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The Connection Newsletter 75 - Context
The Connection Newsletter 75 - Look at the context
Hello!
This is edition #75 of
The Connection
, the mostly weekly email I send family, friends, and future friends (hello!) Thanks for being here.
This is the 75th edition of The Connection. And the articles this week in particular helped me remember
why
I started this newsletter in the first place: technology, entertainment, and culture are converging faster than ever. If you want to understand one piece, you can’t just pick up a trade blog or paper like TechCrunch or Variety.
You have to look at one in the context of the others.
I remember executives laughing at the idea of putting up our writers for an “Amazon” show. We didn’t know in a few years Amazon would relocate their studio to the old Culver Studios (where they filmed
The Wizard of Oz
), or that they'd start bundling movies and shows with Prime, a service that 93% of its users keep after the first year.
But we could have.
In April 2012 I spent a week working at a YouTube multi channel network. Hated every second of it. But I watched one dude tear open packs of Pokemon cards and pontificate about the relative value of different Charizard Holo Foils for 20 minutes… and he had 20K subs.
At that moment, I could have better understood the rise of the influencer. I could have understood that there were nascent social media platforms (e.g. Instagram, Snap) that were going to take that game to another level.
But I didn’t see it then.
And look at where we are now.
As always, thanks for reading and coming on this journey with me.
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Bob Iger, CEO of Walt Disney, is sitting at the #1 spot on
.
He’s also one of the nicest people in the industry.
“Literally, I have never heard one person say a bad thing about him and I have never seen him be mean,” David Geffen marveled. “To be honorable, decent, smart, successful and a terrific guy is unusual anywhere. But it is most unusual in the entertainment business. He’s in a category of one.”
(This from Geffen who, I think most would agree, does not share the same reputation. See
.)
The New York Times covers Iger’s slow rise to the top, and the bridges he kept intact along the way.
But Jeff Bezos certainly should have.
It’s not just that he’s taken over Culver Studios, or become the bastion for independent film and television in the age of Studio Franchises (e.g. Star Wars, Marvel, Fast & Furious).
As Bezos himself put it: “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes.”
That’s not just a quip. That’s reality.
"Today, Bezos controls nearly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States. More product searches are conducted on Amazon than on Google, which has allowed Bezos to build an advertising business as valuable as the entirety of IBM.
One estimate has Amazon Web Services controlling almost half of the cloud-computing industry—institutions as varied as General Electric, Unilever, and even the CIA rely on its servers. Forty-two percent of paper book sales and a third of the market for streaming video are controlled by the company; Twitch, its video platform popular among gamers, attracts 15 million users a day.
Add The Washington Post to this portfolio and Bezos is, at a minimum, a rival to the likes of Disney’s Bob Iger or the suits at AT&T, and arguably the most powerful man in American culture."
How much influence does Chinese money have on Hollywood? The closer you look, the scarier it gets. The first time I noticed Chinese money influencing a film was 2012, in Rian Johnson's Looper. In the script, the protagonist had dreams of moving to France. By the time the story made it to the screen, these dreams had relocated to Shanghai. Time will tell the ramifications of Hollywood continuing to pander to Chinese box office sales, and how this will shape the culture of film. Also, check out these movies:
That's a glimpse from
at how the number of films co-financed by Chinese money has grown.
With Bong Joon-ho's latest film,
Parasite out, it was time to revisit Okja and Snowpiercer (both on Netflix. I used to have a bootleg DVD of The Host but lost in sometime in the last decade.) This profile of the Korean director was a fascinating one. One detail I loved:
He meticulously storyboards each scene (see image above), but he does not shoot coverage (multiple shots from various angles and perspectives that get edited together later).
“That process allows him to fully control what the cut is going to be, and the result ends up being very original. Bong finds it more efficient because everything about a shot has already been decided, so the cast and crew don’t have to repeat the same thing over and over from different perspectives.”
He also lied to Harvey Weinstein in order to get his infamous “fish” scene into the final cut of
Snowpiercer, saying it was a tribute to his father, a fisherman.
“It was a fucking lie. My father was not a fisherman.”
The “Billions” creators and showrunners Brian Koppelman and David Levien (same guys who wrote Rounders) will write and EP the series, based on the book, “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.” Chances are it won’t make it out of development, but if it does I’d give it a watch.
DoorDash announced they’re opening a ghost kitchen in Redwood City. The shared commissary will produce meals for four restaurants, and staffed by the concepts’ own employees, while DoorDash maintains the facility and handles the delivery logistics.
.)
As Kristen Hawley puts it in her Expedite newsletter (
):
“Delivery-only kitchens were built for speed and growth potential. Without a dining room, they can be set up quickly and run from small spaces. Delivery data and analytics mean that companies with access to data — and right now these are the big delivery companies — are able to pinpoint demand and adjust supply. This means they can show up in any given market rather quickly to serve a need that assuredly exists”
Great example of how a corporation can move fast -- and the cost of doing so.
CEO Steve Easterbrook would command each manager to nominate their best executive to the task of building an online delivery business that would aim to be fully operational by the beginning of January—in two weeks’ time. When Brady suggested they target delivery from 3,000 restaurants by July 1, he told her he would be disappointed if they didn’t get to 18,000—about half of McDonald’s locations around the globe.
Glossier started out as a media company.
“Weiss wanted to start a website that would show the real-world beauty routines of fashion insiders and celebrities—stuff that she learned on shoots, like Karlie Kloss’s devotion to Bag Balm ointment on her lips. Weiss bought a $750 used camera and the domain for intothegloss.com, and by September the first post went live, with publicist Nicky Deam sharing her Fashion Week survival items.”
I was trying to think of other examples of media companies that got into a physical product business: goop and Jerry Media come to mind. Can you think of other examples?
On the return of Michelle Phan.
“I was at the height of the party. And that’s when you want to leave.”
Thanks for reading!
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