Licht’s Deck Chairs

Happy Friday, I’m Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email on the inner workings of American media—and, occasionally, the gossip du jour among the executives and high-power insiders who run this industry. Tonight, we take stock of Chris Licht’s what’s-old-is-new-again CNN, Eddy Cue’s edge in the fight for NFL Sunday Ticket, and the story everyone in my world really wants to talk about: Ari Emanuel’s Adonis-like abdomen.

P.S. As a reminder, you’re receiving the free version of In The Room at . For full access to Puck, and to each of my colleagues, click to subscribe here.

LEARN MORE

The Tao of Ari’s Abs & Licht’s Deck Chairs

Notes on the yacht-hosing photo of our age, the latest dish on Apple’s battle with Amazon over N.F.L. rights, and the Chris Licht narrative shift.

DYLAN BYERS

“What is Ari’s diet!?” This is a question, offered without sarcasm or irony, that has been raised in at least half a dozen different conversations that I’ve had this week, in Los Angeles and New York, with Ari Emanuel’s fellow Hollywood executives, rival agents, various on-air talents and P.R. heavies. It’s a reference, of course, to the now-famous photos of the superagent-cum-media mogul hosing down Elon Musk aboard his yacht in Mykonos, first published by TMZ. As I quickly learned, the thesis I put forward earlier this week—that there really wasn’t all that much news for a media reporter to cover in these dog days of summer, when everyone seemed to be off in some other time zone—turned out to be utterly false: there was something the media establishment was talking about, obsessively, and it was Ari’s Adonis-like abdomen.

To the degree there was any real news value in those photos—there wasn’t—it came from simply knowing where Elon was and what he was up to on the heels of his decision to abort his highly-publicized Twitter takeover. (Alas, a Delaware court may decide in a couple months that he can’t walk away so easily.) But while the general, online public was repurposing the Tesla C.E.O.’s very pale, bulldog-like physique into a thousand memes, the industry insiders who have been on yachts with Ari, or aspire to be on yachts with Ari, or aspire to be represented by Ari—or at the very least aspire to be at the same private function as Ari—were very much focused on the 61-year-old man with washboard abs and zero ounces of body fat, and asking themselves: how does he do it?...

SUBSCRIBE TO CONTINUE

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT