“I’ve called some of my friends directly and said exactly this: I marched with you. I made movies about Black Lives Matter. I feel like I do everything I can — not as a Jew but as a person. It’s part of my life. And you didn’t show up on Oct. 7. I don’t understand why. And it makes me really angry,” said Bender. 

“He said he was sorry,” he went on. “He just said: ‘You’re right.’”

Like many Hollywood progressives, Bender, a self-described “super leftie” who has been active for decades in left-wing causes from Democratic races to racial equity to abortion rights, a sense of crisis has set in at the lack of support from longtime friends in the community. 

“I feel wounded,” he confessed. “I feel hurt. I feel angry.”

He’s not alone. In parlor meetings and industry restaurants, at posh valet stands and favorite Brentwood haunts, Hollywood progressive Jews — which is to say, a whole lot of people in entertainment — are struggling with a lack of visible support from longtime fellow travelers. With hordes of protestors out on the streets calling for a Free Palestine, with Palestinian supporters ripping down posters of kidnapped Israelis, Jews I spoke to felt that sympathy was going only in one direction among leftists. 

“It’s hideous,” one prominent executive said to me, reflecting sentiment I am hearing frequently. “In general we’re pariahs.”

“I get the two sides of it, I really do,” said veteran producer Mike Medavoy, whose parents fled the Nazis when he was a child, leading to his being born in Shanghai, China. “I understand how people are reacting. But that’s not the way to do it,” he said referring to calls for a cease fire in Gaza. 

“You can’t continue to let them (Hamas) do what they just did,” he continued. “I’m not calling for a cease fire. I’m calling for recognition that Hamas killed 1,200 people. That’s not somebody you say to, ‘Come on over for supper.’”

Medavoy has been involved in dozens of films over his career that deal with progressive causes, like “Dances With Wolves” and “The People vs Larry Flynt,” and some that reflected on the folly of war from “Apocalypse Now” to “Platoon” to “Coming Home.”

Combined with his personal history, this has given him a different perspective on the violence of Hamas, he said. Antisemitism is a real thing, and a dangerous one.

“If students at universities don’t understand this, then teachers have failed,” Medavoy said. “The world has failed. Or something is really wrong.”

The disconnect over Israel between progressive Jews in Hollywood and the broader progressive movement has gone from being a minor difference of opinion to an enormous crisis of confidence among longtime friends. Why haven’t women’s groups decried the use of rape against Israeli women on Oct. 7, they ask? Why haven’t Black and brown people spoken out against atrocities? How could LGBTQ groups support a regime that would murder them for expressing their own gender identities? 

The discordance has extended to support for movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.

As feminist Nicole Lampert recently wrote in a blog post titled “MeToo Unless You are a Jew”: “The response among the majority of groups committed to ending violence against women and girls (VAWG) was threefold: to keep quiet, to disbelieve the victims, or to insinuate they deserved their fate. In the words of 140 American “prominent feminist scholars,” to stand in solidarity with Israeli women is to give in to ‘colonial feminism.’”

BLM took a similarly anti-Israel position, despite a great deal of support from left-wing Jewish groups.

“The fantasy that liberal Hollywood Jewish people told themselves was that getting behind BLM was an extension of the civil rights movement, instead of reading the fine print in the BLM charter about Palestine,” said producer Matti Leshem, who often embraces progressive causes but eschewed BLM.

(The BLM platform written in 2016 includes a section calling out Israel for “the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people,” and states: “Israel is an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people.”)

The betrayal must cut even deeper at an organization like the Anti-Defamation League, which was created to fight antisemitism and that had supported Black Lives Matter and even the #MeToo movement.  

At the time of the BLM manifesto, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tried to walk a middle path, writing that while he agreed with the majority of BLM’s document, the characterization of of Israel was “one-sided” and “unfair”.

Today there has been no word from BLM on the Hamas attack. 

A spokesman for the ADL declined to comment for this piece.

Leshem was present at a Democratic fundraiser in Los Angeles last weekend featuring Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff where these feelings rose to the surface yet again. In the question and answer portion of the event, a young Jewish woman lamented that she did not know what to tell her children about Israel and Hamas. 

“She said something like, ‘Why can’t we all just love each other,’” Leshem recalled, exasperated. “Our problem is not right wing antisemitism. Our problem is left wing antisemitism.

“You see the causes you naturally gravitate toward as a Jew, and most of those causes have been perverted by a neo-Marxist agenda which sees the world only in terms of oppressed and oppressors,” he said. “That’s the problem. If you only see the world that way, you cannot understand the world. 

“From there you get to – ‘Israelis are colonial white oppressors, oppressing our dark brethren.’ It’s nonsense,” he added. “In order to be a responsible member of society, you have to be able to hold opposing views in your head… Our responsibility as storytellers is always to be able to do that. To hold that paradox in our head, but also to tell the truth unequivalocally. But truth is very fungible. That’s a huge problem.” 

Whether that’s true or not, it is certainly a widespread emotion, and the consequences to relationships and future choices remain to be seen. 

Bender can’t say whether it will end friendships. 

