Will Smithgate, CNN, & Warren Buffet’s Mystery

Good morning,

Happy Saturday and welcome back to The Backstory.

It was another incredible week here at Puck—Matt Belloni’s fascinating, behind-the-scenes reporting on the Will Smith controversy; Baratunde Thurston’s essay on slapgate; Dylan Byers’ notes on CNN’s streaming pivot; and William D. Cohan’s examination of a Warren Buffett mystery. Check out our best work, below, and stick around for the backstory on how it came together.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni explains what really went down offstage at the Oscars.
and…
Baratunde Thurston essays on the Will Smith tragedy.
and…
Eriq Gardner explicates the legal fallout of the controversy.

WASHINGTON:
Tina Nguyen uncovers Ron DeSantis’s dangerous political calculation.

WALL STREET:
William D. Cohan reveals a major Warren Buffet mystery.

SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer chats with tech’s public enemy No. 1.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers presages the future of CNN.

PODCASTS:
Will Pence knife Trump? Listen to The Powers that Be: Daily, hosted by Peter Hamby.
and…
What’s arguably the most disruptive mediaco in the U.S.? Check out The Town, Matt Belloni’s new show about what’s really going on in Hollywood.

Meanwhile, I also encourage you to take advantage of our article gifting feature. You can share our work with your colleagues, friends, and family. Subscribers are entitled to 5 article gifts per month.

The Slap

On Sunday evening, I was doing what you presumably were, too—thinking about the week ahead, bemoaning my busted bracket, sending some half-baked work notes to myself, and half-watching the Oscars when Will Smith sauntered onto the stage and open-handedly cold-cocked a shell-shocked Chris Rock. It was stunning, bewildering, horrifying and just, well, bizarre. I’d never doubted the veracity of the altercation for a second, but it was nevertheless confirmed for me shortly thereafter, as it probably was for you, via a group text thread that had surfaced a clip of the un-bleeped Australian telecast.

In moments like these, I tend to text Matt Belloni, Puck’s founding partner and Hollywood expert, to find out what’s really going on behind the scenes. On this evening, in fact, Matt was sitting in his tux inside the Dolby Theatre, both taking in the Academy Awards and also reporting on the events via Puck’s Twitter handle. As I was about to hit the blue up arrow on my iPhone, sending a message asking him for insight, I saw Matt’s latest tweet: “This is real. Stunned silence in the room. Assume Will Smith was bleeped but no one can believe what just happened.” And then, moments later: “I’ve never seen the #Oscars audience stunned like that, and I was here for the Moonligh/La La Land debacle.”

The Will Smith slap wasn’t just uncanny. It was also a powder keg moment spanning across the corridors of American power—Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. The episode’s entanglement in our zeitgeist is as profound as it is complex and illustrative of the way influence and opporunity work in our culture these days.

Here, after all, was arguably the world’s most successful movie star, who was nominated for his role in the film, King Richard, which was the signature prestige picture of the year for Warner Bros. and its sister streamer, HBO Max. And Warner and HBO Max are, of course, two of the most prized entertainment assets in David Zaslav’s Warner Bros Discovery roll-up, which will finally be traded on the Nasdaq in nine days, as Zaz tries to compete with the likes of Netflix and Disney+.

Meanwhile, Smith isn’t just an actor; he’s a cultural force of a historic nature—a multi-decades famous multi-hyphenate talent who has marketing deals with corporations across the Fortune 500, a groundbreaking actor who was invited by the Clintons to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom, was at least half-seriously granted permission by Obama to portray him in a biopic (“he’s got the ears,” he once said), and has already taken on the role of Muhammad Ali. Smith was about to win his first Oscar, and perhaps contend for another next year for Emancipation, Apple’s highly-vaunted release, which is currently in post-production.

Will Smith’s slap of Chris Rock had become a financial-political-tech Franz Ferdinand moment. Smith lost his dignity, many people lost respect for an icon, and many, many more lost money. As you scale the totem poles of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, Smith’s transgression reminded us, it’s all really just one world.

In these ways, and others, the Smith episode is a uniquely Puck story—it’s an event of immense shock and complexity that will reverberate for weeks and months and years to come. As usual, Puck’s stars rose immediately to the challenge of unearthing the private details of the story behind the story—the details only the true insiders knew about.

Shortly after leaving the Dolby Theatre, for instance, Matt taped an emergency episode of his newish podcast, The Town, a partnership with Spotify and The Ringer, which captured the uncertainty of the moment and laid out the transformative questions that would shape the Academy’s disciplinary response. He followed up with a hair-raising tick-tock chronicle of the events, filled with uncomfortable backstage details about how the slap played in the theater. And then followed that up with a second behind-the-scenes piece on how Hollywood’s culture of enablement lay at the root of the crisis.

On Monday afternoon, as we were headed back to Puck’s headquarters from a lunch welcoming our newest employee, ace media planner Julia Baldyga, executive editor Ben Landy and I got an email from Baratunde Thurston with a first draft of a piece that he’d composed first thing that morning, after meditating on The Slap and his knowledge of Smith’s own experience with domestic violence as a young man.

Ben and I walked down 9th Avenue with our noses in our phones, oblivious to traffic and bicyclists. Bratunde had the guts to articulate the real agony of the saga, and he did it with utter grace. If you read anything this weekend, I’d turn your attention to Will Smith’s Tragic Lesson. Actually, make it a twofer. I’d also refer you to Eriq Gardner’s acerbic and realpolitik piece on the legal questions raised by the imbroglio: The Will Smith Legal Fallout.

As ever, these pieces, among others, are representative of the sort of work you can only find at Puck. Thanks for your support.

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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