Media: The Washington Post Goes Hollywood (literally)

From Vanity Fair, August 28:

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

Brian Grazer, Bryan Lourd, and Fred Ryan dish on the DC paper’s partnership with Imagine and CAA, which already has four projects in development. “I actually wish I’d thought of it!” says Richard Plepler.

or all its associations with the khaki-ness of the nation’s capital, The Washington Post nonetheless exudes a certain sex appeal. This was the paper, after all, that inspired All the President's Men, America’s ultimate political thriller, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Watergate’s Woodward and Bernstein. More recently, when Marty Baron retired last year after his storied run as executive editor, the A-listers in his video send-off included Liev Schreiber, who immortalized Baron in Spotlight, and Steven Spielberg, who directed 2017’s Pentagon Papers drama, The Post, starring Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham.

Despite its Hollywood cred, The Washington Post hasn’t exactly had a strong presence at the intellectual property gold rush, even as other major media outlets have methodically mined their content and turned it into weaponry for the streaming wars. But that’s all changing now that the Post has become bedfellows with two Hollywood heavyweights: Imagine Entertainment and Creative Artists Agency, which are giving the 144-year-old institution a jolt of creative mojo. Two months since the announcement of a “strategic partnership”—in which Imagine will “create scripted and non-scripted film and television properties derived from The Post’s vast archives, current reporting, and ongoing investigations,” and CAA will broker the deals—the arrangement is already bearing fruit, with four projects “actively in development,” Imagine honcho Brian Grazer told me. “It’s one of the oldest and most reputable papers in America and perhaps the world. Getting special access to stories and being able to, at times, talk to journalists, is just gigantically valuable, particularly if your affinity is to make movies and television based on fact.”

As Peak TV reached a fever pitch over the past few years, news organizations became bullish about selling their IP, not only because of the ravenous demand from the networks and streamers, but as a way to diversify revenues amid the collapse of their traditional business models. The New York Times, for instance, struck a deal with Left/Right to produce documentaries for FX and Hulu, while turning its Modern Love column into an Amazon Prime series. Vox Media and BuzzFeed created in-house studios to develop scripted and unscripted features for the likes of Amazon and Netflix. Vanity Fair’s parent company, Condé Nast, has a sprawling entertainment division that shepherds our content to screen. And so on.

But a mash-up between one of America’s top news outlets and one of its top production companies—with one of Hollywood’s Big Three talent agencies in the mix as their broker—appears to be a sui generis proposition. “I actually wish I’d thought of it!” said Richard Plepler, the former HBO boss who now has a development deal with Apple TV+. “There’s so much IP out there, so many stories flying around, and breaking through is a big deal. Traders call it ‘edge’—maybe that’s AI, or a superior research team. In the content business, you’re also looking for edge. So obviously, if you have a deal with one of the greatest news organizations in the world, to me, that’s a genuine advantage.”....

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How are they going to top Tracy and Hepburn in a movie about fact-checkers?