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
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!
Erin, I love this so much and feel the same way: “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 think that LG is now the only celeb gossip site I regularly visit, and it's because I appreciate the tone and the writing is reliably great. I do really like Pajiba, and Go Fug Yourself has always been amazing, but I really only look at it when this site links to it. Or during Fug Madness.
Ten or fifteen years ago, I was way more of a gossip vulture and I'd read practically anything. I feel like Lainey and Michael K. sort of raised me, LOL
Look what happened to Sophie Turner when she went to shoot a movie in London, Joe Jonas and company implied she was a bad mother. So the double standard is real!!!
All of Gen X is Prince Charles waiting for their 90 year old boss to die since they refuse to retire and when we finally get our promotion, we get cancer. (Sorry this is still my post-election mood.)
I would pay double to keep The Squawk vibe going. And I say that as I am slashing non-essentials from my budget in anticipation of next year and an economic fall out.
Boomer here. I've worked since I was 11 years old, starting with babysitting, folding newsletters, and yard work. Got my first W-2 job 2 weeks after I turned 16 and worked up until 3 years ago when my industry experienced massive layoffs. I applied for 32 jobs, paying 1/2 what I was worth, between Jan-May and could not get hired. "Overqualified" was what I was told. After paying taxes for 44 years, my Social Security benefit is 83% less than I've been earning over the past 10 years. And yes, I did contribute to a 401K account but, when calculating how long those funds will last, the new age used for calculating is 95! People are living longer; funds have to last longer. I am fortunate that, with major adjustments to our budget, we can afford to live on my husband's salary but many of my single friends need to keep working until at least 70 to make it work. They would love to retire and let the next generation take over but it's simply not financially feasible. Obviously, this doesn't apply to the men mentioned in Hollywood but please don't be so quick to condemn all of us Boomers. And, as a side note, my husband is 5 years younger, Gen X, and he's been receiving cancer treatment for the past year.
This is a huge reason people aren't retiring in the majority of jobs. For Hollywood, particularly, that's less of the issue as we're talking about extremely wealthy people clinging to power.
But yeah this is a very common situation, sadly. I hope your husband is hanging in there, good vibes only.
My hometown weekly newspaper is $2 a week and publishes riveting articles such as “Town to hire third crossing guard?” And I gladly pay for it. So would absolutely pay more for the Squawk.
I just want to say thank you. For the last couple of weeks, and particularly since Tuesday, I haven't said much, not just here but everywhere. While everyone else else was hopeful, I looked around the place where I live and saw the writing on the wall. So I've not talked much anywhere (Well, except for Wednesday morning when I took my granddaughter to college and yelled at two college students who were high-fiving because neither of them voted, and I had an out of body experience in their faces. I'm not proud of it, but it was a brief moment of release.} Anyway, I still don't want to talk about it, despite all the thoughts racing through my head. And you've given me a place to not think about, a place that doesn't try to dumb everything down. A place where intelligent discourse is had on trivial celebrity intrigue and also topics of earth-shattering importance. Thank you for this.
No, but they weren't waving them around or I might have. It truly was an out of body experience. Once I saw the high fiving I floated out of my body and descended upon them with a vengeance. The young man said I'd given him things to think about when next he had the opportunity to vote. The girl just looked scared. They backed away from me slowly, never to be seen again.
And as soon as they had disappeared, I heard a disembodied voice from across the atrium say, "I agree!" It was the front desk lady, whose job it is to be nice to everyone and help them find whatever they need. Apparently I said the things she wanted to say but couldn't.
Lest we forget how many people nowadays engage with all of their media on the same device which makes it easier for them to view it all as “content”. I will not watch films or tv shows on anything but a television, increasingly people are forgoing having televisions and as we know, going to the movies. This also makes it easier to call all media output “content”. I won’t even get into the dating apps and how it’s dehumanizing us to try and find love on the same device where we order lunch.
I wish I could disconnect my phone from being my main source of music, too. I loved the Stevie Nicks Rolling Stone interview where she says she only uses her phone for the camera.
At the danger of wading into a blisteringly hot topic in parenting circles : this is actually our approach with parenting our young kids with screens. And it seems to work for us! Kids watch their tv shows and movies in front of a big old TV, sitting down, focusing on it. It’s a ritual and routine. Can’t play on our phones. Don’t have their own yet. iPads are for PBS kids games exclusively.
They get lots of screen time but so far it’s spread out across different devices so there is different energy associated with each activities. Seems to work. Keeps the whining down!
