Joe Escalante live from Hollywood, Not really Hollywood, We're actually in Burbank.
Thank you so much for listening to us on KiB right here in Los Angeles
and on your iHeartRadio app worldwide. I'm filling in for Joe Escalante who is
about to jump on a plane in Spain and fly all the way back here.
So Joe, please have safe travels. We love you, buddy.
Thank you so much for calling us earlier at It was midnight in Spain and
he was just hanging out at in Pamplona with the running of the bulls.
I'm sure he was exhausted. It sounded like he was drinking a lot of
water when we were talking to him. It sounded like he needed to hydrate
because it sounded like he did a lot of running away from bow Vines,
long day in the bullpen. Yeah, and like you guy, a little
bit tired. Yeah. So we were talking a little bit earlier about the
upgrades happening at Regal and investing in the company to bring the best out of
it and trying to make it a better experience for the people, for the
audience out there, and something that the audience was used to having. If
we didn't if we couldn't go to the movies, was being able to pick
up a DVD or a Blu ray. And since those are kind of being
phased out by streaming, red Box, the ubiquitous red Box, you see
them everywhere outside of every seven eleven. Yeah, they're not going to be
outside seven eleven very much longer. They just filed chapter seven bankruptcy. They
actually tried to do Chapter eleven. They realized that there wasn't anything they're worth
salvaging, so they are just selling it for spare parts exactly. And sadly
because I have so many good memories as a kid of just going to the
red Box and tapping through that screen. Sometimes it was broken and like half
the pixels didn't work, But that was part of the challenge. You really
had to earn that movie. Plus on a sunny day, you needed to
use that shade that they had over the top so it didn't burn into the
screen. But a thousand employees at red Box are haven't gotten paid. That's
right, Yeah, that's not good. So it is a sign of the
time things moving farward, uh, the way that the industry progresses. And
this is one of those things you know vhs had to go by the wayside,
Beta Max a bit of dust back in the day. And now that
we're slowly starting to see the phasing out of physical media of CDs, DVDs,
blu rays, all of them are being subbed out because we're getting the
same kind of quality and usually a lot faster without having to go to like
to a store to buy it. So we're you getting all we need from
streaming services. So, you know, we we saw Blockbuster Video evaporate,
you would imagine that over you know time, with the way things are going,
red Box is going to be gone the same way. So exactly,
it's it's a shame. I think it's going to be one of those things
that you know, we all look back fondly on and we'll we'll see like
a red Box thing pop up like at some novelty place or at some random
bar and people can kind of get their novelty kick out of it again.
But that's that's a shame. We're going to lose red Box and that's heartbreaking.
Yeah, And honestly, I think that there's probably going to be some
lawsuits to follow because the lawyers from the company said that money was put allegedly
deducted from workers' paychecks that was meant to cover health care benefits, things like
that, and directed elsewhere. And an additional thing is that now that these
thousand employees are going to be losing their jobs who still have not been paid
for the work that they've already done, that people are investigating like what happened
financially within the company to kind of make that happen. And now within the
Chapter eleven bankruptcy, all of the assets would have been put into an estate
that then the company can continue to use. But as they were transitioning between
the two bankruptcies, the company execs fired the group of people tasked with managing
and monetizing those assets, which makes it a lot easier for them to just
liquidate them without having any liability for where that money was going or really tracking
it to make sure that the employees who need to be paid and who have
already performed services for pay have you know, they're not going to get it.
So it's going to be kind of messy for red Box, pretty disappointing,
But yeah, lenders don't want to go and back up a company that
I'm just looking at this one. The former chief executive owned eighty percent of
the shares and is the one who is primarily being accused of misusing funds.
So when you have something that's that dominated at the top by one person owning
eighty percent of it, the lenders don't want to do business with them anymore,
and when they see just how badly misused the funds for the company were.
So it's a shame when you see corruption destroy a company that may have
found other ways of surviving past the and you know, maybe creating its own
streaming service that you know, it would be difficult to make one that competes
with Netflix and all of the other ones out there, but red Box does
have a brand and it may have been able to profit off of that,
but now we'll never know exactly. And one of the things that's probably scooping
a little bit of the dirt on the grave of Redbox is a new streaming
service. Yay, another thing we're gonna have to pony up a little bit
of money for every month. This one is coming from Hallmark, So we're
gonna have the Hallmark Plus streaming service coming up in September. Yeah, yeah,
So I'm really I'm doing the best to temper my enthusiasm about this.
