When broadcast networks ruled the world, TV shows — at least successful ones — almost always produced at least 22 episodes each season. It was just the way the world worked: Programmers needed as many episodes as possible to ensure they had enough content to fill the nine-month season that ran between September and May. Like so many aspects of the television business, those days are over. Long after cable networks trained viewers to live with just 13 episodes of their favorite shows, both cable and broadcast outlets are now adapting their business models to produce even fewer installments per season. The biggest broadcast hits of 2014 (How to Get Away With Murder) and 2015 (Empire) debuted with just 15 and 12 episodes, respectively. HBO’s big spring shows — Silicon Valley, Veep, and that one where everybody dies a horrific death — wrap up their annual runs on Sunday after just 10 episodes, a now-standard tally at many cable networks. SundanceTV’s brilliant Rectify will be back next month, but its third season will last just six episodes. There may be more amazing TV series than ever, but viewers often have to settle for a lot less of the shows they love.
To a degree, the shrinking episode counts are just a continuation of a decades-old trend in television: As the quality of programming has improved, seasons have shrunk. During the medium’s infancy, in the 1950s and ’60s, it wasn’t uncommon for shows to churn out 30 episodes per year. I Love Lucy, the first big sitcom smash, produced a jaw-dropping 35 half-hours its inaugural season, airing a new episode every week between its October 15, 1951, premiere and its season-one finale on June 9, 1952. (New episodes even aired on Christmas and New Year’s Eve.) By the 1970s, as TV started growing up — and networks began focusing on attracting younger, more discerning viewers — most shows were down to 22 to 24 weekly installments. (Super successful series, particularly soaps such as Dallas, would still churn out 30 or more episodes annually).
The biggest shift came in the late 1990s and early aughts, when cable networks got serious about the scripted business. Networks such as HBO, USA, and TNT (and later, FX and AMC) didn’t have to worry about some imaginary “TV season.” Shorter runs simply made it easier to compete against the big broadcasters. “Cable was not competing on the same cadence as broadcast with respect to sweeps and other things that favored the broadcast model,” says Charlie Collier, president and general manager of AMC and SundanceTV. “Length of series was subordinate to putting your programming in a competitive environment where it could thrive. We would look for the window, no matter the length, where we through our storytelling could stand out.” Thirteen also made sense on an even more basic level: It’s the number of weeks in a calendar quarter. It made planning out a year of programming easier, and let cable networks organize their marketing campaigns accordingly.
So how did 10 episodes become the new 13 for cable shows? Game of Thrones is sometimes given credit (or blame) for the most recent wave of episodic downsizing, and it certainly has been the biggest hit to adapt the less-is-more level. But in truth, HBO didn’t really blaze this trail. AMC’s Breaking Bad aired just seven episodes its first season (though it jumped up to 13 in season two). Starz CEO Chris Albrecht started experimenting with 8- and 10-episode orders immediately after he got to the network in January 2010, ordering short seasons of shows such as Boss and Magic City. Comedy Central has made 10-episode-and-less seasons the norm for its shows since Workaholics bowed in 2011. More recently, other networks have followed: Showtime’s Happyish and Penny Dreadful are both airing 10 episodes this season, and FX’s Fargo tells its tale with the same number. Though there are some common themes to this new normal, several factors are behind the episodic deflation:
Producing fewer episodes allows networks to expand the number of shows on their roster. Like so much in the entertainment business, financial considerations are absolutely a part of the equation when it comes to figuring out why episode counts are shrinking. The issue isn’t that networks are looking to keep budgets under control by producing fewer episodes, or that shows have become too expensive for the once-standard 13- or 22-episode seasons. “It’s not about saving money,” Albrecht explains. “If you’re doing 10 episodes, you get a chance to put more shows on.” Or, as another cable industry veteran puts it, by greenlighting four series with six episodes each, rather than two with 12-episode orders, a network has a chance, in theory, to lure four distinct audiences instead of two audiences.
This is crucial for premium cable or streaming services such as HBO, Starz, or Amazon. Unlike basic cable or broadcast outlets, subscription-based services aren’t looking to increase their inventory of ad time on their hit shows because, of course, they don’t carry any ads. “They don’t get that much of an incremental profit gain when a show is a big ratings success,” our cable vet says. “For them, those shows are all long-term loss leaders to try to drive subscription count.” Albrecht backs up that equation. Having more shows means more opportunities to reach different sets of potential subscribers, and, he says, “more marketing campaigns to show [consumers], ‘Wow, there’s an awful lot of stuff on Starz.’” Adds our cable industry vet, “It means they’re twice as likely to attract somebody to subscribe to their network.”
The fundamental financial difference between premium and basic cable has always existed, but it’s only recently started having a major impact on episodic counts. What’s changed is that HBO, which for most of the 1990s and early 2000s dominated the premium space, now has much more competition in that category — not just from streamers such as Netflix, but also from Showtime and Starz. The former started upping its game around 2008, opting to buy fewer big budget theatricals and instead invest that money in more originals. And Albrecht — the architect of so much of HBO’s success during his past life as head of the company — dramatically upped Starz’s originals output when he joined five years ago. All of these new players have turned up the heat on HBO, and the network has responded by turning out far more series than it ever has: When Ballers and The Brink premiere next week, the network will have launched more than two dozen major new scripted shows since Showtime’s strategic shift in 2008. By contrast, during a similar seven-year span between the 1997 bow of Oz and 2004’s Entourage, HBO unveiled about half as many big new shows. While HBO — easily TV’s most profitable network — has very deep pockets, it doesn’t have unlimited resources. It’s not a stretch to assume that one reason the network now makes fewer episodes of almost all of its shows is because execs have decided HBO needs to make more shows, period. (An HBO spokesman declined to make an executive from the network available for interview and declined repeated requests for comment.)
The non-linear world doesn’t care about episode counts. For decades, more episodes produced almost always meant more profit in the long run for TV shows. Getting a series solidly into syndication, for instance, hinged on getting at least 90 to 100 episodes in the can — enough so that weekly comedies and dramas could become daily staples on local TV stations and cable networks. Cable’s 13-episode seasons changed things a bit, since it took seven years — versus as few as four — to get enough episodes produced to land a show in syndication heaven. But the mandate remained mostly the same: You needed a certain number of episodes every year in order to get a show into syndication within a reasonable time frame.
But as it has with so many aspects of the TV business, streaming and video on demand have changed the formula. Non-linear outlets such as Hulu or Netflix don’t have any time slots to fill; there’s no episodic minimum needed to make a show work on streaming. Studios can now begin monetizing shows almost immediately: Now, it’s not uncommon for a new show to be “syndicated” to Netflix within weeks of wrapping its freshman year. And while it’s true streaming networks pay for shows on a per-episode basis, networks and studios can now count on digital syndication money for shows of almost any episodic total. “In the high-end, serialized scripted television business now, syndication is often on library-like streaming services,” Collier says. “So it doesn’t matter if you have two hours or 22, it’s all delivered at once. Streaming services don’t need to fill hours, per se. They are more about offering bulk lists of titles.” Obviously, there’s still an incentive to find big hits that produced 100 or more episodes — the next generation of Law & Order or Modern Family. But streaming economics mean it’s possible to make money on shows with lower episode counts. And that flexibility is part of the reason why cable networks are increasingly okay with shorter seasons for certain shows.
Shorter runs can attract bigger stars in front of the camera. The dramatic explosion in quality scripted original content means networks are looking for every way possible to stand out from the pack. One obvious strategy: Get big-name movie stars to take a spin on a TV show. But luring such names isn’t easy, particularly if those stars still want to make time for movie roles. So networks have agreed to cut episode counts, figuring shorter runs of a show with a big star are worth it if that show becomes a hit. This is part of the reason why fans of How to Get Away With Murder had to settle for just 15 hours of the show last season: Viola Davis made a shorter work year part of her contract, following the lead of Kevin Bacon (The Following) and several other stars. The trend also applies on premium cable, where shorter runs and limited episode counts make it easier to land a Matthew McConaughey for the eight-hour-long first season of True Detective.
Creative ambitions dictate it. As much as some fans of Game of Thrones might love to visit the Seven Kingdoms every week of the year, the show is one of the most ambitious and complex weekly series productions in TV history. Even at 10 episodes, producers have talked of the difficulties of getting everything produced in time. This sort of ambition is being repeated at multiple networks — and not just for shows that boast massive special effects and casts of hundreds. Better Call Saul co-creator Vince Gilligan has been vocal about his desire to hand-craft each episode of his AMC series, which is likely why season one of the Breaking Bad was limited to just 10 episodes. Empire co-creator Lee Daniels had expressed a desire to keep his show at 12 episodes a season, in part because the show needs to produce radio-friendly original songs and elaborate performance pieces in nearly every episode. (He compromised and agreed to do 18 episodes next season.) In the past, networks might be tempted to tell their showrunners to suck it up and just deliver the “product.” That doesn’t cut it these days, at least not at many networks.“It’s always a balance of business and creative, but if we’re going to invest in the best creators, a good place to start is by asking what they can envision and deliver,” AMC’s Collier says. “It’s not always about ‘brand’ or business. The first thing we ask is, ‘What does the creator see?'”
Playing nice with talent is also what led Starz to reduce some of its episode counts. When Albrecht first got to Starz, “One of the things I did when I came here was say, ‘Okay, we’ve got to offer something different [to the creative community] because we’re the new kids in town,” he says. “So I said we’re not going to do pilots. We’ll go straight to series.” But cutting out the pilot process — while also trying to get a certain number of shows on the air each year— also required some adjustment in episode orders. Rather than 13 or even 10, Starz began ordering just eight episodes of new series, including its new hit Power. “These big shows that are story-driven, you’re starting from scratch without a pilot, so you really don’t have time to work the crew through and shape production,” Albrecht explains. “We’d think about ordering 10, but then we’d back down to 8 because we realized these guys wouldn’t be able to write all the episodes. Then you never get ahead in the writing, and once production starts, the writers room gets really slowed down. So without a pilot, eight really seems to be a good number for a first season.”
Starz and other networks aren’t dogmatic about these numbers. Outlander, for example, produced 16 episodes its freshman year — though, for viewers, those hours were split in two groups of eight episodes. “There was no way to deliver 16 episodes sequentially because it’s such a massive undertaking,” Albrecht says. “We wanted to give it enough time to do the book justice and please the fans. But 16 episodes of a giant show like that? We couldn’t get them [all at once].” Albrecht admits that sometimes episode orders can end up being too short. Last fall’s Survivor’s Remorse unspooled just six episodes. “We needed to get that done really quickly,” he says. But despite stellar reviews, the show’s ratings were underwhelming — and Albrecht blames the small episode tally. “It wasn’t enough for it to get traction,” he says. Season two will be 10 episodes, which is a number Albrecht believes makes sense for most established series on his network. “We’re looking at making sure we have enough shows and enough episodes of those shows to satisfy the audience, but we’re also trying to give each show the right amount of episodes so we can put our best foot forward creatively,” Albrecht says.
While fans may sometimes lament the paucity of episodes these days, TV insiders believe in most cases the shorter runs are good for quality control. “You don’t have what you had in the ’80s and ’90s, and still at some networks today, which is, ‘Get me 24, because I need to fill up my schedule,’” says one cable vet. “Great storytelling got watered down because you didn’t want too much stuff in one episode, or you didn’t want to give up too much character too soon. If you have no clock, you don’t need to slow down or speed up. You just need to tell the right story. There’s something very liberating about not having to fit in one box.”
