Hollywoods

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — A young woman is desperate to raise $50,000 for her mom’s life-saving medical treatment. She will get the money, but only if she agrees to her stepsister’s unusual proposal: to marry her wayward fiance, who comes from a wealthy family but also has a rap sheet.

That’s the plot line for an episode of “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband.”

That may sound like a telenovela. In fact, it’s a popular series that appears on ReelShort, an app where audiences can view on their smartphones over-the-top, dramatic tales reminiscent of soap operas called micro dramas.

Unlike a regular TV show, this drama unfolds over 60 episodes, each lasting one to three minutes. After six episodes, viewers hit the paywall, where they could continue watching ad-free with a $20 weekly subscription, watch ads or pay as they go.

Already, the series has garnered more than 494 million views since it launched in 2022 and ReelShort says it has made more than $4 million from the show.

With titles like “The Billionaire Sex Addict and His Therapist,” “How to Tame a Silver Fox” and “Pregnant by My Ex’s Dad,” micro dramas lean heavily into sensationalism and light on budgets, which are typically less than $300,000 per series. And many of them are filmed in Los Angeles.

Director and co-writer Cate Fogarty watches actor Diego Escobar on dual vertical monitors. The film, by platform DramaShorts, is shot vertically to be adapted for viewing on a phone screen.

(Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times)

Short serialized dramas first took off in China, where they are hugely popular and generated revenues of $6.9 billion last year, even surpassing domestic box office sales, according to DataEye, a Shenzhen-based digital research firm.

Now, Hollywood is starting to take note of the bite-sized format.

In August, the venture arm for Lloyd Braun — the former ABC executive and chairman of talent agency WME — and L.A.-based entertainment studio Cineverse formed a joint venture called MicroCo to build a platform for micro dramas.

“Traditional Hollywood moved away from a whole genre and storytelling that fans love, and I think micro dramas really took advantage of that and really leaned into that fandom,” said Susan Rovner, chief content officer of MicroCo.

Studio interest

Major studios are investing in micro dramas in an attempt to replicate China’s success and find new ways to appeal to younger audiences that are accustomed to watching short-form videos on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and other platforms while on the go.

Fox Entertainment recently announced an equity stake in Ukraine-based Holywater, a producer of micro dramas. Under the deal, Fox Entertainment Studios (a division of Fox Entertainment) will produce more than 200 vertical video titles over the next two years for Holywater.

And Walt Disney Co.’s accelerator program, which invests in startups, recently named micro drama business DramaBox, whose parent company is based in Singapore, as part of its 2025 class.

David Min, Walt Disney Co.’s vice president of innovation, said he believes micro dramas will continue to do well, especially with younger audiences accustomed to watching entertainment on their phones.

“We have to be where everyone is consuming their content, so that’s an opportunity for us,” Min said in an interview. “…This is just another new platform to experiment with and explore and see if it’s right for the company.”

First assistant director Chakameh Marandi, left, and actress Leah Eckardt wait during filming at Heritage Props last month in Burbank.

(Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times)

This year, ReelShort, which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., says it will produce more than 400 shows, up from 150 last year.

All of the productions are filmed in the U.S. and mostly in Los Angeles, said ReelShort CEO Joey Jia in an interview. The company plans to build a studio in Culver City that will adapt its most popular micro dramas into films.

“We offer a lot of opportunity,” Jia said.

Warsaw-based DramaShorts said in 2026 it aims to shoot 120 micro drama projects in the U.S., up from 45 to 50 this year. About 25% of those will be in the L.A. area.

DramaShorts co-founder Leo Ovdiienko says, “People are so used to consume content through social media, through TikTok, through Instagram, through Facebook and to share information.” .

(Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times)

“People are so used to consume content through social media, through TikTok, through Instagram, through Facebook and to share information,” said DramaShorts co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Leo Ovdiienko, 29, in an interview. “I believe it’s only a matter of time before the big players will also come to this stage.”

The company works with production partners in L.A. who employ actors, writers and crew members who work on the quick-turn projects, a bright spot in a struggling job market.

“The plus side of filming in L.A. is it is the epicenter of Hollywood,” said executive producer, writer and director Chrissie De Guzman, who has worked on DramaShorts projects. “We know how the state of our industry is doing right now, so a lot of talent have moved into the vertical space.”

Though vertical dramas are the length of a movie, they are spliced up into small chapters and produced quickly. A 100-page script might be shot in just one week as opposed to a month for a feature film.

Each chapter usually features a cliffhanger or dramatic moment — whether that’s a slap or a character in danger.

“It just hits every little emotional point,” said Caroline Ingeborn, chief operating officer at Palo Alto-based Luma AI, which provides micro drama companies with AI tools. “It hooks you in like this and because it’s so easy to press [Play]. You just need to see the next episode.”

The crew of vertical film “Sleeping Princess” break between scenes.

(Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times)

Labor tensions

With ultra-low budgets, many of the productions are non-union, prompting some writers and actors to work under pseudonyms to avoid facing sanctions from their unions, said several people who work on the shows.

In an effort to address the issue, performers union SAG-AFTRA recently announced it has created agreements that cover low-budget vertical dramas.

Writers Guild of America West President Michele Mulroney said in an interview the union is aware that “there are companies that are trying to do this work non-union, so the guild wants to help our members … in ways that they can work on verticals and make sure they get that work covered.”

Micro drama producers said they welcome talking with the unions, but questioned whether their business models could support union contracts.

“We’re not anti-union at all,” said Erik Heintz, executive producer at Snow Story Productions, which makes vertical dramas for platforms including DramaShorts.

