Jay Penske: Free Palestine!
Tumbling down the slippery slope of a media mogul bowing to pressure. Plus: Paramount searches for pennies and Starbucks Studios saves the day
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)
A funny thing happened yesterday: A major arm of Penske Media broke ties with the U.S. Army after protests over the Army’s support for Israel.
Well, don’t take my word for it. Here’s the celebratory Tweet from United Musicians and Allied Workers (with the “Austin for Palestine Coalition” tagged), which led the protests of South By Southwest over ties to Israel that brought about this decision:
This would all be whatever — a squabble between the left (the festival world) and the far left (the artists/activist wing of social media) — but for the fact that the company making this decision does in fact have an owner, which is a major player in Hollywood, owning as it does all the trades, the number two or three awards show, some tent buffet at Cannes and the power summit for faded hipster, 50-somethings in cargo shorts known as SXSW.
Not that you would really get that from reading the trade monopoly’s coverage of the decision, in which the ownership of the festival in question is treated like a little neither-here-nor-there curiosity, along the lines of “Did you know about this hotel? Larry Storch and Forrest Tucker stayed here while they filmed the pilot of F Troop?”
Deadline let slip in its fifth paragraph (out of six) that “SXSW is partially owned by P-MRC Holdings, a joint venture of Deadline parent company Penske Media Corporation and MRC” — and then dropped the matter entirely.
THR, very busy advising its readers how to watch the Penske-owned CMA Awards online as it potentially morphs from trade into an “entertainment lifestyle brand,” didn’t touch the story at all. Variety let it slip in a parenthetical footnote at the end of its story, noting, “(Disclosure: Variety and SXSW share a common owner in PMC.)”
IndieWire alone noted the conflict near the top of its story, and actually took one additional step: “IndieWire has reached out for additional comment.” No word if that outreach involved taking the elevator a couple floors up to ask in person.
It’s hard to overstate how unusual it is for a festival in this challenged climate to turn away a sponsor . . .
Unusual perhaps to the point of . . . totally unprecedented for a film festival, at least as far as I can find in contemporary history. The entire job of festival chiefs these days is more or less begging for sponsors to underwrite a tiny smidgen of the festival and coming up with new and novel ways to debase themselves at their feet. (Deadline noted that 80 acts pulled out of the “challenged” festival earlier this year because of Army sponsorship.)
Sponsors have, of course, cut ties with festivals, as Bell did this year with TIFF. But the only example from recent times I can find of a festival cutting off a company that wanted to give them money is the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which parted ways last month with the investment house Baillie Gifford over its support of the fossil fuel industry, which had sparked protest from participating authors.
The throwing up hands in the air explanation given by the Book Festival in that case was very telling and probably not far from the thinking of the SXSW authorities this year: “The pressure on our team has simply become intolerable. We have a major global festival starting in 10 weeks’ time and we need to focus all of our efforts and energy on delivering a safe and successful event for our audiences.”
In other words, don’t ask us to stand for — or against — anything; we never met any pressure we didn’t cave in the face of.
In the case of the SXSW pressure however, it would take considerable fortitude to make that stand. As IndieWire noted, the protests involved more than “100 artists . . . including bands like Squirrel Flower, Good Looks, and Scowl, Gel, and Glare.”
I mean, come on. Maybe there’s a motor oil heir somewhere who could stand firm and stare down Squirrel Flower . . . but when you’re standing off against Squirrel Flower and Gel?! And Glare?! What’s a media conglomerate to do?!
Caving to a mob would be a generous description of the official response, issued in a bizarre cryptic formulation of weasel words dropped on the SXSW site . . .