‘All Men Are Guilty,’ Says Mega-Mogul Barry Diller
As against today, when people operate out of research and marketing.”
He says that Netflix and Amazon have blasted Hollywood into “a completely different universe.”
“It’s something that’s never happened in media before, when Netflix got a lot of subscribers early on
and made the brilliant decision to pour it into original production, like spending more than $100 million dollars to make ‘House of Cards,’ instead of buying old stuff,” he says.
I ask Mr. Diller what he thought of Sacha Baron Cohen’s joke at David Geffen’s recent birthday party at Jimmy Iovine’s house in Los Angeles
that Mr. Geffen, Mr. Diller and the other starry billionaires and millionaires there represented “the world’s third-largest economy.”
“It is a funny joke,” he says.
And we are hopscotching topics, from Silicon Valley taking over Hollywood to Jared & Ivanka & Josh & Karlie to pornography to his company’s dating websites to the time Harvey Weinstein tried to
throw Mr. Diller off a balcony in Cannes to how his friend Hillary Clinton is faring to the mogul’s dismissal of Donald Trump (whose Secret Service code name is Mogul) as “a joke” and “evil.”
I tell him that a friend of mine, an executive in network television, fretfully asked her Hollywood psychic how long Mr. Trump would last as president and the psychic asserted
that it wouldn’t be more than two years and that the president would be felled by a three-page email.