Jon Taplin’s Blog

I’ve tangled with some bullies in my life, but Harvey Weinstein is surely at the top of my list. When I sold the film Shineto one of his rivals, he hunted me down at dinner in Sundance and put me up against the wall. He doesn’t like to be on the losing team and his long time relationship with the Clintons has him staring defeat in the face. So what does he do? He threatens Nancy Pelosi to cut off the money to the DCCC unless she personally embraces his plan to privately finance a new primary for Florida and Michigan.

Since Harvey and Bill Clinton’s other patron (who are they, Bill?) are going to finance this little oligopolistic fiasco, I assume they will also be in charge of counting the votes. General Pinochet would be proud.

I’ve always believed that the best guage of how well a politician is doing is the domination of the news cycle. I’m just back from a 17 hour flight from Singapore. On the NBC Nightly News, Barack had the first 9 minutes. The whole hour interview put up on line, has had a huge number of hits. His walk through the House reminded people that he is a rock star.

Hillary is freaking out, saying that she is the candidate for “older white voters. Howard Wolfson, her chief flack is supposedly negotiating a kiss and tell book deal, so the crew are already getting ready to abandon ship. On Oberman tonight, Jonathan Alter suggested that Hillary’s camp is trying to pull Lyndon Johnson’s power move in 1960, in which he got Kennedy to offer him the VP slot in return for his ending a convention floor fight. That would be a travesty, which Barack would never even consider.

Meanwhile John McCain has already resorted to late October rhetoric by saying the Hamas has endorsed Obama. He is really looking cuckoo and if you are trying thowing last minute dirt in May, you need a new script, as Newt Gingrich has suggested. But McCain may have some other problems on his mind.

Even from halfway around the world you can sense a sea change. Hillary’s campaign is running on fumes and she just needs a few days to find a graceful exit. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich warned the Republicans were headed for a November blowout.

Gingrich says the Republican loss in the special election in Louisiana’s sixth congressional district this past weekend should be “a sharp wake up call” for party members.

Gingrich noted President George W. Bushcarried the district by 19 percentage points in winning reelection in 2004. In the end, Democratic State Rep. Donald Cazayoux defeated Republican Woody Jenkins. Republicans tried to cast Cazayoux a liberal by comparing him to Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama, but voters didn’t seem to buy it.

The former Georgia lawmaker also pointed to polls that show Americans now favor Democrats on a host of issues, including taxes and the war on terrorism.

But the real bad news for McCain is that the economic headwinds are getting stronger. Keep reading →

I know Bill and Hillary are worth $50 million, but the question of whether they will keep lending their campaign millions more is probably the source of some real family discussion tonight. All Bill got out of his six days of campaigning in North Carolina was a sunburn. The word is that Bill has loaned her another $6.4 Million this month. Even thought Rush Limbaugh will be crowing in the morning that his Operation Chaos provided Hillary’s margin of victory in Indiana, that is not enough reason for Bill to have to work four days a week for the rest of the year on the lecture circuit to pay for this charade. Perhaps discretion is the better part of valor.

What seems like a century ago, I said that Obama’s steady organizational strength would prevail by June.

If Obama can do well in Pennsylvania and win Oregon and North Carolina, then the elders like Pelosi, Gore and Edwards will probably call on Clinton to abandon the race and let the party unite behind Barack.

Tonight he won 55% of the under 65 white vote in North Carolina. He will do better than predicted in Indiana. The math for Hillary is now impossible. But Bill won’t let the fat lady sing.

Yesterday Singapore announced it was building a next generation broadband network that would bring 3 gigabits per second to each home.  The government will supply $750 million to put the fiber optic conduit  and two private companies are bidding to run the network. What’s most important from a policy standpoint is that the network will be run on an open access policy. For those of us who believe in Network Neutrality, it is a breath of fresh air.

Any operator can plug into it for a fee and provide Internet, IPTV and telephony services. No single operator will be allowed to own the network and block newcomers from accessing it.

Last night I toured with my host the new Fusionopolis Complex where many of the creative industries are starting to locate. They have everything from a Lucasfilm animation facility to a state of the art Biotec research center. It is a brilliantly designed complex of live-work spaces with large swaths of green park, all built, ironically on the military bases of the former British Army Colonial occupiers. The attention to cutting edge detail in the building is astonishing right down to the acoustic sound treatment on the auditorium walls–millions of teak balls with hollow centers that baffle sound. Keep reading →

In the early days of TV, artists like Sid Caesar (with his writers Mel Brooks, Neil Simon and Woody Allen) had free rein to push the boundaries of humor. Can you imagine some marketing guy today approving a five minute silent pantomime like this classic with Caesar and Nanette Fabray?

From the beginning of the Microsoft-Yahoo tussle I thought that Steve Ballmer should just be patient, because Yahoo’s shareholders would eventually force Jerry Yang’s hand. It now looks like Jerry is being taken to the woodshed by some very big boys.

“I’m extremely disappointed in Jerry Yang,” said Gordon Crawford, a portfolio manager at Capital Research Global Investors, which owns over 6% of Yahoo’s shares. “I think he overplayed a weak hand. And I’m even more disappointed in the independent directors who were not responsive to the needs of independent shareholders.”

This could be a done deal in two weeks and Yahoo has no where to run.

I teach an undergraduate course called “The Communication Revolution, Entertainment and Art”. I often have to remind students what the last word has to do with the rest of the title. Marcuse wrote,

In its refusal to accept as final the limitations imposed upon freedom and happiness by society, in its refusal to forget what can be, lies the critical function of the artist.

One of my first jobs was working as a tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. Their work was testament to Marcuse’s statement. I think we are impoverished by our lack of artists who refuse “to forget what can be”, but I’m not sure I know what happened between the late 60’s and the present day. McLuhan had his own ideas about the way we deal with dangerous artists.

To reward and to make celebrities of artists can, also, be a way of ignoring their prophetic work, and preventing its timely use for survival. The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.

So does the culture of celebrity and marketing make it easy to ignore the prophet? What was the nature of the world in 1922 that both a Louis Armstrong and a Pablo Picasso could have such revolutionary effect on our culture? If US Magazine existed in 1922, would Louis and Pablo be “celebrities are just like us” drinking anisette at Els Quare Gats in Barcelona or sharing a reefer with King Oliver at a Windy City stage door?

The problem with the 80-20 rule in entertainment (80% of your profits come from 20% of your product) is that it is a relatively recent development. John Hammond, who discovered Billy Holiday, Benny Goodman, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen didn’t live by the 80-20 rule. Mo Ostin, who ran Warner Bros. Records from 1967-1995 kept artists like Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks and the Kweskin Jug Band on the roster despite their anemic record sales, because they were artists he was proud to release.

I guess I’m sick of the 500 channel universe and the 24 hour celebrity culture. I want to be shocked again by an artist as brave as Orson Welles making Citizen Kane. What will it take to get back to that reality show?

My flight from LA to Singapore (via Tokyo) arrived at 1 AM. The new Terminal 3 is both pristine and beautiful, with high arching celings and amazing signage in many languages. As we pulled out of the airport on to the East Coast Parkway, the driver noted that the first three miles of the parkway could double as a 747 runway if “ever there was a terrorist incident”. I looked down the flat straight parkway and he noted that all the planting in the median was in movable boxes. Take them away and you have a world class runway.

While I waited to check in, I went on the screamingly fast wi-fi system that is available free to all in every part of the city. My host said it was to encourage people to get out of their cubicles and see their work more creatively. I am here talking about the nature of the creative process and it is something this country is determined to foster in its citizens. They already have a pretty robust Computer Animation business that services most of Southeast Asia, but they want to be a global outsourcing player, and I’m convinced they will.

It’s at times like this that I think the U.S. is living in a fools paradise. Last month Singapore was able to deploy $11 billion in cash to take a huge stake in the Swiss Bank, UBS. Singapore is spending its considerable savings both on building a world class digital infrastructure available to all citizens but it is also able to opportunistically bail out some of the West’s desperately over-leveraged banks at very good terms for Singapore.

I guess what has depressed me so much in the last few weeks is that from a global perspective, America is slipping behind, and yet we are contesting an election over American flag pins, egotistical preachers and assorted nonsense that has nothing to do with our massive failures both in Iraq and in every town in our great country. While the rest of the world is moving ahead we are cutting back. At USC, the National Science Foundation grants are harder to come by. Corporate chieftains like Jeff Immelt of GE get criticized for making long term bets on Green Tech. And everywhere we look our bridges, schools, pipelines and digital infrastructure are second class. If the American people are so short-sighted as to fall for the Clinton-McCain “Gas tax Holiday” to encourage consumption, when in fact we should be doing everything we can to reduce consumption–then they will get the panderer they deserve for a President.

Two months ago, I had hoped that a young man named Barack Obama could run a campaign telling people not what they wanted to hear, but what they needed to hear. Clinton and McCain call that “elitist”. I call it courageous, but whether we still think of our leaders in terms of Profiles In Courage, is debatable.