Pidpare

@TemplarsRoar To their credit, they know the kinds of "women" who will mostly buy these things. Attractive young women already live in a charmed fantasy and don't need videogames to escape into like the rest.

BREAKING: On the Steam Machine promotional page, they use these two people to promote the console. This is part of a continued and relentless campaign to normalize the abnormal and to promote people who do not represent gamers and gaming culture. We recognize these things and will highlight them as a problem of an ideology and way of thinking that seeks to subvert normalcy. This needs correcting in culture, beyond just gaming.

@AVARY @THR Not sure what dark secret you're referring to, but Carey does have a long history of "dating" porn stars and other similar types.

@THR Drew Carey is hiding a dark, horrible secret and he’s terrified because all veils will be lifted. The vampire ball is ending.

Drew Carey Blasts L.A. Mayoral Candidate Spencer Pratt: "F*** This Guy Already" hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-n…

@AVARY I loved this film and read the original script; a good chunk of it was different, including the ending, for the better, though the final film is tighter and faster despite the silly sequence where Pitt accidentally "kills" an entire crew, which is more plausible in the script.

Perhaps had the film utilized AI in its production it would have been $20M instead of $80M and Gray would have been allowed control over his vision, though one has to wonder what the A-T-L was on Ad Astra. I hope we someday get to see Gray’s director’s cut.

@gothburz @LiveinSpirit7 He believed in only what made him the most money. You may have "pulled the levers," but he allowed himself to be "pulled" as long as the price was right. In the end, he wasn't anything special, just another actor who will get on his knees for the right price.

@LiveinSpirit7 He believed in plenty. He believed the audience wanted certainty more than laughter. He was right. That's not cynicism. That's the market speaking. We just listened.

