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UPDATE Fox News says it’s conducting an internal review of the Ailes-Doocy situation. But Fox News isn’t reporting the story or the review.
EARLIER Many hours have passed. Every news organization and blog in the world has reported the sexual harassment lawsuit filed by former anchor Gretchen Carlson against Roger Ailes.
Every one except Fox News and the New York Post, the beachheads of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. And there’s no word from Rupert Murdoch himself, who’s been radio silent since he married Jerry Hall on March 4th.
Surprisingly: the Wall Street Journal, Murdoch’s only respected paper, has reported the story with a stealth headline. They just mention a lawsuit but don’t say it’s about Ailes or the company.
Some reports indicate that Carlson may add Fox News to the lawsuit. Right now Ailes is the sole defendant in the case, filed in New Jersey.
I’ll update when the Post or Fox News figures out how to say one of their stars until two weeks ago is suing their boss for something fairly serious.
PS No word on the other News Corp sites like Heat St. or Fox Nation.
Now we know why Gretchen Carlson left “Fox and Friends,” was moved to the blah afternoon slot from 2 to 4pm on Fox News, and was eventually dismissed on June 23rd without cause. She claims in a lawsuit that Steve Doocy harassed her on the morning show, Fox News chief Roger Ailes demoted her and harassed her some more, and now she is gone.
Carlson– a Stanford University graduate and former Miss America– says Ailes propositioned her when she went to him to discuss her demotions. She says he said, “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago, and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better.”
The lawsuit– filled with detail and pretty grim– is the talk of the New York media world this afternoon. It comes at a tricky time for Ailes, who spent the better part of the year fighting with Donald Trump over the coverage he received from Megyn Kelly.
It also comes as James and Lachlan Murdoch have wrested power of News Corp from their doddering father, Rupert Murdoch. They got rid of the NY Post’s long time editor, Col Allan. The word is they’d like to do the same to Ailes. A couple of years ago in the New York Times, their sister Elisabeth’s now former husband Matthew Freud said of Ailes: “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.”
Ailes and Fox News are not strangers to the land of sexual harassment. In 2004, Fox News settled a multi-million lawsuit brought against Bill O’Reilly by producer Andrea Mackris. O’Reilly has since generated headlines about his own marriage. Since divorced, he lost a custody battle this past winter.
Carlson, however, is not an unknown entity like Mackris. And times have changed since 2004. Carlson is respected and high profile. Nothing explained her departure from “Fox and Friends” where she was the only level head among jackals. Ailes lured her to Fox from CBS News, not the National Enquirer. She’s no airhead. Carlson says that when she complained to Ailes in 2009 that co-anchor Steve Doocy was harassing her, Ailes told her she was a “man hater” and a “killer” and “needed to get along with the boys.”
Even if (and it’s likely) Carlson settles with Fox News, the damage has been to Ailes. My sources say that the Murdoch brothers knew about this last week, and allowed it to go public. If that’s the case, Ailes may be headed to early retirement before the presidential election. And that would be quite an irony after everything else that has transpired this year.
And who would run Fox News in Ailes’s absence? That, my friends, is the $64 million question.
A new report says streaming of pop music was up 58% in the first half of 2016. Everything else is in the toilet. Album sales were down 14%. Song sales were down 24.2%.
On demand audio streams were up 107.8%.
Fans don’t need to keep or own the current music. They’d rather just listen to it on a service on their phones.
What we can infer: The days of buying music, owning it, playing it at home, having an album collection — that’s over. Since the music is meaningless, and it’s all similar, there’s no feeling that it’s important.
There are some exceptions: Beyonce’s “Lemonade.” Adele’s “25.” Or “Hamilton,” which people buy and memorize. But for the most part, music by today’s poplets from Drake to Bieber to Selena– it’s been reduced to a ring tone.
Kanye West didn’t think enough of his “Life of Pablo” to release it properly in any form.
In the first six months, Prince landed two albums in the top 25 thanks to his untimely death.
Vinyl sales were up, although I don’t know why. I was so glad to get rid of warped records that skipped back in 1982. And it’s not like vinyl is still $5.98. These records sell for an average of twenty two bucks! How crazy is that? What’s next? Raccoon coats?
