The chaotic earthquaking of 60 Minutes over the last three days obviously constitutes major high-stakes drama. The blistering confrontation that happened between 60 Minutes corespondent Scott Pelley (who’s been canned), the show’s recently-hired exec producer Nick Bilton and editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is a much, much stronger scenario than the bellowing argument between CBS corporate and 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman …one of the scenes that make Michael Mann’s The Insider such a classic. Obviously.
It follows, naturally, that there’s a major movie in this — a Mann film perhaps? — about the Pelley-Bilton-Weiss contretemps, and more broadly ablout the whole kowtowing-to-Trump, Paramount purchase of CBS and 60 Minutes and handing the reins to Weiss (i.e., David Ellison, son of Larry, last year took control of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, in a multibillion-dollar merger).
Love this passage from Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin’s 6.1.26 N.Y. Times story: “In an extraordinary exchange, Mr. Pelley, his newscaster’s baritone sometimes shaking in anger, told Nick Bilton, the new executive producer, that he had ‘slender’ qualifications for his new job and questioned the network’s commitment to the future of the program, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.
“The 10 a.m. gathering, held at the program’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters, was intended as a formal introduction to Mr. Bilton, a tech journalist and filmmaker who was appointed last week as part of a major shake-up at 60 Minutes. CBS fired Tanya Simon, the previous executive producer, and her deputy, along with Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, two of the show’s correspondents — an event that Mr. Pelley referred to as ‘Black Thursday.'”
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