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Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice,” the tale of how a young Donald Trump fell into the orbit and under the spell of the venal lawyer Roy Cohn in the 1970s, struggled to get financing and a U.S. release after its premiere in Cannes last May. But it did unexpectedly well in Oscar nominations, with Sebastian Stan breaking into the Best Actor category for his performance as Trump and Jeremy Strong landing a Best Supporting Actor nomination for playing Cohn, a vicious fighter and closeted gay man who gave the would-be tycoon rules for survival that he still uses: always attack, admit nothing, deny everything and never admit defeat.

What led you to Roy Cohn?

Another filmmaker had approached me five or six years ago about playing Roy. There wasn’t a script, but I went and I watched some of the documentaries. Matt Tyrnauer’s (“Where’s My Roy Cohn?...

To know Michael Kassan is to know the people in his Rolodex. At least, that’s the promise.

The Madison Avenue impresario, who once ran a media-buying operation and parlayed his experience there into a role as the ultimate go-between among ad agencies, big-spending clients and the media outlets that crave them, finds himself — at least for now — without a base of operations.

In an explosive arbitration filing that surfaced Tuesday, Kassan alleged UTA, which snatched up his marketing consultancy, MediaLink, for $125 million in late 2021, had undermined the business since his arrival. Executives including UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer and the newly-christened New York chief Julian Jacobs “secretly concocted a scheme,” Kassan’s attorneys alleged, that siloed off MediaLink from the rest of UTA’s business with advertisers and marketers, then pressured Kassan to cut costs and raise fees on existing clients. “After two long years of Kassan battling Zimmer’s repeated broken promises,...

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For nearly two decades, Harvey Weinstein’s predatory tendencies were legend in Hollywood. And until a news organization could gather the sourcing and the courage to take on the mogul, that’s what they would remain. In 2017, 29-year-old NBC reporter Ronan Farrow was convinced he had the goods, with several of Weinstein’s victims willing to go on the record. Then his higher-ups held up the story. Undaunted, Farrow turned to The New Yorker. His feature for the magazine, along with an investigation by The New York Times, turned the whispers into fact and kicked off the #MeToo reckoning in October 2017. Farrow followed with exposés on Brett Kavanaugh, Leslie Moonves and Andrew Cuomo. Today, Weinstein is behind bars and many of Hollywood’s most powerful men have been held to account, several by THR’s Kim Masters, who has reported on allegations of...

In September 2002, Kaja Sokola was a 16-year-old model newly arrived in Manhattan from her native Poland. While attending an event whose guest list was curated by her agency — Next Model Management, one of the biggest and most successful modeling firms in the world — the 5’11” teen with a dream of becoming an actress met movie producer Harvey Weinstein. He was 50 years old at the time and at the height of his power and influence. She was living apart from her parents for the first time.

“People at the event said, ‘This is the king of Hollywood,...

Bertram “Bert” Fields, the larger-than-life entertainment lawyer whose roster of star clients and studios spoke to a penchant for doling out legal threats with a rhetorical flourish, along with a capacity for winning lucrative settlements, has died at his Malibu home, his rep confirmed to Variety. He was 93.

Fields thrived on the notion that he never lost a trial, and even if the Perry Mason-like reputation wasn’t exactly true, he was a relentless litigator who defined some of the industry’s most heralded cases of the 1980s and ’90s, with clients that included Warren Beatty, Tom Cruise, the Beatles, Edward G. Robinson, Michael Jackson, Rupert Murdoch and, at one time or another, just about all of the major studios.

Cruise said in a statement, “Bert Fields was a gentleman; an extraordinary human being. He had a powerful intellect, a keen wit, and charm that made one enjoy every minute of his company.

It appears people have finally had enough of the Harvey Weinstein story: “Hollywood Ending,” the new book from media reporter Ken Auletta, has fizzled in its first three weeks of sales with only 2,600 copies sold. Npd BookScan, which tracks print book sales in the U.S., reported Thursday that 690 copies were sold last week, the book’s third week of publication. A total of 1,533 copies were sold in the first week, which dropped to 375 the following week. That brought total sales to 2,598. It’s “a pretty weak debut for a book from a writer of this caliber, on a topic that was this significant at the time that it happened,” Npd analyst Kristen McLean told TheWrap. Even on Martha’s Vineyard, where Weinstein once spent summers at a sprawling vacation home, the local Edgartown bookstore has sold only three copies. “If you want to know why I think it hasn’t sold,...