But we were trying to talk about some of it, like, you know,
if we can think of any favorite Hallmark movies that have existed, do
you think? But yeah, no, the only one that I can think
of was Death of a Cheerleader, and that one I only know because they
filmed it at my high school, Westlake High School up Thousand Oaks. Yeah.
Absolutely, And so I was in high school when they did the filming
of that, So they did a lot of the scenes while everybody was at
school. So that that was the one fun part about growing up in high
school out going to high school out here. A lot of times your school
ended up in a movie. And there was another movie that was made when
I was a freshman that I showed up and they made me an extra and
I actually got paid. Hey, I got paid like seventy five bucks a
day. It was called a Dangerous Place. It was a high school.
Yes, my high school was a dangerous place. Now it was did you
look scared? Get in here? It was a straight to HBO film that
had it was like had karate like tournament in it, and they had me
as an extra in the tournament. It was kind of funny. So I
made like seventy five bucks for two days or one hundred and fifty bucks for
two days work. That's amazing. Yeah, I was like fourteen. I'm
like, this is the coolest thing ever. Yeah. I remember the school
up the street. For me, I went to a Catholic school and then
there was a very beautiful all girls Catholic school right up the street. They
shot a lot of ladybird there. Oh that was yeah, super cool and
very recognizable too. I think the school is now shut down, but like
they filmed a lot of other cool stuff there. The scene from bird Box
where like the car flips over was by my mom's house. But back to
Hallmark. I wonder like who they're going to use to promo this site,
because I feel like whenever a new product like this comes out, they kind
of pick the big influencers or groups of people that can kind of push it
along to the right audience, giving them like a special code or something like
you know, I'm my gym, my bar studio. For all the girlies.
We get like free hair hair shampoo, Like we get little samples of
that. Is it going to be like in the English Teacher's department lounge where
they plug this. I don't know, beating circles like who's gonna go.
I don't know who the target audience is for this. I'm guessing that their
subscriptions will go up around the holidays because they know usually people come home from
the holidays and they like to have a lot of the holiday films on and
that seems to be like an endless stream bah holiday family fun. So I
get the feeling that you know, you'll see it kind of like seasonally shift
as far as their subscription, the number of subscribers that they have, kind
of like how people will subscribe to like say Max because a new show is
out, and then once that show's done for the season, they'll cancel it
because they saw all the shows, saw the episodes. So yeah, I
could see this becoming a thing that has a following, but it's going to
be a niche following for sure. It's kind of funny that you point out
that maybe people would just have things on in the background, because as a
horror fan, I can't imagine on Halloween being like, you know what,
let's get into the season and play Insidious two on the TV on repeat.
That would just really get us in the mood. Yeah, totally. That
usually for me on repeat, it it'll be like the movie that people can't
really tell if it's a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie, Nightmare after Christmas,
or just plays on repeat between octopery. Yeah, that's just on constant
and I have got I've got kids, so that's got you know, you
definitely have that all the time during the holiday season. You know my holiday
repeat series Seinfeld, Oh so cozy it is. Yeah, I'm for Thanksgiving.
I'm a mystery signed seed, a three thousand nerd, and there's always
a Thanksgiving tradition with that show. So that's my big holiday traditional show.
Sorry, Hallmark, you're not going to get my money just saying I appreciate
you guys. I think that what you do is a service that you know
we need, just not for me. Not going to put in the money
for that. Sorry, I got I got that money, could go to
another month of Netflix. Yeah, just goes poorly. Then I'll be hopping
on that streaming service asap. I think that's maybe what Maybe that's the target
audience. There you go, We'll be right back. We got some more
coming up. We got a couple of big lawsuits to talk about. I'm
sure this will make Joe Escalante very happy because he is an entertainment lawyer and
this is these are these are two entertainment law things that we're about to get
into. So yeah, keep it right here. We're going to be right
back after traffic. Joe Ascalante live from Hollywood, not Hollywood. We keep
saying that it's Burbank. Thank you so much for joining us on k E.