“I ask myself that question,” he said. “I feel isolated. Scared.” He took a beat. “You have to work stuff out. You have to move through it. I’m definitely upset at people.”

The post Hollywood Progressives Face Crisis Over Left-Wing Support for Gaza: ‘You Didn’t Show Up on Oct. 7’ appeared first on TheWrap.

There were no babies. No beheaded babies. No burnt babies in the oven. 

The Israeli army decided to keep the worst of the images of Hamas massacring Israeli civilians out of its screening presented in Los Angeles on Wednesday — a compilation of video from victims’ cellphones, terrorists’ bodycams, kibbutz security cameras, city CCTV, first responder phones and intercepted conversations. 

It was bad enough without them. You know without my saying so how horrible it was. Perhaps the nightmare of 1,400 people slaughtered on Oct. 7 has been digging a dark hole in your psyche, as it has mine.

The real-time images of “Bearing Witness” were very much the stuff of a horror movie — a woman in pink pajamas cowering under a desk, shot at close range. An attempted beheading of a corpse with a garden hoe. Two little boys on a kibbutz, roughly age eight or nine, who race into their safe room with their father, only to see a hand emerge from around a corner and lob a grenade inside. The father is killed. The boys were shown running out screaming, back into their home, captured from the distant vantage point of a security camera. 

There was an ominous moment when a dozen women soldiers — out of uniform — gather in a corner of an unidentified room, talking in panicked tones, one of them recording on her phone. Far across the room, a Hamas terrorist appears with his machine gun. The video ends suddenly. We do not know what happened to the women. 

Some of this footage has already been on social media — images of bodies littering the road near Sderot, video of young people stampeding across a desert plain as they flee the grounds of a music festival, audio of the plaintive cries of a first responder (“They’re dead, all dead”) as he discovers piles of young bodies. 

And as the IDF representative at Wednesday’s screening mentioned, these images were drawn from fewer than 150 of the dead. We hear audio of a Hamas commander telling his fighters to send a corpse back to Gaza City so the crowd can do what it wants with it. You see bleeding hostages dumped like burlap sacks into the back of a pickup truck. You see many, many people burned into charred, unrecognizable remains.  

What really stuck with me were some of the less obvious moments, like the jubilation of the Hamas terrorists, flashing broad smiles and stabbing the air with their guns after shooting civilians in their cars.

A dash cam recording of one such killing doesn’t show the driver, simply the car going from normal, to cracked windshield, to destroyed windshield, to the car slowly veering off the road into another car. That other car’s passenger already lies dead in the road. 

A terrorist penetrates the walkway beside the simple housing on a kibbutz. A shaggy black dog stops and looks at the camera. Pow, pow, pow. The dog crumples. 

In another clip, a terrorist walks over to civilians, already dead beside their cars. He goes to shoot them again, for good measure. “Don’t shoot,” says a colleague off camera, as if to say, “save your bullets.” 

What sticks with me, burned into my brain, is an intercepted audio conversation between a terrorist, calling home from the attack, and his parents. He says: “Mom, I killed 10 Jews with my bare hands!” He repeats this over and over, excited by his achievement. The word “Jews” is what I hear. Also: “with my bare hands.” 

“Is Dad there?” he asks. His mother in the background says, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” (This is neither an exaggeration nor ironic embellishment. That was the conversation.) 

As the screening proceeded, you could hear the chants of pro-Palestinian protestors outside the Museum of Tolerance on Pico Avenue. What was their issue, exactly? That it was somehow controversial to show up and see the footage of recent atrocities? That it was a crime against the Palestinian cause to acknowledge the existence of acts that can only be described as savagery beyond the pale of human decency? 

The choice to watch this footage should not be political. I did so as a journalist. And I did so as a Jew, to bear witness and understand the facts.

The current images throughout the media, of Palestinian suffering in the wake of Israel’s air strikes and incursions, are also not far from my mind. I won’t look away. 

But I am glad not to see images of beheaded babies. Very glad. 

People reacted to the screening in different ways. Some left before it started. Others were openly weeping. And after it was over, several were angry that the IDF did not show more. “Where were the beheaded babies?” one man shouted as he stormed out of the auditorium. “Show the rapes!” said another person, also walking out, angry. 

Later, I learned that a fistfight broke out on the sidewalk outside the museum. 

What, exactly, are we fighting about? 

The post The Footage of the Oct. 7 Hamas Massacre: a Real-Life Horror Movie That I Hated   appeared first on TheWrap.

According to an individual with knowledge of their thinking, the studios believe that if they can’t reach a deal in the next week with the Screen Actors Guild, which has been on strike since July 14, then no new production will be able to start before 2024. 

If that is the case, the studios further believe, then the fall television season is lost, and new movies won’t be able to come out until next summer. In this scenario, early November would be the drop-dead date to salvage any ability to put television or movies into production. Once the calendar hits Thanksgiving, it is unlikely any project would begin production, pushing off everything to the new year, this individual said, and killing the studios’ incentive to push for a deal. 

All that puts significant pressure on the talks going on this week. 