I want to work on that with my own digital life. I definitely whine more than them. 🤪
The Squawk, Pajiba and Go Fug Yourself are the only comment sections/communities I engage because they are thoughtful, kind, funny and I learn something new every time.
Came here to say this, too. I am so happy we have The Squawk bc I can engage with all of you, the staff included. I found the fug girls first, then LG which led me to Pajiba. These are also the ONLY place I read the comments. And thank you ALL for saving my sanity. I am still in a very dark place, but you all are helping me through.
Oh man, #content. My former film studies professor informed me recently that it's horribly common nowadays for him to mark essays where students describe classic cinema as "content."
The entertainment industry certainly wants it all to be seen as content, because it makes it easier to regurgitate into the same slop, or simply cut out the middle man and have AI generate it. To quote Scorsese's Harper's essay on Fellini: "it has created a situation in which everything is presented to the viewer on a level playing field, which sounds democratic but isn’t. If further viewing is “suggested” by algorithms based on what you’ve already seen, and the suggestions are based only on subject matter or genre, then what does that do to the art of cinema?"
Okay wait! Aren’t ppl in their 50s considered Gen X? I know the whole generations thing can be tiresome but if they are considered boomers I have to rejig my whole reality 🤣
I am a very elder millennial/super young Gen X - its not easy. 🤣🤣🤣
As someone who creates content for a living I can fully agree with Paul. What I do is not art. It’s marketing. It’s fun and creative but it’s not art. But i can only speak for the content I create for my clients.
The Squawkers are the best! There have been a few moments where I thought a thread might go off the rails but without fail ppl have kept their interactions respectful and with the goal of understanding. It is impressive! When the election discussions started in the chat I was worried we would get scolded by Jacek (lol) but he just started the sub-thread! Genius!
50s is gen x, I think. Speaking to Hollywood, the people in charge are generally on the X/boomer divide, though Bob Iger is a full boomer.
The problem there is specifically that that top tier management has made enough to retire early but they're not, and it's stalling everyone all the way down. They're just getting richer and richer while everyone else waits for an opportunity to advance.
50’s is definitely GenX. I take umbrage at someone of my generation being lumped in with the likes of Bob Iger. The same type of old dudes way past retirement age are gatekeeping the construction engineering industry too. It’s annoying at best and will totally fuck it up when they die and take their institutional knowledge with them. If a GenX makes it to the top, I’m shocked.
As for couples - Marilyn Monroe & Joe DiMaggio come to mind. They met and married after he'd retired from the Yankees, but he was still massively famous.
I appreciate the Mailbag shoutout! My job for years was to attempt to create an online community and it was an abysmal failure despite significant investment and a big national engine behind us. What you’ve build here is magic and proof of years of hard, excellent work!
I had not even noticed you changed the source of your pics since I honestly almost never pay attention to them, unless you highlight the outfit or something in them. I really come for the writing. I learned to speak English on my own, partly by reading. Reading articles in English speaking magazines and newspapers has been a staple for me for many years now, but the decline in quality has also been extremely obvious. Very few places have the quality you guys have, and I am always so happy to learn a new word or a way of writing I can then utilize in my own. I also come for the entertainment gossip, don't get me wrong, but the variety of topics and now this community make it so entertaining. I became a subscriber a year before I found out the chat was a thing, so the experience has only been improved! Thanks for all the hard work!
I go so many ways about artistry and content. I work for a nonprofit record label (we pay for everything - Taylor Swift would love us!). Managing release schedules and how to utilize songs and singles essentially as content to best support an artist's touring work and values is so so tricky. We've been able to maintain a whole album release model but the timeline for those doesn't always serve the artist who often want to premiere a work and release it immediately. Figuring out how to maintain physical product (CD and vinyl) is a whole other conversation. Not much to add just that I think about the interplay between artistry and content as well as the methods of delivery to consumers constantly!
This is so interesting! I'm so interested in the resurgence of vinyl as a collectible especially. It's basically the only way for physical media to survive is if it becomes valuable to collectors.