Longtime Hillary Clinton ally and adviser Sidney Blumenthal advised and helped shape political coverage in the early days of The Daily Beast, BuzzFeed‘s Rosie Gray reports.
Though Blumenthal was never on the site’s masthead, he helped direct political coverage including critical pieces on Caroline Kennedy and about Democrats who were unhappy with President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2009.
Tina Brown, The Daily Beast’s founding editor who left the company in 2013, told BuzzFeed that Blumenthal’s role was as a part-time consultant who helped connect the site to writers.
What’s not entirely clear is whether Blumenthal was also being paid by the Clinton Foundation at the same time as his work with the Daily Beast. Our colleague Ken Vogel reported last month that Blumenthal was added to the foundation’s payroll in 2009. Brown told BuzzFeed she was not aware of whether Blumenthal was also being paid by the foundation while he worked for The Daily Beast, and a Clinton Foundation spokesperson told BuzzFeed that their dates were “incorrect” but did not respond to their follow up questions about whether the dates overlapped.
We’ve reached out to The Daily Beast for further comment and will update here accordingly.
Sidney Blumenthal Played Under-The-Radar Role At Young Daily Beast
Blumenthal quietly helped steer politics coverage at the fledgling publication. Including a pair of Caroline Kennedy hit pieces.
BuzzFeed 6/28/2015 by Rosie Gray
WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton’s confidant Sidney Blumenthal played a quiet role in shaping, and sometimes steering political coverage, in the early days of The Daily Beast.
Blumenthal’s role, early employees said, was touched with a bit of the conspiratorial haze that has emerged as a point of controversy in Clinton’s campaign. He wasn’t listed on the site’s masthead, and the site’s founder, Tina Brown, said she had “no idea” whether or not he was on Clinton’s payroll while helping to shape the site’s political coverage. In one case, he commissioned a hit piece on a potential Clinton rival, Caroline Kennedy, though his name appeared nowhere on the story.
Brown, who founded The Daily Beast, confirmed to BuzzFeed News that Blumenthal had been a “part time consultant” in 2008 and 2009 and had “assigned and connected us to some writers as asked.”
“He was supposed to find writers for ideas and stuff like that,” said one former Beast writer who recalled Blumenthal shaping coverage that tended to be “stuff from Democrat-(or ‘Democrat-‘)-in-exile people who were skeptical of and/or outright didn’t like Obama” — work like this piece by Michael Lind about the “Democratic suicide” under Obama. The employee suggested Blumenthal was responsible for bringing in Democratic political strategist Doug Schoen, who has written semi-regularly for the Beast since 2009. Contacted by BuzzFeed News, Schoen said Blumenthal had “never edited me” at the Beast or anywhere else.
In the winter of 2008-2009, the Daily Beast ran twopieces that were critical of Caroline Kennedy, one referring to her as a “puppet” and the other describing her candidacy as an “insult.” Kennedy was seeking at the time to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate — the scion of a rival dynasty who, if she had she had been appointed to the Senate, would immediately have been seen as a likely national Democratic figure of a new generation. The author of the pieces, current New York Daily News columnist Harry Siegel, who was at Politico at that time, confirmed to BuzzFeed News that Blumenthal had commissioned and edited them. (He also said that Blumenthal’s editing had been “intelligent and incisive.”)
One former Daily Beast employee described Blumenthal as having been a “recruiter.” Blumenthal, the employee said, had a preferred group of writers from whom he would draw submissions, including Scott Horton, the attorney who won a National Magazine Award in 2011 for a Harper’s story about Guantanamo. Horton didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Blumenthal could be somewhat of a headache for the Beast staffers. Though not officially on staff as an editor, he would send in pieces that he said had been edited, expecting them to be published as-is.
Blumenthal’s involvement with the Beast didn’t last for a long time; one former staffer estimated it as being around six to nine months. It appears to have been a result of his longtime friendship with Brown, for whom he worked at The New Yorker in the 1990s.
Leaked emails obtained in the Guccifer hack provide a glimpse into the Brown/Blumenthal relationship; in an email dated December 27, 2012, years after Blumenthal’s ambiguous role with the Beast had ended, Brown emailed him: “How are you, sid. Are u done with lincoln? [Blumenthal has been working on a biography of Abraham Lincoln.] So want your politics brain back! Is there an aspect of BUSH you might want to do for when he goes ?the Bush clinton relationship?” The email was sent during a health scare in which George H.W. Bush was hospitalized; news organizations routinely plan out obituaries and other coverage before an aging subject has died.
“Even if Bush does get through this crisis, mark me for the piece,” Blumenthal writes.
The emails also show Blumenthal reaching out to Brown for David Petraeus’ contact information in 2013; she gives it to him, but says “u must never ever say came from me.”
But they weren’t that close: When the deal to combine Newsweek and The Daily Beast closed, Brown, a source said, had a congratulatory call with a man she thought was her new owner, Sidney Harman. “Get me Sidney,” she told one of her assistants. When she learned she had actually been put on the line with Blumenthal, not Harman, she hung up.
It’s unclear to what extent Blumenthal was involved with the Clinton Foundation during his quasi-employment at The Daily Beast. It has recently come to light that Blumenthal was being paid $10,000 a month by the Clinton Foundation while he was advising Hillary Clinton on Libya during her tenure as Secretary of State. He is also a paid adviser to two organizations run by Clinton ally David Brock: American Bridge and Media Matters. (Politico reported that Blumenthal was added to the Clinton Foundation payroll in 2009. It’s unclear if that overlapped with his time at the Beast.)
Brown told BuzzFeed News she had “no idea” if Blumenthal was working for the Clinton Foundation or CGI at the time. Asked if he was on the Clinton Foundation payroll during 2008 and 2009, a Clinton Foundation spokesperson said “The dates you have are not accurate.”
A spokesperson for the Clinton Foundation didn’t respond to follow-up questions about whether Blumenthal was on the payroll there during his time at the Beast. Blumenthal didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Blumenthal said “we are not making any further statements.”
update
This story has been updated to add information from a Politico report.
IN THE HEARTLAND Union Cafe, a popular gay and lesbian hangout in Columbus, Ohio.The artist Brian Reaume in his studioSTYLE COUNSEL Gabriel Mastin at the Short North design shop Collier West.
Lean, tattooed and hunky in the way of a young Henry Rollins, Brian Reaume is living the life of a gay indie Brooklyn or Bay Area artist. He lives in what real estate agents call a ‘‘transitional’’ neighborhood, in a house filled with midcentury furniture and quirky art by him and his friends. In a small shop on a funky strip of cafes, bars and galleries, he sells his paintings along with the vintage housewares that he collects with the shop’s co-owner, Nancy Carlson, who lives upstairs. Two years ago he created ‘‘There’s No Truth in Silence,’’ an installation in his studio — which is among a warren of artists’ spaces in an old warehouse — that drew thousands one weekend with its controversial use of the American flag, a swastika, a cross and a chair emblazoned with the word ‘‘fag.’’
But the life that Reaume leads isn’t in Brooklyn or San Francisco. His tatty-cool neighborhood isn’t Bushwick or the Tenderloin; it’s Kenmore Park in northeast Columbus, Ohio, in, as he put it to me on a recent visit, ‘‘a very good pocket in the middle of the ghetto.’’ And that funky strip with his shop, Birchwater Studios, is North High Street in Columbus’s Short North, which has gone from sketchy to stylish in the past 15 years.
Reaume, 37, grew up outside Detroit and 10 years ago was on his way to an artist’s life in New York. But his brother, already in Columbus, needed a roommate for a year. So Reaume came — and never left. ‘‘I fell in love with it,’’ he told me at his shop. ‘‘There’s so much opportunity to show work here.’’ Reaume has found a market for his abstract canvases and sculptures along with income as a window-display builder for Victoria’s Secret, whose owner, Limited Brands, has its headquarters in Columbus. He’s also the father of an 11-month-old son, Thadeus, having been the sperm donor for friends, a lesbian couple, and he lives in a four-room 1948 Lustron ‘‘kit home’’ that he bought for $63,000. Rather than move to New York, Reaume said, ‘‘I turned Columbus into New York — and made my environment what I wanted.’’
In Ohio’s capital city, gay men, lesbians and bisexuals make up about 6.7 percent of the population of about 750,000, according to a 2006 study by the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute. That’s a far cry from more than 10 percent in San Francisco, Atlanta, Boston, Minneapolis and Seattle, but it’s higher than most Midwestern cities, including Chicago (5.7 percent). And in several Columbus ‘‘gayborhoods’’ — like the Short North, German Village and the lesbian stronghold of Clintonville — the gay quotient is far higher than 6.7 percent.
That’s due in part to Ohio State, the nation’s second largest university, with 55,0000 students. The campus, adjacent to the Short North, is a youth-driven city unto itself that draws thousands of young people from all over the Midwest each fall, among them lesbians, gays and transgender students hungry for the relative openness of the city and the campus. (Campus Pride, a national gay college group, just ranked O.S.U. among the nation’s gay-friendliest campuses.) ‘‘You have this new crop of hot young guys
that come every year,’’ said Brent Clevidence, a co-owner of Level, a sleek, year-old restaurant and bar in the Short North that is popular with the gay crowd. ‘‘It’s just a very vibrant community.’’
Besides Limited Brands (the owner of Henri Bendel and Bath & Body Works as well as Victoria’s Secret), Abercrombie & Fitch is also based in Columbus, and both companies lure top design and retail talent — many of them gay — from larger cities. They come and stay for at least a few years, maybe buying a jewel-box Victorian or Craftsman fixer-upper for as little as $200,000. ‘‘We have tons of crossover here from New York and San Francisco, people constantly moving in and out,’’ said Chris Hayes, 37, an Ohio native who moved to Columbus after several years in New York City. ‘‘Columbus really turned itself around in the late ’90s,’’ said Hayes, the editor in chief of Outlook: Columbus, the town’s glossy gay monthly. ‘‘We’re not recession-proof, but we’re not a manufacturing economy, so we’ve done O.K.’’ Four years ago, he paid $281,000 for a 1,400-square-foot loft downtown. ‘‘It’s like my New York dream apartment, but it was affordable.’’
According to longtime residents, Columbus has long had a robust gay population. But like many other cities in the past two decades, it’s become more visible and woven into the town’s broader culture and night life. ‘‘When I first started going to the bars, in the ’80s,
you had to go into blank doorways or down alleyways,’’ said Jackie Vanderworth, a stylish, statuesque woman who was holding court one raucous Saturday night at Union, a sprawling restaurant and bar on North High Street. ‘‘Now you have neon signs and people holding hands in the Short North.’’ Vanderworth has been openly transgender at her job at the local Fox TV affiliate since 1996. ‘‘They didn’t bat an eye,’’ she explained of her colleagues’ reaction to her gender transition. ‘‘Our news director has me over for dinner parties.’’
While life here seems easygoing for gay folks, it’s especially so if you learn to love college football. The Ohio State Buckeyes, the reigning Big Ten champion, create citywide mania. ‘‘You can either dive right into the O.S.U. craziness when you move here,’’ Hayes said, ‘‘or you can hate your life for six months.’’ I was in town on game day — when the Buckeyes, to no one’s surprise, trounced small-fry Ohio University, 43-7 — and seemingly everyone in town was wearing scarlet-hued Buckeyes shirts and strings of buckeyes around their necks. That included a dozen members of Scarlet and Gay, O.S.U.’s G.L.B.T. alumni group, plus their friends and lovers, whom I joined at their tailgate party.
