Mailbag for November 8, 2024
Mailbag for November 8, 2024
Film isn't 'content', retire already Bob!, on Barry Keoghan's parenting privilege, Substack launch learnings, and has there been a Travis and Taylor before
Dear Squawkers,
Thinking some more about Paul Mescal, specifically a comment he made in his interview with The Times, which is ostensibly about Gladiator II, but in this interview, Mescal says something I think we all need to be more conscious of, which is to refuse to refer to film—or any art—as “content”. He says: “Over the last few years people have been talking about films as content. […] That’s a filthy word. It’s not ‘content’, it’s f***ing work. I’m not being snobby, but there are two concurrent industries. One that works with a lack of care, artistic integrity. Go nuts, make stuff with Instagram followers as a factor, whatever … But the other is what has always been there — the craft of film — making, directing, lighting and production design. That keeps artists alive.”
I started catching myself calling film and TV “content” in the late 2010s. I can’t find the exact moment, but at some point while recording an episode of my old podcast with Kayleigh Donaldson, The Hollywood Read, I remember catching myself and saying something along the lines of—we need to stop calling film “content”. I really started making a deliberate effort NOT to call film/TV “content” last year, during the strikes, because by then it was glaringly, gallingly apparent that calling film and television “content” is a deliberate attempt by money men to demean the entire industry, to devalue the work, to deprioritize the craft, to make it seem like just anyone can walk off the street and make a successful movie or show, and not that it takes unique artistic talent and skill nurtured by generations of artisans passing on their knowledge to the next generation, who will continue to expand and increase the knowledge base and skill level of the people who actually make the films and series that make the entertainment industry profitable.
“Content” originally referred to online-only entertainment, the work of Youtubers and Viners and now TikTokkers. Their creative output needed a name, because what they do ISN’T filmmaking, not in the traditional sense. But then somewhere in the streaming era, “content” crept into the language of cinema, and we have GOT to kick it out. We CANNOT let the conflation of social media memes and cinema continue, because it IS being used to devalue cinema, to make it seem as disposable as any weekly digital fad.
That said, I disagree with Mescal about digital content having a “lack of care, artistic integrity”. There are people on Youtube who put a LOT of effort into what they do. The folks at Watcher Entertainment, for example, are attempting to bring TV-level production values to Youtube shows (how they’re going about that and if their audience even wants that is a separate conversation). There are video essayists who put a lot of creativity into their presentations—I recently enjoyed this long-form deep dive into The White Lotus by The Water Cooler, not least because the presenter had a costume change for each character/segment of his essay, which was a fun visual touch. I’m not here to shit on Youtubers and TikTokkers for doing their thing, some of them are tremendously creative, talented, hard-working people who are building a whole new wing of creative industry from scratch.
But it isn’t filmmaking! And Paul Mescal is right, calling filmmaking “content” is filthy. It’s a low-down trick that has worked for a decade to devalue cinema, but it’s time to pull it back and draw a sharp line around cinema. Cinema IS NOT content. Cinema is cinema. The people who want to call it content do that so they can make it seem less effortful, so they don’t have to pay people living wages to produce it. Fuck those people. I refuse to call it content any longer.
Onto the mailbag!
Question from Hannah M.:
I mentioned this already in the chat, but regarding the Hollywood Reporter article about old bosses being responsible for Hollywood’s malaise, is this something or just a whole lot of talk about nothing? I guess what I am asking is if we’re at a breaking point in Hollywood where something has to give or if it’s just gonna be more malaise going forward.
Sarah’s answer:
Something has to give, but also, this is not just a Hollywood problem. Across all industries there is an issue with older workers not retiring. I hate to make this a generational thing, because of a lot of generational fighting is a distraction to keep us from coalescing around shared class values, but Boomers are not retiring and it’s screwing everyone else.
The thing to note in that THR article linked in Hannah’s question is how young the Boomer bosses were when they came into power. Ari Emanuel founded Endeavor in his thirties and was in his forties when he merged Endeavor with William Morris to form super agency WME. He still runs Endeavor today, in his sixties. Film producer Michael De Luca became President & COO of New Line at just TWENTY-SEVEN. Today at 59, he’s co-chair and CEO of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group. There is no sign he’ll be leaving that post any time soon. Similarly, Kevin Feige was 33 when he was named president of production at Marvel Studios, which is he still running today at 51. Again, no sign he’s going anywhere.
