The News Items Podcast
John Ellis talks with interesting people doing important work. Some you've heard of. Some you haven't. All of them are worth listening to, at some length.
The News Items Podcast
Hollywood's Stress Test, with Richard Rushfield (Episode 18)
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John Ellis talks with Richard Rushfield, founder of The Ankler, about a Hollywood business model under stress. Rushfield traces the industry’s troubles back to the end of fin-syn rules, the rise of Netflix, and a wave of consolidation that has left studios bigger, safer, and more risk-averse. They discuss Disney’s parks-first future, Paramount’s high-stakes tie-up with Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox’s Roku bet, YouTube’s dominance, AI anxiety, China’s fading promise, and why horror still works while comedy has nearly disappeared. It’s a tour through Hollywood’s money, politics, technology, and creative exhaustion.
Hosted by John Ellis
Hello and welcome back to the News Items Podcast. I'm John Ellis. I'm the editor-founder of news items, also of political news items. You can find them both at news-items.com. Our guest today is Richard Rushfield. He's the founder of The Ankler and widely regarded as one of the most influential independent voices covering Hollywood. His widely read commentary on the industry's power bases and business, both good and bad, have earned him a devoted following across Hollywood, what Vanity Fair described as a quote, bold-faced subscriber list. Over a two-decade career, Mr. Rushfield has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he authored the long-running intelligence report and has written and edited for outlets too many to name. He previously served as editor-in-chief of Hitfix and is the author of three books. He was also the first author to publish on Substack out of Los Angeles starting in 2018. So you're one of the originals on the Substack menu, so to speak. And you make a very persuasive case that that is sort of the origin of Hollywood's what you might call woes. So can you sort of walk us through that column? I thought it was just a terrific piece.
SPEAKER_00And by the way, thank you for for news items, which I was a very early adopter of, I believe, and has been a invaluable part of my my it's the way I start every morning and uh I love it. But uh Thank you. So thank you for doing it. So FinCEN, which I which as as it's referred to, I talked about what so what you had from the uh in the late sixties, early seventies, the FCC imposed these rules to sort of break up the strength of the three major networks, which uh seemed to have near near monopoly power at that time. And what they mandated was that networks could not could only be the distributors, uh, and they couldn't they would not own the shows that they produced. What immediately came out of that is you had this flourishing of these independent producers and this and and what became a a very competitive space of these producers making all kinds of shows, and what the the 1970s is thought of as a golden age of television immediately came out of that and and led to eventually the cable networks that came because you had so many people doing so many different things rather than uh just these three networks. So entertainment in general does not work very well when it is a sort of command and control system. Entertainment is sort of based on having happy surprises, and you need to have them at very regular intervals for it to survive. And once you fall into a pattern of doing the same thing, you your audience starts to drift away almost instantly, and that that is drifting film. You had thanks to these independent producers, you had a very vital world in Hollywood that led to that that led also to filmmakers. One one thing uh a very wise CEO once explained to me as as it as it became in the the 90s, the that movies get an outs get get probably 90% of the attention out there. But as he explained to me back then, the the business of Hollywood, the business of the movie studios is a cable TV business, essentially. And he's and his codicle to that was even movies are a cable TV business. And every everything flowed out of out of the the cable bundle and the cable revenues. And when that met with this ecosystem of independent producers, it produced a really rich and vital and growing world. In the 1990s, they were they decided to end those those rules because they thought that that they they wanted to make it open to to these new upstart internet providers. And then uh I think before Netflix came along, even, but the idea that this ecosystem had become too powerful, and now we're gonna open up to to new people. What the effect of this was to create a a world where when the networks could own their own their own their own shelf, as it were, that that it would revert back to what what happened before, which was sort of consolidation and a few just a few players having the uh the wherewithal to support these vast production budgets, except that now it was on a huger scale because it it would come to include the streaming networks and everything else. And what what we've seen, sorry, I'm glossing over a lot of a lot of stuff in a complicated issue, but what we've seen since then is this consolidation where everything is coming together in it once again, and it was it was three networks back in the uh back in the 1960s, and we're looking to essentially be three major streaming services that that will fund most of entertainment. And those will at the moment, if if they continue, those would be those would be Netflix, Disney, and some sort of Warner Paramount combination if the uh if if that continues with with other minor players in there also. So it is this consolidation led by Vincent, which has led to a really strangled world here, and both creatively and economically depriving people of opportunities and outlets and leaving Hollywood vulnerable to competition from uh from the internet and from in international and and uh just changing the nature of this business.