‘‘It’s pretty much a spiritual experience when you walk in here and see thousands of your brothers screaming like a fraternity,’’ said Troy Fabish, a real estate agent with a Buckeye-red pompom bobbing from his jeans pocket. ‘‘You feel like you’re part of the family.’’ He said he was even comfortable enough for public displays of affection, and kissed his boyfriend to prove it. During the game, the men took no pains to hide their particular enthusiasm, exclaiming their crushes on certain players. Everyone around them seemed happy to have them in the mix.
That welcoming spirit isn’t surprising, given that Columbus is a fairly progressive city, its broad-minded tone set by Michael B. Coleman, the black Democratic mayor since 2000. ‘‘The G.L.B.T. community is important to the city’s future and economic vitality,’’ Coleman told me, adding that he is working to get the City Council to pass a bill giving health benefits to the domestic partners of city workers.
The fact that such a benefit, available in more than a dozen states, would be a major step forward is a reminder that Columbus is still a gay oasis in progress, in a state that, though it voted for Barack Obama in 2008, remains deeply conservative in some parts. Ohio attracted national attention during the 2004 election when the state passed a referendum, by a two-thirds majority, banning any version of gay marriage whatsoever. It was a devastating margin to Tom Grote, 46, the son of the founder of the region’s 200-store Donatos Pizza chain. ‘‘I totally thought of leaving the state,’’ he told me, recalling the hurt of seeing houses with pro-ban signs in so-called liberal Columbus neighborhoods. Instead, he and a handful of other influential Ohio gays founded Equality Ohio, the state’s first well-funded gay-rights lobby, focusing on efforts like passing a state bill banning work and housing discrimination against homosexuals.
Grote met Rick Neal, then an advocate for refugee issues in Washington, D.C., in 2006. Today the two live in a refurbished 1907 brick house on Schiller Park in German Village. They’re the fathers of 19-month-old Amoret, whom they adopted from a local agency. (Since Ohio forbids gay couples from adopting a child together, Grote is the legal father and Neal has co-custody rights.) Neal said the three of them attracted more gawkers on a recent trip to Germany than they do around town. ‘‘Even in Berlin, Munich — holy cow, their eyes fell out,’’ he said. ‘‘Here, we might get a few stares out at the big mall in Easton. But no comments. This is the Midwest — people are polite.’’ Grote smiled. ‘‘What makes Rick really proud,’’ he said, ‘‘is when African-American women say he does a nice job with Amoret’s hair.’’
Grote and Neal, a Milwaukee native, said Columbus, with its quaint neighborhoods and network of gay parents, is a perfect fit for them. But it can feel limited if you yearn for the cosmopolitanism of bigger cities. Such is the plight of Gabriel Mastin, 28, a personal stylist at Nordstrom who is known to many as the town’s most fashionable young man. The night I met him, Mastin showed up with three of his female friends for dinner at Rigsby’s Kitchen, the city’s culinary pioneer in the Short North. He wore chunky glasses, a silk scarf tied around his neck, pleated trousers made by his tailor and sneakers by John Varvatos for Converse, and he carried a vintage periwinkle American Tourister airline bag.
‘‘Columbus isn’t awful if you find your niche to plug into,’’ he said. ‘‘But it can be tough. It’s very Abercrombie-cornfed-jock-I-eat-at-Max-&-Erma’s-and-Bob Evans. Some of the older gay men are a little more sophisticated.’’ Mastin grew up in Mansfield, Ohio, and told me that his parents have rejected him for being gay. ‘‘We do holidays and birthdays, but that’s about it.’’ In Columbus, he’s found a surrogate family of established, mostly partnered gay men with whom he has thrown himself into activism. Still, he said, ‘‘I want to make major bank and move to London. When I meet someone here who has style, I’m like, ‘Who are you? Can we be friends?’ ’’ Most of the time he just tries to get his male Nordstrom clients out of pleated Dockers and into skinny jeans.
Yet Mastin is doing more in Columbus than just biding his time. ‘‘Gay Pride here is amazing,’’ he told me over wine and Donatos Pizza at Grote and Neal’s house. (Amoret was brought down to say good night in her red Donatos onesie.) ‘‘We get up and dance on boxes with our shirts off every year.’’
‘‘Well,’’ Grote corrected him, ‘‘maybe every few years.’’
ESSENTIALS | Columbus, Ohio Hotel The Lofts Large, comfortable rooms in a refurbished downtown brick building near the Short North. Bike rentals available. 55 East Nationwide Boulevard; (614) 461-2663; 55lofts.com; doubles from $179.
Restaurants and Cafes
German Village Coffee Shop A neighborhood staple since 1981. 193 Thurman Avenue; (614) 443-8900. Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams The hit artisanal ice-cream chainlet, featuring flavors like Salty Caramel. 714 North High Street; (614) 294-5364; jenisicecreams.com. Level Dining Lounge Sleek hangout with margarita martinis and decadent sweet potato fries. 700 North High Street; (614) 754-7111; levelcolumbus.com; entrees $8 to $17. Rigsby’s Kitchen The 24-year-old Short North game changer serves top-notch Mediterranean fare. 698 North High Street; (614) 461-7888; rigsbyskitchen.com; entrees $19 to $33. Union Cafe Attracts a gay following with its vaguely Asian décor and menu. 782 North High Street; (614) 421-2233; unioncafe.com; entrees $11 to $20.
Bars AWOL Hole-in-the-wall gay bar in quiet, less gentrified Olde Town East. 49 Parsons Avenue; (614) 621-8779. Bodega The Short North’s mixed-crowd hipster dive. 1044 North High Street; (614) 299-9399. Exile Gay bar popular with the leather crowd. 893 North Fourth Street; (614) 299-0069. Wall Street Nightclub Popular lesbian dance club in the Downtown District. 144 North Wall Street; (614) 464-2800.
Shops Birchwater Studios Brian Reaume and Nancy Carlson’s Short North gallery and vintage furnishings store. 815 North High Street; (614) 598-1830; birchwaterstudios.com.
Collier West Stylish home goods and antiques shop in the Short North. 787 North High Street; (614) 294-9378; collierwest.com.
So much of what I learned at the Produced By Conference (presented by the Producers Guild of America) is extremely useful to producers and filmmakers at every level. Over two days, numerous panels featured seasoned producers, celebrities, CEOs, and industry professionals discussing the latest trends and offering advice for navigating film, television, and web production.
On any level of production, producers deal with similar issues, have a lot of the same questions, and each has their own style for problem solving. With new technologies and ever-changing film production resources, a conference like this is beyond valuable for staying on top.
Here were the top 15 takeaways:
ARM YOURSELF WITH INFORMATION
As a producer you need to be able to speak to people. You need to establish trust, be kind, be central in the process so your crew will respect and listen to you. A key part of producing is diplomacy. In many ways, producers have to be politicians. I personally like to think of the director as the General and the producer as the President and we’re at war to make this movie! Choose your battles and learn as much as you can. Make sure to learn from other producer’s experiences and always trust your gut.
Also, when arming yourself with information, stay on top of what’s happening in all aspects of the production world. The latest in film financing incentives, film legislation, new technologies, trends, similar movies (past and present) to what you’re working on now, cultural relevance…absorb as much as possible. When you want to keep learning, that’s also when you know you’re doing you truly love.
This is from a panel that included Ian Bryce, producer of Transformers and World War Z; Tracey Edmonds, producer of Jumping The Broom and “With This Ring”; John Heinsen, CEO of Bunnygraph Entertainment; Stu Levy, producer of Priest and Pray for Japan; Gary Lucchesi, President of PGA and producer of The Lincoln Lawyer and The Age of Adaline; and Lori McCreary producer of Invictus and “Madam Secretary.”
INCENTIVES ARE KEY FOR FINANCING
When financing and packaging a film, it’s critical to have some sort of incentive offered by a state or country to attract production and boost a local economy. Creative is the most important when dictating where to shoot the film or series but having some sort of tax incentive is a must. The balance is backing creative into the tax incentive options. Deborah Wettstein of Indian Paintbrush tells the story about how because of the German tax incentives, Wes Anderson explored a region he wasn’t thinking about and found the abandoned department store that became The Grand Budapest Hotel.
The 2015 Produced By Conference was held on the historic lot of Paramount Pictures in Hollywood.
However, there are problems with shooting in a tax incentive state or country when there is no production support or crew. David Glasser of Weinstein Company spoke in great detail about how Malaysia offered an amazing incentive but there was no support. Since the shoot was big enough, they worked with the government to beef up the incentive in order to build studios and infrastructure for production support. They trained local crew and transformed the region.
When exploring tax incentives and how they will affect production, create a budget that explores the local resources and then factors in freight shipment of equipment needed and traveling crew. Then, see if the incentives are worth the additional costs.
Big things to look for in terms of production incentives:
Are there any funding caps or ceilings?
Factor in the losses because of exchange rates.
What are the production services available in the area?
When is the upcoming legislative session and will that have an effect on your upcoming shoot?
Incentives need to be a two-way street. Moviemakers get an incentive but what does the region get in return?
On the incentives panel: Debra Bergman, Senior VP of Scripted Production for Fremantle Media; Shirley Davis, VP Physical Production for Alcon Entertainment; David Glasser, COO and President of The Weinstein Company; and Deborah Wettstein, CFO of Indian Paintbrush Productions. Moderating was Joe Chianese, EVP of EP Financing Solutions.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY SHOULD BE MULTI-PLATFORM
Content now exists across multiple platforms. What’s important is the Intellectual Property behind the content. Don’t call your pitch a “movie” or a “TV series” or “web video,” call it your IP that can exist in many formats. Sure it can start as a movie, but think about how pieces can exist on YouTube or Vine for either ancillary content or for marketing purposes.
One particular panel was all about social media and new technology challenging traditional media. Walter Newman at Adult Swim talks about how social media is a great incubator for talent and ideas. If a concept or character works in a six-second Vine video, maybe it can become a series of videos that develops a fan base.
In the world of social media, comedy works the best, especially in the shorter format platforms. The celebrity Viners on the panel talk about how hard it is to tell a story in six seconds. They do, however, still adhere to the three-act structure: a beginning, middle, and end.
On this panel: Brandon Calvillo and Greg ‘Klarity’ Davis Jr., two celebrity Viners; Jason Mante, the head of user experience at Vine; and Walter Newman, the Director of Comedy Development for Adult Swim. Sanjay Sharma of All Def Digital moderated.
THINK OUTSIDE THE TRADITIONAL MODELS FOR FINANCING
The most inspirational voice I’ve heard in a long time was that of Sophie Watts, President of STX Entertainment. She talked about taking risks and thinking outside the traditional financing structures and industry rules. She explained how she didn’t understand where money came from and how projects get theatrical releases so she started calling the exhibitors and theater owners directly. She started striking her own deals that allowed for more variety in theaters and smaller films to have a voice. In a world of digital distribution, why isn’t this happening more often? Audiences want the theater experience and also want variety. Why can’t we have more content to choose from in theaters?
What she did is extremely difficult and time consuming, but the message is clear: carve the path for your project.
Sophie is inspiring because she’s passionate and states that there is a lot of money out there for films with a decent script, name actors, and a somewhat recognizable (or at least competent) director attached. If you have that, you’ll get financed.
