In the wacky coda to one of the most searing chapters in American history, everyone remained true to form.
Anita Hill reacted with starchy disgust.
Ginni Thomas came across like a spiritually addled nut.
Clarence Thomas was mute, no doubt privately raging about the trouble women have caused him.
And now into the circus comes Lillian McEwen, an old girlfriend of Thomas’s.
Looking to shop a memoir, the 65-year-old McEwen used the occasion of Ginni’s weird phone message to Anita — asking her to “consider an apology” and “pray about this” and “O.K., have a good day!” — to open up to reporters.
If “the real Clarence” had been revealed at the time, he probably wouldn’t have ascended to the court, McEwen told The Times’s Ashley Parker. Especially since the real Clarence denied ever using the “grotesque” argot of the porn movies he regularly rented at a D.C. video store.
In her interviews, McEwen confirmed Thomas’s obsession with women with “huge, huge breasts,” with scouting the women he worked with as possible partners, and with talking about porn at work — while he was head of the federal agency that polices sexual harassment.
Years later, some of the Democrats on that all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee told me they assumed there must have been a consensual romance between the boss and his subordinate. McEwen assumed so, too, because Clarence took Anita with him when he changed agencies. Hill has made it clear she felt no reciprocal attraction.
Joe Biden, the senator who ran those hearings, was leery of the liberal groups eager to use Hill as a pawn to checkmate Thomas. He circumscribed the testimony of women who could have corroborated Hill’s unappetizing portrait of a power-abusing predator.
For the written record, Biden allowed negative accounts only from women who had worked with Thomas. He also ruled out testimony from women who simply had personal relationships with Thomas, and did not respond to a note from McEwen — a former assistant U.S. attorney who had once worked as a counsel for Biden’s committee — reminding him of her long relationship with Thomas.
It’s too late to relitigate the shameful Thomas-Hill hearings. We’re stuck with a justice-for-life who lied his way onto the bench with the help of bullying Republicans and cowed Democrats.
We don’t know why Ginni Thomas, who was once in the thrall of a cultish self-help group called Lifespring, made that odd call to Hill at 7:30 on a Saturday morning. But we do know that the Thomases show supremely bad judgment. Mrs. Thomas, a queen of the Tea Party, is the founder of a new nonprofit group, Liberty Central, which she boasts will be bigger than the Tea Party. She sports and sells those foam Statue of Liberty-style crowns as she makes her case against the “tyranny” of President Obama and Congressional Democrats, who, she charges, are hurting the “core founding principles” of America.
As The Times’s Jackie Calmes wrote, Mrs. Thomas started her nonprofit in late 2009 with two gifts of $500,000 and $50,000, and additional sums this year that we don’t know about yet. She does not have to disclose the donors, whose money makes possible the compensation she brings into the Thomas household.
There is no way to tell if her donors have cases before the Supreme Court or whether her husband knows their identities. And she never would have to disclose them if her husband had his way.
The 5-to-4 Citizens United decision last January gave corporations, foreign contributors, unions, Big Energy, Big Oil and superrich conservatives a green light to surreptitiously funnel in as much money as they want, whenever they want to elect or unelect candidates. As if that weren’t enough to breed corruption, Thomas was the only justice — in a rare case of detaching his hip from Antonin Scalia’s — to write a separate opinion calling for an end to donor disclosures.
In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court chose the Republican president. In Citizens United, the court may return Republicans to control of Congress. So much for conservatives’ professed disdain of judicial activism. And so much for the public’s long-held trust in the impartiality of the nation’s highest court.
Justice Stephen Breyer recently rejected the image of the high court as “nine junior varsity politicians.” But it’s even worse than that. The court has gone beyond mere politicization. Its liberals are moderate and reasonable, while the conservatives are dug in, guzzling Tea.
Thomas and Scalia have flouted ethics rules by attending seminars sponsored by Koch Industries, an energy and manufacturing conglomerate run by billionaire brothers that has donated more than $100 million to far-right causes.
Christine O’Donnell may not believe in the separation of church and state, but the Supreme Court does not believe in the separation of powers.
Brock (left) described Media Matters’ campaign against Fox as ‘guerrilla warfare.’ | Courtesy of Media Matters, AP Photo, POLITICO Screengrab
The liberal group Media Matters has quietly transformed itself in preparation for what its founder, David Brock, described in an interview as an all-out campaign of “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” aimed at the Fox News Channel.
The group, launched as a more traditional media critic, has all but abandoned its monitoring of newspapers and other television networks and is narrowing its focus to Fox and a handful of conservative websites, which its leaders view as political organizations and the “nerve center” of the conservative movement. The shift reflects the centrality of the cable channel to the contemporary conservative movement, as well as the loathing it inspires among liberals — not least among the donors who fund Media Matters’ staff of about 90, who are arrayed in neat rows in a giant war room above Massachusetts Avenue.
“The strategy that we had had toward Fox was basically a strategy of containment,” said Brock, Media Matters’ chairman and founder and a former conservative journalist, adding that the group’s main aim had been to challenge the factual claims of the channel and to attempt to prevent them from reaching the mainstream media.
The new strategy, he said, is a “war on Fox.”
