Lessons from Media Players
A few notes from our recent readings in Issue #6 of our ongoing review series.
I am a great believer in diaries, if only in the sense that bar exercises are good for ballet dancers: it’s often through personal diaries—however embarrassing they are to read now—that the novelist discovers his true bent—that he can narrate real events and distort them to please himself, describe character, observe other human beings, hypothesize, invent, all the rest
— John Fowles on Diaries
WHEN WE READ the biographies and stories of others, what are we trying to achieve? A roadmap for our own lives, that details where to go and where not to go? Pure entertainment, the way we admire circus animals going about their loops?
Over the last few weeks, the quote above by John Fowles on the relation between diarists and novelists was on our minds. If a novelist’s sense of style is shaped by maintaining and reading personal diaries, how are we shaped when we read biographies? Like diaries, aren’t they distorted visions of other people’s lives, filtered through the lens of the subject and the biases of the biographer?
Perspective, we say to ourselves. We are trying to gain perspective. If we succeed, we may end up crafting our own reality, by becoming the leading character in our own story. What we are truly after is building our own sense of self.
And so we continue to read.
Take for example the people we’ll talk about in this issue. We’ve been reading David Milch’s Life’s Work—our favourite TV writer’s memoir. Deadwood, the show that David created and wrote is a seminal viewing experience, a wonder of language and scope. We’d never seen anything like it. Naturally we wanted to know what compels a man to write such a thing. To use a reductionist analogy: if David Milch’s consciousness was a function, we first wanted to know its inputs. Who were the writers that he read? What life experience moulded him? What were his vices? The cauldron where all these inputs merged and fused to form Deadwood would forever be unknown to us, but we wanted to come close—because we too wanted to build something like Deadwood.
Or consider Barry Diller. How does one become a force in television, in movies, in the internet? When people reach the top of a single ladder they tend to stay there, to milk it for what its worth. But Barry leapt from ladder to ladder, a constant stream of reinvention in a long and storied career. From the mailroom at William Morris he joins Paramount Pictures and eventually becomes its head. From there he helps build Fox Broadcasting, the (then) fourth national network after ABC, NBC and CBS. And then he pivots hard: from the oak-panelled board rooms of his earlier media empire he joins QVC: a ‘televised home shopping network’—a mere backwater in the TV landscape of the day. Diller saw something, and he made the leap, finally building the platform that brought together all his past loves: the trifecta of entertainment, communications, and technology into IAC, his holding company.
And finally there’s Larry Gagosian. “A real killer”, some say. “This motherfucker works 24/7” fellow art dealers exclaim in tones of slight jealousy. Gagosian came on our radar recently, when we discovered a long form profile written on him by The New Yorker. The image we get of Gagosian is of an awe-inspiring figure who came from nothing and became the biggest art dealer in the world (he has nineteen galleries to his name). We’ve always loved stories of nobodies who drive their eighteen-wheelers straight into the establishment’s heart. In Gagosian’s case we wanted to know not only what drove him, but also some of the tactics. We’ll discuss these later in this issue.
Clearly, the core personality traits that these men embody speak deeply to us. We aren’t solely attracted to them because they come up with ingenious ideas, but because they are mere vessels for them. And in their movements we see these ideas come to life. It is this execution that we are most drawn to. Everybody can come up with novel ideas, but few have the chutzpah to act them out across a long and varied life.
As Munger said: “Take a simple idea and take it seriously”. The stories of these men are testament to that claim.
What follows are three short ideas from their lives.
Barry Diller: Smart Agenting
THE YEAR WAS 1994. Barry had recently left his post as Chairman and CEO of Fox, Inc and moved to QVC, a ‘televised home shopping network’ where the mix of commerce and media was creating a perfect chain of action and reaction. Barry thrived in this new arena.