President of STX Entertainment, Sophie Watts discusses alternative financial models.
There are so many outlets for film other than theatrical or DVD. Netflix, iTunes, VOD, and other online platforms are allowing for more opportunities to reach and audience and to make a sale. And don’t forget that Netflix and iTunes exist in multiple countries and those are separate deals.
Crowdfunding can be helpful, but it can also be a total pain. It’s great for docs and could be a strategy for matching funds with an investor. Some films use crowd funding lately as a marketing tool, but keep in mind that there is strategy and a particular type of content that does the best in crowd funding.
In addition to Sophie Watts on the panel was Johanthan Decker, President and COO of Voltage Pictures; Elsa Ramo, Founding Partner of Ramo Law; Hal Sadoff, Producer; and Adrian Ward, Division Manager of Pacific Mercantile Bank. Moderating was producer and Producer’s Guild President Gary Lucchesi.
SELL DOMESTIC FIRST, THEN SELL FOREIGN
Right now, foreign sales for your project will vary depending on what the US domestic distribution is. If you have a large theatrical release, you have a better chance at an overseas domestic release. A small theatrical release may sometimes help or hurt foreign sales depending on what type of content you have. However, a small theatrical release can help for marketing VOD and broadcast sales domestically but not for foreign. If it’s content that will mainly live on television, sometimes it’s best to go after broadcast sales directly. Arm yourself with as much information as possible about similar types of productions and how they preformed. But keep in mind as global markets are changing, our North American domestic territory may not influence foreign territories as much.
THINK GLOBAL
Where is the future of film financing? China and Norway. Seriously, those two countries are becoming heavy hitters in the film production world. We’re going to see a lot more content coming from them in the near future.
China is building theaters faster than any country in the world. Their box office ticket sales are rising as the US audience dwindles.
Think global for sales and also for production. Take advantage of production incentives in other countries but as listed above, be aware of limitations and resources an incentive country has to offer.
BUILD YOUR AUDIENCE
Whether it starts online or it’s through a book, start building an audience as early as possible because it will only help bring your project to life faster. As discussed in the social media panel, new technology platforms are a great way to generate an audience but there are limits. Although social media influencers appeal to a younger demographic, this audience is very relatable and obtainable. The key with this audience in particular is honesty and authenticity.
On the Social Media panel, the celebrity Viners were asked how they built the audience they both shrugged and genuinely had no idea. They just kept posting what felt honest to them and the fan count continued to grow.
PARTNERSHIPS ARE IMPORTANT
Partner with other producers who have the connections or experience you don’t have. Join forces. Don’t be afraid to cold call or email, just don’t always expect a return call. The best is to get recommendations to companies or contacts through referrals.
Partnerships with companies are important, as well. Find companies which seem to be natural fits for the types of projects you’re making. Don’t approach a reality TV production company with an idea for an indie drama, unless of course you hear that they are specifically looking for material like that.
Variations on this theme resonated in many of the panels.
The Vine panelists at the 2015 Produced By Conference: Brandon Calvillo, Klarity, and Walter Newman.
TALENT ATTACHMENTS ARE IMPORTANT: ACTORS AND DIRECTOR
This is a very important one because the biggest questions distributors, investors, festival programmers, advertisers, brands, audience members, EVERYONE asks is: “what is your movie about?” and “who is in it?”
Who is in you film or series will help the project stand out. For financing, a recognizable cast will attract pre-sales. Audiences also want to see their favorite actors on screen. That isn’t going away.
One panel that gave advice to producers based on a question from the audience talked about dealing with difficult talent. Ian Bryce, producer of Transformers, talked about how important reputation is. Listen to the experiences other producers have had with cast and directors. If talent has a bad reputation, get ready for trouble on set that you’ll have to deal with. It’s better to avoid problematic talent.
A producer’s job is to moderate the creative appetites and make a happy set. Easier said than done sometimes!
Bryce is very much the mellow diplomatic producer and says he “treats artists like a son or daughter and walks them through the process. ‘Over-communicating’ goes a long way. “
When trying to find these talent attachments, partnerships with other producers will help but consider a good casting director. They will get your script to talent agents especially if you don’t have representation.
There is also mention of YouTube, Vine, and social media talent that have large followers. But keep in mind their limitations as performers.
Casting is 80 to 90 percent of the success of your shoot. If you cast the wrong person, you’re screwed.
BE CLEAR AND CONCISE
This really is advice for a lot of areas of producing, and life in general. When pitching, when coming up with the financing deals, when developing partnerships, be as clear and simple with your message so it’s easy for you and others to communicate.
Have a clear road map with smaller, attainable goals that will lead to the ultimate goal of finished content.
There were two panels about pitching for television and pitching for film. These panels were set up like an episode of Shark Tank and moderated by producer and amateur stand-up comedian Mark Gordon. Mark hilarious put people on the spot as they pitched to a panel of seasoned production veterans.
In the pitching panels, a big piece of advice is to be clear about the story and what the pitch is about. What is the arc? Who is the character? Is there a good role to attract an actor to this project? It seems like a simple concept but so many pitches easily became meandering and go on tangents that confuse and muddy the ideas.
ONE, THREE, AND TEN
In the panel on Pitching For Film, producer Marshall Herskovitz (The Last Samurai, “Thirtysomething”) gave the best and most concrete advice for pitching I’ve ever heard. This is from his experience of pitching and then listening to pitches.
First, tell your idea in ONE sentence. The logline.
Then tell the idea in THREE sentences. Elaborate on the logline.
Then tell the idea in TEN sentences. Here is where you go through Act 1, 2, and 3.
He developed this format because he was just as anxious listening to a pitch as the person pitching. What this format does is force you to really understand what you’re pitching so then it’s clear when you pitch it. It is the road map for you and the executive hearing the pitch. Then, if the executive is engaged, they’ll start discussing the project and character even before the pitch is over.
BE FLEXIBLE AND TENACIOUS
This advice comes from multiple panels talking about many areas of producing. Producing requires a mindset that adapts to change. If you can’t handle quick problem solving and change, maybe this job isn’t for you. The industry is constantly changing and producers need to be flexible about the types of projects they work on and where those projects can live in order to survive. Consider multi-platforms. Don’t be afraid to work on big projects as well as small projects. Each project will be its own learning experience. *Just don’t do a project you don’t like creatively.
Every producer on every panel clearly has tenacity. The reason they get things done and projects made is because they don’t wait around for other people to open doors. They open the doors themselves. Even with an agent or representation, there’s still a lot of hustle to this job.
MAKE YOUR FILM RELEVANT
That was actually written in upper case in my notes: MAKE YOUR FILM RELEVANT. This was stated at the financing panel, the pitching panel, and the advice for producers panel.
Have an understanding of who your audience is and why this film matters. Why is this film relevant? If it is something that speaks to our culture, our time, political climate, important themes, etc, then you’re allowing for a more meaningful connection with your audience and increasing the chances of better word of mouth.
Then based on how your film or series is relevant, use that to help finance the film in reverse. When you know where the film will best live because of the content, audience, and social relevance, then you can construct the road map of what companies to target to help finance and distribute this content.
Pitching for Film: Mark Gordon, Stephanie Allain, Marshall Herskovitz, and Graham King.
BE HONEST AND PASSIONATE ABOUT YOUR WORK
This is advice that appeared in almost every panel. Being honest about your work and what you want to create affects every aspect of the producing process. As a producer, you need to know what kind of content you want to make and then go after that. It’s fine to be flexible and like a lot of different types of projects and genres, but when you’re honest about what you like and don’t like, you’ll start to see what your style is. Hone your taste and be proud of what you’re trying to make because you have to live with these projects for a very long time.
The producers on the panel giving general advice all agreed that schlock will come back to haunt you. Never produce a project you don’t feel good about. Trust your gut.
This advice helps a lot with pitching. When pitching for film and television, convey what is exciting, what you love, what is your personal connection to the story, and why the story is important to you. Excitement is infectious and we’re in the business of entertainment. Audiences want to feel something from content so that feeling needs to be conveyed during the development process.
Honesty and passion will help with confidence and that’s important for any pitch or meeting with anyone about a project.
CONTENT IS KING
The one thing that was said in ALL panels regardless of the topic. CONTENT IS KING!! At the end of the day, all that matters is what’s on screen or going to be on screen.
In the panel on pitching for film, producer Graham King (Argo, The Departed) talked about how there is a lack of ideas and original stories in the industry right now. If you have an interesting story that you’re passionate to tell that could find an audience, you have something of value.
Content is king across all platforms and higher quality and well-crafted material will stand the test of time. A great script is the foundation for any project, and if the producer is passionate, tenacious and fearless enough to fight for it, it will get made. Don’t give up!
The seventh annual Produced By Conference was held May 30-31, 2015 on the historic studio lot at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood.
Coitus scenes move past titillation to reveal subtleties of character
When Michelle Ashford describes how her Showtime series “Masters of Sex” (pictured) approaches onscreen sex, she points to the recent arc in which researcher Dr. Bill Masters experiences a bout of impotence.
“It’s not sexy,” Ashford tells Variety. “It’s painful and it makes you cringe, and that’s our job. We’re not the bodice-ripper show. We’re just trying to tell the story as honestly as possible.”
Without the restrictions of broadcast standards and practices, cable and streaming series have long pushed the boundaries of depicting sex on TV. But unlike cable’s early days, when sex was merely meant to attract viewers, such series as HBO’s “Game of Thrones” and “Girls” are using sex to further storytelling and draw more realistic characters.
“It’s nonverbal storytelling,” says Sarah Treem of Showtime’s “The Affair.” “With sex, people tend to communicate things they can’t say in language. When we’re approaching sex scenes, we always try to make sure it is narratively important. We try to use our sex scenes to get to the next place.”
John Wells, showrunner of fellow Showtime series “Shameless,” agrees: “It’s not that being able to use sex in shows or profanity makes the shows better, but it does allow you to be more honest about how people live their lives.”
Even Cinemax’s “The Knick,” set in repressed post-Victorian New York, uses sex to show cultural shifts, according to writers John Amiel and Michael Begler.
“It’s another thing we like to play with on the show: where we’ve come medically, race relations — sexuality is another piece of it,” Begler says.
Though Starz’s “Power” showrunner Courtney Kemp Agboh says her cast has come to expect sex scenes, she’s writing against traditional portrayals.
“The narrative of the sex scene is always about the male orgasm, and for me that’s the least interesting thing we could do,” she says. “Our show tends to be about the female experience, so it’s much more about the initial kiss, physical seduction, mental seduction.”
Aussie musician and model on joining the cast: “I have a crush on every single person on the show”
Rolling Stone 6/11/2015 By Mac McClelland
This season, Australian model, TV personality, actress and musician Ruby Rose joins the cast of Orange Is the New Black as Stella, a sexy, mysterious stranger rumored to turn the show’s perennially troubled couple, Piper and Alex, into a love triangle. Rose, 29, auditioned hard for the part to get onto one of her favorite shows. “Especially for someone in the LGBT community, I don’t think there’s been a show that’s so true about the experience of being gay or lesbian or trans. It’s helping a lot of people discover who they are. And I think that’s magic — you don’t get that a lot on TV.”
Talking to Rose for our cover story on the new season of Orange, we grilled her about that controversial “failure” quote, the benefits of therapy and how she “has a crush on every single person on the show.” (You can also check out her short film on gender fluidity, “Break Free,” below.)