SPEAKER_01I remember talking to Rupert Murdoch about why he chose to sell the entertainment assets of Fox to Disney, and his reply was, do you know how many feature films we make in a year? And I said, Well, I don't know, 20, 25. He said it's 14 to 16. He said, Do you know how many feature-length films Netflix makes in a year? And I said, I don't know, 20, 25. And he said, 40. And so truthfully, we can no longer compete.
SPEAKER_00At the time that that they sold it, Netflix had come out of nowhere and their production budget for film, I th I believe was as much as every other studio combined for a while. So it was it it it was like nothing Hollywood had had ever seen. And they also brought with them this new business model that uh you know, on on on the one hand, you you you say uh Netflix is doing its own business, let them let other companies try uh try different things and and and and that would be for the for the best for Hollywood. The corrosive effect that Netflix has is really how other companies influenced or imitated them and more than more than how they didn't know. So the the model that that that they brought in is they eliminated the idea of that producers and and participants in a in a production and own a piece of it and the back end. They said, we will pay enormous amounts like no one had ever seen, and we'll buy out the back end as it's called. We'll have 100% ownership in perpetuity on on all these productions. That is a a practice that has been increasingly uh imitated elsewhere, and that is that is part of the consolidation and the the the fincen problem that you no longer have these independent groups who can make a living off it. And also from a consumer perspective, independent producers were there to ensure the quality. That you you had someone in charge of the quality. You had you had people really invested in the success of every production, and you had people who had a big outcome in trying new things and doing and taking chances and taking risks that you know a few a few major players, Netflix and Disney being at the top, those, aren't incentivized to do in that way.
SPEAKER_01One of the big themes of your writing is the diminishment of risk, that everything essentially is risk-averse. Has that just become dramatically more evident in the course of your career writing about Hollywood?
SPEAKER_00Uh certainly. It started first with film, and it actually came sort of pr pre um internet. It be it came from this uh this idea, the sort of big IP idea led by uh Robert Eigert of Disney. That the problem with with making a film is that you make a new movie and you're putting together an entire business from scratch, and you don't know who the consumers are, you don't know if there will be any consumers. You've got to teach the audience and the world what this new thing is and have to get them to come to movie theaters within this three-day window, this exact three-day window essentially, to make to make it a success. And under Iger at Disney, they they they they took over Pixar and Marvel and Luke Some. They had these ideas that you could have a strategy that was entirely sort of sequels and and and remakes and these universes, as they call as they came to call it with uh with Marvel, and that you could essentially get out of the idea of having to make risky original things. And that was enormously successful for them for about 10 years. There was a year when I think Disney alone, this one studio, accounted for more than half of the box office. I think that was in 2019. And every other studio did it. The problem, of course, is eventually you've got to introduce new things, especially in entertainment where novelty is the entire, it's it's not just a feature. It's like I mean, you can keep selling Quake Roats oatmeal or uh or or bathroom tissue the same and make little tweaks on it forever. But but if movies look essentially the same now as they did 10 years before, you're gonna your audience is gonna go running. So that was that that that was the problem with that. And that that so movies lost his originality and it kind of migrated over to streaming, where they went from 200 shows to 700 shows they were making, which gave them room to take all kinds of chances, all kinds of risks, and do all sorts of crazy things. Now the streaming world is because of consolidation, because the boom is seeming busting because basically Disney and and Netflix have maxed out on subscribers and are now looking to maintain. They have become more risk-averse too, and are going to much safer things. So it's a problem across the business.
SPEAKER_01Is there a reason that Disney can't find a chief executive other than Bob?
