I.
When I was a Federal Trade Commissioner, I learned that, as exciting as I thought my job was, most people don’t think about corporate consolidation. The word “merger” does not get the heart thumping. “Media merger” sounds like you’re stapling a document.
So let me try something different: If you watch CNN, if you watch John Oliver or Bill Maher or White Lotus or House of the Dragon, if you fall asleep on your couch to hours of Friends or Guy Fieri or Anthony Bourdain or Turner Classic Movies or Rick and Morty, if you’ll admit for the purposes of this essay you’re actually snoring to 90 Day Fiancé and Naked and Afraid and Sister Wives, or even if you’re waiting around for Shark Week: Your screentime will soon come under new ownership.
Or rather, it might. That wannabe owner is centimillionaire David Ellison, son of centibillionaire Larry Ellison, and he is the new CEO of Paramount Skydance. Which means that last year he bought CBS News, 60 Minutes, The Daily Show, CSI, Survivor, The Good Wife, Dexter, Star Trek, Yellowstone, Landman, BET, MTV, Showtime, the CW, South Park, and Spongebob Squarepants. He paid $8 billion for them. Now he wants to buy Warner Brothers Discovery for $110 billion—13 times what he paid for Paramount.
The problem is that David Ellison does not have that money. So, he’s borrowing it. Not him personally. No, he wants to make the new, combined company take on $79 billion in debt. According to The Wall Street Journal, Larry Ellison allegedly informed White House officials that a Paramount takeover of Warner Brothers would result in an overhaul of reporting at CNN. In a possible preview of what’s to come, 60 Minutes has seen an exodus of senior reporters; correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi claimed she was pushed out for “refusing to sanitize accurate reporting.”
Democrats have denounced the merger. Just recently, 12 Democratic state attorneys general sued to stop the transaction and it is now on hold until as late as June of next year. Yet if you focus on the fact that it’s Democrats suing Trump-aligned Republicans, you see only half the story; the fight can look like politics as usual. When you focus on the money, however, you see a looming economic calamity.
I’m not the only one who sees it. In April, over a thousand people from across the entertainment industry wrote an open letter calling for the merger to be blocked. They also focused on the economics, warning that the deal would result in “fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences.” There are now well over 5,000 signers to the letter. Yet the impact of the deal on the people who actually make film and television remains out of focus.
So, last month, alongside the Writers Guild and other groups opposed to this merger, I went on a listening tour of three cities that it would hit the hardest—Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta. At each stop, we focused little on politics, but far more on the workers “below the line”—an industry term for all the writers, actors, and blue-collar workers who never make the top billing on a movie poster.
I heard anger and despair. I saw glimmers of a broader coalition that might one day fight corporate takeovers. And I experienced Paramount’s bizarre attempts to smear us.
II.
People think “Hollywood” is rich, glamorous, and famous. It’s Oprah and Ryan Reynolds. It’s an Ozempiced executive lunching poolside with George Clooney.
The reality? “Hollywood” is the 20 people who apply to be their waiter. “Hollywood” has no pool and often, no health insurance. And for years now, “Hollywood” is not just in Hollywood, or even Los Angeles—it’s in New York and Jersey City; it’s in Atlanta and Savannah; it’s in Nashville and Baton Rouge and Kentucky and Miami.
The vast majority of people who work in film and television are not studio executives, nor are they famous actors. They are, overwhelmingly, blue-collar workers, freelancers, and small businesses. And they are in free fall.
According to the Future Film Coalition, a grassroots organization that helped organize the meetings, L.A. county has seen almost one in three of its film jobs disappear. Half the sales that used to happen at the nation’s top film festivals now do not happen. More than half of documentaries now made do not make any money. “A decade ago, the casual conversation between peers would be: What are you working on now?” said an actress at the Los Angeles town hall. “Now it’s: Are you working?”
The decline came from multiple causes, including a Covid-era collapse in productions, a race to the bottom on tax credits, and the writers’ and actors’ strikes giving studios an excuse to run those shoots abroad. The people we met understood that. But they couldn’t stop talking about the waves of layoffs that had followed waves of mergers.
Adam Conover—the only above the line actor who spoke at any of the meetings—told a dizzying story about the life and death of his investigative comedy series, Adam Ruins Everything.
