Hollywood Hand Jobs
I’ve never seen Hollywood so orgasmic as during today’s simultaneous climaxing in Beverly Hills, Burbank and Century City offices over the sexy new iPhone. (Quick, buy stock in Kleenex.) Now, all Steve Jobs needs to do is make a very-limited-edition line so the celebs can come in their Oscar swag bags. That said, what does Jobs’ techno toy mean for the entertainment industry? You feel the horniness in your gut: This is finally the Perfect 10 of new media too-cool-for-the-room platforms that the public has been aching for. This is the perfect call girl that does everything you want: movies, TV, e-mail, tunes, contacts, the works. This will make you crazed enough to switch to AT&T’s Cingular even if the service sucks, just so you can run your fingers up and down that sleek, oxymoronic 3.5-inch widescreen display. And, therefore, this is finally what Hollywood can start to monetize if everyone jumps on its bones early enough, the way Disney’s Bob Iger did in September and Paramount’s Brad Grey did on Tuesday. The debut of Paramount’s School of Rock, Zoolander, Chinatown, the first six Star Trek pics and more than 100 more for purchasing and downloading on the iTunes Store for $9.99 is a shrewd move. After all, Disney was first because of the Pixar connection. But, clearly, Viacom’s Grey doesn’t want to end up like Tom Freston, who was ousted by parent company Viacom geezer-in-charge Sumner Redstone for failing to embrace all aspects of new media. (Freston was fired in September for failing to buy MySpace.)
Every other major studio: What in the world are you waiting for?
By now, iTunes is the largest online video store in the world, with more than 1.3 million full-length films and 50 million TV episodes sold to date. At December’s UBS Global Media Conference, NBC Universal TV Group’s Jeff Zucker boasted that, while the major networks are losing viewers, his company will end 2006 with as much as $400 million in revenue from its digital operations — and that’s expected to soar to $1 billion by 2009. He explained how: “The week after a new prime-time hit show like Heroesis on NBC, it repeats twice on the Sci-Fi Channel. The next morning, it airs on NBC.com. It plays there free with advertising. Then, it’s available for sell-through on iTunes.”
As for the hardware, just think how Sony and Motorola and Palm have surrendered to Apple. (Not to mention Microsoft, which only recently came out with its own pathetic iPod clone, Zune.) Sure, there’ll always be a business market for Crackberries and Windows-based Treos. But the iPhone will flourish even as iPod sales continue to decline. The two versions, 4 gigabytes for $499 and 8 gigabytes for $599, go on sale in June, as does a new Bluetooth wireless headset in the shape of a slash mark, and a new pair of iPod-like earbuds with integrated microphone.
Hey, even a staunch supporter of Sarbanes-Oxley corporate regulation like me can overlook a little stock-options backdating by Jobs just as long as his toys keep coming, and coming, and coming.
Lipstick Jungle? Or Just a Kiss-Off?
With the sanitized version of HBO’s Sex and the City successfully launched in syndication, the networks are all hot and bothered to develop their own versions in a kind of kiss-off competition. ABC has ordered next-generation Cashmere Mafia from Sex and the City and Melrose Place creator-producer Darren Star with Working Girl writer Kevin Wade. And ABC has picked up Women’s Murder Club, with a logline of “CSI meets Sex and the City” to be directed by Brett Ratner (who changes girlfriends more often than he changes underwear). But the most titillating is NBC’s in-house adaptation — finally, after a false start last year — of Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell’s 2005 book Lipstick Jungle.
To quote one reviewer, Bushnell’s Lipstick Jungle picks up where Sex and the City (adapted from Bushnell’s New York Observer column of the same name) left off: “In the money-soaked, power-hungry, beauty-obsessed jungle that is New York City. This time around, the ladies are a bit older, a lot richer, but not particularly wiser nor more endearing than Bushnell’s earlier heroines.” There are three women this time, all high on “New York’s 50 Most Powerful Women” list: Nico is editor in chief of Bonfire magazine, Wendy is president of Paradour Pictures, and Victory is a fashion designer. There are new boardroom tales, but also the same racy bedroom antics and gender-flipping roles. NBC thinks this show about 40-somethings could be its answer to ABC’s Desperate Housewives, which is plot-impotent this season.
Hopefully, Bushnell’s dollars for the new hourlong comedy will be better than her HBO deal. Everyone thinks she made a mint off Sex and the City, but Bushnell herself has confirmed she cashed out long before the series took off, in the ratings and otherwise. Lore has it that Bushnell sold the rights to Sex and the City producer Star for a mere $60,000 way back in 1996 because she wanted to redecorate her NYC apartment (though her subsequent books and other projects have reportedly earned her millions). Interesting that, at one point, Star tried to buy the TV rights to Lipstick Jungle too, but the deal went south. Now, that’s another kind of kiss-off.
