The Hollywood Reporter’s Top 24 Stories of 2024

If you’re planning on attending Tom Rothman’s party in November, you’ll need a costume. Rumor has it the Sony chairman is asking invitees to the event — which is a joint birthday bash with his wife, actress Jessica Harper — to dress up as characters from movies made under his reign. Luckily, it’s a long list of wardrobe choices, stretching back a multitude of decades. You could go as Jack Dawson from 1997’s Titanic. Or Satine from 2001’s Moulin Rouge! Or Miranda Priestly from 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada. Or Rick Dalton from 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

The point here is, Rothman is turning 70 and has been in charge at Sony (and before that, Fox) for a very, very long time.

As it happens, he’s not the only silver mogul in Hollywood these days. Bob Iger is 73 and has been running Disney off and on for nearly 20 years. Ari Emanuel, 63, has been running WME for nearly 30 years, since he started his agency in 1995 (after starting in the mail room at CAA, the company co-founded by then-28-year-old Michael Ovitz in 1975). Jeremy Zimmer, 66, has been running UTA for more than 30 years, since he co-founded that agency in 1991. Michael De Luca is a relative spring chicken at 59, but he’s been fronting studio slates — at New Line, MGM, Amazon and Warner Bros. — for three decades. 

Many of these no-longer-so-young Turks are now old enough to qualify for AARP discounts. But few of them seem in any huge rush to retire.

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On a sunny day last November, the grief-stricken family and friends of producer Kevin Turen gathered at the Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, then made their way to a reception on the Warner Bros. lot. At just 45 years old, Turen had been driving with his 10-year-old son in the car when he suddenly slumped over, having suffered a cardiac event. His son managed to stop the car and call for help.

A true cineaste with a zest for life and a long list of independent film credits (Arbitrage, The Birth of a Nation, Pieces of a Woman), Turen was beloved by many. Among the mourners that day were Robert Pattinson, Andrew Garfield and Zac Efron. Zendaya, the star of the biggest success of Turen’s career — the culture-rattling HBO series Euphoria — missed the funeral but attended the reception.

Absent from the gathering altogether was Sam Levinson, the temperamental writer and director behind Euphoria and the ill-fated series The Idol, which was intended to launch The Weeknd’s acting career. Levinson not only had been Turen’s very close friend but also his partner in their Little Lamb Production company — until Levinson shocked many who knew both men by cutting ties with Turen earlier in the year. The reasons were mysterious to all but a handful of close associates.

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Glen Powell arrives at lunch through a back door toting a container of bone broth he isn’t eager to look at, much less consume. He’s more a “chicken-fried-steak-in-Austin kind of a guy,” he insists, but he’s signed on to star in an A24 revenge thriller and he’s supposed to drop 15 pounds in a matter of weeks. It means he won’t be ordering the midday margarita that Ron Perlman is nursing at the next table. Reluctantly, Powell requests a green juice.

“I’ve almost given up on this diet, like, three times,” he says, flashing a familiar smile. “I’m like, ‘Can’t we just change the character?’ “

But Powell’s not one to give up on anything, so he hands over the broth. The restaurant’s going to store it for him, he tells me, since he doesn’t have a kitchen of his own in Los Angeles anymore. After more than 15 years here, he is moving back home to Texas, where he’ll finally complete his college degree and be closer to his family. He’ll keep a place in Tribeca, too, but he’s officially turned over the keys to his spot in the Hollywood Hills that he’s been living in ever since he landed his breakout role in Top Gun: Maverick. In fact, this is Powell’s last week in L.A., which is hitting him harder than he anticipated. Still, at 35, he’s ready for a change, and the real benefit of “getting to this point in Hollywood is that I can now leave Hollywood,” he says. “It’s like I’ve earned the ability to go back to my family.”

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What does it feel like to take a punch to the face from a legit boxer?

Since turning his attention full time to the sport in 2020, Jake Paul, 27, has absorbed his share of them — first from fellow YouTubers, then pro athletes, then MMA fighters and now from actual boxers.

“Eighty-five percent of the hits you don’t really feel — but then there’s that other 15 percent,” Jake says, munching on an omelet and a bowl of berries on the poolside terrace of his compound in Puerto Rico.

