Media insiders are buzzing that Andy Lack wants NBC to become “the next Fox News” after he poached cable stars Greta Van Susteren and Megyn Kelly from the network. “He believes he’s building MSNBC and NBC into the next Fox. It seems
the network wants to take a more conservative tone,” a source said. Kelly was hired at NBC without an official time slot, but Page Six exclusively revealed she would be taking over the “9 a.m. or 10 a.m. hour” of “Today” in September. We’re told she is getting paid about $12 million a year for the gig, which will include a Sunday talk show. Some fear Kelly may not be worth the bucks since her Fox replacement
Tucker Carlson nearly doubled her ratings on Fox News after her
departure. We hear MSNBC anchor Joy Reid may also be on the chopping block.
“They haven’t renewed her contract. She’s been working without a contract for at least a month,” an insider told us. An MSNBC spokesperson, however, insisted that Reid “is working under contract. And the network wants her to stay.” A rep for NBC said, “The only thing Andy Lack is interested in ‘tilting toward’ is even more good journalism.”
With theater attendance at a
two-decade low and profits dwindling, the kind of disruption that hit
music, publishing, and other industries is already reshaping the
entertainment business. From A.I. Aaron Sorkin to C.G.I. actors to
algorithmic editing, Nick Bilton investigates what lies ahead.
A few months ago, the vision of Hollywood’s economic future came into
terrifyingly full and rare clarity. I was standing on the set of a
relatively small production, in Burbank, just north of Los Angeles,
talking to a screenwriter about how inefficient the film-and-TV business
appeared to have become. Before us, after all, stood some 200 members of
the crew, who were milling about in various capacities, checking on
lighting or setting up tents, but mainly futzing with their smartphones,
passing time, or nibbling on snacks from the craft-service tents. When I
commented to the screenwriter that such a scene might give a Silicon
Valley venture capitalist a stroke on account of the apparent unused
labor and excessive cost involved in staging such a production—which
itself was statistically uncertain of success—he merely laughed and
rolled his eyes. “You have no idea,” he told me.
After a brief pause, he relayed a recent anecdote, from the set of a
network show, that was even more terrifying: The production was shooting
a scene in the foyer of a law firm, which the lead rushed into from the
rain to utter some line that this screenwriter had composed. After an
early take, the director yelled “Cut,” and this screenwriter, as is
customary, ambled off to the side with the actor to offer a comment on
his delivery. As they stood there chatting, the screenwriter noticed
that a tiny droplet of rain remained on the actor’s shoulder. Politely,
as they spoke, he brushed it off. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, an
employee from the production’s wardrobe department rushed over to berate
him. “That is not your job,” she scolded. “That is my job.”
The screenwriter was stunned. But he had also worked in Hollywood long
enough to understand what she was really saying: quite literally, wiping
rain off an actor’s wardrobe was her job—a job that was well paid and
protected by a union. And as with the other couple of hundred people on
set, only she could perform it.
In the mid-90s, the first time I downloaded an MP3, I realized that the
music industry was in grave trouble. People who were my age (I wasn’t
old enough to legally drink yet) didn’t want to spend $20 on a whole
compact disc when all we coveted was a single song on the album.
Moreover, we wanted our music immediately: we preferred to download it
(illegally) from Napster or eventually (legally) from iTunes without the
hassle of finding the nearest Sam Goody. It turned out that this
proclivity for efficiency—customizing your music and facilitating the
point of sale—was far from a generational instinct. It explains why
the music industry is roughly half the size it was one decade ago.
These preferences weren’t confined to music, either. I also felt the
raindrop moment firsthand when I began working at The New York Times, in
the early 2000s. Back then, the newspaper’s Web site was treated like a
vagrant, banished to a separate building blocks away from the paper’s
newsroom on West 43rd Street. Up-and-coming blogs—Gizmodo,
Instapundit, and Daily Kos, which were setting the stage for bigger and
more advanced entities, such as Business Insider and BuzzFeed—were
simultaneously springing up across the country. Yet they were largely
ignored by the Times as well as by editors and publishers at other news
outlets. More often than not, tech-related advances—including
e-readers and free online blogging platforms, such as WordPress and
Tumblr—were laughed at as drivel by the entire industry, just as
Napster had been years earlier.
Of course, the same logic that had decimated music would undermine print
publishing: readers didn’t want to travel to a newsstand to buy a whole
newspaper when they were interested only in one story or two. And, in so
many cases, they really didn’t care all that much whose byline was at
the top of the piece. Subsequently, newspaper advertising revenues fell
from $67 billion in 2000 to $19.9 billion in 2014. Meanwhile, the same
pummeling occurred in the book-publishing world. Many consumers didn’t
want hardcover books for $25 when digital versions were available for
$9.99. An algorithm generally provided better suggestions than an
actual in-store clerk. And consumers never had to leave home to get the
book they wanted. Amazon, knowing this, eviscerated the business. While
print sales have finally leveled out (largely through a reliance on
science fiction and fantasy), the industry has seen sales fall
precipitously over the past decade.
Hollywood, these days, seems remarkably poised for a similar disruption.
Its audiences increasingly prefer on-demand content, its labor is
costly, and margins are shrinking. Yet when I ask people in Hollywood if
they fear such a fate, their response is generally one of defiance. Film
executives are smart and nimble, but many also assert that what they do
is so specialized that it can’t be compared to the sea changes in other
disrupted media. “We’re different,” one producer recently told me.
“No one can do what we do.”
That response, it’s worth recalling, is what many editors and record
producers once said. And the numbers reinforce the logic. Movie-theater
attendance is down to a 19-year low, with revenues hovering slightly
above $10 billion—or about what Amazon’s, Facebook’s, or Apple’s
stock might move in a single day. DreamWorks Animation was sold to Comcast for a relatively meager $3.8 billion. Paramount was recently
valued at about $10 billion, approximately the same price as when
Sumner Redstone acquired it, more than 20 years ago, in a bidding war
against Barry Diller. Between 2007 and 2011, overall profits for the
big-five movie studios—Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount
Pictures, Universal Pictures, and Disney—fell by 40 percent. Studios
now account for less than 10 percent of their parent companies’ profits.
By 2020, according to some forecasts, that share will fall to around 5
percent. (Disney, partly owing to Star Wars and its other successful
franchises, is likely to be a notable outlier.)
Show business, in many ways, has entered a vicious cycle set off by
larger economic forces. Some 70 percent of box office comes from abroad,
which means that studios must traffic in the sort of blow-’em-up action
films and comic-book thrillers that translate easily enough to Mandarin.
Or in reboots and sequels that rely on existing intellectual property.
But even that formula has dried up.
Chinese firms, including Dalian
Wanda, are rabidly acquiring companies such as Legendary Entertainment,
AMC, and Carmike Cinemas, a smaller theater chain, with an apparent goal
of learning how Hollywood does what it does so China can do it better.
As The Wall Street Journal reported last summer, more sequels bombed
than did not. Fortune called it “a summer of big flops.”
MGM’s
Ben-Hur, which was produced by Mark Burnett, cost $100 million and yet
grossed only $11 million in its opening weekend.
