Our Friday Free-For-All features a sweet seashell and some animated Quick Bites

Plus did they really make a good PREDATOR sequel?!

It’s Friday, August 5th, and here’s where we are…

There’s really no story in the industry this week that is as confounding or as significant as the changes underway at Discovery/Warner Media.

image courtesy of Adil El Arbi/Instagram

This is not about Batgirl or a Scoob! sequel or any individual film. What makes the story shocking is the way David Zaslav seems almost wholly unconcerned with what he’s doing to Warner’s reputation in the creative community. Like it or not, the entertainment industry is driven by people and relationships and what made Warner one of the titans of this creative community for decades was the way the various leaders of the studio tended to those relationships. Zaslav has aggressively shit on that history from the moment he took control of the conglomerate, and despite hiring Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy (both smart and promising names to run the film division), everything else he’s done has sent the resounding message that this is not a place where people are going to want to do business.

I have less and less appetite to write about what is happening to the film industry because, honestly, it feels like trying to do a true-crime podcast about your own mother’s violent murder.

None of it makes sense to me because I can’t just see all of this as “content.” There is a part of me that is jaded and hardened and cynical about what gets made and how and why, and I hate that part. I hate that part because I work to constantly feed and protect the part of me that can sit in a dark room for two hours and vanish into a screen to experience this thing that is the result of the intense collaboration of dozens if not hundreds of people all trying to express an idea or an emotion, all of it the result of what often starts with one person in a room with a thought they simply can’t shake. At their very best, movies and tv shows are like magic tricks, these things that momentarily connect us to something that feels absolutely real even though it is utterly artificial. It is a privilege to be able to make these things for a living, and the thing that is true of all of the most successful and prolific people I know is that they are not cynical about what they do. They do not let the genuinely awful white noise of this industry ruin the part of them that makes that magic trick happen, and that is maybe the most essential skill they have.

There is something deeply soothing about the new Video Archives Podcast, co-hosted by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary. Tarantino and Avary became friends while working at the video store in Manhattan Beach, and when the store finally closed, Tarantino bought their entire VHS archive while Avary bought the entire laserdisc inventory. The podcast features the two of them picking a double-feature off the shelves of the store, which now resides in a room in Tarantino’s house, and then discussing the films as well as those particular video presentations of the films. It’s a very fetishy show, very particular, and that’s exactly why I’ll listen to it. Sure, in some ways it’s just an ad for the New Beverly, where each of the double features that they discuss will end up being shown on 35mm, but I don’t see anything wrong with that. Anything that gets people out to see older movies on the big screen is okay by me. Besides, I don’t feel like there’s anything particularly calculated here. You don’t do an episode on Moonraker and Firefox if you’re trying to chase SEO placement. This feels like exactly what it is… two old friends continuing a conversation they’ve been having for decades. I love that they disagree completely on some of these movies, and I think the addition of Gala Avary, Roger’s 20-something daughter, is a delightful occasional counterpoint to these two late-50s dudes and their perspectives. It’s a welcome addition to the podcast rotation, a nostalgic bath I can look forward to taking twice a month.