The island has been home to Jake and his older brother, 29-year-old YouTuber turned WWE wrestler Logan Paul, since late 2020. Many assume it’s to avoid paying federal taxes on passive income, which the territory’s Act 60 allows as a means of promoting local investment. To that, Jake responds, “This is the most beautiful place in the world, and it’s my home and I wouldn’t live somewhere that I don’t absolutely love.” It also happens to be a spot that, like Jake, is obsessed with boxing.

With his wiry blond goatee and a towel wrapped across his torso like a toga, he suggests Zeus sitting atop Mount Olympus. It’s hot out here — a sultry heat that feels much warmer than the temperature, currently 91 degrees.

Jake purchased the home in Dorado — what a local tells me is the “Beverly Hills of Puerto Rico” — in 2023. Old habits being hard to break, the boy who made it big posting outrageous, aspirational content promptly showed it off to his 21 million YouTube followers in a video titled “My New $16,000,000 House.”

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“I don’t know if anybody told you, but none of us knows what we’re doing,” announces two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster halfway through the Drama Actress Emmy Roundtable. She’s surrounded by two more Oscar winners — Expats’ Nicole Kidman and Lessons in Chemistry’s Brie Larson — who nod in agreement. The True Detective star continues, “and that’s the real beauty of it, having that freshness of doubting yourself.” Over the course of an hour at The Georgian Hotel in Santa Monica, that trio, along with The Morning Show’s Jennifer Aniston, Shogun’s Anna Sawai, Griselda’s Sofía Vergara and Feud’s Naomi Watts, discuss everything from mentorship to menopause.

Who here has ever lied to land a job? 

NAOMI WATTS Oh, for sure.

BRIE LARSON We all lied and said that we knew how to ride a horse, and we couldn’t.

NICOLE KIDMAN I can ride a horse, but I did lie about ice skating. Not a good one to lie about. 

JENNIFER ANISTON I might have not been fully honest. I said I couldn’t ride a horse, just because I didn’t want to ride the horse. 

WATTS Oh, I definitely added special skills to my résumé back in the day. Multiple languages, lots of weird sports. 

SOFÍA VERGARA I didn’t lie to get a job, but I lied to my agents so they’d take me when I moved to L.A. I said I could sing and dance. Why not? I didn’t think they were going to send me out. Then they sent me to an audition for Chicago on Broadway.

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On Oct. 21, 2021, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, then 24, arrived at the Bonanza Creek Ranch just south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, an hour or so before sunrise and reported to her job as the armorer and props assistant on the set of the low-budget indie Western Rust. She took a COVID test, swung by the catering tent and headed to the prop truck to prepare weapons the cast would need that day, including Alec Baldwin’s gun, a long Colt .45 revolver, which she loaded with what she has said she thought were dummy rounds.

When first assistant director Dave Halls called for Gutierrez-Reed on a walkie-talkie, she walked to a church set on the edge of the ranch’s mock Western town and approached Halls, seated in a pew with director of photography Halyna Hutchins and director Joel Souza, conferring about the schedule. That morning, most of the camera crew had walked off in a protest of their working conditions, and the remaining crew were scrambling. “I told him I needed a weapons check, and he said, ‘We don’t have time,’ ” Gutierrez-Reed said of Halls, according to testimony she gave to New Mexico’s Occupational Health and Safety Bureau (OHSB) in December of 2022.

About two hours later, the gun Gutierrez-Reed had stored, cleaned and loaded for Baldwin fired a live bullet into Hutchins’ chest, killing the 42-year-old cinematographer and injuring Souza, who stood beside her. The shooting, a rare and horrifying accident in a film industry that was built on gunslinging imagery, would shine a light on the use of real weapons on sets, the ramifications of low-budget filmmakers’ penny-pinching and the dysfunction of a Santa Fe prosecutor’s office charged with figuring out who exactly is to blame.

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“Schindler’s List was never a cure for antisemitism,” emphasizes Steven Spielberg. “It was a reminder of the symptoms of it.”

These days, tragically, antisemitism is all over the headlines: Neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville. The Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. The Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel that claimed the lives of some 1,200 Jews, the largest slaughter since the Holocaust. Not to mention a former and possibly future American president using Hitler-like language at his Nuremberg-esque rallies, referring to immigrants as “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of America.