It was around this time that Barry gave a keynote address to some TV delegates in New Orleans1. Reading the transcript of his speech 30 years later, and listening to him talk about that world, we can’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu. 1994 seems like such a long time ago, but the trends that Barry describes are more familiar than ever:
In information, the average American is literally bombarded daily with facts and opinions, products and promotions, each year through the endless morass…
The Endless Morass. Sounds achingly familiar to the muddy marshland of our current information age. And it’s a good metaphor too—when you’re stuck in a morass, getting out is painful, slow, and you get mud all over your clothes.
The news we depend upon for factual balance—television, magazines, talk radio—all these reporters and pundits pumping up every story, then tearing it apart and then dropping it. Remember the war on drugs? Does anyone know who is the current Drug Czar? Or if we even have one? Or what about the radon scare? Or global warming?
Add podcasters to the mix. Old Media and New Media now bombarding us with their takes. Barry bemoans his current state of television, countless channels to keep track of, and people wasting most of their time flicking through the TV Guide. A ‘banquet of choices’ but the ‘diet is thinner’. This sounds exactly like the TV landscape of today:
“Consumers put on a TV set and they see 16 apps. And each of those are doing different pricing. And you’re sitting there with your phone and Googling where a show is or where a sport is.…It’s just not a good consumer experience”
— Comments by David Zaslav (CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, 2024)
So what does Barry propose? A simplified future. He calls the concept ‘Smart Agenting’:
Well, I certainly do not mean something that gets movie stars better work. Linking a computer and its power to search, find, and help us sort through this complicated world-that is what I call smart agenting. Using it to gather the data for only what we need or want to know. Using it in television entertainment and shopping, by giving us choices based on our interests and needs. Smart agenting would do the homework for us in each of these areas, homework for which we are hopelessly ill-equipped today.
Sounds like ‘recommendation systems’ on steroids. A stream where we choose what we want to see, as opposed to the feed forcing us to pick amongst un-needed choices.
As AI Agents become more mainstream, Barry’s explanation of this future takes on a different tone. It gives us a solid roadmap to solve the problem, because the issue of informational overload still exists. We wrote earlier about a new kind of interface that may emerge if AI Agents become our primary mode of interaction:
As agents become better, they will stack multiple user requests into one flow. Consider this: we ask an agent to book us a flight and tickets to a hotel in NYC. The agent interfaces with Booking.com, airline websites, hotels.com and comes back to us with a booking code and confirmation. In this example, these ‘legacy websites’ merely acted as data providers, exposing their APIs to the agent which is the only user-facing interface.
Barry’s ideas from 1994 explore exactly this kind of interface. No more going to multiple places for information. The system has a full map of your user profile and serves your needs in a single place:
When we find an easy, national way to send information back and forth powered by a smart computer, we will open up the world. We will not go from seventy channels to the five hundred that scare you, but to one channel. This channel will access thousands of possibilities and opportunities. You will be able to edit your own information, watch the television shows you want to watch, and buy anything at any time at the best price. You will get back the "clicker" with just two or three buttons on it, and the machines will tailor all these available choices to your life, taste, location, and income.
Or as Barry would later describe to Rolling Stone: “It’s not going to be 500 channels for you to surf idiotically through. It’ll be one channel. It’s a one-channel idea, with not 500 channels but 500,000 access points.”
It’s a simple idea. But taken to the extreme it is very powerful. Search and discovery in an age of excess, done with agents that understand your profile. Barry makes the need for such a service very clear:
This is not an elective; we have no option. Getting to this simplified future is not going to be easy.
Two things jump out at us after reading this anecdote. First, that Barry loves his work, and he takes himself and his instincts seriously. The future is unpredictable, but you can hone your instincts for it. The ‘smart agenting’ idea was his instinct at a time when everybody in the business wanted more and more. It was a simple idea he wanted to take to the extreme.
Second, that he isn’t making a bold pronouncement or staking his company’s claim to a grand future. Instead, he is making a reasoned claim that is backed by personal instinct. Reading his other interviews we can see that Barry doesn’t really like making any bold pronouncements about the future of his industry. When asked by a reporter about the next generation of TV programming he gave a blunt answer:
Barry: What is the next generation of great TV programming going to look like? I haven’t a clue.