But the real threat isn’t China. It’s Silicon Valley. Hollywood, in its
over-reliance on franchises, has ceded the vast majority of the more
stimulating content to premium networks and over-the-top services such
as HBO and Showtime, and, increasingly, digital-native platforms such as
Netflix and Amazon. These companies also have access to analytics tools
that Hollywood could never fathom, and an allergy to its inefficiency.
Few have seen the change as closely as Diller himself, who went from running Paramount and Fox to building his own tech empire, IAC. “I
don’t know why anyone would want a movie company today,” Diller said at
Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit in October. “They don’t make
movies; they make hats and whistles.” (Half of the people in the
audience, likely representing the tech industry, laughed at this quip;
the other half, from Hollywood, cringed.) When I spoke to Mike Moritz,
the iconic venture capitalist, backstage at the event, he noted that a
nominal investment in a somewhat successful tech company could generate
more money than Hollywood’s top-grossing movies. “In my mind,” he
said, “Hollywood is dying.”
II. Here Comes Facebook
Part of the problem, it seems, is that Hollywood still views its
interlopers from the north as rivals. In reality, though, Silicon Valley
has already won. It’s just that Hollywood hasn’t quite figured it out
yet.
When Netflix started creating its own content, in 2013, it shook the
industry. The scariest part for entertainment executives wasn’t simply
that Netflix was shooting and bankrolling TV and film projects,
essentially rendering irrelevant the line between the two. (Indeed,
what’s a movie without a theater? Or a show that comes available in a
set of a dozen episodes?) The real threat was that Netflix was doing it
all with the power of computing. Soon after House of Cards’ remarkable
debut, the late David Carr presciently noted in the Times, “The spooky
part . . . ? Executives at the company knew it would be a hit before
anyone shouted ‘action.’ Big bets are now being informed by Big Data.”
Carr’s point underscores a larger, more significant trend. Netflix is
competing not so much with the established Hollywood infrastructure as
with its real nemeses: Facebook, Apple, Google (the parent company of
YouTube), and others. There was a time not long ago when technology
companies appeared to stay in their lanes, so to speak: Apple made
computers; Google engineered search; Microsoft focused on office
software. It was all genial enough that the C.E.O. of one tech giant
could sit on the board of another, as Google’s Eric Schmidt did at
Apple.
These days, however, all the major tech companies are competing
viciously for the same thing: your attention. Four years after the debut
of House of Cards, Netflix, which earned an astounding 54 Emmy
nominations in 2016, is spending $6 billion a year on original content.
Amazon isn’t far behind. Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat are all
experimenting with original content of their own. Microsoft owns one of
the most profitable products in your living room, the Xbox, a gaming
platform that is also a hub for TV, film, and social media. As The
Hollywood Reporter noted this year, traditional TV executives are
petrified that Netflix and its ilk will continue to pour money into
original shows and films and continue to lap up the small puddle of
creative talent in the industry. In July, at a meeting of the Television
Critics Association in Beverly Hills, FX Networks’ president, John
Landgraf, said, “I think it would be bad for storytellers in general if
one company was able to seize a 40, 50, 60 percent share in
storytelling.”
It would be wrong, however, to view this trend as an apocalypse. This is
only the beginning of the disruption.
So far, Netflix has merely managed to get DVDs to people more quickly
(via streaming), disrupt the business plan of the traditional
once-a-week, ad-supported television show, and help solidify the verb
“binge” in today’s culture. The laborious and inefficient way shows
and films are still made has not been significantly altered. That set I
visited in Los Angeles with its 200 workers wasn’t for an NBC or FX
show; it was actually a production for a streaming service. The same
waste and bloated budgets exist across the entire industry. To put the
atrophy into perspective, a single episode of a typically modest
television show can cost $3 million to shoot and produce. By
comparison, a typical start-up in Silicon Valley will raise that much to
run a team of engineers and servers for two years.
But all those TV workers feel as if they are in safe harbor, given that
the production side of a project is protected by the unions—there’s
the P.G.A., D.G.A., W.G.A., SAG-AFTRA, M.P.E.G., and I.C.G., to name
just a few. These unions, however, are actually unlikely to pose a
significant, or lasting, protection. Newspaper guilds have been steadily
vanquished in the past decade. They may have prevented people from
losing jobs immediately, but in the end they have been complicit in big
buyouts that have shrunk the newspaper industry’s workforce by 56
percent since 2000. Moreover, start-ups see entrenched government
regulation, and inert unions, not so much as impediments but as one more
thing to disrupt. Uber and Lyft have largely dominated unions and
regulators as they have spread around the world. Unions did not impede
Airbnb from growing across American cities. (The company has 2.3 million
listings in 34,000 cities.) Google, Facebook, ad-tech giants, and
countless others have all but stampeded demands for increased privacy
online from groups such as the A.C.L.U. And that’s just to cite the most
obvious examples. In the 1950s, the movies were the third-largest retail
business in the U.S., surpassed only by grocery stores and car
dealerships. Look what Silicon Valley has already done to the other two
sectors.
At the heart of the disruption is the most profound element of
Hollywood: the theater. Just as customers now generally eschew albums
for singles (or streaming services such as Spotify), and hardcovers for
more economical e-books, we will eventually stop going to the movies,
which are already expensive, limiting, and inconvenient. Instead the
movies will come to us. If the industry continues the process of
“windowing” (in which studios wait weeks, or sometimes months, to
release a film that has already been in the theaters onto other
platforms), people will continue to steal a movie they want to see, or
they’ll simply stop watching them altogether. (In 2015, the top films in
theaters were illegally downloaded more than half a billion times.)
Meanwhile, consumers will continue to opt for other forms of
entertainment, such as YouTube, Netflix, and video games, or turn to
Instagram or Facebook.
And it’s only a matter of time—perhaps a couple of years—before
movies will be streamed on social-media sites. For Facebook, it’s the
natural evolution. The company, which has a staggering 1.8 billion
monthly active users, literally a quarter of the planet, is eventually
going to run out of new people it can add to the service. Perhaps the
best way to continue to entice Wall Street investors to buoy the
stock—Facebook is currently the world’s seventh-largest company by
market valuation—will be to keep eyeballs glued to the platform for
longer periods of time. What better way to do that than a two-hour film?
This might begin with Facebook’s V.R. experience. You slip on a pair of
Oculus Rift glasses and sit in a virtual movie theater with your
friends, who are gathered from all around the world. Facebook could even
plop an advertisement next to the film, rather than make users pay for
it. When I asked an executive at the company why it has not happened
yet, I was told, “Eventually it will.”
III. A.I. Aaron Sorkin
The speed with which technologies can change an industry today is truly
staggering. Uber, which is eight years old, is worth more than 80
percent of the companies on the Fortune 500 list. When Silicon Valley
goes after a new industry, it does so with a punch to the gut.
Hollywood executives may invoke their unique skills, but engineers are
unlikely to see things quite that way. We generally assume that
artificial intelligence poses a risk to lower-skilled jobs, such as
trucking or driving cabs. But the reality is that the creative class
will not be unharmed by software and artificial intelligence.