It is the fastest growing sector in the music industry but unless you are a major pop artist, there is no distribution that is beneficial to artists or labels. We are dedicated to promoting and documenting the work of Chicago classical musicians and try to manage physical product on an artist per artist basis. A lot of artists and collectors want vinyl/physical product but some artists want to avoid creating waste and only want digital. Reviewers and media still prefer it. Ultimately, there is no distribution for vinyl so we treat it as "concert merch" that artists can make, sell, and keep all the profits from. We allow them to use the existing album artwork and we pay for a vinyl mastering if they want to pursue it. In many ways it is similar to the content discussion - physical formats function more like promotional products rather than commercial products. We also have more artists interested in bypassing traditional streaming services and have been negotiating new digital distribution deals on their behalf. I could talk about my work all day.
I don't think books are quite there yet but special editions of books is a subject on everyone's mind in publishing (+ if tariffs change, how will we get the books over here from China, where most fancy books are printed?)
I just bought myself a record player and have started collecting vinyls and it has been such a delight, especially because my kids love putting on their favorite records. I still have all my CDs and I was going through them the other day to pull out a few to put in my car and my daughter couldn't understand a world where the only music you had came from the radio or round plastic discs.
When it comes to engagement in this community I’d say this: like attracts like! Eveyrone at LG has lively and respectful debates with each other from politics to fashion (I really love when one of you sneaks in an edit with a snarky or aghast comment into another’s article) and thus you’ve attracted people who do the same. I’ll admit that maybe 6 months or so ago I was ready to unsubscribe thinking that the comments were leaning more towards the Gen Z and Millennial generation that I’m not a part of! Not out of fear but out of seeking a community where I feel some part of. I didn’t unsubscribe, luckily I was wrong and there seems to be a healthy amount of generational diversity here which I enjoy.
Thank you for creating and maintaining this great community. I love the gossip but I also love the deep conversations and the behind the scenes stuff too. I’m a subscriber for life (now that I got my credit card expiration fixed!!!!
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!
THE JEWELS
Erin, I love this so much and feel the same way: “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 think that LG is now the only celeb gossip site I regularly visit, and it's because I appreciate the tone and the writing is reliably great. I do really like Pajiba, and Go Fug Yourself has always been amazing, but I really only look at it when this site links to it. Or during Fug Madness.
Ten or fifteen years ago, I was way more of a gossip vulture and I'd read practically anything. I feel like Lainey and Michael K. sort of raised me, LOL
Look what happened to Sophie Turner when she went to shoot a movie in London, Joe Jonas and company implied she was a bad mother. So the double standard is real!!!
I thought about the exact same thing when I was editing the post.
All of Gen X is Prince Charles waiting for their 90 year old boss to die since they refuse to retire and when we finally get our promotion, we get cancer. (Sorry this is still my post-election mood.)
I would pay double to keep The Squawk vibe going. And I say that as I am slashing non-essentials from my budget in anticipation of next year and an economic fall out.
Boomer here. I've worked since I was 11 years old, starting with babysitting, folding newsletters, and yard work. Got my first W-2 job 2 weeks after I turned 16 and worked up until 3 years ago when my industry experienced massive layoffs. I applied for 32 jobs, paying 1/2 what I was worth, between Jan-May and could not get hired. "Overqualified" was what I was told. After paying taxes for 44 years, my Social Security benefit is 83% less than I've been earning over the past 10 years. And yes, I did contribute to a 401K account but, when calculating how long those funds will last, the new age used for calculating is 95! People are living longer; funds have to last longer. I am fortunate that, with major adjustments to our budget, we can afford to live on my husband's salary but many of my single friends need to keep working until at least 70 to make it work. They would love to retire and let the next generation take over but it's simply not financially feasible. Obviously, this doesn't apply to the men mentioned in Hollywood but please don't be so quick to condemn all of us Boomers. And, as a side note, my husband is 5 years younger, Gen X, and he's been receiving cancer treatment for the past year.
This is a huge reason people aren't retiring in the majority of jobs. For Hollywood, particularly, that's less of the issue as we're talking about extremely wealthy people clinging to power.
But yeah this is a very common situation, sadly. I hope your husband is hanging in there, good vibes only.
Glad to see your voice here, KathyK. ❤️
I’m super glad to see you mention Gen X’ers. Boomers and Millennials all ween to forget us. :)
I’m sorry for your husband’s diagnosis and what you both must be going through.
Oh wow, the Prince Charles analogy! 🎯
I WANT to pay double to keep The Squawk going. I pay my hyper-local news blog $10 a month, and The Squawk is as valuable to me as they are.
My hometown weekly newspaper is $2 a week and publishes riveting articles such as “Town to hire third crossing guard?” And I gladly pay for it. So would absolutely pay more for the Squawk.