Despite labor tensions, these short-form dramas have provided a key source of employment for Hollywood workers who’ve struggled to find jobs as production has moved out of California.

Corey Gibbons, 44, a director of photography, said vertical dramas kept him in the business when other work dried up.

“I have a feeling that we’re on the brink of something that’s really going to change,” Gibbons said. “I’m just excited to be a part of it.”

So was 27-year-old actor Sam Nejad, a former contestant on “The Bachelorette” who started acting in vertical dramas in January. He said he’s landed one or two lead roles a month since then and can earn $10,000 a week.

“It’s a new art,” Nejad said. “The new Tarantinos, the new Scorseses are all coming through this.”

ReelShort’s office in Sunnyvale looks more like a typical Silicon Valley startup than a Hollywood studio.

Jia, the chief executive, sits at a desk in an open floor seating area with his staff. Along the office walls are framed posters with titles like “Prince With Benefits,” “Never Divorce a Secret Billionaire Heiress” and “All the Wrong Reasons.” Jia proudly points out why each program was notable on a recent tour of the space.

“I don’t have money to hire celebrities,” Jia said. “I have 100% rely on story.”

The 46-year-old entrepreneur, who has an electrical engineering background, launched his business in 2022. At the time, there wasn’t much interest from Hollywood studios.

The skepticism followed the high-profile collapse of Quibi, the startup led by studio mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and tech executive Meg Whitman, that worked with A-list movie stars on series that would appear on an app in short chapters. Quibi raised $1.75 billion, only to shut down roughly six months after launching.

Jia took a different approach. Rather than signing expensive deals with celebrities, he hired students or recent graduates from colleges like USC to work at his company.

Jia approves all of the micro drama stories at ReelShort, which he says is expected to generate $1 billion in revenue this year.

A ReelShort representative declined to disclose the company’s earnings but said the business is profitable.

Jia said ReelShort has 70 million monthly active users, with 10% of them paid users.

The churn — the rate at which customers drop weekly subscriptions — can be more than 50% at ReelShort, Jia said. That makes it paramount for the company to have a steady stream of content that entices customers to keep paying. Currently it has more than 400 in-house titles and roughly 1,000 licensed titles.

Like others in the genre, ReelShort and DramaShorts rely heavily on data metrics like customer retention and paid subscribers to make their content decisions.

“A lot of directors are thinking, when I shoot the film, ‘I don’t care how people think, this is my creation, it’s my story,’” Jia said. “No, it’s not your story. Your success… should be determined by the people.”

LONDON’S biggest port is a confusing place.

First of all, it’s in Essex not London, and it’s bizarrely a regular filming destination for Hollywood directors – doubling up for everything from Venice to Gotham City.

From Batman to Indiana Jones and even Paddington Bear, the port town of Tilbury in Essex is a big star of the screen.

When Christian Bale was Batman, he spent time filming at the docks while it doubled up as Gotham City, as well as the nearby Coalhouse Fort on the edge of the River Thames.

The Coalhouse Fort was built in the 1860s to protect the Thames – and in the movie was made to look like a prison.

Christian Bale isn’t the only mega star to have spent time in Tilbury, Harrison Ford, Sean Connery and director Steven Spielberg visited the docks to film the third Indiana Jones movie; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

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They even used the docks as the background for a boat chase, which they pretended was Venice.

And perhaps the most famous star of them all – Paddington Bear.

Tilbury featured in the first Paddington Bear film, at the beginning of the movie when the bear migrates from Peru and ends up heading into London.

Tilbury Dock is located in Tilbury Town, which features a star-shaped, 16th century fort on the waterfront that was built to defend the river against enemy ships.

It was in nearby West Tilbury that Elizabeth I rallied her army, awaiting the Armada in 1588.

You can now visit Tilbury Fort, as it’s managed by English Heritage, tickets for adults cost £8.60 and tickets for children are £5.

Meanwhile, the train station in Tilbury Town has been shortlisted as one of the most life-changing stations in the country.

It’s part of the World Cup of Stations Competition where a group of shortlisted stations in Britain battle it out head-to-head in a public vote.

People have shared their own stories about the train stations to celebrate 200 years of British railway.

Tilbury Town has been hailed as a “key point of arrival for people journeying to Britain.

“From emigrants and returning servicemen to post-war migrants seeking fresh opportunities, Tilbury became a symbol of hope and renewal.

“One of its finest moments came in June 1948, when the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, bringing hundreds of passengers from the Caribbean.”

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For more on trains , these two UK towns are getting new stations for the first time in over 60 years for £45million.

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HE was the golden boy of Hollywood.

Men envied his obvious friendship with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, and almost all his female co-stars adored him.

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In fact, Jane Fonda admitted she couldn’t keep her hands off him on set, while Meryl Streep said he was the “best kisser ever”.

Robert Redford, who yesterday died in his sleep aged 89 at his ranch in Utah, was rejected for 1967 movie The Graduate because no one would ever believe he was a loser with women.

But the handsome star was haunted by nerves and self-doubt that caused him to be endlessly late on set.

As the greatest names in showbiz paid tribute to the blond-haired icon, his representative revealed Redford was “surrounded by those he loved” when he passed away. She added: “He will be missed greatly.”

‘Love of pranks’

In blockbusters such as Barefoot In The Park, The Sting, All The President’s Men, The Great Gatsby, The Horse Whisperer, Indecent Proposal and Up Close And Personal, Redford was box office dynamite.

But the Oscar-winning actor was terrified stardom might turn him into a product for Hollywood studios to sell. He moaned: “Films to them are just like vacuum cleaners or refrigerators. The approach sickens me.”

The megastar even refused to make sequels to his biggest hits, Butch ­Cassidy and The Way We Were with Barbra Streisand.

