THB #552: It's Not Alive... ALIVE!!!

You probably know the feeling. There is some precious item in your home that you have had for a long time, but it just doesn’t really fit in your space anymore. You move it. You push other stuff around, trying to make it feel right. You put it in the closet. But then you feel weird about it just sitting there, in the closet, gathering dust. You could sell it and use that money for something that fits better. So you sniff around about its value on the market. You make a small effort to sell it… but the offer is lower than you expect. You’re not going to sell it for that meager amount. It’s an insult. So you find a place for it in your home again. And it still doesn’t fit. Then, one day, you watch Swedish Death Cleaning on Peacock (highly recommended!) and decide that you just have to move on from this item. Do you know someone who would love it the way it deserves to be loved? Is there someone who would pay top dollar for it?

After a few more months of this, you have hit your limit. “Get this fucking thing out of my house!!!”

That’s kinda how I see Shari Redstone today.

I’ve never been a billionaire. I remember a bunch of years ago when an old friend of mine who was “dating” Sumner Redstone was flown in the corporate jet to New York to have lunch with Shari… kind of a vetting activity. That is how those people live. But the thing is, at a much lower budget, your mom and sister and sometimes daughter still want the meet the girl who you are having a relationship with… whether you are spending your money to take her to concerts and paying for dinner at The Sizzler or you are buying her a multi-million dollar house, pushing hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time into her bank account, and letting her spend unlimited funds on whatever makes her happy.

Billionaires… they’re just like us!

Paramount is a shit show. It’s been a shit show for a very long time.

They have had a lot of incredibly talented people around that shit show for a lot of years. Wave after wave of them. Truly some of Hollywood’s best. In an industry that is often about pulling a rabbit out of a hat, the many people in power at Paramount have been asked to do miracles, not magic tricks.

Never forget… until Sumner was incompetent - years before he was declared so - Shari was left out of the Paramount equation. She is not an unintelligent woman… but she and her father did not see eye-to-eye about the business. He did not want her running things.

So irony of ironies, she turned out to be a lot like he was in his later years. In his younger years, he would have bought Fox or Warner Bros and been on the attack to build Paramount into the biggest studio ever.

But like the company he bought/built, he is dead. (Well, unlike the company, he is not walking dead… he would have bought AMC TV by now if he was Young Sumner.)