The Press Box - 'The Press Box’ — Entertainment Writing: SVU (Ep. 375)

Episode Date: November 10, 2017

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss how the Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K. scandals have changed entertainment journalism (03:30), Disney versus the nation's film critics (21:30), and the Ric Flair 30 for 30 documentary, 'Nature Boy' (37:30). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons. I want to tell you about the ringers gambling podcast. It is called Against All Odds with Cousin Sal, and you're not going to believe this, but it is hosted by Cousin Sal. The biggest degenerate gambler that I know, he's such a degenerate. He has three other degenerates that he calls the degenerate trifecta. And they break down every conceivable gambling thing you would ever want to gamble on. They even take it to Captain Morgan's Make Believe Casino, where Sal makes up props on all kinds of things, sports, pop culture, you name it. you are going to want to get your gambling advice from these guys. Cousin Sal, he's been a staple on the BS podcast for the last 10 years.

So good that we gave him his own podcast. Check it out against all odds with Cousin Sal. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. David, we're going to talk about the new Rick Flair 30 for 30, but I wanted to ask you, what would the Brian and David 30 for 30 be like? Oh, man. It would have to open with a recreation of the two of us at the age of 60, driving from Fort Worth to Dallas, Texas

to go to the Sportatorium and watch wrestling. I feel like that's the origin story, right? It is. That was the first time we really decided we were going to be really good friends, I think. Yeah. Maybe in this archival film, we had just played a game of Royal Rumble

on Super Nintendo. I'd also like to fast forward at the moment years later when we were living together in New York and a friend of mine came in from out of town and acted kind of like a drunken lout. Oh, no. spent the night at our place, and then you caught me the next morning trying to sneak out and leave you with my friend. I was walking down the stairs from my room.

Apologies for my lost voice, by the way. I was walking down the stairs into the living room, looked down and see this friend who should remain unnamed, completely splayed out on the couch, bigger than the couch, still in a three-piece suit from the night before for some reason, totally out of it. And all of a sudden, you just sneak from your bedroom to the exit door, which you're about three-piece. three feet apart in this tiny apartment. And I was just like, no. And then you woke that friend up and dragged him out the door with you and thus began your wonderful day. The coup de grow of this would be, of course, to get the right Thompson narration for our 30 for 30. I wonder if he's available.

What if I told you that there was a fairly obscure podcast and that through the blood of its makers, it emerged as a slightly less obscure podcast. This is the press box. the Ringer Podcast Network. The Pressbox is the podcast where using the words, ethics or responsibility gets you put in time out. I'm Brian Curtis. Ringer editor at large, he's David Shumaker, Ringer Art Director, Writer, Podcaster. Playing her today.

How are you, David? I'm doing okay. Sorry about the voice, but my spirits are high. Once again, we've got three topics to talk about today. First, how Harvey Weinstein and now Louis C.K. accidentally changed entertainment journalism. Second, the biggest battle in the history of the Marvel Union. universe, Disney versus the nation's film critics.

And finally, David, is subject near and dear to your partially North Carolina-bred heart, the Rick Flair 30 for 30 documentary, and the rise of the authorized sports biography. Woo! That was pretty good, giving your voice and everything. That's all I got. Let's start here with Louis C.K. Because we now live in a universe.

Do you remember like nine months ago when we lived in the universe where we were just waiting every day at like 5 Eastern for a Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush piece to drop in the time. Scoops o'clock. I remember it well. Now we've transitioned to a new universe where we wait for a tale of sexual harassment and or abuse from a famous Hollywood person to drop. In this case, this had been rumored for a number of weeks. It was preceded this morning on Twitter by news that Louis C.K.'s new movie has been canceled

from a New York film festival because a Times piece was coming out and then just before we got on the air here the Times piece came out it is titled Louis C.K. crossed a line into sexual misconduct five women say. You want to just read the push notification

which is maybe easier than summarizing this thing? Yeah, the New York Times push notification on my phone haven't even opened from my home screen yet although I've read the piece of my laptop, to be clear, says from the New York Times the comedian Louis C.K. masturbated in front of two female comics in 2002, the women said, three others described separate sexual misconduct.

So let's leave that right there. And let me pivot to a slightly bigger point, which is that I think I'm amazed at how Harvey Weinstein and all the other people that have come out in these various investigations now, now including Louis, have basically changed the orientation of entertainment writing. You open these sections now, and it's almost like entertainment writing SVU, where so many of the resources and so much of the labor is devoted to catching the next predator or talking about what the old predator was doing in the case of Ronan Farrow's latest New Yorker bombshell. And I feel that the whole just notion, at least temporarily, of entertainment journalism has changed. What do you think?

I mean, it's indisputable. Our wonderful boss slacked around a picture a week ago of just like what the Hollywood reporter's homepage looked like right at that moment. And like 11 out of 12 were stories of alleged sexual harassment or assault or proven. I mean, in some cases, I guess. But like it was, it's a little bit just halting to see. Well, I mean, on the one hand, the degree to. which this sort of like horror is permeating Hollywood culture and just our culture at large,

but also just, I mean, it's, it's, you know, shocking to see a place like the Hollywood reporter totally be taken over by that sort of story. It really is. And speaking of the Hollywood Reporter, I was calling around doing some reporting this week just on how much, how many resources are devoted to these things. Here's amazing. Hollywood Reporter has, they told me about seven reporters, more or less working full-time on the speed.

Matthew Bologna, the magazine's editorial director, said about a half, 50% of his time is spent on these stories. This is during traditional award season stuff. Their directorial roundtables, right, all those kinds of things that they do. Variety has that many or more reporters working on the story. We saw an interesting thing this week, too, or last week, which was BuzzFeed, purged part of its entertainment editorial staff. And one of their stated reasons was because they'd fallen behind on the Weinstein story. And then like the next day or two days later, they published the first Kevin Spacey story. Yeah.