In an interview and a 2010 planning memo shared with POLITICO, Brock listed the fronts on which Media Matters — which he said is operating on a $10 million-plus annual budget — is working to chip away at Fox and its parent company, News Corp. They include its bread-and-butter distribution of embarrassing clips and attempts to rebut Fox points, as well as a series of under-the-radar tactics.
Media Matters, Brock said, is assembling opposition research files not only on Fox’s top executives but on a series of midlevel officials. It has hired an activist who has led a successful campaign to press advertisers to avoid Glenn Beck’s show. The group is assembling a legal team to help people who have clashed with Fox to file lawsuits for defamation, invasion of privacy or other causes. And it has hired two experienced reporters, Joe Strupp and Alexander Zaitchik, to dig into Fox’s operation to help assemble a book on the network, due out in 2012 from Vintage/Anchor. (In the interest of full disclosure, Media Matters last month also issued a report criticizing “Fox and Friends” co-host Steve Doocy’s criticism of this reporter’s blog.)
Brock said Media Matters also plans to run a broad campaign against Fox’s parent company, News Corp., an effort which most likely will involve opening a United Kingdom arm in London to attack the company’s interests there. The group hired an executive from MoveOn.org to work on developing campaigns among News Corp. shareholders and also is looking for ways to turn regulators in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere against the network.
The group will “focus on [News Corp. CEO Rupert] Murdoch and trying to disrupt his commercial interests — whether that be here or looking at what’s going on in London right now,” Brock said, referring to News Corp.’s — apparently successful — move to take a majority stake in the satellite broadcaster BSkyB.
A spokeswoman for Fox News, Irena Briganti, declined to comment on Media Matters’ efforts, but the group draws regular barbs from Fox hosts Beck and Bill O’Reilly.
“Tonight is not an episode you casually watch and take out of context like Media Matters does,” Beck remarked last month.
A more extended attack came in February on the freewheeling late night show Red Eye, which conducted a mock interview with a purported Media Matters employee.
“It’s horrible. All we do is sit and watch Fox News and make up stuff about Fox News. It is the saddest place I have ever seen in my life. I think about it, and I want to throw up,” the mock employee said. “I get to work and I take off my clothes, and they strap me into a chair in front of a TV with [Fox News Channel] on. They keep my eyelids propped open like in “Clockwork Orange,” and I sit and type all day.
“If there was no Beck, George Soros would come down and demand we make it up,” the “interviewee” continued. “I would watch the “Flintstones” and transcribe Fred Flintstone’s words and attribute them to Beck. It was the only way to get Soros to stop hitting me.”
(A Soros associate said the financier, who gave Media Matters $1 million last year, did not earmark it for the Fox campaign. Soros suggested in a recent CNN interview that the Fox depictions of him as a sinister media manipulator would better be applied to Murdoch.)
In some views, the war between Media Matters and Fox is not, necessarily, bad for either side. Media Matters has transformed itself into a pillar of the progressive movement with its aggressive new brand of media campaigning. And the attacks cement Fox’s status on the right.
“Fox is happy about it — and it makes their position more vivid among their supporters,” said Paul Levinson, a media studies professor at Fordham University. “One way of keeping your core supporters happy is to be attacked by people your core supporters don’t like.”
But Media Matters says its digging has begun to pay off. The group has trickled out a series of emails from Washington Bureau Chief Bill Sammon, leaks from inside the network, which show him, for instance, circulating a memo on “Obama’s references to socialism, liberalism, Marxism and Marxists.”
The leaks are part of a broader project to take advantage of internal dissent, Media Matters Executive Vice President Ari Rabin-Havt said.
“We made a list of every single person who works for Fox and tried to figure out who might be disgruntled and why, and we went out to try to meet them,” he said. “Clearly, somebody in that organization is giving us primary source documents.”
Media Matters, he said, is also conducting “opposition research” on a dozen or so “mid- and senior-level execs and producers,” a campaign style move that he and Brock said would simply involve recording their public appearances and digging into public records associated with them.
And Brock’s 2010 planning memo offers a glimpse at Media Matters’ shift from media critic to a new species of political animal.
“Criticizing Fox News has nothing to do with criticizing the press,” its memo says. “Fox News is not a news organization. It is the de facto leader of the GOP, and it is long past time that it is treated as such by the media, elected officials and the public.”
Clinton, flanked by communications adviser Matt McKenna (left) and top aide Doug Band. | John Shinkle Close
NEW YORK — No newspapers, no television, no Web: If someone boycotted them all, it might have been possible to avoid Bill Clinton this past week.
Everyone else knew that he was back at center stage — full of ideas, full of meetings, full of formal pronouncements and provocative asides.
CEOs like Google’s Eric Schmidt, movie stars like Jim Carrey, boldfaced international names like Tony Blair — and President Barack Obama himself — mingled with the former president at the Clinton Global Initiative, the annual conclave that each year swells to new proportions.
Some 40 heads of state here for a United Nations summit booked time for personal meetings with Clinton. A parade of interviewers — many feigning interest in the CGI in order to quiz him on politics — have asked Clinton to divine the mysteries of the 2010 elections as though he were a bearded oracle atop a peak in the Himalayas.
