Nina Metz

🙃

‘Andor’ Creator Tony Gilroy Gives the Interview He Couldn’t During Its Release While promoting his cautionary tale about fascism, Disney asked Gilroy to refrain from using the word. Nine months after it aired its finale, the 'Star Wars' series feels scarily prescient.

"While promoting his cautionary tale about fascism, Disney asked Gilroy to refrain from using the word"

lololololol

My interpretation of that observation is that **the movie itself** (Fennell by extension) thinks the sex it's portraying is wildly transgressive

Or no?

Listen, I think AI is 👎👎👎 ... but I don't agree with your last point! I think the difference is adoption of the internet across industries was way more gradual so people just got used to it

But you can not even **apply** for a job in 2026, for example, without using the internet

(They sent the pitch 9 times in this email chain. NINE. At some point — I'd say starting with email No. 5 — it's just hostile behavior. How is this helping your client?)

It's one thing to be ambitious about getting press for your client. It's another to harass journalists by emailing the same pitch over and over and over despite no response

But hey, you wanna do your job badly ... knock yourself out

"If you just write back with a pass, we wont email ha ha"

Let's not pretend we're all not inundated with emails everyday. I don't have time to respond to the ones I'm not interested in ... especially when they are clearly part of a mass emailing

Publicists think it's cute to do this? Really??

Feeling bad for a TV actor whose PR team has sent out "just following up!" emails on a pitch I have no interest in to SINCE SEPTEMBER

No response after 3 followups IS a response

I now have to work *not* to have negative feelings about the actor as a result. Doing your client a real disservice!

Quick reminder that Substack recently sent out push notifications to random users promoting a literal Nazi blog that they host.

There's a reason why a lot of us don't share Substacks, or even visit sites hosted with them anymore.

Convincing people to engage with real-world outcomes as **completely normal** things to bet on is a great way to numb people to the impact of those outcomes

It's very: Why have a conscience at all? Who cares whether someone is hurt so long as you made the right prediction and therefore made $$

"News is a record of things that have happened ... But no news organization exists to predict the future. By definition, you cannot know the news before it happens"

Right! This is so deeply fucked

I think you mean NBC not Paramount lol!

His CBS show is ending in May — a budgetary decision according to Paramount; speculation about the company’s real motivations suggests otherwise. But perhaps he feels he has nothing to lose, so damn the torpedos.

“There Are So Many Real World Consequences That People Don’t Notice” | Friday Things Entertainment journalist Kristen Lopez on Hollywood’s favourite ableist tropes, how on-screen representations reflect what’s happening in the real world and her new book, Popcorn Disabilities .

I pitched a lot of places for interviews about POPCORN DISABILITIES but the one I wanted most was in my favorite newsletter, Friday Things. So I'm so happy that Stacy Lee Kong wanted to chat with me about representation, journalism, and more.

www.fridaythings.com/recent-posts...

Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus, researchers say A Stanford University team have tested their nasal spray vaccine in animals but still need to do human clinical trials.

'This [...] elicits a far broader response that is protective against not just the flu virus, not just the Covid virus, not just the common cold virus, but against virtually all viruses, and as many different bacteria as we've tested, and even allergens.'

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Andrew accused of watching young girl be 'tortured with electrical shocks' A FBI report alleges the former prince watched as a girl aged six to eight years old was 'tortured with electrical shocks' by Ghislaine Maxwell, with Andrew denying all wrongdoing

Will be interesting if a more reputable outlet tries to report this out because there is fundamentally no sourcing here

They are *always* making calculations so Hawke’s waving away of “jet-lagged drunk celebrities” is … 🙃

Seeing NPH doing commercials for gambling was it for me. He doesn’t need the money, it has no relevance to his career, and yet chooses to use his celebrity to promote it.

Fallon is the human form of capitulation. Meyers? Dunno how he’d react given similar circumstances. Tho also a product of Lorne Michaels, he has some intelligence and doesn’t feel so craven. They all play nice with their corporate masters but would he be like “fuck it” if the situation warranted? 🤷🏻‍♀️

The Berlinale, aka the Berlin International Film Festival, was in the news this week. Not because of the movies on the lineup. But because this year's jury president, the film director Wim Wenders ("Wings of Dire," “Buena Vista Social Club"), kicked things off by telling journalists that people who make films "have to stay out of politics." Echoing those sentiments, at least to a degree, were some of the actors also in attendance, including Neil Patrick Harris to Michelle Yeoh. This only intensified the perception that the fest's participants were told to avoid anything but promotional-focused soundbites.