I am the Senior Vice President of Late Night Strategy at CBS. I am the person who turned a comedian into a priest and charged advertisers to watch the congregation. I want to be precise about what I built. Not a comedy show. A permission structure. For eleven years, six million Americans tuned in every night to find out what they were allowed to believe by morning. We didn't sell jokes. We sold certainty. Certainty costs nothing to produce. People will pay anything for it. We charged $50 million a year and still lost money because it turns out permission is even cheaper than we thought. In 2014, we had a genuinely dangerous comedian. A man who once testified before Congress in character as a fictional conservative pundit and made the entire chamber look like they'd been pantsed on C-SPAN. His fake persona was the most brilliant satire on television. Layered. Ironic. Unpredictable. The character could say anything because nothing was real. The character was the art. The character was the comedian. We killed the character and put the real man on stage. The real man was a lecturer. Earnest. Thoughtful. Correct about everything. Correct is not funny. Correct is not dangerous. Correct is the absence of danger. We promoted the absence of danger and called it growth. His character could make a Senate committee squirm. The real him makes an audience nod. Nodding pays the same as squirming. Nodding is easier to produce. His final words on air were "We love doing this show for you, but what we really, really love is doing this show with you." The audience wept. I wrote that line. Not the words. The architecture that made those words feel true. For eleven years, the audience believed they were participants. They were not participants. They were the product. "With you" is what you say to a congregation. A comedian says "at you." We hadn't said "at you" since 2015. Our internal metric was called Affirm Rate. It measured the percentage of monologue segments that generated applause instead of laughter. I invented this metric. I also invented the bonus structure tied to it. In 2015, our Affirm Rate was 34%. By 2022, it was 94%. I received a raise every year. We are crushing it. At the things I made up. That's performance management. But I need to tell you about the real discovery. The one I put in a deck called "Content Strategy 2019-2024." The one that got me promoted. Agreement gets applause. I knew that early. But correction — telling the audience their vocabulary is slightly outdated, their outrage is aimed two degrees off-center, their feelings are valid but their phrasing needs work — correction gets them back tomorrow. Agreement is a transaction. Correction is a subscription. We converted a comedy show into a nightly software update for moral vocabulary. Churn was near zero. They couldn't afford to miss an episode. Missing an episode meant using last week's words in this week's meeting. That's social death. We monetized the fear of social death and called it entertainment. I want to be honest about something. The content was not bipartisan. We chose a side. But I need you to understand: we did not choose it because we believed in it. We chose it because that side's audience is more responsive to correction. They want to be updated. They want to be told their language is outdated. They experience correction as care. The other side does not respond to correction. They respond to provocation. Provocation is harder to monetize. You can't build a subscription on provocation because the audience doesn't come back to learn — they come back to fight. Fighting is unpredictable. Correction is scheduled. We optimized for the audience that wants to be told what to think. That audience leaned one direction. That's not ideology. That's market segmentation. The writers' room had a whiteboard. In 2015 it said "What's funny?" In 2018 it said "What should they feel?" By 2021 it said "What are they still saying wrong?" I watched that whiteboard evolve like a finch beak and I never intervened. The market was speaking. We listened. Listening to the market is the same as leading the audience. They can't tell the difference. A writer named Marcus raised his hand in 2019. "What if we just tried to make them laugh again?" I thanked him for his passion and scheduled a creative alignment conversation. He transferred to streaming development within the month. The Affirm Rate the week he left was 91%. Laughter would have brought it down. That's risk management. Here is what nobody will say out loud. I will say it because I am proud of it. We made our audience worse at politics. Not better. Worse. Every night for eleven years, we expressed their outrage for them. Professionally. With a band and good lighting. And because the outrage had been expressed — because a man in a suit had furrowed his brow with the precise calibrated degree of indignation — they didn't need to express it themselves. They watched. They clapped. They felt the catharsis of resistance without resisting anything. They went to bed having done nothing and feeling like they'd done something. That's the product. Not comedy. Not information. Catharsis. Catharsis is the enemy of action. A man who has screamed into a pillow does not then also scream in the street. We were the pillow. A $50 million pillow with a house band. If you feel the outrage has been expressed for you, you will not march. You will not organize. You will not call your representative. You will tune in tomorrow to feel it expressed again. That's retention. Our retention was extraordinary. I want to talk about the comedy-to-catechism pipeline because I think people underestimate what we achieved. Stage one: comedian makes jokes about the powerful. Audience laughs because the powerful are absurd. This is the Carlin model. The jester punches up. Everyone below feels relief. Stage two: comedian makes jokes about people who disagree with the audience. Audience laughs because disagreement is stupid. The jester has turned around. He's still on the stage but now he's facing the crowd with a pointer. Stage three: comedian stops making jokes. Comedian identifies incorrect beliefs and explains why they're dangerous. Audience does not laugh. Audience claps. The jester is gone. In his place: a hall monitor with a desk and a band. Stage four: audience watches not for entertainment but for certification. Having seen last night's episode means you know which words are current. Not having seen it means you might