Basically, there’s a generation of Hollywood leadership that came into power in their twenties to forties, who are still in power today, 20-30 years later. And you could say most people don’t retire until their mid-sixties, at least, and a lot of these people aren’t at retirement age, which is true. But most people don’t retire until their mid-sixties because they can’t afford to. Ari Emanuel’s net worth is estimated at over $400 million. Kevin Feige’s is $250 million. Bob Iger is 73, has been the CEO of Disney for most of the last 25 years, and is worth an estimated $700 million. These people can afford an early retirement.
But they’re not vacating their seats, which has created stagnation across the industry in the middle ranks. One of my college friends started as an on-set PA in the mid-2000s, when we graduated college. She rocketed up the corporate ladder, getting a VP title at 32. Her title has gotten longer over the decade since, but she hasn’t actually been promoted. They just gussy up her business card because there is nowhere to promote her, none of the senior officers at her studio have retired. Another friend works on the legal side of the industry and is in the same position—fancy ass title that amounts to middle management, no promotion in sight because everyone above her is still there after ten years. The people I know who have been promoted do it by job hopping. It’s basically the only way up, but even they have stalled out around the same middle-management level. There’s only so high you can go if the upper echelon doesn’t retire.
Which is why a LOT of Millennial talent in Hollywood is leaving for other industries. Some got into streaming in the early stages and there is a swath of 30-40 something upper management at companies like Netflix and Prime Video. Some hopped to video games and now find themselves negotiating movie deals against their old bosses. Many, many Hollywood dreamers left for tech, which is why their messaging is so good when their products are so often bad.
The people running the industry today are largely the same people who were running it in the 2000s, and some of those people have been around since the 1990s. The industry is VASTLY different, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at a list of Hollywood executives. The malaise isn’t going anywhere until we get a new (younger) class of leaders in Hollywood.
Question from Lexi in the daily chat:
I’d love for LG to tackle this story because of one particular angle … the part about [Barry Keoghan] building a nest egg for his son. That’s something I’ve never considered about his post-Banshees work: capitalizing on his popularity and working away a lot are in service of something more important ❤️ https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/nov/05/barry-keoghan-hits-out-at-disgusting-online-trolls-using-his-son-against-him
Lainey’s Answer:
Sarah addressed this briefly on the main site and in one of the chats this week – her point being that whether or not Barry Keoghan chooses to post or not post about his son is none of anyone’s business. I actually hadn’t heard about trolls on social media commenting about this. That said, I wrote about Barry’s parenting privilege during last award season in this post when Saltburn made him the toast of the town and it was revealed in GQ that he’d moved to LA for award season and to, as you note, “capitalize on his popularity”. He tells The Guardian that he is “just trying to get a good body of work and create safety for my child”.
Yes, of course, this is “in service of something more important”. But I still go back to what I said in that post from January:
“And that’s a whole other conversation that we should have if we’re talking about career ascent and the move from supporting to lead. Barry and Alyson Sandro, Brando’s mother, are no longer in a relationship. She is presumably the one parenting Brando back at home in London while Barry is ‘staying [in LA] a while’ to make his moves. What would that be like for a woman in the same situation? What extra considerations would there be in order to realise this goal? I think about what Ali Wong said during her acceptance speech about her ex-husband, Justin Hakuta, and the fact that she couldn’t have progressed to the next phase of her career without his involvement. Presumably Justin, who is an entrepreneur (he’s a Harvard Business School graduate), has had to make some adjustments/compromises in his career in order to accommodate her growing success. We’re nowhere near the point where this is typical but that’s also why it was so important for Ali to shout that out, so that eventually it can be normalised in the same way that it’s so ‘normal’ in Barry’s situation – for a male artist to be able to make his art and have a family, secure in the comfort that there’s a woman who is handling the responsibilities on that front. Right now, the majority of women who find themselves like Barry, with opportunity before them and who are also mothers, do not have that luxury.”