Which then took that story into that trajectory. So it's not just that these stories are so big, but they are, I think, you know, consuming the labor of these various publications. We talked about related subjects in previous weeks. And I think that there's, you know, there's two different tracks of conversation that we can have. I mean, one, I think is the sort of like moral track, which is these publications. realizing that they have turned a blind eye to this, either deliberately or accidentally for a long time and working to make up for that. And the second one is the sort of, you know, crass or more, you know, like question about driving,

driving and driving clicks, you know, getting people to read your story based on a tweet. I mean, these are the stories that have a lot of urgency and a lot of relevance right now. And certainly, you know, that's – I'm sure that people in. charge can see that sort of stuff happening. Sure. To go to the moral track for a second. There's this meta-media story inside Harvey, inside all these, right? Why wasn't this reported sooner?

If everybody knew, quote-unquote, why wasn't it reported sooner? A couple of ideas. And I think many of these things can be true. One is that Hollywood press, lots of the Hollywood press, relies on access, right? Everything from, we need Harvey Weinstein to advertise in our paper. We need Miramax or Weinstein Company's. stars to appear on the cover of our things. We need to get into screenings.

The topic we'll talk about in a minute. Down to we need the goodies that the random, you know, entertainment blogs need, right? Yeah. We need little like making of videos and things like that. If that stuff gets leaked to us or set visits, then we're happy. That's one thing. I think that's probably slightly overstated, but that certainly is a part of it. The other thing, the big thing I heard this week when I was making calls in this is just the willingness of people to come forward and tell their stories.

Sure. It's just totally different. And that's a credit to the two New York Times reporters who broke the first Harvey story because they spent so long doing that. And it's certainly not easy to do this. But if you see this Louis story, if you see Kevin Spacey, if you see these various charges that have been out there, it's people are coming forward. And it is so much easier to get this into print when you have people on the record. Yeah. I mean, Julia Wallach, who's one of the comedians who was featured in the Louis C. Hay story, said the quote that I think that was the kicker on the piece was, quote, because of this moment, as gross as it is, we feel compelled to speak.

And, you know, you're absolutely right. I mean, a lot of the motivation is that other, you know, that they see other people doing it, but not just that, but they feel that this sort of veil has been lifted, it seems like. that there's the opportunity to speak now. And to take that back to what you were saying about the outlets, I mean, there's certainly a big difference between one person making an accusation or, you know, one outlet breaking an embargo or doing something else that the studio disapproves of versus everyone doing it. And, again, we'll talk about this in the next segment.

But, you know, if it's one blog that's doing something that tease off Harvey Weinstein, I mean, it's not just Harvey you have to think of, it's all the other studios that then hear the story and they say, well, we're not going to do business with this blog because we don't want to get into this mess, right? And it's very similar with the sexual harassment. One person can be dismissed. We saw there was the report last week about all of the secret agents that Harvey Weinstein was using to kind of keep tabs on and to discredit his potential accusers. It's easy for one person to come up and then there just be this, you know, a couple of black marks on their resume and for someone to dismiss them. It's when there's the chorus of voices that the power is actually, you know, present. And it's funny because we can trace that right to the beginning of the story when the Times and the New Yorker,

by whatever timing or happenstance or momentum or whatever it was, happened to be working on the story at the same time. So the Times was never going to be alone. In fact, they were, you know, all – and when we look back at the stories that failed to get into print, we've heard versions of the New York Times story in New York Magazine that came out in Ronan Farrow's latest bombshell report about all the Intel Harvey was trying to, to gather on his accusers and on journalists, you know, those publications at the time were often on an island. Yeah. And in this case, they were basically working in tandem even if they were pursuing different

stories. Let me ask you a question. You said he talked some people at the Hollywood Reporter. You talked about taking up 50% of the time of whoever's in charge there, which is a huge amount of his time. Also, I mean, part of the nuts and bolts of it is when you're publishing, when you're working on stories like this, the people in charge have to start. spend an enormous amount of time talking to lawyers, you know, and like vetting everything on the way.

You know, and, you know, we've been, you know, we publish things that aren't nearly, don't nearly have the same ramifications. And when a big story like that comes out, our boss, Sean Fentasy is, you know, spends half a day just like parsing through stuff. But my question for you is what, what are the people at outlets like the Hollywood Reporter? I mean, do they, do they convey that it feels like a moral mission on their part? Or is it just this is what's happening and we have to cover it? I think there's a little bit of moral mission on it. So that's a great question.

Entertainment writing, we don't want to libel all of entertainment writing by saying that it's fluff. But clearly there's a different, you know, whatever moral universe in saying, I'm breaking a deal because about a studio signing the next Spielberg movie to I am getting into this territory of harassment and abuse. Right. So I think there's something for the publication and probably for the individual writer. Yeah. You know, some of them that's like, wow, this is, this is just feel, that feels like the beat really changed on me overnight. To your point about vetting, it's pretty amazing because they are getting into vetting

territory that they probably didn't do very much. There was this piece in the Hollywood reporter by this woman named Anna Hunter Graham, which was the first piece about Dustin Hoffman. Right. He said Dustin Hoffman harassed her and more on the set of a movie when she was 18 years old. And one of the things she did is that she actually wrote letters to her sister at the time, and the Hollywood Reporter were telling me, they looked at the letters and looked at like, you know, one is they obviously met with her and talked to her. They talked to her sister. They

examined these kind of things. But one of the things they did is they looked at the paper stock of the letters. They also looked at the cursive script of the letters, which looked like a cursive script that a teenager would use. So you're, you know, you're doing all this thing. You're putting together all these things. And, of course, then you're going to Hoffman or his spokesman or his lawyer and all this kind of stuff. But you're doing a lot of different things that are probably way, way out of the zone of normal Hollywood morning. Sure. Yeah, I mean, and not to trivialize this conversation at all, but, you know, we've talked before and you've written a lot about the, you know, the way that media is changing in the sort

of social media era, how, you know, highlights, which used to be, used to be the, like, the main component of ESPN are now, they have to figure out a way to do something else because people have seen the highlights before. In a similar way, the sort of fluff, as you put it, that an entertainment website might have previously published, look at these pictures from the set of Thor, you know, Spielberg's directing this new movie, whatever. All of that is out there in tweets before their story goes up, right? And there's really no reason to click through.

