can we please get some inside baseball rants from Jacek and Emily about running the website? I know that’s a really vague question, but I would have never thought to ask about the difference in targeted vs non-targeted ads and found it fascinating. So, I don’t know what I don’t know but would love to hear more!
Jacek’s Answer:
OK so you’re right, that’s pretty broad because without making it sound like we design rocket ships over here, there are a lot of little day-to-day elements involved like search optimization, ad server management, site map maintenance, accounting, payroll, campaign management, reporting, bill payments, etc. and other things that go into any business that we won’t bore you with. And Emily can share a little bit about what the actual posting/photo editing process looks like from the time we receive a piece from Lainey or Sarah once it’s edited and ready to go to when we hit publish and push it live to LG.
Maybe the best way to tackle this quickly without writing an essay is to go over some of the things that you see when you visit the site in terms of revenue and cost, and you can get a sense of what goes into running the site that way.
The main way we pay for everything you see on the site is via ads. Those have been around for a long time and they are called to a page by an ad server provided (in our case) by Google that looks at the vast inventory of ads available from their pool of ads or those of our other ad partners, which include Amazon and a number of ad exchanges that serve as the middleman between publishers like us and the brands that you see. That decision of what to show you in that moment is based on a number of factors including your approximate location, your browsing profile if you haven’t restricted the ability to have it be seen via things like third party cookies, which we’ve talked about before, and other factors. It’s also why sometimes you’ll see some inappropriate garbage that slipped through the filters and we need to block it reactively. We don’t actively go and select the advertisers we want to advertise with us. That would be nice!
The effectiveness of those ads is determined by how well they are matched to your interests, which is where you’ve seen me rant about all the things that are happening in the industry to stop this from happening in the interest of privacy, but at the expense of relevant advertising. Sadly, that’s a give and take that the industry is trying to reckon with and publishers like us struggle with when ads become more general, more poorly targeted, and therefore cheaper.
We used to dabble in affiliate marketing when we did the old Sasha Finds posts, but we found that it wasn’t very lucrative and a LOT of work. The podcasts were another revenue source for us while we still recorded them, but to be honest, unless you are a big podcast with millions of listeners, it’s a hard thing to monetize in a way that lets you make a living. Maybe we didn’t do it right, but also, it took up a lot of time that we just don’t have on what amounted to a passion project.
So The Squawk is one of the ways we’ve supplemented our ad revenue by providing this platform for our most engaged readers to pay a little bit per month (or year – thank you for those of you who forked up and ESPECIALLY those of you who chose to pay more just because!), and it is helping absorb some of the costs we incur running both.
As for those costs on the LaineyGossip side, as Lainey mentioned before, our biggest expense line item is paying Emily, Sarah, and the writers. Emily is on a salary and is our only full-time employee, Sarah is compensated per word along with added fees for co-editing, and our writers are paid per word. Without getting too specific, those ‘people’ costs run into the hundreds of thousands per year.
Our next biggest expense is photos. We license photos from a number of photo agencies including Getty Images, Shutterstock, Backgrid, and others. You’ve seen them all in our photo credits. Those run anywhere from a few thousand per month to a few hundred per month each, depending on the profile and reach of the agency (e.g. Getty is EVERYWHERE and are paid a premium) and the deals are capped at giving us either a yearly download quota, or others that have a monthly download maximum. I can’t get too specific about exact costs because each agency negotiates separate deals with each publisher based on their reach, but when you do the math on this, you can probably tell at the end of the year we’re somewhere near six figures in photo costs per year. And that’s just for non-exclusive photos. Some we need to license separately as Lainey mentioned before, but we don’t do that too often because in those cases, a single photo might cost as much as half or a quarter of an entire monthly bill from that agency for non-exclusive photos.
There are other line items but I’ll stop at server costs and maintaining the website. We aren’t flush enough to have a full time developer and server admin, so I have two expert friends of ours on retainer to help when the website needs to be updated and isn’t something simple that I can do myself (I don’t code but I’ll do some things with site code that amount to copying, pasting, and uploading to the server when small changes are needed) or if some shit goes down and we need to troubleshoot. If they do extra work beyond the retainer, we pay them per hour. And to host the site and throw it behind a CDN so it doesn’t load like a web page on a 2005 Nokia, we’re looking at another $20K or so per year.
