The Bluestocking, vol 314: Marvel and throuples

90 percent of all octopuses in Oklahoma

Happy Friday!

This week’s Helen Lewis Has Left The Chat features Katie Herzog of Blocked and Reported and Mike Pesca of The Gist talking about Slack meltdowns.

Helen

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The Life and Death of Hollywood (Harpers)

The shift to IP further tipped the scales of power. Multiple writers I spoke with said that selecting preexisting characters and cinematic worlds gave executives a type of psychic edge, allowing them to claim a degree of creative credit. And as IP took over, the perceived authority of writers diminished. Julie Bush, a writer-producer for the Apple TV+ limited series Manhunt, told me, “Executives get to feel like the author of the work, even though they have a screenwriter, like me, basically create a story out of whole cloth.”

At the same time, the biggest IP success story, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, by far the highest-earning franchise of all time, pioneered a production apparatus in which writers were often separated from the conception and creation of a movie’s overall story. “Working on these big franchises is a little bit like being a stonemason on a medieval cathedral,” Stentz told me. “I can point toward this little corner, or this arch, and say, That was me.” Within this system, writers have sometimes been withheld basic information, such as the arc of a project. Joanna Robinson, co-author of the book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, told me that the writers for WandaVision, a Marvel show for Disney+, had to craft almost the entirety of the series’ single season without knowing where their work was ultimately supposed to arrive: the ending remained undetermined, because executives had not yet decided what other stories they might spin off from the show.

A very crunchy longread (lots of figures and technical details) about the consolidation of the Hollywood’s big players, the effect of that on writers, and the death of “peak TV”.

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This purports to be a map of “if you move to the US and want the same weather you left”. Please argue with it. Credit: @tunguz on X.

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Quick Links

1. “The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing.” The shift in social media—particularly Meta’s turn away from news—is bad for sites that rely on outrage bait (The Atlantic).

2. The world’s oldest conjoined twins died last week at 62. They were joined at the head, facing opposite ways, and one of them transitioned in 2011 (Guardian).

3. “He cultivated a flamboyantly geeky look, with equal shades of Sherlock Holmes (ascot, horn-rimmed glasses) and Ace Ventura (cerulean blazer, silky skull-print shirt). A quirky-shoes enthusiast, he sometimes wore a pair of white brogues made to look as though they were spattered with blood.” Probably not a huge surprise that a writer obsessed with serial killers would turn out to be a wrong ‘un, but nevertheless a very entertaining story by Lauren Collins (New Yorker, £)

4. “It’s a Monday morning in March, and Danny Lavery is up first to quietly bake the bread he proofed the night before and to walk the two little dogs Maxim Casaubon Lavery (goes by Bon Bon) and Huckleberry Rigaud Lavery (prefers Gogo). Danny and the dogs are, for now, alone in the early-to-bed, early-to-rise camp. His wife, Grace Lavery, gets up a little later, and Lily Woodruff is liable to sleep in as well. Lily has a number of projects to attend to, but at the forefront is gestating the household’s baby.” You know this newsletter aims to be the world’s #1 source of throuple news (The Cut).

5. “In the beginning, we did all the typical stuff. Read the books on nonmonogamy, did the relationship check-ins. We’d sit down, take notes. We did every exercise in the books, listened to every podcast. We learned a strategy from the Multiamory podcast called “agile scrum,” which was adapted from business-meeting models. We utilized that format.” The New York Times sees your throuple and raises you a “20-person polycule in the Boston area”.

6. “On August 9, 1996, the cast and crew of Titanic ended a big day of shooting with a seafood dinner. An hour later, around 40 people started feeling queasy, including director James Cameron. Later, it would turn out that somebody had spiked the clam chowder with a hallucinogenic drug called PCP or ‘angel dust’. In this episode, assistant camera operator Jamie Barber tells us how the crew ended up in hospital, dancing in a conga line.” This is what podcasts are for (What It Was Like)

7. “Keeping Liz Truss at the forefront of the national conversation is, at least so far as their attack on the Tories is concerned, the Labour Party’s biggest strategic goal. And fortunately for the Labour Party, keeping Liz Truss at the forefront of the national conversation is Liz Truss’s biggest strategic goal too.” (Tom Hamilton, Substack)

8. What Ben Goldacre did next (Odds and Ends of History, Substack)

9. “The watershed for me was probably my 2016 feature “What Is Gender, Anyway?” — which ended up on the New Statesman website after being initially commissioned, and then spiked, by Mosaic, the (now defunct) popular science magazine of medical research foundation the Wellcome Trust.” Sarah Ditum on the wild era of the 2010s (Tox Report, Substack).

10. “How the Cliffords wound up owning about 90 percent of all octopuses in Oklahoma is a journey that begins with his son’s love of marine biology — especially octopuses.” A classic in the genre of “this pet we thought was fat was actually pregnant.” (Washington Post)

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