Good evening, I'm Matt Belloni.

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Thursday Thought…

Yes, it was a sleazy move for Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed’s lawyers to go on Today and float that someone might have “sabotaged” the gun that killed Halyna Hutchins. It also was likely a smart move, sowing reasonable doubt and directing the finger-pointing elsewhere at a time when the key question—How did the live bullet get in the gun?—likely won’t be answered for months, if ever.  

Zazmania Takes Over Hollywood as the Warner-Discovery Plot Thickens

He's having dinner with Ari and Bryan, holing up at the Polo Lounge, and meeting with Jason Kilar's direct reports. As he works on the $43 billion Warner-Discovery combination, David Zaslav seems to be all over town, and the subject of an endless game of Telephone... if Biden's antitrust enforcers don't rain on the victory parade.

Talk to people at Warner Bros. or HBO these days and invariably they’ll ask: So… what are you hearing from Discovery? And vice versa: What’s the buzz at Warners? There’s a reason for that, of course. As AT&T’s $43 billion punt of WarnerMedia to Discovery sails toward a possible closing date in mid-2022, everyone—top to bottom, but especially at the top—is looking for an angle.

It’s easy to see why. A merger of two complementary media behemoths under Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav will necessarily produce winners and losers, elevated leaders and discarded also-rans, new priorities and tossed-off strategies. Thanks to regulatory rules, the two sides aren’t allowed to discuss non-public details of their respective businesses with each other. The result—like in many combinations of this scope, but exacerbated because these are all Hollywood people—has been a prolonged game of bicoastal Telephone where even the top executives in New York, Silver Spring, and Burbank are communicating through conduits, talking to everyone about their future colleagues. Everyone, bizarrely, except each other.

It’s not that Zaslav hasn’t been feeling out the WarnerMedia people. He’s actually done multiple sit-downs with outgoing C.E.O. Jason Kilar’s direct reports, including news and sports leader (and old Zaz pal) Jeff Zucker and studios and networks boss Ann Sarnoff; and, over the past few weeks, her direct reports, including HBO’s Casey Bloys, Warners film chief Toby Emmerich and TV leader Channing Dungey. Zaslav sat next to Sarnoff at the big Succession premiere last month in New York—an event, incidentally, that AT&T C.E.O. John Stankey was slated to attend but pulled out of at the last minute. For Stankey, the end of his disastrous media foray can’t come soon enough (though AT&T shareholders will still own shares of the new entity).  

Those Zaslav meetings have just been general get-to-know-you chats, I’m told, and at least one person I spoke to about the sit-down couldn’t exactly get a read on his intentions. That’s by design, and people at WarnerMedia nonetheless seem cautiously excited about a leader who doesn’t work at a phone company, but the lack of specific communication has left an information void that has been filled by the usual odd gossip and power moves. Endeavor’s Ari Emanuel and CAA’s Bryan Lourd seem to be jockeying to position themselves as Zaslav’s consigliere in Los Angeles, hosting parties to better acquaint the media C.E.O. most associated with cheap reality shlock and D.I.Y. programming with the real talent that fuels the Warner businesses. Lourd’s private dinner at his Beverly Hills home last week drew Warren Beatty, Chris Hemsworth, Greg Berlanti, the Russo brothers, Legendary’s Mary Parent, Taika Waititi, Netflix’s Tendo Nagenda, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alejandro Inarritu, and Sean Penn—but, interestingly, no Warners executives...

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