Interviewer: That sounds coy. You must have some ideas.
Barry: Come on, let’s move on. This is nonsense. How should I know what the next generation of programming is going to look like? This is mediaspeak. You’re always interested in the next this, the next that.
(source)
We’re sure that as a person in the media/tech industry he too is interested in the next thing—but if old ideas from 1994 are yet to be fully realized, why go for the next shiny thing?
David Milch: Double Acts
THE FIRST SCRIPT that David Milch wrote for television was an episode for Hill Street Blues titled ‘Trial by Fury’, which follows the lives and tribulations of the staff of an inner city police precinct. In his memoir, David points to a character in this episode as an archetype for the kinds of characters he would continue to write.
One of the detectives in the precinct brings in a male prostitute named Eddie. Eddie is a foil to the solemn detective, cracking jokes, being flamboyant. But during the questioning the detective receives a call from his mother about his ailing father, and the tone shifts. Eddie becomes sympathetic and comforts the disturbed detective, offering his own anecdote about his senile grandmother. It’s a small moment—but the lesson is clear. People are more than what they first appear to be.
The reason Milch writes such good characters is because he has lived life, actually lived it—not vicariously through books and TV and films. This Eddie character was based on a person Milch knew: a gay, Black methadone dealer who would come to Yale regularly to meet Milch, and who “started spending time in the library and taught himself Latin and Greek so he could read the gay poets in the original”. This person was extreme juxtaposition in the flesh. But that’s exactly how real people are.
And that’s also how David Milch himself was.
Milch is very forthcoming about his own contradictions in his memoir. Here’s a Yale star student who is also a deeply compromised drug addict. A person whose success created deeper holes inside him. He felt that it was ‘inauthentic’ and ‘accidental’ and he had a need to disown it because “how else do you account for a fact that you’re a junkie? That you’re a degenerate gambler?”
I kept working, like my dad wanted me to. I kept fucking up, like my dad wanted me to.
While his characters come fully to life, Milch is also deeply afraid of his own mortality, and he needed other life-affirming people around him to get him back up:
The thing you must understand is that at every stage of Rita’s and my courtship, and throughout our subsequent life together, I thought I would die fairly soon. When you believe that, you’re willing to accept pretty much any outcome, because what difference could it make? But Rita was willing to believe a life was possible for us, and for me. That kind of belief is its own act of creation.
This was Milch’s double act, balancing two opposites in his mind. There’s a purity in living like that—a tainted purity nonetheless—which allowed him to craft very human characters. And he was attracted to others that exhibited these qualities too. When working for his next show NYPD Blue, he met and befriended a homicide detective in NYC named Bill Clark. Milch wanted to shadow him and learn from him to better inform his characters. Here’s what he says about this relationship:
There’s a process that happens if you open your imagination to the particular truths of a different person and a different environment, to try to give your imagination to what you don’t know. It’s humbling but also enormously rewarding.
And as Milch opened up to Bill, Bill in turn opened up to him. And through continued interactions we as the audience start to see why Milch develops a liking to Bill. Bill is as much of a double act as himself:
Bill had such doubleness too. For all the bodies he’d seen, the things he’d done, he was also the sweetest person I had ever met, with animals, with children. He had been in Vietnam and seen burned bodies and been shot at, but when he’d well up was when he talked about his patrol dog, Mox. He had hundreds of birds. He loved antiques. I was more integrated with Bill than anyone since Judgy. Everything was in play.
Everything was indeed at play. And that’s what we love about Milch. He takes the world as it is, warts and all, and appreciates others who share the same outlook. Earlier he rendered this thought wonderfully, something he learned from the authors William and Henry James:
But the specific ideas from the Jameses—that the totality of experience and behavior is all at play, that we must be hospitable to every story being available as material for rendering, that the good is what works, and that we can rewire ourselves by our behavior—would come to, and continue to, profoundly shape every aspect of how I lived.2
Larry Gagosian: Power in Networks
LARRY GAGOSIAN STARTED by selling posters on the street.