All of which is why, 30 years after Spielberg won best picture and best director for his movie about Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved 1,200 Jews from the Nazis during World War II, THR is revisiting his film with an oral history about the miracle of its making. Speaking to those who labored to get the film onscreen — including stars Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley and Ralph Fiennes, composer John Williams, agent Michael Ovitz and Martin Scorsese, who at one point was attached to direct the picture — what follows is the most complete telling of one of the most important movies not just of Spielberg’s career, but of all time.

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It’s Christmas at the Kennedys’, and a happy sort of chaos has upended the family home, nestled in the affluent L.A. enclave of Mandeville Canyon.

Conor, 29, the heartthrob son once romantically linked to Taylor Swift, has emerged from the backyard sauna and is wandering around the house in a towel. His striking sister, Kyra, 28 — a fashionista and “Page Six”regular back in her party days — is fussing over their father, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 69, in preparation for today’s photo shoot.

Amid this flurry of activity, affecting an air of regal calm as best as she can, stands Cheryl Hines. Hines, 58, has been Kennedy’s wife since 2014 — a second marriage for her and a third for him. Kennedy’s second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, mother to Conor, Kyra and two other sons — Finn, 26, and Aiden, 22 — died by suicide in 2012. Hines now oversees a blended family that also includes her own daughter, Catherine Young, 19.

Not 24 hours earlier, Kennedy — who is running as an independent for president (and polling higher than expected, with 1 in 5 Americans saying they are open to voting for him) — was in the hot seat for a combative CNN interview that challenged his highly controversial views on vaccine safety. Right now, however, he’s debating the merits of beige versus blue dress shirts.

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“It was, by every objective measure, one of the most devastating days of my life,” Dallas Jenkins recalls.

The Midwest-born director and son of a best-selling author of Christian novels had for years struggled to build a Hollywood career and had finally landed his big break: directing a movie for Get Out producer Jason Blum, who shared Jenkins’ belief that there was an untapped market for elevated religious fare. Their film — 2017’s rom-com The Resurrection of Gavin Stone — scored “insanely” well at a test screening and their hopes were high.

Then came opening weekend.

“I was at home with my wife and shell-shocked,” Jenkins recalls. Gavin Stone ranked 18th at the box office and opened to just $1.2 million. “I mean, we were crying. I thought this was my chance. I had finally got in the door. I was working with one of the most prolific and influential producers in Hollywood, who liked me. And it just completely failed. I thought, ‘Maybe this is the wrong business for me.’ “

But within weeks, Jenkins had another idea. This one was for a TV series, which would go on to gather a flock of more than 200 million viewers worldwide who have watched at least one episode, largely driven by word-of-mouth. The show has also sold an incredible $63 million in theatrical ticket sales after becoming the first series to screen an entire season in theaters. It even has its own annual fan convention. All this, and you’ve probably barely heard of The Chosen, which tells the story of Jesus and his disciples across a planned seven seasons.

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It would be perfectly reasonable to assume that debuting at the tail end of the most wildly unpredictable presidential election in modern times would provide Saturday Night Live with all of the drama it can handle as it celebrates its hotly anticipated 50th season. But drama often lurks behind the scenes, too, as it has with the will-he-or-won’t-he retirement rumors surrounding TV maestro Lorne Michaels. In the fall of 2020, it was Michaels who appeared on Sunday Today and revealed that the 50th season would be his last. “By that point, I think I really deserve to wander off,” he told host Willie Geist.

The comment, which he then doubled down on in subsequent interviews, prompted a tireless succession of media stories about who might replace him. Tina Fey’s name emerged, along with that of Seth Meyers, Colin Jost and Michael Che. Then something happened as the milestone season approached: Michaels decided that he didn’t actually want to leave the show he created 50 years ago and has been fastidiously lording over for the past half-century, save for a brief window in the early 1980s. Sure, he’d scale back as he prepares to turn 80 later this year, but the man who has launched the careers of Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig — among many, many others — still loves the sketch series and its command of the zeitgeist, particularly during political periods. “It’s always going to be described the same way, which is ‘uneven,’ and yet people have decided somehow that it’s important,” Michaels says now. “And so as long as it’s important and I can be useful, I’ll stay.”

