Apr 9, 2026

Welcome back to What I’m Hearing, crossing my fingers that everyone at Coachella gets rained on this weekend, which apparently has only happened once (in 2012). And speaking of improbable occurrences, tonight in New York, Lorne Michaels, who famously never reads or watches anything about himself, actually sat through the entire premiere of the documentary Lorne, for which he granted filmmaker Morgan Neville access to his inner circle and two years’ worth of SNL shows. Congrats to Neville for achieving the impossible.

Anyway, tonight, Disney and Bob Iger take their war on an unflattering book to a somewhat embarrassing new front. Plus: How CAA poached Greta Gerwig from UTA, the Cannes lineup flops, and real pushback (finally!) to David Zaslav’s insane pay package.

💫💫 Event P.S.A.s: Stories of the Season is back! Puck’s big Emmys event is set for May 5 in Hollywood. It’s invite-only, but readers who are members of the TV Academy and/or industry guilds can attend by emailing Fritz@puck.news. I’ll announce participants in the lead-up, starting today with our stand-up comics panel, featuring the hilarious Chris Fleming, Robby Hoffman, and Atsuko Okatsuka, and moderated by me.

Also…: I’ll be at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on April 25. Puck is throwing a preparty event called the Puck Penthouse, which is sponsored by Amazon, not a 1980s porno magazine. It’s also invite-only (not quite sure how I got on the list), but let me know if you’re in D.C. and in formalwear and I’ll do my best.

Mentioned in this issue: Bob Iger, Greta Gerwig, Sydney Sweeney, Bryan Lourd, Charles Harder, Ira Sachs, Steven Spielberg, Mike Schur, David Zaslav, Ted Sarandos, Thierry Frémaux, Pedro Almodóvar, Chris Miller, Darren Walker, David Geffen, Melania Trump, Jacob Elordi, Noah Baumbach, Luca Guadagnino, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Casey Bloys, George Stephanopoulos, Michael Eisner, Barry Diller, Zendaya, Josh D’Amaro, Harvey Weinstein, Pawel Pawlikowski, Jeremy Barber, Mike De Luca, Amy Pascal, Tom Cruise, Phil Lord, J.J. Abrams, Robbie Whelan, James B. Stewart, Hulk Hogan, Bob Chapek, Dan Schwerin, Rupert Murdoch, and… Stormy Daniels.

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Let’s begin…

Thursday Thoughts…

Why Hollywood is ghosting Cannes: Yikes at that Cannes Film Festival lineup, right? Zero Hollywood presence and only one U.S. filmmaker (Ira Sachs, we’re all counting on you!). Even five years ago, Cannes veterans Spielberg (Disclosure Day) and Pixar (Toy Story 5) would have considered the Croisette. But the damage done in recent years—to, say, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Elemental, respectively—was real, and even indies like Eddington (A24) took hits from public scrutiny last year. In the social media age, it’s just not worth it for studios to risk their $100 million rollouts on the snobby international critics, idiotic standing ovation stopwatches, and those politically charged press conferences—no matter how much the talent wants a splashy premiere.

Festival director Thierry Frémaux is spinning this as a focus on global auteurs like Pedro Almodóvar and Pawel Pawlikowski, but come on. Even if the Oscars are rewarding more foreign-language films from Cannes, Thierry knows the cachet of the world’s most famous red carpet still depends on U.S. movies and, more importantly, movie stars. It’s not just a Cannes problem—let’s see if Warner Bros. can convince Alejandro G. Iñárritu to withhold October’s Digger from the fall festivals and instead open it like a Tom Cruise movie. But for Frémaux, if the Hollywood chill continues, he’s gonna have to suck it up and—gasp!—invite Netflix back to Cannes.
Zaz’s “problematic” pay pushback: Unfortunately for our guy David Zaslav, outrage seems to be growing over his potential $886 million golden parachute for flipping Warner Bros. Discovery to Paramount. (I know… how can such a C.E.O. windfall be bad if Zaz’s buddies David Geffen and Barry Diller think he’s a genius?) Today the influential ISS proxy firm recommended that shareholders back the WarnerMount deal but not Zaslav’s “problematic” and “extraordinary” pay, particularly the $335 million in so-called “tax gross-ups” that are “inconsistent with common market practice.”

