He’s aware of the storylines, and he reacts to various challenges to his authority as if they’re just weird turns the producers came up with behind the scenes. This should come as no surprise. This is how you win in reality TV, a format Trump is eminently comfortable in.
Donald Trump’s true antecedent isn’t Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, or even Mitt Romney. It’s Richard Hatch, the guy who won the first season of Survivor.
.. Hatch gleefully styled himself as the contestant you loved to hate and invented reality TV as we know it. The producers were only too happy to follow along.
.. Hatch invented the alliance — the voting bloc that would carry a contestant to the finals. He double-crossed others with impunity. And he generally seemed to get a huge kick out of behaving like a total asshole on TV. Hatch understood, on some intuitive level, that we wanted to see people give in to their own worst, most amoral impulses on our TV sets, and where he went, reality TV followed. Reality TV wasn’t for the nice or pure of heart. It was for the nasty, and in that first season, Hatch alone seemed to grasp this.
.. What’s also notable here is the way Hatch drew to himself a coalition of people who wouldn’t necessarily have kept company with him in other situations, simply because he rarely blinked and seemed like he knew what he was doing in a most unusual situation... Richard was the one guy who seemed like he could see the whole picture, simply because he didn’t let things throw him, and that caused others to gravitate toward him, even as they were fairly certain he would stab them in the back eventually... Watch again, if you can, Trump’s confrontation with Megyn Kelly over his previous misogynistic statements. Try to ignore, if possible, how horrible those statements are. Instead, focus entirely on how Trump carries himself... For starters, Trump doesn’t shrink from Kelly’s challenge. He stays ramrod straight at the podium, and he doesn’t shift or move around. That’s pretty basic stuff, but you’d be surprised how many politicians who are under the gun forget all about it.Now notice how he uses his hands. His gestures are kept close to his body, so they don’t fly out too far from the audience’s attention or distract from the speaker at hand. He’s essentially keeping the center of the screen focused entirely on him, even when the Fox News chyron pushes him into the left half of the screen. This is, again, something politicians know to do (keeping your gestures small and forceful conveys control over your own emotions),.. But also look at how good Trump is at sliding what he wants to say in between what Kelly is saying. He holds up a single finger, the universal symbol of “My turn.” He waits for just the right pause to jump in. And he doesn’t let Kelly continuing to speak deter him. He knows exactly how to do this, because, in so many ways, Trump is just back on reality television at this moment. If anything, he makes Kelly seem like she’s out of control of the situation, on a night when Kelly’s performance was generally very good. And that’s to say nothing of how quickly he comes up with this little quip to turn the audience to his side.
Everybody Should Be Very Afraid of the Disney Death Star
The first episode of the Streaming Wars is over. The rebels won. Now the empire strikes back.
Disney also acquires a majority stake in the TV product Hulu, which it may use to kickstart its entry into the streaming wars.
These additions would enrich an overflowing treasury at Disney, whose assets includes Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, ABC, ESPN, the world’s most popular amusement parks, and, of course, its classic animated-film division
.. The deal allows Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire patriarch behind 21st Century Fox, to consolidate his own kingdom—and his legacy—around the very place where he got his start: news.
.. Streaming video has conquered pay TV and created a generation of cord-cutters; the youngest Millennials (those in their late teens and early 20s) watch 50 percent less traditional television .. than people that age did in 2010.
.. For media and entertainment companies, there is one big existential question: Get big and stream, or give up and sell?
.. Traditional television is a pure gerontocracy. The only age demo watching more TV than in 2010 are eligible for Medicare.
.. You could say Disney is spending $60 billion for a risky makeover to appeal to a younger demographic, while Murdoch is using the money to install a golden stair lift.
.. Disney’s long-term strategy is, like Netflix, to own the means of distributing its content. What’s more, this deal is a “horizontal” merger
.. With this deal, Disney would control as much as 40 percent of the the U.S. movie business
.. Its control of the sports-television landscape, between the regional sports networks and ESPN, might be even more concentrated
.. Hollywood studios should be afraid to compete with a corporate Goliath that could earn half of all domestic box-office revenue in a good year.
.. Every tech company should be afraid to get into a content war with a company that combines the
- top blockbuster movie studio, with a
- top prestige-film company, with a
- world-class television production company, with the
- most valuable franchises—Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, and X-Men—in the world.
.. In the last fiscal year ending in October, Disney’s made $55 billion in revenue, with about 60 percent coming from television and film (the rest came from parks, resorts, and merchandise). That 60 percent is endangered: Box-office ticket sales have been flat or declining for years, and television is in obvious structural decline
Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too
Knowing what I know now, I wonder if it wasn’t my friendship with them — and Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney — that saved me from being raped.
