Stay Connected“Ankler Agenda” breaks down the headlines, trends and creativity shaping the evolution of Hollywood, the creator economy and entertainment.
The show is hosted by Elaine Low, author of Ankler Media’s popular “Series Business” Substack newsletter, who is joined weekly by her colleagues Sean McNulty (“The Wakeup”) and Natalie Jarvey (“Like & Subscribe”) — in addition to Richard Rushfield, the Ankler himself. Episodes will also be available every Thursday on YouTube.
Copyright: © Ankler Media
Amid a looming writers strike, cutbacks across the board, price increases and layoffs, Hollywood is at an inflection point, both in terms of how Wall Street sees it and how Hollywood sees itself. New Ankler reporter Elaine Low joins Richard Rushfield and Sean McNulty to dissect the existential crisis around town, as people wonder, what does it even mean to work here anymore? “This year you're really gonna have both creatives and studio execs taking a good hard look at themselves,” says Low. (5:52 The trio also discuss what the average entertainment consumer wants and expects (22:50), whether Apple and Amazon will quit streaming if their core businesses fail to drive independent revenue (30:25), and the soon-to-begin WGA strike negotiations (45:10).
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Sports agent Rich Paul shares his strategy for keeping clients like LeBron James and Jalen Hurts in the money.
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Bruce Vilanch spent 14 of his 24 years on the Academy Awards as the show’s head writer (2000-2014), collaborating with hosts Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, David Letterman and Steve Martin. Today, he breaks down why this year’s Oscars worked — from the use of live TV producers, to heartfelt speeches, to Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes.
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With the entertainment business in chaos, and a potential WGA strike looming, UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer comes out swinging in support of better economics for writers, and delivers sometimes scathing opinions about the unprofitable state of streaming, the great un-ordering of series, and stardom (including Leonardo Di Caprio's advice to Timotheé Chalamet).
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As the one-year anniversary of the Great Netflix Correction approaches, the town’s streaming future sure looks a lot more uncertain as Bob Iger, Jeremy Zimmer, UTA CEO, and Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Tony Vinciquerra make pointed remarks about the un-sustainability of the current streaming economy.
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Sony Pictures Chairman and CEO Tony Vinciquerra talks to Janice Min about The Woman King’s Oscars snub; PlayStation and The Last of Us; the decision to work with Will Smith again, and Spider-Man and Kevin Feige.
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For decades, the prevailing narrative around Gone With the Wind has been that it romanticized slavery and the antebellum south. But, as David Vincent Kimel learned when he discovered one of the film's few remaining shooting scripts, it almost did the exact opposite. The Yale grad student joins the podcast to talk about his groundbreaking story, which exposes the film's warring screenwriters and deleted scenes depicting the horrors of slavery (23:48). “It really is shocking how gritty and uncompromising that early material was,” he says. Also: Richard Rushfield's dire takeaways from talking with 20+ writers against the backdrop of a looming WGA strike (13:18), and the NBA agent joining our IRL Oscar week streaming summit (0:43).
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Today, Richard Rushfield dives deeper into his high school classmates growing up in L.A. (names include Matthew Greenfield, Jay Sures, Brett Morgen, Jason Blumenthal, Maya Rudolph and Jack Black),part of the many revelations from his profile in the Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair. Get ready to learn what car Sures drove, who carpooled with his sister, and which of the names above was his prom date (albeit group date). Also: the forces driving a near inevitable writers strike (19:02), how to interpret David Zaslav’s earnings call (10:11), and more on our IRL Oscar week streaming summit (39:04).
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“It’s a terrible place to make creative decisions when fear seeps into the process,”Peter Kiefer tells our hosts, as he explains what he learned from interviews with a dozen of the town’s senior executives (13:39). Some culprits? Underwater stock options, a top-down obsession with optics, the ruthless demands of Wall Street and private equity, and a relentless mining of old IP. Oh yeah, and the constant threat of layoffs. Also: our IRL Oscar week streaming summit (1:00), the new nepo-ex atop AMC Networks (4:13), Don Lemon’s bad behavior (11:06), and Richard Rushfield’s advice (34:43) for Jenna Ortega and all stars.
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Few technological disruptors to the entertainment industry have appeared quite as fast, or as existentially forebodingly, as artificial intelligence. After ChatGPT, DALL-E and other new AI technologies became publicly available in recent months, Cornell Law professor James Grimmelmann says, “I could feel the ground shifting.”Today, he walks our hosts through samples of AI music, script-writing and visual effects, and the ways in which the industry may be forced to evolve. “I don’t think Hollywood should be afraid. But every person should be thinking how every creative job… is going to look different as a result of this.” Also on tap: what’s coming under Bob Iger’s second shot at Disney.
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