I B A M eleven fifty, I am Engineers Sam, and we
got producer Nikki in the house right now. Joe Escalante is going to be
flying back tomorrow, so that next week we will have Joe Escalante in the
house. But to enjoy us reunion, it will be Yeah, we miss
him. I can't wait to see what he comes back with. Usually whenever
he visits a foreign country, he comes back with something to either show off
or if we're lucky, fingers crossed again awesome. Yeah, he doesn't have
kids, That's why he can afford to buy stuff for other people. What
a sat What a saint. Anyways, we were talking about a couple of
lawsuits, big Hollywood legal lawsuits going on right now. One of them involves
one of the you know, one of the seminole rap bands out of New
York from the eighties and nineties, the Beastie Boys. They have a lawsuit
going up against Chili's because Chili's in one of their ads, used the song
sabotage. Well, yeah, that'll get you a lawsuit. Yeah. Every
time you would think that, and they were using the song starting in twenty
twenty two, you would think that the company would have some kind of sense
to know that you need to ask for permission to do that. But no,
so now they're saying that the use of it was unauthorized. It infringes
on the band's ownership of the song since it was already registered at the copyright
office. People over at Chili's were reached for comment. They didn't immediately respond,
but the reps for the Beastie Boys had no comment on the matter.
They're just gonna, you know, let the lawsuits speak for itself. But
yeah, it's interesting to see that the people over at Chili's didn't know well
enough to not infringe upon stuff that had already been copywritten. And you know
what is funny too, is that this has happened a couple of other times
with the Beastie Boys with a lawsuit that they won in twenty fourteen against Monster
when they used a remix of one of their songs for promotional content, and
so then they won one point seven million dollars. That's example number one,
okay, And then earlier in the year I think, also still twenty fourteen,
they won another lawsuit against a Goldie Box or Goldie Blocks, which is
like a toy company using their song girls, Like there's precedent here to not
mess with them because clearly they're litigious and successful. So like Chili is advertising
what's going on, there's there's some intern out there being like, oh,
oh, I didn't know well. And the thing is that it's not like
they're doing like you know, like we're just gonna steal it and go.
They What they did was that they had characters, three characters who were wearing
the exact same style of outfits that they had in the sabotage video. So
there you could tell that they're trying to show that they were influenced by this
stuff because they know it's really cool stuff. Everybody looks back fondly on that
stuff, so why not. But yeah, if you're going to do a
straight up knockoff of exactly what they were doing. Then, yeah, they're
going to try to say that you guys were you know, infringing upon our
intellectual property there, and we could you know, sue you for no less
than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for wilful infringement of their music. Good
luck, Chillies. Yeah, I have fun with that. Another lawsuit involves
Fox News or not Fox News, sorry Fox the parent company the right.
Yeah. Fox is suing a pop up bar in Philadelphia for doing a pop
up of most Tavern from The Simpsons. Now, we've seen these pop up
bars come around every once in a while. They had the the Scum and
Villainy Cantina, which was a pop up bar that was in referencing Star Wars
and it had a lot of the same They tried to make it similar to
the cantina in the Star Wars movie, so it evoked a lot of the
same imagery and had a lot of the references and stuff like that. But
this is one that appears the people in Philadelphia did not get permission and now
they're getting sued, which sucks because really the only place you can go to
catch a most tavern anywhere anything that's like I guess authorized is at Universal Studios,
and you got to pay a lot of money to get in just to
see, like to get an extremely overpriced beer and have to go through the
crowds that are trying to get in there as well. Exactly, and just
the poor guys in Pennsylvania wanted to have a cute little cartoon meetup. I
think, I mean, I hope it wasn't trying to get back at Fox
or something like that. It seems fairly innocent at least an intention. But
it's like, yeah, yeah, you did do the thing that Fox can
come after you for. So it sucks that that's that's playing out now.
Yeah, well they were charging admission. It was like a thirty seven dollars
ticket to get in. Yeah Simpson, well you have Simpson themed food and
beer. It came with the ticket. So you have a lot of the
stuff that's from the Simpsons. I'm sure they have, you know, Deff
beer and uh maybe they have their competitor fud from there. It was yet
they outlined everything they said. The Most Tavern's exterior features the beige color purple
trim, the most sign you know, also very specific interiors. They got
a picture of Homer Simpson on the outside. It's like he's trying to get
in. Yeah, I could see where they they were selling Simpsons the merchandise
without permission, and twenty century Fox owns the entire franchise and everything. You're
not gonna get away with making money off of something that other people own.
