Welcome back to What I’m Hearing.

Programming note: This week on The Town: I broke down Michael B. Jordan’s career trajectory with his manager, Phil Sun, and I celebrate the show’s one-year anniversary by revisiting my predictions. (For those keeping score, I’ve apparently got a 58 percent correct rate, higher on box office over/unders, including this weekend’s Shazam 2 debacle.)

Discussed in this issue: Jeff Bezos, Ian Metrose, Ben Affleck, Bob Bakish, Nancy Meyers, Taylor Swift, Matt Goldberg, A.O. Scott, Law Roach, and Ron Meyer’s “hostage video”...

But first…

Runner up: Farhad Massoudi, the Tubi C.E.O., whose Fox-owned free streamer earned its first appearance on Nielsen’s monthly Gauge ranking of top 10 most viewed services, leapfrogging rival Pluto TV.

Related fun fact: The most-viewed show on streaming last month, per Nielsen, was not The Last of Us (HBO linear isn’t counted) or You; it was New Amsterdam, an NBC medical drama that can be found on Netflix and Peacock and just concluded after five seasons. Why, again, was this show canceled?

Should an employee quit when asked to do something unethical? We can argue the ethics and obligations there, but it seems Metrose’s main flaw was having Moonves and his chief communications executive, Gil Schwartz, as bosses, and perhaps going to a meeting he should’ve passed on attending. If that’s the standard, who else should step down?

On courting Michael Jordan for his blessing on a golf course:
“I look at golf like meth. They have better teeth, but it doesn’t seem like people ever come out of that. Once they start golfing, you just don’t ever see them again.”

On his word game text chain with Matt Damon, Bradley Cooper and Jason Bateman:
“You have to do the Wordle, the Quordle and the Octordle, and add up your score, and then whoever gets the lowest score wins for the day.”

On Justice League:
“You could teach a seminar on all the reasons why this is how not to do it.”

On first-look directing deals:
“It’s a horrendous deal. You’re restricting yourself in unimaginably disastrous ways for a few shiny trinkets.”

On his parallel parking skills:
“Dude, you know how many people can get in that spot? That was world-class Boston finesse.”

Over salads on the rooftop of the Waldorf, I expected Sanchez to name-drop and list the vague busy-making projects of a typical mogul spouse. There was some of that, and she’s definitely a piece of work in the over-the-top Beverly Hills striver sense of the phrase. But Sanchez had actually started a real business in a male-dominated field and had collaborated with filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Catherine Hardwicke. She’d partnered with the prolific billionaire producer-financier Dan Friedkin on an unscripted company, and she was making commercials and other complex video projects for, among others, the Blue Origin aerospace company, owned by Jeff Bezos.

So, no, I wasn’t surprised when Sanchez and Bezos ended up getting together about a year after our lunch. Nor was I shocked to see that WSJ, the Wall Street Journal’s magazine, recently devoted about 4,000 words to Sanchez—her upcoming all-female mission to outer space, her children’s book, and, interestingly, her new production company, Adventure & Fellowship. That last entity piqued my interest because, in addition to the Bezos promo films and charity spots, she said she wants to fund and develop scripted projects. The enterprising companion of one of the world’s richest men (and a driving force behind Amazon Prime Video) could be a significant Hollywood player if she wants—or at the very least a ripe source of dumb money in a challenged film economy. “We’re focusing on great stories,” Sanchez told WSJ. “They can be movies, commercials, documentaries.”

What Sanchez didn’t mention, and what I learned this past week from chatting with people in her world, is that she’s already secretly making her first scripted film—or at least trying to make it. The experience has been quite the trial by fire. The Golden Door is a female-driven psychological thriller starring Daniella Kertesz (World War Z) and Megalyn Echikunwoke (Night School) that quietly shot in Topanga last summer. No trade announcements, no paparazzi. Sanchez conceived the low-budget project with Matt Goldberg, who works for Pete Berg’s Film 45 and has collaborated with her on unscripted projects like Shatner in Space, a synergistic Amazon special that chronicled William Shatner’s voyage on a Blue Origin rocket. Sanchez and Goldberg recruited the small-scale production company Big Indie, lead producer Dwjuan Fox, and line producer Ryan Gibson, found a script by Dreux Moreland and Hannah Mescon, and hired a filmmaker, Kellie Madison, who’d worked on several low-budget movies, including directing the recent sequel Never Back Down: Revolt.

A few people close to the production told me that Sanchez, who self-financed the couple-million-dollar budget, was an infrequent—and to some, unwelcome—presence on set. But she and Bezos did show up, her more than him, and his teen daughter was an intern on the project and was even given a small role in the film. (I’m not mentioning the daughter’s name because, amazingly, Team Bezos has managed to keep it off the internet… even though I’m guessing that if her two-line cameo stays in Golden Door, and the film is ultimately finished and released, she will likely be a primary reason people will watch it.)

