As CEO, I Will Do Anything To Make This Studio Profitable, Except Release A Good Movie

My latest for McSweeney's

I have a new piece on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a humor outlet.

Here’s the link click it click it click it.

Here’s a joke from it:

Movies are hard. There are a lot of lights, I think, and sometimes men with belts operating cranes? I don’t even know where you get a crane. So how about this: instead of releasing something fresh to reinvigorate a franchise everyone’s gotten sick of, I’ll say that previous, more interesting work is now part of our thing. It’s called optimizing. I haven’t read a script in six years.

Is this piece about anyone in particular? No, just CEOs in general. But also yes, David Zaslav. It’s maybe not super smart to poke fun at the heads of the companies I’m trying to work for, but on the other hand, I am right, and they’re never going to read this.

And for the record, I do understand that if you are the CEO of a multinational corporation that makes a lot more than just movies, it’s probably not, in fact, your job to quality-check all the new releases or come up with cool premises. You hire people for that! It is your job to start streaming services and make strategic partnerships and do share price shenanigans. I get that.

But…also…shouldn’t all that be in the service of, or at least allow, the production of good movies? I’m not saying these guys — and it’s almost all guys — have to be as hands-on as Walt Disney personally overseeing the development of Snow White and Disneyland (though that did make him pretty rich), but Zaslav some of these guys seem to be genuinely in the dark as to what their most visible divisions are creating. In fact I heard an anecdote proving this point that I can’t put in writing here but buy me a drink some time.

Also I just think, if your goal in life is to do corporate mergers and find tax loopholes, go ahead and work at McKinsey, and maybe leave Hollywood to people who like the entertainment industry! And maybe also like…people?

For instance, did you know that Pixar accidentally deleted Toy Story 2 when it was almost done (could happen to anyone!) but one of the producers had a copy of it on her home hard drive because she was on maternity leave, and that’s why the movie exists, and Disney laid that woman off last summer?

Did you know David MOTHERFUCKING Zaslav tried to gut Turner Classic Movies and only reversed the decision after the actual innovators of Hollywood got on the phone to yell at him? And if you were wondering why you can’t watch the well-received HBO original series Westworld on HBO’s streaming service… tax things :) Yes, this is the man who promoted Chris Licht from running a late night comedy talk show to running all of CNN and it worked out not well at all.

Anyhoo, here’s that link again.

Lizzie

PS- If you want to go down a rabbit hole that’ll make you angry, what if I told you 1997’s Men In Black never made a profit?