He hated franchises, but appeared in Captain America: The Winter ­Soldier to please his grandkids.

And he became a champion of independent film-makers, founding the annual Sundance Film Festival to showcase their work.

Born Charles Robert Redford Jr in Santa Monica, California, on August 18, 1936, the actor’s mum was Martha and his dad Charles, a milkman.

His first taste of Hollywood was breaking into a studio as a teenager and trashing the place. He once said: “There was a strong dividing line with a railroad which ran near our house.

“Those who lived on the south side of the tracks, like us, helped to service the big houses on the north side as gardeners, cleaners, whatever.

“My dad would get up to go to work at 2.30 in the morning, come home late afternoon and go to sleep.

“It wasn’t his fault, but it was an inspiration [for me] to do something else with my life.”

Redford’s first plan was to be a baseball star, and he won a sports scholarship to Colorado University.

But he told showbiz writer Garth Pearce: “I was asked to leave because I was drinking too much.”

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His mother Martha had recently died and he turned to alcohol.

After being thrown out of college, he ­travelled to Europe. Redford recalled: “I became a pavement artist in ­Montmartre, Paris, and felt my life had begun at last. I had found my calling.

“Then I moved to Italy, where they openly laughed at my art. Eventually, I was told flatly that I would never make it or sell any paintings.”

So he moved back to New York and tried his hand at acting classes, enrolling at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

He said: “Suddenly, I was getting A-grade reports for the first time. I had failed at school, failed at university, failed as an artist. I thought, ‘There could be something in acting for me’. It was as simple as that, with no great calling.”

He couldn’t play a loser because of the way he looked

Director Mike Nichols

He began to get work, first on stage in New York and then in a succession of small-screen shows, such as ­Maverick, Perry Mason and Dr Kildare as TV boomed across America.

His movie breakthrough came opposite Jane Fonda in 1967’s Barefoot In The Park. She remembers: “I couldn’t keep my hands off him. I was ­constantly forcing myself on him.”

Redford auditioned for The ­Graduate, alongside Anne Bancroft as middle-aged Mrs Robinson.

But director Mike Nichols turned him down, recalling: “He couldn’t play a loser because of the way he looked.

“I told him so and he was dispirited. I said, ‘Look at it this way, ‘Have you ever been turned down by a woman?’. He replied, ‘What do you mean?’. I said, ‘My point precisely’.”

But his next part, The Sundance Kid, alongside Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy, would change Redford’s life forever. As they filmed the 1969 hit movie, he and Newman became best mates — bonding over Mexican beers and a love of pranks.

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Redford was a terrible time-keeper and, at the end of filming — during which he did his own stunts — ­Newman presented him with a tapestry cushion that read, “Punctuality is the courtesy of kings”.

For Newman’s 50th birthday, Redford sent him a wrecked Porsche wrapped in a bow. Newman had it crushed and sent back to his pal. Redford then had it turned into a garden sculpture and returned it.

Despite their 40-year friendship, Newman admitted he never really came to know Redford.

Even though Butch Cassidy was a huge success, Redford, a keen environmental campaigner, was still gripped with doubts about his ability.

He admitted: “I actually quit in the late Sixties, after appearing in some big films. It was not reported at the time but I took my family to a remote part of Spain. I attempted once again to make my living as an artist. But I was not good enough.”

By 1973, The Sting, in which he was reunited with Newman, gave him his only Best Actor Oscar nomination.

‘Not good enough’

His blond hair became his ­signature and he refused to have it cut in a 1940s style for 1977 war film A Bridge Too Far.

Director Sir Richard Attenborough asked him personally to get a short back and sides, but was forced to admit: “It’s no use. He just won’t have it touched.”

Redford once asked angrily: “What is it about my hair? I played Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby in 1974 and the director Jack Clayton wanted to dye my hair black.

“Even the studio wanted my hair black. I said, ‘Find me the part of the original book where it says that Gatsby’s hair is black. It’s not there’.”

Irritated by filmmakers, he decided to direct a movie of his own.

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Ordinary People, which came out in 1980, became one of the most acclaimed films of the decade and won him the only Oscar in his glittering career, for Best Director.

His hits dominated the Eighties and Nineties, with Out Of Africa alongside Meryl Streep winning seven Oscars, including Best Picture.

He directed A River Runs Through It starring a young Brad Pitt, Quiz Show and The Horse Whisperer, in which he also played the lead.

It was really hard . . . as a parent, you blame yourself. It creates a scar that never completely heals

Robert Redford

In between, he starred in Indecent Proposal as a millionaire who offered a married couple $1million if wife Demi Moore slept with him.

There was also romance in Up Close & Personal with Michelle Pfeiffer. But alongside great career success he suffered family tragedy.

His son Scott, who he had with first wife Lola, was a victim of cot death in 1959 at just two months.

The actor said: “It was really hard . . . as a parent, you blame yourself. It creates a scar that never completely heals.”

His second son, Jamie, who ­suffered constant ill health and underwent two liver transplants, died from cancer aged 58 in 2020.

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And eldest daughter Shauna ­witnessed the murder of her long-term boyfriend at university.

Redford told Garth Pearce: “All that personal stuff with my children meant some tough times. When you’re going through it, you lose part of yourself. I confess that I used work to prop me up.”

The Hollywood legend produced and directed films right into his 80s.

His final performance was an uncredited cameo earlier this year as a chess player in Dark Winds, a TV show he executive-produced. Redford officially retired from ­acting in 2018.

Redford is survived by second wife Sibylle, some 21 years his ­junior, who he married in 2009, and daughters Shauna, 64, and Amy, 54, from first wife Lola, who he divorced in 1985.