.. The range of his persuasion tactics went from sweet-talking me to that one time when, in an attack of fury, he said the terrifying words, “I will kill you, don’t think I can’t.”
When he was finally convinced that I was not going to earn the movie the way he had expected, he told me he had offered my role and my script with my years of research to another actress.
.. he gave me a list of impossible tasks with a tight deadline:
1. Get a rewrite of the script, with no additional payment.
2. Raise $10 million to finance the film.
3. Attach an A-list director.
4. Cast four of the smaller roles with prominent actors.
Much to everyone’s amazement, not least my own, I delivered, thanks to a phalanx of angels who came to my rescue, including Edward Norton, who beautifully rewrote the script several times and appallingly never got credit, and my friend Margaret Perenchio, a first-time producer, who put up the money. The brilliant Julie Taymor agreed to direct, and from then on she became my rock. For the other roles, I recruited my friends Antonio Banderas, Edward Norton and my dear Ashley Judd. To this day, I don’t know how I convinced Geoffrey Rush, whom I barely knew at the time.
.. Now Harvey Weinstein was not only rejected but also about to do a movie he did not want to do.
Ironically, once we started filming, the sexual harassment stopped but the rage escalated. We paid the price for standing up to him nearly every day of shooting.
.. So he told me he was going to shut down the film because no one would want to see me in that role.
It was soul crushing because, I confess, lost in the fog of a sort of Stockholm syndrome, I wanted him to see me as an artist: not only as a capable actress but also as somebody who could identify a compelling story and had the vision to tell it in an original way.
.. I was hoping he would acknowledge me as a producer, who on top of delivering his list of demands shepherded the script and obtained the permits to use the paintings.
.. But all of this seemed to have no value. The only thing he noticed was that I was not sexy in the movie.
.. He offered me one option to continue. He would let me finish the film if I agreed to do a sex scene with another woman. And he demanded full-frontal nudity.
He had been constantly asking for more skin, for more sex. Once before, Julie Taymor got him to settle for a tango ending in a kiss instead of the lovemaking scene he wanted us to shoot between the character Tina Modotti, played by Ashley Judd, and Frida.
.. When Harvey saw the cut film, he said it was not good enough for a theatrical release and that he would send it straight to video.
This time Julie had to fight him without me and got him to agree to release the film in one movie theater in New York if we tested it to an audience and we scored at least an 80.
Less than 10 percent of films achieve that score on a first screening.
I didn’t go to the test. I anxiously awaited to receive the news. The film scored 85.
.. the film industry stopped making an effort to find out what female audiences wanted to see and what stories we wanted to tell... between 2007 and 2016, only 4 percent of directors were female and 80 percent of those got the chance to make only one film. In 2016, another study found, only 27 percent of words spoken in the biggest movies were spoken by women.
The Kennedy Center Honors Reveal Why Trump Won
In a year in which Trump has often showed bad judgment, one of his smart choices was to stay away from the Kennedy Center on Sunday night. In this case, discretion was the better part of valor, as the ceremony — like the equally cheesy Hollywood, theater, and music-industry awards shows that don’t pretend to be the same as a royal investiture — was an occasion for hours of liberal virtue signaling at Trump’s expense.
.. cheers for television producer Norman Lear. Indeed, it wasn’t entirely clear whether Lear was being honored for giving us Archie Bunker and a passel of shows that mock the prejudices and values of working-class Americans, or if he was being celebrated for his liberal activism.
.. His fellow liberals may have thought that honoring Lear in the first year of the Trump presidency was a way to poke a stick in the eye of the Donald. But the invocation of Lear’s groundbreaking All in the Family also should have given those in attendance food for thought about why it is that so many real-life working-class Americans refused to take the cues they were given by the left-leaning pop-culture world and voted for Trump last year.
.. His fellow liberals may have thought that honoring Lear in the first year of the Trump presidency was a way to poke a stick in the eye of the Donald. But the invocation of Lear’s groundbreaking All in the Family also should have given those in attendance food for thought about why it is that so many real-life working-class Americans refused to take the cues they were given by the left-leaning pop-culture world and voted for Trump last year.
.. His fellow liberals may have thought that honoring Lear in the first year of the Trump presidency was a way to poke a stick in the eye of the Donald. But the invocation of Lear’s groundbreaking All in the Family also should have given those in attendance food for thought about why it is that so many real-life working-class Americans refused to take the cues they were given by the left-leaning pop-culture world and voted for Trump last year.
.. For the television audience that will watch the show when it appears later this month on CBS, this will confirm what grassroots conservatives and working-class voters already thought about Trump’s critics. Displays like this are why so many Americans have stopped listening to sermons from their supposed betters in the arts. If liberals want to make a case against Trump that his voters will listen to, they are going to have to stop talking down to them.