There were some reports online that you had concerns about Orange at first. Did you think it was going to be exploitative?
I cringe every time I see that quote; it was taken totally out of context. [Talking to Sunday Style Magazine, Rose was quoted as saying “The show is obviously brilliant, but it has women directors, writers and producers; it’s about women in a prison. Everything about it had ‘failure’ written on it.”] What I was saying was that in the acting industry in general and [given] what we’re provided in content on TV and in film, life in a women’s prison is not something that’s usually discussed or portrayed. And on top of that, the main characters are all female protagonists, it’s written by a lot of women and cast by women — everything about it is amazing. I imagine producers seeing it pop up and being like, “I don’t know about all this female power going on.” It’s definitely a minority in what we’re usually offered.
So you were a fan of the show?
I was a really big fan of the first two seasons. I was a little bit late on the first because I was not in the country; I just saw it going crazy on social media. So I turned it on on a Friday, and three days later, I’ve just watched an entire series of a TV program; I was like, “There has to be something wrong with me.” I had never binge-watched TV before Orange.
It’s just not something that you’d think would have value written all over it. You wouldn’t look at it and think, “That’s gonna be a hit.” You think that with superhero movies. There’s something on that show that everyone can relate to. That’s why it’s so successful.
Which character did you relate to?
I related to everyone in a way. There’s little bits of Alex and Piper I related to in my life — though probably more Alex. I have the cheekiness of Nicky, but then I’m like a hopeless romantic like Lorna [played be fellow Aussie Yael Stone]. There are parts of Poussey [played by Samira Wiley] that I connected with. But my character, Stella, is so similar in her mannerisms to me, and she’s very androgynous. It’s such a perfect fit.
Much has been made of the diversity, in every sense, of the cast; as a model, do you feel like you were a more traditional choice for TV?
[Scoffing] “Model.” I don’t think of myself as a model. I’m genderqueer, and I’ve got tattoos. Since I got the part some people have asked me what it’s like to be the hottest girl on the show, and I’m like, “What? That’s not true, at all.” Every single woman on that show is so sexy — it’s really kind of crazy. Poussey is such a babe. Alex is out of control. Nicky has a thing about her. Every one of these girls has different sex appeal, whether they’re vulnerable, or whatever it is. I have a crush on every single person on the show, much to my fiancée’s amusement. And then when you get to know them off camera it’s even worse because they’re so talented, so nice, so funny; I’ve never laughed so hard in my life. I wish I could be as beautiful as them.
A lot of them, it turns out, have been through lots of therapy, or are really spiritual. . .
I fit into both those categories! I love therapy. I swear by therapy. I couldn’t exist without therapy. And I’m in the program [Alcoholics Anonymous].
A lot of us on the show have been through things in life that have taken us in different directions. We’re almost all like underdogs. I say that in a positive way. There is no competition or weird insecurities; everyone’s sort of rooting for each other. They’ve been through so much, and they’re so successful. The positive message is: go to therapy [laughs]. There’s hope for all of us.
The New York Times 6/11/2015 Interview by MARK LEIBOVICH
Michael Wolff
You wrote in December 2013, in a media-criticism column for The Guardian, that no one reads The Times Magazine anymore. So thanks for joining us in this private setting. You know, the first article I ever published was in The Times Magazine, in 1974.
In your new book, “Television Is the New Television,” you are very bullish about the enduring power of television. Does any of your optimism extend to print media? It could. I mean, everybody in print media says that digital is the future. I think that if those mooks are saying, “Digital is the future,” that would be a fairly strong indication that digital is probably not the future.
You don’t hold the forecasting abilities of the print-media industry in much regard, in other words. There’s a real interesting contrast between the television industry and the print industry. Print thought, Oh, we’re screwed, and we better just capitulate. Television was pretty well prepared for this. These guys came along and said, “We’re going to eat your lunch,” and television said, “Hmm — try.” They sued everybody into oblivion. Television never let anyone have anything for free.
What is your daily media diet like? I wrap my coat around my bathrobe and I walk to the corner and I buy The Times, The Journal and The FT. I used to buy The Post, but then they wrote terrible things about me. My personal mission is to bring The Post to its knees.
You’ve been critical of the media’s reaction to the Brian Williams kerfuffle. Essentially, you believe that his punishment by the media has vastly outweighed his crimes. Yes. I guess, in a general fashion, I just find more and more that the media consensus is always wrong. Whatever they say is going to happen, whatever the consensus is about what should happen, is wrong.
So you believe that NBC is victimizing both its viewers and itself in order to conform to what you would say is a needlessly high-minded standard? I don’t think the standard exists. Williams is not a journalist; he’s a performer. Nobody does any reporting — it’s the evening news, for goodness’ sake.
If you were in charge of NBC News and Williams were caught telling exaggerated or made-up stories on your watch, what would you do? I would do what Roger Ailes would do. Through Roger’s eyes, the issue is: What does my audience want? So, why should I have to run my business on the basis of what media people say I should do — people who don’t want me to succeed?
If I were to ask you a question like, “Well, doesn’t NBC have a quote-unquote ‘obligation’ to uphold the highest of journalistic standards,” I’m guessing you would laugh at me. I would laugh at you.
Hillary Clinton has been largely unavailable to the media. Do you think she has an obligation to take questions from the press? I certainly don’t. Again, this is one of those things. Why does the press always become the center of its own story?
Do you really think the media is that irrelevant in terms of Hillary Clinton’s ability to get elected? Well, no — I think the news media is central to her ability to get elected. I think Hillary is highly vulnerable because her campaign probably rests on her success in not having the media kill her. That may be true about everybody’s campaign, but I think it is much more true about hers.
Do you think Hillary Clinton would be well served to follow the “What would Roger Ailes do” credo? I think we would all be well served to follow that credo. That’s what we should be thinking: What’s good for my own business? We’re in a business that’s dying everywhere. We said, “We’ll make everything for free.” On a very real level, you have a responsibility to make your own business work. And it’s a responsibility that I feel very hotly, because in our business — where I make my money and you make your money — somebody screwed that up.
Is podcasting in the middle of a long boom or a short bubble? The future of radio, a medium already being buffeted by streaming music, may be riding on the answer.
Podcasting — a terrible tech insider’s name for delivering radiolike shows directly to your phone — has long been prone to cycles of hype and doom. While the medium is more than a decade old, from the moment the very first pods were cast, people have been calling podcasting either the world’s next great media revolution, or another failed byway in digital experimentation.
The truth, as ever, is somewhere in the middle. The breakout success last fall of “Serial,” a true-crime investigation spun off by the public radio show “This American Life,” attracted serious mainstream attention to podcasts, and set off another storm of boosterism about their place in the future of media. Now, the hype has cooled, but podcasting is still chugging along.
The largest podcasting operations are attracting sizable audiences and advertising revenue. The ads work. Large and small advertisers report a significant upside to the campaigns they run on podcasts, and ad rates on top-tier podcasts approach $100 per thousand listeners, which is many times what it costs advertisers to reach audiences in most other digital formats.
Alex Blumberg, left, and Matthew Lieber, co-founders of Gimlet, on the roof of their office in Brooklyn.
Yet the overall audience for podcasts is growing very slowly. In February, Edison Research reported that 17 percent of Americans had listened to one podcast in the previous month. That is up just slightly from Edison’s 2012 survey, when 14 percent of Americans had done so. The business also has some problems, including a labor-intensive ad-buying process, a shortage of audio producers and the inability to accurately measure who is listening.
So don’t call podcasting a bubble or a bust. Instead, it is that rarest thing in the technology industry: a slow, steady and unrelentingly persistent digital tortoise that could eventually — but who really knows? — slay the analog behemoths in its path.
One company worth watching is Gimlet Media, a podcasting start-up founded last year by the public radio star Alex Blumberg and his business partner, Matthew Lieber. Gimlet, which raised nearly $1.5 million from investors and employs 18 people, now shows three production-heavy narrative podcasts — programs that, in their sound and journalistic integrity, are analogous to “Serial” and “This American Life.”
The company has found a substantial audience. Gimlet’s shows attract four million listeners a month, a number that has doubled since the beginning of the year. (Gimlet counts one download or stream of a show as a single “listen”; as I’ll explain below, this measurement may not necessarily be accurate.)
http://www.wnyc.org/story/case-2-britney/
Gimlet is betting that high production values will win the future of podcasting. Gimlet’s shows also suggest that podcasting can foster new kinds of programming that might never have taken off in traditional radio.
For instance, the premise of “Mystery Show,” Gimlet’s newest production, which began playing last month, sounds a bit like a stunt. On each episode, Starlee Kine, a longtime public radio personality, solves mysteries for people. But Ms. Kine does not investigate the kind of serious mysteries addressed by the producers of “Serial.” Instead her inquiries are the sort of ridiculously fun questions that no journalist would ever get paid to answer. Why, for example, was Britney Spears once seen carrying a book by a writer that no one ever reads?
“Until podcasts blew up, I was about to leave radio — there didn’t seem to be a place for this show,” Ms. Kine told me.
Mr. Blumberg said that he couldn’t imagine the show running on traditional radio. “It feels so new,” he said. “It’s sort of like comedy journalism. We follow the rules of journalism, but the purpose is to make you feel something. The purpose is amusement and entertainment.” (Speaking of comedy journalism, I do a weekly tech-commentary podcast with a friend who works at Business Insider.)
“Mystery Show” has also proved Gimlet’s thesis that a network of shows can create a self-sustaining audience. With the possible exception of “Serial,” podcasts aren’t really part of the viral web. They don’t get chatted about on Facebook and Twitter, and the sharing and discovery features of many podcasting apps are limited. For the most part, people hear about new podcasts from other podcasts they already listen to. And once people start listening to podcasts, they keep listening to more podcasts.
The share of podcasts in Americans’ diet of audio programming grew by 18 percent from 2014 to 2015, according to Edison. People who listen to podcasts daily spend about two hours a day, on average, with podcasts, a larger share than for any other form of audio, Edison reported.
For Gimlet, listeners’ willingness to try new podcasts has translated into instant audiences for its newest shows. “Startup,” the company’s first show, took 30 days to reach 100,000 listeners a week. Its weekly audience is now more than 500,000. “Mystery Show” took four days to reach 100,000 listeners, mainly because it was being promoted by Gimlet’s two other shows. By its fourth episode, its audience was about 250,000 weekly listens.
Banking on a similar effect, in February, the parent company of the web magazine Slate — which has been producing podcasts for years — created Panoply, a network of shows it produces with media partners, including The New York Times. Matt Turck, the chief revenue officer for Panoply, said the audience for Slate’s own podcasts grew from two million downloads a month to six million downloads a month in 2014. By combining many shows into a single network, Panoply hopes to sell a single large audience to advertisers.
Neither Panoply nor Gimlet would discuss revenue or profits in detail, but both said the advertising business was booming. Podcast advertising has been dominated by a regular cast of mainly tech companies looking to attract a relatively wealthy audience with an affinity for technology. Firms like Audible, Stamps.com, MailChimp, Squarespace and several apparel and food companies are regular sponsors. More recently, podcasts have also begun to attract large entertainment marketers — movies and TV shows now advertise on podcasts — and even large national brands like Ford and Acura have sponsored shows.
