Good morning,

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

It was yet another incredible week: Matt Belloni contemplated the book value of Zaz’s treasure chest; Abby Livingston previewed the Capitol Hill denizens headed to K Street; Lauren Sherman revealed the Chanel succession frontrunner; John Heilemann reported on the Democrats’ private conversation post-D.N.C.; Dylan Byers identified CNN’s secret Trump whisperer; Eriq Gardner dug into a pesky Disney-Elon Musk lawsuit; Tara Palmeri had a very candid chat with G.O.P. svengali Jeff Roe; Rachel Strugatz got to the bottom of a Givenchy scandal; Peter Hamby analyzed some proprietary Kamala crosstabs; Julia Ioffe offered the view from Russia on the Telegram founder’s arrest in France; Bill Cohan analyzed the Bronfman Paramount bid collapse; John Ourand chatted with ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro; and Marion Maneker got the readout from a legendary gallerist.

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

ART MARKET:
Marion Maneker trades stories with a gallery legend.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni imagines a hypothetical Zaz fire sale.
and…
Scott Mendelson runs the numbers on Amazon’s stewardship of MGM.

SILICON VALLEY:
Eriq Gardner has the latest on a mercenary Elon Musk lawsuit.

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan chats up a few Paramount dealmakers about the Bronfman bid collapse.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers uncovers CNN’s odd-couple secret weapons.
and…
John Ourand previews an MLB local rights bidding war.

WASHINGTON:
John Heilemann relays Democratic insiders’ private conversations about Harris, while Abby Livingston polls K Streeters on their top 2025 recruits from the Hill.
and…
Tara Palmeri has an incredibly candid chat with G.O.P. mega-consultant Jeff Roe, and Peter Hamby parses the latest Echelon-Puck poll.
meanwhile…
Julia Ioffe gets the readout from the Kremlin on Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s arrest.

PODCASTS:
🚨 John Ourand debuts his new show, The Varsity, with a frank, long-form conversation with Peyton Manning about his media success, Brady & Belichick, N.I.L., and more.
and…
John Heilemann and comedian Alex Edelman discuss the comedy of politics on Impolitic.
and…
Matt and Wells Fargo’s Steven Cahall lay out Zaz’s financial options on The Town.
and…
Tara and Jeff Roe get into the DeSantis of it all on Somebody’s Gotta Win.
and…
Lauren and Edie Parker founder Brett Heyman enjoy high times on Fashion People.
and…
Peter and Dylan recount CNN’s trials and triumphs on The Powers That Be.

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I was Zooming on the big screen with a sports media C.E.O. I’ll admit that it was a slightly agenda-less conversation—we’d been put in touch by a mutual pal and were just riffing about our businesses, swapping tales from our various startup experiences. Then, totally unprompted, he unfurled a long soliloquy about his obsessive fandom for my partner John Ourand, author of Puck’s essential private email on the sports media sector, The Varsity. And when I say “soliloquy,” I mean like, it was a Shakespearean soliloquy—the guy laid it on thick but also entirely sincerely.

I’m never surprised when a friend or associate professes their fealty to one of my partners. Great writers, after all, are in the connection business, and one of the most virtuous evolutions in the industry is that they’re no longer forced to bury their personalities or interests or natural styles. Indeed, we’re all the sum of our experiences and quirks, and loyal readers truly want to know the backstory of the people creating the work they consume. Maybe this is an invitation into my own psychology as a process-oriented character, but I inevitably find the journey to be as compelling as the destination. This is as true in journalism as it is in business—and particularly relevant to Puck, where we transparently fuse these realms.

But Ourand enthusiasts got a little extra treat this week. On Wednesday, John launched his podcast, also artfully titled The Varsity, with a fabulous and extraordinarily introspective conversation with Peyton Manning, the Hall of Fame quarterback turned fledgling media mogul. Yes, yes, the broader culture recognizes that Manning has leveraged his on-field stardom to become the emcee of the popular ManningCast and the producer of unscripted series, such as Quarterback. But Omaha Productions, the company that he runs with Jamie Horowitz, secured a $400+ million valuation last year through an investment from Peter Chernin’s North Road. Manning and Horowitz have created a perfectly timed production company to feed the streaming industry’s ravenous appetite for sports and sports-adjacent content.

On the inaugural episode of The Varsity, Manning recounts the Omaha origin story and surveys the broader media landscape—our unbridled obsession here at Puck. He also offers a little insight into Tom Brady’s post-playing career and observations on the rapid monetization of college football. As you might expect of any Puck product, Manning talks to John like a peer. I think you’ll love the show, and I behoove you to check it out over the long weekend.

The Varsity is going to drop into your feeds every Wednesday and Sunday. Tomorrow, in fact, John will be releasing his equally intimate conversation with Jimmy Pitaro, the well-liked chairman of ESPN and one of the finalists in the bake-off to replace Bob Iger as C.E.O. of Disney. (My two cents: I think the Disney board will keep Pitaro at ESPN to preserve their optionality of perhaps, one day, spinning it off with some debt from the mothership. And since we’re on the topic, I also think entertainment co-chair Dana Walden is slightly ahead of parks tsar Josh D’Amaro in the race to succeed Iger—but funny things can and often do happen on the way to the forum. You can read about the latest on the Disney succession saga in Dylan Byers’ excellent piece, The Burbank Campaign.)

I won’t give away the goods of the conversation, but I was truly compelled by Pitaro’s level of honesty about the sweeping evolution in their business. Regardless of what the future holds for Bristol, ESPN’s strategy will be studied in business schools for years to come. Pitaro needs to strike a nearly impossible balance between defending his linear business and investing aggressively in streaming. (A recent court injunction to delay Venu, his screwy joint venture with Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery, may turn out to be a blessing in disguise…)

Simultaneously, he has to perform some almost otherworldly P&L gymnastics—figuring out how to maximize profits while cutting operating expenses and accounting for the extraordinary price tag of live sports in his COGS. As with Zaz or Will Lewis or Mark Thompson, or Iger himself, the leitmotif of this age’s media executives has become capital optimization. That may not be the seduction that led them to pursue their varying forms of moguldom, but it is indeed the story of our time and precisely what you should expect from Puck—and, of course, The Varsity.

Have a great long weekend,

Jon