The CEOs from four of the major entertainment conglomerates – Disney’s Bob Iger, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav and NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley – will meet anew on Thursday with SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland and their legal teams in an effort to reach a contract. 

The negotiations restarted this week on Tuesday after the CEOs walked away two weeks ago over a new demand that SAG-AFTRA receive a $1-per-subscription fee from streaming divisions on top of raises and other benefits that had been negotiated between the two sides. The studios considered that proposal, along with two previous ones seeking a percentage of all streaming revenue, as a non-starter. 

Meanwhile the CEOs, who are negotiating on behalf of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), presented their counter-offer to the guild on Tuesday. 

The guild decided to skip further bargaining on Wednesday so they could discuss the offer. 

An insider familiar with the studio side of talks said there was some surprise among the AMPTP ranks when the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee requested the delay, but they are taking it as a hopeful sign that there will be progress when the two sides do meet again.

Tuesday’s meeting was the first since Oct. 11, when the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios in contract talks, abruptly walked away from talks. The primary disagreement behind that decision concerned SAG-AFTRA’s proposed streaming revenue-sharing plan, which AMPTP leaders characterized as a “levy” on streaming services. 

SAG-AFTRA estimated its proposal to average to about 57 cents per streaming subscriber, with that revenue being paid to the guild who would in turn distribute it to performers whose work appears on the streaming service. The AMPTP, which says the fee in the actors’ union proposal actually was a $1-per-subscription fee, rejected the proposal in a statement released on Oct. 11, calling it an “untenable economic burden.”

The AMPTP is pushing for a viewership bonus model similar to the one agreed to with the WGA and had believed when talks first resumed that it would have been sufficient to reach a deal with the actors guild. But SAG-AFTRA believes that the revenue-sharing plan is a better model to ensure increased pay for performers throughout the union’s membership for the work they do on streaming films and TV shows.

A SAG-AFTRA representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post Witching Hour: Studios to Devote Another Week to Resolve SAG Strike or Give Up Until January | Exclusive appeared first on TheWrap.

That inability to formally denounce the massacre of 1,400 Israelis by Hamas – men, women, children, babies and elderly – two weeks after the event infuriated some members of the guild, most prominently “24” and “Homeland” co-creator Howard Gordon, Joel Fields (“The Americans”) and Jonathan Prince (“American Dreams”), according to multiple individuals who spoke to TheWrap. 

Some 75 guild members met over Zoom on Friday afternoon to share their frustrations about the matter. And since the guild’s decision to say nothing, several said it was beyond comprehension that their board could not do something all the other Hollywood guilds and major companies had already done — make a simple declaration denouncing the massacre of innocent civilians in the most brutal of ways, even while also recognizing Palestinian suffering.

“It’s shocking,” David Kohan, co-creator of “Will and Grace,” said in an interview with TheWrap. “To me, it’s either cowardice or something worse.”

“I want to know how come that is,” said Matti Leshem, another guild member. “I don’t want to draw conclusions about the board of the Writers Guild, but for me that’s the question: Why can’t they thread that needle?” 

He added: “It’s a moral question. You’re either pro that, or against that. And if you’re not against what Hamas did, you’re pro-terror. You’re pro-raping women and burning babies.”

When reached by TheWrap, one board member declined to go into detail, but reflected the internal strife in saying only: “I’m too exhausted and frustrated from all this. Nothing to say.” 

A spokesperson for the guild declined to comment on Sunday. 

The difficulty seems to be among guild members who sympathize primarily with the Palestinian plight, or who do not agree with showing any support to Israel. Their views mirror those of the progressive left, which has shown support on campuses across the country for Palestinians and against Israel, and among activists like The Squad in Congress, who have called for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. 

That view was reflected in an open letter posted on Medium on Saturday and signed by 267 members of the WGA, SAG-AFTRA and the DGA. The letter accused “high profile members” of the WGA of exerting pressure to issue statements supporting Israel.

“We must tread carefully when endorsing any government’s actions, especially when said government has been accused of carrying out human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide,” the letter read. 

“As storytellers, the narratives we craft matter, and the language we use has consequences,” the letter continued. “This is especially true in a moment where many of us who stand against genocide cannot even take that bare minimum position publicly without fear of being doxxed or blacklisted.” 

The signatories did not use their names, only initials and guild affiliation. TheWrap could find no guild members willing to speak on behalf of that view. 

Reached by TheWrap on Sunday, showrunner Gordon called the letter “a gross distortion” of what was being asked. “No one ever asked for that,” referring to an endorsement of Israel, he said.

He added: “Words like ‘genocide’ are being thrown around. All that was ever asked for by me or anyone else was merely acknowledging the horror.”

The letter provided no specific examples of signatories or others being blacklisted or doxxed for opposing Israel. 

Like other Jewish progressives who have been reeling from an antisemitic backlash to the war in Gaza, those in the Writers Guild who have supported causes, from LGBTQ rights to Black Lives Matter, said they were wounded by the lack of support from their guild. 

“I’ve always been a progressive,” Kohan said. “But the facts matter. The truth of the situation and the history matters. The actual context matters. If you don’t have the moral backbone to condemn an act of mass slaughter on civilians, women and elderly, does that make you pro-slaughter?”