He had pitched the show to Discovery, Comedy Central, TNT, TBS, and truTV, among others; truTV bought it because their new president wanted to compete with Comedy Central. “We employed about 100 people for the time we shot the show, and then countless contractors, caterers, et cetera,” Conover said. “We manufactured television for five years here in Los Angeles.” Another 100 people worked in an office building in midtown Manhattan cutting the show’s ads and setting its marketing strategy.
Then AT&T bought truTV’s parent company, Time Warner. AT&T put truTV, TNT, and TBS under one manager, who then called Adam, fired Adam, and fired every person working for the show. Then AT&T sold all those channels and merged them with Discovery, which put the channels under new management that fired the guy who fired Adam.
Now, Paramount, which bought Comedy Central, wants to buy all those channels, which would combine most of the channels that competed to buy the show in the first place.
“Hollywood is what it is,” Conover reflected, because people could “sell something into an open market, sell an idea, then employ hundreds and thousands of people underneath them—that created the media ecosystem that caused America to be a cultural power in the world, and created all the wonderful media that we love. And it’s about to die.”
Paramount, of course, had a different take. “Generally, we are very empathetic to the folks in Hollywood,” their top lawyer, Makan Delrahim, told the Los Angeles Times a few days before the town hall. “But this transaction will actually create more and better and exciting jobs.” Other mergers may kill jobs, Delrahim seemed to be saying. But David Ellison and David Zaslav—the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery—have no intention of firing people.
We held our town halls at the Lumiere Cinema in Los Angeles, the Writers Guild headquarters in New York, and the Plaza Theater in Atlanta. Each room was filled with people who had been fired by Ellison and Zaslav.
There was the writer in Los Angeles laid off by Paramount after Ellison bought it. She was late on rent. “I don’t have any prospects. My severance has run out. Unemployment is about to run out,” she said. But she insisted that she was happier now because of how poorly she had been treated since Ellison took over.
There was the writer in New York who was developing a show with Charlize Theron about a mom and her trans teen in the Texas panhandle. That writer, Jacob Tobia, was fired the moment Zaslav took over Warner Brothers and became the CEO of the company Ellison is now buying. “They didn’t even allow me to complete my contract or finish revising the pilot script before they made the decision,” Tobia said. “It was axed mid-revision. They paid me out and told me essentially to go away.”
Writing for film or TV may sound cushy. Maybe it once was. Now, an L.A. expat in New York explained, “There’s no jobs at the bottom of the rung anymore.” The entry-level position in writing—the writers’ production assistant—has been eliminated. So the people working the next rung of jobs are really working “two jobs, for $20 an hour, in Los Angeles.”
The living wage in L.A. is around $30. Local Starbucks baristas make $20.
III.
Any gauzy mirage we may have had of life in the industry was wiped away in Atlanta, where our meeting was dominated not by writers or actors but by about a dozen members of Local 479 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the union that represents the technicians and craftspeople who work behind the camera or between takes.
Unlike the Writers Guild, IATSE’s national leaders have never called for the merger to be blocked. As I introduced myself, each person was careful to tell me that they were there to speak for themselves, not their union.
A tightly wound 30-something named Roger Thacher stood waiting near the popcorn station. He had a beard and wore glasses, an olive-green baseball cap, and a black, orange, and green Hawaiian shirt—his old crew’s “Friday uniform,” he was quick to note. “Otherwise I look wildly unprofessional.”
Roger gave me a sad smile. He thanked me for holding the event. He told me about his work as an assistant prop master. “That laptop behind you, that smartphone in her hand?” he said, gesturing to my colleague who was sitting at a nearby table. “I’m the guy who makes sure those have green screens. I’m the guy who tracks the amount of water in every glass that shows up in the shoot. I’m the invisible job behind the invisible job.”
But he seemed to be holding something back.
When the event began, I called on him in the audience. He stood and explained that he had joined the industry in 2017 and joined IATSE one year later. Business was booming then. “Many of us wondered how sustainable all this could be,” he said.
“Our fears were realized after the last big Disney consolidation,” he said. He had been working on a Hulu show that was shooting at a local college 10 minutes east of Atlanta. “Then, Disney finished their acquisition of Hulu—100 percent—and suddenly, our job moved across the border to Canada.”
He paused, then went on: “I used to shave my head for set to look clean for my work. My last day on a union job was the day we lost our first child to miscarriage. After a month,” he said, his voice breaking, “I noticed I was getting a little fuzzy up there. So I decided to have a little bit of fun—I’ll let it go until I work a union show again.”