Anyway, you can see where this is going: The 20-day shoot wasn’t exactly as smooth as buying undies on Amazon.com. According to several sources, it was… a challenge, to say it nicely. The film’s first assistant director, director of photography, and script supervisor all quit during the shoot, either due to conflicts with the filmmaking team or the generally chaotic environment on set, depending on who you believe. (Sanchez, Bezos, Goldberg and Madison all declined to comment; Fox did not respond to my email.)

I don’t want to do the blind-quote back-and-forth that you often see in articles about problematic shoots. Suffice to say Sanchez didn’t make many friends by maintaining a relatively lavish trailer while others were sweltering, and by asking if she could land her private helicopter on the set while the cast and crew were worried about basic safety protocols and the craft services was apparently inedible. Goldberg’s former assistant, who took a production position on the project, became empowered to reign over the set and clashed with almost everyone, according to two sources. And after Bezos visited, Sanchez is said to have declared that the film needed a new twist—despite being more than a quarter done shooting—so she brought back the writers, and new scenes and changes to previously-shot scenes were drafted. That’s what led to several key crewmembers to throw up their hands and bail, these sources said. The project kinda spun out from there.

Madison turned in a director’s cut in November, and it didn’t have a lot of Sanchez’s changes, so just a few weeks ago, Madison was fired. (One crewmember joked that she was “freed from her misery.”) Sanchez and team are now looking to find another director to do additional shooting and recut the movie, but it’s not clear whether this project will ever be finished, let alone find a distributor.

Bezos, obviously, could help on that front, though Amazon is not currently involved at all in this project, and nobody I talked to there was even aware it exists. This certainly isn’t the first example of very rich people finding out that Hollywood filmmaking is not easy. Bezos himself, at the premiere of Amazon’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power last summer, joked about how happy he was that his efforts to meddle in the show were disregarded. “I need to thank you both for listening whenever it helped, but mostly I need to thank you for ignoring me at exactly the right times,” he announced to showrunners Patrick McKay and John D. Payne.

It doesn’t sound like anyone on the Golden Door set had the same kind of leverage to ignore Sanchez when they needed to ignore her. After all, despite this being her project, she was the inexperienced person on that set. I’m not trying to crap on her. Best case scenario, she finishes this movie and makes more. But hopefully some lessons were learned. I’m guessing they weren’t.

In related news, Mean Girls book author Rosalind Wiseman says she’s made only $400,000 on the franchise and that Paramount—shocker—claims the movie and musical are not yet in profits. Pro tip: Audit and sue! [NY Post]

Top stylist Law Roach “retired” with a cryptic message: “If this business was just about the clothes I would do it for the rest of my life but unfortunately it’s not!” How long until he starts naming names of the awful talent publicists who made his life miserable? [LA Times]

Writers Guild negotiations with the studios begin tomorrow, though nobody expects anything substantial to happen until riiiight before the May 1 deadline. [Bloomberg]

Did Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon steal the ideas in the recent Hulu limited series Welcome to Chippendales from a podcast called Welcome to Your Fantasy? The evidence is compelling. [NY Times]

A.O. Scott, abdicating his chief film critic throne at the Times after 23 years and 2,293 reviews, finds space in his send-off to defend his 2001 endorsement of Tom Green’s Freddie Got Fingered. [NY Times]

Ron Meyer indeed looks like he’s in a hostage video when appearing in the new Anthony Pellicano docuseries, as Kim Masters notes. [The Business]

Taylor Swift has amassed a real estate portfolio valued at $150 million. She’s 33. [WSJ]

“Cruise and [James] Cameron don’t owe you or the Academy shit. They both delivered huge hits and campaigned for them. If they don’t want to go to the dumb party, they shouldn’t go. I wouldn’t either. Maybe the Academy should focus on creating an evening that people actually want to attend?” –An actor

“These guys obviously have huge egos, and you can’t ignore the fact that as successful, aging white males, they are not used to having to suffer through anything that doesn’t center them. Sitting in the theater and celebrating Everything, Everywhere and Women Talking—like Steven Spielberg did!—not on your life.” –An executive

“You didn’t even mention how disrespectful Cruise was to [Paramount owner] Shari Redstone. I saw her at the Governors Ball, yet the guy she paid $100 million didn’t show up.” –Another producer

“We used to debate who will host the Oscars. Now it’s who will ghost the Oscars.” –An agent

“This is a great point (upfront deals disincentivizing talent from their best work and pricing everyone out of the market), but to me you also have to talk about marketing campaigns. Warners… will have to spend at least $40 million on a big fat campaign for this [Nancy Meyers] package. You can make the argument, and it’s a good one, that [Warners] has more revenue sources, but they aren’t getting a ‘discount’ unless they make the movie for under 9 figures.” –An executive

“Realigning incentives would make sense for everyone who’s trying to cut content costs to make streaming a profitable endeavor, while also going a long way with the issues the guilds have regarding pay. And we’d probably get better content out of it and shows that get an extra season or two to prove their value.” –An analyst

“Would Nancy’s budgets be questioned if she were a man?” –A non-industry reader

Have a great week,
Matt

Got a question, comment, complaint, or a good story involving Ben Affleck or Lauren Sanchez (preferably both)? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.