Paul Anka has been masterful at adjusting to fast-evolving showbiz changes, from learning languages to record his songs and build his following in places like Japan and Europe, to remaking himself in Las Vegas after The Beatles pushed him off the radio, to writing My Way for Frank Sinatra and She’s A Lady for Tom Jones. But in Anka’s Deadline interview last Friday to promote his new album Inspirations of Life and Life, he was particularly prescient. We did the interview before the holidays last year, and Anka predicted that Paramount will still end up with Warner Bros Discovery over Netflix, well before the seller re-opened talks that largely had been considered a done deal. Anka posited many useful insights in how Hollywood might adapt to the disruption, but in speculating about the WBD sale he recognized signs of gamesmanship he saw from his long tenure as a Las Vegas fixture. The question was about how contraction, A.I. and other might cripple both the music and the film/TV industries.
“Cripple the business? The motion picture business has been totally run out of the state of California,” Anka said. “There’s no film business as we knew it, it doesn’t exist. It’s over. I was with [David] Zaslav at his house recently, he threw a party for me when HBO released the documentary. Very brilliantly, they created a bidding war. John Malone is brilliant. Now, it’s probably going to get held up in court two years because the Ellisons are not going to let it go easily. You’ve got Trump behind them, and the Arab money. Who knows? Ted Sarandos is very close with Zaslav. Sometimes these guys do each other a favor, it’s an old Vegas trick. You want to sell a hotel? You go to your buddy and say, give me an offer. Just pretend you’re in the game. And they float it out there and it starts this bidding war. I still think it’s going to be Paramount that winds up with it. Ted and Netflix have never stepped out and purchased anything, it has all been built in-house. They’ve never been buyers, and Ted has been thumbing his nose at the theatrical business for years. He hasn’t made a lot of friends among the exhibition people. But things are going to change regardless of who gets it. You’ll have less places to go to with product. We’ll be down to three places, maybe. We know that the overseas sales are very important and they’re making films everywhere; in Atlanta, Canada. It concerns me because we don’t have the film base and that the Hollywood we grew up in, it’s over.”
English (US) ·