As far as narrative beginnings go, this one fits the outsider archetype perfectly. The story goes that Gagosian was a parking attendant in Westwood, LA (this is the ‘70s) and one day he saw a street vender selling cheap and cheesy posters at the edge of the parking lot. He notices that people were actually buying this stuff, and so he decides to copy the guy’s business. Soon, he adds a frame to the prints and charges a markup, and lo and behold he’s in business.
Now, Gagosian had no training in the art world, and at this time he was merely packaging posters out of a little patio he leased which he called the Open Gallery. Eventually he added fine art (prints and photographs) and started selling them in his shop. The guy was slowly building a platform, and he had a keen sense of what it took:
‘passion, focus, hard work, and in terms of my profession, having a decent eye’3
Its not clear where he learned the importance of networks, but Larry understood the sheer value of being what we’ve called a nodal player: someone who is densely connected with the right people, and through which a lot of important information goes through. Maybe it was his time at William Morris (where he was working at the same time as legendary agent Michael Ovitz) that showed him the value of building connections. Maybe he just understood that was how the world worked.
Either way, Larry becomes a master at this. We’d like to imagine a young Gagosian going through books and mapping out the key trends and people of the art world, figuring out ways to position himself in their midst. “Next to his bed, he had these stacks of art books,” a woman he briefly dated around this time, Xiliary Twil, recalled. “He was really studying.”
This nose for finding connections would help him excel in the secondary art market:
The œuvres of even the most renowned artists are inconsistent. Masterpieces are rare and often hard to find. No central registry records the owners, locations, and prices of art works. Being a good secondary dealer requires knowing which people are collectors, where they live, what hangs inside their houses—and whether they might be induced to part with any of it. Gagosian excelled at what Douglas Cramer, a soap-opera producer and an early client, once called “the hunt.”
The Hunt. Such a primal way to describe what a master connector does. You can only be good at the hunt if you also have a great eye for people and their talents. Gagosian’s ‘instrument of choice’ for hunting was the telephone, and “he often made upward of a hundred cold calls a day, sniffing out the location of an art work, lining up buyers, then haggling with the owners until the work shook free”. The journalist and art adviser Allan Schwartzmann would describe Gagosian in the following colorful terms:
“He knew who everyone was. He saw them before they knew him. That kind of aggressiveness and that eagle sharpness for who mattered—there was no precedent for that. That’s the eye of an industrialist. That’s someone who was seeking to build a massive financial empire.”
The core of Gagosians’s engine was reading and networking. At first, this sounds ridiculously simple, but if both those things are taken to the extreme, they can yield outsized results. For example, take his reading habit. Gagosian loved biographies, and he was excessive in his reading habit:
He is a big reader, and one of his favored subjects is the life of Joseph Duveen, the great dealer who helped assemble the collections of Andrew Mellon, J. P. Morgan, and other Gilded Age titans. There are several biographies of Duveen, Gagosian informed me, and he has “read ’em all.” According to one of them, by S. N. Behrman, Duveen made a point of “showing his multimillionaire clients that he lived better than they did.”
Similarly, he was excessive in his networking, and excellent at inducing people to buy into the art world. His gatherings (at yachts, in his house, at dinner parties) were the perfect sandboxes for him to prey on the mimetic desires of his attendees. In that sense, he was a true dealer. He knew that playing on people’s sense of scarcity would work, and it did.
Like in our last essay on Roy Cohn, we make no moral claims about how these tactics can be used. But for our purposes, they are worth studying.
Three different men in the world of media. Three different stories. But here’s what the media mogul, the TV writer, and the mega art dealer have in common: an unrelenting love of their craft, and the humility to study all its pieces.
That’s it for this week. Onwards to Consilience!
All quotes in this section come from “Life’s Work” by David Milch, unless otherwise stated.