It's wonderful that Barry is out there hustling to build a nest egg for his son, a nest egg he never had given his own complicated childhood. This is a beautiful ambition. But as a single parent, he’s able to build that nest egg because his co-parenting partner is the primary parent; he has the peace of mind when he’s out there nest egg building that his son is being safely looked after by his mother. And, as a man, frankly he’s not judged by the same parenting standards.
The celebrity single mother, who came from an impoverished background, trying to build a nest egg more often than not can’t leave her child with their father and move to another city for months to make more money. See Keke Palmer. See Halle Bailey. See Katie Holmes!
If they did, though? Imagine if they did leave their kids to go nest egg building, imagine the persecution? You don’t have to imagine, actually. Not this week in America because over half the people who voted in this election voted in favour of laws that dictate how women should live their lives, and the role they are expected to play in society. I’m sure you’ve seen on social media the videos of men proudly gloating that “it’s your body, my choice”?
There is no way a woman in Barry Keoghan’s position gets the same grace. Or, frankly, the same acting opportunities. The nest egg is happening because he’s being offered roles, very attractive roles. And already, in that department, actresses are working at a disadvantage. In this situation, in these times, she might do more branded posts on Instagram, more sponcon. Maybe a podcast. Guess what would happen then? More shit talking about her being too greedy to be a good mom.
Question from CD:
What are some things you have learned since launching The Squawk a little over one year ago? Has anything surprised you about the LG readers or Squawk community now that you know more about them? Has anything about exploring a new business model been unexpectedly challenging (or unexpectedly positive)? Essentially, I'm just looking for any insights you've gained from taking the business in this new direction.
Jacek’s answer:
There are a few things to unpack here and a couple of ways to go about it. The first relates to what we’ve found about the community, and I’ll address the other parts about the business model after that.
I wrote the other day in one of the election threads how we’ve been so amazed at the level and manner of engagement amongst our paying members in our comments and chat threads on The Squawk. Here we were, the day after the election when many of our mostly left-leaning members were in total shock about what had just happened, and the discussions about what went wrong, how they were managing, what needs to happen next were so supportive and constructive, and reflective of what we’ve seen to date in these forums over the last year even over much less important but equally polarizing issues (case in point, the Sussexes and the Palaces). I wrote in the thread how when we launched The Squawk, we weren’t sure what to expect in terms of how much we would need to moderate and step in, how messy it could get, or whether or not there’d be enough interest to sustain The Squawk. We had a best guess, which ended up being pretty accurate, but we weren’t sure.
How that part of The Squawk has gone since was so well summed up by Jen, who wrote this in response to my comment earlier in the thread:
I work in engagement for an association (which used to be the common-ground, like-minded meeting place for many professionals), and the type of community you have built here in these daily chats is the kind of thing we would write case studies and brag about. It is THE DREAM of anyone who is trying to bring people together voluntarily on common interests and issues. Both the level of engagement and the quality of discourse/disagreement. And the fact that we so often dive into gossip-adjacent topics like the Olympics and politics, while still connecting them to our main purpose, which seems to be to use gossip and current events to connect with each other and better understand our world and culture. I don’t know if it’s common to other Substacks as this is the only one I participate in. All to say, if I could pull this off at work I’d be a hero. So kudos to you folks, it’s really amazing.
I forwarded that to Lainey, Sarah, and Emily because it IS something to be proud of, and of course so much credit goes to our members. But it’s also a product of the way we were able to unintentionally and naturally curate our audience on LaineyGossip.com over the years.
As many of you know, we were a very different blog in our early years and that meant we also naturally invited a different crowd, people who loved the meanness of our site, who enjoyed the slagging and nasty bits. And of course, many of those folks are the same folks who still read the site today, who evolved their gossip taste and understanding over the years, and who were willing, like us, to learn a bit about themselves.
Others dropped off over the years, however. We lost some of those who wanted us to stay nasty. We lost our Trump-supporting readers who didn’t like how left we leaned after 2016 when politics started to become more polarizing and personal. We lost others over the course of the #MeToo and George Floyd movements, when they felt offended at the use of terms like white privilege or at the suggestion that hockey had a culture problem. And of course, we lost those during our 2020 “cancellation” who perhaps didn’t know who we were in the early days of LaineyGossip or were just reminded that we wrote nasty things and felt like they were unforgivable.