Not that their pieces wouldn't have been more substantial and more interesting. I think that the very concept of writing for the Internet is changing in a certain way that there's no reason to string paragraphs together to introduce a photo gallery in a way that maybe there once was. if you're going to be a writer, you actually have to, you know, think about tackling the big stuff. Sink your teeth in something that you can sink your teeth into. I think that's totally true. I think it's funny when we talk about the Hoffman example in particular, that particular essay, it's not if that had been submitted at some earlier point that the people who were running the magazine wouldn't have believed the person or wouldn't have doubt it or anything like that.

I think it's also that that genre didn't exist. Yeah. Of I Am Going with a Lupita Nyanga wrote a big, one in the New York Times about about Weinstein. But like that genre of, you know, I am a person, some cases not a famous person, and this happened to me.

Yeah. I just don't think that was out there and it would have been very hard for even publication to wrap their mind. It's like, I don't know the answer. I could imagine that sort of thing being published on like Jezebel, but with names redacted because you know, the people that would have had the

gall to publish it wouldn't have had the legal resources to actually, you know, go to to war over it. But you're right. I mean, as far as a mainstream publication, this is, I mean, genre feels a little bit dismissive, but it's totally right. This is a new genre for, you know, reporting. And speaking of redaction, by the way, so many of these have been out in the world in

redacted form. Olivia Munn in her book. Corey Feldman in a book. Rose McGowan in various forms. Sure. And this is the point. And the Louis C.K. Right.

And this is the moment where we put the name to the all. Right? Because it wasn't. It was like the person was happy to write about it but couldn't or wouldn't for whatever reason put the name to it. Yeah. And that's kind of mind blowing it in itself. Also the other question I got when I was talking about this week is where are we in this

arc? Because I mean, you know, and the thing I got from most people was the beginning, a third of the way through. I mean, no one has any idea because it's a matter of one, how many more. more, how much more is there to expose out there? And then, of course, the second question being, how much can you get into print? Yeah. But most people I talk to who work in entertainment journalism seem to think we're closer

to the beginning than we are to the end. Yeah, I mean, if you look at something like Kevin Spacey, just, I mean, to take one example, that story was not, that, that didn't begin as a Harvey Weinstein style mega expose into a great history of this sort of malfeasance, right? This was a pretty isolated, I mean, a pretty single, it was a single, it was a single, incident that spoke to a bigger idea and then more and more allegations have come out and it looks like there is this history that exists now. I think that you can kind of take that as a, as a little metaphor for the whole, I mean, to answer your question, for the whole reporting process,

right? I mean, we're at the beginning, even if a lot of the major figures have been pointed out, even if a lot of, even if conceptually we know where we are, the reporting is going to go on and on and it's going to get bigger and bigger. I mean, the Louis CK piece, that came out today, something like you said, we've been talking about for weeks, but also, but people had, you know, people broadly put have been talking about for years. But, you know, Lucy Kay is not the only, is not the only name I've heard in the past few weeks as this piece is coming from the New York Times or someone else. Like, there are other big, there are, there are big stories that are going to drop. You know, I just, I just think it's a matter of, of, you know, how big. And like you said, how long it goes.

And somebody described it to me as we're still in the low-hanging fruit phrase. Excuse me. Yeah. Whereas the people we're hearing about now are people that were in the realm of rumor, even for people like you and me. We're not plugged into the Hollywood world like lots of people are. Yeah. For a long time.

Yeah. And we're not, we have not gone yet to the level of I just had no idea. Yeah. That's exactly right. And also sources that have been out there, even if they've only been out there anonymously prior to now, the people that you mentioned before, some of the Louis C.K. accusers, And people who have shown a willingness to talk anonymously are, you know, conceptually that's more accessible than someone who's just never said anything about something before. You don't even know to ask them, right?

Oh, absolutely. So, yeah, I think that there's a whole lot of just we don't know what's going to happen. Well, we will look, we will watch Twitter. We will listen to rumor and we will see what gets into print next on this story. Meantime, David, it's time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we reveal that Twitter is the world's most derivative medium. even for some of journalism's most original voices. I actually have a runner up this week. You might remember that Twitter went to 280 characters.

Did you see this one? Yeah. If I wanted to deal with 280 characters, I'd go read Game of Thrones. That was huge this week. Also really funny. I mean, props to everybody that wrote that. Props to everybody that wrote it. It's amazing.

Like, everybody wrote it. It was huge. But today's winner comes from BuzzFeed's Matthew Zitland. Wow. And I'm going to tell you what. He submitted it or he tweeted it? He tweeted it to us. Right.

This wasn't his joke. No, no. Okay. Yes, he is an observer rather than a maker of the joke. Thank you, Matthew. And this wins because it's way more obscure. You know, I always get my journalistic antenna go up, right, when a joke is so obscure and yet everybody makes it. So you might have seen the story last week where Senator Rand Paul was attacked at his house in Kentucky.

Yes. You saw this. apparently suffered a bruised lung and five broken ribs. And a gated community in Bowling Green. Right. So here are two things you need to understand to understand the overworked Twitter joke of the week. Are you ready? One, Rand Paul is on the libertarian end of the GOP spectrum.

Yes. And read Ayn Rand novels apparently as a teenager like Atlas Shruck, right? Second, important fact, the fight at his house was apparently due to a dispute over lawn maintenance. Yes. So if you tweeted Atlas Shrubbed Wow Is that a suspiciously obscure pun for something that just went wild? Yeah

The Washington Post Elizabeth Brunig The Ringer's very own Kate Nibbs Jesse Wagman of the New York Times Mother Jones is Clara Jeffrey among many, many random accounts Atlas Shrubbed You made it from the lawn care bit to Rand's libertarianism,

to an iron rand novel. Yeah. Wow. I feel like we should have had Nibs on to defend herself. But it's okay. I'm standing in awe of that tweet, regardless of how many times it was tweeted. That's funny, too.