In an interview with TheWrap before the controversy took root at the Writers Guild, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, urged Hollywood organizations to denounce Hamas’s actions as a moral imperative.  

“The people creating the content are king,” he noted. “The brands and stories that come out of Hollywood have extraordinary power, as do the people behind them.”  

He went on: “In this world that seems complicated, there are moments that are not complicated at all. This is one of them.”

But this moment has been extremely complicated inside the guild, which represents the heart of Hollywood storytelling.  

“The Board of Directors has worked exhaustively to consider the great diversity of opinions among our members on this issue, and determine how best to address this as a Guild,” said Stiehm, without providing any further detail. 

She added: “Like the membership itself, the Board’s viewpoints are varied, and we found consensus out of reach. For these reasons, we have decided not to comment publicly.” 

Asked to respond to why a statement was necessary, Kohan said: “because all the other guilds have done it. And your reluctance to do it is now taking a stance. By not doing it, you’re taking a stance.”

“In a vacuum, maybe you wouldn’t take a stand. But not taking a stand is very much taking a stand.” 

Gordon added: “To be characterized as taking a side in this conflict is factually and irresponsibly wrong. I would hope the guild leadership, if they’re not going to make a statement of sympathy for the victims of the terror attack, would at least disabuse anyone of that misapprehension.” 

And, he added: “I’d like a toning down of the rhetoric, which isn’t helpful. I’d like to call for calm, even internally. We will never be understood if we’re yelling.”

The post Inside the Writers Guild’s Tortured Debate Over Denouncing Hamas Violence in Israel | Exclusive appeared first on TheWrap.

Instead, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher touched a frayed nerve with the CEOs, principally Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, according to multiple insiders who spoke to TheWrap. 

The guild had returned to the negotiating room at SAG headquarters in West Hollywood with a new ask: Instead of demanding a 1% levy on all streaming revenue, the guild was demanding a flat $1 per subscriber, per year fee. 

This was an unusual first-dollar revenue share regardless of profit or any individual contributions to the success of any show, much less a company. The money would go to the guild itself rather than individual actors on any show — and the union would decide how to distribute. 

The CEOs had already rejected the idea of revenue sharing in principle as untenable for their business model. But in their view, it was back. 

“On what basis would you do that?” Zaslav pressed. 

Drescher deflected. “Think how much better actors’ lives will be,” she said. 

And she said what the CEOs took to be a threat: that if she did not get this benefit for her members, it would be back to the strike lines for all. SAG-AFTRA has been on the picket lines since the strike began, but the threat seemed to indicate a robust showing along the lines of the vociferous presence of WGA members throughout the summer.

This subscriber proposal made no sense to CEOs Zaslav, Sarandos, Disney CEO Bob Iger and NBCUniversal’s Studio Group chairman Donna Langley. They felt they had already offered significant raises to actors in their negotiations up to that point, and that a flat levy to the guild on their subscription revenue was, as Sarandos later put it, a bridge too far. 

They also worried they’d need to give a similar deal to other guilds, which would cost even more in a portion of the industry – streaming – where most studios are losing money. 

It was an economic model they could not accept. 

After they left the negotiating room, Sarandos called his peers to circle up: the studio heads agreed that they were done talking. 

“We’re not a socialist country,” said an individual on the studio side. “We said, ‘This is crazy.’ It made no sense.” 

TheWrap spoke to insiders on both sides of the negotiating table, and both agreed that the breakdown was over this deal point, even though there had been constructive negotiations between the principals for days that was supposed to lead to what both sides had hoped would be “closeout proposals.” 

It wasn’t to be. 

Negotiations were scheduled for the following day, Thursday, Oct. 12. Instead, within a couple of hours, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the eight companies that represent the major studios, issued a statement that they were suspending talks because the gap between the two sides was “too great” to bridge. 

And in a move that mirrored one that backfired in August in talks with the WGA, the AMPTP released the details of their proposal to SAG-AFTRA to the public. The move was perceived as a gesture aimed at circumventing guild leadership and prompted accusations of bullying. 

In an interview with TheWrap on Thursday, SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said the new proposal that became a sticking point was their attempt to offer something different after the guild realized that the studios were “never ever going to agree to anything that involved attachment to their revenue stream.”

“Our committee did some soul searching and came up with a revised proposal not attached to revenue stream, but attached to viewers and subscribers. I thought it was going to be more palatable to them,” he said, adding that he “fully expected” them to accept the new model.

In their statement issued on Wednesday evening, the studios said the cost of this levy would amount to an additional $800 million a year. Crabtree-Ireland countered that characterization and said the new proposal actually comes to 57 cents per subscriber, not $1, after removing non-SAG shows (like reality and international content) from the equation.

On the studio side, an insider disputed that these nuances were presented in the negotiating room, insisting that the stated fee would be $1 per subscriber per year. 

“They have either intentionally or non-intentionally misconstrued the cost of the proposal,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “I told them how and why [Wednesday] night and they decided to leak that incorrect valuation in their press release. The correct valuation is about $500 million – a little bit less than 57 cents per subscriber per year. Less than a postage stamp per year per subscriber is not that much of an ask.”