Several advertisers told me that podcast ads had proved to be tremendously effective. They can’t be easily skipped, and because they are often read by hosts, audiences are often convinced of their authenticity. “We feel it creates a deep personal connection to our brand,” said Ryan Stansky, the marketing manager who runs podcast advertising at Squarespace, which currently sponsors hundreds of podcasts.
Even though rates are high, selling ads is still a laborious process and top-tier shows limit the number of ads that appear in each show. The more ads that appear, the less each advertiser will pay, a dynamic that may limit the upside of the business. There are also technical problems to be solved. Podcasters can count their downloads, but it’s difficult to tell if downloads translate to listeners, and it’s nearly impossible to tell who is listening, and to figure out what sort of ads listeners may like. There are also few standards in the business, which means podcasters and advertisers are often suspicious of one another’s claims.
“I’ve heard directly from sales reps in casual settings that numbers get lied about,” Mr. Stansky said. “I’ve heard that from the other side — sales reps that I’ve worked with saying, ‘Yeah, we lied to you about numbers.’ And to me, that’s the most scary part of it all, that you’re paying for something that you’re not actually getting.”
Podcasters concede that dodgy numbers are a problem, but they argue it is one that will be solved as the business matures and technology improves. Several advertisers, including Squarespace, create “offer codes” or specific web links to promote as part of their ads — a way to track how many customers podcasts bring to their sites. Larger advertisers like Ford said their investments in podcast marketing are small, so the numbers aren’t being watched closely. And the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an online ad trade group, is creating standards for podcast audience measurement.
In other words, there is a lot about this business that still needs to be worked out. This will most likely happen eventually. Podcasting is destined to be huge, both as a medium and a business. “It’s the future of radio,” Mr. Turck of Panoply said. Just don’t expect that future to come tomorrow.
Sidney Blumenthal at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on April 23, 1998.
The journalist Sidney Blumenthal is scheduled to testify today before the House Benghazi Committee. Blumenthal wasn’t serving in the US government on September 11, 2012, when Islamist militants killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. But the committee’s investigation into Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s response to the attack has revealed that Blumenthal was sending her dozens of emails passing along private intelligence on the ground in Libya during her time at State, including in the aftermath of the events in Benghazi.
To his detractors, this all feels familiar. Blumenthal’s time in the White House in the late 1990s earned him a reputation on the American right as something like the first family’s Rasputin, a vicious, mudslinging partisan who’d stop at nothing to defend Bill and Hillary Clinton. “Sid Vicious” was one common nickname; his own White House colleague Rahm Emanuel gave him the nickname “grassy knoll,” owing to his penchant for identifying and decrying various conservative conspiracies against the president. Of course that guy would be involved in what was, from the right’s vantage point, Hillary’s greatest screw-up as secretary of state.
But Blumenthal is far more fascinating than this caricature makes him out to be. The one key thread running through all his work — his career as a journalist at the New Republic and the New Yorker, his time at the Clinton White House, his work on the Hillary campaign and as an outside correspondent during her time at State — is a desire to rebuild American liberalism in such a way that it could take on the post-Reagan right and win. Blumenthal is someone who saw the country’s politics fundamentally transform in the 1980s and yearned for a liberal movement and a Democratic Party that was capable of adapting and defeating the New Right. He eventually concluded that the Clintons were the best hope for achieving that kind of transformation. His Clinton loyalism isn’t a form of personal fealty. It’s an allegiance born of perceived ideological and moral necessity.
Who, exactly, is Sidney Blumenthal?
Blumenthal during his time as a White House senior adviser.
Sidney Blumenthal is a journalist and political adviser. Blumenthal is probably best known for his time as assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton from August 1997 to January 2001, during which time he was deeply involved in Clinton’s defense against impeachment charges brought by Republicans in Congress. He also served as an adviser on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign.
Before joining the administration, he worked for decades as a political journalist, starting in Boston area alt weeklies before moving to Washington, DC, to work for, at various points, the New Republic, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker. After the Clinton administration ended he returned to writing, spending years as the Washington editor of Salon and then becoming a columnist for the Guardian.
He’s also had a small side career in show business, serving as a consultant for the Robert Altman-directed, Garry Trudeau-penned HBO series Tanner ’88, which tracked a fictional congressman’s bid for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, and producing the films Max and Taxi to the Dark Side, the latter of which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
What was Blumenthal’s writing like before he joined the White House?
Pat Caddell, the pollster for Jimmy Carter who was emblematic of the consultant class Blumenthal described, in 2011.
Blumenthal was a prolific writer in his first decades as a journalist, with two books standing out as particularly illustrative of his interests and of where his career was headed.
The Permanent Campaign, released in 1980, argued that regional party bosses were being supplanted by a cadre of professional campaign consultants, using as examples the crop of then-new Massachusetts politicians (Barney Frank, Ed Markey, John Kerry) who won despite their lack of ties to the Irish Democratic machine.
A consequence of the increased power of campaign consultants was a blurring of the line between campaigning and governing, creating the titular “permanent campaign” dynamic. The decline of industrial-era bosses and rise of poll-driven consultants, he argued, mirrored the broader transition in the economy from manufacturing to computing and information technology, “where white-collar workers outnumber blue-collar, computers are the archetypal machines, knowledge is a vital form of capital, much heavy industry is exported to the more dynamic Third World countries, and America becomes the home office of the world.”
The book’s predictions hold up remarkably well, both on politics and on the economy at large. Crucially, Blumenthal didn’t view the permanent campaign dynamic as necessarily a bad thing. “While many bemoaned the emptiness of image making and the lack of principle in polling, I saw these techniques as inevitable and neutral,” Blumenthal writes in The Clinton Wars. Blumenthal would go on to engage heavily in this variety of politics in his time at the White House, where image making was a key part of his portfolio.
The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, first published in 1986, is a history of the conservative movement, written at the height of its ascendancy. It was released when Blumenthal was writing for the style section of the Washington Post on the “conservative beat”; he had originally been hired for the national reporting team, but was moved to a more analytical part of the paper when it was revealed that he had worked as a speechwriter for Gary Hart’s 1984 Democratic presidential campaign, while simultaneously giving Hart glowing coverage in the New Republic. Hart was, in many ways, the proto-Clinton, a modernizer who wanted the Democratic party to embrace the new information economy and discard some of its liberal orthodoxies. Unsurprisingly, Blumenthal took a shine to both.
The basic argument of Rise of the Counter-Establishment is that the conservative movement emulated what it perceived as a loose but effective conspiracy of elite institutions — the Brookings Institution, the Ford Foundation, the New York Times editorial page — and so created a much more cohesive and effective counter-establishment — the American Enterprise Institute, the Olin Foundation, the Wall Street Journal editorial page — to combat it. “They imitated something they had imagined,” Blumenthal wrote, “but what they created was not imaginary.” The book, the conservative writer Tevi Troy notes, “provided a blueprint for what would be called the vast right-wing conspiracy” during Blumenthal’s time in the White House. It laid out who, exactly, the enemy was that a new generation of Democratic politicians had to defeat.
How did Blumenthal get to know the Clintons?
Then-President Bill Clinton attends Renaissance Weekend at Hilton Head on January 1, 1998.
Blumenthal first met Bill Clinton in 1987 at Renaissance Weekend, an annual convening of various luminaries in Hilton Head, South Carolina. The Democratic presidential primaries were mere weeks away, and after much consideration Clinton had opted not to run that cycle. In the Clinton Wars, Blumenthal remembers the then-governor being remarkably candid about his ambition for the office, but Blumenthal recalls being won over by the fact that Clinton was reading William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged, a then-new, now-classic sociological work on deindustrialization’s effect on inner cities, particularly isolated poor black communities. “After a few days’ exposure to him,” Blumenthal writes, “my initial impression of a young man in a hurry was evolving and deepening … He was a charismatic if loquacious speaker who had an easy facility with the arcana of public policy.”
Blumenthal wound up touting Michael Dukakis heavily in that election cycle, leading Christopher Hitchens to write with a mixture of amazement and disdain of his “ability to put a radical shine on the most wretched Democratic nominees.” But in 1992, he was sympathetic to Clinton, writing a cover story in the New Republic (to which he’d returned from the Post) titled “The Anointed,” which touted him as the frontrunner, a visionary beloved of party elites capable of reviving liberalism in the post-Reagan era.
Clinton, Blumenthal writes, was part of a group of Democrats interested in “rethinking … the future of liberalism and the Democratic Party”; Blumenthal calls this project “the Conversation.” He favorably compares Clinton to Dukakis (a “mere technocrat”) and his 1992 rival Bob Kerrey (“bereft of much of a rationale beyond his biography”), who were both, Blumenthal is eager to note, not part of the Conversation. They weren’t in the in-crowd, they didn’t know the right people, and they weren’t policy savants like Clinton. They weren’t trying to remake liberalism the way Blumenthal thought it needed to be remade. But Clinton — like Hart before him — was.
Critics alleged that the distinction was more personal than it was ideological or substantive. “Blumenthal has yet to analyze, however, his own role in ‘The Conversation,'” Jacob Weisberg wrote in the New Republic a year later. “Most of those quoted in his story are not just sources but long-standing personal friends. And he sees his advocacy journalism as an extension of that friendship.”
By Blumenthal’s telling, he hadn’t fully been won over when “The Anointed” was released. His “road to Damascus” moment, according to Clinton Wars, came after the story went to press, when the Gennifer Flowers scandal broke just before the New Hampshire primary. Clinton was slipping once the allegations of an affair emerged, and former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas was looking like the frontrunner. “But then in Dover,” Blumenthal writes, “in a bandbox of an Elks lodge, I watched Clinton lift himself back to political life … His performance, upon which the fate of his entire campaign depended, was the most electrifying political moment I had witnessed since I was a boy in the Chicago Stadium,” where Blumenthal had seen John F. Kennedy speak in 1960.
How did Blumenthal write about Clinton in his first term?
Bosnian Muslim refugees flee Srebrenica in a United Nations truck on March 31, 1993. Blumenthal attacked Clinton’s slow response to the ethnic cleansing against Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs.
Early in Clinton’s first term, Blumenthal, by then at the New Yorker, was often deeply critical of the president, who clearly, in Blumenthal’s eyes, was not living up to the promise he had identified in “The Anointed.” A piece in January 1993 described a chaotic transition process with “the sort of murderous atmosphere that had led to the assassination of James Garfield by a disgruntled job seeker.” A May piece lambasted Clinton’s unwillingness to take military action to stop the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, declaring, “There are few things more dangerous to a President’s and a nation’s credibility than the suggestion of commitment without putting force behind it.”
As the term progressed, Blumenthal’s coverage grew ever more positive. Clinton was, in Blumenthal’s view, growing into the effective liberal modernizer Blumenthal always thought he could be. In January 1994, Blumenthal published a piece evaluating Clinton’s first year, based on a long interview with the president. While Blumenthal wrote that Clinton “had the worst first week of any President since William Henry Harrison,” he overall paints a glowing portrait of the leader who pushed through a controversial budget plan, the Brady Bill gun control measure, and NAFTA. Clinton, Blumenthal reported, “feels he has gained a grasp of his office and its powers.”
Paula Jones attends President Clinton’s deposition in her sexual harassment suit against him on January 17, 1998.
A piece in June on Paula Jones’s sexual harassment suit against the president dismissed it as an unsubstantiated far-right witch hunt. Scandals like Jones’s, he argued, were “destructive of all partisanship — partisanship in the sense of vigorous public combat about competing visions of society … In the tabloid haze, public life evaporates.”
