Good Morning,
Two numbers tell today’s Hollywood story. Top executive pay at the major studios jumped an astonishing 51 percent last year — to $615 million — even as the industry shed 17,000 jobs (The Wrap). And then there’s CBS, which will turn a $40 million annual loss into a $55 million profit not by producing better late-night programming but by handing Stephen Colbert’s former slot to comedian Byron Allen and walking away (Variety). And who cares about the ratings? They no longer have anything to do with the bottom line. Contraction is the business model now.
The pressure from above isn’t easing either. ABC’s local stations called the FCC’s early license review “unlawful, arbitrary and unconstitutional”; Disney followed with a filing arguing the move violates the First Amendment (AP, Wall Street Journal). In the UK, Arts Council England rolled back its “Let’s Create” inclusivity push in favor of a return to “excellence.” The DEI era is truly gone. (The Stage).
We learn more about how AI is changing creative input: a study of hundreds of thousands of college essays finds the prose gets smoother but the underlying ideas collapse into a handful of templates (New York Times). Publishers, meanwhile, are bracing for nonfiction to follow fiction into the AI flood (New York Magazine).
And a reveal about the man who built a career on stage-fright silence: newly surfaced audio of Harpo Marx actually speaking (The Guardian).
All of our stories below.
Doug