use yesterday's vocabulary in today's meeting. The show is no longer comedy. It is a credential. Watching it means you are educated. Not watching means you are the person being discussed. We made a show that you watch to prove you're not the kind of person who doesn't watch it. That's a closed loop. Closed loops don't need content. They need continuity. We provided continuity for $50 million a year. A comedian — whose entire historical function was to say things too dangerous for anyone else to say — became the person who decides which things are too dangerous for anyone to say. And the audience applauded. Every night. For 2,500 nights. Because being told what is forbidden feels exactly like being told what you already knew. Prohibition performed as validation. I put that in the deck too. Our audience was correct about everything. I know this because they applauded everything we said. The applause proved the correctness. The correctness justified the applause. We called this audience research. The methodology was peer-reviewed by the audience. They approved unanimously. Every night. The actually funny comedians left. They went to podcasts. To clubs. To rooms where the audience doesn't know what's coming and that uncertainty is the point. They took the laughter with them. We kept the applause. We called those spaces problematic. That's market differentiation. The problematic spaces are funnier. But funny is not our product. We lost $40 million a year. We didn't lose it because the show failed. We lost it because we spent $50 million producing what a podcast host in his garage gives away between mattress ads. The podcast is funnier. The podcast is more dangerous. The podcast has an audience that laughs instead of claps. But we had the Ed Sullivan Theater. We had 461 seats. We had a former Beatle play the farewell episode. Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Jon Batiste, and Louis Cato playing "Hello, Goodbye" like it was a benediction. I booked a Beatle for a funeral. The Beatles played that stage in 1964 and the audience screamed so loud you couldn't hear the music. Our audience didn't scream. They wept politely. That's the difference between entertainment and church. We ran a church. Jon Stewart showed up to the finale and did a bit where he pretended to deliver a corporate statement from Paramount about the cancellation. The audience laughed. It was the first time they laughed in a way I didn't recognize. Involuntary. Surprised. Dangerous. For ninety seconds, a comedian was in that building. Then it was over. John Oliver said "At some point, this may come for all of our shows" and then added "but Stephen, what's important to remember is that tonight, it is going to eat you." The audience laughed again. Involuntary again. Two moments of actual comedy in a three-hour farewell. Both of them about death. The finale drew 6.74 million viewers. Biggest weeknight audience in our history. More people came to the funeral than ever visited the patient. I know what they were mourning. Not comedy. The comedy died in 2016. Not the man. The man is fine. He's wealthy. What they mourned was the permission structure. Starting today, they have to decide what to believe on their own. They have to form an opinion without waiting for a man behind a desk to form it first and deliver it with a knowing look. Some of them haven't done that since 2015. The funeral wasn't for the show. It was for the certainty. He joked about the Peanuts theme music licensing cost on his last night. "Oh no! I hope this doesn't cost CBS any money!" The audience laughed. It was a joke about money. About the network losing money. The last joke was about money. Not about truth. Not about power. About a licensing fee for a cartoon piano riff. Eleven years and the final joke was about accounting. I think that's perfect. The show was always about accounting. We just dressed it up as conscience. The President of the United States — the man we spent eleven years explaining was dangerous to an audience that already believed he was dangerous — posted an AI-generated video of our host being thrown into a dumpster on the Late Show set. Then Trump danced to "YMCA" in the clip. Viewed more times in four hours than our farewell managed in a week. His production cost: zero. Ours: negative $50 million a year. We manufactured his relevance every night at 11:35 for eleven years and he never paid us a dime. We were his marketing department. He turned our funeral into content. His ROI was infinite. Ours required a write-off and a farewell concert. The Strike Force Five — Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers, Oliver — appeared in a segment about late-night losing "one middle-aged white man who makes jokes about the news." They were joking about their own obsolescence. All of them know. None of them will say it. The format is dead. The audience moved to phones. The phones don't have desks or bands. The phones have men in garages who are allowed to be wrong, allowed to be surprised, allowed to say something their audience hasn't already approved. That's comedy. We stopped doing that a decade ago. We did approval. Approval looks like comedy from a distance. Up close it's church. I do not feel guilt. Guilt would require me to believe I took something from them. I didn't take anything. They came to us. Every night. They chose the catechism over the comedy. They preferred correction over surprise. Certainty over danger. Instruction over laughter. They wanted to be told. Not challenged. Not shocked. Not made to laugh against their will at something they didn't see coming. They wanted to see it coming. They wanted to mouth along. That's not comedy. That's karaoke. We ran the most expensive karaoke bar in television history and the only miscalculation was charging a cover when the songs are free on every phone. We turned a jester into a priest. We turned an audience into a congregation. We turned laughter into obedience. We turned political engagement into passive consumption. We turned a comedy show into a permission structure and charged $50 million a year to tell people what they already believed in a voice slightly nicer than their own. They were so grateful they showed up to mourn us. 6.74 million of them. Weeping. For the certainty. Applause is more reliable than laughter. I proved it. The proof cost $450 million, one character, one comedian's capacity for danger, and one audience's willingness to act. The metric went up.