Behind the scenes, Blumenthal introduced Clinton to Tony Blair, then an up-and-coming British politician whom Blumenthal profiled for the New Yorker before his election as prime minister. Blair, like Clinton, faced the challenge of modernizing his nation’s left party in the wake of an iconic and transformative conservative national leader (in his case, Margaret Thatcher), a challenge that Blumenthal found intellectually invigorating. Later, in the White House, Blumenthal would take a keen interest in developing the pair’s trans-Atlantic “Third Way” model as a coherent ideology and approach to left politics.
Blumenthal gained a reputation as the most pro-Clinton member of the Washington press corps. To his fans, this was perfectly normal, a continuation of a long tradition of DC journalists developing close relationships with the White House. “George Will consorted with Ronald Reagan, to no detriment to his career,” Rutgers historian David Greenberg wrote in his review of Clinton Wars. “David Frum cashiered his service as a speechwriter to the incumbent into a best-selling book, The Right Man — only to return to writing pro-Bush pieces.” But to his critics, Blumenthal was doing the administration’s job for them. When he finally joined the White House in 1997, his former employer, the New Republic, asked whether he’d “get his back pay.”
This is a lot of ’90s history to take in. Can we lighten the mood by delving into a ridiculous DC feud to which Blumenthal was party?
Of course. In addition to his journalistic, political, and film production careers, Blumenthal is a playwright, authoring, most notably, This Town, whichwas set in the White House press room — where, per Blumenthal’s summary in The Clinton Wars, “a small pack of archetypal, frustrated journalists compare their respective speaking agents and fees while projecting their anxieties onto the president and his staff, who are being unhelpful in advancing their careers.” The reporters then go on to invent a sex scandal involving the White House dog. Blumenthal brags in his memoir that the play was staged at the LA Theatre Works and the National Press Club in DC.
The play caused a minor bit of trouble for New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich when his 2011 book on DC political culture, This Town, was in progress. Leibovich writes in the book that when Blumenthal caught wind of the project, he sent Leibovich’s editors an email with the subject line “Re: Mark Leibovich: Potential Plagiarism Problem.” Here’s Leibovich’s account of the correspondence:
Blumenthal, whom I think I have met once, began the email by demanding that I acknowledge that he “wrote a widely produced and reviewed satirical play, entitled ‘This Town,” on the Washington press corps … and that is the origin of the phrase and concept.” He boasted that his play had been “prominently staged at the Washington Press Club.” He concluded that “of course, titles, unlike trademarks, can’t be copyrighted, but they shouldn’t be plagiarized. Perhaps Leibovich is unaware of the problem. Perhaps he was born yesterday. But he should not open himself up to a silly plagiarism problem.”
The key word here is “silly,” though admittedly my credentials are suspect because I have never had anything “prominently staged at the Washington Press Club.” Still, I feel bad to have inflicted hurt unto Blumenthal by overlooking a play that’s been forgotten by nearly everyone, in “this” or any town. And by Sidney’s own Wikipedia page too. So, in good faith, I will acknowledge that Blumenthal apparently wrote a play in the nineties called This Town, and future editions of this book will hereby be known as the New Testament.”
What was Blumenthal’s involvement in the Clinton impeachment?
Blumenthal after testifying before a federal grand jury on February 26, 1998.
Blumenthal had a wide portfolio in the West Wing, working on “matters as varied as the State of the Union speech, press freedom in Argentina and Turkey, the recent US visit of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and a presidential bid to highlight the coming millennium,” according to a 1998 LA Times profile. But he is best remembered for his role in helping Clinton weather the Monica Lewinsky scandal and subsequent impeachment proceedings.
Blumenthal’s most notable public role in the proceedings was as a witness, first at a federal grand jury for independent counsel Kenneth Starr and then at the actual impeachment trial in the US Senate. He was first called to testify by Starr in February 1998, one month after the Lewinsky scandal went public. He agreed to answer any and all questions about his contacts with the press, but declined to answer questions about his private conversations in the White House, as the Clinton administration was claiming that executive privilege exempted aides from having to testify on such matters.
Blumenthal was asked if he had been digging up or disseminating dirt on members of Starr’s staff so as to discredit his investigation into the scandal, and if Clinton had asked him to do so; he vehemently denied the accusations. “Ken Starr’s prosecutors demanded to know what I had told reporters and what reporters had told me about Ken Starr’s prosecutors,” he told members of the media upon exiting the court house. “If they think they have intimidated me, they have failed.”
Starr called him back in June after a federal judge ruled that executive privilege could not prevent Blumenthal from testifying. Blumenthal recounts in The Clinton Wars being asked specific questions about the president’s sex life in this appearance:
[The prosecutor] asked me, “Did you specifically ask the President whether he had received oral sex from Monica Lewinsky?” “No.” “Did the President state anything to you about receiving oral sex from Monica Lewinsky?” “No.” “Did you prepare the President and/or First Lady for responding to any questions that might arise because of the nature of the Lewinsky case about sexual addiction?” “No.”
He also was asked about when he first discussed the Lewinsky story with the president and first lady. Blumenthal testified that Hillary had told him that “the President was being attacked, in her view, for political motives, for his ministry of a troubled person.”
[President Clinton] said, “Monica Lewinsky came at me and made a sexual demand on me.” He rebuffed her. He said, “I’ve gone down that road before. I’ve caused pain for a lot of people and I’m not going to do that again.” She threatened him. She said that she would tell people they’d had an affair, that she was known as the stalker among her peers, and that she hated it and if she had an affair or said she had an affair then she wouldn’t be the stalker any more.
In his book, Blumenthal writes that he believed Clinton really hadn’t been involved with Lewinsky until shortly before the president admitted it publicly. He was disappointed in his friend, but felt that “If Clinton’s presidency were destroyed as a result of Starr’s work — a partisan investigation targeting Clinton for alleged crimes, having failed for years to discover any wrongdoing and now invading his private life — the effect on the Constitution and American politics would be poisonous. The presidency would be shattered as an institution and the devastation to democracy would be irreparable.” It wasn’t a matter of defending Bill. It was a matter of defending the republic itself.
Even when he spoke to Hillary, the two “dispensed with the extraordinarily difficult personal problem at the start. As her friend, I wanted to respect her privacy. I said that whatever ‘issues’ anyone had, and hers was worse than anyone’s, we had to think about the politics. That was her reasoning as well.”
Blumenthal wound up being one of only three people deposed as part of the US Senate’s trial of Clinton. The other two were Lewinsky and Vernon Jordan, a friend of Clinton’s who helped her find a job after her White House internship ended. The deposition was lengthy and included a few bizarre tangents, such as a portion when House prosecutor Rep. James Rogan (R-CA) asked Blumenthal to explain the plot of Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon.
But the crux came when Blumenthal was questioned about whether he had been tasked by the White House with spreading rumors about Lewinsky being a “stalker.” He had already told the grand jury that Clinton told him Lewinsky was known as a stalker among her peers and resented the label. The question was whether Blumenthal spread this further in the press.
House prosecutor Lindsey Graham (R-SC), now a senator and presidential candidate, asked Blumenthal about a January 30, 1998, AP article by Karen Gullo, which wrote, “Little by little, ever since the allegations of an affair between President Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky surfaced 10 days ago, White House sources have waged a behind-the-scenes campaign to portray her as an untrustworthy climber obsessed with the President.”
Graham asked, “Do you have any direct knowledge or indirect knowledge that such a campaign by White House aides or junior staff members ever existed?” Blumenthal said no, and that senior White House staff “felt very firmly that nobody should ever be a source to a reporter about a story about Monica Lewinsky’s personal life, and I strongly agreed with that and that’s what we decided.” Graham pressed him again on stories suggesting that Lewinsky was a stalker, and Blumenthal insisted, “I don’t know about any White House sources on these stories.”
Christopher Hitchens at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on May 1, 1999, shortly after the end of his friendship with Blumenthal.
Blumenthal’s testimony didn’t wind up having much bearing on the Senate’s verdict, but it did create a side issue for him personally after his friend, the journalist Christopher Hitchens, signed a sworn affidavit saying that Blumenthal had called Lewinsky a stalker repeatedly in a March 19, 1998, lunch with Hitchens and his wife, seemingly contradicting the claim that he’d never called her a stalker in conversations with reporters.
Blumenthal pushed back immediately, issuing a statement saying, “My wife and I are saddened that Christopher chose to end our long friendship in this meaningless way.” Blumenthal’s friend and supporter Joe Conason, then at the New York Observer, contested Hitchens’s statement by noting that the term “stalker” had appeared in press stories about Lewinsky at least 430 times before the lunch occurred, suggesting that Blumenthal wasn’t a source and was simply discussing information in the public domain.
What other disputes with conservatives did Blumenthal engage in at the White House?
Then-House Judiciary Committee chairman Henry Hyde (R-IL), who spearheaded the impeachment of Bill Clinton, on September 28, 1998.
While the impeachment was taking place, it was discovered that Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), one of the leading social conservatives in the House and the lead House manager for the impeachment hearings, had engaged in an extramarital affair in the 1960s. Many Republicans claimed Blumenthal was behind the story:
Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) blamed the Hyde story on White House assistant Sidney Blumenthal. “I think this is Sidney Blumenthal’s MO,” LaHood said. “Blumenthal is a sneak. He’s out to destroy people’s careers, and he ought to be fired.” Asked what proof he had, LaHood cited the “process of elimination.”
…Blumenthal said in a statement last night that he “was not the source or in any way involved with this story on Henry Hyde.” He said that he did not “urge or encourage any reporter to investigate the private life of any member of Congress” and that when asked in the past by reporters about any rumors, he told them “this was wrong, they shouldn’t publish it.”
At the very beginning of his tenure at the White House, Blumenthal had to deal with a nasty smear from the Drudge Report (which had not yet helped break the Lewinsky story). The site claimed that he had abused his wife and covered it up — an accusation that, by all accounts, is patently false. It retracted the claim the next day, but Blumenthal filed a $30 million defamation suit. Eventually, four years later, the suit was settled with Blumenthal paying Drudge $2,500.
During his time in the administration, Blumenthal was also a central figure in recruiting the unlikeliest Clinton loyalist to date: David Brock, the former American Spectator reporter and anti-Clinton muckraker who has since become a liberal stalwart, founding the media watchdog group Media Matters and the Democratic Super PAC American Bridge. After the Drudge story, Blumenthal called Brock to ask if he knew anything about who planted it.
“Without hesitation,” Blumenthal writes, “he told me of conversations he had had with Drudge and others in which he had learned how Drudge had been prompted by a small group of right-wingers to post the libel about me on his website.” They became friends, and Blumenthal became a counselor to Brock as he broke from the right, a move announced in a 1997 Esquire article titled “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man.” Politico’s Thrush calls Brock’s conversion “Blumenthal’s greatest coup — and the one that cemented his standing as a Clinton loyalist.” Blumenthal had helped flip a key member of the counter-establishment he had chronicled a decade prior. He was putting his analysis of the right into practice, and getting major results.
What was Blumenthal’s role in Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign?
