“It’s a Gold Mine”: Inside The Washington Post’s Big Hollywood Deal

For all its associations with the khaki-ness of the nation’s capital, The Washington Put up nonetheless exudes a sure intercourse attraction. This was the paper, in any case, that impressed All of the President’s Males, America’s final political thriller, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Watergate’s Woodward and Bernstein. Extra just lately, when Marty Baron retired final yr after his storied run as govt editor, the A-listers in his video send-off included Liev Schreiber, who immortalized Baron in Highlight, and Steven Spielberg, who directed 2017’s Pentagon Papers drama, The Put up, starring Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham.

Regardless of its Hollywood cred, The Washington Put up hasn’t precisely had a robust presence on the mental property gold rush, at the same time as different main media shops have methodically mined their content material and turned it into weaponry for the streaming wars. However that’s all altering now that the Put up has change into bedfellows with two Hollywood heavyweights: Think about Leisure and Inventive Artists Company, that are giving the 144-year-old establishment a jolt of inventive mojo. Two months for the reason that announcement of a “strategic partnership”—through which Think about will “create scripted and non-scripted movie and tv properties derived from The Put up’s huge archives, present reporting, and ongoing investigations,” and CAA will dealer the offers—the association is already bearing fruit, with 4 initiatives “actively in improvement,” Think about honcho Brian Grazer informed me. “It’s one of many oldest and most respected papers in America and maybe the world. Getting particular entry to tales and having the ability to, at occasions, discuss to journalists, is simply gigantically beneficial, significantly in case your affinity is to make motion pictures and tv primarily based on truth.”

As Peak TV reached a fever pitch over the previous few years, information organizations turned bullish about promoting their IP, not solely due to the ravenous demand from the networks and streamers, however as a solution to diversify revenues amid the collapse of their conventional enterprise fashions. The New York Instances, for example, struck a take care of Left/Proper to supply documentaries for FX and Hulu, whereas turning its Fashionable Love column into an Amazon Prime sequence. Vox Media and BuzzFeed created in-house studios to develop scripted and unscripted options for the likes of Amazon and Netflix. Vainness Truthful’s guardian firm, Condé Nast, has a sprawling leisure division that shepherds our content material to display. And so forth.

However a mash-up between one in every of America’s prime information shops and one in every of its prime manufacturing corporations—with one in every of Hollywood’s Massive Three expertise businesses within the combine as their dealer—seems to be a sui generis proposition. “I really want I’d considered it!” stated Richard Plepler, the previous HBO boss who now has a improvement take care of Apple TV+. “There’s a lot IP on the market, so many tales flying round, and breaking by means of is a giant deal. Merchants name it ‘edge’—perhaps that’s AI, or a superior analysis group. Within the content material enterprise, you’re additionally in search of edge. So clearly, you probably have a take care of one of many best information organizations on the earth, to me, that’s a real benefit.”

The Put up set the wheels in movement earlier this yr when writer Fred Ryan began placing feelers out to his West Coast contacts, together with Willow Bay and Elizabeth M. Daley, each of whom he is aware of from serving on the board of the College of Southern California. (Bay, a veteran broadcaster who’s married to former Disney chief Bob Iger, is dean of the college’s communications and journalism college; Daley is dean of the movie college.) Ryan stated it was Daley who urged he attain out to Grazer—cofounder of Think about with Ron Howard—to select his mind about which brokers would possibly greatest assist the Put up develop into movie and tv. “We simply hit it off from the very starting once I defined what we have been making an attempt to do,” Ryan recalled. Grazer informed me, “As I used to be speaking with Fred, I’m beginning to suppose, If he’s gonna do that, it ought to be us. I’d love to do that. We’d have entry to all of the previous tales which have been written and all of the stuff that’s being written now.”

Grazer instantly proposed that CAA ought to signify the partnership. They arrange one other name, this time looping in CAA energy agent and managing director Bryan Lourd, and the Put up’s then chief communications officer, Kristine Coratti Kelly, now head of communications and advertising and marketing for CNN. “I may instantly sense this enthusiasm on Bryan Lourd’s half,” stated Ryan, who then flew out to Beverly Hills for conferences with Lourd and Grazer. “We simply knew on the spot, this was the correct partnership, so we stated, okay, let’s get the groups collectively.”

In April, Ryan hosted a pair dozen folks from CAA and Think about within the Put up’s Okay Avenue headquarters. Grazer, who was in Rome on the time (contemporary off a gathering with Pope Francis) Zoomed in from Italy; Howard joined nearly from LA. The group obtained to be flies on the wall for the Put up’s each day information assembly, and later sat down with govt editor Sally Buzbee and different newsroom brass. “It was a giant deal for me,” stated Lourd, who majored in journalism at USC and obtained to know former longtime Put up writer Donald Graham from rubbing elbows at Allen & Firm’s annual Solar Valley Convention. “The Put up is that this storied factor for anybody who remotely ever cared about journalism. All of the President’s Males, and Redford, and the way vital he was to my early concepts about movie star—I used to be tremendous excited to be there.” So excited, that Lourd ended up becoming a member of the Put up as a visitor for that weekend’s White Home Correspondents’ Affiliation Dinner, the place his tablemates included Ryan, White Home bureau chief Ashley Parker, and Senator Amy Klobuchar. His aim for the collaboration, he informed me, is “to place the correct construction in place to provide the Put up and its journalists an entry level to skilled producers, to try to determine what would lend itself to different codecs, be it a podcast or a sequence or a movie.”