Channels with Peter Kafka9 Okt 2024

Behind the scenes of the Trump movie you almost never saw

What do Donald Trump and the video game industry have to do with each other? Nothing! Yet we’re combining them into a single podcast, anyway. First up: A chat with Gabriel Sherman, the longtime Vanity Fair reporter who wrote and produced “The Apprentice.” That’s the new Trump biopic that isn’t what you think it is, and is very much worth your time — and which almost never got released in the U.S. As Sherman tells us, this is a movie that’s a sort of Trump creation myth, centering around his relationship with Roy Cohn, the notorious lawyer/fixer. It’s not an anti-Trump movie in the vein of “Vice”, but it’s also not a flattering story. That makes it hard to understand why Trump-backer Dan Snyder initially backed the production — but less hard to understand why Snyder reportedly wanted to block it once he’d seen it. Sherman walks us through the whole backstory, which is wild even by Hollywood’s standards. And then we switch gears completely, to talk about the surprisingly troubled state of the video game business, with Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. I’m used to seeing conventional media industries struggle in the face of digital disruption — but one of the reasons they are usually struggling is the rise of video games. Yet that industry is undergoing multiple years of brutal layoffs and consolidation. Schreier, whose new book “Play Nice” follows the twisted path of legendary games studio Blizzard Entertainment, tells us how the industry got itself into trouble, and whether it can play its way out of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Episoder(587)

A Hollywood Manager Explains the New Rules of Show Biz

Today’s show is about money, and how to make it in entertainment. The streaming boom made Hollywood feel like it had solved its money problem: Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney and everyone else wanted ...

17 Jun 53min

Brian Stelter on the 60 Minutes Mess; Nilay Patel on Apple’s AI Problem

Brian Stelter and Nilay Patel are both covering big, powerful institutions that are undergoing real change, whether they like it or not. Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst, joins me to talk about the...

10 Jun 1h 6min

How Dhar Mann Turned After-School Specials Into A Billion-View Business

Dhar Mann’s videos look simple, because they are simple: Someone acts badly, someone learns a lesson, everyone gets a moral by the end. You don’t have to be a kid to enjoy these, but it helps.The busi...

3 Jun 37min

Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour Explains Why Boring Data Is a Great Media Business

I think of Dow Jones as The Wall Street Journal, because that’s the part I know — and the part I used to work near/around/inside. But Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour has built a much bigger business around...

27 Mai 46min

Vox Media's Jim Bankoff Explains Why He's Selling to James Murdoch

Jim Bankoff has spent nearly 20 years building Vox Media. Now he’s selling a big chunk of it to James Murdoch, who is acquiring Vox Media's Podcast Network - the same one that produces this podcast - ...

20 Mai 28min

Versant CEO Mark Lazarus is Running a Post-Cable Cable Company

Versant is the new company Comcast created when it spun off CNBC, MS NOW, USA and other cable networks it no longer wanted inside the mothership. That makes Mark Lazarus’ job pretty simple to describe...

20 Mai 40min

Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala and His Secret Succession Plan

Roger Lynch has spent the last seven years trying to turn Condé Nast from a magazine company into a profitable portfolio of global brands. Now he has a new set of problems: Google traffic is disappear...

13 Mai 53min

The Internet’s Let-It-Rip Era, With The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel

The internet is in its let-it-rip era: more AI slop, more video, more clips — and very little in the way of guardrails or rules. Charlie Warzel, who writes and hosts Galaxy Brain for The Atlantic, jo...

6 Mai 1h 4min