Researchers at M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory are looking at ways to teach computers how to corral
information so as to perceive occurrences before they even happen. At
present, this application anticipates events that will move markets, or
monitors security cameras to help emergency responders before something
tragic occurs.
But there are other applications for these kinds of technologies, too.
If you could give a computer all the best scripts ever written, it would
eventually be able to write one that might come close to replicating an
Aaron Sorkin screenplay. In such a scenario, it’s unlikely that an
algorithm would be able to write the next Social Network, but the end
result would likely compete with the mediocre, and even quite good, fare
that still populates many screens each holiday season. The form of
automation would certainly have a massive impact on editors, who
laboriously slice and dice hundreds of hours of footage to create the
best “cut” of a film or TV show. What if A.I. could do that by
analyzing hundreds of thousands of hours of award-winning footage? An
A.I. bot could create 50 different cuts of a film and stream them to
consumers, analyzing where viewers grow bored or excited, and change the
edits in real time, almost like A/B testing two versions of a Web page
to see which one performs better.
Actors, in many ways, have been disrupted for years—from the reliance
on costumed superheroes to the rise of C.G.I. filmmaking. Many agents
whom I’ve spoken with already seem to know this and have moved their
portfolios away from Hollywood to include, among others, clients from
professional sports. There is a reason we see so many once promising
actors, from Jessica Alba to Kate Hudson to Jessica Biel to the Mowry
sisters, looking to re-invent themselves in new careers during their 30s
and 40s, once their prime. The future augurs less of a need for actors
other than, despite Donald Trump’s puerile objections, the Meryl Streeps
of the world.
Kim Libreri, who spent years in the film industry working on special
effects for films such as The Matrix and Star Wars, predicts that by
2022 graphics will be so advanced that they will be “indistinguishable
from reality.” In some respects, that is already on the verge of
happening. If you watched Rogue One, you will have noticed that Peter
Cushing appeared as one of the main actors in the film, which was shot
last year in London. Cushing, who died in 1994, was (mostly) rendered in
C.G.I. The same was true for Princess Leia, played by the late Carrie
Fisher, who has a cameo at the end. The C.G.I.-enhanced version of
herself hasn’t aged a day since 1977. “While stars used to be able to
make a movie, now they can hurt it,” one Hollywood producer lamented to
me. His outlook resembled Moritz’s: “The movie star, like everything
else in Hollywood, is dying.”
IV. The Audience Wins
In all of these instances of technological disruption—A.I., C.G.I.
actors, algorithmic editors, etc.—there will be the exceptions. Like
everything else involving money and creativity, there will indeed be a
top category—those who have great, new, innovative ideas, and who
stand above everyone else—that is truly irreplaceable. (Indeed, this
has proved to be the case in music, journalism, and publishing.) There
will be great screenwriters and even great actors. The real winners,
however, are the consumers. We won’t have to pay $50 to go to the
movies on a date night, and we’ll be able to watch what we want to
watch, when we want, and, most important, where we want.
And while Hollywood could take control of its fate, it’s very difficult
for mature businesses—ones that have operated in similar ways for
decades and where the top players have entrenched interests—to embrace
change from within. Instead, one can imagine the future looking
something like this: You come home (in a driverless car) and say aloud
to Alexa or Siri or some A.I. assistant that doesn’t exist yet, “I want
to watch a comedy with two female actors as the leads.” Alexa responds,
“O.K., but you have to be at dinner at eight P.M. Should I make the
movie one hour long?” “Sure, that sounds good.” Then you’ll sit down
to watch on a television that resembles digital wallpaper. (Samsung is
currently working on flexible displays that will roll up like paper and
could encompass an entire room.) And you might, through the glory of
A.I., be able to watch with your spouse, who is halfway around the world
on a business trip.
There are other, more dystopian theories, which predict that film and
video games will merge, and we will become actors in a movie, reading
lines or being told to “look out!” as an exploding car comes hurtling
in our direction, not too dissimilar from Mildred Montag’s evening
rituals in Fahrenheit 451.
When we finally get there, you can be sure of
two things. The bad news is that many of the people on the set of a
standard Hollywood production won’t have a job anymore. The good news,
however, is that we’ll never be bored again.
Nick BiltonNick Bilton is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair.
The
studio has struggled recently, including with last year’s Ghostbusters
sequel and a movie based on the Angry Birds video game. Sony warned in
June the division was at a risk of posting more losses. Source: Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection
by Yuji Nakamura, Pavel Alpeyev, and Takashi Amano
Sony Corp.
said it will take a 112 billion yen ($1 billion) writedown in its movie
business after reviewing the future profitability of its operations.
The
company said it would book the charge in the fiscal third quarter and
is examining how that will affect its forecasts. To offset part of the
loss, the company also said it would sell shares in the medical web
service M3 Inc. to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Japan unit, in a deal worth about 37 billion yen.
The
announcement comes two weeks after Sony said the chief executive
officer of Sony Entertainment, Michael Lynton, is stepping down after a
13-year run. The studio has struggled recently, including with last
year’s Ghostbusters sequel and a movie based on the Angry Birds video
game. Sony warned in June the division was at a risk of posting more
losses. “There has been a suspicion in the market that Sony doesn’t
have a firm grip on the movie business, but still the amount is a
surprise,” said Kazunori Ito, an analyst at Morningstar Investment
Services.
“That said, with Lynton’s departure and this writedown, all
the bad news is out and the attention can turn on their plan for the
coming fiscal year.”
Little Changed
Sony shares closed
little changed in Tokyo prior to the announcement. Shares listed in
Germany fell 2.6 percent in light-volume trading after the statement was
published.
“The decline in the DVD and Blue-ray market was faster than we anticipated,” Takashi Iida, a Sony spokesman said by phone.
The
Tokyo-based company is increasingly relying on its video games
business, which generated twice as much income in the last fiscal year
as film. Sony’s PlayStation 4 console is outselling Xbox One, its
closest rival from Microsoft Corp., by about two-to-one, according to
industry website VGChartz.
Lynton’s departure capped a tumultuous two years for the division since a
cyberattack blamed on North Korea paralyzed the studio. The hacking led
to private messages leaking onto the internet and the departure of
film-division head chief Amy Pascal. Sony’s CEO Kazuo Hirai has
temporarily relocated to California for six-months to oversee a review
of the division and look for a replacement for Lynton, the company said
this month.
‘Financial Responsibility’
In an e-mail to employees, Hirai and Lynton said the
transition gets underway this week and turn-around efforts will focus on
expanding globally, making more use of the studio’s intellectual
property and “realizing a culture of financial responsibility.” The
e-mail also partly blamed the writedown on “dramatic” industrywide
shifts in home entertainment.
In June, Sony lowered its projection
for film revenue in fiscal year 2018 by $500 million to a range of $9.5
to $10.5 billion. It also lowered its operating profit margin to a
range of 6 to 7 percent, from 7 to 8 percent. Sony’s Iida said the
division’s television broadcasting unit, which generates the majority of
revenue, is unaffected and continues to do well.
Sony is
increasingly leaning on China to offset the downturn. In September,
Dalian Wanda Group Co., the world’s largest movie screen operator, agreed to invest in Sony Pictures productions in an open-ended partnership. But a slowdown in movie revenue on the Chinese mainland has raised doubts about how much the deal will bolster Sony’s performance.