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Oscar nominations were announced in Los Angeles at 5:30 a.m. on Jan. 23. The backlash began by sunrise. Barbie received eight nominations, including for best picture, but where were individual nods for director Greta Gerwig or star Margot Robbie, the A-list architects who constructed a billion-dollar blockbuster out of an $18 plastic doll that was born in 1959? Barbie fans went berserk online, denouncing the Academy for what they saw as a sexist snub. Breathless press coverage of the controversy dominated the news cycle for days, and even Hillary Clinton weighed in to support her shunned sisters. 

By Jan. 26, producer Lynda Obst had heard enough. “I have to write about this misplaced horror,” Obst unloaded on Facebook, offering a history lesson pulled from personal experience, reminding her readers that comedies rarely fare well at the Academy Awards in top categories. Furthermore, she and best friend Nora Ephron “didn’t flip out” when the late filmmaker’s movies failed to gain traction outside of screenplay categories. Ephron did not “expect kudos” simply for being female, nor did Obst “expect applause” for casting Jodie Foster in 1997’s Contact, one of Hollywood’s rare female-fronted sci-fi blockbusters, alongside Alien, with Sigourney Weaver. “Barbie is a super fun, super commercial movie that made a trillion dollars or something and that is a serious reward. This is feminism run amok and having devoted my career to hiring and developing female talent I know from whence I speak.” 

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If it’s a trendy health or wellness hack, I’ve probably tried it. Meditation apps, gratitude journals, bulletproof coffee, sleep optimization — done all that. I went through a cryotherapy phase, which has now evolved into a cold plunging phase (because why be merely shivering for three minutes when you can be freezing in agony for six?). Infrared sauna? The Finnish are onto something. Red light LED mask? Let’s glow!

So I was probably always going to get around to trying ketamine therapy, which I did two years ago. I had read all the things: How the animal tranquilizer and party drug can work wonders for treatment-resistant depression. How it can “reset your brain.” How ketamine’s unique dissociative effect allows the user to take a step back, get off their hamster-wheel of ego-driven thinking and obtain some healing distance on past traumas. 

Which sounded terrific. I wasn’t depressed, exactly, but felt stuck in a rut — like one of those Westworld androids that keep doing the same patterns of behavior over and over. Also, when I was a bit younger, I had watched both my parents decline and perish from illnesses that are among the worst our world has to offer, and those memories still haunted (my mom had cancer and my dad had Alzheimer’s, and, in case you’re wondering, Alzheimer’s wins that particular “which is more fucking awful” race hands down). I suspect those experiences, and wanting to reduce the odds of contracting a similar disease myself, are a big reason I chase wellness trends (“not today” as Syrio Forel declared).

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Hollywood writing partnerships dissolve for many reasons. There may be creative disagreements, personality conflicts, workload imbalances. For the celebrated author Dave Eggers and his younger brother Toph, who’d had a run of collaborations, the rupture in their bond could perhaps be attributed to all these things. But, mainly, to far deeper, darker troubles.

“For so many years I was locked in a certain relationship with Dave, and I just couldn’t see fault in him — and then, once I did, it flipped,” says Toph over one of several long meals at diners and delis across L.A.’s Eastside.

Dave emerged as a literary phenomenon a quarter-century ago with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, his memoir about raising Toph after both of their parents died of cancer within weeks of each other. The book became a generational touchstone for its joking-but-not, manic-expressive style — evidenced in the title itself, as well as the stream-of-consciousness prose — along with its wry exploration of ’90s youth culture, elevating Eggers to the rare pantheon of young writers, from Jack Kerouac and Bret Easton Ellis to, more recently, Sally Rooney, whose work transformed them into bona fide celebrities. One passage recalled how Dave, who then worked as an illustrator, narrowly lost out on being cast for The Real World: San Francisco to cartoonist Judd Winick.

In the book, Dave depicted Toph (short for Christopher) as a guileless kid, the personification of hope. Now, at 41, Toph is wearied and aggrieved. Fair or not, he places some of the blame on Dave.

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In 2021, ESPN broadcaster Sage Steele was suspended following comments she made on a podcast, including calling parent company Disney’s vaccine mandates “sick” and questioning why Barack Obama considers himself Black when he was raised by his white mother. When she returned to her job, she felt she’d been sidelined from key on-air opportunities. So she dialed one of her closest friends, Chris Harrison, for advice. They’d gotten to know each other while co-hosting the Miss America pageant and the Scripps National Spelling Bee. He, too, had recently lost a big gig — as host of ABC’s The Bachelor, after defending a contestant accused of racism.