SPEAKER_00Well, they they they they've they've got one now, Josh Josh DeMarrow. Uh I mean, what they made clear in his appointment is that Disney is essentially a parks business, and that the theme parks are the the engine of the whole thing, and that everything else is just uh feeding into that. They paired him with uh essentially with Dana Walden, who will be in charge of the graded thing, and hopefully she can keep creating new characters and new stories that essentially become rides and cruise ships down the line. The interesting thing about being a becoming a studio CEO is that it takes so long to make movies that when you come in for about three years, you're just you're you're just living off whatever your predecessor did, and you get all the credit in blank. Like Toy Story this weekend Toy Story was an enormous hit, the biggest hit at opening of the year. So that will all be seen as to Josh DeMarrow's credit, but you know, that was a that was a movie that was put into work probably five, seven years ago of a series that started before Bob Iger, under what Michael Iser was CEO, but it will all be Josh DeMarrow's uh credit there.
SPEAKER_01It's interesting that films are really about to, you know, or the point is to create a uh ride at an amusement park.
SPEAKER_00I mean that when you look at the the the amount of money those parks those parks uh churn out and uh the parks and they have cruise ships also now, and it's it I mean the amount of revenue that drives to the whole the whole system is incomparable.
SPEAKER_01So we have to talk about Paramount, because that's all anybody is talking about. Give us your take on Paramount, Warner Brothers Discovery tie-up, I guess.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's uh it's it's another front in the uh in the FinCon war here and them and and consolidation and bringing everything together under one roof, which uh for a lot of us uh think augers bad things for the industry. It's interesting because if if it had been Netflix had won the war, it would have been a more sort of lean conversation about consolidation and those effects uh because it's paramount and because of the Ellison family and their closeness with Trump and and and their willingness uh to send all sorts of happy signals to this administration as it reviews this project, it it's it's also become a political dispute. But uh you know, I uh I would say t tempers are rising on it. It will be I I believe the largest uh LBO in in US history, you'd probably know that better than me. But uh, I think it is, yeah. But uh the and the question is that it the estimates is that will leave them in about eighty billion dollars of debt. So it if it's going to be this new giant studio to compete with Netflix, but they're sitting on eighty billion dollars of debt, you know, the the film division in a good year might have turned out might have brought in two billion dollars of uh gross receipts. Uh how they make a dent in that in in that in that number is a big question, and they haven't really told us much about that, and they haven't told so is this just going to be you know, the the fear is that this consolidation will lead to just a huge streamlining and them and then them selling off parts and the combined company being much diminished. You know, the the the answer against that is well the Ellisons have a lot of money and they can do whatever they want. And surely they didn't buy this company just to strip it down, which I I've I've floated some conspiratorial thinking that maybe this is all about something else, all about something bigger in the Ellison world. But that those are those are those are the many fronts here.
SPEAKER_01Can can you uh tell us what the conspiracy theories are?
SPEAKER_00I I just I look at I look at this and say, I don't see the the path to this being a profitable business. I I I don't and I don't I don't see why Larry Ellison would go down this road. And I also see that they are whatever what they are very loudly attempting to telegraph to the administration their their loyalty and support for him in and in in the moves that that that they're making here, which makes me wonder is there some sort of bigger Oracle benefit that this is basically a a marketing tool for uh for that. And that that gets into a world beyond my knowledge. I'd well they give healthcare to Oracle or something, or all all the all the government's cloud accounts to Oracle or something that makes the uh you know, in the end, I think they'll put in personally 40, 50 billion that makes that 40 or 50 billion insignificant.
SPEAKER_01So I I wonder, because I do believe it has been approved now, the deal has been approved by the FCC.
SPEAKER_00It has, yeah, and the and and the Justice Barn very which which apparently preempted its own lawyers' review to approve it. Uh now we await apparently the the state's attorney generals are are going to file suit. Uh we don't know how many states Rob Bonta, California's attorney general, has been leading that and sort of dropping hints that other states will be involved. Uh and has said he we we don't know how many other states will be involved, and we don't know what court it will go through and what their reaction to it will be. Um I'm I'm told the co the the court can pause it or the court can let go through while while this suit works his way through. And you also have the Europeans. Uh I it's the the I think a lot of a lot of this a lot of the transaction uh taking effect depends on European approval of it also. And uh and they they they are due to uh I think they're due to weigh in any day now and uh say whether they're gonna hold it up. So we're waiting for all that.