You don't have to call for comment on a word Twitter joke of the week. There's no. I don't want to use the word ethics because I'll get put the penalty bugs, but there's no ethics on this segment. Topic number two, David, back in September, the New Los Angeles Times published an investigative piece by Daniel Miller that revealed that the city of Anaheim was giving Disney various sweetheart tax breaks and other subsidies. Disney did not like this story. Company said in a statement, we regularly work with news organizations around the world.

But in this instance, the Los Angeles Times showed complete disregard for basic journalistic standards. By the way, that's some great PR speak. We'd love to work with you on this piece. They always say that. So what happened is Disney and Marvel's Thor, Ragnarok, came out on. November 3rd and there wasn't a review of it in the LA Times because Disney banned the paper's critics from its screenings. Yeah. Apparently, in one case, also from its press website, which is not actually a penalty for those of us who've ever visited those things.

Anyway, this brought a wave of support. Ty Burr, Boston Globe, Lisa Rosenberg, the Washington Post, the A.V. Club in the York Times, various critics said they wouldn't go to Disney screenings, various critic groups, said they would not consider Disney movies for awards. And then Disney backed off, weirdly declared victory, and everybody gets to go to screenings again. What did you make of this whole weird kerfuffle? First of all, I would like to say that Thor Ragnarok was magnificent. It's really good. Bad time to ban critics, right?

It was a really fun movie. It was really bizarre. The sequence of events, the timeline itself was enthralled. was enthralling because the first, our first notification of this came as like a footnote in the LA Times, like a holiday movie preview, I guess, which just happened to be coming out that day. They chose not to make a bigger deal of it than that. But, you know, they had to acknowledge the fact that there was no evidence of the Avenger or Black Panther or what's the new, what's the new animated film, Coco or something? Coco. Yeah, those movies weren't mentioned or weren't whatever.

Where's Coco? Yeah. And so at that point, you know, the Twitter hordes went on, you know, went on that investigation mode. And so did actual reporters to try to figure out the backstory. And like you said, the Times piece investigating the Anaheim Disney relationship, the LA Times piece, you know, became central to this, to the, you know, to the whole situation. Can I say one thing about that? Yeah. I live in Orange County.

I get the LA Times. Yeah. I didn't know that piece existed until. Disney got mad and made me aware of it. Yeah, I mean, this is one of the first times I've seen the stric and effect evoked online and not in like a story that just like, you know, made me uncomfortable. But it's, I mean, it's totally true. It was it.

This should be on the Wikipedia page if it isn't already. Yeah. I mean, I think that it, you know, I don't know if this is jumping to the end of the argument, but I think that, I mean, Disney definitely made more of a problem for themselves by doing this than they would have had by. countenancing the LA Times as a, especially their entertainment coverage as a just regular news organization. That's what people pointed out was bizarre.

You're punishing different people. You're punishing different people. I don't think anybody should be punished, quote unquote, anyway. But it's strange that you would then go after different people who did not write the piece about the game. Yeah. But just the imperviousness that Disney must feel to be able to do that regardless of its same people or different people, that's what's sort of shocking about it.

It's not the first time that a big entertainment company has thrown its way to. around, but to throw your weight around in such a bald-faced way, you know? I mean, it's very strange. I don't know if it's that they feel impervious or there's just some kind of, you know, some kind of high you get by just throwing a fit publicly. Maybe so. You just want to punish somebody. You don't even think it's going to end particularly well. Yeah. And you just do it. And then you're like, okay, you know, we had two days of being mad and now we're sorry. Now it's over. Well, it's funny. So it relates a little bit of the last conversation. You were talking about, you know, why stories weren't previously published about Harvey Weinstein or whatever.

And there's the access issue. There's the relationship, you know, having a relationship with the content, you know, movie producers, movie studios, that kind of thing. I mean, listen, we're not that far removed from the, you know, studio heyday where they would plant all the stories about their stars, personal relationships. And then if you wanted to write anything that wasn't approved by them, they would blacklist you or blackball you. You know, but they would do it. It would be more of a one-on-one thing. You know, you're not getting any more access. You'll have nothing to prove.

You threaten an editor or you, you know, you threaten a writer at a bar over cocktails. The idea that you would just sort of like, not publicly, but just sort of like, you know, just open, just have like a blanket. You don't get to see any of our movies in a way that had to be reported by the LA Times. It's just sort of beggars belief in a certain way. But I think you've made one of the really key points here, which is that all publicity, is doled out basically by how happy or mad a company is a publication or writer. Yeah. This was a public example and kind of a weird, clumsy broad brush example.

But that is all access, right? Let's not kid ourselves. You know, why don't you have the top stars of wrestling on your podcast every week for an hour, right? For an hour-long interview where they talk candidly about the WWE. Well, you know, you might want to, but, you know, this is not how it works, right? Yeah. And that's everything. And this is just what happens to every reporter in private now gets pushed out into public.

Sure. And people naturally get really weirded out and angry. I think the thing is the private stuff, you don't get an armada of reporters backing you up like the critics did in this case. Yeah. You know, other reporters aren't going, well, if you're not, if you're not dealing with Brian, then I'm not going to deal with you either. In this place is the L.A. Times is competitors. So that's a kind of a rarity. It's not the first time, you know, in recent months that we've seen journalism bound together.

And I sort of in dispute with a common enemy. I mean, the same thing has happened with President Trump, you know, when he's like gone after CNN, that other news organization, when they, early on, I think they banned some people from some press gatherings or whatever. They're not putting the press conferences on television, not allowing cameras. Exactly. Yeah. And it's, I mean, I think that it's hard to look at it without this sort of zoomed out concept of, you know, our faith in journalism or, you know, the confidence in journalism is at an all-time low.

