Le Blog

He Finally Got The Boss He Deserved
It was both poignant and ironic that I had just left the FOX lot in Century City when I saw this alert flash onto my phone at a traffic light. Per DEADLINE’s Erik Pedersen: Jonathan Dolgen, a respected longtime entertainment industry executive known for his tough dealmaking and attention to budgets while chairman of Viacom

Curb Your Criticism. For Now.
It’s another fall before a Presidential election, and once again we have an outsider with some radical views declaring his intention to run for the office of President of the United States. This time, thankfully, no “golden escalator” was in sight. All I saw in the background of yesterday’s annoucement from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The Horror Of Blind Faith
I’m in the demographic sweet spot where I actually remember the rash of films that hit big screens during the 1970s with the primary intention of scaring the bejeezus out of you, I actually went to the movies to see the first iterations of what would eventually become massive franchises, such as HALLOWEEN, FRIDAY the

This Time, It’s Personal
Like so many American Jews, the images that played through my news and social media feeds yesterday were both sobering and disturbing. On the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur war–on a Shabbat, on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah–we saw the news of Hamas’ attack on Israel. As of this writing,

From Small Wonder To Infinite Wisdom
Anyone who could conquer Youngstown was destined to conquer Hollywood and Silicon Valley, right? I first crossed paths with Mark Lieber when he was a young sales executive for a soon-to-be defunct distribution arm of the soon-to-be extinct Metromedia conglomerate. Mark even joined while the fate of the company was in limbo, shortly after it

Not Ready For Sub-Prime Players?
In today’s media landscape, true success is rare, and relative to even the recent past the bar for what is considered success has lowered to the level of a champion Limbo player. This was the verbiage of an actual press release from CBS News that came out earlier this week touting the “success” of some

Thank You For A Being A Hunk
One of the nice things about social media is that occasionally some folks that are little more than Facebook friends with really good stories to tell choose to do so in long posts, usually when some seminal event in their lives triggers it. When Betty White passed away a couple of years ago, one such

Of Course, John Was Right About Peak TV. He Rarely Isn’t.
I’m disappointed at times that I haven’t quite been able to communicate exactly how I feel about FX Chairman John Landgraf. On many occasions, I’ve called him out on his seemingly quioxtic obsession with driving home the point that there’s simply too much TV being made, that a bubble bursting was inevitable, and we should

They’re Baaaackkkkkkkkkkk
It was somehow both fitting and sobering that on the anniversaries of both the day and the day of the week that Johnny Carson took over THE TONIGHT SHOW 61 years ago and forever changed the viewing habits and the way a majority of people learn about the news that the STRIKE FORCE FIVE all