Spoiler Alert: This article contains details of Ken Auletta’s Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, which came out this week.

Just a few months before the incarcerated Harvey Weinstein goes on trial anew for multiple West Coast sex crimes, Ken Auletta’s just-published Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence seeks to offer the big picture about the producer who brought arthouse to the multiplex and the industry that enabled his evil.

In the shadow of the 2017 exposés from the New York Times’ Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey and now fellow New Yorker scribe Ronan Farrow, Auletta’s 466-page hardcover book comes more than two years after the much-accused mogul was sentenced to 23 years behind bars by a New York judge for rape and sexual assault.

As much a biography in many ways of Harvey Weinstein’s brother Bob Weinstein, the New Yorker staffer...

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In 2017, Ronan Farrow published an extensive takedown of Harvey Weinstein, following New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey in exposing the producer’s years of abuse and sexual assault. He received help and consultation from fellow New Yorker scribe Ken Auletta, who first heard the whisperings about Weinstein’s behavior twenty years prior, while reporting on a profile for the magazine. Auletta remained plagued by questions surrounding the abuse — when it started, how it remained an open secret, what the warning signs were — and, as such, embarked on another round of investigations into Weinstein, particularly his early life.

The result is the biography Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, which explores everything from his childhood in Queens to the founding of his now-defunct companies.

Below, The Hollywood Reporter shares an exclusive excerpt which details stories from the heyday of Miramax Films.

Does TV news have a future outside of the existing television ecosystem? The question is top of mind for news executives as the entertainment world dramatically shifts, with linear TV channels facing steady decline and streaming on the rise.

In his 1991 book Three Blind Mice, Ken Auletta detailed how the rise of cable TV, and specifically CNN and its coverage of the Gulf War, threw the network news divisions at ABC, NBC and CBS into chaos. “Instantly, the public glimpsed the cataclysmic changes in the television industry,” Auletta wrote. “Viewers realized that CNN, not the three networks, was the ...

Does TV news have a future outside of the existing television ecosystem? The question is top of mind for news executives as the entertainment world dramatically shifts, with linear TV channels facing steady decline and streaming on the rise.

In his 1991 book Three Blind Mice, Ken Auletta detailed how the rise of cable TV, and specifically CNN and its coverage of the Gulf War, threw the network news divisions at ABC, NBC and CBS into chaos. “Instantly, the public glimpsed the cataclysmic changes in the television industry,” Auletta wrote. “Viewers realized that CNN, not the three networks, was the ...

David Zaslav is relocating from New York to the Left Coast: The CEO of Discovery, who is set to lead the proposed combo of WarnerMedia and Discovery, said he will primarily be based in Los Angeles by the time the deal is expected to close in mid-2022.

“I’m moving to California,” Zaslav said, speaking Wednesday at the Paley Center for Media’s International Council Summit. He said he’ll have an office on the Warner Bros. lot, because “that’s where the content is made… The better content we have, the better chance we have of being the leading media company in the world.” Zaslav added that he will return regularly to the East Coast to keep tabs on the company’s media businesses based there, including CNN.

Zaslav, interviewed at the Paley event by the New Yorker media writer Ken Auletta, said he will be “very hands-on” in...

David Zaslav, Hollywood’s man of the hour due to Discovery’s pending merger with WarnerMedia, declared he will mostly live in LA by 2022 and be “very hands-on” in running the combined entity.

Speaking with veteran media writer Ken Auletta at the Paley Center for Media’s online International Council Summit, Zaslav expanded on his comments in recent months. He has often mentioned having bought Woodland, the Beverly Hills home long owned by late Paramount chief Robert Evans and talked of having an office on the Warner lot. But today’s discussion put a finer point on all of that.

“I’m moving to California,” Zaslav declared. “That’s where I’m going to live. … I’m going to get up most days, I’m going to live in LA, with an office on the lot.” The reason, he explained, is simple. “That’s where the content is made. This is a content company.