Yeah, Like it's one thing if you're just you know, you're you've got
a picture of the Simpsons in the place. Fine, but they're selling like
T shirts and memorabilia and merchandise. Now that's money that twentieth century Fox wants
to get their fingers on, exactly. So, yeah, that's a shame
because that's the kind of you have a pop up bar like that. Had
they not been selling extra merchandise and doing that extra if they may have been
able to fly under the radar and get away with it. Yeah. And
I think also, like some of the things I'm reading on this say that
the people who put this on are claiming parody. Well, it's not like
fake Most Havevern. It's not parody Most Haven. It's just it's kind of
is just Most Haven. And that's where you can't really play the parity card
if you're not going for the parity image. So that's just that's just pronounced
trademark infringement. Yeah, I'm sure they sent a cease and desist, but
they obviously didn't cease or desist, so now they're getting actually yeah, yeah.
So it's a shame when you have something like this that people enjoy and
want to go out and experience and spend money at having it get taken down
because they did something dumb like sell merchandise that they really shouldn't have. They
may have gotten away with just having like a most havevern pop up. Yeah,
it may have flown under the radar, but since there's being money being
made, of course people are going to want to get their fingers on it.
I mean, frankly, anytime anyone tries to charge me a thirty seven
dollars cover fee, I want to sue too. So that's grounds enough.
I'll just start with that. Fair enough, Seriously, prices are outrageous nowadays.
Uh okay, Well let's go and Judd, we will have like a
little transition moment and we will go away from lawsuits and go to something that
just happened yesterday. The Kid's Choice Awards over at Nickelodeon. That's right.
They did take place in Santa Monica, not far from where I work.
I was lucky enough on my little walks outside during my work day to get
a glimpse of the gargantuan SpongeBob made of cinderblocks that they were painting by hand.
Let me just tell you, guys, this was no joke. I
felt like an Egyptian watching the Sphinx get filed. It was so epic.
It's like, wait, that's my favorite pharaoh and he's so big. That's
how I felt about mister SpongeBob, which, by the way, has recently
turned twenty five years old. I think today is SpongeBob's birthday. Actually,
yeah, like we got to Google search SpongeBob's birthday, but I think it's
today. And Happy birthday, SpongeBob. He's twenty five years old. He
still acts like he's what like eight July fourteenth. That's right, Yay,
Happy birthday, SpongeBob. And congratulations because he did win the Kids Choice Award
for Favorite Cartoon. I mean it was only right it was his birthday.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it's Nickelodeon I mean they've SpongeBob has
I think kept Nickelodeon afloat for the last maybe twenty years. It's a spunge.
Yeah, and he's a very profitable sponge. Yeah. And the thing
about the Kids' Choice Awards that I always forget is that it really is kind
of a grab bag of everything. This is just the kids. The kids
just choose. Yeah. Well, and the cool thing is that here's something
that they The categories that they have are for stuff like best Voice for an
Animated film, so best Voice Actor and voice best Voice Actress, where you
don't necessarily see that in other award shows. And yeah, these are the
Kid's Choice Awards. But that's I guess who the ones are spending the most
money in Hollywood exactly. It's the parents of these kids. So they're the
ones who are going out of their way. Best movie was Barbie. The
Best Actress was Margot Robbie for Barbie. Best Actor was Timothy sports Chalet for
Wonka. That's that's interesting. Yeah, I'm a big fan of sports Shelle.
He's good. Yeah him and Bandersnatch. Oh, that's right, he
did do that. He did snatch that band. That's so true. Yeah,
Yeah, he's great. Yeah, that's but I guess the choice for
Willy Wonka was someone interesting I wouldn't have. Well, it was a good
movie. Do you saw Wonka? Yeah? It was really honored a lot
of the original like Gene Wilder. Willy Wonka did a great job of that.
But Timothy sports Shelle was outstanding. I'm a big fan of his work.
He's I know, I'm mispronouncing his name. Also, real quick,
before we go to break, a favorite animated film. This was a stacked
category. You had Super Mario Brothers. You had teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
which everybody like thought was the underground coat of the year, but everybody lost
to Spider Man across the Spider Verse. And I'm still waiting for that.