“Chris said, ‘I know who you need to talk to — my lawyer. He’ll be calling you momentarily,’ ” Steele remembers. “Within five minutes, Bryan Freedman was on the phone with me.” Steele left ESPN — she now has a podcast at Bill Maher’s Club Random Studios and will voice an upcoming animated series for conservative media outfit The Daily Wire — but was pleased by the settlement Freedman clinched. “He’s the kind of person you need if you’re David fighting Goliath,” she says. “Little me versus Disney? He’s the defender of what’s right. He fought for me when I didn’t even think I was worthwhile. He made me feel fearless when I was at my most vulnerable.”

Freedman, the divisive Hollywood attorney who’s referred to himself as a “pit bull” and is known for a rabidity and ruthlessness that can make even his fellow ferocious practitioners marvel in astonishment, has ascended as a powerhouse in recent years, becoming the go-to for alpha dogs who see themselves as the underdogs in a crisis.

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Nicole Kidman’s new film, Babygirl, opens with a scene moviegoers may think they have seen many times before — an actress having a very pretty orgasm. For a global movie star with five Oscar nominations and two Emmys, you might even consider the opening risqué. But it’s what follows that reveals Kidman to be in fresh cinematic territory and why she calls this role “a calling.” In subsequent scenes, director Halina Reijn divulges that the intended audience for the opening breathy performance had been the character’s handsome, loving husband (Antonio Banderas) — and Kidman delivers other, much more feral climaxes without him. In the A24 movie, a gender-flipped love letter to erotic thrillers like 9½ Weeks and Basic Instinct, Kidman plays a powerful CEO, wife and mother whose attraction to a brazen young male intern (Harris Dickinson) threatens to blow up her Instagram-perfect life.

It’s a bracingly vulnerable performance, provocative even for the woman who raised eyebrows 25 years ago with Eyes Wide Shut, and a role that caps a year in which Kidman is, seemingly, everywhere. Her six 2024 projects include the soapy Netflix murder mystery The Perfect Couple, which became the most watched original streaming series in the U.S. in September; the Taylor Sheridan spy thriller series Lioness on Paramount+; and Lulu Wang’s prestige drama series for Amazon Prime, Expats. The crush of output is thanks in part to a scheduling quirk caused by the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, but it also reflects the rarefied position in which Kidman finds herself at age 57, more in demand than ever. 

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A population riven in two, but bound to the same fate. Individuals whose identities are reduced to the faction they’ve chosen, red or blue. And the bitterly contested stakes: prosperity or death.

Sound familiar?

“I want to highlight the theme of taking sides,” Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk says of the major motif for season two of his international hit series, in which people in personal financial crisis engage in a battle royale for the chance to win a life-saving sum of money. Hwang is standing in the show’s enormous dormitory inside the belly of Studio Cube, Korea’s largest production facility, about 100 miles south of Seoul. While the familiar set still features rows of bunk beds stacked halfway up to the ceiling like scaffolding, it’s impossible to overlook a new feature: a giant blue “O” and red “X” illuminated on the floor, with corresponding blue and red lines bisecting the room.

Though it is November 2023, with the U.S. presidential contest still a year away, Hwang knows that season two will drop around the time of the election — which he calls “the ultimate O-X event.” He also notes that sectarianism is universal. “In Korea these days, we’re seeing much worse conflict between the elderly and the younger generation. And you see demarcation everywhere. There’s no room for debate, only hostility. So I was inspired by the direction the entire world is taking.”

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Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s 49th birthday was three days ago, but he’s still in a celebratory mood.

If there was any question as “Fiddy” nears 50 whether he’s still at the top of his game, the answer arrives with him at the photo shoot for this story: The rapper turned mogul brings $3.5 million in cold hard cash, most of it stuffed into two heavy black suitcases. Some is assembled into a square stool that he sits on while smoking a cigar. Every now and then, as he poses for photos, he digs into the stash and adds a few more stacks to the table beside him — as those on set watch in awe, including the four security guards Jackson arrived with. The doors are locked shut, and the window shades are closed for maximum privacy.