Ronan Farrow’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein — first his coverage in The New Yorker in 2017, then his metacoverage of what it took to get that story in his 2019 book “Catch and Kill” — helped to crystallize and define a moment in American cultural life. With the new documentary series “Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes,” Farrow amplifies that work, continuing to tell both the story of Weinstein’s predations and of his attempts to quash serious journalistic inquiry.

This will be familiar to many potential viewers. As the show’s title suggests, this series — directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato — is a spinoff of Farrow’s podcast, itself a spinoff of the “Catch and Kill” book. Anyone familiar with either will be revisiting a story they’ve encountered before. And yet as a primer for a new audience, this is a worthwhile bit of programming from HBO, keeping both Weinstein...

Former alleged victims of Harvey Weinstein speak out in the trailer for Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes, an expansion on Ronan Farrow’s bestselling book and hit podcast of the same name. The six-part documentary series premieres July 12th on HBO Max.

Catch and Kill features on-camera interviews between Farrow and some of the interviewees featured in his investigations against Weinstein’s sexual misconduct, including former employees of the Hollywood producer as well as Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, the woman who wore a wire that caught audio evidence of his misconduct.

Ronan Farrow’s “Catch and Kill” is being adapted into a six-part HBO docuseries, the premium cable channel announced Monday.

The series, titled “Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes,” builds on the reporting featured in Farrow’s book and podcast of the same name, featuring “intimate, revealing interviews with whistleblowers, journalists, private investigators and other sources” connected to the allegations of misconduct against media figures including Harvey Weinstein.

The series will premiere on Monday, July 12 with two episodes airing back-to-back each week. Read full episode descriptions below and check out a trailer for the series above.

Fenton Baily and Randy Barbato (“Carrie Fisher: Wishful Drinking”) are directors and producers on the docuseries via World of Wonder. Farrow also serves as an executive producer.

The series is produced by Mona Card, produced and edited by Francy Kachler and produced by Unjin Lee. For HBO, Tina Nguyen is senior producer, and Nancy Abraham...

The reminders came often from Sumner Redstone, self-made architect of a vast media empire.

“Viacom is me,” he once told Fortune magazine. “I’m Viacom. That marriage is eternal, forever.”

“I’m in control!” he chided Mel Karmazin in a nationally televised news conference as the executive tried to outline his vision for the newly merged Viacom and CBS. “Remember — I’m in control!”

The late Frank Biondi Jr., who engineered a series of key deals in the 1980s and ’90s as Viacom CEO, once acknowledged to the New Yorker‘s Ken Auletta that it could be frustrating toiling in semi-obscurity. “Sumner is the embodiment of this place,” he shrugged.

Redstone, who died Wednesday at age 97, personified more than just a single company. He came to represent a media and entertainment era when deeply flawed, nakedly ambitious, larger-than-life personalities single-handedly set the agenda.

“Sumner Redstone was, for all his business thuggery,...

Harvey Weinstein once waltzed into every room in Hollywood as the king of the movie business. Now, he’s shuffling into New York City criminal court with a walker, facing life in prison for five sex crimes charges, including rape.

Looking back at Hollywood history, has there ever been a case quite like this?

Weinstein’s trial stands on its own, according to veteran journalist Ken Auletta, who first profiled the fallen movie mogul nearly two decades ago.

“If you go back in movie history there are untold examples of abusive behavior by studio heads — the casting couch, which is the phrase that Harvey used — and there was a casting couch, and young starlets succumbed, in exchange for roles in movies,” Auletta said. “But very rare was the incidents of these studio heads actually raping a woman and doing some of the things that Harvey Weinstein is accused of doing.

Where’S My Roy Cohn? Sony Pictures Classics Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten Director: Matt Tyrnauer Screenwriter: Matt Tyrnauer Cast: Ken Auletta, Roy M. Cohn, Anne Roiphe, Roger Stone, Donald Trump, Barbara Walters, Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan Screened at: Tribeca, NYC, 9/17/19 Opens: September 20, 2019 Documentary film-makers have […]

The post Where’s My Roy Cohn? Review: By no means a stale history lesson appeared first on Shockya.com.