Consumers of this week’s glut of Clinton coverage might be forgiven for wondering: What happened to the idea that the 42nd president was an embittered has-been, his presidency no longer relevant with a younger and bolder Democrat in the Oval Office, his reputation permanently bruised by a graceless and losing season on the campaign trail for his wife in 2008?
This week’s New York extravaganza was a reminder that the widely written Clinton obituaries of two years ago were not merely premature but divorced from history: Clinton’s life for decades has been marked by familiar cycles of victory, disaster and recovery.
“There will be good times and not-so-good times,” Clinton said Wednesday in a wide-ranging POLITICO interview. “I have loved the life I’ve had since I left the White House.”
This week put the latest comeback in sharp relief. The CGI summit came after a recent Gallup poll put Clinton’s approval rating at 61 percent, 9 points higher than Obama’s and 16 points higher than George W. Bush’s. Obama, who once dismissed Clinton as an incrementalist president in contrast to his own “transformational” ambitions, is now being urged by many midterm-dreading Democrats to study the 1990s — history lessons Clinton remains happy to deliver.
The CGI also offered a milestone to measure the broader arc of Clinton’s post-presidency, a period now nearly a decade long. Over 10 years, Clinton and Douglas J. Band, 37, the man who has become by far his most powerful aide and among his closest confidants, have succeeded in turning the 42nd president into a global brand — one that at times seems to operate as a kind of free-floating mini-state.
The brand resides partly in the realm of good deeds, as in Clinton’s earthquake relief work in Haiti or his foundation’s efforts against AIDS in Africa. It resides in the realm of money, specifically his success in making himself worth at least tens of millions of dollars through speeches and investments after leaving the presidency deep in debt from legal bills. The brand resides partly in the realm of celebrity, as when Clinton and Band watch the World Cup in South Africa with Mick Jagger and Katie Couric in their suite. And, it goes without saying, it resides in the realm of politics, as Clinton jets off to far corners of the country to raise money and stump for Democrats.
What may surprise people about the Clinton of 2010 is how little it resembles the Clinton of 2001. After leaving the presidency in January, former first lady Hillary Clinton was all set, newly elected to the U.S. Senate. But the former president himself was at loose ends, viewed by many in his inner circle as deeply demoralized, possibly even depressed.
The final hours of his presidency were scarred by the Marc Rich pardon scandal — an earlier occasion, like the 2008 campaign, when some commentators believed Clinton had permanently marred his legacy. With his wife in Washington and most of his White House aides scattered to new jobs, Clinton was brooding at home in Chappaqua, N.Y., often alone except for his personal valet, Oscar Flores. Having spent his life cosseted by aides, Clinton had trouble navigating some routine aspects of modern life. One aide went with him to the automated teller machine at the bank and saw that he had a million dollars in a standard checking account. Perhaps, sir, you should consider moving some of that, the aide suggested.
What’s more, Clinton seemed to have little conception of how to spend his post-presidency beyond reflecting on the achievements of his tenure and nursing his grievances over the defeats. One close aide said at the time he worried that Clinton would squander his legacy “like Willie Mays,” who finished his career greeting customers at a casino.
It was during this period that Band was enlisted to help Clinton. The University of Florida graduate was a familiar figure in the Clinton fold but not then an exalted one. He was the last of four personal aides — known by the coarse title “butt boys” in White House parlance — to work with Clinton at the White House. The job was to be by the president’s side almost constantly from morning to night, at home and on the road, keeping track of his speeches, making sure he didn’t lose his glasses, coughing and shooting peevish glares when Oval Office visitors overstayed their welcome. It might have been a menial job at times, but it also offered uncommon access to the behind-the-scenes life of the president.
The Clintons prevailed on Band to give up a job offer from Goldman Sachs to stay with the former president.
Recalling that period now, Band said in a POLITICO interview that he is shocked to think of how threadbare Clinton’s operation was: “He has this whole new life, but the apparatus of the presidency is completely gone.”
Band said it took time for Clinton and the people around him to conceive a strategy for leveraging an ex-president’s assets — mainly fame and the ability to command an audience with virtually anyone on the planet — into a formal operation.
“He’s one of the most recognizable and important people alive,” Band said, adding that while this creates opportunity, “the burden and the challenge of it is significant. … You have to create the organization, you have to raise the money, and you have to build that enterprise from scratch.”
At the beginning, Band’s role was much the same as the body-man assignments he took on at the White House. Over the years, however, it became clear that he was no longer a mere “butt boy.” A series of rivals to be Clinton’s top staff aide gradually fell by the wayside. In practice, if not title, Band became something like the chief operating officer of Clinton’s life.
These days, Band is sometimes treated as a principal rather than a staff man. He sits on Coca-Cola’s international advisory board and is involved in efforts to recruit the World Cup and America’s Cup to the United States. He was invited to Vernon Jordan’s birthday party this summer as a guest, not as Clinton’s coat holder.
With new power, controversy inevitably followed. Particularly in New York, Band is a regular name in the papers, even though he rarely speaks on the record. His reputation among outside observers of the Clinton operation, and even some on the inside, sometimes seems like a composite. It is one part H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s single-minded enforcer. And it is one part George Stephanopoulos, another person who as a young man won entree to a world of celebrity by virtue of his relationship with Clinton.