Drescher also expressed surprise that the studios cut off negotiations.

“It really came as a shock to me because what does that exactly mean and why would you walk away from the table? It’s not like we’re asking for anything that’s so outrageous,” Drescher said to NBC on Friday. 

A spokesperson for SAG-AFTRA declined further comment on Sunday. 

A spokesperson for the AMPTP declined to comment for this story.   

Either way, the tension between Drescher and the CEOs– much more so, it appears, than with Crabtree-Ireland – inserts a personal element that now needs to be overcome. 

“She’s holding up the whole industry,” said the insider on the studio side. “We left. I don’t know if we’re coming back anytime soon.” 

For all of TheWrap’s Hollywood strike coverage, click here.

The post Inside the Breakdown of SAG-AFTRA and Studio Talks – A Threat Leads to a Walkout | Exclusive appeared first on TheWrap.

Late Wednesday, Paramount issued a statement saying: “We stand with the people of Israel and the global Jewish community,” the clearest and most public statement yet. In an internal memo provided to TheWrap earlier in the day, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said: “The terrorist attacks by Hamas on innocent men, women, children and babies have been unimaginable, abhorrent and inexcusable. Many have lost their lives and others have been taken hostage and remain unaccounted for.”

TheWrap reached out to all the major entertainment conglomerates — including Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Sony, Apple, Fox, Lionsgate and NBCUniversal — to see if they intended to weigh in on the violence. 

But other than a few studios (also including Lionsgate, which said it was “shocked and saddened” by the events in its own internal memo), a brief condemnation of Hamas from Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel at the Bloomberg Screentime conference on Wednesday and pro-Israel Instagram posts by talent agencies CAA, WME and UTA, Hollywood had little to say about the massacre that riveted the world in its horror. 

It is rare for Hollywood studios to comment on current events, but the horrific nature of the tragedy has created more pressure to do so. After all, even Hollywood’s most brutal horror movies do not countenance the nightmare of the slaughter of hundreds of young adults at a music festival or, as confirmed on Wednesday, the beheading of babies and toddlers. 

And harsh anti-Israel backlash by ultra-progressives such as student groups at Harvard — who said Israel was “entirely” responsible for the Hamas attack — has left many Jews and their allies furious and eager for public statements of support. 

Complicating matters for Hollywood decision makers are numerous factors, including the heavy Jewish presence in the industry, a wave of investment capital from oil-rich Gulf states and a sensitivity to politics-averse Wall Street.  

One top Hollywood PR company told TheWrap it was advising its clients on the matter on Wednesday, debating whether it would be better to speak up or duck the issue entirely. 

Crisis manager Michael Sitrick told TheWrap that Zaslav limited his risk by speaking out in an internal memo. “You’re really not issuing a statement,” Sitrick said. “You’re writing to your employees, which you have every right to do, and then if it gets leaked, you’re not issuing a public statement.”

PR expert Molly McPherson said some companies were afraid to become targets of criticism themselves. “It is such a complex situation, many people do not understand the historical root of the problem,” she said. “To speak out too much could cause more problems.”   

Deafening Silence

“The silence has been deafening,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told TheWrap of studios’ and other entertainment conglomerates’ reluctance to address the reignited crisis in the Middle East.

“I appreciate the complexity of running a global entertainment company,” he said. “[But] what happened over the weekend wasn’t an attack, it was a massacre. These were terrorists, barbarians, savages. What they did to these people remind us of the most horrifying stories from Rwanda, or the Holocaust.” 

He continued: “Some things are difficult. This is easy. Stand with Israel. Stand against terror.”

Greenblatt has been vocal for months about a rising tide of antisemitism that has resulted in an upward spike of racist incidents to what he called “record levels.”

In that environment, speaking out against unspeakable acts of violence is critically important, he said. The decision to remain silent “compounds the anxiety,” Greenblatt added, “and leaves people with a sense of deep, deep concern. It makes them feel like they’re alone.”

In their statements this week, some companies were measured to the point of being anodyne. 

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote on social media: “I have been in touch with our teammates there to make sure we do everything we can to help support their families and their safety, and to assist however we can in this very difficult time. We’re also in close contact with our humanitarian relief partners on the ground and will be supporting their efforts. Hoping that peace arrives as soon as possible.”

Condé Nast Workers Stand Up

On Tuesday, Condé Nast employees revolted after an HR memo about the attacks struck many as being vague and “both-sidesing” the brutal violence.

“As we witness the horrific ongoing violence in Israel and Gaza, we know many of our colleagues are suffering,” read the memo, sent by chief people officer Stan Duncan.

The following day, CEO Roger Lynch sent his own memo, clarifying the company’s position. “As we have all been witness to the brutal attacks committed on Saturday, and as the reporting continues to show the magnitude of the atrocities, I want to be very clear that we as a company condemn the attack by Hamas against Israel, as well as all acts of terrorism,” he said.