The title of Matt Tyrnauer’s stone-the-bastard documentary about the corrupt lawyer, attack dog and inhuman being who everyone loved to hate comes from Donald Trump. “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” the President reportedly shouted in frustration when his attorney general Jeff Sessions dared to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Cohn died in 1986, leaving Trump without the mentor and fixer who helped make him the Donald what he is today. Enough said.

Or so you’d think . But in tracing the origins of a monster, Tyrnauer, known for docu-profiles...

The stories are legion, and they are remarkably similar. Some begin in a Buffalo, New York, concert hall in 1978; others in a five-star hotel in Venice in 1998. But it usually starts with a seemingly benign offer of help, or a friendly chat, or a meeting about the next step in someone’s career. Then maybe, suddenly, there’s only one room on a business trip because of a booking “mistake.” Or a lunch meeting mysteriously gets moved to a penthouse suite. Or an insistence that this man, a modern-day movie...

Bad people tend to make for good documentaries, and Roy Cohn was one of the worst. A conniving Rasputin figure who advised Senator Joseph McCarthy, forged Donald Trump into the man-like thing he is today, and cravenly laid the groundwork for a political climate that encourages the pursuit of power at the expense of foundational American principles, the infamous “fixer” left this mortal coil with a well-earned reputation for being as morally bankrupt as anyone who ever walked the earth. And yet, Matt Tyrnauer’s “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” — while erudite, well-researched, and all too relevant — is an unilluminating chore to watch, even as it convincingly argues the profound extent to which its subject helped blemish the moral complexion of the modern world.

As a lawyer, Cohn overpowered the legal system with the brute force of his ad hominem attacks and backstage maneuverings (he would say that knowing the...

Of all the terrifying things Harvey Weinstein has ever said — insults hurled, jobs threatened, tantrums unleashed — perhaps the most blood-chilling are these six words: “Don’t you know who I am!?” That’s the line actress Nannette Klatt recalls the producer bellowing when she declined his advances in a private hotel-room meeting. For decades, Weinstein — a Hollywood outsider who’d hustled his way into the industry’s inner circle — was one of the most powerful men in showbiz. He could make careers, and he could crush them.

For the nearly quarter-century he was on top — earning Oscars, making money, and peddling influence — Weinstein was above the law. He was, so to speak, “Untouchable.”

In her powerhouse documentary of the same name, director Ursula Macfarlane turns that word against Weinstein, empowering his accusers while also holding those who’d been complicit in his crimes accountable. For months after The New York Times...

21st Century Fox executive chairman Lachlan Murdoch defended Fox News and gave a glimpse of the vision for New Fox during a wide-ranging Q&A on Thursday with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times’ DealBook conference.

Murdoch also weighed in on the fate of Megyn Kelly as she departs NBC News and the hiring of former White House communications director Hope Hicks to head corporate communications for the New Fox entity that will be created after 21st Century Fox sells most of its assets to Disney next year.

“Our biggest critics of Fox News are not watching Fox News,” Murdoch said, referring to the steady stream of outrage generated on social media by those who react to short clips of the cabler’s programming.

Sorkin, a Times’ veteran and CNBC anchor, pressed Murdoch about his personal reaction to the growing anger in Hollywood and elsewhere among those who...

New Fox chief Lachlan Murdoch deflected criticism of the company’s stewardship of Fox News, whose strident programming has inflamed Hollywood figures such as longtime Fox creators Seth MacFarlane and Steve Levitan.

“I understand where that’s coming from,” he said, responding to Levitan’s vow to never work for Fox again if it continued owning the cable news network. “But most of the biggest critics of Fox News are not watching Fox News.”

Murdoch made the comments during a session at The New York Times DealBook conference. Moderator Andrew Ross Sorkin pressed the executive numerous times about Fox’s Republican tilt, including the do-si-do that saw former Fox exec Bill Shine head to the White House and former communication staffer Hope Hicks go to Fox. He said it was “100% false” that Jared Kushner or others connected with President Donald Trump had manipulated the hiring of Hicks.

The Fox boss...

