Ankler Bracket: 'The Players' Tourney Starts Now
Your b-ball bracket is probably a mess (Yale?! Oakland?), so join ours, where you pick Hollywood GOATs past and present
Hollywood, for better and worse, has been defined from the very beginning by the outsize empire builders who created this place. But who among all the titanic figures who have trod along our backlots and red carpets is the greatest of all time? Why shouldn’t we decide together?
Amid the gloom that overhangs the industry at the moment, we all deserve a bit of fun. That’s the spirit underpinning our first-ever Players Tournament Bracket.
The NCAA mens’ tourney is a 64-team bracket with four divisions and that is our model. But rather than divide things by region, our four brackets of 16 are divided by time: Old Hollywood (pre-1970), Easy Riders/Raging Bulls (70s-80s), Big IP Hollywood (90s-00s) and the Streaming Era (10s-Present).
Starting today, we’ll post round one of the Old Hollywood division for you to vote. Polls will be open for a day. The schedule this week will then be as follows:
Tuesday, March 26: Easy Riders/Raging Bulls Round 1
Wednesday, March 27: Big IP Hollywood Round 1
Thursday, March 28: Streaming Era Round 1
Nest week we’ll get things down to the Final Four and then schedule our final for April 8, the same day as the mens’ college-basketball game.
Richard Rushfield, Sean McNulty and I helped make the hard choices of whom to include — and it was not easy! So if you or your mentor (or your nemesis) didn’t make the cut, know that you’re still a champion every time you look in the mirror.
Old Hollywood
They built the studios, the agency business, the TV networks and set the template for everything that followed. Which larger-than-life personalities will advance? That’s for you to decide:
#teamthalberg
Only surprise in voting so far is William Paley over Adolph Zukor. Paley never left New York while Zukor was a fixture on Hollywood. Paley loathed the film business while Zukor created the first modern studio in Paramount. Go figure.