He said of his success: “The key to sanity in Hollywood is to have a life separate from movies and to never repeat yourself on film by doing a sequel.

“I lost my way and my focus ­several times. Having to deal with life, death, illness and catastrophe puts anyone to the test. Movies and acting was never my first love, but it was an enduring one.”

Walt Disney Co., Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Discovery on Tuesday sued a Chinese artificial intelligence firm called MiniMax for copyright infringement, alleging its AI service generates iconic characters including Darth Vader, the Minions and Wonder Woman without the studios’ permission.

“MiniMax’s bootlegging business model and defiance of U.S. copyright law are not only an attack on Plaintiffs and the hard-working creative community that brings the magic of movies to life, but are also a broader threat to the American motion picture industry,” the companies said in their complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

The entertainment companies requested that MiniMax be restrained from further infringement. They are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, as well as attorney fees and costs.

This is the latest round of copyright lawsuits that major studios have brought against AI companies over intellectual property concerns. In June, Disney and Universal Pictures sued AI firm Midjourney for copyright infringement. Earlier this month, Warner Bros. Discovery also sued Midjourney.

Shanghai-based MiniMax has a service called Hailuo AI, which is marketed as a “Hollywood studio in your pocket” and used characters including the Joker and Groot in its ads without the studios’ permission, the studios’ lawsuit said. Users can type in a text prompt requesting “Star Wars’” iconic character Yoda or DC Comics’ Superman, and Hailuo AI can pull up high quality and downloadable images or video of the character, according to the document.

“MiniMax completely disregards U.S. copyright law and treats Plaintiffs’ valuable copyrighted characters like its own,” the lawsuit said. “MiniMax’s copyright infringement is willful and brazen.”

“Given the rapid advancement in technology in the AI video generation field … it is only a matter of time until Hailuo AI can generate unauthorized, infringing videos featuring Plaintiffs’ copyrighted characters that are substantially longer, and even eventually the same duration as a movie or television program,” the lawsuit said.

MiniMax did not immediately return a request for comment.

Hollywood is grappling with significant challenges, including the threat of AI, as companies consolidate and reduce their expenses as production costs rise. Many actors and writers, still recovering from strikes that took place in 2023, are scrambling to find jobs. Some believe the growth of AI has threatened their livelihoods as tech tools can replicate iconic characters with text prompts.

While some studios have sued AI companies, others are looking for ways to partner with them. For example, Lionsgate has partnered with AI startup Runway to help with behind the scenes processes such as storyboarding.

“The Conjuring: Last Rites” gave movie theaters a needed jolt over the weekend with a much better than expected domestic opening of $84 million and a global take of $194 million, a franchise best and the latest success for Warner Bros. and its New Line Cinema banner.

But it will take more than supernatural scares to ease Hollywood’s jitters after a weak summer movie season that exposed more challenges facing the traditional film industry.

Ticket sales fell slightly from last year’s summer season, which for the movie business spans from the first weekend of May through Labor Day. Movies grossed $3.67 billion in the U.S. and Canada this summer, down 0.2% from the same period in 2024, according to data from Comscore. More importantly, it’s still down from the pre-pandemic norm of about $4 billion, a disappointing result given that summer typically accounts for about 40% of annual grosses.

If you account for inflation, it’s even worse. Adjusting for today’s dollars, summer revenue was down 34% from 2019, meaning theater attendance was weaker than the topline revenue stats suggest. With actual attendance still impaired compared with the days before COVID-19, there’s a growing sense that the industry’s fears have come true: Audience habits have changed, and they’re not going back.

The problem wasn’t a lack of movies compared with last year. The effects of the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes have dissipated by now.

Rather, the issue was a shortage of big studio movies that audiences really wanted to see. The biggest release was Disney’s “Lilo & Stitch” remake, which collected $424 million domestically. There was nothing like last summer’s “Inside Out 2” or “Deadpool & Wolverine,” which both generated more than $600 million in North America.

The problem of the shrinking overall audience could be due to multiple factors.

In particular, theater owners blame the shrinking of the theatrical window — the period of time a new movie is held back from home video after its big screen debut — to roughly 45 days from the previously standard 90 days. Audiences know they don’t have to wait long before a new movie becomes available in their living room. That encourages them to save their money for only the biggest, Imax-worthy spectacles. The growing influence of Imax and premium large format screening may exacerbate that trend, as audiences choose between paying extra for a better “experience,” or just waiting to see “F1 The Movie” on their couch.

There were plenty of sequels and reboots, but those often performed worse than prior installments, indicating that audiences were less enthusiastic about seeing another Marvel movie or rampaging dino feature. “Jurassic World: Rebirth” made $861 million globally, which was big, but still the series’ smallest outing since 2001’s “Jurassic Park III.” Warner Bros.’ “Superman” collected a healthy $614 million, but that was still less than 2013’s “Man of Steel” ($670 million).

Superheroes didn’t come flying to the rescue. Marvel’s “Thunderbolts” put up a modest $382 million while “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” opened strong but collapsed in subsequent weeks for a total of $511 million worldwide, a middling outcome for the Disney-owned comic book universe. No wonder studios are increasingly looking at video games as a source of intellectual property for movie adaptations, as my colleague Sam Masunaga recently wrote. After all, Generation Alpha’s list of favorite franchises is dominated by video game-related titles, according to a recent National Research Group report.

Another threat emerged as international audiences appeared to sour on some U.S. blockbusters. “Superman” and “Fantastic Four” grossed less abroad than they did at home, which is an unusual result for big-budget action flicks.