The second season of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why drew an average minute audience of 2.6 million in the U.S. during the first three days of its May 18 debut, according to figures released by Nielsen.

The premiere episode of Season 2 pulled in 6 million viewers in three days, Nielsen said.

While Netflix and other streaming players don’t share ratings information directly, Nielsen has broken through recently with its Svod Content Ratings, which shed some light on who is streaming what on multiple services.

Viewership of the show, which details the path that leads to a teenager’s suicide, was markedly young and female. About 65% of its first-weekend audience was female, Nielsen said. And while Netflix’s The Crown attracts an audience that is 75% aged 35 and older, 13 Reasons has the exact opposite profile, with 75% of its viewers being 34 and under. Of those under 34, 52% were between 18 and 34.

Binge-watching also defined the season’s launch,...

Netflix programming chief Ted Sarandos defended the methods of the streaming service’s approach to programming during an hour-long appearance today at the Paley Center for Media.

The streaming service is aiming to appeal to “2,000 different taste clusters of people,” he said during the Paley Media Council session, which was moderated by veteran media writer Ken Auletta. The ultimate goal, he added, is producing “the show that everyone in the house can’t live without.”

Asked at the tail end of the session about the news of ABC canceling Roseanne, Sarandos said, “No comment.” A minute later, he noted the commotion in the room after an audience member shared the news as it came across the transom. “Everybody is looking at their phones,” he chuckled.

Netflix has spent hundreds of millions to lure Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes in recent months, leading to grumbles from traditional rivals about Netflix’s war chest.

Netflix has inked a multiyear deal with the Obamas for original programming — but the content from the former First Couple will not have any political bias, according to chief content officer Ted Sarandos.

“This is not The Obama Network,” said Sarandos, speaking Tuesday at the Paley Center for Media in New York. “There’s no political slant to the programming.”

Sarandos was interviewed journalist Ken Auletta at the event. Noting that the Netflix exec is a Democrat, Auletta asked what he would say to Republicans about Netflix’s seeming push to the political left — including the appointment of former Obama adviser Susan Rice to its board.

“Umm, wait for the programming,” Sarandos responded.

He said Netflix’s deal with Higher Ground Productions, the production shingle formed by Barack and Michelle Obama, is for entertainment programming, including scripted films and TV shows as well as unscripted lifestyle content and docu-series. Netflix...

Friday night’s episode of “Frontline” centers on veteran Oscar guest Harvey Weinstein, who will be absent from Sunday’s ceremony. In October, the producer became only the second person ever to be expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts in Sciences, after The New York Times and The New Yorker alleged his long history of sexual harassment and assault. He is under police investigation in New York, Los Angeles, and London.

IndieWire got a sneak peek at the special, which follows yesterday’s news that Maria Contreras-Sweet and a group of investors will purchase the assets of Weinstein’s namesake company and start anew. It features interviews with six Weintein accusers, as well as Women in Film’s Los Angeles president Cathy Schulman, the journalists whose reports led to Weinstein’s downfall, and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, whose February 11 civil rights lawsuit against The Weinstein Company nearly thwarted Contreras-Sweet.

New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. fired Jill Abramson because he was afraid to lose managing editor Dean Baquet, he told Vanity Fair in his first interview since the firing. “We risked losing Dean, and we risked losing more than Dean,” Sulzberger said. “It would have been a flood, and a flood of some of our best digital people.” Also read: Jill Abramson Says Losing Her NY Times Job Hurt, Unsure What's Next for Her (Video) Sulzberger also insisted that New Yorker writer Ken Auletta‘s report that Abramson was paid less than her male counterparts was false, and...

Jill Abramson is fighting back--at least as part of her workout. Abramson's daughter Cornelia Griggs posted the below photo to Instagram of the former New York Times executive editor, whose surprise ouster from the paper this week shocked the media world, wearing boxing gloves and working out with a punching bag. 2014 NY Media Power List: Jill Abramson, David Carr and A.O. Scott The caption reads, "Mom's badass new hobby," followed by the hashtags, #girls and #pushy. The photo appears to be a response to The New Yorker's Ken Auletta's highly-cited report that Abramson was pushed

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New Yorker media reporter Ken Auletta reported Wednesday afternoon that issues of pay disparity had directly proceeded Jill Abramson's dismissal from the New York Times, a development that ricocheted around the media, especially given the Times' focus on pay disparity as a policy issue. On CBS This Morning, Auletta noted that the pay disparity aspect of the story may have been overly emphasized.