Speaking out on violence — and the loaded term “terrorism” — is quickly becoming its own kind of litmus test for companies and institutions. The complicating factor seems to be the desire by some activists to take the side of Palestinians, who in Gaza have suffered under an Israeli blockade for over a decade. But Gaza is controlled by Hamas, which is devoted to Israel’s destruction. 

“It’s perfectly reasonable for a Hollywood studio head to speak on the atrocities,” McPherson said. But with “this type of atrocity, I don’t believe anyone should be judged for speaking out, or choosing not to speak because no one should be incumbent on speaking out on something that is so horrific… Watching the footage, it’s understandable why someone would choose to remain silent.”

Sitrick said Hollywood studios have been slow to issue statements because of fear of putting a foot wrong. 

“There’s all of this risk analysis and, in my experience, there are a lot of people internally that are involved in this, including your lawyers,” he said. “You have your outside people, your internal people. So you probably would let your board know before you put it out.”

On navigating the potential blowback from a polarizing statement, Sitrick noted that the job of PR consultant is to say, “‘OK, here are all the various reactions that could happen here. Here’s what we should do about it.’ And we go point by point. And so that doesn’t take a day. It may take a few hours, but you want to be prepared when you go out there and have the infrastructure in place to handle this stuff.”

His advice to CEOs thinking it might be too late to issue their own statement related to Israel: “Don’t worry it’s late. Better late than never. Now, if you put it out two weeks from now, that’s a little late.”

Lucas Manfredi and Sharon Knolle contributed to this story.

The post ‘The Silence Is Deafening’: Hollywood Companies Tread Lightly in Denouncing Hamas Violence appeared first on TheWrap.

I called Dar at his home on the Mediterranean coastal town of Atlit to get a sense of how even progressive Israelis are feeling at a moment as raw as any in memory. 

SW: What is the mood on the ground in Israel? 

GD: I’m talking to friends, people everywhere have connections to people who’ve been kidnapped or are dead. 

The strength of this nation is its spirit. Over the past nine months our country has become divided. There is a scene in my movie in which Vespasian’s generals urge him to finish off the Jews, because the time is ripe, they are in a civil war, they are killing each other other. Vespasian answers: ‘Why hurry? They are doing our job for us. Once we near Jerusalem they will unite.’ I thought Iran and Hamas saw “Legend of Destruction,” but apparently not. Otherwise they would have waited and let us fight each other. 

But now they have united us back. The way I see it, it’s an internal question. When we are not united, we cannot survive. 

 SW: Do you feel supported by world opinion?

GD: Right now, world opinion is with us because we are clearly the victim. But probably, when we actually do fight back and make them pay, the world will turn against us again. We need to finish this problem with Hamas and be determined, no matter what the rest of the world says.  If we don’t do it now, we should close this country. 

We live in the roughest neighborhood in the world. Look at how the Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Syria, Gaza and Iran behave. We are now forced to play by the neighborhood codes. Like when you are a newbie in jail — if you don’t show your strength, you will be fish food in no time. 

Had we been tougher before with Hamas, we would not have been in this situation now.

We all got used to Hamas’ terror attacks and missiles towards our civilians, and the “concept” was trying to contain and manage this ongoing crisis over many years. That they attack and we sit quietly and bomb them a little bit back. The Talmud says that he who is compassionate to the cruel will ultimately become cruel to the compassionate. Now we have to be cruel. 

SW: Do you really believe that is a path? Is that not your pain speaking? 

GD: Don’t forget that we disengaged and pulled back all troops and Israeli civilians from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Believe me hardly any Israelis want to reconquer the Gaza Strip.

However, how many missiles would you accept on New York before you retaliate? I say one. How many Americans civilians brutally slaughtered would you accept before you wipe out your enemy? We have 1,000 and counting. This is the equivalent to 40,000 Americans dead in seven hours.

The post On the Front Lines: Israeli Director Gidi Dar Talks Gaza War, Retribution and the Cycle of Violence  appeared first on TheWrap.

Most of us will never step foot there, but if you’ve been, you won’t forget it. The corrugated tin roofs perched on rickety huts that people call home in the sprawling refugee camps. The open sewage. The poorly paved roads. The lack of basic infrastructure. The undernourished children.

But most of all there is the despair and anger in the eyes of adults, that always seems close to the surface. I was there as a young reporter in the late 1980s and again in the 1990s as violence flared anew. That persists today, as the attack on Israel that broke out this weekend made clear.

What is so striking, tragic in fact, is the obvious reality that Gaza could be a gem. This strip of land crowded with 2 million people — many still categorized as refugees five decades after the conflict in question — sits along the Mediterranean Sea, where it’s easy to envision a thriving port. A fishing industry. Resorts with beautiful beaches and tourism. An international airport. 

None of that has ever happened for Gaza. 

Instead, the current Islamic authoritarian government — Hamas (officially categorized as a terrorist organization by the United States) — spends its limited resources on other matters. On Saturday, it mustered its strength and treasure and focus to launch an attack on Israeli civilians. To slaughter 260 young people attending a music festival in the desert. To hunt down families on farms and kill them in their homes. To – if early reports are to be believed – rape women. To take more than 100 hostages, including the elderly, people with dementia, tiny children. 