It’s not clear why, but some explanations have been floated. China is no longer the reliable source of revenue that it once was, as audiences increasingly favor local-language productions. Some speculate that America’s diminished standing abroad has contributed to audience fatigue. The quintessential Americanness of the Superman brand is also widely believed to be a factor in that film’s underperformance outside the U.S.

Original animation struggled, as Pixar fielded its worst opening weekend ever with “Elio.” To add insult to injury, Sony Pictures Animation’s “KPop Demon Hunters” became a cultural phenomenon, but only after first launching on Netflix.

The rest of the year has some major releases, but they’re not expected to bring the business back to full strength. September is usually a slow month for moviegoing, “Last Rites” notwithstanding. Disney’s “Zootopia 2,” Universal’s “Wicked: For Good” and James Cameron’s “Avatar: Fire and Ash” will probably do huge business. But while individual films can do well, the overall picture isn’t so rosy.

Stuff we wrote

Number of the week

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors and publishers to settle a lawsuit that accused the company of illegally using written work to train its chatbot Claude.

The topline figure is the largest known settlement for a copyright case, equating to $3,000 per work for an estimated 500,000 books, The Times’ Queenie Wong reported.

But the case was not an outright win for authors worried about AI being trained on their published material. Far from it.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco ruled in June that Anthropic’s use of the books to train the AI models constituted “fair use,” meaning it wasn’t illegal. Fair use is a doctrine that allows for the limited use of copyrighted materials without permission in certain cases, such as teaching, criticism and news reporting. It’s an essential part of AI companies’ defense against copyright infringement claims.

The real problem for Anthropic was that the startup had illegally downloaded millions of books through online libraries. So the piracy was the true sin in this case, not the training of AI on books without permission.

Anthropic pirated at least 7 million books from Books3, Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, online libraries containing unauthorized copies of copyrighted books, to train its software, according to the judge. However, it also bought millions of print copies in bulk and scanned them into digital and machine-readable forms, which Alsup found to be in the bounds of fair use.

Film shoots

Finally …

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Read: Amy Nicholson’s review of “The Wizard of Oz” at Sphere in Las Vegas.

No surprise, 2025 has been an eventful year so far in Hollywood.

In addition to the megahits and epic bombs at the box office, the entertainment industry has been roiled by chaotic forces.

The second Trump administration. The ongoing Blake Lively–Justin Baldoni legal saga. The federal trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs, resulting in a mixed verdict in which the hip-hop mogul was acquitted of the most serious charges — racketeering and sex trafficking. And of course, the devastating wildfires that ravaged the Los Angeles area, particularly Pacific Palisades and Altadena, back in January.

But in terms of the actual business of movies, TV and streaming, there’s plenty of serious stuff to dig into that could shape the future of entertainment — from streaming’s continued ascent, to Disney and Universal’s lawsuit against Midjourney, to the race for state tax credits to save California’s beleaguered production economy.

Here’s our Wide Shot midyear review, by the numbers.

The box office has been on a roller-coaster ride since the COVID-19 pandemic, with the release schedule feeling the effects of the industry’s broader retrenchment. Although the 2023 strikes that thinned out the release schedule are in the rearview mirror, the uncertainty has very much continued.

After a brutal first quarter (ouch, “Snow White”), sales have rebounded thanks to hits including “Minecraft,” “Sinners” and “F1,” with grosses reaching $4.43 billion so far domestically, according to Comscore. That’s up 15% from the same period last year, but still down 26% from 2019. Attendance is up 6.5% from 2024 with about 350 million tickets sold, according to Steve Buck at EntTelligence.

The challenges remain the same.

Studios struggle to draw crowds with much other than the biggest blockbusters and whatever they can convince Gen Z is an “event” movie. And the films themselves are so expensive that even big numbers don’t guarantee that an action spectacle with a robust audience will break even during its theatrical run. Even horror movies aren’t really low-budget anymore (see “Final Destination: Bloodlines” and “28 Years Later”).

After years of shortened theatrical windows, audiences know they can wait to see a new movie at home, often after just a few weeks. That’s why theater owners at the industry convention CinemaCon called on studios to commit to a longer standard gap between a movie’s theatrical release and its availability for home viewing. Meanwhile, audiences face ever longer preshows, with ads now playing between the trailers at AMC. With so much debt, the chain sure needs the money.

The slate for the rest of the year is lumpy.

July is looking strong after “Jurassic World Rebirth’s” $147-million Fourth of July weekend opening, with Warner Bros. and DC’s “Superman” reboot, and Disney and Marvel’s “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” hoping to reinvigorate the superhero genre. Prerelease tracking for “Superman” is all over the place, but an opening of $125 million is a fair target. “Fantastic Four” is poised for a debut in the ballpark of $100 million. But August is lacking in obvious hits. Maybe Paramount’s “The Naked Gun” will bring pure comedy back — but we’ll see.

Paramount caved, reaching a $16-million deal to settle President Trump’s lawsuit over CBS News’ “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris. Trump declared victory over the “Fake News media,” while 1st Amendment advocates and journalists howled, fuming that the owner of one of TV’s most respected brands chose to buy peace rather than fight the case — widely considered frivolous — and stand up for press freedom.

There are still unanswered questions. In the aftermath of the deal, a source close to Trump‘s world said the president’s team is also anticipating millions of dollars in airtime for PSAs related to MAGA-friendly causes and antisemitism — an alleged side deal that Trump himself referenced after the fact. Paramount said its deal with the Trump team did not include PSAs.

In any event, Paramount’s leaders — not to mention its incoming owners at Skydance Media and RedBird — are eager to move on. David Ellison and Shari Redstone are now counting on the Federal Communications Commission to finally approve the $8-billion merger so they can get to work reshaping the storied entertainment firm.