The news that Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor of the New York Times, had been ousted from her position on Wednesday led to a debate over the reasons behind it and whether unequal pay was at the heart of her departure. The Times’ own Ravi Somaiya cited publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. as saying “an issue with management in the newsroom” was the reason for Abramson exiting the job after two-and-a-half years, to be replaced by managing editor Dean Baquet. Also read: Jill Abramson Replaced as New York Times Editor by Dean Baquet But New Yorker writer Ken Auletta wrote Wednesday that.

Maverick Us distributor/producer Harvey Weinstein is so notorious for cutting films that he acquires he earned the soubriquet Harvey Scissorhands.

So it.s not surprising that Weinstein is embroiled in another row, this time with Korean director Bong Joon-ho over his post-Apocalyptic sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer.

The English-language film stars Chris Evans as the leader of a revolt on a train that carries the last survivors of the human race after an experiment to end global warming fails. The cast includes Song Kang-ho, Tilda Swinton, Ko Ah-sung, Jamie Bell, John Hurt, Ed Harris and. Octavia Spencer.

Bong.s 126 minute film opened in Korea on August 1, selling nearly 3.3 million tickets in the first five days for a gross of Us$21.4 million.

The Weinstein Co. pre-bought the rights for the Us, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It will be released in Oz by Roadshow Films.

The Hollywood Reporter hailed...

Senior contributing writer Jodi Enda’s in-depth examination of strategies newsrooms use to try to stay solvent won the prestigious prize today at Syracuse University’s Mirror Awards luncheon — an annual affair that attracts New York’s media elite. The event paid off for the school this year: The family of Dick Clark, an alum who won the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award, presented Syracuse with $5M for a state-of-the-art broadcast education facility that will open next year and be named after the American Bandstand host. The school presented its Fred M. Dressler Leadership Award To Disney/ABC Television Group President Anne Sweeney and I-3 innovation award to Fivethirtyeight.com’s Nate Silver. For traditional/legacy media the winners were: Ken Auletta, best single article, for a piece in The New Yorker about The Times of India. (This is his fourth win in the seven years since the awards were introduced.) Syed...

You might think Henry Blodget would be thrilled that an exhaustive profile in this week's New Yorker touts his Business Insider for building an audience of 24 million unique visitors a month with its tabloid spin on the day's business news. It turns out he hasn't read it, he tells TheWrap. "I'm a huge Ken Auletta fan, but this is one article of his that I won't be reading (old survival habit from the dotcom days)," the CEO and editor-in-chief of Business Insider told TheWrap. "He is a class act and one...

Guild Hall, the visual and performing arts center on eastern Long Island, recently honored the recipients of the 28th Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Awards John Alexander for Visual Arts Walter Isaacson for Literary Arts Nathan Lane for Performing Arts and Mickey Straus, who received the Special Award for Leadership and Philanthropy. Marshall Brickman was the Master of Ceremonies with special guest presenters Ken Auletta, Alec Baldwin, Jack O'Brien and Lorne Michaels. The awards were presented during a benefit dinner on Monday, March 4 at The Plaza Hotel in New York City. BroadwayWorld has photos from the starry gathering below...

This is a story that the Wall Street Journal had better have right: The paper reports this morning that its managing editor, Robert Thomson, will become CEO of the still-unnamed publishing company that News Corp will create next year in a spin off. Next week the company plans to announce Thomson’s appointment and the elevation of his deputy, Gerard Baker, to replace him as managing editor of the Journal, the paper says citing “people familiar with the matter.” The company also may announce other senior appointments and board members, as well as a name for the publishing company, but final decisions haven’t been made. CEO Rupert Murdoch said in October that he would announce the leadership plans by year-end. Last year The New Yorker‘s Ken Auletta described Thomson as “perhaps Rupert Murdoch’s only close friend. The two men are both from Australia, are married to Chinese women,...