@MissJilianne What the hell? Holy crap. It was already pretty bad in the early to mid 2010s, but since when did they allow people to set up booths?

As a Democrat, I can admit I’ve been voting wrong. Look what Mayor Karen Bass has allowed to happen to Hollywood Boulevard. It’s not only disgusting, it’s an embarrassment. It’s much worse than the picture depicts.

@Fengyi1811 Stuff like this is why AI is definitely the future of filmmaking, in part or in whole. Given how little this cost compared to how much it would have without AI, there's no reason future multi-million dollar productions won't use this tech to save money.

祖国人粉丝花重金重制的黑袍大结局，且不论哪一方笑到最后，这才是应该有的大场面。

Marty Supreme (2025) was unpleasant yet compelling. Terrible, unlikeable characters and a story that ups the tension in preposterous ways to make up for a lack of plot, it's not a sports movie, but a thriller about an arrogant douchebag who gets his ass handed to him by life.

@StarterScript @AVARY Also, sexual assault is a crime punishable by laws already in place. It rarely happens on set, much like gun violence, but if it does, there are ways to deal with it legally that don't require needlessly handcuffing future productions in perpetuity.

I am critiquing the line "There should be no middle man between a director and his actors". We do that with stunt crews. Sex scenes are basically that but instead of a crew, one person who is there to make sure the scene is planned out, people know what they can and can't touch or show, etc. The intimacy coordinator also coordinates the costumes and coverups. Let's say youre a male actor. You get a special thing to cover your junk. You also get an option of a few different ones depending on what works with your anatomy. Who's job is that without an intimacy coordinator? It it the costume designer's job to make sure your balls fit in the pouch? The costume designer's assistant? There is actually a long history of young actresses being sexually assaulted during filming sex scenes. I left that part out of a much longer thing I wrote up which you can read if you check my profile. But I did talk, at length, to an Oscar nominated director who stopped working long before intimacy coordinators. This guy directed a four minute long sex scene. And I think he would have appreciated having an intimacy coordinator because it would have been a lot cheaper than the cost of a 3 hour delay. If you didn't give a shit about what it did to the actress to be pushed into doing a scene she didn't want to film, or the feelings that remained with him about it years later, you might just think "he had to work with that actress for the rest of the shoot and it might have disrupted their working relationship and her ability to give a great performance and negatively impacted the movie".

@StarterScript @AVARY Stunts and sex scenes are two very different things. Comparing them is dishonest. You've described nothing that couldn't be decided between a director and his actors. If the director chooses to involve other people, it's his prerogative, but a separate job for it is unnecessary.

@LostXtui This was AI? Holy moly.

祖国人通过层层外包，500美元💵找到中国人拍了《黑袍纠察队》大结局 #theBoys b23.tv/9Y1SnUF

@StarterScript @AVARY Wait, so you're saying people sometimes take jobs they don't really like just for the money, even if they don't like their bosses and have to do things they don't want to do?

@pidpare @AVARY No they're not. An actor takes a job. The director is not some god. They're often a 24 year old who got the gig because his dad is a producer or his uncle financed the movie. Plenty of actors think their directors are idiots but take a role for money or other reasons.

This is 100% true & should have been obvious, were we not living in upside down insane times. The director should be (and traditionally has been) the sole coordinator of intimacy between actors. The buck stops there, for better or worse.

@SocietyMovies I noticed this too. How can they preach tolerance out of one side of their mouths, then spout insults out of the other? It's almost as if they're...hypocrites.

No matter how hard they try to normalize being gay, deep down they know that homosexuality is a humiliation ritual which is why it's always their first go to insult... Actions over words.