M3
slipped 1.2 percent prior to the announcement on Monday and is up 17
percent over the past 12 months. M3 will continue to count Sony as its
largest shareholder even after the deal, according to data compiled by
Bloomberg. Prior to the deal, Sony held 39.3 percent of M3’s outstanding
shares.
by Brent Lang Senior Film and Media Editor “Live By Night” mostly fired blanks when it debuted in theaters last December, and its failure has resulted in a lot of financial carnage. The expensive gangster picture was a passion project for Ben Affleck, who directed, wrote, produced, and starred in the story of a Florida rum runner. But critics ripped the picture, calling it dramatically inert and a muddle.
That’s left Warner Bros., the studio behind the film flop, looking at a
$75 million loss, according to insiders with knowledge of its financing
and rival studio executives.
“Live By
Night” has made $16.5 million globally, and is not expected to have
international appeal despite Affleck’s star power. Talky period pictures
don’t tend to play well overseas, particularly when they don’t come
loaded with Oscars (“Live By Night” was shut out). The film cost $65
million to produce and tens of millions more to distribute and market.
Warner Bros. only gets a percentage of ticket sales. It will try to
cushion its losses with home entertainment sales and rentals, as well as
television licensing deals. The studio did have a significant financial
partner on the film in RatPac-Dune Entertainment, though it’s not clear
how much the slate financing partner invested in “Live By Night.” “Live By Night” is adapted from a Dennis Lehane novel. It co-stars
Elle Fanning, Sienna Miller, Zoe Saldana, and Chris Cooper, and centers
on a Prohibition-era criminal who battles with the Ku Klux Klan and
rival gangs as he struggles to corner the market on hooch. Warner Bros. has a long relationship with Affleck, having backed and
made money on his previous directorial efforts such as “Argo” and “The
Town.” He also played the Dark Knight in the studio’s “Batman v
Superman: Dawn of Justice,” “Suicide Squad,” and the upcoming “Justice
League.” Affleck plans to direct a standalone Batman film. A spokesman for Warner Bros. declined to comment.
As the world’s most in fluential media mogul nears his 86th birthday, his
sons have stepped up to steer the family business. But can they ever
escape their father’s shadow?
On a cold winter morning last month, James Murdoch took to the
stage at a digital media conference in a skyscraper overlooking Central
Park and sat down on a beige sofa. The room was packed — members of the
Murdoch family tend to draw a crowd. Dressed in the media CEO uniform
of jeans, suit jacket and open-necked white shirt, he deftly parried
questions about the political leanings of the Fox News Channel. Asked if
the network was, as its slogan claims, “fair and balanced” — a question
that elicited some giggles from the audience — Murdoch pointed to the
difference between its news reporting and its opinion shows, where
conservative warriors such as Bill O’Reilly command big primetime
audiences. If Rupert Murdoch’s second son was nervous about the
multibillion-pound deal he had been secretly putting together — a deal
that would reignite a political storm dating back to the 2011 tabloid
phone-hacking scandal — he certainly didn’t show it. Less than 48
hours later the news was out: 21st Century Fox, the entertainment
company run by James and jointly chaired by his elder brother, Lachlan,
and their father, announced an £11.7bn proposal
to buy the 61 per cent of Sky that it didn’t already own. Critics
ranging from former Labour leader Ed Miliband to Hacked Off, the press
reform pressure group, immediately spoke out against it, citing the
behaviour of Murdoch-owned tabloids during the phone-hacking scandal.
The Guardian ran an editorial with the headline: “The fox is in the
henhouse again”, and more than 100,000 people signed a petition urging
the government to refer the proposed takeover to Ofcom, the UK media
regulator. “Rupert Murdoch . . . already has too much influence over our
news,” the petition stated. “This new power grab would give him even
more.” This is the second time
the Murdochs have tried to buy all of Sky, having withdrawn their first
bid almost six years ago in the face of public outrage around the
hacking scandal. It is unclear if they will succeed this time around,
although executives inside Fox are privately confident. What is more
certain is that a gradual transfer of power from Rupert Murdoch to his
sons, a process that began when he gave them big new jobs in the summer
of 2015, is picking up pace. When
Fox confirmed a week after the Business Insider conference that it had
made a formal offer to Sky about a takeover, it was James and Lachlan
who laid out the company’s plans on a call with investors: Rupert, the
press baron who founded British Sky Broadcasting in 1989, was absent.
When the former Fox News presenter Gretchen Carlson sued the channel’s
chairman Roger Ailes for sexual harassment last summer, it was James and
Lachlan who swiftly authorised an independent investigation by an
outside law firm into the allegations — something that led to Ailes
being forced out of the network he had founded 20 years earlier. Rupert,
returning from a holiday with his new wife Jerry Hall, joined the
discussions later. This is not to say that the 85-year-old Rupert
has detached himself from the empire he spent more than half a century
assembling. In some respects, he has more direct involvement now than he
has had in years. He has been running Fox News since Ailes’s departure
(a permanent successor has yet to be found) and was also closely
involved in coverage of the Brexit campaign at The Sun, Britain’s
best-selling daily newspaper. Still, 18 months after he began the
orderly transfer of power to his sons (there was no official role for
Elisabeth, his daughter) James and Lachlan, 44 and 45, are making their
mark. The
brothers oversee an enviable collection of businesses — a movie studio,
cable channels and a publishing house worth a combined $62bn. But that
does not mean they have nothing to worry about. Their newspapers have
been walloped by an industry-wide collapse in print advertising, while
Fox’s television networks are grappling with the “cord-cutting”
phenomenon — the cancellation of pricey cable subscriptions by a
generation that prefers binge-watching on demand. For owners of channels
such as Fox that means fewer viewers and pressure on advertising. The
competition is also beefing up. Time Warner, one of Fox’s main rivals
and the owner of HBO, CNN and Warner Bros, has agreed a blockbuster $85.4bn sale to AT&T,
which will create a giant that dwarfs Fox. If it is cleared by
regulators, the combined company will be able to deliver Time Warner
movies and TV programming direct to more than 160 million AT&T
customers around the US — something Fox is currently unable to do. Add
these challenges to the scrutiny and opposition that their Sky deal
will generate and the younger Murdochs find themselves in a challenging
environment. Their father overcame considerable obstacles to become the
world’s most influential media mogul, battling political establishments
on both sides of the Atlantic and making risky bets along the way,
buying The Sun, launching Sky and Fox News, to name but three. The
question now facing James and Lachlan is this: do they have what it
takes to fill his shoes? Like any family, the Murdochs
have had their share of rows. The difference is that the Murdochs
control a vast array of global businesses and brands, so, if and when
they fall out, the stakes are somewhat higher. “It’s like Game of Thrones,” says one person who knows them well. “Or The Hunger Games.” In
2005, Lachlan abruptly left a senior position in New York running News
Corp’s television stations and moved to Australia. The catalyst for his
departure may have been Rupert siding with Roger Ailes over him in a
programming-related matter. The decision would not have been taken
lightly: his exit appeared to end his chances of one day succeeding his
father. Rupert had once remarked that of all his children, Lachlan was
his most likely successor because, “He was the one who was always most
interested . . . when he was a 13-year-old kid, he worked as an
apprentice with the printers in the pressroom, cleaning all the oil and
the grease off the press.” When Lachlan returned to Australia, he
embarked on several new business ventures — including investing in Nova
Entertainment, a radio group. He had started his career in Australia in
the mid-1990s, where he learnt the ropes at News Corp’s print and
broadcast operations. Then, in 2000, he led an investment by News Corp
in REA, an Australia-based real estate listings company. The company
later increased its stake to 61 per cent, paying a total of about $100m.