Before his marriage in 2007, Band showed up in the tabloids for dating model Naomi Campbell. (His wedding to Lily Rafii in Paris was attended by Clinton and a host of tycoons and was topped off with fireworks. The couple now has a 9-month-old child.) He also won unwelcome publicity in 2007, when a Wall Street Journal article detailed a business deal gone sour with a jet-setting Italian scam artist who later went to prison.
Band said he realizes that the reason many people seek him out or that doors open to him is because of his role with Clinton, and that someone in his role must tread modestly. His reputation as the enforcer in the Clinton circle comes because someone must fend off a ceaseless barrage of invitations, entreaties and requests for favors that descend on a former president — a task Clinton, with his accommodating temperament, would never take on for himself.
But Band seems to warm to the task. While Clinton now gets along well with Obama, there is occasional chest-bumping between Band and West Wing aides like chief of staff Rahm Emanuel over whether enough deference is being shown to the former president and his allies. In 2008, John Edwards called, seeking a statement of support from Clinton when his affair with Rielle Hunter exploded publicly. A loyalist with a long memory, Band sent back word, asking whether Edwards recalled his own denunciation of Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky controversy.
Band’s loyalists within the Clinton team said his reputation as an operator has obscured his achievements as a strategist. Clinton’s efforts bear Band’s imprint more than that of any other person, except the former president himself.
It is now a far-flung enterprise. At Clinton’s Harlem office, there are 120 employees. From his home in Little Rock, former White House aide Bruce Lindsey weighs in on issues relating to Clinton’s foundation and his record at his presidential library. Policy aide Ira Magaziner, who works on AIDS issues, lives in Rhode Island, and communications adviser Matt McKenna works most of the time from home in Montana. On some policy and political matters, former White House advisers John Podesta or Tom Freedman weigh in from Washington.
The Clinton Global Initiative, according to Clinton, first grew from a suggestion by Band: The former president should try to replicate the annual gatherings of the elite in Davos, Switzerland. Clinton said he wanted the focus to be on global philanthropy, moving beyond panels and speeches and requiring that all participants make specific pledges of money and effort aimed at innovative solutions to world problems. This week marked the sixth CGI summit. In an interview, Clinton said one of the biggest successes of recent years has been enlisting more CEOs to help promote market-based solutions for health care and other humanitarian challenges.
Band said one project has been neglected over the past decade: an organized effort by veterans of Clinton’s White House and other allies to promote and defend his eight years in office.
In the interview, Clinton made clear that he thinks Republicans do a better job than Democrats of developing a sheen of mythology around their presidents.
“President [Ronald] Reagan has got a much higher standing than he did when he left the White House because the Republicans are smart, and they work relentlessly on legacy,” Clinton said. “They understand how important it is to have their narrative out there. When he left the White House, people were worried about Iran-Contra and didn’t feel too hot about things.”
The Reagan comparison also touches on one of the sore points of another relationship: the one between Clinton and Obama. During the 2008 campaign, Obama made waves when he implicitly pooh-poohed Clinton’s accomplishments during an interview with a Reno newspaper.
“Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” Obama said at the time. “He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.”
Clinton, in his interview, chalked that quote up to politics and offered repeated praise for Obama’s intelligence and policy judgments, though he did critique the president’s political strategy. Aides said Clinton nursed deep resentments over the 2008 campaign for at least a year afterward, but he has gradually let them go.
“You’ve got to draw distinctions, and that’s the deal,” Clinton said. “Politics is a contact sport. And to complain about contact is like a pro-football quarterback complaining if he gets sacked on the weekend.”
He made clear that he regards his own achievements as “transformational,” even if Obama professed not to. He said the fact that Obama passed health care while Clinton did not was simply a matter of “arithmetic” — Obama had more Democrats in the Senate.
He also noted that Obama remains undefined. In diagnosing what’s ailing the presidency, Clinton volunteered that a negative public caricature was able to take hold partly because Obama didn’t have a long background in public life.
“Partly, he was vulnerable to that because he came up so fast,” Clinton said of a president 15 years his junior. “He even wrote in his autobiography that at the time it was a positive thing: People could see a blank slate and write their hopes and dreams in it. And that’s what his branders, as they call themselves, thought about that.”
The comment was intended as a sympathetic analysis of Obama’s political challenges, yet it carried an echo of Clinton’s warning three years ago that Obama’s re´sume´ was too thin to be president.
Clinton did not say directly what many moderate Democrats believe — that the Obama team, in its disdain for what it considered Clinton’s small-bore brand of politics, did not appreciate his instinct for how to advance a progressive agenda in a country that remains skeptical of government. Now that Democrats are facing peril in the midterms, Obama may think anew about Clinton.
Here at the CGI, there was no absence of people who think the 42nd president’s example remains relevant. Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm said “people are nostalgic for the Clinton style of governance.”
“His experience after 1994 was ‘communicate, communicate, communicate.’ I think that’s something President Obama and the Democrats will try to do too,” she said. “He brings the perspective of somebody who has been able to govern through crisis and opposition in the legislature.”
