The Curse of the Media Mogul

An important article has just appeared in the October 2009 issue of The Atlantic, entitled “The Moguls’ New Clothes”, by Bruce C. Greenwald, Jonathan A. Knee and Ava Seave, taken from their book – just published in the USA (October 15, 2009) entitled The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies.

Jonathan A. Knee is an investment banker and an adjunct professor and director of the Media Program at Columbia Business School.  Bruce C. Greenwald is a Professor of Finance and Asset Management at Columbia Business School.  Ava Seave is principal and cofounder of the consulting firm Quantum Media and has held management roles at Scholastic Inc. and The Village Voice.

Here is an interesting quote from their article and book:

A number of highly profitable media companies provide so-called must-have content to professional markets, like the legal, medical, or financial communities.  But even here, the actual content rarely creates the competitive advantage.  Indeed, much of the content is not even owned by the media company—for instance, public legal decisions, or the price at which two parties trade a security on an exchange.  The barrier to entry raised by these companies comes instead from how they integrate, analyze, and deliver multiple sources of diverse content, much of which is widely available.  Put simply, the core of any competitive advantage more often than not derives from the manner of aggregation rather than the creation of content, continuous or otherwise.  It is no coincidence that Google, the most profitable and successful new media company, is an aggregator, not a content creator.

Being economists, they go on about the “barriers to entry” and “competitive advantage”, but their analyses – not especially complimentary to media moguls (presenting various myths which the moguls operate on, and demolishing them) – are particularly valuable.  The Google competitive advantage has been hashed and re-hashed many times (and will again shortly, with Googled – The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta – early November release in USA and a 1 December release in Australia).  And it is easy to say that “Google is an aggregator” and therefore so much more powerful than a simple producer of content.  But it is awfully hard to become a financially successful aggregator of content.

Postscript:  Ken Auletta has just published an article entitled “Searching for Trouble: Why Google is on its guard”, in the October 12, 2009 edition of The New Yorker, which draws from his upcoming book.  (Note not all of the article is currently not all available online.)

Duplicity the twister plot

Saw the film Duplicity recently – a good film, although not quite in the category of writer/director Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton.  I enjoy watching Clive Owen so much that I will go to anything he appears in – although I am still most haunted by his role in the dystopian and rivetting Children of Men.   He plays baffled intelligence and humorous British sex appeal very well – and fits our times in a way that is hard to describe.  For a good article about Duplicity, read D. T. Max’s “Twister” in the New Yorker of March 16, 2009, about director Gilroy.  But be warned – the article makes only partial sense if you have not seen the film.  Gilroy does great time shifts, and his use of a repeat dialogue scene (4 times, by my recollection, each of them with a different meaning – and each of them giving the film a different perspective) between Clive Owen and Julia Roberts is already entering the world of film legend.

“Reign Over Me” film review

Written and directed by Mike Binder

Starring Adam Sandler, Don Cheadle, Jada Pinkett Smith, Liv Tyler & Donald Sutherland

Are you interested in a film which captured some essence the late Bush Administration, pre-Barack Obama times?  That pre-recession mixture of despair, grief and half-hearted hope? Released in April 2007, the film Reign Over Me was marketed as an Adam Sandler film, but the real creator and brains behind it was the film’s writer/director Mike Binder (The Upside of Anger), the American-Jewish former stand-up comic.  Reign Over Me also places Adam Sandler firmly in a straight dramatic role, and teenage fans of his numerous juvenile (albeit frequently very entertaining) comedies will be disappointed.

Sandler plays Charlie Fineman, a Jewish dentist whose wife and daughters were killed on one of the September 11th hijacked planes.  Since then he has descended into a sort of madness, a paranoid and semi-psychotic state of half-awareness, overwhelmed by his grief and a clear case of post-traumatic stress disorder.  Dishevelled and semi-shaven (looking not unlike Bob Dylan of twenty years ago), he wanders the streets of New York on a small scooter and plays endless video games in his apartment.  He assiduously avoids his former in-laws, the (obviously Jewish) Timplemans, who are desperate for contact with him.

Enter his former university room-mate Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle), a wealthy African American who also became a dentist – and a very successful one.  Alan lives in a beautiful apartment with his gorgeous wife (Jada Pinkett Smith) and two girls, but has progressively cut himself off from his emotions and is slowly drowning in loneliness and mid-life crisis.  When Alan runs into Charlie on the street, he is shocked that Charlie doesn’t even recognise him.  Out of this re-grows an unlikely but frequently hazardous friendship for both men: Charlie is slowly – achingly slowly and painfully – drawn out of his psychotic state, and Alan starts to find the stimulus for feeling and caring again, gradually taking control over his life and emotions, feeling real joy for the first time in longer than he can remember.

As a portrait of fractured lives, numbing pain and unresolved grief, Reign Over Me is one of the best dramatic American films in many years. Binder knows his territory well – and even appears in the film as Charlie’s old friend Bryan Sugarman, a Jewish accountant who looks after Charlie’s finances.  Donald Sutherland has an excellent cameo as a wise judge charged with deciding whether or not to commit Charlie to a mental institution, and Liv Tyler also appears as a psychiatrist.

Binder keeps a (mostly tight) rein on the script, with the exception of introducing one weird dental patient (played by Saffron Burrows), where it goes a bit out of control.  His greatest achievement is in the performances: S andler always needs a good director to do his best work, and in Binder he has found one, bringing out a great performance of occasionally uncontrolled rage.  If Sandler’s range is slightly limited, I forgive him.  But the real star of this film is Cheadle, whose role demands an emotional complexity and who inhabits the character of the wealthy New York dentist with the same aplomb as his star turn in Hotel Rwanda.

Reign Over Me shows an enormous maturity (a charge rarely levelled at mainstream American movies nowadays) in its ability to deal with one of the most difficult themes in contemporary American public life: the after-effects of September 11th.  There are no crashing planes here and no Islamic terrorists, just some wealthy upper-middle class New Yorkers in emotional crisis.  Reign Over Me belongs with books like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, both of which also attempt to make sense of the events of September 11th in the 21st Century.

Reign Over Me covers the territory of grief and loss well, and hints at a number of significant sub-themes.  Excepting Cheadle’s character and family, most other characters in the film are Jewish:  thus this is a story not just about grief but about Jewish grief and pain.  The decision to create and develop the black-white Johnson-Fineman friendship is also unique in recent film.  Relations between American Jews and African-Americans historically have been fraught with difficulty, and Reign Over Me posits that the black-Jewish relationship can be equal, pure and ultimately uplifting.  Now that’s a message for our times.

(original review, first published on donperlgut.wordpress.com on March 29, 2009)

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