Honestly, how dare they question Zaz and his handpicked board? Didn’t they see him dressed down in casual, non-billionaire blue jeans on Tuesday at the Euphoria premiere? The April 23 shareholder vote will be merely advisory on compensation—so Zaz, as he has in the past, will likely extend his middle finger to those whiny shareholders and abscond with the hundreds of millions. But if the noise gets loud enough, boards sometimes pay attention, so there’s two weeks left for constructive feedback from people like Mike Schur, exec producer of HBO Max’s Hacks, who today called Zaz an “absolute vacuum cleaner, sucking cash out of the company while leaving its creative teams and executives begging for scraps.” (Disclosure: Through a recent acquisition, Zaslav is a de minimis investor in Puck.)
Speaking of the ‘Euphoria’ premiere…: Congrats to Zendaya for showing up an hour late on Tuesday, ensuring she would be considered the grand finale on the red carpet and far more important than Sydney Sweeney, Jacob Elordi, and the rest of her co-stars (and also ensuring there would be no full-cast photo from the event). A-level power move.
How long until free? This long…: Next week’s CinemaCon conference is certain to obsess over the windows between movies in theaters and on subscription streaming services. But increasingly, major studio titles are licensed to free services, where they run with ads, and according to new data from Reelgood, the “time to free” diverges wildly depending on the studio…

Greta and the science of the CAA poach: Why would one of the hottest directors in town fire the agent that helped get her there? Back in September, when CAA’s Bryan Lourd signed Noah Baumbach after two decades at UTA, I noted “the ultimate prize is likely Baumbach’s partner in life and sometimes work, Greta Gerwig.” Cut to Tuesday, when CAA announced that yes, the A-list Barbie and Narnia director is now a client. No surprise: Gerwig has been a Lourd project for years now, and CAA often goes through the spouses.

Baumbach, they determined during the Barbie hoopla, had soured on UTA’s Jeremy Barber and was gettable. So all of a sudden Baumbach is a top priority—personal attention from Lourd; surrounded by CAA foot soldiers at awards season events and film festivals and Chanel dinners; A-level actor clients dangled for his movies; subtle hints at all the things he could be doing if he had better representation. Then, once Baumbach jumps, the dynamic between Gerwig and Barber, her agent of 18 years, changes, and it’s only a matter of time before the bigger fish joins.

I’m not sure to what extent this happened here, but Lourd often enlists those around the talent: There’s the implicit (or sometimes explicit) horsetrading that goes on among the lawyers and managers and business managers and even publicists who share other clients. Mike De Luca at Warner Bros., who oversaw the Barbie release, is a longtime Lourd quasi-client and evangelist. Producer Amy Pascal, who often works with Gerwig, including on the upcoming Narnia, is such a big Lourd friend and advocate that one agent told me this week if Pascal’s on a movie with a vulnerable client, “start the stopwatch.” (To wit: Luca Guadagnino moved from WME to CAA shortly after wrapping Challengers with Pascal, and at last month’s Producers Guild Awards, Gerwig sat not at the UTA table but at a better table with Lourd and Pascal, whom Gerwig was introducing onstage.) Why would Amy care? I think that even for big producers and executives, it feels good when the town’s most powerful agent owes you something.

Anyway, Barber probably didn’t do himself any favors, and for many talents, the allure of being handled by the biggest and most influential agency—and especially the guy who runs that agency—is overwhelming. Everyone’s telling them they’re the best, why shouldn’t they be represented by the best? It doesn’t often work out that way, of course, but again… the allure, and Lourd constantly projects himself as the center of the Hollywood universe. Even tonight, he was hosting a reception at his house for Darren Walker, the former head of the Ford Foundation and new president of management-production firm Anonymous Content, with a guest list that included Anonymous owner Laurene Powell Jobs, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, HBO’s Casey Bloys, Sony’s Ravi Ahuja, and filmmakers J.J. Abrams and Greg Berlanti. No disrespect, but Casey and Ted aren’t showing up for a Thursday night reception at Jeremy Barber’s house. At the same time, I’m sure CAA’s footsoldiers are currently busy targeting Project Hail Mary’s Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who now become UTA’s top filmmaker clients. And the perpetual courtship continues…
Box office over/under: Universal’s rom-com You, Me & Tuscany has softened a bit to about $12 million in the tracking, so I’ll take the under.

Now to a media exec’s covert war on media…

Bob Iger vs. the Bob Iger Book

For a supposed press champion, the former Disney C.E.O. has thin skin. And with the looming publication of an unauthorized biography, he and the Mouse House are playing offense with a surprising lawyer who has repped Trump, Melania, and Harvey Weinstein. Quite the client company…

Matthew Belloni

Just how concerned is Bob Iger about an upcoming, unauthorized book? I’m told Disney has hired pitbull anti-media litigator Charles Harder—yes, that Charles Harder—to push back on author Robbie Whelan’s tome, which I first revealed back in 2023 with the working title The House of Mouse: Bob Iger and the Fight for the Soul of Disney.

