I can’t say Jane Fonda and I have anything even remotely close to a “relationship”. But she does have this uncanny knack of making guest appearances in my life. My cousin was fremeies with her second husband, activist Tom Hayden, who besides being her plus-one came to national attention as what the late and thoroughly unrelented SANTA MONICA OBSERVER dubbed “the father of rent control”–as a landlord, they’d frequently clash at city council meetings often enough to where he was a known entituy. She was Mrs. Ted Turner during my time working for Mr. and seemed to willingly go along with his blanket request to have our clients rub shoulders with them–we mused about that a while ago– and let’s just say her acting was only slightly short of what she demonstrated in her Oscar-willing role as a complicated prostitute in one of the firsr “adult” films I was allowed to watch, KLUTE. More recently, I was on set when she and Lily Tomlin taped a memorable faux guest appearance on SHARK TANK for their hit Netflix series GRACE AND FRANKIE hawking “squatty potties”, and when she faked an actual relationship with a friend of mine to justify his emergency casting as her “good friend” for an appearance on a COVID-impacted appearance on WHO WANTS TO BE MILLIONAIRE that was literally the last thing taped in front on a studio audience for months and the last time I got to set foot on my beloved Sony lot–for now, I’d like to believe.
So by my minimalistic standards that qualified her as someone I have more than a passing interest in–all the more inflamed when she immediately felt it was her calling to weigh in yesterday on the rubbing stamping of a business transaction involving her ex-hubby’s ex-company. As THE WRAP’s JD Knapp told it:
Jane Fonda’s Committee for the First Amendment condemned Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders on Thursday for voting to approve the studio’s pending merger with Paramount. “Today’s decision by Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders to advance a merger with Paramount is a serious setback — for our industry, for the workers who sustain it, for consumers, and for the fundamental democratic values that depend on a diverse and independent media landscape,” a statement read. “But this merger is not a done deal — and this fight is far from over.”
This bravado immediately brought to mind the imagery she projected during the KLUTE and Hayden chapters of her life–a much more rebellious era where she broke ranks with her right-wing embracing John Wayne-worshipping pop Henry, earning the nickname “Hanoi Jane” in the process. TIME’s Mahita Gajanan valiantly tried to explain that evolution to folks under 60 in a 2018 piece:
(T)he Vietnam War had been raging for roughly a decade. Amid what was widely perceived as a lack of progress in the war, its continuation prompted widespread protests in the U.S. It was around that time that Fonda focused her political activism solely on the antiwar movement… Having worked on behalf of Native Americans and the Black Panthers in the 1960s, Fonda dove into protesting the Vietnam War, first with the formation of the “Free Army Tour” (FTA) with actor Donald Sutherland in 1970. FTA was an anti-war show designed to contrast Bob Hope’s USO tour, touring military bases on the West Coast and talking to soldiers before they were deployed to Vietnam.
In 1972, Fonda went on to tour North Vietnam in a controversial trip would come to be the most famous — or infamous — part of her activist career, and led to her the nickname “Hanoi Jane.” While in Vietnam, Fonda appeared on 10 radio programs to speak out against the U.S. military’s policy in Vietnam and beg pilots to cease bombing non-military targets. It was during that trip that a photograph was taken of her seated on an anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi, making it look like she would shoot down American planes.
So she’s had a long history with taking issue with the views of unpopular Republican regimes and their paranoid president. Obvs that what we have in place at the moment is a way more despicable and far less qualified version of even the Richard Nixon that was driven from the White House from his own self-inflicted wounds. And the fact that the most visible beneficiaries of yesterday’s democratic decision by the folks who actually have skin in the game with WBD are buddy-buddies with the guy who was honored last night at a little shindig that DEADLINE’s Ted Johnson covered allowed her group’s remarks to be amplified with yet another outpouring of “peaceful protest”:
Donald Trump arrived at the Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. on Thursday evening to attend a private dinner hosted by Paramount CEO David Ellison, who is seeking approval of his proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Across the street on the National Mall, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and about two dozen other merger opponents held a rally opposing the transaction, casting it as an example of Trump administration corruption. Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called the Ellison event an “oligarch’s dinner.”… Norm Eisen, co-founder of Democracy Defenders Action, read Paramount’s invitation to the event, which Status newsletter posted on social media this week. It read that the event was an “intimate gathering in celebration of the First Amendment honoring the Trump White House and CBS White House correspondents.” “This resembles the First Amendment in the same way that a book burning is a celebration of the written word,” Eisen said.
That’s certainly in line with the additional justification that came from Camp Jane which Knapp highlighted:
“We’ve seen time and again that sustained pressure works. Efforts to challenge consolidation, from the proposed Tegna-Nexstar Media Group deal to scrutiny of Live Nation Entertainment and Ticketmaster, have demonstrated that coordinated legal, political, and public advocacy can change outcomes, especially when state Attorneys General step in to protect the public interest,” it continued. “We will continue pressing forward on every front”.
So at both the sun rising and sun setting extremes of her life Fonda has shown a willingness to attach herself to causes she finds significant–which I guess when you one has lived a long life with the sort of financial trappings being birthed into Hollywood royalty and being a working actress and producer for parts of seven decades produces entitles one to. But I’d like to ask what was going through her fertile mind in the middle stages.
She was not merely just screwing with the heads of the folks in charge during the era where she was Atlanta Jane. She was literally screwing the guy making the decisions for not one but two different legacy movie studios during their marriage. When hundreds of employees she actually knew were losing their jobs as a result of financially and competitively motivated mergers and consolidations not all that different to what the shareholders at Warner Brothers Discovery officially approved yesterday morning. Myself included, I might add. Not to mention a whole bunch of my friends and colleagues both with Turner and Warner Brothers itself before the Time Warner iteration ultimately cast aside Turner himself–at just about the time that he and Jane decided to part ways themselves.
Was the fact that there was no politically polarizing force in play at that time the reason that Atlanta Jane didn’t raise a fuss? Or perhaps it was because she eventually buried the hatchet enough with dear old dad to make ON GOLDEN POND and get nominated for yet another Oscar in the process that her interest in who gets employed in Hollywood was temporarily replaced by her interest in who gets to pay next to nothing to live by the beach without air conditioning?
I’m pretty sure Fonda was around enough boardrooms and saw enough of hubby’s paperwork to know the mathematics of Hollywood. The numbers attached to both Paramount and Warner Brothers individually are anything but favorable. And neither competes even remotely with Netflix–a behemoth that GRACE AND FRANKIE’s sustaining success in its ascending days from upstart to utility greatly contributed to. It’s not like job security was a given for the rank and file even before the Friends of DJT got their grubby little paws on the very company Ted Turner opted to get into bed with and didn’t materially grow when he had the chance.
She might be able to take solace in the fact that the Ellisons and their toadies haven’t exactly been overachieving even before yesterday. Brendan Carr and Pete Hegseth might be getting the chance to pound beers and break bread with them at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this coming Saturday night , but recent ratings trends for CBS NEWS and box office figures for Paramount materially point out they’re definitely at the losers’ table.
Which is the case I continue to plead with those who simply cannot resist the urge to conflate hard media business decisions with political rhetoric. You are literally pissing in the wind when it comes to the determination of those affiliated with the current administration to wrest the car keys away from others you may perceive to be more “democratic”. You really want to hurt them where it matters most? Don’t watch. And don’t anyone dare lecture me with that “silence is complicity” BS. In media, as opposed to politics, silence is deafening.
You know, Jane, the kind of silence you demonstrated somewhere between Hanoi and Burbank. Which if one looks at a world map is the very spot Atlanta just happens to fall into.
Until next time…