Hollywood Playbook: Thursday's Top 5 News Items

Hollywood Playbook: Thursday's Top 5 News Items

Low-Rated Hyper-Partisan Lefty to Replace David Letterman

Stephen Colbert is a divisive and rabid left-winger who is already on Late Night and regularly beaten by Adult Swim. Last week he averaged fewer little more than than a half-million demo viewers and fewer than 1.2 million total viewers.

Why would CBS hire such a divisive host who is already failing in Late Night?

All about the left holding on to the culture.

 

Comcast Execs Grilled By Skeptical Senators Over Merger

This is likely all window dressing. Comcast and Time Warner have literally spent billions to buy President Obama and the Democrat Party. The communications giant has also spent countless hours using NBC News and MSNBC as an invaluable in-kind contribution for Democrats. A nice show of outrage against the merger in Senate hearings followed by swift FCC approval, followed by higher cable bills, followed by a left-wing multinational enjoying an even tighter hold on the American culture.

Cut the cord, America.

Power to the People.

 

Harvey Weinstein Still Making Anti-Bush Movies

What courage it takes for producer Harvey Weinstein to Speak! Truth! To! The! Out! Of! Power!

Ballsy!

Edgy!

Avant-garde!

 Five years after George W. Bush leaves office, four years after we learned water-boarding was crucial in bringing down Osama bin Laden, and 6 years after every single anti-Bush/anti-American anti-war film flopped at a wonderful 100% rate — all sad little Harvey has left is to “jerk-store” W. with a movie no one is going to see.

Jon Stewart Proves It’s Been a Slow News Week By Slamming ‘Noah’ Critics

A full two weeks after “Noah” hit theatres, Jon Stewart finally slams the film’s critics. It has been a slow news weeks and Mr. ClownNoseFunnyMan is feeling it like the rest of us:

 

‘Movies Lost Some of Their Magic, Stars Faded’

If you are unfamiliar with the now-20 year-old battle that occurred between Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen, and Michael Ovitz, this Hollywood Reporter story is a fun read. It really was a seismic shift in Hollywood power and the writer, Kim Masters, is correct that the days are over when an individual can hold the kind of power that allows a personal pissing match to cause a business earthquake.

“The world changed,” she writes:

At this point, it’s a cliche to say that the studios have become cogs in enormous corporate machines. The digital revolution happened, movies lost some of their magic, stars faded. No one has managed to match the power wielded by Ovitz in his day. No one inspires the same visceral fear, and it’s impossible to imagine that anyone ever will. It turned out Geffen, Eisner and Ovitz were the last of their breed. Anyone old enough to remember has to miss the days, not so long ago, when rampaging beasts roamed Hollywood and the action behind the scenes was as dramatic and improbable as anything on the big screen.

Two things…

1. I’ve always believed Eisner hired Ovitz expressly for the purpose of destroying him. Ovitz leaving his CAA perch was akin to Samson cutting his own hair. Bring him in, bury him… Warren Beatty did the same to Pauline Kael decades earlier. Beatty took the most powerful and influential (and overrated) critic out of circulation by giving her a job in the belly of the beast. It didn’t last long, and she was never the same afterwards.

2. Hollywood needs “Rampaging Beasts.” The closest there is anymore is Harvey Weinstein, but he’s no  Lew Wasserman, or Daryl Zanuck. Weinstein would have made a perfect PR toadie to an actual Giant, but his movies just aren’t very good and when you’re a screamer you show too many cards.

Machiavelli never screamed.

The multi-nationals removed the mogul and without a Mayer or Selznick you have no one to find and groom movie stars.

And without movie stars, you have no magic — just CGI’d sound and fury.

 

Quick hits:

FXX is Marathoning all 552 episodes of ‘The Simpsons’ This Summer

Mickey Rooney’s Body Remains Unclaimed Due to Messy Family Feud

19 TV Shows on the Bubble

‘X-Men’: Could Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique get the next spin-off film?

‘Iron Man 4 and 5’?

 

Send tips, requests to jnolte@breitbart.com

Follow  John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC              

 

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.