And obviously, when they do those polls, people are thinking of political journalism. But there is still the element of a powerful figure feeling like they can push around a newspaper or a newspaper reporter because nobody's going to care if they do it. I mean, I think that's what it is at the end of the day. Yep. And nobody cares about film critics either, by the way. Oh, yeah. You know, I mean, I only see the sports writerly version of this. But it's every time I tweet about press access somewhere or something, usually on behalf of somebody else.

It's, oh, you want you little sports writer. Yeah. You know, it's weird because I don't think the public sees the press as the minor player in this dispute. They see there's Disney, which makes movies that they like, and there's the press, which often makes them mad. Yeah. And it's made me, like, tainted by liberal bias, quote unquote. So they often just side with the big company. Yeah.

Or they just don't care at all. It's just like a dispute that's just completely over their heads. I was also interested, by the way, and what we're talking about reviews, what a small part of the cosmos a movie review is now? I was just thinking this, yeah. I mean, if we looked at Vulture or whatever site we want, like how many things did they write about Thor and the Last Jedi before they got to the review?

And how much more attention would 10 things we learned from the last Jedi trailer get than the actual review of whether the movie was any good? good. Well, I mean, especially in this kind of no-s-poilers world we're in now, it's like, I mean, and I can speak for myself in the situation. If there's a movie I really want to see, I'll bookmark the ring a review and go see it on opening night and read the review on my way home. You know, read the review immediately afterwards. I don't necessarily want to read 1,200 words before I go see the movie. If I'm already confident, I want to see it, and especially when you're talking about movies like Thor or like, you know, I mean,

the sort of things that are actually keeping the movie theater industry afloat right now, These are movies that you go to on an impulse. And if it's a sustained impulse over a long period of time, like the Star Wars creates with the trailers and all the little info, intel drops, all the better for them. But it is sort of true that it's about hype. It's not about information, right? So in some sense, the less you know about the movies that are really working right now, the better. Yeah, it's hype disguises information.

Yeah. Here are the things we learned from the trailer. Well, it's still an ad. Exactly. It's still an ad. It's an ad to go see the movie. No, it's totally true. I mean, I like your idea about, I mean, I like your note about, you know, people saying,

oh, you, why any sports writer? I mean, there certainly is bubbling up underneath all of this, whether it's the distrust of the media or just the leveling of the playing field in the internet era. You see a lot on, you know, Twitter of people responding to writers who have any complaints at all with, and the, and the responses is in some sense always why you and not me? Like, why should you get to see a movie three days early? You know, why should you get an advanced copy of this video game? Why should you get to read the book before it comes out?

You know, it's like, just do your job, do it the morning of, do it, you know, whatever. But it's like, that's not the way the industry has worked for so long. I like the point of Lisa Rosenberg made in The Washington Post where she very correctly and honestly said, there is this little window where a critic getting their review out or Game of Thrones review or whatever can command the Internet for a big thing. Like on Saturday after the Last Jedi comes out, nobody. really cares what I have to say about the movie. Right. But if I'm a deputized movie critic, maybe Thursday afternoon whenever the embargo lifts or

even Wednesday night, I have this kind of like few hour period where I possess the ultimate knowledge. Yeah. And I get lots of clicks, you know, and all that stuff. And then like three days later, I have to have like a convoluted theory about the Mary Sue or nobody's going to read anything that I write. No, it's totally true. It has a very weird place in the world right now.

Big question. What if we just canceled, what if they, or we, what if the movie studios just canceled critic screenings? What if they just took them off totally and said, that was the thing of the old world. Now you can just, we're not going to worry about it anymore. You can just go see it. Or better yet, or better yet or more specifically, they said, there's no reason to screen the Last Jedi.

Nobody's going to make a decision anyway. We'll screen our small movies that we need publicity for, but the big movies, we're just going to take them off. I feel like, on the one hand, with the direction that movies or the movie industry is is going right now, I mean, specific. movies in theaters, you know, the last two months have been pretty paltry before Thor. And we see again and again, there's only certain kind of movies that were, all of that is to say, with the general downward trajectory of the movie business in theaters, I think they would be

reluctant to rock the boat to that degree, even if, even if relatively few people noticed, right? It's like, they're used to, I used to work in the book publishing business. There used to be a time where if the New York Times Book Review was going to put your book on the cover of the book review, you would find out two weeks in advance and you would go publish 100,000 more copies. I mean, literally 100,000 more copies. Now, when that happens, you might publish 5,000 more or depending on the level of the book. It's a small percentage boost, but no one's going to stop sending the New York Times copies. We're still going to put the New York Times, if the New York Times has anything resembling a positive sentence in the review, that's still

going to be on the cover of the paperback. You know, it's an institutional thing, and it would be really, It would be crazy, even though, you know, people have tried different looks, it would be pretty crazy to turn your back on it because, you know, that's what people expect. Yeah, but it's sort of, it's, you know, you mentioned the Trump example. It's relying on norms. It's not a rule. Yeah. There's no rule that says they have to show anything to the critics. Or book publishers have to show anything.

Sure. I mean, in the, in the – Like you said, they do it because they think at the end of the day that they get something good out of it, which is they get publicity. And they don't get something bad out of it. Because in the immediate future. If Disney just said our big tent polls aren't going to have any press screenings, then every time one came out in that window where you were talking about, the little magic hour where the review kind of can own the internet, now the piece that's going to be taking its place is what's wrong with Thor that Disney won't show us the movie? Mashable, I talked about this to you, you know, yesterday is that Mashable has this great graph where they chart embargo date against Rotten Tomato score that's sort of proving that the later they string along the embargo the embargo, the worst of the movie. is going to be.

It's not, and I don't think it necessarily means that, like, people review it poorly because of embargoes. It's because they just embargo the bad movies. And I think every time there's a movie that's embargoed, you see those stories online. Why aren't they showing us this movie? What's wrong with this movie?

And that's going to be every Disney release or what's wrong with Disney for, you know, for at least for the first year of this idea. I was interested in Ava Ava Duverne tweeted, who's directing Disney's A Wrinkle in Time, tweeted in support of the critics, you know, and it's people like her, right? Yeah.