Speaking of Paramount, one of the company’s biggest franchises is causing headaches for the new owners — and vice versa — as the company wrangles with the creators of “South Park” over the future of the long-running, foulmouthed cartoon.

Skydance balked at a proposed overall deal worth at least $2.5 billion for the “South Park” guys, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, sources have said. (Their current $900-million deal is still in place.) Separately, the two sides are trying to work out the streaming rights to the show. Paramount wants to run the episodes on Paramount+, but it also wants to share the rights (and the costs) with another streamer — perhaps the 300-plus episodes’ current home, HBO Max. The streaming rights are expected to fetch north of $200 million a year.

In Hollywood’s current era of downsizing, Skydance may have legitimate reasons to not want to overpay for a show entering its 27th season. But Parker and Stone still have leverage: Without “South Park,” the cupboard at Comedy Central is pretty bare.

Parker and Stone’s lawyers have gone to the mat, accusing David Ellison’s allies — namely former NBCUniversal boss and current RedBird executive Jeff Shell — of overstepping their authority in the negotiations. The “South Park” team expressed its displeasure in a way only the makers of Cartman and Kenny could. After Comedy Central announced a delay for the new season premiere, the show’s X profile tweeted a statement saying the Skydance deal was “a s—show and is f— up South Park.”

Hollywood got its long-sought lifeline from Sacramento, as Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a beefed-up film and television tax credit program, allocating $750 million annually for productions in the state.

That’s more than double the previous program, which was capped at $330 million a year. Shortly afterward, the state legislature passed a law to increase the tax credit to as much as 35% of qualified expenditures for movies and TV series shot in the Greater Los Angeles area — and up to 40% for productions shot outside the region. It also expanded the types of productions that could qualify.

California currently provides a 20% to 25% tax credit to offset qualified production expenses, such as money spent on film crews and building sets. The plan does not cover above-the-line expenses, such as actor and director salaries, which remains a disadvantage as California tries to compete with other states and countries. New York and Texas are both ramping up their own incentive programs.

The Golden State’s production economy has been devastated by competition. Boosting the tax incentives is one lever the state can pull to lure shoots back. There’s also been a push to overhaul red tape at the local level in Los Angeles. Whatever good all this does, it’s sure to be more effective than Trump’s now-largely forgotten call for tariffs on movies produced abroad.

Streaming hit a major symbolic milestone earlier this year, as television usage for YouTube, Netflix and their brethren overtook broadcast and cable for the first time in May, according to Nielsen. Streaming services combined to attract 44.8% of all TV set viewing, representing the largest share to date for direct-to-consumer platforms. Viewership for linear networks was just behind at 44.2%.

Nielsen’s regular viewership report — the Gauge — is a useful snapshot of the state of television today. Combined with the rapid decline of cable and satellite bundle subscriptions, the drop-off in viewing explains much of what’s going on at the legacy media companies.

Firms including Disney and Paramount are still cutting hundreds of jobs to adjust to the new realities. Warner Bros. Discovery — which has been on a yearslong quest to reduce its heavy debt load — said it will split its operations in two, cleaving the studios and streaming business from its global networks. That decision followed NBCUniversal’s move to spin off its cable nets into a new company called Versant.

Those plans are gambles. Cable networks are in decline, but they’re profitable. For most media companies, streaming is growing but has only just gotten into the black after years of losing billions.

Honorable mentions:

$417.5 million: Alcon Entertainment, the production company known for “The Blind Side” and “Blade Runner 2049,” gained a prized asset by acquiring the film library of bankrupt Village Roadshow. The $417.5-million deal gives the firm Village’s stakes in movies including “Joker” and “Mad Max: Fury Road,” both released by Warner Bros. Village Roadshow declared bankruptcy amid a brutal legal battle with Warner Bros. over its release of “The Matrix Resurrections,” which went to streaming and theaters at the same time.

$400 million: “It Ends With Us” director Justin Baldoni’s lawsuits against actress Blake Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds, the New York Times and others were tossed last month, with a judge ruling that the claims — including defamation, extortion and breach of contract — failed to pass legal muster. U.S. District Judge Lewis J. Liman granted motions to dismiss both a $400-million countersuit against Lively, Reynolds and others and a $250-million defamation claim against The Times.

$2 billion: The biggest movie of the year isn’t from Hollywood at all. It’s “Ne Zha 2,” an animated Chinese film that grossed more than $2 billion, the vast majority of which came from its home country. Despite trade wars and the dominance of local productions, though, U.S. movies can still do well in China. “Jurassic World Rebirth” opened with $41.6 million there.

$20 million: Walt Disney Co. and Universal are suing AI firm Midjourney for allegedly ripping off and copying their intellectual property with its image-generating technology. With 150 violations cited in the lawsuit, at a statutory $150,000 per infringing item, that’s a total of more than $20 million in potential damages.

$300 billion: The eye-popping valuation for privately held OpenAI, the San Francisco company behind ChatGPT and Sora.

$9.2 billion: The amount Disney ultimately paid for Comcast’s Hulu stake, valuing the service at $27.6 billion. After a mediation process, Disney paid less for the stake than Comcast wanted.

— Times staff writers Meg James, Samantha Masunaga, Wendy Lee, Stephen Battaglio, Stacy Perman and Josh Rottenberg contributed to this article.

Stuff we wrote

Finally …

Listen: For your morning run, Killswitch Engage’s “This Consequence.”

Watch: I finally started “Apple Cider Vinegar” over the weekend, and hoo boy, what a fascinating, infuriating story.