SPEAKER_01So speaking of streaming, which we were uh Fox just acquired Roku for twenty-two billion dollars. Explain to us why that's a smart move or a bad move on Fox's.
SPEAKER_00You call it FAST, uh the the the fast channels, the ad support free ad supported services, which were which I've now come down to essentially Roku and and Tubi. And Fox also owns Tubi. It's it's kind of the least glamorous part of the industry, so it it doesn't get a lot of attention, uh, but it it takes up uh when you when you look at how much of the the eyeball time being spent by by by viewers there between between those two channels and what they're watching. I mean, YouTube just dwarfs everything. So it's a it's a huge sector of of entertainment. And Fox is making a a big move into it. Again, the least glamorous part of entertainment, so it doesn't get nearly the ink, it doesn't get you know a millionth the ink that say a little independent movie does, but it's it's a hugely consequential piece of piece of the business.
SPEAKER_01Can anybody possibly compete with YouTube? It seems to me that YouTube is, you know, the central station of media outlets these days.
SPEAKER_00Apart from TikTok, it's hard to see who really can get into that business. Uh YouTube but you YouTube still has really declined to get to to jump into original production, and that's what leaves you know this opening for everything else in Hollywood, because they they they still are happy to just to have influencers and micro things. The influencers can't can't fund a twenty million dollar an episode production bill. So that's not gonna happen there unless unless the company supports it. And you know, if the company decided, well, we're we're gonna fund a ten billion dollar production budget tomorrow, they could they they could say we can fund a hundred billion dollar production budget tomorrow with cash on hand, probably. But that that that you know that that that is that sort of thing that Amazon or or or Apple or YouTube would get into that in a serious way is the thing that keeps even Netflix awake at night. The idea that they could that they would decide that they are going to just own this uh the the this sector, but they're clining to to go that far that deep into it is what allows the others to come to to survive, essentially.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell One thing that's changed uh dramatically since you've been uh writing, even for the anchor since you've been writing about uh Hollywood and the media business more generally, is the arrival of AI and the the unbelievably uh inexpensive ability to to make you know eventually, I guess, feature le feature-length films just using the AI tools that uh DeepMind and and Chat GPT, etc. uh provide. What do you think the impact of AI is now and what do you think the impact is going to be on Hollywood's business and on on the creative side of the Hollywood business?
SPEAKER_00It's become almost a moral panic at this point where where directors as they they launch their film are terrified that of the questions they're gonna get about how much AI did use. And you know, if a production assistant sent a sent sent a text to the director saying, What do you want in your coffee? and and it that that was spell checked by the by by the phone, then that film used AI technically. So it's it's very hard for a movie to say we didn't use AI, but it but they every director is being demanded, did you use AI on this film? And the ones that did are uh have this sort of scarlet letter over them because AI is seen as a thing that will swallow creativity and the industry and take all the jobs away. I think the reality we we j we don't know how it's going to play out, but the idea this is a competitive market for for filmmaking. There was a a one that was very noted at Sundance where it was a probably a five million dollar budget on that film, but it looked like a $50 million film. It was very uh it looked like a very polished, accomplished film in a way that an independent film usually couldn't have. And a lot of people suspected there was a lot of AI tools that went into making that. But so on the one hand, you can say, and it's probably true, that will take the jobs away from a lot of people. On the other hand, for studios, if if they can have five million dollars that look like $50 million movies, they're probably gonna green light a lot more of those movies and put a lot more of those movies into production. And at the upper end of that scope, where you have movies with $200 million budgets, they want to save, they they do want to save money, but they're also competing against other other movies. So if if you have a $200 million budget and say AI lets you take $50 million off that budget, then that's great for your budget there. But you have another movie coming out that was a $200 million budget that will that will take those uh those improvements and build on them, and that will be a $200 million movie that will now look like a $1 billion movie, and you'll be competing against that. So the idea that you just pocket these savings and lay people off and do everything much smaller is not how Hollywood produced. traditionally works. But there's undoubtedly vast areas where we're we're where people can can do it. But in the end, I think technology in Hollywood generally becomes a tool in the hands of of uh of creative people. And and and that's that's that's where this will end up.