Those who joined over those years or remained with us during our evolution were folks who were open to hearing from diverse voices, were willing to learn a bit about their own biases and insecurities, and didn’t need to read juicy tear-downs to appreciate that gossip can be other things besides nasty, and this is primarily who is left on LaineyGossip and The Squawk today, and who takes part in our chats. So we’ve found that our discussions on The Squawk require little to no moderation. We’ve had to clap back or monitor things literally twice over the last year, and we find that often our community will respectfully shut down a rant that goes across a certain line, so there’s a degree of self-policing that takes place. It’s constructive, it’s supportive, and it’s SO not Twitter.
Not to discount what I just wrote above, it also helps that we’ve asked those folks to pay a subscription fee. It’s amazing how much more civilized people are when they need to put a name and a credit card to their rants, and this is a trend you’re starting to see all over the internet to access sites or forums. Not just because of the moderation effects that it has as I describe above, but also because a lot of online publications are finding that relying solely on ad revenue is starting to become an unsustainable business model. Our subscription revenue has definitely helped us ride out some weak months when the ad business sees seasonality, or when Google decides to turn off the taps for a bit and send less traffic after one of their many algorithm updates during the year.
Many of our concerns about The Squawk were related to the community and how much upkeep that would take. That’s been minimal as mentioned. The challenges we HAVE seen have been mostly quite manageable, like ensuring that what we write can be supported by photos when possible. Photo licensing is often assigned to specific domains, so if you have two or more, some agencies require you to pay more to use photos on your other sites. It’s partly why, if you’ve noticed, we’ve dropped Getty Images late this year and moved the bulk of our photo licensing to Shutterstock. They are the smaller of the big players in the industry (but closing the gap mightily) and offered us the flexibility to extend our photo licensing to The Squawk. They also cover nearly all the same events that Getty does, so we’ve found that we don’t have many unintended gaps in our coverage because we can’t get photos.
The Squawk has also added writing time to our plates, and that has been a challenge but one that has been more manageable since Lainey left The Social. We likely would not have been able to launch this site if she hadn’t left, or it might have looked a bit different. Every Thursday night (when Sarah is prepping the site for Friday) Lainey jumps into your questions in the mailbag request thread or stuff she finds in her email and cranks out two to three thousand words over dinner and into the evening. But it’s been enjoyable for her as it’s a different kind of writing than it is for LaineyGossip, and so far, she hasn’t felt overly taxed. I also enjoy jumping in as I am right now to offer some insights into the business of LaineyGossip/The Squawk when those questions come up.
Lastly, the other ‘bumps’ in the road after a Substack channel launch is when the yearly renewals come up. Credit cards expire, excitement of a new launch wanes, people lose jobs and tighten up, housing gets EVEN MORE expensive, you name it. The heart skips a beat when you look at your subscriber chart take a cliff dive on day 365 post launch, only to realize as you zoom out that it’s a small portion of your base. Thank you for those of you who subscribed and re-subscribed. And for those of you who needed to get new cards in the system.
Where we go next is the next puzzle. I’m currently in discussions about possibly changing our ad partners in the new year. We’ve also talked about what other features we can bring into The Squawk, and we’ll share those with you as we go. But for now, let me use these last few lines to address those of you who are reading this as part of your free subscription as a bit of an extended sales pitch. If you’re exhausted with the trash, trolling, name calling, and utter chaos of Twitter, Facebook, and the other “free” social media networks, join us in our Squawk forums. It’s such a different place. And we hope it stays that way, of course, as it grows, but we’ll also protect it. We have no qualms about giving someone their money back if their aim is to soil the experience of our other members. Thankfully that has yet to happen, so we invite you to join us if you are tired of what’s out there in Elon’s world.
Question from Laura:
Has joining Substack cut down on your email box? Or just added a different stream of communication to keep up with?
Sarah’s answer:
At first there was a decrease in email, but a year later, my email seems to be back at normal levels, it’s just somewhat different people emailing me, I presume because some emailers are here now. Substack hasn’t really done much for my inbox, probably because people who comment online and people who email are two different types of people.