Today, News Corp’s investment is worth more than $3.3bn. With
a tribal tattoo on his left forearm, Lachlan is not as buttoned-up as
the typical corporate executive. Passionate about photography, mountain
climbing and the great outdoors, he returned to Fox in 2015 after a
decade in Australia, driving on to the company’s studio lot in Los
Angeles in a pick-up truck. According to Peter Macourt, the former
chief operating officer of News Corp Australia who worked closely with
him in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lachlan shares many traits with
his father. “They are both very open and like to get people’s views,” he
says. Lachlan wasn’t someone to rush around barking orders. “It was
always a two-way conversation rather than a dictatorial way of
approaching management.” There has always been a competitive
streak to Lachlan and James, who are 15 months apart in age, but close
observers say there have been no real fireworks since James was made Fox
chief executive and Lachlan chairman (alongside his father) in the
summer of 2015. “I don’t think they are close but I don’t think they are
fighting,” says one. A colleague puts it more bluntly. James and
Lachlan “are figuring out how to get along. It’s not a secret that they
are not big fans of each other.” One person close to Fox insists the
brothers’ relationship is good. “The family had some complicated issues
years ago but are in a great place now.” James
did not always seem destined for a career in the family business. He
attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he contributed to The
Harvard Lampoon magazine, writing a comic strip called Albrecht the
Atypical Hun. He left before finishing his degree and started Rawkus
Records with two friends: the label, located between a falafel
restaurant and a porn shop in New York’s Tribeca district, would claim a
place in hip-hop folklore because of the role it played in launching
several top acts, including Mos Def and Talib Kweli. News Corp
ultimately acquired Rawkus and, while James no longer has any direct
involvement in it, he continues to be interested in hip-hop. He raved to
me about Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s acclaimed hip-hop
musical, shortly after its Broadway debut in 2015 and urged friends and
colleagues to see it. Jason Hirschhorn, who now runs the
MediaREDEF news letter, first met James Murdoch at Horace Mann School in
New York. “His first day on the bus he had a shaved head and an
earring,” he tells me. “He was reading Catcher in the Rye and
wearing Chuck Taylor sneakers.” The two bonded over a shared love of
sneakers and are friends to this day: Hirschhorn, who has worked at MTV
and was co-chairman of MySpace, says James understands that content and
distribution “are being married together” and that Fox content “has to
be where the audience is”. The
brothers may have the top two jobs at Fox but it was their older
sister, Elisabeth, who was once the favourite to get a big role running
the family businesses. The 48-year-old is a seasoned executive and
founded Shine, the independent television group behind MasterChef, which
was later acquired by Fox. Her father admired what she had achieved but
their relationship soured during the phone-hacking scandal. She was
critical of James’s and Rupert’s response to the unfolding drama, which
upset Rupert, who expected her to stand with the family, according to an
insider. Elisabeth distanced herself further in her 2012 MacTaggart
lecture at the Edinburgh television festival in which she criticised
aspects of James’s lecture at the same venue three years earlier and
defended a regular Murdoch punchbag — the BBC. Murdoch’s
increasing hostility to Elisabeth’s then husband, the London PR man
Matthew Freud, complicated matters. People with knowledge of the
situation say that Freud’s ongoing friendship with Tony Blair angered
Rupert after allegations emerged that Blair may have had an affair with
Murdoch’s ex-wife, Wendi. Freud and Elisabeth separated in 2014 and
friends note a marked improvement in her relationship with her father.
They spent part of last summer and Christmas together and are said to be
the closest they have been in years.
Elisabeth Murdoch was critical of James’s and Rupert’s response during the phone-hacking scandal
Still,
the chances of her returning to the fold with a formal role look
remote. In a 2015 interview with the Hollywood Reporter, James said
Elisabeth’s decision to leave Shine after it had been acquired by Fox
was a “regret”, adding: “We’re a close family but she’s doing other
things now.” A source told me Rupert would “love to have her back in”
but the word from people who know Elisabeth is that she has no interest
in returning. It has been 18 months since the brothers
were given their new roles and the verdict from people who know them is
that so far they have handled the transition well. “They are well suited
to assuming the mantle and will do a very good job,” says Sir Martin
Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, which buys advertising for its clients
at News Corp titles and on Fox channels. He has known the family for
years. “It’s a triumvirate, because Rupert is still very much involved.
I’m told he was in the office every day over Christmas.” Triumvirates
are not common at the head of large companies for good reason: someone
needs to take responsibility for the big decisions. Lachlan is the
co-chairman of News Corp alongside his father, but former Times and Wall
Street Journal editor Robert Thomson, who is its chief executive, makes
day-to-day decisions. “[At Fox] the way it tends to work is that the
movie studio is Lachlan and Rupert, anything to do with international
television — Sky, Star — is James,” one executive says. “Then a little
bit of the US television stuff is up for grabs except Fox News, which is
all Rupert.” A
person close to Fox puts it differently, saying major decisions are
made jointly: “It is a true partnership between Lachlan and James.”
Another executive scoffs at this: “The big issue is the dynamic between
the three of them . . . it’s very weird,” he says. They are rarely
together in one place: Lachlan works out of the Fox studio in LA, while
James is at the building it shares with News Corp in midtown Manhattan.