The author of an in-depth exploration into the events that led to the 2003 toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad won the first John M. Higgins award for enterprise reporting at today’s Mirror Awards reception in New York. Peter Maass, who wrote the piece for The New Yorker with support from Pro Publica, called for non-profits and others to support serious journalism and “make more of these flowers bloom.” For traditional/legacy media, other winners of the awards sponsored by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School were: Anna Holmes, who took Best Commentary for her work in The New York Times and The Washington Post; The New Yorker‘s Ken Auletta, who won Best Profile for his look at Jill Abramson’s rise to executive editor of The New York Times; and Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky, who had the Best Single Article for an in-depth look at Apple.

When it comes to the pleasures of reading, my tastes grow increasingly promiscuous. My favorite books of the past few years include a father’s outrageous tales of life with his four young sons (Somewhere More Holy, Tony Woodlief); an undertaker’s everyday dealings with dead bodies (The Undertaking, Thomas Lynch); a history of Google (Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It, Ken Auletta); the account of an obsessed lumberjack and an exotic spruce tree in British Columbia (The Golden Spruce, John Vaillant); Jay-z’s autobiography (Decoded); an anthropological history of modern advertising (The Age of Persuasion, Terry O’Reilly); and...

The Murdoch hacking scandal keeps spreading. In the Nyt, David Carr reports that Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has paid $655 million “to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go way.” Compare Carr's piece to the WSJ's positive spin. Rebekah Brooks, the recently departed head of News International, was arrested on Sunday, just days before she was due to testify before Parliament. Ken Auletta blogs on Murdoch's minions at The New Yorker. Sunday's Nyt featured a shocking page one expose on Scotland Yard, which is also under fire, losing beleaguered police commissioner, Paul Stephenson, Update: followed by deputy police commissioner John Yates. In the wake of these arrests and resignations, a peer of Murdoch told The Wrap that the mogul was "dead money. ...

Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin.Photo via Google blog.Yesterday, Google announced on its blog that chief executive officer Eric Schmidt will step down. He will be replaced by Google co-founder Larry Page, the 38-year-old president of products. Page’s fellow founder, Sergey Brin, will remain president of technology. (We suspect that come next winter, the rearrangement may affect the trio’s shared number-three ranking on Vanity Fair New Establishment list.) “This triumvirate approach has real benefits in terms of shared wisdom, and we will continue to discuss the big decisions among the three of us,” Schmidt wrote on the Google blog. “But we have also agreed to clarify our individual roles so there’s clear responsibility and accountability at the top of the company.” In yesterday’s statements, both Schmidt and Page had effusive praise about each other’s contributions to the company. Googled author Ken Auletta,...

On the heels of the critical and commercial success of Sony's The Social Network, Michael London's Groundswell Productions is revving up its planned adaptation of Ken Auletta's book Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, having commenced searching for a writer, according to Forbes. The film, due in 2012, will shine the spotlight on Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page -- both radically different moguls than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. While the Google story may not be as filled with lies, greed and deceit like Zuckerberg's ascent, it's nonetheless a fairly compelling tale that should serve as a fascinating depiction of two people realizing their vision to change how we find and consume information. As Groundswell begins hunting for someone to write the script, Deal Central endorses these five candidates to bring the search engine's story to the big...

Set photos from 30 Minutes or Less, Sean Penn in make-up for This Must Be The Place, Daniel Craig on the set of Cowboys vs. Aliens, Mads Mikkelsen in costume on The Three Musketeers, and Martin Scorsese himself and set decoration for "The Invention of Hugo Cabret".

First look photos from Arthur, Beginners, Black Swan, Bridesmaids, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Ceremony, The Conspirator, Daydream Nation, The Dilemma.

Further first look photos from Everything Must Go, Good Neighbours, Henry's Crime, Hereafter, The High Cost of Living, The King's Speech, Passion Play, True Grit, What's Wrong with Virginia, Yogi Bear.

Next, more stills from Devil, Due Date, Faster, Making Plans for Lena, Miral, Monsters, My Soul to Take, The Social Network, Somewhere, The Tempest, The Town.

