Good morning,

Thanks for reading The Backstory, your weekly capsule of the best work emanating from Puck.

It was yet another great week: Matt Belloni unearthed an epic Hollywood tiff and examined the dawn of the cable-pocalypse—which John Ourand elaborated on in chilling detail. Tara Palmeri chronicled the rampant backbiting and male insecurity inside the walls of Bedminster, and Peter Hamby narrated the race to define Kamala Harris. Eriq Gardner pinpointed a legal case adding to David Zaslav’s summer of discontent, while Bill Cohan outlined Zaz’s path toward stock price salvation. Meanwhile, Lauren Sherman offered some advice to a new fashion C.E.O., and Marion Maneker revealed what lies beneath Sotheby’s new $1 billion infusion.

Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

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ART MARKET:
Marion Maneker parses the data to reveal signs of green shoots in the art market and delves into Patrick Drahi’s $1 billion financing.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni gets to the bottom of the Ari Emanuel-Casey Wasserman feud and deciphers Zaz’s $9.1 billion write-down.
and…
Scott Mendelson questions Hollywood’s rom-com strategy.

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan offers the bull case for Zaz.

SILICON VALLEY:
The indefatigable Bill also examines X’s financial woes and Linda Yaccarino’s job security.

MEDIA:
John Ourand digs into NBCU’s cable bundle problem and weighs the dowry of Netflix’s arranged marriage with CBS.
and…
Eriq Gardner foreshadows the legal doom for Venu, the WBD-Fox-Disney three-way adventure.

WASHINGTON:
Tara Palmeri gets the readout from Bedminster on all the Trump boomerangs, starting with Corey Lewandowski.
and…
Julia Ioffe explains Zelensky’s incursion into Russia.
meanwhile…
Peter Hamby articulates the G.O.P.’s challenges to define Kamala Harris.

PODCASTS:
John Heilemann discusses the contours of the race with liberal wunderkind Ezra Klein on Impolitic.
and…
Matt and Tara debate the implications of Harris’s Hollywood ties on The Town.
and…
Tara and Symone Sanders-Townsend chart the Kamala-mentum on Somebody’s Gotta Win.
and…
Lauren and the Times’ Jessica Testa inspect Melinda French Gates’s glow-up and the latest in Olympics fashion on Fashion People.
and…
Matt and Ourand dissect the Cable-pocalypse on a special double episode of The Powers That Be.

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Bill Clinton, likewise, transformed the presidency from a professional capstone into a mere first-act finale. Enormous scandals aside, and against long odds, he reestablished himself as a global éminence grise with the Clinton Global Initiative. Princess Diana leveraged a stint as a beloved royal to fulfill her real calling as a philanthropist and social worker of the highest regard. Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson arguably accomplished more as executives than athletes. Anyway, you get the point: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fortune cookie line about second acts sounds quaint when applied to the architects of the modern zeitgeist.

In some ways, Phoebe Philo fits this archetype, too. During extraordinary runs at Chloé and Céline, she created the much-admired, constantly ripped-off boho chic aesthetic that defined the tastes and wardrobes of stylish wealthy women and eventually filtered down through the rest of the industry and into the fast-fashion labyrinth. Philo’s vision was fresh and iconoclastic, and it was hardly a surprise when she and her husband, Max Wigram, decided to strike out on their own. With seed investment from LVMH, the two built not only their brand but their own company.

There are extraordinary designers and there are extraordinary entrepreneurs, and the overlap in the Venn diagram is not large—Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, Coco Chanel, and so forth. And yet, Philo and Wigram set out to not only disrupt the industry, but also reintroduce a version of her inimitable look. As Lauren Sherman perspicaciously notes in Phoebe Philo’s Founder Syndrome, it hasn’t always been easy. Phoebe Philo, the brand, has encountered all the classic startup headaches—management team exits, logistics issues, challenges in momentum, etcetera. It’s a fascinating tale of ambition and acceptance, and yet another example of a successful person’s desire to challenge themselves in full public display.

Philo’s successes and tribulations are merely the latest example of how individual choices shape our culture, a leitmotif on display this week at Puck. In Trump’s Magical History Tour, Tara Palmeri explains how the former president’s rehiring of his favorite Red Bull-chugging wingman from the 2016 campaign reinforces his ongoing effort to seemingly undermine his own election chances—go figure. In Blink Twice, Linda, Bill Cohan digs into the financial challenges that Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino have created for themselves at Twitter (sorry, X). And in Drahi’s Billion-Dollar Question, Marion Maneker explores the Sotheby’s owner’s fascinating and complex new financing, and what it means not only for his employees but the rival auction houses, artists, and art market writ large.

But if you only have time to read one thing this weekend, I’d turn your attention to Matt Belloni’s excellent piece on the latest twist in the fate of Paramount, itself a saga featuring multiple second-acters. As Matt notes in It’s Go-Shop Time for Paramount, liquor scion and former music mogul Edgar Bronfman Jr. is once again sniffing around the company, threatening to outbid Skydance’s David Ellison and RedBird’s Gerry Cardinale. It’s an extraordinary late-stage complexifier, which may end up going nowhere, but nevertheless demonstrates just how much these businesses turn on the insatiable ambitions of the personalities involved. It’s one of the enduring stories of our time, and precisely what you should expect from Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon