Clay Tweel

@alexgibneyfilm @davidsirota @waybackmachine Agreed! The Wayback Machine site is crucial. An unparalleled digital record of the internet. 🙏

@davidsirota is right! Save the @waybackmachine

Great news: The Bob Baker Marionette Theater is going to buy the Highland Park building they've been leasing since 2019. To combat the current landlord's rent increases the operation is in the home stretch of buying the former York Theater outright. Per @ToddMartens: "Bob Baker over the last year has raised $4.5 million of the $5 million purchase price. It is seeking $500,000 to close the gap as well as an additional $2 million for what it describes as critical renovations, such as repairing the building’s roof and restrooms." latimes.com/travel/story/2…

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Has no one who works in AI ever watched the Terminator movies!?

@TheHofstatter @BORReport People miss comedies.

@BORReport Surprisingly solid.

Sony's Anaconda grossed an estimated $5.10M this weekend (from 3,075 locations). Estimated total domestic gross stands at $54.27M. #AnacondaMovie #BoxOffice

He’s not even trying to hide it.

@BilgeEbiri Exxon.

Which company makes those thick black markers they use to redact names? Is there a stock we can invest in? nytimes.com/2025/12/19/us/…

Here’s why so much of today’s entertainment feels mediocre. For most of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the major studios owned the theaters. That system ended in 1948 with the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures. The Paramount Decrees forced the Big Five studios to divest their theater chains and banned practices like block booking. The result? Studios no longer had a guaranteed screen for every film they made. If a movie was bad, theater owners simply wouldn’t book it. Survival required quality—studios had to compete on merit. The same logic held through the home-video and television eras. Studios made the discs, but they didn’t own Target, Best Buy, or Blockbuster. Networks made shows, but every program lived or died by Nielsen ratings and advertiser dollars. There was friction, transparency, and real risk. Then streaming arrived. In 2020, a federal judge officially terminated the Paramount Decrees, declaring them obsolete in a world dominated by Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, and the rest. The irony is brutal: streaming has recreated vertical integration on steroids. The same companies now control production and the only theaters that matter—their own apps. Unlike the old studio-owned cinema chains, these platforms don’t have to disclose viewership numbers because the business model is subscription-based, not per-ticket or ad-supported. Metrics are secret. Accountability is gone. Because every subscriber dollar flows into the same corporate pool regardless of what is watched, the streamers have zero financial incentive to pay market rates—or any real money at all—for outside independent films and series. Why license an indie movie for $10–20 million when you can spend that and more on an in-house project that keeps 100 % of the upside, strengthens your IP library, and is guaranteed top-of-app promotion? Independents are now forced to sell their work for flat, often insultingly low fees (or give it away entirely for “exposure”) because the platform already has a full slate of self-produced content it will always prioritize. The gate is not just closed, the gatekeeper owns the only road. With no obligation to report performance, studios face zero external pressure to justify budgets. They can greenlight endless in-house projects that are guaranteed distribution, while acquiring outside films or series for pennies on the dollar—if they bother at all. Independent producers are left begging for scraps or shut out entirely. This is monopoly power the 1948 Court never imagined: total control of both creation and exhibition, insulated from market feedback. When studios and theaters were forcibly separated, independent cinema flourished because talent and good ideas could still find an audience. Today a handful of tech-entertainment giants own the entire pipeline in a way even the old moguls couldn’t dream off. Monopolies aren't capitalist. We prevent them to open real competition, innovation, quality, and the occasional movie that wasn't filtered through a Teslabot in Netflix's HR wearing an Apple Vision Pro.

@DEADLINE Is it better to be great or to be first? Studios: First! Storytellers: 😩

Discovery Unpicks Louvre Heist In Fast-Turnaround Doc deadline.com/2025/11/discov…

Our movie is finally coming out! Tonight on @POVdocs !

@DaveTrippinWV @FoundryTheater Thanks Dave! Hope to see you there!

Screening Tuesday at @FoundryTheater - The Bitter Pill - the @Claytweel doc about Huntington's court fight with the monster that is big pharma. Admission is free check out the link to register foundrytheater.org/event-details/… #RecoveryMonth #opioidcrisis

@SkyyTweet Solid team. Nice work!

I did it! Meet my beautiful fantasy football boys. I call them… The Female Gaze. 🫡(Should I switch any starters? This is all very exciting and overwhelming!!!)

@SkyyTweet Jamar Chase or Bijan Robinson

Playing fantasy football for the first time and I just found out that I'm picking second in our draft! Uhhhh can anyone tell me who to pick pls? lol

@lollasta I created all the custom graphics for the movie, and the Devito logo for his pool man company was my fav. An early career highlight for me was animating it in AE and watching it play on the Jumbotron at CLE baseball stadium. 😎

@Claytweel I'd read a book about this🐒

the movie where Parker Posey dumps Paul Rudd for, you guessed it, Danny DeVito

@lollasta I was so low on the food chain I have no idea. But - It was the Wild West of indie movies. Attach a couple stars and get a few million to greenlight it. 🤷🏻‍♂️

@Claytweel holy shit! how did this movie come about?

@firstshowing Marketing must not have been that good. I’ve never heard of this movie until this moment. 🫣

This is such a fascinating failure because if you followed their marketing for #Ballerina they were clearly really *desperate* for it to be a massive hit. They promoted the HELL out of it. Tons of trailers, clips, promos, posters galore, even that doc, huge premieres, everything.

@RichardERoeper I love Real Genius so much. I did my best to pay homage to it by using the same song to end my movie “Print the Legend” on Netflix. 😎

“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is one of the best songs of the 1980s, and it was put to perfect use in Martha Coolidge’s “Real Genius,” a brilliant and lovely and inspirational and gloriously funny film with layers of meaning that rival “Groundhog Day.”

@Todd_Spence @joe_dante It’s definitely the best 😎

This is great. Vidiots in LA has become one of the best movie theaters. @joe_dante

@ericspiegelman Eric.

New Lena Dunham show is better than Fleabag. Don't @ me

🫶🫶