Blumenthal stayed close to the Clintons through the 2000s, when he wrote the Clinton Wars and served as Washington correspondent for Salon. In November 2007, he officially joined Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign as a senior adviser. Publicly, his service on the campaign is best remembered for an incident in which he was caught driving 70 miles an hour, drunk, in a 30 mph zone in Nashua, New Hampshire. The serious charge — “aggravated drunken driving” — was pleaded down after the arresting officer was called up for service in Iraq, rendering a trial impossible. But more consequential were allegations by Obama campaign officials (confirmed by some journalists’ accounts) that he was involved in spreading among the most vicious, race-baiting attacks of the primaries.
In Game Change, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann report that Blumenthal was “obsessed” with the “whitey tape”: a hoax originated by ex-CIA officer and ardent Hillary supporter Larry Johnson claiming there was a videotape of Michelle Obama railing against “whitey” at Trinity Church, which the Obama family attended in Chicago. (Johnson later added for good measure that Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan was present at the event.) It was a ridiculous rumor. “I mean, ‘whitey’?” Michelle later commented. “That’s something that George Jefferson would say.”
But according to Halperin and Heilemann, Blumenthal and Hillary alike were convinced the tape was real. Blumenthal also, according to Occidental College political scientist Peter Dreier, sent around emails to “an influential list of opinion shapers” hyping links between Obama and Chicago developer Tony Rezko, Weather Underground militant turned education researcher Bill Ayers, and Frank Marshall Davis, a black left-wing poet whom Obama knew a bit when he was a teenager. One email read:
The record on Obama’s fabled “judgement”? So how would he conduct himself in those promised summits without preconditions with Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, Chavez, Castro, and Assad? Let’s look at how he did with Tony Rezko.
While the Clinton camp obviously disputes these reports, Blumenthal was nicknamed “Sulfur-Breathing Spawn of Hell” in the Obama campaign headquarters.
What was Blumenthal’s role while Clinton was secretary of state?
Blumenthal’s source, Tyler Drumheller.
Blumenthal’s purported role in the anti-Obama attacks wound up costing him a job at the State Department under Hillary. After reports surfaced that she was planning to bring him on as a counselor, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, “Hell no. If she hires him, I’m out of here.” Senior adviser David Axelrod added, “Me too.” Emanuel was left to deliver the bad news to Clinton, who accepted the verdict.
However, Blumenthal and Clinton stayed in contact during her time in office. Most controversially, he passed along intelligence on the situation on the ground in Libya in 2011 and 2012, as the US was intervening in the country’s civil war. He emailed her at least 25 memos on the country, many of which she passed along to her aide Jake Sullivan.
“From time to time, as a private citizen and friend, I provided Secretary Clinton with material on a variety of topics that I thought she might find interesting or helpful,” Blumenthal wrote to Politico in a statement provided by his attorney. “The reports I sent her came from sources I considered reliable.” Clinton characterized his correspondence as “unsolicited” but welcome. “He sent me unsolicited emails which I passed on in some instances and I say that that’s just part of the give and take,” Clinton said, adding that she sometimes passed them along to “make sure [she wasn’t] caught in a bubble” and only getting information “from a certain small group of people.”
The source for most of Blumenthal’s emails was a man named Tyler Drumheller, who was the CIA’s division chief for clandestine operations in Europe. Drumheller was a vocal critic of the Bush administration, claiming that it ignored intelligence casting doubt on its claims concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. Blumenthal had championed Drumheller’s story in his role as a journalist at Salon.
The Washington Post’s David Ignatius reports that “A principal of Alphom” — the consulting firm where Drumheller now works — “told me that Blumenthal had approached Drumheller and said his friend Clinton was ‘looking for information’ about Libya.” Leaked emails between Drumheller and Blumenthal suggest that the two worked closely on gathering intelligence in Libya. “A May 14, 2011 email exchange between Blumenthal and Shearer shows that they were negotiating with Drumheller to contract with someone referred to as ‘Grange’ and ‘the general’ to place send four operatives on a week-long mission to Tunis, Tunisia, and ‘to the border and back,'” ProPublica’s Jeff Gerth and Gawker’s Sam Biddle report.
According to the New York Times’s Nicholas Confessore and Michael Schmidt, the emails to Clinton often contained information others in the State Department knew to be false. For example, the late Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens disputed a memo arguing that the Libyan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood was about to make gains in parliamentary elections, when it in fact fared quite poorly. Another diplomat noted that the memo “confused Libyan politicians with the same surname.”
Blumenthal also passed along information related to the Benghazi attack, sending Clinton an email the day after the attack blaming it on protesters angry about a vehemently anti-Islam YouTube video titled “The Innocence of Muslims,” which was sparking worldwide protests around that time. Clinton passed the email on to Sullivan. But while this was the initial theory of the intelligence community, it proved to be false, as militants actually showed up specifically to attack the US mission in Libya. A day later, Blumenthal followed up with an email stating that Ansar al-Sharia, a jihadist group, had pre-planned the attack and used the protest as a cover, which contradicted the administration’s public statements at the time. That’s mostly right; Ansar al-Sharia members were involved but they weren’t the only attackers, and the attack was one of opportunity, rather than being preplanned.
The US mission in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.
Blumenthal occasionally veered into American domestic politics in his correspondences, warning that the Romney campaign was planning on using the Benghazi attack to show Obama was weak on national security. He described this as the “Jimmy Carter strategy,” an illusion to the Reagan campaign’s usage of the Iranian hostage crisis as an attack line against Carter in the 1980 race.
The Confessore and Schmidt article also reported that Blumenthal was working as a consultant for the Constellations Group, which was pursuing business leads in Libya at the time. This was fervently denied by Blumenthal’s friend Conason, who claimed in a Politico piece that “he was never paid a penny.”
Adding to the controversy was the fact that Blumenthal was for several years earning $10,000 a month from the Clinton Foundation, including the years he was passing along these memos (he was also, and continues to be, affiliated with Brock’s Clinton-aligned group American Bridge). Conason claims that Blumenthal’s work for the foundation “chiefly involved conferences, speeches, and books relevant to the former president’s legacy” and did not “have any bearing on Libya matters.” Blumenthal was also, in the period at question, working hard on his soon-to-be-released series of Lincoln biographies.
The House Benghazi Committee first got access to his emails to Clinton in February — they were made public in May — and chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) subpoenaed Blumenthal on Tuesday, May 19, to testify about their contents. He is scheduled to appear before the committee on Tuesday, June 16. “It is incumbent on our committee to learn … what his role was in U.S. Libya policy and how it impacted decisions related to security,” committee member Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) told Politico’s Rachael Bade. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) suggested a few questions the panel wanted answered: “Did somebody ask him for this information? Did he just start volunteering this information? Why was he even given the information?”
Sixteen years ago, Cho was using her comedy to start many of the conversations we are having today, by talking about diversity, representation, and the way we treat women. But her sharp and prescientcommentary was relegated to the sidelines of pop culture — it was something you had to seek out.
A survey of the television and comedy landscape today yields plenty of sterling success stories — stories that are rooted in what Cho was fighting for. Consider, for instance, TV series like Fresh Off the Boat and Black-ish, or, well, anything that Amy Schumer or Shonda Rhimes touches. They all propagate messages of diversity, representation, and feminism that are as prominent in pop culture as they’ve ever been. Cho helped pave the way for that to happen.
“We really needed that kind of comedy at the time,” Cho told Vox. “We just didn’t have the language yet. Now we do, and it’s really a great time for minorities and women in comedy. We have people that are brilliant and talking about feminism, race, and equality in an important, exciting way.”
Cho’s comedy is important. She continued a long tradition of female comedians — including Moms Mabley, Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, and Wanda Sykes, among others — who shattered the mold in terms of the type of comedy that women were “supposed” to perform. And on a larger scale, female comedians like Cho and the women who inspired her have blazed a trail with their sharp social and political criticism, pushing for equality one joke at a time.
Things are different for Cho now. Some of battles she fought have been won. Some of her go-to targets, like George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, are out of the spotlight. And politically, society is more in line with her vision of equality and diversity than it was 16 years ago. But that hasn’t stopped Cho from pushing the envelope.
Margaret Cho’s early comedy still rings true today
In 1999, Cho embarked on her “I’m the One That I Want” comedy tour following a tender point in her career. Five years earlier, she’d landed her own TV show on ABC called All-American Girl. It was the first primetime sitcom in the history of the medium to feature a predominantly Asian-American cast.
It was also a living hell for her.
And as we would learn through the standup she performed during “I’m the One,” network executives commented on her appearance body so frequently that Cho developed an eating disorder. She was also waging a war against ignorance and a general lack of familiarity with Asian-American faces on television — ABC even assigned an Asian consultant to Cho’s show because they felt it wasn’t “Asian enough.”
“When you’re on television you become a kind of community property, and people say whatever they want about you,” Cho revealed during one standup appearance. “And because I’m a woman, a lot of people said that I was ugly, and that I was fat,” she continued.
What Cho said in 1999 still resonates. The main difference is that in 2015, Americans are more apt to acknowledge our own ignorance and failings outright. We’re also more ready to address those deficiencies through pop culture. For example, a recent episode of Inside Amy Schumer‘s third season boldly addressed the way we talk about women’s looks in a skit that expertly parodied the play 12 Angry Men.
“I feel like [Schumer has] taken what I’ve done and really expanded on that,” Cho told me. “She’s really powerful, and I think that feminist voice is so important.”
Though Schumer and Cho have touched upon some of the same topics and clearly share similar viewpoints, Schumer’s comedy is markedly different from Cho’s. It’s less pointed, less angry, more subtle. Cho had to fight to further some ideas — like that of representation in the media — that we didn’t yet have names for. Her comedy was more political, more biting. In some cases, it was almost reminiscent of motivational speeches. It was all those things because it had to be.
“It was really great to be able to do that. And that kind of comedy was needed at the time,” Cho told me. “We didn’t know how to talk about things like invisibility.”
What’s next for Margaret Cho?
Margaret Cho loves playing men.
At the 2014 Golden Globes, Cho performed a bit in which she played a North Korean character named Cho Yung Ja. Though some people found the character offensive, Cho Yung Ja was a timely riff — Seth Rogen and James Franco’s The Interview and the ire it caused in North Korea was a news fixation at the time — on the former/current North Korean leaders Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un, two figures Cho had previously played on the NBC comedy 30 Rock (for which she earned an Emmy nomination). And in the recently released film Tooken, a comedy spoof of the Taken franchise, she portrays another eccentric, villainous Asian man known as Brownfinger.
“Brownfinger, he’s an angry man and he’s just pissed off at the world,” Cho says. “And I understand that. And he tries to get back at everyone by wreaking havoc in people’s lives.”
Playing men has been a liberating experience, Cho says.
“I really love playing men. I think it’s letting go of having to put on makeup, and actually it’s a longer process to make me into a woman than to make me into a man,” she said. “I just really appreciate that. It’s fun to kind of challenge yourself. You’re able to let go of the trappings of being an actress. It’s exciting.”
Cho is now in the process of recording a comedy album she plans to release this fall, as well as trying her hand at producing and working behind the camera on scripted and non-scripted TV shows that are in the nascent stages of development. All of these projects tie into Cho’s upcoming “PsyCHO” comedy tour, which launches in October.
Cho says she was inspired to return to the standup circuit because while she’s worked hard to start meaningful conversations about plenty of social issues, there are still many that she feels strongly about, many to be angry about. The point of the “PsyCHO” tour is to channel that anger and use it for good.
“There’s so much violence against people of color, women, and the LGBT community — ‘PsyCHO’ talks about the right to anger,” Cho says. “We have a right to that anger, and we can harness it and use it to benefit ourselves.”
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