So she wants the critic screening. But I wonder, it's like, what does Michael Bay think about Disney, you know, banning the screen? Would he be happy with it? I'm not. Somebody who just gets kicked around and kicked around by the critics. They might have a different view. They may say screw it. You've thought more deeply about Michael Bay in your career than I have.

But I think my guess is that Michael Bay was probably super eager to show everybody pain and gain like a month out just because he felt like that was his little character piece. that was his artistic thing. I love that movie, by the way. But I think that, you know, for Transformers or something like that, you know, one of his more traditional films, I can't imagine it would make that much of a difference to him. Yeah. And, you know, it's the way the rest of the movie publicity works is if I'd want to talk to, you know, J.J. Abrams when the Force Awakens comes out, I don't get to talk to him. He's going to sit down for a few interviews, right?

And Disney's going to totally dull them out by how important I am, whatever they think they have to gain by him talking to me. You know, you could see movies acting like that, right? We have very little to gain on X movie, but a ton to gain on this little art house drama. We're on pain and gain or on whatever it is. Or we made a good movie, so we gave it to the critics like they do now. And we made a turkey that's coming out in February. So we're just going to dump it and hope everybody gets fooled into seeing it on Friday.

Yeah, I think the real fear isn't that they would cut off previews, you know, advanced screenings altogether. It said they would go to a few outlets to say they went to the ringer.com and they said, you're going to be one of three people that gets to see Black Panther before it comes out. No one else gets to. But between you and me, you've got to give it a good review. Yeah. Like that.

And that's the sort of. I don't agree to your deal. No, I know. But that's the sort of throwing around one's corporate weight that we saw in this LA Times, you know, debacle. And that someone like Disney is, a company like Disney is apparently totally shameless. about right now. All right, before we move on to our next topic, let's take a quick break. Hey, it's Bill Simmons.

Wanted to make sure you subscribe to The Watch with Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan. Two longtime friends who have had this podcast since 1973. Yeah, that's how long. It was even before a podcast they were having this. These guys spent their whole life arguing with each other. And now we just record it and they go out of it. They talk about everything in pop culture. It is one of the most popular pop culture podcasts, especially valuable during

Game of Thrones season. But they'll argue about movies, music, TV, you name it. The Watch, one of the best pop culture podcasts on the Internet. Subscribe now, wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go to something that inspired better feelings in the universe. David, this is the Rick Flair 30430 documentary. Yeah. The Nature Boy wasn't a wrestling character.

The Nature Boy wasn't fake. The Nature Boy wasn't. was me. You don't have both seen it. You wrote a piece about it on Theringer.com. Here's one of the first question I want to ask you. How much of that hour plus is the real Rick Flair? The documentary dealt with that, and I wrote about it and talked about it on the Masked Man show yesterday.

The documentary, I think, made too much of a deal of this concept of Rick Flair versus Richard Fleer. So setting that aside, I'm going to assume that your question is about. how much is he kind of performing and how much is he bullshitting us? You know, and they say in a documentary he's a liar. I mean, Triple Age calls him a liar. His ex-wife calls him a liar. I think that for all intents and purposes, what we saw on that documentary was almost entirely the real Rick Flair,

but truth is separate from that. Okay. I don't think it, I don't think for any, I think most wrestlers who have had the level of six, that he's had or anything approaching it, who have been in the public spotlight for so long. I think for them there's very little delineation between person and character, not just because they've been playing the same role, well, because they've been living a life of what they call K-Fabe in the business, the adherence to the big lie.

And at a certain point, the truth and the, you know, fake truth just sort of congeal in your head. So, I mean, I think that, I don't think if you talk to Rick Flair in a, you know, casual moment at a coffee shop, he would be very much different than what you saw in that film at all. Yeah, and it's funny because it's part of his legend that, as he says in the movie, I lived my gimmick. Yeah. It is both the flare gimmick and then part of the guy's gimmick, the actual person's gimmick. Sure.

I thought it was a couple interesting things about it. One is it in this whole idea of biography. There's two problems you can run into, right? One is the cooperation on the subject, which doesn't seem to have been a problem here. The director had a flare at his beck and call. He had several interviews with him, obviously, which we saw the movie. The second one is that you get deep into your subject and realize there's no there there. Yeah.

And I thought, you know, like the first 30 minutes had some really interesting insights about how he wasn't very close to his parents. And he was clearly also the son of a dentist. So he was clearly being the jet flying, Kistisdiel and guy was sort of romantic when you grew up in Minneapolis. But I thought in the second, in the sort of hour that really, remained, it became increasingly clear that there was really just no, what's the word for it? There was no, there was nothing about Flair. There was no, he wasn't solving a particular problem. No.

He didn't seem to be particularly disturbed by anything he'd done in his life. He seemed to have really, he seems to felt he was the greatest wrestler and had basically no regrets about his career at all. And that's very hard to do. And so it became harder and harder to kind of dramatize it. And I thought it got stuck a little bit because it was just kind of like, and then wrestled some more and then he wrestled some more and then he wrestled some more and he kept going in the end and at the end I actually felt really I love a really sad movie yeah it was there was a

deep sadness to it I did not think it was a triumphant movie but I also felt I was sad at the end a little bit because I felt there was something unresolved about him well I mean there's a I don't remember where it was it might have been in the Charlotte Observer there was a piece last week or earlier this week about you know the documentary and it talked to the director Roy Rory Carp and he talked about showing, screening the film for Rick Flair in a hotel room. And he was scared because there's all the stuff about Rick being a bad dad. You know, there's some other personal life stuff. And he was worried that Rick was going to have a negative reaction to it.

And Rick was like, it's perfect. Or, you know, it's exactly what it needs to be, whatever. And just like that was that. But so you're right about you need the cooperation of your subject in a certain way. But to take your bigger point about there not being any there, I mean, I think that, you know, the best documentaries, you know, broadly put, but the best 30 for 30 documentaries specifically are a pretty narrow slice, right? It's this season of the Bears. It's this game. It's this day.