(He is also developing a property that a colleague describes as an
“end-of-times house”, with its own water and solar power supply, in a
remote part of Canada.) “What they haven’t worked out is a clear line of
authority,” the executive continues. “It’s really management by
committee or James and Lachlan trying to get Rupert to agree to
something.” The brothers will manage the Sky bid with the aim of
avoiding the fate of the last offer they made for the company. Back in
2010, the family couldn’t have handled things much worse, according to
Claire Enders, the media analyst. She points to the aggressive posture
taken at the time, particularly by James, who in his 2009 MacTaggart
lecture lambasted the BBC, calling the scale of its activities
“chilling” and describing the regulation of UK broadcasting as
“authoritarianism” that limited choice and freedom of expression. This
disdain carried over into the first Sky bid a year later, with
“hectoring” phone calls by the Murdoch camp to government ministers,
Enders says. It was, she goes on, “an extraordinary farce”. The
bid this time has been made in less charged circumstances. There has
been no antagonism towards Ofcom or the government and no backdrop of a
criminal investigation. “The previous bid was highly politicised but
this bid is very deliberately not politicised at all,” says Enders. The
Murdochs, she adds, “are being patient and understanding and they are
not hectoring”. David Yelland, a former editor of The Sun who now
runs Kitchen Table Partners, a communications firm, agrees there has
been a change of tone. “I don’t think they’ve ever done a better-timed
transaction and they’ve done it in the right way.” He says Fox and News
Corp are using more professional advisers and that corporate governance
standards at the two companies have improved. “There used to be people
who ran Sky who would get calls from Rupert and he would tell them about
something Sky was going to do. And they would say: ‘Great, have you
spoken to the board?’ And he would say: ‘I am speaking to the board,
aren’t I?’” The Sky offer that landed just before Christmas has an
air of inevitability about it, Yelland suggests. “It could have been
incredibly controversial but by the time it got dark in London that
night you knew it was a done deal.” Not
everyone shares this view and there are plenty of people for whom
phone-hacking memories still linger. Ed Miliband was leader of the
Labour party in 2011 when what had been a minor scandal about a few
rogue tabloid journalists erupted into global outrage about
institutional corruption at UK tabloid newspapers. The catalyst was The
Guardian’s revelation that journalists at the News of the World,
Murdoch’s best-selling Sunday tabloid, had hacked the voicemail of Milly
Dowler, a murdered schoolgirl. With his empire in crisis, Rupert
Murdoch closed the newspaper. The revulsion at the time was
widespread and focused attention on the contentious bid for Sky. Miliband led the attack, tabling a motion in the House of Commons
calling for the bid to be blocked. It was unanimously approved by MPs.
The Murdochs dropped the bid and, in that same summer of 2011, James and
Rupert appeared in front of a House of Commons select committee, where
they apologised for the phone-hacking scandal. Rupert told the committee
it was “the most humble day of my life”. Miliband is incredulous
that the Murdochs have come back for a second tilt at Sky. “Politicians
from all parties agreed that phone hacking and the events that had taken
place at Murdoch newspapers were shocking and shouldn’t be allowed to
happen again,” he told me. “Here we are six years later and they think
they can come back and try and take over Sky again as if nothing ever
happened.” He points to a 2012 report by Ofcom into whether Sky
was sufficiently “fit and proper” to hold a broadcasting licence. This
was before the Murdochs had split their assets into two companies, so
all of their businesses and investments — including the 39 per cent
stake in Sky — were at that point housed within News Corp. The Ofcom
report concluded that Sky was indeed fit and proper but censured James,
who was then running News Corp’s UK arm, saying he “repeatedly fell
short of the conduct to be expected of him as a chief executive officer
and chairman”. “It
was clear from the Ofcom report that its basis for ruling Sky to be fit
and proper to hold a licence was that the Murdochs were minority and
not 100 per cent owners — and that James was not in an executive role,”
Miliband says. “What we see now is James is the chief executive of Fox
and that the Murdochs are trying to take full control of Sky. Ofcom has a
continuing duty to assess fitness and it seems to me that it should
revisit that report given the changing circumstances.” Miliband
and other opponents of the new offer, such as deputy Labour leader Tom
Watson, have also voiced concerns that the sale would threaten media
plurality: in other words, it would concentrate ownership and reduce the
diversity of views in the marketplace. Fox insiders disagree and say
the media landscape has shifted significantly since 2011. Platforms such
as Facebook and Google now dominate the distribution of online news,
while a new generation of digital publishers that includes BuzzFeed, Vox
and Vice attracts large audiences. Fox executives are also
privately confident about their chances because the company has not
owned newspapers since its demerger with News Corp in 2013. And yet the
family that ultimately controls those two companies is still the
Murdochs. Miliband says the deal cannot be allowed to proceed. “This is a
big test of government and regulator. Will they act without fear or
favour, even in the face of such a powerful company? The Murdochs may
think that this will be waved through by a friendly government. I intend
to give them a run for their money.” There is little
doubt that the Murdochs are using different tactics this time, with
Rupert assuming a much lower profile. It is unclear if this is by
default or design: elsewhere in his companies he has been more engaged
than ever. He was in The Sun newsroom on a near daily basis in the weeks
leading up to the Brexit referendum and was often spotted in the office
of the editor, Tony Gallagher. He has always taken a close interest in
the layout, design and content of the paper and, in Gallagher, has
someone who shares his view that Britain will be better off out of the
EU. While The Sun backed Brexit, The Times, another News Corp paper, did
not: Murdoch was decidedly unhappy about the editorial line it took and
made his feelings known, according to another insider. He was
even more hands-on at Fox News after Ailes was forced out last summer,
stepping in as interim chief executive — a position he continues to hold
— and leading the network through its coverage of the presidential
election. Alongside Brexit the Trump victory must have ranked, according
to Yelland, as “the two great moments for Rupert as a populist.” Recent
moves show that Rupert has his eye on the next four years and the Trump
administration. When, after a public spat with Trump, Fox News star Megyn Kelly
left the network this month for a lucrative deal at NBC, it was Murdoch
who selected her replacement, Tucker Carlson, to take Kelly’s coveted
9pm slot. Wedged between Bill O’Reilly at 8pm and Sean Hannity at
10pm, it means that the network’s three primetime hours are now hosted
by pro-Trump presenters. Compared with its rivals CNN and MSNBC it also
devoted less time to last weekend’s anti-Trump women’s marches, with its
pundits dismissing their significance. “The reason you get big marches
in cities is that’s where the left lives,” said one presenter, Greg
Gutfield. Murdoch is in regular contact with Trump, according to
two people familiar with the situation, and is also friendly with
Ivanka, the new president’s daughter, and her husband, Jared Kushner,
the top Trump adviser who helped steer the winning campaign. New York Magazine recently
reported that Trump had asked Murdoch to suggest candidates to run the
Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the media industry —
and which is likely to scrutinise the AT&T-Time Warner deal. Murdoch
had, in return, requested restrictions on AT&T’s proposed purchase
of Time Warner, the magazine claimed. A Fox spokesperson declined to
comment.
James told more than one friend of his dismay at the Trump presidency
Murdoch’s
support for Trump distinguishes him from some of his children,
including James, who told more than one friend of his dismay that his
father was backing the Trump candidacy. James’s wife, Kathryn, backed
Hillary Clinton during the campaign and has been a vocal critic of the
new president on Twitter. In September Kathryn tweeted: “A vote for
Trump is a vote for climate catastrophe”, while on the night of the
president’s stunning election victory she wrote: “I can’t believe this
is happening. I am so ashamed.” James and Kathryn are committed
environmentalists: she is on the board of the Environmental Defense
Fund, which a Fox News report recently labelled a “leftwing group”,
while James wrote in The Washington Post in 2009 that
“conservation-minded conservatives” were “missing in the heated
partisanship of today’s politics”. “His passion for the
environment is real,” says Gary Knell, president and chief executive of
the National Geographic Society. It recently expanded an 18-year
partnership with Fox that gives the Murdoch company effective ownership
of the society’s publications and cable channels. National Geographic,
which champions science and conservation, is an unusual stablemate for
Fox News, where Greg Gutfield said on air last year that public figures
such as Alec Baldwin who had spoken out about climate change had “a lot
in common with Isis because they . . . want to go back to the seventh
century”.