I just LOL'd
I just want to say thank you. For the last couple of weeks, and particularly since Tuesday, I haven't said much, not just here but everywhere. While everyone else else was hopeful, I looked around the place where I live and saw the writing on the wall. So I've not talked much anywhere (Well, except for Wednesday morning when I took my granddaughter to college and yelled at two college students who were high-fiving because neither of them voted, and I had an out of body experience in their faces. I'm not proud of it, but it was a brief moment of release.} Anyway, I still don't want to talk about it, despite all the thoughts racing through my head. And you've given me a place to not think about, a place that doesn't try to dumb everything down. A place where intelligent discourse is had on trivial celebrity intrigue and also topics of earth-shattering importance. Thank you for this.
You didn't Jason Kelce their phones did you?
No, but they weren't waving them around or I might have. It truly was an out of body experience. Once I saw the high fiving I floated out of my body and descended upon them with a vengeance. The young man said I'd given him things to think about when next he had the opportunity to vote. The girl just looked scared. They backed away from me slowly, never to be seen again.
And as soon as they had disappeared, I heard a disembodied voice from across the atrium say, "I agree!" It was the front desk lady, whose job it is to be nice to everyone and help them find whatever they need. Apparently I said the things she wanted to say but couldn't.
You may not have been proud of yourself, but I am. Well done for speaking up.
I wish this was on video so I could share it.
The idea of being proud that you hadn’t voted! Thank you for saying something to them.
Same! Thanks for sharing. I have placed myself in a bubble as well and am selectively emerging at this moment. And I echo everything you said.
Lest we forget how many people nowadays engage with all of their media on the same device which makes it easier for them to view it all as “content”. I will not watch films or tv shows on anything but a television, increasingly people are forgoing having televisions and as we know, going to the movies. This also makes it easier to call all media output “content”. I won’t even get into the dating apps and how it’s dehumanizing us to try and find love on the same device where we order lunch.
My goal is to one day have lunch delivered by an extremely hot interesting man. Two for one.
I wish I could disconnect my phone from being my main source of music, too. I loved the Stevie Nicks Rolling Stone interview where she says she only uses her phone for the camera.
At the danger of wading into a blisteringly hot topic in parenting circles : this is actually our approach with parenting our young kids with screens. And it seems to work for us! Kids watch their tv shows and movies in front of a big old TV, sitting down, focusing on it. It’s a ritual and routine. Can’t play on our phones. Don’t have their own yet. iPads are for PBS kids games exclusively.
They get lots of screen time but so far it’s spread out across different devices so there is different energy associated with each activities. Seems to work. Keeps the whining down!
I want to work on that with my own digital life. I definitely whine more than them. 🤪
The Squawk, Pajiba and Go Fug Yourself are the only comment sections/communities I engage because they are thoughtful, kind, funny and I learn something new every time.
Came here to say this, too. I am so happy we have The Squawk bc I can engage with all of you, the staff included. I found the fug girls first, then LG which led me to Pajiba. These are also the ONLY place I read the comments. And thank you ALL for saving my sanity. I am still in a very dark place, but you all are helping me through.
Oh man, #content. My former film studies professor informed me recently that it's horribly common nowadays for him to mark essays where students describe classic cinema as "content."
The entertainment industry certainly wants it all to be seen as content, because it makes it easier to regurgitate into the same slop, or simply cut out the middle man and have AI generate it. To quote Scorsese's Harper's essay on Fellini: "it has created a situation in which everything is presented to the viewer on a level playing field, which sounds democratic but isn’t. If further viewing is “suggested” by algorithms based on what you’ve already seen, and the suggestions are based only on subject matter or genre, then what does that do to the art of cinema?"
Okay wait! Aren’t ppl in their 50s considered Gen X? I know the whole generations thing can be tiresome but if they are considered boomers I have to rejig my whole reality 🤣
I am a very elder millennial/super young Gen X - its not easy. 🤣🤣🤣
As someone who creates content for a living I can fully agree with Paul. What I do is not art. It’s marketing. It’s fun and creative but it’s not art. But i can only speak for the content I create for my clients.
The Squawkers are the best! There have been a few moments where I thought a thread might go off the rails but without fail ppl have kept their interactions respectful and with the goal of understanding. It is impressive! When the election discussions started in the chat I was worried we would get scolded by Jacek (lol) but he just started the sub-thread! Genius!
50s is gen x, I think. Speaking to Hollywood, the people in charge are generally on the X/boomer divide, though Bob Iger is a full boomer.
