I Read Bozoma Saint John's Coming Memoir
➕ Inside the future of 'Atlas Shrugged' at the conservative streaming service spending $100M+ on content
Welcome to The Optionist! Thanks for reading along. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and is ready for the end-of-year sprint to get everything done before the holidays. For today’s free edition, I wanted to dive into a couple of stories worth highlighting. First, there’s the announcement of an Atlas Shrugged TV series. It was such a hugely influential book among conservatives since its publication in 1957, but is it something viewers are interested in? And what’s with the platform that’s gonna stream it? Second, in February we’re getting The Urgent Life, a memoir from former Netflix chief marketing officer Bozoma Saint John. Many people around town have wondered about what she’d say about her tenure at the streamer (and before that at Endeavor and Uber) in the book. I read the galley and I’m here to report on how juicy it is (maybe).
Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen
Right-wing media company The Daily Wire’s acquisition of the rights to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged for its subscription streaming site Daily Wire+ sparked my curiosity, both for the IP and the platform it ended up on. Atlas Shrugged is one of the biggest novels of the late 20th century — it’s been a perennial seller for more than 60 years and had a profound influence on the conservative movement. So it got me thinking about the consumer interest in a series, and also what the heck is the Daily Wire+ — and what’s it doing in entertainment?!
Atlas Shrugged is one of those legendary novels that lots of people have chased over the years as their Rosebud. Godfather producer Albert Ruddy had his eye on it for a long time, but failed to land it because he wouldn't give Rand script approval (though he was involved in attempts to make it after Rand's 1982 death). NBC almost made it with Rand's cooperation until Fred Silverman nixed it. Angelina Jolie — reportedly a Rand fan — was attached to a version in the early 2000s.
If you haven't read it, Atlas Shrugged is about a dystopian future U.S. where free enterprise is undermined by a totalitarian government. A (female) railroad executive discovers that key business and other key leaders — men of the mind — are retreating from society to a hidden community in the Colorado mountains. She and her new lover, John Galt, who runs the retreat, convince the leaders to return to society and together they topple the authoritarian government and return free enterprise (and freedom). Rand uses the book to expand on her philosophy of objectivism — individualism, capitalism and reason are good; government intervention is bad. (Amazingly, libertarian Rand Paul was not named after Ayn Rand. )
Sales were good when the book was first published in 1957 (it spent 22 weeks on the NYT bestseller list), but reviews weren't, with the National Review calling it "silly" and Time asking, "is it a novel?" Still, over the years it has sold around 10 million copies, and experienced a surge in popularity during the 2008 financial crisis when it sold about 500,000 copies a year for a few years. The importance of Atlas has less to do with the book itself than how it and author Rand generally have become totems for the right.
The Daily Wire said it was planning to develop Atlas as a TV series for its Daily Wire+ digital platform ($12 a month). This seems like a tough sell to me. I'm not sure how big an audience there is for this. There was an Atlas theatrical trilogy less than a decade ago that bombed from Strike Pictures/Atlas Distribution Co. ($4.6M worldwide gross against a $20M budget for Part I, and it went down from there) and that was in the wake of the book’s financial crisis-fueled popularity. I'm not sure the plot, written as an attack on totalitarianism in the midst of the Cold War by a Russian emigre, speaks to most Americans today.
This problem is compounded, in my opinion, by the explicitly political intention of the filmmakers. You've got Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro, a right-wing troll, as a producer alongside The Atlas Society, an organization dedicated to promoting Rand and objectivism. These are people who want to make this precisely because they think it can sell the politics of the book. The point isn't that political entertainment is inherently bad. Of course, all work is political in some sense. But it can be hard to make good entertainment if all the creative decisions are made in service to politics. Recall The Ankler’s series on The American Viewer to see just how unpolitical most Americans are.
In short, we've got a dated novel being adapted by fans of its politics at a time when Americans political concerns have moved in other directions.
Poking around the Atlas Shrugged adaptation also sent me down a rabbit hole about the economics of the Daily Wire's entertainment push. So far, they've said they’re committing $100 million to entertainment and another $100 million to children's programming (an announcement made in the midst of the Disney-Florida "Don't Say Gay" controversy).
On the adult side so far, that has yielded Shut In, about a suburban mom who must save herself and her kids from a meth-head home invader. It debuted in Feb 2021 to about 300K viewers on a free YouTube stream before going behind the Daily Wire+ paywall. There’s also Terror on the Prairie, set in the Old West, about a woman who must protect herself and her children against a ruthless gang of rogue soldiers, which went directly to Daily Wire+. For the Daily Wire, the key marketing hook seems to be the inclusion of Gina Carano, who was dropped from The Mandalorian for her inflammatory social media posts (like the one comparing being a conservative in America to being a Jew in Nazi Germany). The Daily Wire+ description of the movie leads with, "Gina Carano is back. Disney canceled her. Now, the un-canceling begins."