I don’t think anyone wants to acknowledge that he is about to be 86 years old
Knell
is unconcerned. “There may be parts of the organisation I don’t agree
with but my view is that a company like Fox has partnered with us to
expand our scope and that works fine,” he told me. “I can tell you
personally that I wouldn’t have suggested the deal to our board if a
[prospective] co-owner did not respect science or the environment.” He
says James attended the White House screening of Before the Flood,
a documentary on climate change that National Geographic produced. “We
did a [magazine] issue on global warming and climate change and [James]
told us that he reads the magazine with his kids,” Knell says. “Lachlan
has been very supportive as well.” Their father has a rather
different view of climate change. In 2015, when he was still using
social media, Rupert tweeted that he was a “climate change skeptic, not a
denier”. He — and Fox News — also differ with younger members of his
family when it comes to Trump. A senior Murdoch executive tells me there
is no pressure to fall into political line. “You don’t have to agree
with Rupert. During Brexit, there were people around who were
passionately for the Remain campaign.” This is true of the Fox movie
studio too, where most employees are Democrats. “We are all united by
our anti-establishment beliefs,” the executive says. “I’m not sure it’s a
bad thing if people disagree with each other.” Rupert
may have taken a backseat role in the Sky deal but he still rules the
roost. He personally selected former DreamWorks chief executive Stacey
Snider as the new chairman of Fox’s movie studios. An insider says
Rupert was lobbied to appoint her by David Geffen and Jeffrey
Katzenberg, two of Hollywood’s most influential players and the
co-founders of the DreamWorks movie studio alongside Steven Spielberg. Rupert
also has the last word on the biggest decisions. Sky was among several
companies exploring an offer for Formula One last autumn when Chase
Carey, Rupert’s former top lieutenant at Fox — and a Sky board member —
asked to be recused from board meetings. Carey had been approached by
John Malone’s Liberty Media to run Formula One if its own offer was
successful and wanted him to join its bid. James, who was intent on
buying Formula One, didn’t want Carey to do so. But Rupert didn’t
object. That Carey left “tells you Rupert still calls the shots”, says
one person familiar with what happened. Liberty won the bid: Carey, now
installed as the new Formula One CEO, is drawing up grand plans to
overhaul the sport. For how much longer Rupert will be able to
call the shots is unclear. “I don’t think anyone wants to acknowledge
that he is about to be 86 years old,” a friend says. “The big question
is going to be what happens when he steps aside.” There are other
pressing questions. The proposed AT&T-Time Warner deal, if approved,
poses a clear competitive threat. Fox’s purchase of Sky will give it
similar direct access to millions of consumers in Europe — assuming the
deal is cleared. But Fox still lacks a direct route to viewers in the
US, the world’s biggest media market, which means it will continue to be
beholden to the cable and satellite companies that distribute the
channels that make up the bulk of its profits. Fox
does own a stake in Hulu, a video-streaming service that has more than
12 million paying subscribers in the US and which is about to launch a
virtual cable service — a collection of broadcast and cable channels
bundled together and accessed over the internet. Viewers will be able to
subscribe to the Hulu live service without having to shell out for
cable or satellite television. Fox has high hopes but it only owns 30 per cent of Hulu, as do Disney and NBCUniversal, with Time Warner owning the rest. Buying
all of Hulu would be tricky, given that its co-owners are rivals, but
if the future of media is about selling subscriptions directly to
consumers then Fox doesn’t have many other options. Another possibility —
following Time Warner’s example and selling itself to a big telecoms
company — is unlikely to be considered. “Do you really want to be James
and Lachlan and say: we’re the guys who decided to sell the family
company?” one friend says. Whatever they decide, the younger
Murdochs have their work cut out if they are to emulate their father
who, more than 60 years since he started out in Australian newspapers,
still has a feel for the popular pulse like nobody else. “Like it or
loathe it, it’s all swung Rupert’s way,” says one colleague, pointing to
the role Fox and News Corp outlets played in the votes that upended the
American and British political establishments last year. “The access,
the influence . . . it’s all there.” Matthew Garrahan is the FT’s global media editor Illustration by Hellovon Photographs: Austin Hargrave/August; Bloomberg; Getty; AFP
TV icon Mary Tyler Moore died on Wednesday after being hospitalized in Connecticut, her rep confirmed to The Huffington Post. She was 80.
“Today, beloved icon, Mary Tyler Moore, passed away at the age of 80
in the company of friends and her loving husband of over 33 years, Dr.
S. Robert Levine. A groundbreaking actress, producer, and passionate
advocate for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, Mary will be
remembered as a fearless visionary who turned the world on with her
smile,” her rep Mara Buxbaum told The Huffington Post in a statement.
Moore, who was born in
Brooklyn, New York, in 1936 and grew up in Los Angeles, rose to
international fame starring on the 1960s sitcom “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” She later starred on the beloved 1970s sitcom “The
Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which is one of the first shows to feature a
never-married, working woman as its central character. Moore played
single, 30-year-old TV news producer Mary Richards.
The show, which featured Moore’s character asking for equal pay
to her male co-worker and going on the pill, became a paradigm of the
women’s liberation movement and is credited with inspiring women to
break the mold confining them as wives and homemakers.
“I think Mary Tyler Moore has probably had more influence on my career than any other single person or force,” Oprah Winfrey said in a recent PBS documentary celebrating the actress.
“She wasn’t aggressive about it, but she surely was,” she said. “The writers never forgot that. They had her in situations where she had to deal with it.”
The real-life Mary commanded just as much respect. Her namesake show came
to fruition in 1970, when she and her former husband Grant Tinker
co-founded production company MTM Enterprises and successfully pitched the show to CBS. In its seven-season run, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” held the record for most Emmys won ― 29 ― until “Frasier” broke it in 2002.
“First and foremost Mary was a businesswoman and she ran her series beautifully,” friend and “The
Mary Tyler Moore Show” director Alan Rafkin recalled in his
autobiography. “She was the boss, and although you weren’t always wedded
to doing things exactly her way, you never forgot for a second that she was in charge.”
After the show, Moore
continued her acting career and earned an Oscar nomination for Best
Actress for her portrayal of a mother grieving the loss of her son in
1980’s “Ordinary People.” She most recently appeared in “Hot In Cleveland,” alongside her “Mary Tyler Moore Show” co-stars Betty White and Valerie Harper.
Rick Rowell via Getty Images
She became an outspoken advocate for animal rights, founding Broadway Barks 15, an annual homeless cat and dog adoption event in New York City, and has fought for legislation to protect farm animals from inhumane suffering.
“I would like to be remembered as somebody who made a difference in the lives of animals,” she said in a 1997 interview for the Archive of American television.
Moore, who was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 33 and
suffered near blindness resulting from the disease in recent years, has
also been a longtime advocate for researching cures for diabetes and
served as the international chairman of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. She published a memoir on the subject, Growing Up Again: Life, Loves, and Oh Yeah, Diabetes, in 2009.
She was preceded in death by her son, Richard, in 1980 and is survived by her husband, Robert Levine.