The problem there is specifically that that top tier management has made enough to retire early but they're not, and it's stalling everyone all the way down. They're just getting richer and richer while everyone else waits for an opportunity to advance.
50’s is definitely GenX. I take umbrage at someone of my generation being lumped in with the likes of Bob Iger. The same type of old dudes way past retirement age are gatekeeping the construction engineering industry too. It’s annoying at best and will totally fuck it up when they die and take their institutional knowledge with them. If a GenX makes it to the top, I’m shocked.
I think I’m the last year of the boomers. I was born in 1964.
As for couples - Marilyn Monroe & Joe DiMaggio come to mind. They met and married after he'd retired from the Yankees, but he was still massively famous.
Can you imagine what her Instagram feed would have looked like?
I appreciate the Mailbag shoutout! My job for years was to attempt to create an online community and it was an abysmal failure despite significant investment and a big national engine behind us. What you’ve build here is magic and proof of years of hard, excellent work!
I had not even noticed you changed the source of your pics since I honestly almost never pay attention to them, unless you highlight the outfit or something in them. I really come for the writing. I learned to speak English on my own, partly by reading. Reading articles in English speaking magazines and newspapers has been a staple for me for many years now, but the decline in quality has also been extremely obvious. Very few places have the quality you guys have, and I am always so happy to learn a new word or a way of writing I can then utilize in my own. I also come for the entertainment gossip, don't get me wrong, but the variety of topics and now this community make it so entertaining. I became a subscriber a year before I found out the chat was a thing, so the experience has only been improved! Thanks for all the hard work!
Yes! I too love good writing. Great point about decline of print media.
I go so many ways about artistry and content. I work for a nonprofit record label (we pay for everything - Taylor Swift would love us!). Managing release schedules and how to utilize songs and singles essentially as content to best support an artist's touring work and values is so so tricky. We've been able to maintain a whole album release model but the timeline for those doesn't always serve the artist who often want to premiere a work and release it immediately. Figuring out how to maintain physical product (CD and vinyl) is a whole other conversation. Not much to add just that I think about the interplay between artistry and content as well as the methods of delivery to consumers constantly!
This is so interesting! I'm so interested in the resurgence of vinyl as a collectible especially. It's basically the only way for physical media to survive is if it becomes valuable to collectors.
It is the fastest growing sector in the music industry but unless you are a major pop artist, there is no distribution that is beneficial to artists or labels. We are dedicated to promoting and documenting the work of Chicago classical musicians and try to manage physical product on an artist per artist basis. A lot of artists and collectors want vinyl/physical product but some artists want to avoid creating waste and only want digital. Reviewers and media still prefer it. Ultimately, there is no distribution for vinyl so we treat it as "concert merch" that artists can make, sell, and keep all the profits from. We allow them to use the existing album artwork and we pay for a vinyl mastering if they want to pursue it. In many ways it is similar to the content discussion - physical formats function more like promotional products rather than commercial products. We also have more artists interested in bypassing traditional streaming services and have been negotiating new digital distribution deals on their behalf. I could talk about my work all day.
I don't think books are quite there yet but special editions of books is a subject on everyone's mind in publishing (+ if tariffs change, how will we get the books over here from China, where most fancy books are printed?)
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/96085-special-editions-of-books-take-a-special-touch.html
I just bought myself a record player and have started collecting vinyls and it has been such a delight, especially because my kids love putting on their favorite records. I still have all my CDs and I was going through them the other day to pull out a few to put in my car and my daughter couldn't understand a world where the only music you had came from the radio or round plastic discs.
When it comes to engagement in this community I’d say this: like attracts like! Eveyrone at LG has lively and respectful debates with each other from politics to fashion (I really love when one of you sneaks in an edit with a snarky or aghast comment into another’s article) and thus you’ve attracted people who do the same. I’ll admit that maybe 6 months or so ago I was ready to unsubscribe thinking that the comments were leaning more towards the Gen Z and Millennial generation that I’m not a part of! Not out of fear but out of seeking a community where I feel some part of. I didn’t unsubscribe, luckily I was wrong and there seems to be a healthy amount of generational diversity here which I enjoy.
Thank you for creating and maintaining this great community. I love the gossip but I also love the deep conversations and the behind the scenes stuff too. I’m a subscriber for life (now that I got my credit card expiration fixed!!!!
Kevin Feige, at 51, is GenX. We truly are a forgettable generation if people are calling him a Boomer.