The third's the third part of the Kids Have Got Taste. Thank you Kids
Choice Awards. That's right, we'll be back. We're going to go to
break right now. We got update from Fox News Central coming up, and
after that we're going to get into some more stuff. My heart is breaking
on this next story. I love inside the NBA, and they're gonna take
it outside of the NBA. We'll be right back. Joe Ascalante live from
Hollywood. We are in Burbank. Thank you so much for joining us.
I'm engineer Sam, producer Nikki's here with us right now going into all of
these stories of the week coming out of Hollywood. Thank you so much for
joining us on AIB and on the iHeartRadio app. I'm gonna throw the phone
number out there. You don't have to use it, but if you want
to give us a call and talk to us, you can. It's eight
seven seven five two oh eleven fifty eight seven seven five to two oh eleven
fifty. We were looking at some of the other winners from the Kids Choice
Wards. I know we usually when we talk about the awards shows, we
tend to be on more of the adult themed shows. I don't mean like
the Porn Awards or anything like that. I'm talking about like the you know,
like the Oscars or the Grammys. But really, uh, it's not
necessarily a bell Weather, but it's a good idea to see where trends in
Hollywood are going because kids tend to be on top of things a lot more.
Definitely, so when you see stuff like you know, mister Beast being
the favorite male creator, A lot of our audience isn't gonna know who mister
Beast is, but if you saw how much money he was giving away and
how much stuff he was giving away on his YouTube channel, you would tune
in because there it's competitive stuff, obviously, but it's like you're s people
win millions of dollars. And not only are you seeing people go through these
crazy tasks put on by some like Psycho Overlord with infinite dollars, you're seeing
it from every single four K camera angle possible, as well as handheld stuff
by the contestants. I mean, I'm not even one really for this type
of media, but when I sat down and I watched a full twenty five
minute Mister Beast video the other day and I was captivated. So yeah,
maybe the kids are onto something good. Yeah, soy. We'll keep an
eye on all of those little trends as we go on live from Hollywood.
But one thing that I wanted to bring up, because I don't know about
you, Nikki, I'm a big sports fan. I know I keep my
finger on the pulse of the sports world as much as I can, and
this is a story that has me like very much like it's a close story
for me because I'm a big basketball fan, and the NBA are there going
through contract negotiations as far as they're brought the broadcast rights. Who gets to
play NBA games for us to you know, consume, but NBA. Right
now, it looks like the rights for the NBA are going from ABC and
TNT. They're now moving the rights over to NBC, Amazon Prime Video,
and ABC ESPN from the twenty twenty five twenty twenty six season all the way
through the twenty twenty thirty five twenty thirty six season. The NBA is going
to get about seventy six billion dollars on this deal. Now, that sounds
all well and good. It sounds a lot like, you know, a
lot of like you know, inside baseball, as far as you know the
companies and the amount of money that's going around. But the thing that I'm
really hurt by is that TNT, which has been covering the NBA since like
nineteen ninety, is going to be losing the rights to the NBA, and
along with it goes arguably one of the funniest shows on TV inside the NBA,
like one of the no choke funniest shows you want to see. Charles
Barkley, Shaquille O'Neil just ripping each other to shreds. I was showing Nikki
some of the videos from that show, and it's legitimately like there's reasons why
it's won Emmy Award after Emmy Award because it consistently is one of the funniest
shows on TV, and we after next season are very likely to be deprived
of it. Now there is a chance that you know, like the whole
thing could end up in court and TNT can sue to try to keep the
hope on Dreams alive for NBA fans everywhere, but they also could try to
match the deal. Then they'll have five days to match the deal once the
official deal is you know, signed out. Once they make the agreement to
the deal, TNT will have the right to match the deal, but it's
highly unlikely that they're going to be able to pull the resources to do it
right. So that means and Charles Barkley has already announced that he since tn
T will no longer cover it. He said he doesn't want to work with
anybody else, no other network, so he's going to retire, so he's
done with that. Afterwards, Kail O'Neil. I'm sure he's gonna find Shaq
is like a he is a multi media conglomerate just by himself, so he'll
find some way to do something fun. And you know, Kenny Smith is
always fun and entertaining. But really all three of them together with Ernie Johnson
was one of the It was just like watching my family having hilarious arguments with
each other about sports or just any topic in general. Yeah, I mean,
just just seeing the chemistry from like the clips that Sam showed me in
studio. Hey, I'm not I'm not a sports fan. I'm not a
basketball fan. I'm hardly even a TV watcher, but oh my god,
Charles Barkley is so funny and the chemistry that they have so good that even
now I'm sad about this loss. Yeah, and I'm sure we're gonna have
a lot of Like you know, I remember, back in like nineteen eighty
nine, Kareem Abdul Jabbar retired was retiring from the Lakers, and every city
he went to they did some kind of tribute to him because he was like
the greatest basketball player of all time at that point. So I can see
for every city that they go to they're gonna do some kind of tribute to
them, and that's gonna be fun to watch because there's always gonna be good
stuff happening. But it's also gonna be really bittersweet because we know the reason
for us seeing a lot of that, like the new like whenever they'll go
and like to have tributes to them and have fun moments that they keep really
that they'll relive and stuff like that. It's gonna be really bittersweet because we
know it's not gonna be around forever. And I'm happy we have YouTube.
