George & Brad Bite the Apple That Fed Them
George & Brad Bite the Apple That Fed Them
Talent takes the upper hand on the $3 trillion tech giant; Penske's cringe-inducing Applause-o-Meter
Welcome to the Jamboree, my weekly series of quick(ish) takes on the industry’s passing parade.
This Week’s Jamboree Listening Companion:
(Enjoy to one song with each item as you read)
Toronto Kicks Off the Race
Welcome to a very special Jamboree edition. Coming to you live from Toronto where the festival starts today. Arriving last night, King Street enjoyed one last sleepy evening before the onslaught. Roy Thompson Hall perches like a curled-up panther waiting to stretch its limbs and pounce, snoozing one last hour as its meeting with the starting gun of the Oscar race beckoned.
Looming above it all, one newly-installed name — the pinnacle of Hollywood power — blazed down on festivalgoers, a beacon calling prestige junkies and kudos crashers home to their destinies.
Beneath this banner, dreams will be found and lost in the next week. Miso cod canapes will be devoured by the tens of thousands. Deals will be made for amounts both dazzling and disappointing.
Katey Rich (who’ll be interviewing Hugh Grant for a Prestige Junkie live podcast taping) and I are on hand to capture the whole affair. If you’re up here and see me, give a holler. I’d love to say hello.
And now, before we get this thing moving, a quick look at a few of the big stories rocking our foundations this week.
And the Oscar for Most Awkward Debut Goes To . . .
Apple, Brad Pitt and George Clooney are three of the most pristine, platinum-clad, untouchable brands on the planet. So when the three of them join forces, what could go wrong?
Apple, for starters, is learning how much nicer it is to release consumer electronics. The new watch update tends to stick to the company line at rollouts and doesn’t hem and haw awkwardly when asked how it feels about this launch. The Vision Pro headset definitely doesn’t say things like: “We’re figuring it out, we haven’t gotten it figured out yet.”
Related:
As opposed to launching creative projects made by creative people who — despite taking many millions of your dollars — weirdly don’t act like employees of your company are supposed to act, subject to NDAs and the iron hand of the comms chief. Despite those hefty paydays, they have no fear of a company which has made very clear in the past that its people should be seen and not heard. (And really, not seen either.)
This week in Venice, Brad and George had the unenviable task of rolling out the film that Apple had just a couple of weeks earlier, unceremoniously unreleased.
Being pros, they gamely tried to put a sort of shrugging, half-smile on it. But they didn’t try that hard . . .