Roger took off his hat. Long black hair fell over his shoulders.
“My hair is now down to the middle of my back. And I have a beautiful son at home who is 13 months old.”
He considered himself lucky; he had worked in another industry before. “I knew I would be okay,” he said. But he couldn’t say the same for his friends. “I hosted dinners for colleagues who lost 80 percent of their salary. I helped friends pack up and leave the state because they couldn’t afford their house.”
An older woman named Laurie Garner spoke a few minutes later. She stayed seated. She had worked in film and TV in Atlanta since the early ’90s, mostly in the art and prop departments. Her IMDB page lists credits from Watchmen, Atlanta, The Hunger Games, and Pitch Perfect, among dozens of others. This was a craftsperson who was recruited for the most prominent productions in Georgia.
Garner’s voice was unsteady; the right side of her face was limp. “I cannot afford health insurance because I have no work,” she said. “I haven’t worked since 2024 on Stranger Things,” That year, the Art Directors Guild suspended their job-training program, telling applicants in an email that “we cannot in good conscience encourage you to pursue our profession while so many of our members remain unemployed.”
CEOs often say they won’t do mass layoffs after a merger—they’ll just fire the underperformers. When I think about that, I think about a filmmaker named Christalyn Hampton who was in the back row of the Plaza. She wore dreads under a black Falcons hat. Her documentary about a local abortion clinic, The Devil is Busy, had just been nominated for an Academy Award.
“Even though I was recently nominated for an Oscar, it’s not like jobs are flowing in for me,” she said. “A lot of my documentaries about social justice? There’s no place for those. The mandates in a lot of these industries are true crime, cults, and celebrities.”
Paramount’s financing for the merger illustrates this dynamic. When you’re $80 billion in the hole, you don’t ask yourself: How am I going to tell an amazing story? You ask yourself: How the hell am I going to pay these guys back? And how can I absolutely guarantee that this next show will make money? You don’t take risks. You play it safe. And people like Christalyn Hampton are out of work, and her ideas about social justice won’t make it to your screen.
Towards the end of the session, a set decorator named Jamie Rosegren stood up in the front. She was the business agent for Local 479, although she too clarified that she was speaking for herself. Her union had 5,400 members; around 2,000 were in arrears because they had no work. “Now that people don’t have that work, they don’t know what to do with themselves,” she said. “We’ve seen more suicide. We’ve seen larger instances of depression among our crew.”
Atlanta was the home of Ted Turner’s media empire, which had merged with Time Warner, then AOL, then AT&T, then Discovery—each one generating another round of layoffs. The Paramount merger would be merger number five. Ethan Tussey, a Georgia State professor, told the crowd Turner properties used to employ 8,000 people in Atlanta. Now, it was less than 3,000.
IV.
Monday morning after our town hall at the Lumiere, a three-screen independent theater in Los Angeles, I drove to KCRW’s studios at Santa Monica College for an interview with Kim Masters, an institution in entertainment reporting. Masters played a clip of a CNBC interview with Ellison in which he said the deal would be “good for the creator economy” and “good for Hollywood.”
I told Masters that Ellison’s math did not work. And it doesn’t, on a couple of levels. According to Ellison, the deal will generate “$6 billion in synergies”—Wall Street’s word for the cost cuts that follow a merger, usually in the form of sweeping layoffs. Yet Ellison insisted that most of the savings would not come from layoffs. “Nobody believes that,” said NYU professor Scott Galloway. “It’s going to be difficult to cut billions in snacks.”
The bigger picture doesn’t work either. Paramount is promising to make payments on $79 billion in loans, promising to stop spending $6 billion elsewhere—while also promising to put more movies in theaters than any studio has ever done in modern history.
My children tease me with something they call “monkey math.” I, the pedant, fall for it every time. It goes like this. I’ll be driving them to school or making sure they brush their teeth, and one of them will say: “Papa, what’s two plus two?”
I grimace, lower my head, and say “four.”
“No!” they scream, overjoyed. “It’s 22!” As I start to say, “No, it’s no–,” they holler, “It’s monkey math!”
Ellison is trying to convince people two plus two is 22. Fitch has downgraded his company’s credit to junk status.