The mind reels at the barbarism on display, and true to horrific form, celebrated in some Palestinian quarters and, officially, in Iran. Also at the hopelessness of the gesture, because Hamas cannot vanquish Israel, of course. Cannot eliminate the Jewish state, as is its stated intention. And its attack only invites retaliation by one of the best equipped armies in the world. 

As the Al-Jazeera anchor asked an Israeli expert on its air on Saturday: “How humiliated are Israelis right now?” As if that was the point.

It is folly, in fact. But it is the kind of folly that has defined this conflict, defying common sense and good intentions for 50 years and a dozen administrations. 

This is an action that will live in infamy, and stain the Palestinian cause yet again. It will probably spell the end of Hamas, as Israel will not rest until it has eliminated every member of this organization that so brutally attacked its civilians. This new cycle of violence, after so many cycles before it, will – I fear – convince the last pie-eyed optimists that peace is not possible between Israel and Gaza.

You cannot begin to understand this one action without understanding the hubris, greed and entrenched emotion around what belongs to whom; whose victimhood is more virtuous; and what injustice is the real injustice. 

I began my journalism career with the hope of understanding, and then explaining and telling both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I studied Hebrew, then Arabic, and jumped into the then-Palestinian territories (now Palestine) to seek to understand the root of the problem. If the world could see for themselves, if the stories could be told, I thought, a reasonable outcome would happen. 

But it’s not a communication problem, it turns out. It’s a political problem by people who do not want to solve it. This was true for too many years for Yasser Arafat. It is true for Hamas. 

In the ensuing decades, Israel has shifted from spunky underdog in the minds of many, to flawed regional power, to evil oppressor. None of those identities are right. Israel is complicated and full of disappointments, an exercise in the dastardly human condition.

But Hamas – I can’t find the gray there. They mirror the nihilism of Al-Qaeda, ISIS and the like. They have shown their colors.

My 89-year-old father is in Israel, visiting with my older brother and his family for the Jewish holidays. I am not that worried about them; they are in the middle of the country. 

Instead, I worry for the death of hope. I mourn for the dead and wounded, for the kidnapped, the tortured. And I mourn for the suffering that will be visited on so many Palestinians who have no control over their own destiny. I mourn for the despair in the hearts of so many who would dream of peaceful coexistence. 

The post The Death of Hope With War in Israel, Chaos in Gaza   appeared first on TheWrap.

Figuring out the future of entertainment wasn’t easy before 2023. But this year, it got really hard.  

We have had two strikes that shut down nearly all production and hobbled new releases for four-and-a-half months. We have had Wall Street dissatisfaction. A moribund box office. Streaming challenges. And we have the rise of AI. 

It doesn’t mean doom and gloom for the future, but it does mean there’s a lot to figure out as the future hurtles toward us at a frantic pace. That’s what we will discuss at TheGrill, which for 13 years has been about investigating the changes to entertainment brought by technology. So let’s break it down. 

This year has been a painful convergence of long-term trends and short-term realities, none of them particularly positive. In streaming, the exploding cost of peak production has met the concrete wall of Wall Street’s profit expectations. So entertainment stocks are down; Disney is down from $180 a share in the spring of 2021, to about $80 a share now.

As we all know, the writers strike that began in May ran for 148 days before finally reaching resolution and a new contract on Sept. 24, just days ago. Now, negotiations to resolve the second strike, between SAG-AFTRA and Hollywood’s major studios, are underway, after three full months of a work stoppage. For all intents and purposes, Hollywood has been on hold as all sides have tried to figure out an economic model that works. 

What underlies all this disruption are the changes to the business of entertainment that technology has wrought. The move from a 40-year-old business model of sharing profits with the talent that creates successful television and movies has been overtaken by streaming. The labor disputes have been all about raising streaming residuals and this new scary thing: artificial intelligence. 

In December, we got hit by a true thunderbolt from the land of technology. ChatGPT and the emergence of generative AI sent everyone into a tailspin as we’ve tried to wrap our minds around the implications of computers that gather information at warp speed, producing full-blown written content, images and solutions that replicate human skills — with no need for humans.  

Our imaginations have reeled as we consider the future:

What are the outer limits of artificial intelligence? 

Will robots replace actors? 

Will movie stars be replicated as digital avatars? 

Can ChatGPT write a respectable script? If so, who owns the copyright?

Will it replace writers? 

Can AI write a score? Design a set? Choreograph a dance number?

Quite apart from all that, there are some who fear that unregulated generative AI represents a threat to the imminent future of humanity. And they cite the movies that predicted this — “Terminator.” “The Matrix.” “Ex Machina.” “Blade Runner.” Is this a realistic worry? 

So, let’s take a beat. We know more today than we knew in December, when generative AI was unleashed on the world. 

We will delve into these concepts with the leading researchers and experts on the subject, and with the people who are using these tools already in entertainment. Spoiler alert: The machines may not be taking over just yet. 

Meanwhile, the writers strike is over, and we have hopes that the actors will find a similar path forward with the studios, soon. A roundtable discussion will delve into this. 

