THB #100: Happy Birthday To THB

Mar 16, 2022

By the actual first birthday of this newsletter version of The Hot Button, I guess it will be THB #250 or so. But this is where the digit counter flips to a third number, so… huzzah.

I’ve loved doing this. Some weeks are better than others. Sometimes, I find myself repeating ideas and I just want to smack myself. The themes of this newsletter have been the themes of the moment in this industry. The transition from linear television and cable to streaming is a huge one. It’s bigger than Netflix could ever even imagine for itself. It’s a $250 billion+ a year space and all I really want is an expansive conversation about it all. But most of my colleagues in media just want to whip the same heavy cream way past being whipped cream into common butter.

I guess that is the real answer to what I am doing here and what I would like to turn this into… which it really hasn’t so far. A conversation.

I am a fierce, if not abusive rhetorical fighter. But if I am alone, challenging myself, I have no chance to really grow, occasional revelations aside. it’s boring. I would love to teach high school or college kids about this business… but only if I could truly interact in a way that would allow them to engage in a real dialogue about the industry in which they have an interest.

I suppose that part of my problem, in what has been a mostly pleasurable experience, is that I don’t include these buttons as often as I should.

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For someone who is fairly tech savvy, I am shockingly blocked in the area of self-promotion. I love me. But I hate selling me.

This brings me to another recurring theme of this newsletter… the media. And man, the media doesn’t like being called out. I have been advised by the closest of supporters that I should never use the word “Penske” again in this newsletter. I get it. People always assume it is some kind of anger at the billionaire. (Poor billionaire!) But it’s not.

I see the freedom that is accorded journalists who can make a living as journalists to be a huge responsibility as well. It was best explained to me as a philosophy in improv class 30 years ago or so… play to the top of your ability. Some people have gotten pissed off by vocabulary in my writing… or my ellipses… or me not offering the detailed backstory on some of the history I reference in passing. But these things are invitations to readers to do more than just read something and keep moving. It is a chance to know more, whether a word or a long, complicated history.

I have always felt that writing too densely is my failure as a commercial journalist. Sometimes you need to eat my soup with a chisel. But it is how I think. And if you think it’s dense on the page, try being in my head for a while, trying to sort that mess out.

For me, telling you the hard truth about your work is a show of absolute respect. I don’t tell people who I don’t respect that they are less than perfect. That means when I can’t stop myself from vomiting out my truth about something Matt Belloni writes, it’s not because I think he is an idiot… it’s because I think he’s a super smart guy pissing away his skills on petty gossip and self-aggrandizement. But… it’s going good for him, so he seems super happy with himself and whomever’s name he is dropping that hour.

Writing for the public pretty much without an editor for 25 years has been fascinating. I’ve always wanted an editor… or a real boss. But my effort to have either has failed. It’s a real loss for me. And I think for anyone who reads me. I don’t see editors as “just” spellcheckers or someone to explain my boundaries to me. I see an editor as someone who can see what I am chasing and to help me find the groove and then do better work as a writer within that groove. I know that those exist in serious journalism. Haven’t met any of those in entertainment journalism.

The closest I came was as a lowly hand in News & Notes at Entertainment Weekly back when it mattered. I adored my primary hands-on editor there. She got me, even when i was writing 250 words, and she was the voice that most often guided me on the demands of the editors above her. There was a lot of good work done there. But there was also a lot of stuff killed there. It was there that I learned that many top editors really demanded that we print the legend, not the truth. So when a story zigged when they expected it to zag, the response was not to follow the zig… it was to find someone willing to confirm the zag. Or when an important cover was in the offing, to silence the news. It certainly wasn’t always true and I appreciate all that I learned in that gig and all the super smart people who worked there…. but it was true often enough. I loved killing myself for that little job… and I am enraged by the irony that food delivery services only really came into their own more than a decade after I needed to be tied to my computer for all those hours of closing.

The third big theme around here has been movie theaters and their survival. It’s all a bit heartbreaking. Arguing logic and facts and dollars all day and all night can’t begin to counteract the lazy, unresearched assumptions of so many writers in media these days. And indeed, their dystopian notion of everyone permanently glued to their chairs consuming beyond their brain’s ability to process, broken up only by endless recaps of every single series that comes along and attracts more than 750,000 sets of eyeballs, never leaving the house, except to so anything but go to the movies because those kids and their phones… it’s too much!!!

What is so weird about it is when I find people who agree on all the facts, but still insist that another conclusion is necessary. I don’t want to cook dinner with them. Sugar and salt are NOT interchangeable, no matter how many times a CEO says it in an investor’s call.

I recently found someone who really seems to get it… and I am so thankful. But I know that it doesn’t matter. What matters is how the bosses at all these companies see it in the relatively short term… until one comes along that isn’t pathetically myopic. That’s what keeps me alive… because those people do show up and one can change the entire (little part of the) world.

I don’t think New Bob is a bad guy… he was just drawn that way. But if he had Roger Rabbit, he’d put it on Disney+ first and be excited about the 2 million subs that signed up for 3 months each. But enough about the end of the world as we know it.

I still love movies. I still love TV. And I still love The Business. (I also love everything about The Theater, but live in Los Angeles with my wife who doesn’t want to return to the east coast, so… that is that.)

My deepest thanks to my closest advisors. And to the sponsors of this newsletter, primarily MGM/UA this Oscar season, with a kick of Searchlight and Netflix hopefully moving here from MCN for Emmy season and beyond. I feel they are sponsoring me and my ability to have a voice as much as buying access to you… and I thank them so much. I would like to keep this newsletter free, even if paying for it would be relatively cheap… how many $100 bills do I expect people to burn? And the prices for the $100 newsletters will surely go up next year. it’s a problematic form in that regard.

Please…