“He has leveraged his celebrity and his knowledge in a way no one has,” said civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. “What Barack maybe needs to look at are the people close to him. He needs better communicators.”
SVP, Television at Smokehouse Pictures
– Present (1 month)
Vice President, Development and Production of Wayfare Entertainment Ventures, LLC
February 2011 – (3 years 6 months)
Development/Production Executive of WAM Films
2008 – 2011 (3 years)
Development Executive of Appian Way
2005 – 2008 (3 years)
Assistant at Industry Entertainment
2004 – 2005 (1 year)
Assistant at International Creative Management (ICM)
2003 – 2004 (1 year)
Education
Wesleyan University (Film)
1999 – 2003
University of Southern California (Film)
2001 – 2002
Trinity School
1996 – 1999
In the Media:
6/6/2014 Dreadcentral.com
The script is by Stacy Chbosky and John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle (Quarantine, The Poughkeepsie Tapes, The Coup). Revolver is fully financing Exorcism on Crooked Lake, with the company’s Nick Phillips and Kelly Martin Wagner producing alongside Sarah Shepard and Ben Browning (Inquest). The Dowdle brothers are exec producing.
5/14/2013 Deadline.com
Start Motion Pictures (formerly Wayfare Entertainment) has set 28 Weeks Later helmer Juan Carlos Fresnadillo to direct and Shia LaBeouf to star in Villain, a psychological thriller written by Robocop remake scribe Josh Zetumer. Villain follows two brothers who mysteriously re-connect in an unforgiving wilderness. The role of the other brother will be set shortly. Start Motion Pictures’ Ben Browning, Sarah Shepard and Jeremy Kipp Walker will produce, and Michael Maher will executive produce with Zetumer. Start will also finance. Wild Bunch will be selling the film in Cannes, alongside their other titles that include the Nicolas Refn-directed Only God Forgives, James Gray’s The Immigrant and Guillaume Canet’s Blood Ties.
9/9/2012 Variety
Wayfare Entertainment has tapped Mitchell Akselrad to pen the feature adaptation of short film “The Gate.” ……
Westrup will produce the pic along with the short’s original producer, Spencer Friend, and Wayfare Entertainment’s Ben Browning and Sarah Shepard.
2/4/2011 Variety
“Sanctum” production company Wayfare Entertainment has tapped a trio of execs to join its development and production roster, with Journeyman Pictures alum Jeremy Kipp Walker (“It’s Kind of a Funny Story”) on board as head of production.
Sarah Shepard, former head of film and TV development for WAM Films, joins as VP of development and production, and Evelynda Rivera, who was manager of physical production at Focus Features, has signed on as director of physical production.
Gotham-based Wayfare, established in 2008, expands its ranks while it positions itself as a provider of development, packaging, financing and physical production services. ……
Shepard, who like Rivera joins the company later this month, will run all project sourcing and also will co-manage Wayfare’s emerging-talent lab with Walker.
12/16/2008 Variety
Verbinski will produce with Alain Chabat, Stephanie Danan and Sarah Shepard of WAM Films. The project takes root at the studio through Verbinski’s U-based Blind Wink Prods. banner.
6/9/2014 The Wrap
George Clooney’s Smokehouse Pictures Enters Overall Deal With Sony Pictures Television
The two-year agreement calls for Smokehouse to develop and produce comedy and drama series for broadcast, cable and digital platforms.
(http://www.thewrap.com/george-clooneys-smokehouse-pictures-enters-overall-deal-with-sony-pictures-television/)
Smokehouse has just signed a deal with Sony Pictures Television. The two-year agreement calls for Smokehouse to develop and produce comedy and drama series for broadcast, cable and digital platforms.
According to Smokehouse’s IMDB Pro page, they are not developing any TV project yet. The only TV series they have done is TNT’s Memphis Beat. Smokehouse produced 4 episodes in 2011.
George Clooney Inks Overall Deal With Sony Pictures TV
6/9/2014 THR
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/george-clooney-inks-deal-sony-710491
George Clooney is joining the ranks of big-screen stars heading to the small screen.
The Oscar winner’s Smokehouse Pictures — which he runs with partner Grant Heslov — has inked a two-year overall deal with Sony Pictures Television to develop and produce comedy and drama series for all platforms, including broadcast, cable and digital, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
The deal expands Clooney’s relationship with Sony, where Smokehouse has produced features including The Monuments Men, August: Osage County, Argo and more. The company previously had a first-look TV deal with Warner Bros. Pictures and Warner Bros. Television. Under the latter, Clooney and the company produced TNT’s Jason Lee cop drama Memphis Beat, which ran for one season on the cable network.
Heslov, meanwhie, has a long roster of TV credits as an actor. As an exec producer, his credits include Memphis Beat, Unscripted and K Street.
At SPT, Clooney joins a roster of producers including Breaking Bad’s Vince Gilligan, Shawn Ryan (The Shield), David Shore (House), Barry Josephson (Bones) and Televisa, among others.
Clooney becomes the latest big-screen star to ink TV deals. He joins Steve Carell and Jessica Biel (both of whom are based at Universal Cable Productions), among others.