Asked whether he had to visit the bank to get the funds, Jackson says with a relaxed smile: “I just had that. I got more than that,” then adds that “I was inspired [to bring it] by [Muhammad] Ali,” referring to the 1964 Sports Illustrated cover for which the then-22-year-old boxer posed with $1 million in winnings. “I was like, ‘I want to do a shoot like that.’”

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It’s a frigid Sunday afternoon in April, and Andy Cohen is perched on a park bench, ruminating about the ups and downs — but mostly the ups — of his nearly three-decade-long career in broadcasting. Occasionally, a passerby walks past and smiles, or shyly waves hello. This, it quickly becomes apparent, is a common occurrence for Cohen, 55, who seems to be something of the unofficial mayor of this cobblestoned, townhouse-lined neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, where he — and now his two children, Benjamin, 5, and Lucy, 2 — has been living for 27 years. Everybody, it seems, loves Andy Cohen. Well, not everyone, but we’ll get to that in a moment. He started his career in New York in his early 20s, a precocious, fiercely ambitious network executive with not-so-secret dreams of making it big in front of the camera as a TV host (despite being told by a mentor that he had “no charisma”). Today, he’s not only a producer of one of the most successful reality franchises in television history (the one with all the Housewives), but he’s spent 15 years as host of Bravo’s much-buzzed-about late night talk show Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen, on which everyone from Hillary Clinton to Mariah Carey has answered his jaw-droppingly blunt questions. He oversees two unruly radio channels on SiriusXM — and hosts two shows himself. He has written five best-selling books (about himself, naturally), and every New Year’s Eve he entertains millions of CNN viewers worldwide by getting wasted on camera with his pal Anderson Cooper.

It’s been a remarkable ascent for the fast-talking Jewish gay kid from St. Louis who turned out to have a lot more charisma than his former boss could see. And that rise has surprised — and delighted — nobody more than Cohen himself, who makes no bones about how much he adores being famous. Like a certain other Andy, he has a Warholian fascination with celebrity, especially his own, even if it does sometimes make his dating life a tad complicated (he once got kicked off Grindr for “impersonating” Andy Cohen).

Lately, though, Cohen has been dealing with something he’s previously only had the good fortune to poke fun at: scandal. 

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A few years ago, audio platforms and media companies threw enormous amounts of money at creators to build their podcasting slates. Spotify, which spent more than $1 billion on its push, inked deals with the Obamas, the Sussexes and more, in addition to bankrolling its biggest star, Joe Rogan. Now, after a content spending pullback, it’s a different landscape. One that, in the telling of SiriusXM president and chief content officer Scott Greenstein, has matured to the point where it’s clear which big players in the audio space still can write checks. Namely, SiriusXM, Spotify, Amazon’s Wondery and iHeartMedia.

SiriusXM has been particularly aggressive in making rich talent deals this year, snapping up both SmartLess and Call Her Daddy, two of the most popular podcasts in the industry. The acquisitions were notable not only because of their price tags, both at $100 million-plus, but also for what they say about the satellite radio giant’s larger business strategy and reputation as a talent-friendly destination. 

“No one is kind of correcting us or saying, ‘Oh, I don’t know, you should do it this way,’ ” says Ted Danson, who’s new to the podcasting space with Where Everybody Knows Your Name With Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson (Sometimes), which is under Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco banner, acquired by SiriusXM in 2022. “We get this kind of carte blanche: ‘Go have fun and talk to interesting people.’ ”

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Kathy Griffin breaks her silence just once during the hourlong flight. “So far,” the redhead whispers, “it’s just a lot about food.” 

Earbuds back in, she returns to the source of her frustration: hour 23 of Barbra Streisand’s 48-hour audiobook memoir. The comedian enters a semi-meditative state, eyes closed and left hand on Elliot Stabler, the vibrating chihuahua mutt who’s as much her emotional support animal as she is his. Griffin has a few reasons for wanting quiet on our June trip from Los Angeles to her San Jose tour stop, but the one that matters most right now is that she footed the bill for this chartered jet. The five other passengers, all but two of us on her payroll, oblige her wish. My first time flying private is at the behest of a self-identifying fourth-tier celebrity who spent two months of 2017 on the No Fly List. 