The top vinyl albums were David Bowie’s “Blackstar” (33K), Adele “25,” and “Purple Rain.” The Beatles sold just over 12,000 copies of “Abbey Road,” and Miles Davis made money from just over 12K of “Kind of Blue.” Kind of weird.
All the numbers come from a service call BuzzAngle Music.
Broadway: “Hamilton” is has eaten everything in its path at the box office. “Bright Star” is gone, and other shows are suffering.
But the biggest collapse has to be “Shuffle Along.” On May 29th, the musical starring Audra McDonald and Brian Stokes Mitchell took in $985,656. That was two weeks before the Tony Awards.
For the week ending this past Sunday, the total was just $787,622. It’s no surprise then that producer Scott Rudin has decided to close the show on July 24th. The steady downward spiral can be attributed not so much to McDonald’s announced departure but to the wipe out at the Tony Awards.
Interestingly, the total number of tickets sold hasn’t dropped much. But the average ticket price has really dipped. The potential gross last week was $1,125,028. The gap between what the show could make and does make it getting bigger.
Rudin isn’t used to this. “The Book of Mormon” continues to be a top 3 hit at the Broadway box office. Last week that show did 98% of its capacity.
Smokey Robinson will receive the Gershwin Prize from the Library of Congress this November. He joins Paul McCartney, Carole King, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Willie Nelson and his Motown compadre Stevie Wonder.
Smokey wrote what is undeniably Motown’s anthem, “My Girl,” for the Temptations. His huge catalog of songs for his own group, the Miracles, for himself, for the Temps and all the other Motown groups is staggering. It’s everything from “Tracks of My Tears” to “Shop Around” to “Cruisin'” and “Tears of a Clown.” Without Smokey there would have been no Motown. A whole radio format is named for his song “Quiet Storm.” He wrote “Beaten to the Punch” and “Two Lovers” for Mary Wells, and countless hits for Marvin Faye including “Ain’t that Peculiar.”
No one deserves the Gershwin prize more than Smokey, that’s for sure. Congrats!
Alexander Hamilton used to be happy just to be on the $10 bill.
But this Saturday he goes up on the $20,000 bill. There are currently a pair of front row center tickets for the Saturday July 9th 8pm performance on secondary market seller Stub Hub.
Location Row A 105 and 106. Price? $20,000. Apiece. That’s $40,000, not including refreshments, souvenirs, dinner before or after the show, cab ride. And you’re not invited to the inevitable cast party after the show.
On that night, Lin Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr., and Philippa Soo will leave their Tony award winning roles in the Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning musical.
Seat F109 is also available — for $7,500. The lowest price tickets are available in the rear mezzanine for an average of $2,500.
In over 40 years no one has ever been able to turn Erica Jong’s classic 1973 bestselling novel of sexual liberation, “Fear of Flying,” into a movie.
Many have tried. My late friend producer Julia Phillips wanted to direct the book with Goldie Hawn playing the heroine, Isadora Wing, who travels all over the world looking for “the zipless f—.” Julia wrote the entire hilarious saga of not making that movie in her bestseller, “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again.” After what seemed like decades of a tug of war with everyone in Hollywood, including a lawsuit with Erica Jong, Julia finally surrendered. The movie was never made.
Three years ago there was some kind of announcement that producer Donald Kushner had director Laurie Collyer and they were going to do it. Again, it never materialized.
But now I can tell you that “Fear of Flying” will fly at Columbia Pictures, where Julia set it up with Ray Stark and David Begelman in 1973. Alas, Collyer is gone. In her place is Tanya Wexler, whose 2011 movie about the invention of the vibrator, called “Hysteria,” was an indie hit. Kushner is still the producer. No stars’ name has been mentioned so far, but I think Hawn’s daughter, Kate Hudson, would be perfect. And wouldn’t that be poetic justice? Wexler might opt for Maggie Gyllenhaal, who starred in “Hysteria.”
Jong is working with Wexler and screenwriters Piers Ashworth and Shauna Cross to get the right screenplay. But I do hear that Jong, who last fall published a sequel called “Fear of Dying,” is struggling with them “to get the right tone. Isadora’s tale has been updated from the 70s to current times.
The four day weekend was brutal at the box office. “The Legend of Tarzan” managed to swing from one branch to another without falling into the jungle. The result was $45 million, which isn’t bad but isn’t great either. It just is.