It was only a matter of time before the major Hollywood studios started taking the fight to the artificial intelligence industry over its alleged abuse of intellectual property.

Now, it’s on.

Last week, Walt Disney Co. and Universal Pictures sued AI firm Midjourney in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, accusing the popular image generator of blatantly copying and profiting from copyrighted images of characters from franchises such as “Star Wars,” “Minions,” “Cars,” Marvel, “The Simpsons” and “Shrek.”

The complaint cited numerous examples, illustrated with dozens of striking photos, of San Francisco-based Midjourney’s technology being used to generate virtually indistinguishable copies of Darth Vader, Iron Man, Bart, Woody and Elsa, sometimes in frames quite similar to scenes from the actual movies and TV shows.

The lawsuit says Midjourney employed such images to promote its subscription service and encourage the use of its image generator. The companies are seeking unspecified monetary compensation, as well as a court order to stop Midjourney from further infringement, including by using studio-owned material to train its upcoming video tool.

“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” Disney and Universal’s lawyers wrote in the 110-page complaint. “Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing.”

The stakes of this battle are high, according to the studios. The AI company’s misuse of Disney and Universal’s intellectual property “threatens to upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law that drive American leadership in movies, television, and other creative arts,” the court document said.

Midjourney has not responded to requests for comment.

AI companies have typically argued that they are protected by “fair use” doctrine, which allows for the limited reproduction of material without permission from the copyright holder.

Midjourney founder David Holz in 2022 told Forbes that the company did not seek permission from copyright holders, saying “there isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from.”

This battle is a long time coming.

Artists — including screenwriters, animators, illustrators and other entertainment industry workers — have been raising the alarm for years about the threat of AI, not just to their actual jobs but to the work they create. AI models are trained on anything and everything that’s publicly available on the internet, which includes copyrighted material owned by studios or the artists themselves, they argue.

The Writers Guild of America last year called on the big entertainment companies to take legal action against tech giants and startups in order to put a stop to such “theft.” But this is the first time any of the major film studios have gone after an AI company for copyright infringement. They may not be the last.

The studios are following the lead of the New York Times and other publishers, who sued OpenAI and its backer Microsoft over alleged plagiarism. The major music labels have also taken AI firms to court over the use of copyrighted music. Studios are in an awkward position because they’re weighing the possibility of licensing their content to AI firms or using the technology for their own purposes.

Reid Southen, a Michigan-based film concept artist whose research on AI was cited at length in the lawsuit, said he hopes Disney and Universal’s complaint encourages others to take a similar stance.

“Hopefully, I think other studios are looking at what’s going on with Disney and Universal now, and considering, ‘Hey, what about our properties?’” said Southen, who has worked on studio films including “The Matrix Resurrections,” “The Hunger Games” and “Blue Beetle.” “If Universal and Disney think they have a strong enough case to pursue this, I would hope other studios would take note of that and maybe pursue it as well.”

Southen became part of the story in December 2023, after the release of Midjourney v6 started making waves online. He saw someone use the tech to generate an image of Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker, and he started messing around with it himself to see what kinds of copyrighted material he could prompt it to rip off. He posted the results on social media, which led AI researcher Gary Marcus to reach out.

Marcus and Southen published an in-depth article for IEEE Spectrum in January 2024, making the case that Midjourney and other well-funded AI firms were training their models on copyrighted work without their permission or compensation and spitting out images nearly identical to the studios’ own material.

That article illustrated how simple prompts could produce nearly exact replicas of famous film and TV characters.

The prompts didn’t necessarily need to ask for a particular character by name.

The researchers were able to coax uncanny images from AI with prompts as basic as “animated toys” (resulting in pictures of “Toy Story” characters) and “videogame plumber” (which turned up versions of Mario from “Super Mario”). According to Marcus and Southen, all it took was the phrase “popular movie screencap” to evoke a picture similar to an actual frame from “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” or “The Dark Knight.”

“It shows that they are very clearly trained on hundreds, if not thousands, of movies and YouTube videos and screen caps and all this stuff, because I was able to find matching screen caps and images, not just from trailers, but from deep in movies themselves,” Southen said.

The Midjourney examples were the most egregious, Southen said, but the company was not the only offender. For instance, OpenAI’s image generation technology DALL-E was also capable of producing “plagiaristic” images of copyrighted characters without prompting them specifically by name, Southen said, echoing the findings of his and Marcus’ IEEE Spectrum article.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. The Disney and Universal lawsuit did not name OpenAI, which is also responsible for the video generator Sora that is trying to take the film business by storm.

Many chatbots and text-to-image tools have guardrails around intellectual property, but they clearly have limitations. Ask ChatGPT to create an image of Kermit the Frog, and it will flatly reject the request. However, for example, I was recently able to request a picture of a Muppet-like female pig character, and the result was not unlike Miss Piggy, though I wouldn’t quite say it was a one-for-one copy.

Southen argues that this is a sign of a serious flaw in large language model training — the fact that they’ve already been fed on so much publicly available data. “Sometimes it’s not giving you something that’s spot-on, but it’s giving you enough that you know that it knows what it’s doing,” he said. “Like, you know where it’s pulling from.”

In public comments, studio executives have made it clear that they’re not against AI as a whole. “We are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity,” said Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s chief legal and compliance officer, in a statement on the lawsuit.

As media industry expert Peter Csathy put it in a recent newsletter, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do AI.

But even doing it the right way will be disruptive. Use of AI for storyboarding and pre-visualization could save millions of dollars, which translates to more job losses in the entertainment industry. Lionsgate and AMC Networks have announced deals to use AI to streamline operations and processes.