All this is to say, it isn’t cheap doing this but we love it and we want to keep doing it if we can. And also, if you’re at Wordpress or one of the full service ad networks, this is NOT an invitation to email me so you can tell me how much cheaper and more efficient your solution is.
Emily’s Answer:
A typical day for me has me up by 5am Pacific time. After I’ve made coffee (and meditated!), I spend the first part of the morning going through emails and catching myself up on what I’ve missed while I was sleeping.
Lainey generally has the first article to me between 5 and 6amPT and once it arrives in my inbox, I get started. I log in to the backend of our site and get the piece ready to be published – a lot of which is a technical process involving many little steps specific to our editor. Hard to explain and likely boring to read!
Sometimes Lainey (or Sarah) will send specific instructions about photos, but mostly it comes down to reading the article carefully and making sure I’m including everything mentioned (a specific detail on an outfit, for example). We have subscriptions to several photo agencies and as long as an available set isn’t exclusive and massively expensive, I get to take my pick! Selecting and editing photos for each article is one of my favourite parts of the job because I have some creative freedom. If a set IS exclusive, but it’s juicy and we want it, I will reach out to my contact for a rate and potentially begin a negotiation process from there.
Posting an article can take anywhere from 15 minutes to half an hour or more, depending on the length of the piece, the number of embeds, the amount of work it will take to edit photos, etc. Articles roll in throughout the day, and in between posting I’m staying on top of email, posting to The Squawk, refreshing photo agencies for fresh content, and doing the same with breaking news - sending relevant updates to both Lainey and Sarah.
In the evening, the two of them get an updated photo list from me. This is my last duty before shutting down for the night, to go through our agencies and compile a list of relevant photos that have been released since we wrapped the day on the site.
The most surprising thing about my workday might be that I talk to Jacek more on a daily basis than Lainey. Yes, we email back and forth about the day’s articles, but most of my day-to-day communication happens with Jacek. Because we both work alone and from home (from opposite sides of the country), we check in with each other, but also because he’s our resident expert on all things technical and absolutely everything to do with the site, I have questions for him almost daily. On the flip side, I try to leave Lainey alone as much as possible and even after 14 years of doing this (holy shit), I feel guilty and nervous about bothering her with a question. The woman is damn busy! And sometimes unavailable when she’s shooting, which can be frustrating if I need clarification on something and an article is due to go up.
As far as job complaints go, I’ll take it. It was a dream job fourteen years ago and still is!
I can speak for everyone here at LaineyGossip.com, past and present, and The Squawk when I say that Emily is our favourite. She’s also probably the snarkiest out of all of us and none of us on the team have been spared of her sass. Without Emily, what we write wouldn’t be seen – so thanks to all of you for keeping Emily and the rest of us employed and gossiping! We are truly so grateful that you have joined this community and have allowed us to give more insight about what we do and how we do it.
Keep squawking, keep gossiping,
Lainey and Sarah (and Emily, and Jacek)
Re Myra’s question: there is a looong history of the truly rich and elite flipping looks with the masses. For centuries being as pale as possible was what you wanted, because it meant you weren’t out field labouring all day and could sit inside in comfort. Then tan was in for the same reason: it signified you weren’t stuck in an office all day, you could afford a lot of leisure time. I think we might be seeing some of that as a certain segment of people start rejecting the Instagram face that is pretty widely attainable now.
❤️Love this site so much and thank you for sharing these mailbags each week! I look forward to them every week and Lainey Gossip every day. If there's anything more we can do to support and keep this site going please let us know. I've been reading since I think the late 2000s and love the growth and insight and just all of it. Reading "my stories" here at the end of a long work day is such a treat and I appreciate all the hard work that goes into making this happen. There is truly no other space on these internets that provides this type of thoughtful content. Thank you all!!