When in the whole #MeToo thing it came out that Matt Lauer had a button under his desk that controlled his office door lock
And people were like “eww, why would you even have a rape button”, and the answers were “security” (not really) and “everyone does” (true)
But having done a short tour in Hollywood biz-office work I can confidently say that in a media economy that turns on attention, fucks will just barge into your office and demand your time if they can (and thrive doing it) and it’s basically a way to rig an enforced they-knock-on-the-door-you-yell-“come in” system
Remember those McDonalds Monopoly promotional games that McDonalds used to due during the 90s. Where your meal would come with little coupons that were supposed to represent properties from the monopoly boardgame that you could combine to win prizes, including a $1 million grand prize? Turns out it was rigged by the mafia. Because of course it was.
According to Jacobson, when the computerized prize draw selected a
factory location in Canada, Simon Marketing executives re-ran the
program until it chose an area in the USA. Jacobson claimed he was
ordered to ensure that no high-level prizes ever reached the Great White
North. “I knew what we were doing in Canada was wrong,” Jacobson
recalled. “Sooner or later somebody was going to be asking questions
about why there were no winners in Canada.” Believing the game was
rigged, he decided to cash in too.
Not long afterward, Jacobson
opened a package sent to him by mistake from a supplier in Hong Kong.
Inside he found a set of the anti-tamper seals for the game piece
envelopes—the only thing he needed to steal game pieces en route to the
factory. “I would go into the men’s room of the airport,” he later
admitted, the only place the female auditor couldn’t follow him. “I
would go into a stall. I would take the seal off.” Then he’d pour the
winning game pieces into his hand, replace them with “commons,” and
re-seal the envelope. First, he stole a $1 million “Instant Win” game
piece and locked it in a safety deposit box. Then he stole documents
that he claimed proved the Canada conspiracy. “I thought I would need
that to protect myself,” Jacobson recalled. If his employer ever fired
him, he had a “get out of jail free” card.
Robin told me that Uncle Jerry’s money soon funded certain
Colombo-run businesses, including a private members’ club in Hilton
Head. She thought he was sophisticated and liked the way he dressed. In
return, Jacobson sent other “opportunities” to the Colombos, Robin told
me. Late one night, she was stoned and rifling through the kitchen for a
snack, when she found in their freezer a mysterious plastic bag. Inside
was a single gray-colored M&M candy, which was part of a
promotional contest, she said. In 1997, the Mars candy company launched a
competition to find an “imposter” M&M, along with a game piece that
made the winner an instant millionaire. (Mars did not respond to
enquiries, but records show that Cyrk, a company that produced
promotional materials for Mars, merged with Simon Marketing in 1997.)
Colombo suddenly appeared behind her, grabbed the bag and yelled:
“Do not eat this!”
Murray was a quick-thinking Midwesterner who had risen through the ranks
at McDonald’s, and was often the public face of the company during any
drama. She was the “McQueen” of McDonald’s, said Joe Maggard, a
disgraced Ronald McDonald actor who was convicted of making harassing
phone calls while posing as the clown.
Good article.
Interesting meta-follow up: this whole article was commissioned by a Hollywood producer in order to auction the story to a film studio:
But
in the end — just about 72 hours after the story’s publication, to be
precise — only one group would emerge victorious: 20th Century Fox and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s
production company Pearl Street Films, which bid an eye-watering $1
million for the 8,700-word online long read (most articles command
option fees of less than $1,000). That’s the highest price ever paid for
an optioned article in Hollywood history, according to agents who
worked on the deal. The plan is for Affleck to direct and Damon to star
(presumably as Jacobson) with hot-shot Deadpool writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese handling script duties.
Which
would all be a happy Hollywood ending for any ink-stained wretch trying
to pump out long-form narrative nonfiction these days. Except this
wasn’t just good luck or some kind of fluke that “McScam” had so
thoroughly connected with Hollywood: Klawans and Maysh had been
developing the article with the specific aim of turning it into a film
since 2016.
Klawans (Nacho Libre, Amazon Prime’s The Legend of Master Legend)
is the independent movie and TV producer known for his meticulous
research: reading through countless niche journals, RSS feeds, police
blogs, library microfiche and clippings from news outlets from around
the globe in pursuit of ripped-from-the-headlines movie fodder. Seizing
upon the oddball and the obscure — often long-forgotten spot news about
people with hidden lives doing weird, wonderful, often shocking things —
he enlists a small cadre of professional journalists to re-research the
subjects, then write long-form articles that get published in reputable
magazines, newspapers, and websites. The idea is that articles are
better than pitch meetings — that development executives will be more
likely to open their checkbooks if the “planted” story is arranged into a
linear narrative with a three-act structure. Klawans buys the story
subjects’ life rights and will often circulate an unpublished article to
Hollywood production companies before publication to gin up interest.
The foremost example of this M.O.: 2012’s Argo.