George Clooney & Grant Heslov’s Smokehouse Pictures Inks Overall Deal With Sony Pictures TV
6/9/2014 Deadline.com
http://www.deadline.com/2014/06/george-clooney-grant-heslovs-smokehouse-pictures-inks-overall-deal-with-sony-pictures-tv/
Since launching Smokehouse in 2006, Clooney and Heslov have been focused primarily on features, developing and producing films that the two directed, like Leatherheads, The Ides Of March and The Monuments Men (Clooney) and The Men Who Stare At Goats (Heslov) as well as features directed by others, most recently Argo, helmed by Ben Affleck and last year’s August: Osage County, directed by John Wells. Clooney comes from a strong TV background, having started in television as an actor and then producer. CAA-repped Smokehouse has a history at Sony — the company moved its feature deal from Warner Bros. to Sony in 2009.
Feature projects in development (10 feature films):
Coronado High ( Drama)
– A look at the lives of a group of young drug smugglers.
Dangerously Funny (Comedy)
– Folk and comedy duo tom and Dick Smothers Brothers work their way up from 1960s San Francisco clubs to landing their own primetime TV show.
Untitled George Clooney Project (Crime | Thriller)
Starring George Clooney
The Yankee Commandante (Drama) (with Focus Features)
– An American named William Alexander Morgan travels to Cuba in the late 1950s to lead a guerrilla force against President Batista and join sides with Fidel Castro during the Cuban Revolution.
Director: George Clooney
The Monster of Florence (Crime | Drama | Mystery) (with FOX 2000 Pictures)
– A reconstruction of eight double homicides believed to have been committed single-handedly between 1968 and 1985 in and around Florence, Italy.
Starring George Clooney.
The Innocent Man (Drama)
– The story of Ron Williamson, a man who sat on Oklahoma’s death row for 11 years for a crime he didn’t commit. Based on John Grisham’s “The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town.”
The $700 Billion Man (Drama)
– The true story of a Government bailout manager who moved to a cabin in the woods after the U.S.’s financial meltdown in 2008.
Pioneer (Thriller)
– A man working on an oil pipeline investigates his brother’s death. Based on the Norwegian film ‘Pioneer’.
Our Brand Is Crisis (Comedy | Drama)
– A feature film based on the documentary “Our Brand Is Crisis”, which focuses on the use of American political campaign strategies in South America.
Starring George Clooney
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (Drama | Thriller) (with Civil Dawn Pictures)
– A thriller set against the backdrop of the war on terror, The Challenge tells the inside story of a historic Supreme Court showdown. At its center are a Navy JAG and a young constitutional law professor who, in the aftermath of 9/11, find themselves defending their nation in the unlikeliest of ways: by suing the president of the United States on behalf of an accused terrorist in order to prevent the American government from breaking the law and violating the Constitution.
The Center for American Freedom is free of the traditional lines between politics and journalism. Reinschmiedt helped with paperwork, research assistance.
6/23/2014 | BuzzFeed
The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, employed a Republican consultant and opposition researcher to help put together two of this year’s biggest stories about former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
In February, the site published “The Hillary Papers,” a report that unearthed papers belonging to Diane Blair, one of Clinton’s closest friends, from the archives at the University of Arkansas. Last week, the Free Beacon released audio recordings from an unpublished 1980s interview, in which Clinton discussed a child rape case she took on in Arkansas. In the tapes, Clinton suggests the accused attacker, a man she successfully defended, was guilty.
The stories, both by Free Beacon reporter Alana Goodman, were a legitimate and hard-to-find commodity: new reporting on the most covered woman in America. They both landed large, lighting up the internet with headlines on the Drudge Report, occupying the political press for days, and ensuring the Free Beacon a place among the new partisan outlets whose reporting makes them impossible to ignore. Goodman’s most recent story hit during the first week of Clinton’s media tour to promote a new memoir, Hard Choices.
Shawn Reinschmiedt, a former research director for the Republican National Committee, provided Goodman assistance with both stories, according to documents released by the University of Arkansas and published by Business Insider on Sunday following a copyright dispute over the Clinton tapes.
The documents include a special collections request, signed by Reinschmiedt on March 5, for duplicates of the audio recordings, as well as a subsequent email and letter from the library to Reinschmiedt about his request.
Reinschmiedt has served as a consultant to the Center for American Freedom, the nonprofit that houses and funds the Free Beacon, since its founding two years ago. Tax filings show the organization paid Reinschmiedt’s “political intelligence” firm, M Street Insight, a total of $150,000 for “research consulting” in 2012.
Michael Goldfarb, founder of the Center for American Freedom and the Free Beacon, said it is standard practice for his reporters to rely on outside consultants for help with stories that have a research component. The Free Beacon also used a production firm to help present the audio from the Clinton tapes, he said.
Political reporters often work closely with partisan opposition researchers on stories; those researchers are typically employed by campaigns, however.
Reinschmiedt supplied assistance with paperwork and helped sift through archives, according to Goldfarb. (The Diane Blair collection includes thousands of documents, organized in 109 boxes in the basement of the university library.)
“The Beacon provides research and production support to all our reporters just like every other media outlet,” Goldfarb said Sunday night.
