For 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.”
The Post set the wheels in motion earlier this year when publisher Fred Ryan started putting feelers out to his West Coast contacts, including Willow Bay and Elizabeth M. Daley, both of whom he knows from serving on the board of the University of Southern California. (Bay, a veteran broadcaster who is married to former Disney chief Bob Iger, is dean of the university’s communications and journalism school; Daley is dean of the film school.) Ryan said it was Daley who suggested he reach out to Grazer—cofounder of Imagine with Ron Howard—to pick his brain about which agents might best help the Post expand into film and television. “We just hit it off from the very beginning when I explained what we were trying to do,” Ryan recalled. Grazer told me, “As I was talking with Fred, I’m starting to think, If he’s gonna do this, it should be us. I’d love to do this. We’d have access to all the past stories that have been written and all the stuff that’s being written now.”
Grazer immediately proposed that CAA should represent the partnership. They set up another call, this time looping in CAA power agent and managing director Bryan Lourd, and the Post’s then chief communications officer, Kristine Coratti Kelly, now head of communications and marketing for CNN. “I could immediately sense this enthusiasm on Bryan Lourd’s part,” said Ryan, who then flew out to Beverly Hills for meetings with Lourd and Grazer. “We just knew on the spot, this was the right partnership, so we said, okay, let’s get the teams together.”
In April, Ryan hosted a couple dozen people from CAA and Imagine in the Post’s K Street headquarters. Grazer, who was in Rome at the time (fresh off a meeting with Pope Francis) Zoomed in from Italy; Howard joined virtually from LA. The group got to be flies on the wall for the Post’s daily news meeting, and later sat down with executive editor Sally Buzbee and other newsroom brass. “It was a big deal for me,” said Lourd, who majored in journalism at USC and got to know former longtime Post publisher Donald Graham from rubbing elbows at Allen & Company’s annual Sun Valley Conference. “The Post is this storied thing for anyone who remotely ever cared about journalism. All the President’s Men, and Redford, and how important he was to my early ideas about celebrity—I was super excited to be there.” So excited, that Lourd ended up joining the Post as a guest for that weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, where his tablemates included Ryan, White House bureau chief Ashley Parker, and Senator Amy Klobuchar. His goal for the collaboration, he told me, is “to put the right structure in place to give the Post and its journalists an access point to professional producers, to try and figure out what would lend itself to other formats, be it a podcast or a series or a film.”
The main conduit is Justin Wilkes, Imagine’s president and chief strategy officer, who now facilitates a weekly meeting between Post editors and the teams at Imagine and CAA. The editors “flag stories in progress, that are about to be published, or which were just published, where the Post thinks there are opportunities to expand on,” Wilkes explained. “The biggest opportunity for us is the ongoing investigations. That’s where the Post really shines, where they’re four or five or six months down the line with a particular story, putting a lot of resources behind it, and now they’re letting us in on that story before it even breaks.” Imagine producers recently embedded with Post journalists for one such story, which they’re turning into a documentary, “to see the process of reporting and what it takes to get the truth right,” said Wilkes. “Imagine is so bullish on it that we’re financing it.” Other projects in development include something related to the fall of Afghanistan and also a scripted TV series based on the Post’s recent “Gringo Hunters” feature, about an elite Mexican police squad that targets American fugitives fleeing across the southern border.
A few caveats: Story subjects like these aren’t necessarily proprietary to the Post (the news industry, like Hollywood, is a highly competitive business), not to mention the reality that many more stories are optioned for development than ever actually get made. Also, Ryan acknowledges that the Post isn’t expecting this to be a profit center—it’s more about getting the Post’s brand in front of as many audiences as possible. “First and foremost,” according to Ryan, “is how the brand is presented.”
For what it’s worth, money didn’t even really come up in my conversations with the principals. The driving factor here appears to be genuine enthusiasm about bringing the Post’s journalistic oeuvre to market. “What got me super excited,” said Grazer, “is that Ron and I have made a lot of movies based on true stories. We love true stories and documentaries. We have 18 to 22 projects a year, and a lot of the things we do are based on true stories and the IP that underlies that, whether it’s Apollo 13 or A Beautiful Mind or Friday Night Lights. The Washington Post is just so rich with stories that you can bring to cinematic environments. It’s a gold mine.”
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Inside The Washington Post’s Big Hollywood Deal - Vanity Fair
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