For those who stopped paying attention to Griffin after that photo — the one she posted of herself holding the bloodied likeness of Donald Trump’s severed head that left her unemployed, ostracized and in hot water with the Feds — things got a hell of a lot worse from there. Though she ultimately was never charged with conspiracy to assassinate the president, she says the ordeal cost her more than $1 million in legal fees. She became addicted to pills, primarily OxyContin and benzodiazepines. She attempted suicide. She was diagnosed with lung cancer. She lost use of a vocal cord after an operation to arrest that cancer. And, in December, her relationship of more than a decade dissolved when she filed for divorce from her husband. Griffin calls it “the laundry list.” This flight is as much about shushing those demons as it is ensuring she’ll still be able to speak after the two-plus-hour set puts her battered larynx through the wringer. 

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The NBA’s blockbuster $76 billion megadeals with Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon Prime are a testament to its product, and the unrivaled reach and power of live sports. And the deals should also send shivers down the spines of almost everyone in Hollywood outside the network executive suites.

While the 11-year agreements are seen as a critical strategic maneuver by the media companies looking to build streaming business and are a financial boon for the league, they are also, in the words of one veteran media executive who declined to be named, the latest example of a “transfer of wealth from Hollywood to the sports leagues.”

Already, agents and writers are grumbling that the rich deals will mean fewer new TV shows ordered, and fewer reruns, which will result in lower residuals.

NBC’s deal alone will replace more than 150 hours of broadcast TV entertainment with live NBA programming on Sunday and Tuesday nights (not including the playoffs, NBA All Star Weekend or select WNBA games, which will also run on NBC). “When you zoom out and think about the total picture of what we’re trying to do, which is to bring our excellent TV media assets into the future, I think we view the NBA as an excellent piece in that puzzle,” Comcast president Mike Cavanagh told Wall Street analysts July 23, while adding that “it will allow us to rebalance programming from other areas — obviously, we’ll fill a few nights on NBC with this content versus other content.”

That “other content” will be, largely, entertainment programming.

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If you were to stick a pin in a timeline at the exact moment Silicon Valley declared war on Hollywood, it would likely land on Aug. 29, 1997. That’s the date Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph got together in Scotts Valley, about an hour south of San Francisco, and started a little DVD delivery company called Netflix.

The rest is history: Within just a couple of decades, all the traditional pillars of the old entertainment order started to crumble. Linear television, cable TV, theatrical box office — nothing was left standing, at least not as tall as it once had. This we all know, all too well.

But here’s what’s new. Very recently, just over the past several weeks, there have been signs that Southern California once again is rising — or trying to, at any rate. This time, though, the civil war with the north isn’t over digital platform windows or online content protection; this time, it’s mogul-to-mogul combat on a much grander battlefield, as both sides — super-rich techno libertarians versus not-quite-as-super-rich old guard Hollywood liberals — clash over what sort of government the country should be electing in November. Today, they’re fighting over nothing less than the presidency of the United States.

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“I trust myself as a writer, I trust my process,” Quentin Tarantino declared onstage at the Adobe Max creative conference in 2016. “I never try to take anything out too soon. If I do, I realize it, and I put it back.” The acclaimed filmmaker added: “Not every film needs to be made. Not every movie should be made.”

And one of those movies that will not be made — as the world learned April 17 — is The Movie Critic, which was billed as Tarantino’s 10th and final film. The project initially focused on a writer working for a fictional porn magazine in the late 1970s and then it quietly evolved, amid a flurry of rewrites, into something resembling a spinoff of his ninth film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (with some potential meta twists, as we’ll explain later).

The decision came as quite a shock given the project was expected to film at least one sequence this year, and then go into full production in early 2025 with an A-list talent attached (Brad Pitt, reteaming with Tarantino for a third time). “I don’t recall him rewriting so much and pushing a start date once he had a movie in mind,” says one agency partner.

A studio was never officially announced, but two sources close to the now-scuttled project tell The Hollywood Reporter that Sony Pictures was firmly on board after ushering 2019’s Once Upon a Time to blockbuster status. That film grossed $377.4 million globally to rank as the writer-director’s biggest movie behind Django Unchained ($425.4 million). Tarantino felt like he found a new compatriot in Sony studio chief Tom Rothman after having made nearly all his previous films with Harvey Weinstein. Sources say the mood on the Sony lot isn’t one of disappointment, however. 

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