SPEAKER_01Amazon owns uh MGM studios. So they're actively in uh the film business. They also have enormous capability on the AI side of things, as well as obviously Amazon Web Services. So it it would seem like they would be an enormous threat to Netflix because, you know, of their wherewithal, of their now standing in Hollywood, et cetera. Are there contracts, are there labor contracts that prevent them from doing as much as they might with AI?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell To some extent they're they're working here, but it's the I mean there are there are things like you you you can't just take Brad Pitt's image and create a and create a synthetic Brad Pitt without Brad Pitt's involvement and and and and not pay him for that. But I mean someone will make an entirely AI generated movie someone will press a button and a movie will pop out and someone will distribute that somewhere and we'll see how that does. My guess is is not very good. I spoke to just talked to uh Chris Melanandry who who's uh the the uh the head of Illumination studios and uh the new movie Minions is going to be a big big hit here and he he talks about the word uh the the the idea of incongruity that incongruity is what really fuels entertainment and incongruity is what the things that you would never think of that to fit together and the things that no computer algorithm could tell you that go together. But the these sort the the mistakes the happy accidents and the little things are what drive creative development and and uh you know I when when people do the whole AI generated movie I'd just say I'm you know my attitude is let let them do it and and and let's see how that works out for them. I don't I I don't think it's gonna go very well. On the other hand of it on the other hand using AI to improve effects and all that well using computer generated tools to do that has been going on for 30 years. That's that's a that that's a process. And it has led to lots of cuts in lots of ways and and and that is unfortunate. But before AI there weren't less people working in uh in the Zen they they were being exported and they explored and they were doing it abroad and it was no longer a centralized system but the people were using these tools and building on them rather than just pocketing the the savings.
SPEAKER_01One of the themes I guess of of news items is the rise of China and China has in the past anyway been a major consumer of U.S. uh film industry product or whatever you want to call it and and that seems to have changed that seems to have diminished. Is that is that true? Has it diminished? Is the the market closing down or what what's going on with the U.S.
SPEAKER_00film industry and China you know we we haven't gotten a clear sense of that and it it it doesn't it it seems like a bit less so but you still have some films that are performing well uh there there hasn't been one clear message of of where it was Hollywood always has like the thing that's gonna that's going to save it. And the it you know we we sort of lurch from one disaster to like oh here's a the big thing. And most recently with live sports was the thing that was gonna that was going to save Hollywood. But the one before that was China. China was the thing that was going to save Hollywood. It's no longer be looked at that way like like that that this huge Chinese market can come in and save us. But I I think with individual films it still makes makes a difference. So that really uh sets them to the side for for the the the major business going on here. But still an open question.
SPEAKER_01Another thing that's always talked about is the rise of TikTok and Instagram and you know attention span being what it is that the most anybody can handle is a one minute snippet on TikTok or Instagram. How real is that how real is that uh narrative I guess? Is is TikTok, are TikTok and YouTube and Instagram making it more difficult for the studios to reach a larger audience?
SPEAKER_00I mean when you look at just sort of eyeball time those things dwarf anything that Hollywood does. It's it's it's it it's vastly better. But you know that a TikTok video can't get people to get a babysitter and come take their families to to spend $100 at the movie theater. It can't it it it can't get people to it in general to pay a $20 monthly subscription fee for services. It can't and it can't it it's not where sort of premium advertisers are looking to to to to place their their their advertisements. So it's not it for sheer eyeball time it's it's competitive but it's not it it it in many ways it's just not in the same business as as we are. And in the end that you know we all hit up hit the problem of there's only 24 hours in a day and seven days in a week and and that can only be divided so many ways but you when you when you look at when you look at the the the successive choice story this weekend the I YouTube has been around for a long time and I and the appetite for for feature films certainly the appetite for produced TV shows has not diminished at all. So it's it's it's still there. The the more interesting thing you you've seen this year you've had a couple of these horror films that have come out of the YouTube world obsession and backrooms become massive hits and it it spawned a lot of talk about how YouTube will be an incubator for the new talent that will will come out and that that will probably be the the next thing that will save that that is going to save Hollywood and we'll we'll see how that works out.
SPEAKER_01So I can I'm I'm a scaredy cat so I can't watch horror movies as I I get that gets worse as I get older I I I found but but but what is the deal with horror movies? They seem to come out I w I went to the movies we went to see uh what's his name Ryan Gosling movie uh Hail Mary which was fantastic and you know because uh the actual AMC theater needs to you know make as much money as possible I guess there are about ten trailers that go on before the movie so if you get a 330 movie actually doesn't start till like four but you know at least five of them are horror movies. So the what's the audience for that?
SPEAKER_00I mean horror movies have been the most consistent genre of Hollywood since the very since the dawn of Hollywood and it's the one genre that never really goes away that sort of reinvents itself every decade with with a new version all through the 90s where there are all these independent films going on horror was still strong with the the the scream series that other genres kind of come and go but horror is always is always there and it's it's always appealed to young people going to the movies together and this is this is this is a big big thing that Hollywood is trying to work for how do you get young people to the movies and Holly and horror is always skewed very young. It's always been kind of a communal sort of thrill ride for the for for for for people to go to and I I I think it's kind of it's it's always been prominent but it's it be kind of become more prominent as other genres have receded so it it it it it seemed bigger and and Hollywood also become and Howard also because it's very it's relatively very cheap to make compared to say a Marvel film, it it allows for a lot more experimentation, a lot more kind of new voices to be part of it.
SPEAKER_01One of the things that surprised me during the pandemic given how grim it was that Hollywood produced it seemed to me virtually no comedies to sort of relieve people's angst about what was happening with the pandemic. Was that surprising to you? Or was it just that the pandemic hit it takes a year and a half to make a comedy and by then you know they would think well the pandemic's going to be over so why do that?
SPEAKER_00What h whatever happened to comedy, I guess is the answer I mean there this is this is this has been the subject this will be the subject of PhD thesis because comedy has drama and comedy or comedy and tragedy are the perennial the perennial spectrum and it's it's sort of and it it's really disappeared. You just you just had in the last few years the studio is barely making things that are pure comedies. I think they're releasing something like five of them this year. It's almost disappeared from from from the menu here and I I think there's a lot of things that have happened um the the the one one that preceded the internet is is the perennial problem that pseudo people point to is that comedies don't travel. Every country's idea of comedy is very unique and idiosyncratic and comedies have not in general played as well overseas as as other kinds of films. So that that that's always been something against them. You had the kind of woke backlash to a lot of different comedians that sort of made various kinds of edgy comedy and sort that that sort of came up as there was a a style of comedy exemplified by the hangover that was kind of seen as sort of frat boyish all the more so it kind of squashed that and it it led to the idea that people don't feel safe to laugh at things together in the world. So and whether that is true or not a lot of studio executives definitely believed believe that and believe that making sort of edgy comedy and R-rated comedy was was was a dangerous thing that that that got them in trouble. So the the dominant form of filmmaking in the last 20 years has been the action comedy which is kind of comedy so if you look at Marvel films it they all kind of fit into action comedy so it's kind of swallowed up a lot of the comedy demand from that and then you had you had the streaming world kept uh Netflix in particular made a lot of comedies and made people think well maybe come maybe maybe streaming is the place for these things now. So you had a lot of different voices I think there's there's more things coming into the system there's when I a lot of this kind of starts and percolates up from the the independent world and at Sundance last time was there were a lot of comedies that broke out of there. So you just you need one or two of those things to really break through in the way that these horror films broke through and and and Hollywood wakes up to it. But it's it's uh it's a big problem.
SPEAKER_01So do you go to these things?
SPEAKER_00Do you go to the Sundance Film Festival and the Tridecca Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival or do you just stay in LA and the the the deal I've negotiated with my family allows me three festivals a year which are Sundance and then the Toronto Film Festival in the fall which was where a lot of sort of the Oscar film debut and it's kind of a good one to go to it's kind of the festival of festivals is how they refer to it where they they bring films that have done well at other festivals there. And then I go to a Cinemacon in Los which isn't a a festival as much as the gathering of the of of the theater owners in America they do that in Las Vegas in April every year where the studios present their plates. So those are my permitted uh excursions every year.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell I left working for Mr. Murdoch in 2019 early 2019. And my goal in life has always been to report to no one and have no one report to me. So I achieved this by going on Substack and starting news items although I do have a couple of people who help on the on the product but you started in 2018 was was it the same thing you you desired to not report to anybody and have no one report to you and then it got so successful it became a real business?
