ICYMI: Memo from Toronto
Catch up on our recent best
Happy Sunday everyone. And greetings from Toronto where I (Richard) am surveying what remains of the festival, and seeing how much festive spirit Hollywood can muster during this very trying moment.
First thing that stands out: thanks to this festival, Toronto has created something of a film community that time forgot. While the rest of the world grapples with the future of cinema, many, many thousands of locals turn out to see the highlights of the year in world cinema. Even without stars, even in different languages, even micro-budget, oblique, far-corners-of-the-world dramas fill up their theaters with Torontoites who take a week to be… excited about film. For those of us who care about the medium, that’s fairly exciting to see.
Despite the relative lack of stars, there are still more than plenty here. Part of that is the year’s big trend: stars as directors. Kristin Scott Thomas, Patricia Arquette, Viggo Mortensen, Anna Kendrick, Michael Keaton and Sean Penn are all debuting films here this year. (The bulk of which, so far, have been pretty well received, so you can take your snottiness elsewhere.)
There are still receptions and after-parties going on late into the evening — although fewer and smaller than in years past. And the usual festival circus of festival sideshow persists: Dicks the Musical’s pre-show party at Hooters; a gallery show of the art of Sly Stallone (not bad!).
Beyond that, looking to the industry side of the festival, it’s bizarrely subdued. There are plenty of industry players on hand; the hotel lobbies are filled with kibbitzing execs, agents and producers, but they seem to be doing a sort of Thorazine Shuffle, marching listlessly through the paces without much enthusiasm. There are still deals getting done; people still compare notes about the night’s premieres.
But there’s a certain dread behind it all, as every conversation turns to: what do you think is going to happen? With no one at the moment anticipating anything good to come.
I’ll have more on the fest in my Tuesday column. And until then, here’s the highlights of this week in The Ankler, just in case you missed it:
Today is Day 132 of the Strike
President Biden and the federal government have intervened in the UPS labor actions and are very much intervening in the UAW action.
The $3 billion lost in the strike so far (and counting) would be equivalent to a natural disaster state of emergency. In August alone, 17,000 people lost their jobs in Hollywood — a number large enough to take a notable nibble out of the national employment picture…
Normally, this would be a chance for Democratic politicians to do their superhero act and parachute in to straighten everyone out. This disaster doesn’t require disentangling a trailer park from a tornado, but one group of largely Democratic voting constituents from, unfortunately for them, another group of Democratic voting constituents who happen to be the biggest personal check writers in the party… Remember those federal mediators who stopped by back in July? They don’t seem to have hung around. Too bad, we could use a couple of them right about now…
And let's all bear in mind when those leaders come around looking for their next round of checks how when this crisis fell, how entirely useless they proved to be.
Don’t miss Elaine Low’s great conversation with labor author Sarah Jaffe about how we got here:
“It's not that the studio is an evil institution any more than any other institution in capitalism is an evil institution. It's just that it's designed to make money and accumulate at the top because that's how the system works. It's not that these guys are uniquely terrible people. Jeff Bezos isn't even a uniquely terrible person. He's easy to hate, but this is how the thing is designed. It is designed to siphon money upwards. It will keep doing that, absent workers making enough hell to change the distribution. That's just what it's designed to do.”
Meanwhile, Peter Kiefer reports Apple paid $5 million for the rights to Michael Lewis’ upcoming Sam Bankman-Fried book, and Nanette Burstein has a doc on the way about the crypto con underway. Once this is all over, the starting gun goes off. But who’ll be first to market in what’s looking like a very different landscape?
The headline of our podcast sums up the worry over where this is all headed:
Transcript here
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Movies, Movies, Movies
Sean McNulty’s bonus newsletter this week for paid subscribers dove deep into the budgetes and return on investment for summer’s studio movies — and he crowns one studio the best investor of them all:
☀️Summer 🎥 Studio Scorecard: Ranking ROI on Every Movie
A fun listen: Sean, Elaine and Richard talk what worked, didn’t and why:
Lastly, thanks to Chaz Ebert for allowing us to republish her late husband’s great words about arguably the best year in cinema history (fun parlor game: would any of these movies be greenlit today?).
🪧Strikegeist
☀️The Wakeup
🎧 Podcasts
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Transcript here
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👓 The Optionist
IP Picks🔎: Miyazaki's Fave Kids’ Book Plus, an inspirational Olympic sports story and a Daisy Jones-like tale with a mystery twist
Curious to your thoughts about today's article in Semafor re: Jay Penske. Is it a coincidence that while Hollywood writers are on strike, not a single Hollywood journalist who works for THR/Variety/Deadline/Indiewire can write about the fact they all work for an uncompetitive monopoly? Or that the biggest scoop of the strike (Bob v Bob) came from CNBC and none of the tv/film industry trades owned by Penske?