In recent weeks, Harder has sent multiple threatening letters to publisher Harper Collins, seeking information about the book’s contents and slamming Whelan, a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter, as a supposedly biased journalist committing a hit job on Iger and the company. In the letters, Disney points to previous negative coverage by Whelan, fishes for clues as to what is being included, and demands sufficient time to “fact check” the book, which has been positioned in the publishing world as a thorough and unvarnished portrait of one of the most famous C.E.O.s of the past 50 years, including his abrupt Disney exit as the pandemic began in 2020 and his return to power less than two years later. Since even before its announcement, the Whelan book has been a hot topic at Disney, which has refused to participate at all.

Harder’s client is technically Disney, not Iger himself, though the letter campaign started before Iger handed the C.E.O. title to Josh D’Amaro last month (he’s still on the company’s board and a “senior advisor” until the end of the year), and Iger is said to be a driving force behind what certainly smells like a campaign of intimidation. Disney and Whelan declined to comment, and Harper Collins didn’t return my email.

It’s funny: Iger, despite more than two decades overseeing journalism organizations at ABC News and ESPN, is famously thin-skinned about how he’s portrayed in the media, and he hasn’t been afraid to lash out at outlets that cross him. Remember back in 2017, when Disney banned the L.A. Times from movie screenings as punishment for tough reporting on the company’s dealings with the city of Anaheim? Iger also likely remembers how much his predecessor, Michael Eisner, hated the classic James B. Stewart book Disney War in 2005, and how Eisner was cast as a villain of sorts. It certainly impacted Eisner’s legacy, at least among those who devour books about the media business, meaning Iger’s peers.

The Iger Files

According to multiple sources, Iger has repeatedly expressed concern about the potential contents of the book to others at Disney. Many at the company believe Whelan’s sources include Iger’s C.E.O. successor Bob Chapek, whom Iger eventually replaced, as well as others who left Disney and may be disgruntled. Harder, they likely hope, can kill aspects of the book, particularly anything potentially unflattering about Iger. (I’m not revealing what I’ve heard about the book’s contents because I haven’t independently reported it out myself.)

And yes, as I mentioned, Disney’s lawyer is the same Charles Harder who famously defended Donald Trump in the defamation suit by porn star Stormy Daniels. Harder and his very Trumpy-sounding law firm, Harder Stonerock (that’s not a joke… they should’ve just called it Giant Boner LLP), has handled various defamation matters for Trump’s campaign and Melania Trump against the Daily Mail. Team Trump likes Harder so much, they made the L.A.-based lawyer a “U.S. Special Envoy for Best Future Generations,” which sounds like a fake title or a Scientology initiative but is apparently a real thing. Harder worked for Harvey Weinstein at the outset of the mogul’s downfall (he actually sued Harvey for $180,000 in unpaid legal fees), and was on Hulk Hogan’s team in the case that brought down Gawker.

Quite the client company for Disney and Iger, who has always positioned himself as a press-freedom advocate. Iger’s name is on the ABC News building in New York, and his wife, Willow Bay, is dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (though Iger also signed off on the $16 million payoff to Trump to settle the dubious lawsuit over George Stephanopoulos’s comments about the E. Jean Carroll case). Iger is also writing a follow-up to his 2019 book, The Ride of a Lifetime, which was announced back in 2022 but was put on hold after he returned to Disney. Page Six reported a few months ago that former Hillary Clinton comms person Dan Schwerin is helping write it (I confirmed that’s true), and a source close to Iger told me he sees his book as a chance to counter Whelan and other non-approved media narratives. That’s how I’d advise Iger, free-speech advocate, to counter a book he hates. Fight the speech not by trying to suppress it, but with more speech.

It’s also amusing that Whelan’s publisher is Harper Collins, which, like the Journal, is owned by the Murdochs. Iger, of course, spearheaded Disney’s $71 billion acquisition of most of Rupert’s Fox empire, and Iger once told CNBC that “we genuinely like each other and respect each other.” Now it’s Iger and Disney, not Murdoch and Fox News, who have jumped into bed with a right-wing Trump tool of media suppression, and with a Murdoch outlet as a target. Maybe the two moguls should again get together over a glass of Moraga Estate wine in Bel-Air to resolve this budding feud.

See you Monday,
Matt

Got a question, comment, complaint, or better names for Harder’s law firm? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

Puck founding partner Matt Belloni takes you inside the business of Hollywood, using exclusive reporting and insight to explain the backstories on everything from Marvel movies to the streaming wars.

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