It’s true that saying something meaningful about any number of real-world issues — there are so many to choose from — might come at a cost

But you can’t participate in a profession that prioritizes your voice, and then be appalled when people expect you to use it

buttondown.com/NinaWatchesE...

To pretend the entertainment industry is not affected by politics is to live in a fiction of one’s own making And why Stephen Colbert has more fortitude than most celebrities at the moment.

To pretend the entertainment industry is not affected by politics is to live in a fiction of one’s own making

… And why Stephen Colbert has more fortitude than most celebrities at the moment

This week’s newsletter

Gambling ruins people who don't even participate. That's the insidious part.

I mean … AI is appealing to studios precisely because they would like nothing better than to never have to deal with pesky human labor who unionize and advocate for themselves

Matthew McConaughey Predicts to Timothée Chalamet That AI Actors Will Crash the Oscars: ‘It’s Damn Sure Going to Infiltrate Our Category’ Matthew McConaughey predicts to Timothée Chalamet during a Variety and CNN town hall that AI actors will 'infiltrate' the Oscars in the future.

Chaser

“It’s coming. It’s already here,” he said, responding to a student’s question about AI. “Don’t deny it. It’s not going to be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea that, ‘No, this is wrong.’ It’s not gonna last. There’s too much money to be made, and it’s too productive”

ElevenLabs Welcomes Matthew McConaughey as New Investor

Shot

“McConaughey has been a part of ElevenLabs story for years – as an investor, early supporter, and now, as a customer”

(ElevenLabs “creates lifelike speech with our AI voice generator and voice agents platform”)

If you ever find yourself wondering how things like the Epstein story happened, consider the mid-level newspaper editor who admitted in a public judicial inquiry that he destroyed a woman’s life and drove her to suicide to try and impress Piers Morgan.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Inquiry brought up the case of Denholm Elliott's daughter - PAUL McMULLAN: Oh, yeah - BROOKE GLADSTONE: - which is one case that you truly do regret. PAUL McMULLAN: I do, yeah. After Denholm died, she hit rock bottom, was allegedly doing methadone. And although she had, you know, the half-million-pound flat that Denholm had bought her, she didn't have any money to get her ten-pound bag in the morning. So she'd get up and go begging at the tube station. Here was a young girl crying out to be helped, and she met a police officer who didn't help her but rang up the News of the World and asked for money because he couldn't believe that this is the same girl who'd walked down the red carpet behind Eddie Murphy with Denholm Elliott, you know.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you offered her 50 pounds - PAUL MCMULLAN: Yeah. BROOKE GLADSTONE: - if she would come to your place and have sex. So you led her into prostitution, which she wasn't in that space for. PAUL McMULLAN: No, indeed. But she was in such a bad place that someone offering her 50 pounds for sex. I mean, that's five bags.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So how do you justify that? Yes, she was a drug addict, yes, she was begging. Why push her that extra step? Why take pictures of her topless? PAUL McMULLAN: I was keen. It was in my first year. I wanted to impress Piers Morgan, who was my boss at the time, and just wanted to say, not only have I caught this girl begging, but l've got pictures of her topless and I've got her offering me sex for 50 quid. How great am I? BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is a pretty dehumanizing enterprise, not just for Jennifer Elliott, but for you, yourself. PAUL McMULLAN: Yeah, that's why I feel terrible about it, not just 'cause she killed herself afterwards, but I, I actually liked her as a person.

Sharing from a friend, a passage from the Leveson Inquiry regarding the British actor Denholm Elliott, who died of AIDS in 1992. Three years after her death, the News of the World journalist Paul McMullan did the following to his daughter—neither a celebrity nor even someone of public interest.

a woman says oh you sweet simple boy while looking at her phone ALT: a woman says oh you sweet simple boy while looking at her phone

"Truth is, there’s simply too much original content on TV these days. The explosion of quality scripted dramas on cable, combined with the Tribble-like multiplication of reality projects, has created an impossibly overcrowded environment for entertainment-seeking consumers."

I wrote this...in 2009