Substack has, however, basically replaced Twitter for me. I try really, really hard to stay off Twitter. It’s not fun anymore, and also, Elon is using it as an AI training program, and I don’t want to feed his bots my original thoughts and ideas for free. There’s probably an AI bot scraping Substack—they’re scraping the whole damn internet—but the vibes are way better here, so the pros outweigh the cons. Overall, there’s no more to keep up with than before, because I just traded one social media platform for another.
Question from Michelle F:
Not sure if this has been answered already, but wondering if we have seen anything like the reality show that is Travis and Taylor before? We’ve seen couples with as much paparazzi and tabloid interest, but it was mainly just photos. But because of the podcast and required media appearances the Kelce brothers speak publicly about relationship- adjacent things, plus Kylie and Donna Kelce have also become personalities, and that didn’t happen with Brange or the Beckhams. It’s like a reality show without an actual show, and I’m wondering if that’s happened before.
Lainey’s Answer:
It didn’t happen with Brange or the Beckhams because their adjacents weren’t, um, as welcoming of the spotlight. Taylor Swift fell in love with a man who was already trying to build a media imprint with his brother – the framework of the Kelce family business was already sketched out before Taylor accelerated their expansion plans so that it’s become, as you say, a reality show without an actual show.
As for whether or not it’s happened before…
Yes and no. No, it hasn’t happened before because all of these digital platforms for amplification weren’t available before. Taylor is a massive force, I get it, but she’s a massive force during a time in humanity (or de-humanity) when we have so many different forms of expression and social engagement.
If all this had been around like 25 years ago though? (Holy fuck, how has it been 25 years!?!) We would have seen this with Britney Spears, guaranteed, 100%.
Britney was so explosively IT, all the adjacents in her life floated to the top too: Justin Timberlake, her sister, her mother, and it’s a testament to the power of her Celebrity that even in those times, which seem like the dinosaur age of social media, it WAS an all-consuming reality show because culture wasn’t so fractured then. There actually was a monoculture, EVERYONE was following along even without Instagram and TikTok. Remember when she and Kevin Federline started dating? That was a reality show, literally! If KFed had access to what influencers do now? Please. There would be TikTok dances, he’d totally have a fucking podcast where he would promote his “music”. He would namecheck Britney every few minutes. I apologise, I do not mean to compare KFed to Travis Kelce, LOOOOLLLL, but the fact of the matter is, in his time, because of Britney’s influence, people were THROWING MONEY at KFed for appearances and to host parties. I know we don’t want to remember this because that guy is such a fuck. But Britney was an industry, she made everyone a player.
I know what you’re trying to say about TNT and whether or not we’ve ever seen a relationship like this before in the celebrity ecosystem. But I don’t think we can make those comparisons because of how media has evolved. Each celebrity couple is a product of the media coverage of their time. And to say that one couple is more “reality show without a show” than the next when they exist in different periods is kinda like comparing athletes. Is Michael Jordan better than LeBron? Is Tiger Woods better than Jack Niklaus? Tiger hit the ball harder and farther. But he was working with tech advancements in equipment that Jack didn’t have. I’m Gen X so of course I’m going to say Michael Jordan, but I think it’s undeniable that LeBron has competed against a field that, in general, is much fitter than the field that MJ was playing against.
It's the same with celebrity gossip and relationships. We haven’t seen a situation like TNT before but that’s less to do with Taylor and Travis than it is with where we are in digital availability.
That’s all and thank you for squawking with us during this hell week!
Just keep squawking,
Sarah, Lainey, and Jacek
I might have used it recently but I remember talking to Lainey about how I hated the word "content" too. It such a gross corporate term.
I'm planning on ditching a lot of news and entertainment sources during the next few years, and it's more for my selfish sanity than for the sake of my wallet. If visiting a site makes my blood pressure rise and my fists ball up, it's probably not worth it.
But this space is different. I don't come here to get fired up; I come here to think. Gossip can be frothy and frivolous, but this place intellectualizes it - or just has straight-up fun with it. I've learned a lot from The Squawkers and I'll love pop culture until I die, so I figure it's money well-spent.
Re. the couples question: I wish I could have been around for the Taylor-Burton media insanity. The jewels! The booze! The condemnation from the Vatican!