And they kind of like spill out from there. I mean, Carp's previous documentary for 30 for 30 was I hate Christian Leitner, which is a little bit more expansive, but it's this really narrow way into Duke hatred, right? It's just through the lens of Christian Leitner. But and I think that when you take on a subject as big as Rick Flair and you're literally starting with his birth, you know. His adoption. Yeah. And taking and taking us up more or less through the present day, it's a lot. And without, you know, you've got to find the there.

You know, you've got to figure out the story you're telling. And I think that making it a story about how he was adopted and raised. and then how, you know, his relationship with his children, if anything tied it together, it was that. I feel like that's a, it's a necessary part of the story, but it felt like a sort of weird misdirection for the first. I mean, the point of the, the pitch for this documentary is 30 for 30 takes on a pro wrestler. Right?

Yeah. And just new ground. Yeah, it's breaking ground for them. It just seemed like they couldn't quite figure out, like they got the elevator pitch and they couldn't quite figure out what the, what the, what the, bigger pitch was. They got the elevator pitch and they got the cooperation. Yeah.

Which was the thing. Yeah. But then there was just a little bit, yeah, it just kind of wound around a little bit. I mean, I think it's funny because there's certain parts of the authorized bio and in the specific case, the 30 for 30. Here we go. Violins. Mm-hmm. Old athletes standing in empty arena.

Or an empty wrestling ring in this case. Yeah. Smoke billowing out behind old athletes standing in empty wrestling ring. Athlete's obnoxious behavior from the past is first glibly. glamorized, and then athlete apologizes for it later in the documentary. I show some contrition for it later in the documentary. Sure. I was once talking to Michael Irvin, and I said, is it amazing how – remember we're in Dallas and Fort Worth when the White House and all the cowboy stuff was like you were like the worst person in the world and everybody thinks it's like so cool?

Yeah. And he's like, yeah, it was the same thing in the University of Miami. Like we were the worst people in the world, by the way, a 30 for 30 documentary in itself. So, yeah, all those things happened. I thought the kind of funny part was, I didn't. think Flair felt very sorry about anything that he did. He certainly felt sad about his son Reed's death. Yeah. But I think if you went to Rick Flair and said, here we go. Even on camera, by the way, and said, you can either be a good dad and have a lesser career. Right.

Or you can be bad dad, as he admits as he was, and be arguably the greatest wrestler of the 80s. What do you think Rick Flair picks? I think he picks door number two. Yeah. I mean, in some ways, it's sort of a... He certainly didn't seem upset about it. You know, it's easy to say you want to be thought of as the best father that I've ever lived, but I wasn't. And I certainly wasn't the best husband. So I guess I'll just have to settle for wanting to be thought of of the greatest wrestler and the most entertaining wrestler that ever lived. That seemed like contrition, but it didn't actually, it wasn't actually contrite. No, he was, he was sad about the concept that he would die.

He wasn't sad about all the things he hadn't done previously in his life. He wasn't immortal. It's funny that you mentioned... The immortal Hulk Hogan, not the immortal Rick Flair. You mentioned Michael Irvin actually had his name written down on my notepad right here because you're talking about the idea of living the gimmick. But I mean, I think that over... There's another good one.

I know, but it's sort of like over... It's an unnecessary delineation just with this... I mean, would you say Michael Irvin lived his gimmick? No. I mean, he was a, you know, a showtime sort of receiver. He was a big personality out in the field. And then, you know, you know, wore fur coats and interviews. Nothing that happened beyond that is terribly shocking.

It could be saddening, but, you know, it's all part of the same person. No one should be too surprised that Rick Flair, who contractually spent half of his life being, you know, a guy strutting around in a suit and riding airplanes and limousines was actually that guy, you know? Yeah, one of the great details here was that he bought a limousine. Yeah. He didn't need it as a prop on the wrestling show. He really needed it to be parked in his driveway. Yeah, I mean, there's all these stories about it. him like actually inviting like in the middle of the ring at a small show in Greensboro,

North Carolina or whatever, like inviting people to the holiday and bar. Like that's where we're going to be partying afterwards. Like it's no, like I said, it all, it all blurs together. There's no difference between the ring and the bar. I thought the documentary was at its best when we were making kind of mini points. Yes. We're pivoting off things. Like difference between Flare and Hogan was interesting.

Kind of why Flair was kind of the perfect guy for the 80s because there's something very 80s about that whole gimmick. right you know, just the way that his generosity in the ring the way

he didn't need to win a lot of the time and putting people over because he realized he was going to be incredibly popular if he was a big loser

you know if he would lose all the time all that stuff was really good to me there were a lot of great I don't want to say

it was I don't certainly I want to say it was bad there's a lot of small moments like that yeah

and I think a lot of the times with guys like Flair or any a lot of athletes is Sometimes they don't solve the problem for you of understanding them or narrative. And so you almost have to bring in the idea from the outside, right?

There is no idea. He is not struggling with anything. So you have to kind of figure out where he fits in the hole. And you've done this a billion times in your writing. But you figure out where he fits in the world and the culture and everything like that. And I thought when the documentary did that, it was actually some of the best stuff because it was really interesting. Yeah. I mean, the story about, I wrote in my piece that the most important thing that happened in his life was the plane crash they talk about early in the movie.

But I think that, you know, if the story that you tell about Rick Flair is how is it that, like, the most important wrestler of that generation was never a WWE starred as Prime, really, you know, or whatever, never. I mean, there's the way to tell the story in a more simplified way. A lot of the stuff you're getting at, though, goes to a sort of bigger idea with a lot of the really interesting things about Rick Flair are just points about the wrestling business in microcosm, sort of. You know, I mean, the partying, every wrestler that was successful did that. Every wrestler of that era did that. And, you know, it's, whenever it would seem like you were hitting on something really interesting about Rick Flair, it was actually not, it said more about the business, I guess. If you want to draw other parallels, though, you mentioned Hulk Hogan, it's funny because Triple H says, you know, don't believe anything Rick Flair tells you. He'll tell you exactly what you want to hear at any, you know, what he thinks you want to hear.

