Mailbag for February 23, 2024
The tension between journalists and their subjects, on junkets, the alchemy of good casting, Aussie Kelce trackers vs Brange gossip inflation, JLo's fancy tour commercial (?), and the end of Vice
Dear Squawkers,
Our February 13 newsletter was about when the Gossip becomes the gossip and the allegations about the anonymous writer behind the blind website Crazy Days and Nights. This week there’s another piece about an online Gossip – much less controversial, not controversial at all, actually, but also a lot more legit. Because while Matthew Belloni’s scoops at Puck, and on his podcast, The Town, are not fantastical and fictitious stories about celebrities who are either cult members or cannibals, they are largely accurate reports on the business of the business.
The Puck newsletter is super inside baseball about the infrastructure of Hollywood. Matthew Belloni isn’t gossiping about who’s dating who and had a hissy over a dress or whatever, his gossip focuses on network executives and other power players who may or may not be fucking each other over or losing out on great opportunities and/or operating with a lack of imagination and therefore ruining their business. This is why the amateur gossips at TikTok aren’t paying attention to his reports, preoccupied instead with lipreading and other historically inaccurate forms of celebrity study – even though the information that Matthew is sharing has a major trickle-down impact on all our favourite celebrities, especially in how they, eventually, manage their careers.
Vulture’s new profile of Matthew, then, is a must-read. Sarah and I are both paying subscribers to Puck and so are most of the decision-makers in Hollywood. We subscribe because it’s our job to analyse the industry; they subscribe because they are the industry, and they want to know what everyone else is doing. As I have said often, for all their bitching about gossip, celebrities and the people who populate the Hollywood hierarchy are themselves the biggest gossips. Most good gossip, authentic gossip, comes from inside Hollywood – they are always telling on themselves, and they are always fronting like they’re above it.
Matthew has been an entertainment industry journalist for a long time; he used to work at The Hollywood Reporter, then left when he could no longer keep kissing celebrity ass – the trades have to engage in a certain amount of “scratch my back” in order to get the cover stories and the features that they need to be able to keep publishing. Now that he’s with Puck though, even though he doesn’t have to deal with celebrity egos so much anymore, he is starting to challenge the relevancy of the trades in the exclusives that he’s getting in terms of the high level business shenanigans that are going on behind the scenes. And, yet, as pointed out in the Vulture piece by Nicholas Quah, the more successful he’s becoming, the more his interests might be aligned with the very people he’s been free to criticise in the early days of Puck. As noted in the article:
“…Belloni is generally liked and respected by the people he reports on, perhaps even accepted as a kind of executive-level peer. This posture is part of what has made him a complicated figure in an era of rising labor movements. During last year’s strikes, Belloni proved willing to criticize the guilds in a way few other journalists felt was worth incurring social media backlash.”
Personally, I’m not sure this is about backlash. To me it’s about the natural tension that must exist between journalists and the people or institutions they’re reporting on. I don’t know if it’s healthy for a journalist to be regarded as a “peer” by media CEOs, especially in these times, as massive corporations are taking over legacy studios and prioritising stock prices over storytelling. So it’ll be interesting to see, as Puck continues to become more popular and influential, how the tone may or may not change. (Sarah: If you’re wondering what that shift might look like, Richard Rushfield’s newsletter, The Ankler, is a similar inside-baseball look at Hollywood, started by a longtime industry reporter that burnt out on the Hollywood media system, too. This week, they ran a puff piece about David Zaslav’s renovation of Woodland, Robert Evans’ legendary Beverly Hills estate. The reno is going great, everyone! Zaz loves art!)
Matthew’s tone right now though, about celebrities individually, since his focus is on bigger picture corporate and higher-level gossip, remains irreverent. When telling Vulture about his decision to leave THR, he dragged Julia Roberts:
“Belloni recalls producing a roundtable with Julia Roberts during which she was “awful,” fulfilling what he says is her “reputation around town” for being “mean” to people. “You’d never know that from the press, and you’d never know it from that roundtable,” he says. “And now I don’t have to care about Julia Roberts’s publicist. Well, I guess I will now, when she calls and screams at me.” (Roberts’s publicist declined to comment.)
First of all, I can confirm publicists call and scream at reporters all the time and I wonder to myself all the time why they think this is … an effective form of communication?
Next, I can also confirm, and I’ve mentioned it many times at LaineyGossip that Julia does indeed have that reputation, and that most reporters, myself included, are terrified of her at junkets. I’ve never had a bad experience with her, fortunately, but I’ve had many conversations with colleagues about their shitty experiences, and there have been occasions at junkets with her where we’re all whispering among ourselves what kind of mood she might be in and who’ll be the unlucky one that day to get her stank face. What’s interesting about Julia, though, is that she’s a classic American Sweetheart – and yet, I do think that the gossip public and internet culture kinda dig that she can cunt with the best of them.