We are excited to jump into other topics on the front burner in Hollywood, including the theatrical business, streaming, M&A and live entertainment, and to hear from experts on stage and all of you who are involved in the day-to-day work of creating the entertainment culture that feeds our world.

Onward to TheGrill! 

About TheGrill: For more than a decade, TheGrill event series has led the conversation on the convergence of entertainment, media and technology, bringing together newsmakers to debate the challenges of and opportunities for making content in the digital age. TheGrill delivers a unique series of curated discussions, industry panels and networking activations that explore the ever-changing media landscape.

TheGrill is powered by the essential source for entertainment insiders, WrapPRO, TheWrap’s premium content subscription platform. This members-only service and community provides deep analysis and access — that can’t be found anywhere else — on the business of entertainment, streaming and media. Click here for more information on WrapPRO.

The post Holding Our Breath in Hollywood This Year appeared first on TheWrap.

If you were one of those people, well, this film is all about you. 

Written and directed at a breakneck pace by two former Wall Street journal reporters (writers Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum) and director Craig Gillespie (“I Tonya”), “Dumb Money” is one of those films that manages to tell a small, specific story of… ok, a stock price being driven sky-high for no intrinsic reason, while also drawing a vivid picture of wealth disparity in our polarized society.  

“For me, it’s much larger than the stock market,” said Gillespie in a conversation just after the film’s premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. “We are living it right now with the strikes in Hollywood. It’s the same themes and conversation. It’s the disparity of wealth that’s going on in the country and a system that feels rigged. There’s no transparency.” 

The Gamestop tale, he said, is about “trying to hold people accountable for that.’

If this were a video this is where we’d freeze frame and rewind. The film retells the very recent, true story of small retail investors who bought massively into the video game retailer, Gamestop, in 2021, led by a whacky YouTube and Reddit influencer named Keith Gill (played brilliantly by Paul Dano). Gill livestreamed his investment philosophy to the masses from his basement under the name Roaring Kitty – complete with kitty memes and videos – with the unusual transparency of showing followers his personal investment grid. 

The company wasn’t doing very well. But Gill “liked the stock,” as he put it, because he knew that big Wall Street hedge funds were “shorting” it, in other words, betting on the company’s decline. (The hedge funders are also brilliantly played by Seth Rogen and Vincent d’Onofrio.) Shorting a stock is, of course, a common Wall Street tactic, but these big investors were doing it on a massive scale, and Gill and his legions of followers put a “squeeze” on those with short positions by continuing to buy the stock. 

Gamestop? The company is a retailer sprinkled in malls that serves middle America’s passion for video games. Gill’s devout belief in the stock – and that of millions of individual investors who followed suit and held the stock under pressure – matched his disgust with the system that consistently screws small investors and rewards the rich guys already in the club. It was nothing short of a modern day revolt by the economic underclass, which sent the $5.00 stock to over $300.  

“I got to see this in real time,” said Gillespie. “The stock market is not something I keep an eye on…  My son was living with us during Covid and he was investing in Wall Street Bets. He went on this wild ride.”

“I got to see the community, the frustration, the voice, the boiling anger – that was directed at Wall Street. It was such an acute moment,” he recalled, especially during Covid. “Everyone was isolated, turning to the internet for community, to vent their frustrations.” 

Producer-writers Schuker Blum and Angelo (based on the book by Ben Mezrich, who was writing at the same time as the screenplay came together) worked in parallel to create the characters who illustrated that frustration: a hospital worker and young mom who invests, played by America Ferrara; two debt-laden college students (Talia Ryder and Myhala Herrold); and a Gamestop employee (Anthony Ramos).

Said Schuker Blum: “We felt it was important to put them on the big screen – that’s what this movement was.”  

Angelo added: “We’ve followed online populism for 10 years – there are scripts floating around Hollywood that no one would make, but it’s one of the biggest forces shaping the world right now.”

At the same time, she noted, depicting stock trading by people in lockdown, “it’s profoundly not cinematic. We worked really hard over many scripts to develop a cinematic language, a story about people who’ve never met each other, but engaged in conflict, having emotional relationships.”

Gillespie sees the Gamestop story as one of the iconic moments that will be an emblem of the period, “before Covid and after Covid,” he said. “Life has profoundly changed. Everyone has reassessed what’s important: the balance of life, of loved ones. To be able to take time and see that moment. It has changed our value system.” 

“It got expressed through the Gamestop stock moment, but it’s still being expressed constantly,” he said. “It’s a very defining thing. We haven’t really processed it yet.”

He recalled a moment in the film when Gill talks about the impact of Covid while images of empty classrooms and grocery shelves fill the screen.  

“You realize how fragile everything was, and has been,” said Gillespie. “I was looking forward to help look at that shared history we have.”

Sony will release “Dumb Money” in limited release on September 22 and wide on September 29.

The post ‘Dumb Money’ Director Craig Gillespie Says Film Goes Beyond Gamestop: ‘It’s the Disparity of Wealth That’s Going on in This Country’ appeared first on TheWrap.