SPEAKER_00That was what I was uh thinking. I just that uh having I I'd spent the past decade and a half kind of working more as an editor than a writer on various uh websites or failing media companies trying to trying to start a web venture and I I decided I I didn't want to deal with the problems of other employees. I didn't want to deal with the problems of uh of of other companies I just wanted to deal with my own problems for a while. So I started that and then the but one thing that happened was happening when I started doing that when you started doing this the marketplace for newsletters was was very uh open and I'm I mean it wasn't I was the best at doing what I was doing. I was the only person doing a newsletter like this uh for Hollywood at the time. So you had a lot of feel but it was becoming increasingly more crowded and I was seeing this is going to become harder for one person alone to to sustain and build something and I and Janice Minn who is a legendary editor within within within Hollywood in the trade world approached me about the idea of building something bigger around it. So I I really have the best of all worlds now and that I can that that she's built this uh the this this big operation around me and I get to just uh focus on all my own problems and issues and everything.
SPEAKER_01So when you did the deal with Janice was that you you presumably obviously came to an agreement with her okay let's take this thing bigger and did you go out and raise money to make it bigger or how did they raised a very small amount of money.
SPEAKER_00We we we we went into we actually the Substack folks suggested just that we joined Y Combinator and and introduced us to them. So we actually did a a Y Combinator training program and the the or their their or their uh boot camp there and they really persuaded us like you're you're a profitable business already why why do why do you want to raise money? What uh what what do you so we we raised a a really small amount of money and we haven't raised money since then uh we've we've gone we've we've lived off our revenue we've been profitable the whole time and and grown on our revenue which you know at this point still owning the full business and and having all the assets gives us a lot of choices so the the Anchor is at theankler.com and I've I've started a new little side project on my own kind of private substack uh called the Rushfield Jamboree which is kind of my my sandbox where I'm gonna start doing a daily interview show and other other sorts of things on there which is part of Anchormedia but is uh my own little playground.
SPEAKER_01So theanchler does you you go there tell tell our audience because I think a lot of people are really interested in in what's happening in Hollywood but I think people are always interested in what's happening in Hollywood.
SPEAKER_00What what are the verticals as they say what are your verticals that we're we're looking at uh kind of the the the the places that the trades and traditional media don't cover we have a report on on who just covers the uh influencer sphere like and subscribe we have we have we have we have a a morning newsletter sort of similar to what you do but for for for the entertainment world specifically called the uh the wake up uh Sean McCulty sort of breaks down the numbers we have uh the few people focused on really just the TV business the business side of of the TV business we have people we we have another one called prestige junkies that uh that focuses on the awards races and the Oscar films and and kind of the the high-end films there we have a we have an AI column we have uh Eric Wehrmark uh AI professional has a that does a a weekly newsletter just about AI so we have a lot of a lot of different things there. And how much does Hollywood hate you? Hollywood hates who it's convenient for Hollywood to hate. So it's uh they they would prefer the they would always prefer that no one have any opinions about about about their work all the time. They're probably not alone in that in the world but but you know I I would say many of my closest sources and uh and best advisors they they come about they they we we start because they call me to yell at me something I write that really incense them and then we have lunch and we're we're best friends after that. So it's uh when when it when it serves their interests to hate me they will they they will they will hate me very very vociferously it's the classic thing where they call you up, they berate you and then the next day they say hey I've got a great story for that you can't think about whether they like you or hate you because those aren't really operative are they paying attention or are they reading you is what you what you got all you can think about.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Any more books coming from you or uh or you're otherwise too busy?
SPEAKER_00I've got a a a book about Hollywood in the 90s that I will write when I retire. This uh doing doing two c I do two columns a week and a daily interview show and then one big interview a week and and and various events and other things so sadly there's not much not much time for book book writing but someday retirement will come and uh and my fourth book will will follow.
SPEAKER_01All right Richard well we take in more than enough of your time to thank you very much for doing this we appreciate it and uh we'll talk to you next time thanks so much for having me and thank you again for all you do there.