I mean, I can go ahead and you know YouTube those the old clips
all the time, but it's still not gonna be the same knowing that they're
gonna be gone. And that's something that I think it's it's not just a
loss to sports fans if you don't have to be a sports fan to watch
that show and find it hilarious. They're really the way that they the the
interactions, the bits that they have with each other. Watching Kenny Smith shove
Shaquille O'Neal into a Christmas tree maybe the funniest thing I've ever seen. I
Mean, there's so much going on on that show that it's gonna be a
loss to the American zeitgeist once it's gone. God, that's so true.
So yeah, we're gonna you know, I'm gonna mourn that pretty hard.
I don't know about you. I'm sure a lot of other people are going
to be mourning. Yeah, anyone has some spare billion dollars, we can
actually recommend you donate it to a certain direction if we want to keep seeing
some of the show. Yeah, I'm sorry, Turner. You guys got
a lot of money. Pony it up. Do something for us. We
need it as a culture. It was one of the few things that we
could all unite behind. I love that stuff. Let's do it again.
Run it back. Also, I mean, because we're talking about how that,
you know, to keep that dream alive, TNT may need to sue
the NBA and all of the other you know, like Amazon and all the
other companies that are involved in that deal. There's other lawsuits that we got
to look at from the entertainment industry that are popping up left and right.
Rebel Wilson, the actress the Hilarious Wearbel Wilson sued for deaf by producers from
the deb after she called them out. Yeah, there was kind of a
dual lawsuit going on there. So she had recently said that the producers were
doing some things not so great with their cash. They weren't really acting appropriately
on the show. Basically, she had accused that they were trying to sabotage
the movie because they didn't want to show it as the final film and was
at the Canadian Film Festival that it was a part of, or was supposed
to be a part of. I think it was basically Rebel being disappointed in
the way that they had managed the film for press releases. Additionally, there
was a writing credit that seems to be at the center of this issue,
where Rebel Wilson wanted to have a standard writing credit, but I think she
only ended up with like an additional writing by credit in the film. It
seems like there was someone who was a recipient of a scholarship from Wilson to
do more writing. I think her name was Hannah Riley seems to be the
person who was also a writer on this film instead received that writing credit,
and there was definitely an imbalance of power between the you know, Rebel Wilson
giving this money to this other writer trying to improve their own career and then
maybe this potentially allegedly sabotage relationship between how Rebel actually wanted the credit to be
distributed. And that is basically what happened. When Wilson talked about what was
happening on Instagram I think it was on social media. Then the three producers
involved kind of I don't know if they just responded or they went ahead and
sued Rebel Wilson for the what the detrimental things that she said about them,
including that was it that Rebel had been sexually harassed somebody. I don't want
to throw that one around, but that's something that I read regards darting her
relationship to the additional writing staff on that show. Yeah, they said they
try to resolve things with her in good faith, but they basically felt that
her actions were deliberate. It was an effort to damage their reputations and sabotage
the entire thing. And it's a shame whenever. I mean, these are
the dirty moments and the dirty controversies that you see in Hollywood that pop up
where people get their egos, their feelings hurt, and they want to get
more credit for something, or they feel like the direction of their idea isn't
going where they wanted to, so then they start talking up and speaking out
against it. And it's a shame when this happens because people really like Rebel
Wilson, so you don't want to have to necessarily think something negative about her,
and she seems like an inappropriate way to go about your career if you're
trying to continue to have one, to start throwing around things like sexual harassment
allegations and get credit where credit's due. But at that point, like if
you have given someone an opportunity to have a writing credit on a film that
you are going to be in and then you kind of want to steal their
credit, that's that's just not very cool. Yeah, it's never nice,
and it's honestly, especially disappointing when like somebody's so funny it's just do something
kind of whack. Yeah it's okay, man, no one's laughing. You
can stop. Yeah, No, that's just disappointing. Yeah, anyways,
we got more celebrities behaving badly. We got one more segment left on the
show. So thank you so much for all of you who have stuck it
through with us up until now and yeah, you'll be back to your own
devices in about fifteen minutes. We'll be right back. We got traffic coming
up. Keep it right here, Joe Joe Escalate live from Hollywood. Thank
you so much for joining us here on your iHeartRadio app and on k E
I B A M eleven fifty. I am engineer Sam. I'm here with
producer Nikki. We are here filling in for Joe Escalante, who's about to
fly back here from Spain. He was running with the bulls and now he
will be flying with the clouds. We got one story of celebrities behaving badly.
