Good morning,

Welcome back to The Backstory, your weekend review of the very best of Puck.

It was another remarkable week: Matt Belloni chronicled a half-decade’s worth of Hollywood transformation; Julia Alexander analyzed the streaming industry’s romantasy problem; Scott Mendelson previewed the summer box office hunger games; Eriq Gardner dug into a surprising legal détente; Dylan Byers offered the latest Bari Weiss kremlinology; John Ourand detailed Netflix’s live-events learning curve; Marion Maneker dissected the multibillion-dollar May sales; Bill Cohan offered a private equity L.B.O. cautionary tale; Ian Krietzberg looked for clues within Mira Murati’s $12 billion post-OpenAI venture; Lauren Sherman broke the news of Everlane’s stunning sale to Shein; Rachel Strugatz followed the decline of Blake Lively’s beauty business; Malique Morris gave a talmudic reading of the boardroom battle at Victoria’s Secret; and Molly Rooyakkers explained the luxury industry’s Reddit problem.

Meanwhile, down in D.C., Marianna Sotomayor performed an autopsy of the D.N.C.’s flubbed 2024 postmortem; Peter Hamby parsed the crosstabs on some exclusive and alarming new Trump polling; Leigh Ann Caldwell reported on a rumble in the Senate; and John Heilemann inspected the president’s foot-in-mouth disease.

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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Lauren Sherman explains why Everlane capitulated to Shein and digs into the Marc Jacobs sale price mystery.
and…
Rachel Strugatz runs the numbers on Blake Lively’s drain-circling beauty business.
meanwhile…
Malique Morris assesses a Victoria’s Secret boardroom brawl while Molly Rooyakkers reveals luxury’s Reddit challenge.

Marion Maneker surveys the lots and leitmotifs from the May auctions, including the Newhouse bonanza and Christie’s manic Monday.

Matt Belloni documents the entertainment industry’s half-decade of magical thinking.
and…
Eriq Gardner inspects a surprising SAG-AFTRA peace offering.
meanwhile…
Scott Mendelson previews the economic viability of the summer blockbusters while Julia Alexander unpacks the streaming industry’s infatuation with the romantasy genre.

Ian Krietzberg scrutinizes what former OpenAI wunderkind Mira Murati has been building for the past 15 months, and decodes Trump’s post-Mythos A.I. policy.

Sage Lattman investigates a grade-inflation scandal at Harvard.
and…
David Kamp offers an elegy for Stephen Colbert.

Dylan Byers renders the latest Bari Weiss kremlinology.
and…
Julia Alexander hypothesizes what the agentic era will mean for publishers.

John Ourand captures the schadenfreude among the legacy media crowd following Netflix’s early stumble in M.M.A.
and…
Eriq uncovers a groundbreaking lawsuit that might overhaul professional tennis.

Bill Cohan sizes up a leverage deal from hell.

Peter Hamby illuminates the ’28 shadow primary between Vance and Rubio.
and…
Leigh Ann Caldwell extracts the essence of the Senate’s panic over Trump’s endorsement of Ken Paxton.
meanwhile…
Marianna Sotomayor takes stock of the finger-pointing within the D.C.C.C.

Dylan and journalist Alex Heath discuss Zuckerberg’s A.I. endgame on The Grill Room.
and…
Ourand and UTA sports chief Jerry Silbowitz chew over the rise of talent-led I.P. on The Varsity.
and…
Lauren sits down with designers Paul Smith and Gabriela Hearst to discuss their new collaboration on Fashion People.
and…
John Heilemann and Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer play out the president’s midterm scenarios on Impolitic.
and…
Matt and Peter grapple with the Spencer Pratt phenomenon on The Town.
and…
Peter rings up Ian to parse OpenAI’s wild week on The Powers That Be.

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On Tuesday evening, I had the serendipitous fortune of bumping into an old friend in a totally unexpected place. I’d flown into Mountain View for a keynote conversation with Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, at the company’s annual marketing summit. As I was deplaning from SFO and preparing for a traffic-filled commute down the peninsula, I got a text from Ben Smith, the co-founder of Semafor. It included a photo of his speaker dossier next to mine at the conference’s reception area. I was thrilled to have a buddy in town, and we quickly arranged to meet for a drink later that evening.

A MESSAGE FROM ANTHROPIC

Claude, the AI without ads

A space to think. Anthropic keeps conversations with Claude ad-free: no sponsored links, no advertisers shaping answers, no paid product placements you didn't ask for. When you bring your hardest problem to an AI, you shouldn't have to wonder who it's working for.

Learn more

In many ways, Semafor and Puck have helped define the latest generation in media. While that might ostensibly make Ben and me rivals, we’re both too battle-tested and circumspect to take that sort of bait. Plus, we’ve learned enough from our forebears to know that this industry is hardly zero-sum. Shortly after he announced the formation of his business, in fact, I called to wish him luck, and we agreed to remain friends and help each other where we could. The sentiment remains.

As the light faded over the roof of the Ameswell Hotel, we got to pick each other’s brains about our respective founder journeys. Indeed, we had plenty to catch up on. Even though our offices are only a couple miles away from each other in Lower Manhattan, the last time we’d seen each other was many months earlier in a hotel restaurant in Washington, where we were both quietly engaged in clandestine recruiting missions. And, other than the occasional hellos at industry confabs, the last time we had spent meaningful time was years earlier at a conference in Deer Valley, of all places.

Photo: Courtesy of Google

When I brought up that memory, we both quickly recalled how few of the other media companies present during that event were still with us. Of course, any Puck reader knows that the rate of transformation has continually accelerated within the media business. In fact, as Philipp and I would discuss onstage the following day, history is an insufficient guide for understanding the leveling power of our current reorientation in the era of artificial intelligence. It’s a topic that Julia Alexander also explored luminously in Puck this week. Call My Agentic!, her masterstroke on the A.I.-laden revolutions descending on the publishing world, is required reading for everyone in the media game.

As Ben and I caught up, we were deeply honest about the shifts that have roiled our industry—some predictable, but many not. We were candid about some misadventures, upfront about incorrect hypotheses, and awestruck about the rate of change. Beyond Silicon Valley, however, few industries have shape-shifted more within Puck’s five-year lifespan than Hollywood. Almost exactly a half-decade ago, our company effectively took its first step when my partner Matt Belloni sent out the very first issue of his industry-defining newsletter, What I’m Hearing, on May 20, 2021. Around that time, a largely unknown executive named David Zaslav had just announced his intention to take over WarnerMedia, the historic core of media assets then owned by AT&T. Five years later, of course, Zaz is selling it all off to the Ellisons for $111 billion. Least predictably of all, he’s also become a de minimis investor in Puck through an acquisition we made last year.

To capture the sheer magnitude of the changes in Hollywood, Matt recently offered a retrospective of sorts. What I’ve Heard: Five Years of Hollywood Disruption is an extraordinary recap, told by the executives and agents who lived through the remaking of the modern entertainment business—for better or worse. It’s imbued with Matt’s characteristically brilliant insights and deep relationships, and it really has become the story of our time. I urge you to curl up with it during this long weekend. After all, the only certainty, in both media and entertainment, is that the next five years will be even more unpredictable.

Have a great long weekend,
Jon

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