On that note, let’s get to the mailbag because the first question happens to be about junkets.
Question from Emma: Lainey, are you still planning to write about the junket experience? The Dune 2 cast have been all over my YouTube feed this week and I’d love to know more about junkets from the media perspective. For example, how is the schedule determined (ie. what order the different media outlets get to go in)? Do you have preferences, like is it better to go in early when the subjects are fresh, or later when they’ve warmed up? As interviewers, do you give each other a heads-up on the energy in the room, or if a certain question bombed, or a star seemed moody? What I’m perhaps most interested in is how you decide the questions and how much latitude you have in this? As a viewer, it’s obvious when actors are asked something they haven’t already answered a bunch of times that day, and I notice they often respond best to really thoughtful questions about their movie - but how do you reconcile this with any pressure to create viral moments or something more clickbaity? On that final point, has the rise of things like Hot Ones, Buzzfeed Puppies, Wired Autocomplete, etc. had any impact on the traditional junket model?
Lainey’s Answer:
Thank you for this, Emma, and for your excellent and specific questions. They actually helped me shape next week’s newsletter that’s coming out on Tuesday for paid subscribers and includes details about the recent Oppenheimer, Argylle, and Dune: Part 2 junkets that I was on recently, with photos that I’ve been saving just for The Squawk. So please look out for that.
What I’ll say today, though, is that it’s been really interesting for me over the last half a year or so to get back into the junket game. For ten years, when I was a co-host on The Social, the majority of my interviews were live; when I did do ETALK interviews, they were long-form, not really junket style. So I was a bit nervous when left The Social six months ago to come back to ETALK full-time and get back on the junket circuit. I was worried I’d be rusty, out of the practice. And in a way it was exhilarating, after an almost 20 year career in broadcasting, to be nervous about the work. I know this is a super earnest thing to say but… I felt alive again!
Yes, I was like riding a bike, I was back in that groove pretty quickly – and maybe even better? Because of my previous experience and because I’d been working on a live talk show for a decade, it made me more nimble, and I’m telling you this with pride, not just in myself, but in my profession, and in my peers who are also in this profession.
I swear I’m not trying to make it a habit of dumping on TikTokers but there’s an assumption out there that anyone can do this job because of the way people on social media edit their content. Editing cuts out mistakes, editing is not live, editing means you can essentially only show the best parts, and where that relates to interviews is that now it’s set up an expectation that interviews happening in real-time that aren’t all bangers and highlight reels must be the fault of a shitty interviewer.
What I’ve seen happen sometimes, though, is when you put a social media influencer in a live setting, without the benefit of Capcut or whatever editing tool is that the content is not as compelling as it is when you’re watching it after being manipulated.
Did you see what happened at the People’s Choice Awards last weekend? There was a TikToker who was doing red carpet interviews, and asking the stars a Would You Rather question that’s popular online:
Gay son or thot daughter? There were a lot of people questioning whether or not this was appropriate (click to jump to Twitter for video):
I personally don’t entirely hate this. I think in some instances it can be funny and certainly result in a great moment that, sure, will go viral.
But I don’t think this approach should be the one we’re valuing more than the approach of those who’ve had experience doing traditional interviews with the goal of not going viral but actually having a conversation. And it shouldn’t be on both extreme ends of the spectrum – like you either have silly and irreverent TikTok interviews or long ass Inside the Actors’ Studio style interviews, or GQ profiles and nothing in between.
I also think it’s absurd that experienced reporters who’ve been working red carpets get warned at these events not to ask about this or that or to keep their questions to the movie only for the event organisers and publicists to invite TikTokers onto the press line to ask about gay sons or thot daughters. Because that’s also been a problem where trained journalists are being limited as to what they can ask and then two feet away a TikToker is out here stunting.
Anyway, as mentioned I’ll have a lot more to say about junkets and interviewing on Tuesday in the newsletter. In classic television fashion then, please stay tuned!
Question from Alexandra: For Sarah: follow-up to Ketri's question about Best Casting: What constitutes doing a great job at casting? Is it the cast's chemistry? (Loved your Spotlight example.) Is it how well the actors fit the roles? If the actor's job is to act, i.e., become the character, how does the casting director's work fit into that? As layperson viewers we can probably tell when someone is poorly cast (looking at you Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, although maybe that's a bad example that's just about physicality) but I'm not as clear about when a casting director has done a good job.
Sarah’s answer:
Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher is a bad example! If you change the name of that film to, say, John Sitter, it would be one of Cruise’s biggest movies of the 2010s. Jack Reacher is a GREAT film, basically a fancy B movie with spectacular action sequences and one of the best car chases in recent memory. But it’s called Jack Reacher and book readers couldn’t get over the character not being six-foot-eleven or whatever, so now they have Alan Ritchson playing a walking steroid vein on Amazon Prime.
But I will use Jack Reacher, the movie, as an example of great casting because top to bottom, that movie is spectacularly cast (by Mindy Marin). Richard Jenkins, David Oyelowo, Rosamund Pike, Robert Duvall, Joseph Sikora—even Jai Courtney fits into exactly the right role. But the coup de grace is Werner Herzog playing the villain. They did it a decade before The Mandalorian! Every actor in that movie is believably of that time and place, the working-class characters actually look working class, the guy managing an auto parts store LOOKS like he could manage an auto parts store. Hollywood has a huge problem casting working class parts, which I don’t get because there is a massive cohort of working-class actors out there, but they keep casting fancy British people to play blue collar Americans. Stop it!
As for spotting good chemistry, it’s basically the “mouth feel” of filmmaking. Does it feel right? Does the romantic couple create sparks, for instance. One thing that has been largely excised from the casting process are chemistry reads, taking the time to put actors together to find the best combination of people to play a couple in love, or soldiers in the trenches together, or a family on a doomed road trip. Casting is HARD, because so much of it is instinct, and so it’s not surprising that a fair few casting directors are former actors themselves. It gives them an insight into how actors might gel on camera together.
Casting is a little alchemical, too, because every director works with the CD differently, but like any other facet of filmmaking, an honest and open collaboration always yields the best results. When directors can communicate clearly what they’re looking for, the CD has a better sense of where to start. Because they keep track, CDs see everyone from A-listers to hopefuls still going to cattle calls, hungry for that first opportunity. The director can give them a type of actor—James Dean type, Denzel type, Julia Roberts type, whatever—and the CD pulls a group of likely candidates and starts sorting.
In olden times, this involved rounds of auditions, now so much of it is done through self-tapes and no one meets in person until later in the process. Some actors do like self-taping, though, because they’re going to be seen on a screen anyway, makes sense to start there (in-person auditions are taped for review). But a big casting search can still mean months of cycling through auditions until the CD winnows the initial pool of candidates to a handful of options, usually half a dozen or so, who will then meet with the director, screen test, hopefully do chemistry reads with candidates for other roles in the project.
In short, you can spot good casting when two things happen: 1) you instantly associate that actor with this role, or 2) you buy into the film so hard you’re transported somewhere else for two hours. Tom Cruise makes you forget you’re watching Tom Cruise, you’re just worried Maverick might die this time. Dominic Sessa seems transported straight from 1971. The couple on screen REALLY look like they’re in love, even though you know the actors are married to other people in real life. Good casting is seamless, you don’t notice it except for how right everyone feels in their role.
Question from Michelle F: May be too late for this week, but I was amazed by the Aussie news stations waiting for Travis’ plane. It was crazy enough tracking her plane to the Super Bowl, but at least that’s one of the world’s biggest stars to a huge event. This is crazy. Are there any analogies to how much this has swept people up, and for this long?
Lainey’s Answer:
If social media was around when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie first started dating, it would have been as crazy as TNT. I know it was so long ago now (almost 20 years, WTF?!) and maybe our memories have dulled over time but that was a fucking frenzy. You know how they always do the box office analysis factoring in inflation? Like how they always say Gone With The Wind is the highest or one of the highest grossing movies of all time when adjusted for inflation? (Don’t come at me math people! I don’t know if this is actually true because I don’t do money math, I’m just repeating a thing that people have been citing with regularity for years and making a point about gossip and social media.) If we substitute financial inflation for gossip inflation considering digital influence/social media/etc where gossip stories are concerned, and take Brange into account, and adjust that couple for inflation, I will argue that they’d be bigger than TNT because Brad and Angelina at the time were two superstars in their own right, whereas Taylor entered TNT as the superstar and Travis was only football-famous. On top of that, there was the Scandal, the love triangle, the Jennifer Aniston of it all. TNT started off relatively wholesome, nowhere near as controversial as Brange. Brange was salacious from the jump, and it went on, literally, for over a decade. At a time when media wasn’t as fractured as it is now. When monoculture wasn’t on the decline. Talk to me about TNT when they get past the two-year mark, because right now, this old bitch says it’s not even a comparison.
But, to your observation about Australian media losing their goddamn minds over Travis’s plane – with all due respect to Australia, and I live in Canada and we’re kinda similar this way – I think the madness over there has to do with a kind of … small town-ness? Hang on Aussies, don’t get mad yet. Let me lump Canadians in here, too.