In addition to Atlas Shrugged, Daily Wire also just announced it’s developing a series based on the late ’80s fantasy series, The Pendragon Cycle, a reimagining of the King Arthur legend set during the Roman occupation of Britain with an evangelical Christian bent. Daily Wire is saying both Pendragon and Atlas could premiere in 2023, which seems ambitious for two series that will require substantial special effects.
It's a lot of money to spend on content for a platform that has around a million subscribers. The Daily Wire is successful as a journalism enterprise — in 2020 its gross revenue exceeded $100 million for the first time — but there's a big gap between being a profitable news operation and being a profitable media company. A hundred million dollars goes really, really fast on content — that's change you find under the couch to a big player — and it is not clear whether they can grow the subscriber base enough beyond the core conservative audience to offset the spend.
In the end, Daily Wire+ is likely to be nothing more than a small sideshow in the early history of streaming and Atlas Shrugged and The Pendragon Cycle to be quickly forgotten, if they even managed to get made at all. Still, the Daily Wire's move highlights the right's fascinating love-hate relationship with entertainment — Hollywood is awful; let's make movies to sell conservatism (Steve Bannon, Dinesh D’Souza). There are a lot of investors in the background of Hollywood with conservative views (or in the case of John Malone, not so much in the background) who might use the Daily Wire+ as evidence that the majors players should make at least a small move in that direction.
I'll be watching to see how all this plays out.
Bad Ass Boz Fails to Dish
One of the bigger insider stories in Hollywood this year was the departure of Netflix’s chief marketing officer Bozoma Saint John, who stepped down after just two years on the job. (If you haven’t read them, Richard’s two pieces on it are fab — here and here.) She was the first African American to join the company’s senior ranks. Before that, she was Endeavor’s CMO and had also held senior jobs at Uber, Beats/Apple and Pepsi.
As both the rare Black woman to make into a Hollywood C-suite job and a larger-than-life personality, Saint John has attracted lots of attention. Self-styled as “Bad Ass Boz,” she’s given Ted Talks, hosted a podcast with Katie Couric, lectured at Harvard and hosted her own workshops on how to build your own brand — she herself has more than 400,000 Instagram followers and did a paid promotional video for Condé Nast and Porsche… while at Netflix (and apparently unbeknownst to them). She’s also been the subject of a snarky and frankly unfair Ad Age story that named her the CMO most likely to leave her job in 2021 and also questioned her credentials. Given the troubles Netflix has had over the last couple of years, stories that hinted at problems within the marketing department and Saint John’s own extracurricular activities, people have been curious about exactly went down. So there’s been a lot of interest in what Saint John’s new memoir, The Urgent Life, might have to say about her time at Netflix (and Endeavor), about racism in Hollywood and perhaps whether it tried to settle scores. Lots of us (me included) were looking forward to a juicy tell all.
Well, I read it and I’m here to report that there’s none of that in the book. The Urgent Life really only takes us through 2013, when Saint John’s husband, Peter, died of cancer. This is a real tearjerker, a poignant tale about losing the love of your life. It toggles between a blow-by-blow account of Peter’s illness and flashbacks to her childhood, their romance and struggles as an interracial couple (he’s white), the birth of their daughter and the miscarriage that almost broke apart their marriage. It’s very much in the vein of stuff like A Journal for Jordan and Two Kisses for Maddy (to comp two titles I’ve read). There’s almost nothing about her professional life in the book. If you followed her story closely (as I have), you’ll see evidence of her colorful personality and healthy ego. But I think readers who come into the story without any of that foreknowledge will find her engaging and approachable. Their love affair is moving and the story of his illness is heartbreaking. She paints a tender but not saccharine portrait of Peter — he seemed like a great guy. I won’t be surprised if someone options this (I’m guessing it won’t be Netflix). It’s got all the ingredients of a weepy hit. What it doesn’t have, sadly, is anything juicy about what goes on behind-the-scenes in Netflix’s C-suite.
More Best of 2022
The “best of” lists keep coming. ‘Tis the season. For books, we recently got The New York Times 100 notable books list, their top 10 of the year and their top books in different genres; Time's top 100 list, Amazon’s top 20 list, the LA Times 20 best books per its critics, including best novels and nonfiction books; and the Washington Post's best of list. The Post's section is especially good as it includes sections on the best YA novels, best graphic novels, best science fiction, the 10 best feel-good stories and other stuff. Fresh Air's Maruine Corrigan lists her top 10 and NPR offers a big list of favorites.
We’ve also got Apple’s best podcasts across multiple categories (new shows, non-English language shows, shared shows, most-listened-to episodes) and top listens from Time, Vogue and Vulture.