Until earlier this year, the Free Beacon had an “entire in-house research operation,” Goldfarb added. That project was shut down, but the website still uses outside firms, including M Street Insight — a fact “we made clear to anyone who cared to ask from the moment we launched,” he said.
Tax filings show the organization also paid the Republican firm CRAFT Media Digital about $233,000 in 2012 for “media consulting.”
Laura Jacobs, a spokeswoman for the University of Arkansas, said the school used Reinschmiedt as a go-to in its dealings with the Free Beacon.
“Reinschmiedt was the primary point of contact,” Jacobs said in an email.
The Center for American Freedom and the Washington Free Beacon were formed as part model, part parody, to their progressive counterparts: the Center for American Progress and its partnering news website, ThinkProgress.
In 2012, Free Beacon editor Matthew Continetti namedThinkProgress and liberal news sites like Talking Points Memo as outlets whose success “at the cutting edge of ideological journalism” he hoped to emulate on the Republican side.
Judd Legum, editor in chief of ThinkProgress, said his reporters and editors have “never used consultants or research firms to help us on stories.”
“Although I’m not sure I see anything wrong with it,” he added.
David Brock, the founder of the liberal groups Media Matters and American Bridge, likened the Free Beacon’s use of outside consultants to the “Arkansas Project” — the 1990s dirt-digging operation in which he played a central role.
The project, funded by a Republican millionaire, aimed to bring down the Clintons with stories in the American Spectator, a conservative magazine. Brock, who has since become a leading figure in the Democratic party, worked on the operation as the Spectator’s investigative reporter.
“Having personally been in the middle of efforts to undermine the Clintons with negative information collected by paid Republican operatives and then laundered through the magazine where I then worked, the American Spectator, where it was presented as the product of legitimate journalistic inquiry,” Brock said, the Free Beacon’s methods have what he called “all the markings” of the Arkansas Project.
“All that seems to have changed is the names of the characters involved,” Brock said. “The M.O. is the same. This is the Arkansas Project redux.”
Brock has long navigated the straits of journalism and partisanship on both sides of the aisle. His group, American Bridge, served as the central Democratic opposition research center, and he now runs a group defending Clinton’s record. This month, he launched a “journalism institute” to investigate the “nexus of conservative power in Washington” and subjects like the Koch brothers.
Through Media Matters, his group that monitors conservative media, Brock plans to release a “news advisory” to reporters and editors on Monday about what he calls a failure to disclose Reinschmiedt’s involvement.
“I trust you’ll agree that a journalistic news website hiring undercover Republican operatives to misrepresent themselves as journalists and secretly to provide it with information is, at best, an unusual practice,” Brock says in the advisory. “I certainly know that you understand that any time a news organization pays money for information, journalistic ethics requires that it be disclosed to readers.”
Goldfarb dismissed the criticism of the Free Beacon’s reporting. “If Clinton allies prefer to talk about the editorial process at the Beacon instead of Hillary’s decision to defend a child rapist she knew was guilty and brag about it on tape after the fact, we won’t be surprised if that’s the story some reporters pursue.”
“If we weren’t doing these stories,” Goldfarb said, “the only Clinton coverage this past week would have been how many books she sold and which Supreme Court justice she ran into at the book signings.”
David Brock, the founder of Media Matters for America and public defender for Hillary Clinton, is set to launch an institute to fund journalism that exposes “the nexus of conservative power in Washington,” according to an advance copy of his news release.
The American Independent Institute, a relaunch of the former state-based digital news-gathering network of the same name, will provide grants to journalists and work with other news organizations on investigative projects targeting conservatives. Sam Skolnik, an editor and reporter who has worked at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Las Vegas Sun and The National Law Journal, will serve as director.
The institute’s first grants have gone to investigations into the Gun Owners of America and its “radical” leader Larry Pratt; the efforts of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology to “undermine scientific inquiry”; and “the adverse impacts of the right-wing billionaire Koch Brothers’ business practices,” among others.
Several of the funded projects will appear in well-known progressive publications such as The Huffington Post, Harper’s and Washington Monthly. The investigation on Pratt and Gun Owners of America, by Alexander Zaitchik, will be featured on a panel discussion at the Open Society Foundations in July and co-sponsored by RollingStone.com.
“The American Independent has a proud history of journalism that spurred progressive change,” Brock, who will serve as president of the institute, said in a statement. “In our new role as a funder of deep-dig reporting projects, our mission — to foster strong journalism with lasting impact — hasn’t changed. With the on-going disintegration of the U.S. newspaper business, the need for alternative sources of information and independent reporting has never been greater. We will continue to meet the new challenges of democracy in a new way.”
Brock founded Media Matters, the watchdog organizations dedicated to combatting conservative bias, in 2004. He is also the head of liberal American Bridge PAC and, in 2014, joined the board of Priorities USA Action, which has announced its support for Hillary Clinton’s likely presidential bid. Over the last year, Brock has been one of Clinton’s most vocal public defenders, pushing for NBC and CNN to abandon Hillary-related film projects and calling on CBS to retract its controversial “60 Minutes” report on Benghazi.
Apparently the Fox News audience was intensely interested in what Hillary Rodham Clinton had to say about her latest book.