Remember a couple of months ago I wrote about all of Toronto having a meltdown and tracking not-Shohei Otani’s plane amid speculation over where he would be signing? Local media was sending cameras to the airport, proper sports journalists were popping off, the biggest news outlets in the country were all over it …and it ended up being a nothingburger.
That’s sports, but I can give you a celebrity example, too. Harry Styles kicked off the North American leg of Love On Tour in Toronto in August 2022. It was round-the-clock coverage on the local news stations. I know this because I work in a news station and every fucking television in the building was doing live looks at the arena, at the crowds, airing streeters with fans screaming their faces off in excitement. And this was happening across all the local outlets. It went on for at least five days, if not more.
If Travis Kelce was flying into London or New York, I’m not convinced the local media would be reacting the same way that we saw in Australia. There is so much more going on in those places. But Toronto? And Sydney? Big cities, for sure, if we’re measuring by population and square footage, whatever, but if we’re measuring by, like, cultural activity? Don’t you think that has something to do with it?
Question from Rachel T: Curious about the financials on This Is Me Now music film— J Lo spent her own money on it, and I think the implication was that Amazon paid less than [its budget] for the streaming (or distribution? Not sure the right term) rights. But would that be a flat fee? Like she for sure lost money on it? Or would the Amazon deal include more money for j lo if it streams really well? I know big stars have done that for theatrical releases, but do streamers ever do that? I thought Netflix at least famously does not do that— high-seeming initial fees, but then creatives don’t make any money even if they produce a hit.
So if J Lo is for sure losing money on this film- is that a tax write off? Chalk it up to marketing costs to boost music streaming revenue? Like a self made Super Bowl? I read— maybe on LG?? It’s been a long week!— that headline performers don’t get paid for Super Bowl, but they make a ton of money on music streaming and concert fees etc from the exposure
Sarah’s answer:
First, a movie bombing is not a write-off the way Warner Bros. Discovery has been tanking films for write-offs. They’re getting the tax break for declaring the film a total loss, a film that has been released is not a total loss, it has earned revenue, if even only $1. I’m sure there are still ways to leverage losses on your taxes, but you’d have to ask an accountant about that.
As for how it works for streamers, yes, it’s basically a flat fee. The strikes last year were largely about how streamers not paying residuals—post-release royalties—is killing the industry. A-listers can command huge up-front paydays from streamers like Netflix and Amazon because they can demand their total compensation, what would normally be split between up-front salary and back-end residuals later, as one up-front fee. (The Scarlett Johansson/Disney lawsuit was about this—she argued by putting Black Widow on streaming, Disney undercut her back end pay which was meant to be part of her total compensation, and the courts agreed.)
Also, don’t assume JLo is losing money? We don’t know! The amount Amazon paid for This Is Me…Now has not been disclosed, it’s all rumor and speculation, so it’s hard to say how much she stands to lose, because we don’t know what Amazon paid for it. But given that the reviews have been mixed for the album and the film, it’s probably not too far off to say so far, things aren’t going as well as hoped. Still, the tour is where the real money is, anyway. The film can be a loss leader for a banger of a tour, but JLo may well come out ahead in all of this—way ahead if tickets and merch sales are strong.
So you could view This Is Me…Now: A Love Story as a fancy ass commercial for the tour, because all it has to do, business-wise, is drive people to the live experience. Artistically, hopefully JLo is satisfied with what she made, financially, she will probably do just fine after the tour. Now, may I direct you to Rachel Handler’s excellent exploration of the Jennifer Lopez Wedding Industrial Complex?
And finally, we’re going to end on a bit of a sobering note but this is super important for us: news broke late yesterday that Vice is probably over. Hundreds of people will be laid off and a lot of solid writing, producing, and editing will be lost. Vice is just the latest digital media company to struggle and fold. It’s volatile out there for digital publishers, most publishers actually, it’s been rough as fuck for talented writers and creatives, for storytellers, for journalists, for people many of us have relied on to bring us thoroughly researched and accurate information. This already has had a devastating effect on public trust in information and education.
I’m not about to give a lecture on why this is happening and who is to blame. If you don’t mind, this is yet another reminder to support and value the places on the internet that you appreciate. It does not have to be LaineyGossip or The Squawk – if you don’t find our content satisfying or engaging, we get it, we won’t keep you. But we do hope that you will invest your time and perhaps more in those who you do think are telling the right stories, entertainingly and responsibly.
Thank you so much, always, always, always, for joining our community and encouraging our work.
Keep squawking and keep gossiping,
Lainey and Sarah
I should mention that TV casting still does chemistry reads on average, I've never asked why but I've always assumed it's because you're going to spend more time together as a TV cast, so they want to make sure they're getting the right mix of people. The attitude with movies is just "grin and bear it for 3 months" and then you never have to see these people again.
Is "mouth feel" the new gut?