It's my favorite segment of the show. This one is actually not necessarily
a celebrity. It's the son of a celebrity. It is Weston almost sounds
like a kind of oil. Weston Cage, Nicholas Cage's son. We've been
talking about a lot, a lot about Nick Cage. Today, his son
got arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. It's one now that right there
alone is bad enough. He assaulted his mother. What that sucks? She
was quoted. She was arriving to offer him support and console him. He
was in deteriorating mental state and urged her to come and help. She showed
up and within minutes she was According to her own words, she was brutally
assaulted and sustained serious injuries. Despite her desperate pleas to the responding police officers
to detain him from mental health evaluation, the cops refused the request and arrested
him straight up. They confirmed that it was The arrest was related to the
It was a verbal scuffle that escalated into a physical assault. And yeah,
during the incident, he punched two victims multiple times, causing injury. The
cops responded and detained him, and he's was yeah, filed to the DA
filed two counts of assault with a deadly weapon against Weston on June twenty sixth,
and with an arrest warrant issued some time after. Wait, was the
weapon his fists? I'm sorry, I don't know if his fists are a
deadly weapon. I don't think he is like a martial arts an expert or
anything. But yeah, that's a little frightening because she, like just being
a good mom, went to go and care for her kid who was saying
like urging her to come and help her, and within minutes he is assaulting
her. Now, that shows the importance of making sure that people get adequate
mental health care. And I mean I am a mental health professional, so
this is something that's very like important to me. At the same time,
it's the cops also have to know how to deal with the situation, and
the mom herself was urging them. You need to get you need to get
a pet team in here, You need to get as psychiatric evaluation team in
here to get to find out what's going on, because he was in an
extremely manic state, and that's a very dangerous state for anybody to be in
whenever you're introducing cops into the situation exactly, because that's where things go sideways
and people who are you know, have are in the middle of psychiatric distress
end up getting shot and killed. So there is something to be said about
how things were handled in the situation. I'll leave that up to other people
to have that discussion. But yeah, beating up your mom is never a
good thing. Yeah, and it's it's honestly not the best press after Nick
Cage stars in a horror film where he is a cultish serial killer. So
just got to say it's not a great not a great one to one.
No, no bad timing, yeah, bad timing. Yeah, but you
know, hope he's hope, he's okay. Morala's story. Don't beat your
mom. Yeah, I mean, just as a rule, standard rule,
standard rule, mental health care is great, and don't beat your mom.
Yeah. Absolutely, we learned something. Yeah. So, uh, we're
gonna close this out with a little bit of inside baseball when it comes to
Hollywood in the inner workings and dealings with these uh, these Hollywood film companies
and streaming companies, and Paramount is about to strike a gigantic major deal with
sky Dance, and there's some issues. There are some issues. I mean,
I think that anyone who's been following this sort of instance of a huge,
the hugest media company trying to make a ggnormous shift into what they're going
to call new Paramount is expecting some turbulence along the way. I mean,
there are other who is it that wants to see their books? That was
let's see here. People want to see the books because basically, what's going
to happen here in order to facilitate this sale between Paramount and sky Dance,
there is going to be someone who is named Sherry Redstone, who owns what
is it, eighty percent of Paramount. That's crazy, she has voter ability.