The appearance of Mrs. Clinton on Tuesday on Fox News — where she was interviewed by Bret Baier and Greta Van Susteren — drew just over two million viewers during the half-hour it was broadcast (6:45 p.m. to 7:15 p.m.). That audience represented an increase of 23 percent over the previous day, when Fox had about 1.6 million viewers in that hour.
The interview also pulled in many more viewers in the group that brings in advertising dollars to news programs, people ages 25 to 54. In that category, Fox News increased 30 percent from the previous day with 303,000 viewers.
Mrs. Clinton is promoting “Hard Choices,” a memoir about her tenure as secretary of state, which ended in 2013. The Fox News interview concentrated heavily on the attacks on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 that left four Americans dead, including J. Christopher Stevens, the ambassador to Libya.
Mrs. Clinton had appeared earlier that evening on CNN, where she added viewers to that network’s usual total, but nothing that approached the audience on Fox. For the 5 p.m. hour, when Mrs. Clinton was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour, CNN attracted 521,000 viewers, with 115,000 in the 25-54 group.
That was an increase of 33 percent in total viewers and 55 percent in the advertiser-preferred group. CNN’s audience is tiny at that hour, with only 393,000 total viewers the previous day and only 74,000 in the 25-54 group.
Even with the lift from the Clinton interview, CNN was still dwarfed in that hour by the Fox News program “The Five,” which had 1.8 million total viewers and 336,000 in the 25-54 category.
One of the biggest upsets in American politics was powered by right-wing media, according to analysis of last night’s defeat of Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), the House Minority Leader, who fell to an obscure Tea Party-backed candidate. Cantor’s campaign spent nearly as much on drinks and dinners at steak houses as David Brat did on his entire primary push. Yet Brat easily defeated the seven-term Republican leader.
“The seeds for Brat’s upset were sown on right-wing radio talk shows, particularly Laura Ingraham’s,” CNN’s Brian Stelter reported. On Fox News last night, radio host and Brat booster Mark Levin celebrated the Virginia “ass-kicking.” (During the same appearance, Levin urged Republicans to “stop chasing genitalia” in order to win elections.)
“There are parts of this country where if Laura Ingraham, and Ann Coulter, and Mark Levin are on the radio supporting you, that’s worth a lot,” Fox’s Brit Hume noted. “In the right place, with the right constituency, those people hold real power.”
Real power, indeed.
For years, that power was mostly directed at Democrats, and specifically at President Obama as talk radio and the larger right-wing media Noise Machine has worked tirelessly to demonize its opponents via nasty and often dishonest, illogical attacks.
After John McCain’s dispiriting loss to Barack Obama in 2008, damaged leaders of the Republican establishment slowly shuffled off the national stage. And into that vacuum rushed Roger Ailes, Glenn Beck, Rush-I-Hope-He-Fails-Limbaugh, and other players from the right-wing media lineup. They took over the messaging for the Republican Party, the attacks on the new president, and helped power the surging Tea Party movement in America.
Teaming up with the GOP and its unprecedented plan to obstruct a president who won an electoral landslide victories, the Noise Machine provided the mass media muscle and set out to portray Obama as nothing more than a suspicious, foreign, anti-capitalist socialist who distrusted America and wanted to take away citizens’ guns. He was also condemned as a “racist” who displayed a “deep-seated hatred for white people.”
The Republican Party, by and large, was happy to watch as the right-wing media took control of the GOP’s communications apparatus, which allowed the right-wing media to take control of the GOP’s public messaging. And when they were demonizing Obama and the Democratic Party, Republicans likely marveled at their good fortune of having millions of dollars in free media at their disposal each week to launch misinformation campaigns against the White House.
And for Cantor personally, the Noise Machine was a godsend. With no apparent interest in governing, legislating, or in public policy, Cantor’s professional goal appeared to be to obstruct the White House at all costs, and to make Obama look bad at every turn. And for that, he had perfect media partners.
But then Cantor became the target.
As the Wall Street Journalreported, Brat “repeatedly accused [Cantor] of supporting amnesty for people in the U.S. illegally,” which is not accurate. Cantor doesn’t support “amnesty,” by any reasonable definition, and has worked to make sure the Senate immigration reform bill that passed with bipartisan support last year hasn’t received a vote in the House.
No matter. Brat’s talk show booster Laura Ingraham began hyping the candidate’s claims on her nationally syndicated radio show, as she vilified Republicans for even thinking about addressing the issue of immigration reform.
“Vote Brat and stop amnesty once for all,” read a blog post on Ingraham’s site. She also blamed Cantor for the “enticement” of the immigrant children into the country, which she described as “an invasion facilitated by our own government.” And while appearing at a Brat rally last week, the talker suggested Obama should have traded Cantor to the Taliban in exchange for American prisoner of war Bowe Bergdahl.
So yes, Cantor pretty much got the Obama treatment from Ingraham and other influential segments of the far-right press: Misinformation wrapped around overheated personal attacks with constant attempts to demonize.
But this is what happens when Republicans help build an irresponsible Noise Machine that’s designed to offend and designed to attack. What happens is that, in case of emergency, there is no ‘off’ switch