In the late ’90s, the producer had read the then-recently declassified
testimony of CIA exfiltration expert Tony Mendez in a CIA journal,
detailing how he helped American diplomats escape the 1979 Iran hostage
crisis by posing them as a group of Canadian filmmakers. Hiring
journalist Joshuah Berman to pitch and “plant” the piece in Wired, Klawans then sold the project to George Clooney’s Smokehouse Pictures with Ben Affleck starring and directing. Argo went on to gross $232 million and win the best picture Oscar in 2013.
“The National Rifle Association (NRA) has said it’s suffering from substantial financial issues that could cause the organisation to “be unable to exist”.
In a recent court filing, the powerful organisation that lobbies on behalf of gun makers, owners and campaigns against almost all gun regulations, said it had lost its media insurance coverage due to an aggressive campaign brought on by New York’s Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo. The campaign encouraged companies to cut ties with the gun lobbying group. A lack of liability insurance threatens to shut down the group’s multi-million dollar media entities, including NRATV, its own streaming channel.“
#HappyFriday
Considering the money they’re getting from gun companies to advertise their stuff and the money they get from the Russians “foreign gun rights advocates“, I’m highly suspicious of these claims.
I think that they’re trying to scam their members out of money, or doing it to avoid paying tax or something.
There you go.
It’s also about making noise to get people riled up against New York politicians.
What the headline refers to is a lawsuit over banks shafting them under pressure from Parkland activists
Their position is “a contract is a contract, and you don’t get to break it without penalty even if the viper cult stomps its feet *veawwy hawd*”
And the media branch of the viper cult frames it as “ha ha, looosers” because they have proven themselves irredeemably evil mannequins with a hollow gourd full of buzzing hornets where their soul should be
The DirecTV “Make Room For Sunday” NFL-themed campaign that turns on “modern households no longer have a room dedicated to television-watching and that’s a loss” sure is something
On the one hand I’m kind of surprised the New Yorker would run a 1984 of the viper cult
On the other hand it’s within the bounds of reason Zadie Smith would write a 1984 of the viper cult, and given that, the New Yorker is where it would run
I too would see the scumbag left’s treatment of Liz Bruenig as weird if I didn’t think “look! we get real, actual wheatfield mommy gfs!” was a powerful, valid point
Does it make sense to say that, abstracting out the opinions of these people, they’re also unique in their business model? IE mostly unaffiliated with normal institutions/media companies, doing podcast-like things, getting money on Patreon-type-stuff, and also being really successful / having big personality cults around them?
Does anyone know of anyone like this either on the left or the more conventional non-taboo National-Review-reading right? Am I right to think it’s at least pretty rare? I can’t think of anything, but I don’t know whether that’s just my limited perspective or a real fact about society.
My 2:30 am response is to point out that National Review reviewed Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as raw untutored bullshit unhelpful to the mid-20th century conservative cause, and even with Michael B Dougherty on board and getting past the NeverTrump stuff I wouldn’t look to them to divine where popular energy is going until after the fact
I remember reading them (sometimes on paper!) in the late ‘90s, and noticing that everyone was trying to pull this fake Buckley voice of writing like an upper-class British ponce, with the exception of John Derbyshire, who confident in the knowledge he was an upper-class British ponce allowed himself a personality
Then The Corner really was an innovation in group blogging (after the Budapest suck.com ex-expats at Reason) and Jonah Goldberg and them used it to backslap over shit Simpsons jokes
The Kevin Williamson thing isn’t a mountain of a molehill, the viper cult’s realized that some of the wise elders of periodical publishing are seeing it’s time to reign things in and compete for the “left-sympathetic but be reasonable we aren’t the country entire” slot that “even the liberal” TNR and Slate held during previous reactionary cycles
Outlets pulling a centrist turn:
• NY Mag
• the NYT editorial page
• The Atlantic (well, “the prestige magazine David Frum edits” was a gimme)
• Tablet (?? but good for giving Wes Yang work)
New right-centrist:
• Quillette
New rejectionist left:
• Splinter (Gawker reconstituted)
• Crooked
New not firmly claimed:
• The Outline
• Quartz
• Baffler
When Uma Thurman (talented professional actress behind Kill Bill’s “The Bride”) delivered an aggressive red carpet “no comment” about Harvey Weinstein and all these outlets praised her for her righteous authentic barely-contained fierceness
I couldn’t help but recall when Gawker was covering the Hulk Hogan trial that took them down, and he tearfully testified to the pain they’d caused him by mockingly showing the world a private recording of him having sex, they dismissively (, accurately) pointed out he makes a living by pretending to be hurt by things that do not actually hurt
it’s cute the way ye olde time journalists felt free to just make up whatever cool stories they wanted, like describing a circus elephant running a man clean through with their mighty tusks when the elephant in question did not in fact have tusks.
nobody would do this nowdays, of course
journalists don’t get paid enough to fabricate ripping good yarns any more :(
WE USED TO CULTIVATE LEGENDS IN THE NORMAL HUMAN WAY