And what's happening, which I think is actually very interesting, is the
relationship between the sky Dance chief David Ellison, who is now friends with Sherry
Redstone's son, Tyler Korf, who has kind of been serving as her advisor
and mediator during this process. They're friends, they met at I think some
sort of conference or relationship they created based on the ongoing kind of agreement between
Paramount and Skuydance. So at some point they became friends, and of course
things get hectic when this much money's being thrown around. So at some point
David just rings up Sherry's son, Tyler and says, hey, man,
everything good, you need you know? How can we make this better as
friends? And it seems that that has realigned the track to continue forward with
this Paramount Skuydance merger deal. Of course, though with that one little hiccup
in terms of family and friends getting some things out of the way, there
are going to be some bigger problems that Paramount and Skuidance should expect to face
in the coming weeks. I mean, they're testing basically the DOJ's tolerance for
big media consolidation. And we talk a lot about antitrust law on this show,
and this is a perfect example of antitrust law coming into question because you
know, you used to be able to bring a story pitch to one studio
and then they could give you some notes, maybe say yes or no,
and then bring it to other studios and attempt to sell your idea or leverage
offers in an attempt to create an idea into reality from the ground up.
But now we're seeing that paramount and s guidance coming together, We're going to
just have one one option when it comes to pitching stories. That's going to
be huge. And then in addition to that, people want to know exactly
what this deal is going to look like financially for a shareholder Sherry Redstone,
because for someone who owns eighty percent of the largest media company, what is
that sale going to look like? Who's going to facilitate the asset transfer of
that sale? And I think people are definitely curious about where all that money
is going and if it's the right amount. Yeah, from what I'm saying,
she has agreed to sell her majority steak in paramount Global to a consortium
led by sky Dance and the production company. Yeah, basically helped by David
Ellison. But yeah, she's agreed to sell her majority steak, So it's
she's she's getting out, which is smart either to take the money up way
at this point exactly. I think that if only the kid of the Red
Box chief executive had a friend on the inside who could have maybe helped them
advise their parents to do the right thing. I think. I think we're
seeing something very similar here, but going maybe the better way for this family.
Yeah, they if they choose not to go with the sky Dance offer,
they're gonna Paramount's going to have to pay four hundred million dollars in the
breakup. That's that's a lot of money to pay for not doing something.
I mean usually that's the kind of money you pay to have some kind of
action. Yeah, but this is like, no, you're gonna you're gonna
pay four hundred million dollars if you don't do anything here. So yeah,
I could see why they would be taking that. It seems like they made
the right choice. But we're gonna have plenty of interesting stories to follow after
this merger gets further along in the process, because I think we're going to
see a lot of people wonder if this is the best idea for media,
if Paramount could have ever made it on its own, and what this skuy
Dance Paramount as they're calling it, new Paramount is going to look like.
One thing I can promise you is that Paramount Plus and Pluto, the video
service that does have ads, they're going to be just fine. So if
you're worried about your show on Paramount Plus not happening for you anymore, you
can relax a little bit. You're still going to have that. Yeah.
No, I'm sure they're going to try and keep all of those pieces together
because that's Paramount Plus is solid. I gotta give them credit. The stuff
that they got is good. I'm a fan of a lot of the streaming
services, but that one, Max and Netflix, those are my top three.
Disney Plus occasionally flirts with me whenever they have something there, and you
know me, I'm a shutterhead at heart. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Real quick, Hollywood lost some legends Richard Simmons, Shannon Door, and
a personal legend for me was doctor Ruth. I don't know, Nikki,
I don't know if you've ever heard of doctor Ruth or remember for me growing
up, she was the like four foot eight German woman who would talk about
sex and the least sexually appealing person you can imagine talking about some of the
most sexually explicit stuff kind. She's a legend and as a person who's got
a PhD in human sexuality, she's a person that really left a mark on
me when I was growing up too. So yeah, we'll be back next
week with Joe Escalante live from Hollywood. He'll be coming back from Spain and
he'll be running away from the bulls as we speak. Thank you so much,
Nikki for all of your help and all of this. This has been
great. We'll do this again next week. Indeed, see you guys. Hi