@JSFILMZ0412 This has always been Hollywood's most significant playing card; their ability to determine what gets major distribution/attention and what doesn't. This has slowly been eroding, first with Youtube, now with AI, but it's a card they're going to keep for as long as they can.

Honestly, I wish we could self-distribute feature films directly on Tubi or Amazon Prime Video without needing connections, gatekeepers, or middlemen. Maybe one day. When that day comes, my scripts are ready. For now, making a 40+ minute Seedance 2.0 short film is still a huge gamble.

@jacktronprime @elonmusk @kangminlee Where is this from?

@elonmusk @kangminlee This was the ending we wanted to see.

The show writers turned Homelander into a Trump analogue, and this is how they choose to end The Boys. This entire show was just a deranged sexual humiliation fantasy projected onto Trump. They can't even produce a decent superhero parody without injecting their twisted fetishes into every script.

@Variety Black Panther is also a fictional "mythological" story, which is why the next film in that series should feature a white main character. Because it's not real and race doesn't matter, right?

Lupita Nyong’o addresses the racist backlash to her casting as Helen of Troy in “The Odyssey,” after some critics called Christopher Nolan a “coward” for not casting a white actress: “This is a mythological story,” Nyong’o said in an interview. "I’m very supportive of Chris’ intention with it and with the version of this story that he is telling. Our cast is representative of the world. I’m not spending my time thinking of a defense. The criticism will exist whether I engage with it or not.” Nyong’o said her interpretation of the character goes deeper than her beauty. “You can’t perform beauty,” she said. “I want to know who a character is. What is beyond beauty? What is beyond looks? That’s the thing about doing such a well-known text, which has been studied and interpreted and derived from. The research could be endless. The good thing about working with a writer like Chris is that it’s on the page. The investigation starts with the pages you’re given. That’s what I based it on.” variety.com/2026/film/news…

@JosephKahn I lived in LA from 2007 to before Covid. Though it wasn't always great even the first few years, I saw the homeless problem increase exponentially. Still remember a woman in a sleeping bag blocking the sidewalk of a nice area in Burbank around 2018. Would have never happen before

The problem with LA is the "Everything's Fine" people. These are people that came to LA after its heyday and during its decline after the financial crash of 2008. The more recent the transplant, the less they are aware of what Los Angeles used to be. They have no idea all the areas that used to be lively, or that there was a world class music and night life scene. If you mention there weren't homeless people shitting on the streets everywhere, they call you a MAGA fascist because unhoused people have rights too and Everything's Fine. If you mention entire neighborhoods like the Pacific Palisades did not burn down, they say you should not be blaming the mayor for the weather (which is controlled by global warming Republicans) and Everything's Fine. You can say it's really not normal for so many shops to be closed all over Los Angeles with empty storefronts, and they'll say something about equity and that Everything's Fine. The street vendors on sidewalks in front of KoreaTown restaurants that are shutting down? That's totally fine because that's LA culture (no it fucking isn't newbie). Crime? Everything's Fine. These theater kid transplants from Michigan say why are you complaining, move somewhere else. They don't know what they don't know. Then they drink a $20 Erewhon smoothie thinking that's the height of LA culture. Everything's Fine.

@CinemaTweets1 He's a mediocre actor who has specialized in black victimhood roles, which are low bar. Not remarkable in the slightest.

Daniel Kaluuya hasn’t starred in a major release in four years. What gives? He’s only 37, already has an Oscar & is clearly one of the most talented actors on Earth. It confuses me why he’s not making more films right now. This guy is a world-class actor in every sense imaginable

@DefiantLs It's just called rap music, unfortunately.

What is this genre of music called?

@PunkRockStory At least they didn't put Eminem or Beyonce or 50 Cent in their top 10. Consider that a victory.

Rolling Stone released its top 100 punk albums of all time Here are the top 20 For me, an unreal list. 😵‍💫 #punk #punkrock #punkalbum #top100 #rollingstone #punkrockhistory