LOS
ANGELES — Oscar voters showered the neo-musical “La La Land” with 14
nominations on Tuesday, a tie with “Titanic” and “All About Eve” for the
most in Academy Award history. But the academy also moved past two
#OscarsSoWhite years by honoring six black actors — a record — and
including diverse films like “Moonlight,” “Fences” and “Hidden Figures” in the best picture race.
Nine movies will compete for Hollywood’s top prize, including several
box-office hits. Joining “La La Land” and “Moonlight” (eight nominations
total), “Fences” (four), and “Hidden Figures” (three) in the best
picture race were “Arrival,” a science-fiction thriller; the
cops-and-robbers drama “Hell or High Water”; the subtitled tear-jerker
“Lion”; “Manchester by the Sea,” about a mournful New England handyman;
and “Hacksaw Ridge,” Mel Gibson’s true story of World War II heroism.
In
a surprise, Mr. Gibson also drew a nomination as best director,
officially ending his 10-year status as a Hollywood pariah for his
offscreen behavior. Filling out the directing field were Damien Chazelle
(“La La Land”), Denis Villeneuve (“Arrival”), Barry Jenkins
(“Moonlight”) and Kenneth Lonergan (“Manchester by the Sea”).
There
were other surprises. “Arrival” emerged as one of the most-honored
films, with support in eight categories, but its star, Amy Adams, failed
to receive a nod for best actress. Instead, her slot likely went to the
newcomer Ruth Negga for her understated performance in “Loving.”
Joining her were Isabelle Huppert from the French film “Elle,” Emma
Stone from “La La Land,” Natalie Portman from “Jackie” and Meryl Streep
from “Florence Foster Jenkins.”
Photo
Denzel Washington and Viola
Davis in “Fences.” Mr. Washington was nominated for best actor and Ms.
Davis for best supporting actress.Credit
David Lee/Paramount Pictures, via Associated Press
In
an embarrassing glitch, a website managed by the academy and ABC, which
broadcasts the Oscars, initially listed Ms. Adams as a nominee instead
of Ms. Negga. An overeager ABC staffer made the mistake, according to an
academy official. It was quickly corrected.
In
a sharp contrast to the previous two years, when the academy put
forward all-white rosters of acting nominees, voters chose the largest
number of black candidates ever. Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris each
received a nod for their supporting work in “Moonlight.” Viola Davis
(“Fences”) and Octavia Spencer (“Hidden Figures”) were also nominated
for supporting actress. Joining Ms. Negga in the lead categories was
Denzel Washington of “Fences.”
The Indian actor Dev Patel was nominated for his supporting role in
“Lion.” Jeff Bridges from “Hell or High Water,” Lucas Hedges from
“Manchester by the Sea” and Michael Shannon from “Nocturnal Animals”
rounded out the supporting actor nominees.
More Than One on the Ballot
In 1940 Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American
performer to be nominated for an Oscar (she won best supporting
actress). Others followed but it wasn’t until 1968 that two or more
black performers were nominated in the same year. In subsequent Oscar
races, one movie would often be responsible for multiple nominations.
This year, six black actors and actresses — in four different films —
were nominated, a record.
Years in which more than one black actor or actress received an Oscar nomination
’65
Actor
Supporting Actor
Actress
Supporting Actress
Winner
’70
Beah Richards ("Guess Who's Coming to
Dinner") goes up against Carol Channing ("Thoroughly Modern Millie"),
who revealed her African-American heritage years later.
’75
Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield are both nominated for “Sounder.”
Whoopi Goldberg, Margaret Avery and Oprah Winfrey are all nominated for “The Color Purple.”
’80
Morgan Freeman (”Street Smart”) and Denzel Washington (“Cry Freedom”) compete for supporting actor.
’85
Two years later, Freeman and Washington are both nominated again. Washington wins for “Glory.”
Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett are nominated for “What’s Love Got to Do With It.”
’90
Denzel Washington in “Training Day” beats out Will Smith in “Ali.” Halle Berry wins for “Monster’s Ball.”
’95
Jamie Foxx wins for “Ray” against Don Cheadle
in “Hotel Rwanda.” Foxx is also nominated for his supporting role in
“Collateral,” but loses to Morgan Freeman.
’00
Forest Whitaker wins for “The Last King of
Scotland” against Will Smith in “The Pursuit of Happyness.” Jennifer
Hudson wins for “Dreamgirls.”
’05
Gabourey Sidibe and Mo’Nique are both nominated for “Precious.” Mo’Nique wins.
Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer are both nominated for “The Help.” Spencer wins.
’10
Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o are both nominated for “12 Years a Slave.” Nyong’o wins.
’15
2016: Denzel Washington and Viola Davis are both nominated for “Fences”; Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris for “Moonlight.”
The
Indian actor Dev Patel was nominated for his supporting role in “Lion.”
Jeff Bridges from “Hell or High Water,” Lucas Hedges from “Manchester
by the Sea” and Michael Shannon from “Nocturnal Animals” rounded out the
supporting actor nominees.
Photo
Taraji P. Henson, far left, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe in “Hidden Figures,” which was nominated for best picture.Credit
Hopper Stone/20th Century Fox Film Corporation
Joining
Mr. Washington as best actor nominees were Ryan Gosling for “La La
Land,” Viggo Mortensen for “Captain Fantastic,” Casey Affleck for
“Manchester by the Sea” and Andrew Garfield for “Hacksaw Ridge.”
Photo
Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner in “Arrival,” which was nominated for best picture.Credit
Jan Thijs/Paramount Pictures
Pundits will inevitably declare that the academy listened to the #OscarsSoWhite protests that found the Rev. Al Sharpton berating Hollywood
in a preceremony rally last year. Public pressure may well have been a
factor, but the outcome, in truth, may have more to do with the vagaries
of moviemaking: a full slate of high-quality movies with diverse casts
that coalesced in the past year.
For
the first time in memory, the academy did not unveil its nominations at
a news conference attended by entertainment journalists. Instead,
reporters were bypassed — no chance for academy officials to be peppered
with uncomfortable questions that way — and the nominations read
without an audience in a presentation broadcast on Oscars.com, “Good Morning America” and other platforms.
Photo
Ruth Negga, second from right, and Joel Edgerton, right, in “Loving.” Ms. Negga received a best actress nod.Credit
Ben Rothstein/Focus Features
The
favorite by far going in was “La La Land,” the show-business musical
directed and written by Mr. Chazelle and starring Ms. Stone and Mr.
Gosling. “La La Land” collected a record seven prizes at the Golden Globes,
and the film has the benefit of being about Hollywood’s favorite topic —
itself.
(Recent best picture winners with entertainment-industry
backdrops have included “The Artist” and “Birdman.”)
The
rules allow the best picture category to have as many as 10 or as few
as five nominees, depending on how voters spread their support. (There
were eight last year.)
The
academy entrusted its previous ceremony to the producers Reginald
Hudlin and David Hill, who brought in Chris Rock to scold Hollywood on
diversity and created a cable-news-style scrawl in an ill-advised
attempt to make acceptance speeches more interesting. Ratings dropped,
and ABC, which broadcasts the ceremony and charges $2 million for a
30-second commercial, moved to take a firmer hand in this year’s
telecast. Jimmy Kimmel, who anchors ABC’s late-night programming block, was selected as host.
