Welcome to Heilman & Haver - Episode 78. We hope you enjoy the show!

Please join the conversation - email us with thoughts and ideas and connect with the show on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and at heilmanandhaver.com.

The Hollywood strike has now passed the 100 day mark with no end in sight. Just one week ago, on August 4, Writers Guild of America negotiators met for the very first time in three months with representatives of the major studios to discuss whether contract talks can resume. According to Bloomberg reporter Lucas Shaw, they “made zero progress. The two sides are no closer than they were at the start of the strike. They can’t even agree on how to resume negotiations.”

With much of the strike centered on the power imbalance between the major studios and their writers and the consolidation and lack of transparency among the streaming giants, we reached out to an expert on the issues of monopoly and corporate power in America for his take.

Matt Stoller is the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project. He is the author of “Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy”, which Business Insider called “one of the year’s best books on how to rethink capitalism and improve the economy.” Stoller is a former policy advisor to the Senate Budget Committee and he also worked for a member of the Financial Services Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives during the financial crisis.

Matt's 2012 law review article on the foreclosure crisis, “The Housing Crash and the End of American Citizenship”, predicted the rise of autocratic political forces, and his 2016 Atlantic article, “How the Democrats Killed their Populist Soul”, helped inspire the new anti-monopoly movement. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Fast Company, Foreign Policy, the Guardian, Vice, The American Conservative, and the Baffler and Matt writes the monopoly-focused newsletter “BIG” with tens of thousands of subscribers. You can follow Matt on Twitter at @matthewstoller.

Welcome to Heilman & Haver - Episode 77. We hope you enjoy the show!

Please join the conversation - email us with thoughts and ideas and connect with the show on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and at heilmanandhaver.com.

IN THE SPOTLIGHT: Sam Wasson

Joining us for Episode 77 is "one of the great chroniclers of Hollywood lore" according to Janet Maslin of The New York Times, and "a fabulous social historian" and sleuth in the eyes of Hilton Als of The New Yorker. Sam Wasson is the author of six books on film, including The New York Times bestsellers Fifth Avenue, 5AM: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman; The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood; and Fosse.

An L.A. native, Sam studied Film at Wesleyan University and at the USC School of Cinematic Arts before publishing his first book, A Splurch in the Kisser: The Movies of Blake Edwards and in addition to his work as an author and publisher, Wasson has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker, and has won three Los Angeles Press Club Journalism Awards. He’s served as a consultant for The National Comedy Center in New York and The Film Society of Lincoln Center, was a Visiting Professor of Film at Wesleyan University and Emerson College and, as a panelist and lecturer has appeared all over the world.

In 2020, Wasson and producer Brandon Millan founded Felix Farmer Press to publish necessary books on the art, business, culture and history of the Hollywood film. His latest book Hollywood: The Oral History - co-authored with renowned film scholar and educator Jeanine Basinger - was released last year and called “Hollywood’s ultimate oral history” by The New Yorker, and “majestic” by The Los Angeles Review of Books. Wasson’s biography of Francis Ford Coppola’s real-life dream studio, American Zoetrope, The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story, will be published by HarperCollins this December. You can find Sam online at www.samwasson.com and he joined us from his home in Laurel Canyon.

Welcome to Heilman & Haver - Episode 76. We hope you enjoy the show!

Please join the conversation - email us with thoughts and ideas and connect with the show on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and at heilmanandhaver.com.

IN THE SPOTLIGHT: Kristen Lopez

Kristen Lopez is author of the new book But Have You Read the Book? 52 Literary Gems That Inspired Our Favorite Films. In it, Kristen offers an endlessly fascinating look at 52 beloved screen adaptations and the great reads that inspired them. Some films, like Clueless — Amy Heckerling’s interpretation of Jane Austen’s Emma — diverge wildly from the original source material, while others, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, shift the point of view to craft a different experience within the same story. Kristen explores just what makes these works classics of both the page and screen, and why each made for an exceptional adaptation — whether faithful to the book or exemplifying cinematic creative license.

Kristen is a pop culture essayist, TV editor for IndieWire, and she’s worked as an entertainment journalist for over 15 years, with her articles appearing at Variety, MTV, TCM, and Roger Ebert. A California native, Kristen was raised in a small suburb near Sacramento and graduated with a Masters in English from California State University, Sacramento. She is also the creator of the classic film podcast, Ticklish Business. In her free time, Kristen enjoys reading and finding Old Hollywood connections in her neighborhood. She joined us from her home in Los Angeles.

Find her writing at TheWrap.com and she’s on Instagram and Twitter at kristenlopez88.