Masters and I talked about the deal for about 25 minutes, touching on its impact on labor, on Paramount’s purge at 60 Minutes, and the legal cases against the merger. Then, she seemed to get a little uncomfortable, and she asked me one last question. She had also read the L.A. Times interview where Paramount general counsel Delrahim touted “more and better and exciting jobs.”
But she had noticed a different part, where Delrahim said that our coalition was engaged in a “fear mongering” political campaign, and that “some of these people are trying to inflict harm on this transaction really because of their own antisemitic views.”
What did I think of that? I called it what it was—a distraction, and a curious one from a man representing a company whose takeover bid was backed by $24 billion from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi.
That was a Monday. That Thursday, a frothy New York Post article cited “a source involved in the merger” who said that the coalition trying to block it was “completely driven by antisemitism and socialism.”
It’s all fun and games until you fire 6,000 people while earning $21.2 million a month.
V.
Another thing I learned at the FTC is that while a particular merger fight in a particular industry may feel existential to the people in that industry, it can be hard to get people outside of it to notice, let alone to care.
In 2023, for example, FTC staff blocked a pharmaceutical company’s effort to maintain a monopoly over treatments for Pompe disease, a horrific genetic condition that kills children before their first birthday. If you Google the case, almost all the coverage comes from the finance and pharma trade press—and the white shoe law firms litigating similar deals.
And so it caught my eye when a soybean grower and cattleman from Iowa, Lance Lillibridge, posted this message on Facebook in May:
[BLOCKQUOTE]As a farmer, watching the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. merger debate sounds awfully familiar. A handful of dominant firms get bigger, independent businesses lose leverage, and the people actually creating the product get squeezed harder and harder. Farmers have lived this story for decades through consolidation in inputs and retail. Now more industries are starting to see the same thing happen to them.[END]
A few days after I saw the post, I interviewed him alongside Kirby Dick, an Emmy- and Polk-award winning documentarian, for the Organized Money podcast. I wanted to know—how did he make these connections?
For Lance, it was all pretty straightforward. His wife is physically disabled from multiple sclerosis, so he spends a lot of time with her watching movies and television shows. “Back when I was a kid, there was a lot of different things to watch—today it’s all about crime. It’s all about who killed who on the farm,” he said.
“We’ve got that same thing going on,” he said, about farmers. Farmers like Lance used to have a dozen different companies to buy seed from; now they have two. If there was very little seed choice, there were “no choices in where you get your fertilizer from, who’s manufacturing it … The consolidation is tremendous and crippling. The fertilizer companies are making more off an acre of land than we are right now. And that’s disgusting.”
On July 13, California Attorney General Rob Bonta stood on a hill in front of the HOLLYWOOD sign and announced a lawsuit, on behalf of himself and 11 other state attorneys general, to block the Paramount-Warner merger. The law enforcers called out Paramount’s monkey math, arguing that the takeover would mean fewer movies for higher prices, and would also lead to higher cable bills. The next day, the Writers Guild announced its own lawsuit to block the merger on the grounds that it would collapse key labor markets for their members. A third lawsuit, filed the same day by a company shareholder, alleged that the Ellisons had effectively bribed President Trump in order to secure his approval of the merger.
Soon after that, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring the company from merging for two weeks, then extended the order for two weeks; then Paramount agreed to delay merging until next June unless if the court issues a ruling before then—a stunning reversal for a company that was so confident the deal would sail through regulatory approvals.
Billionaires usually get what they want. They get the government they want, the healthcare they want, and they break the laws they want, so long as they make the right donations or crypto investments.
This case asks: Maybe not this time?
As for next time, I’m still thinking about my conversation with Lance Lillibridge—and documentarian Kirby Dick’s reaction to hearing the anger and hopelessness on independent farms across the country. I had just shared what it was like to watch fourth- or fifth-generation farmers break down in tears because their business was going bankrupt, or because they were scared that a powerful supplier would learn that they had spoken to an FTC commissioner.
Lance had just talked about how he was shielding his 20-year-old son, who was set on going into farming, from their family’s financial difficulties: “He doesn’t really have an interest to do anything else.”
Something about those scenes clicked for Kirby. “I don’t think people see this issue this way,” he said. “They see it as either a complex issue or something that’s not related to them personally.”
He chuckled and added: “When you started describing that, I sort of just leaned in like, Where can I get my camera? How can I cover that?”