“The BFG” came out at $22 million for four days, which is bad and I feel bad about it. I’ve been getting interesting comments about the title from Twitter followers. No one knew what the initials meant. So the Roald Dahl book wasn’t a big enough lure. There was a major marketing miscommunication here.
“Independence Day: Resurgence” plodded to $76.3 million by Monday night. They have $177 million in foreign sales. Maybe they’re up to around $240 million total. Half of that goes to theaters. So “IDR” remains a P&L misery.
Any success “Tarzan” had is due to Sue Kroll, who’s a marketing genius at Warner Bros. Her real coup for the summer is “Central Intelligence,” which is near $100 million US and $30 mil abroad. It cost about $50 million. A new franchise is born for The Rock and Kevin Hart, who can definitely get two more out of this before “CI” becomes a TV series.
Meanwhile, whatever happened to “Genius” with Colin Firth, Jude Law and Nicole Kidman? Well, it’s made about a million dollars over four weeks. I guess the three stars divide that up. “Genius” had to have cost $10 million, but who knows? They should put it on VOD or Netflix.
So what happens next? This Friday we get “The Secret Life of Pets,” which even I want to see. That’s a hit. “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” actually looks funny. But the very good movie coming on Friday is “Captain Fantastic.” Not to be missed.
July 15th we get Woody Allen’s excellent “Cafe Society,” Bryan Cranston in “The Infiltrator” (already getting good buzz), and the all female “Ghostbusters,” which I’m crossing my fingers for because I like everyone in it.
Pop: CD sales and digital downloads have screeched to a halt this week.
Drake only sold 23,563 CDs and digital downloads last week, while the number 1 album was The Avett Brothers’ “True Sadness” with about 45,000 copies. Now that’s true sadness.
But all was not lost for Drake. If we factor in his streaming sales, his “Visions” came in at 109,437. That was an increase of 86,000– nearly twice what the Avett Brothers sold. The Avetts, whose album is quite wonderful, by contrast had about 3,000 streams.
Drake is easily the streaming king at this point, and his “Hotline Bling” is bigger than ever. On Spotify, “Hotline” and “One Dance” account for close to 1 million streams total. By contrast, the Avett Brothers’ top 10 tracks together equal fewer than 70 million streams.
The pop chart this week was dismal for “real” sales– CDs and digital downloads. The top 10 sold about 200,000 copies. The top 50 was less than 400,000. Beyonce’s “Lemonade” has finally been drained.
The weird note of the week: a deep discount sale on Van Halen’s “1984” album, released 32 years ago, pushed it to number 12.
At the end of next week, new albums by Maxwell and Blink-182 will appear somewhere on the charts. Otherwise the balance of the summer looks pretty bleak with the exception of Steven Tyler’s solo album and DJ Khaled, who’s starting to turn up everywhere on TV.
The top albums in contention for Album of the Year (with September 30th looming as a deadline): Adele, Kanye West, Beyonce, Drake, Paul Simon, David Bowie and maybe the Avetts.
You’d have to go back a long way in the Steven Spielberg canon to find a worse marketed, lousy opening for one of his films as “The BFG” has just had. It just shows you, you can be the most famous director in the world and it still doesn’t matter if the studio isn’t behind you.
On Friday “The BFG” made $7 million. Movie trackers were spot on predicting a $21 million weekend (three days), with $24 mi by end of July 4th. “The BFG” cost $140 million.
This was the fourth film in a row that Spielberg has released through Disney/Buena Vista. War Horse, Lincoln, Bridge of Spies preceded it. Of those three, only “Lincoln” was a bona fide hit although “Bridge of Spies,” at least was Oscar nominated and Mark Rylance won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Everything about “The BFG” pointed to success. The Roald Dahl book is beloved. Spielberg brought the movie to Cannes, where it had a very positive launch. But post-Cannes, “The BFG” was MIA. It all but disappeared. Even a 72 on Rotten Tomatoes wasn’t enough to compel Disney to really market the film. A couple of days ago, my dry cleaner asked me about the upcoming weekend movies. He hadn’t even heard of “The BFG.” That says a lot.
It’s too bad. I wrote from Cannes that I thought Spielberg had captured the energy and essence of “ET.” I still feel that way and will pay to see it again (we had no screening in NY). Maybe word of mouth will push it along. But it could be that Disney has become so used to touting Marvel and animation and sequels, what was needed for “The BFG” just didn’t happen.