Finally, several character one-sheets for Never Let Me Go and posters for Alpha and Omega, Buried, Fair Game, The Freebie, It's Kind of a Funny Story, Life as We Know It,...

Buzz over the release of October’s The Social Network, about the founding of Facebook, has paved the way for another story about geeks who changed the world.

Producers John Morris and Michael London have acquired the screen rights to “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It,” a non-fiction book written by Ken Auletta about Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

However, the story of Brin and Page isn’t one of turmoil, like Facebook’s, but a cooperative effort by two Stanford Ph.D students who suspended their college careers to create a better search engine. They now share a spot as the 24th richest people in the world, each worth roughly $17.5 billion.

At the core is your typical rags-to-riches story of technological success in a growing digital world, but what makes their history particularly intriguing is the impact Google is having on old media...

Looks like The Social Network is getting a companion in the so far largely unoccupied fieldof internet-inspired movies: Deadline is reporting that the story of Google is getting its own film treatment.

Ken Auletta’s book Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It has been optioned by Michael London’s Groundwell Productions and producer John Morris, and details the rise of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The film will follow their story as they attain success while trying to stick to their “don’t be evil” mantra. It’s this focus on the challenges to the pair’s idealism that will be the biggest source of drama, according to London:

It’s about these two young guys who created a company that changed the world, and how the world in turn changed them. The heart of the movie is their wonderful edict, don’t be evil.

The path-breaking invention of internet search engine Google will now be the subject of a Hollywood film. According to Deadline Hollywood, the entertainment industry blog, the film will be based on the Ken Auletta book Googled: The End of the World As We Know It and will tell the story of founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, The Telegraph reported Saturday. "It's about these two young guys who created a company that changed the world and how the world in turn changed them," Michael London, the film's producer, told Deadline Hollywood. "The heart of the movie is their wonderful edict: ...

London, Aug 21 – The path-breaking invention of internet search engine Google will now be the subject of a Hollywood film.

According to Deadline Hollywood, the entertainment industry blog, the film will be based on the Ken Auletta book ‘Googled: The End of the World As We Know It’ and will tell the story of founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, The Telegraph reported Saturday.

‘It’s about these two young guys who created a company that changed the world and how the world in turn changed them,’ Michael London, the.

London, August 21 – The co-founders of Google are set to get the ‘Hollywood treatment’ with a feature film on the way.

According to Deadline Hollywood, the entertainment industry blog, the film will be based on the Ken Auletta book ‘Googled: The End of the World As We Know It’ and will tell the story of the Google founders.

“It’s about these two young guys who created a company that changed the world and how the world in turn changed them,” the Telegraph quoted Michael London, the film’s producer, as saying.

“The heart of the movie is their wonderful edict: don’t be evil.”.

Why should only Facebook has a movie? Google deserves one too!

No, we’re not joking about this.

Producers Michael London and John Morris have acquired the rights to the Ken Auletta book titled Googled: The End of the World as We Know It for a feature film adaptation.

The movie film will focus on how Sergey Brin and Larry Page tried to hang on to their idealistic viewpoints as the site rose to become a global phenomenon, and the story will follow: “…two young guys who created a company that changed the world, and how the world in turn changed them. “

And here’s what producer London had to say in an interview with Deadline:

“The heart of the movie is their wonderful edict, don’t be evil. At a certain point in the evolution of a company so big and powerful, there are a million challenges to that mandate.

By Sean O’Connell

Hollywoodnews.com: Hollywood has come a long, long way since “Wargames.”

Audiences were amazed back in 1983, when Matthew Broderick used a massive home PC to hack into our nation’s security system and potentially launch World War III. Now technology has ensured we can watch “Wargames” on a handheld device that’s roughly the size of a postcard if we wanted to. Times have changed.

But our interest, as storytellers, has not drifted too far from the problems computers and technology can cause. One project that’s already in the can, David Fincher’s “The Social Network,” is eagerly anticipated by movie audiences and Oscar trackers. It’s set to open the New York Film Festival at the end of September, but early reviews are making their way online.

They are extremely positive.

Scott Foundas calls Fincher’s work “splendid entertainment from a master storyteller.” His review is spoiler heavy,...