Rick is a consummate liar. He only will tell you what He wants you to hear That's every wrestler I mean really like they're either lying to make themselves look better Or to make you or to tell you what you want to hear And the best evidence for that in the movie wasn't Rick Flair It was Hulk Hogan saying that Rick Flair was better than him

He's ten times better than I am I mean it's like It's a no-brainer You know and some people point to be You go oh my God you changed the business You did this you do that but no I said You guys you mean the guy next to me Rick Flair.

Hulk Hogan wouldn't say that in a documentary about Hulk Hogan. He would say that because he's been interviewed for a 30-for-30 documentary about Rick Flair. This is the gimmick, as it were, I need to be. I need to put Rick Flair over. Exactly. He's telling you what you want to hear. He's putting him over, exactly. You know, I also think when you talk about Rick Flair is a liar.

That seems to be an amazing thing to say in a documentary about Rick Flair. Okay, tell me what he lied about. Yeah. Show me when he tells you things on the screen, go back and fact-check it and show me what he's lying about. So I understand the embroidery and a... understand it, right? Like, it's easy to say, you can't trust the guy, but tell me how. Yeah. It took everything he said at face value for the most part. And to the extent of, you know, animating all the stories as he was telling, just so you could visualize them,

you know, from his point of view more. Interesting choice, yeah. But you're right. I mean, just to have any evidence of like the untruth, you know, would have been, I think, incredibly informative. Finish up with a few thoughts on the idea of authorized biography. Yes. Because I think we're in this kind of age of sports authorized biography. We've got, and this is a spectrum, granted. We've got the Players Tribune. We've got uninterrupted. We've got something like a 30 for 30 that Rick Flair signs off on and the WWE signs off on. And I know this because I saw the WBWWWRWRour of all the footage, just in case we forgot what we were watching. And then you've got the, like, on the complete opposite side, the Yon Winner bio that Joe Hagan wrote with Winner's cooperation, which in Winner says is absolutely terrible.

And nobody should read, which is also it turns out to be a great advertisement for. the book. It's interesting. These things are not unilluminating altogether. I watched speaking, well, they're not, they're not all illuminating. I watched an uninterrupted segment on with Eric Bledso this week where he just said the press conference cliches about, I love Phoenix, but I'm really happy to be in Milwaukee. He said, he just said them before the press conference. Yeah. Like, oh, thanks for delivering that to us. We really needed that in real time, buddy. But it's funny, right? I mean, Rick Flair tweeted out, watch my 30 for 30 tonight. I, 30 for 30.

Yeah. And it's just funny because it's like that, again, as a journalist, that my ears perk up a little bit because I'm like, oh, wow, it's, you're doing it, you know, not to say the director didn't have agency in this case, but you're doing it in concert with your subject in a weird way. The phrase, I jotted down a phrase that you used in the last segment, which is we're happy to work with you on this piece. Yes. It is, I mean, it all sort of ties together. You know, I mean, it's, it's, it's these, it is informative. And certainly, you know, to get that sort of access to Rick Flair, you do have to get, you know, him to agree to set for the interview. I mean, it's a functional thing.

It's not like a written piece where you can hope for that interview, but right around it in the meantime, you know. I mean, the people are going to come to a Rick Flair documentary because they've seen commercials with Rick Flair sitting in a director's chair. in the middle of a darkened ring. I mean, that's part of the draw. Same with the WWXIS, by the way. They own all the footage. So they're going to have to sign off on the product at the end, you know. These sort of deals are what makes these sort of pieces happen.

Yeah. And it's funny also because I think of like what would make Rick Flair mad. And I think it's probably different than what would make other people mad. Oh, yeah. You know, if you said he was kind of a, if you said he was a bad dad and a liar and a manipulator and stuff like that, I don't know that that would necessarily make him upset. Yeah. If he said he was like a bad wrestler or a bad worker.

Yeah, if there was an angle that he... Slept walked his way through a match. Yeah, or like he was inferior to Dusty Rhodes or something like that. Dusty Rhodes carried him for years. Yeah, exactly. I think that would make him mad. I think he mattered anyway. Yeah, for sure.

I mean, I definitely think that's true. Yeah, or if he just like, you know, stole all of his gimmick from Nature Boy, Buddy Rogers and didn't really add anything to the Buddy Rogers template. You know, I think he would... I think those kinds of things would make him mad. So it's funny. When we say authorized, sometimes you say got their approval, but it's not clear what the approval would actually be and what kinds of things. I think Flair looks at it as like, there's a cool shot of me as an old man wearing my cape and standing in the ring again with the smoke behind him.

And that looks awesome. I look cool. I'm the man again, right? I'm not sure there's anything that Carp for ESPN could have done to, I mean, to really alienate. Flair, I think, you know, I think I touch on this in my piece. the documentary wasn't for the diehard wrestling fan because the diehard wrestling fan is going to sort of your point earlier at every turn in the movie

say I wish I could see 30 more minutes of that thing whatever that is this discussion this you know I but the diehard wrestling fan will approve will be ecstatic about the existence of this because there is a 30 for 30 about wrestling now it's the acceptance into the mainstream

which is what Vince McMahon wandered from the beginning and every wrestling fan has wanted since And to a certain extent, I think that that's what matters most to Rick Flair watching this documentary is that it doesn't matter what's in there. It matters that it's on ESPN. It matters that it has the trappings of a 30-for-30 documentary. It matters that the production values are high and the pictures of him are beautiful. And, you know, in a way he managed to be accepted in the mainstream by virtue of this documentary

regardless of what the contents of it were. Absolutely. I think the takeaway here is to be the man, as Rick Flair said, you've got to secure the cooperation of the man. and the company that owns the rights to the video footage. That's a press box for this week. David Shoemaker, Brian Curtis, back to you next week with more hot takes about press, the press, the media, and probably wrestling too.

See ya. Bye.