For artists like Southen, that’s a troubling reality. He said he has seen his annual income shrink in half since generative AI technology came on the scene.

“You can point at things like the strikes and other stuff going on, but the story is the same for most of the people that I know — that their income since all this stuff came has been dramatically impacted,” he said. “Work that was otherwise very steady for me for a long time is just nowhere to be found anymore.”

Stuff we wrote

Number of the week

Streaming just notched a significant milestone.

The technology’s share of total television usage overtook the combined viewership of broadcast and cable for the first time, according to Nielsen.

Streaming represented 44.8% of TV viewership in May 2025, the data firm said, marking a record, while broadcast clocked in at 20.1% and cable garnered 24.1% for a combined 44.2% going to linear viewing.

Nielsen cautioned that rankings may fluctuate because broadcast networks still command a tremendous share of eyeballs, particularly when NFL football airs.

Finally …

I caught some stellar acts at the Hollywood’s Bowl’s Blue Note Jazz Festival on Saturday. Shout-out to saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin and bassist Derrick Hodge. Here’s Benjamin’s Tiny Desk Concert performance for NPR.

IF awards were given out for most toxic break-up in Hollywood, Alice Evans and Ioan Gruffudd would sweep the board.

Four years after the couple’s marriage ended, their bitter feud continues to overshadow anything either party has ever delivered on the big screen.

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And the end credits are still some way off from rolling, especially when Alice is the leading lady. 

In recent weeks, the actress’s behaviour has become increasingly erratic, from declaring herself homeless to begging her Instagram followers for a place to stay.

Her antics have left fans understandably concerned for her well-being, but there are also suspicions that her brutal honesty is also part of a ‘game plan’ – one she secretly hopes may spark a career renaissance.

An insider told The Sun: “Alice is aware her car crash relationship is the only thing keeping her relevant right now.

“The acting jobs have dried up, and even she admits she’s currently unhireable.

“So documenting both her innermost feelings and stark truths of her desperate situation on social media maintains a profile, and therefore could lead to other opportunities away from acting but still within the industry, like her own reality show.”

The insider added: “Alice knows what she’s doing and will continue airing her dirty laundry in public. She has nothing to lose.”

While Alice, 56, continues to offload on social media, her Fantastic Four actor ex Ioan, 51, is quietly getting on with his life. 

He’s recently remarried to Australian actress Bianca Wallace, who’s felt the wrath of Alice’s sharp tongue, which led to Ioan filing a request for a restraining order against her.

And his most recent movie, Bad Boys: Ride Or Die, banked an impressive $403million worldwide.

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He’s still battling Alice for spousal support and custody and financial support for their two daughters, Ella, 15, and Elsie, 11, but is doing all of his talking via lawyers – unlike his ex, whom he met on the set of the 2000 movie 102 Dalmatians.

Indeed, Alice is updating fans with every cough and spit of the fallout from the pair’s divorce, which she claims has left her financially ruined.

In February, Alice told her 95,000 Instagram followers she, her two daughters, plus their dog Emma were on the verge of being evicted from their home in Los Angeles.

She said it was due to being unable to pay her rent, all while Ioan, who says his ex-wife’s poverty claims are “exaggerated”, was living in comfort in a $5,500 (£4,000) a month apartment with a home gym.

Alice knows what she’s doing and will continue airing her dirty laundry in public. She has nothing to lose

Insider

She claimed there was “no way of renting even the cheapest room anywhere in the city” due to January’s wildfires, which has decimated the rental market. 

Alice wrote: “Four years of hell. And now the girls and I are going to be homeless. Somebody please help. I think I have reached rock bottom.

“In 16 days, we have nowhere to go. Does anybody have a spare room? I’m so sorry for this. So embarrassed.”

In the comments section of the post, Alice replied to many fans’ offers of help, once again opting for stark honesty surrounding her situation.

She revealed that “both sets of grandparents estranged themselves from my girls” when quizzed why her family aren’t supporting her.

Four years of hell. And now the girls and I are going to be homeless. Somebody please help. I think I have reached rock bottom

Alice Evans

She explained: “It breaks my heart. It would be perfectly possible to take sides against me whilst retaining a relationship with my kids.

“They both have their own phones that I have vowed to never touch. Nothing is stopping them from communicating.

“I think it’s a terrible mistake. And punishing children for something they believe their mother has done. Not fair at all.”

She also responded to fans’ offers of rooms to inhabit in countries including Ireland and Mexico, saying she can’t leave LA “without authorisation”, but would have “loved” to take up their kind gestures.

Desperation

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Such was her desperation, she repurposed her GoFundMe page – originally set up in 2022 to help pay for her divorce  – to seek funds for a new home, and she’s now just over $6,500 (£5,000) from reaching her target of $25,000 (£18,000).

Thanking donors this week, some of whom shelled out $2,500 anonymously, she wrote: “Just wanted to tell everybody that me and the girls and Emma are safe with a roof over our heads!

“It’s been a whirlwind, but we made it through the last three days and managed to save all our belongings too! 

“We could never, ever have done this without the incredible love and kindness from all of you. Honestly, I was at my wits’ end and you saved me. 

“Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I will keep you posted. Love you so much.’

Confessing she felt shame in turning to the public for help, she previously wrote: “I’m so embarrassed about this. If you’re here, you know my story. 

Alice is aware her car crash relationship is the only thing keeping her relevant right now

Insider

“You know how much I struggle to keep my two girls healthy and happy and a roof over their heads. 

“You know what I’ve been through. It never ends. I’m just getting squeezed in every which way and smeared in the media so that nobody even wants to employ me.”

Ioan agreed to pay Alice $3,000 (£2,200) per month in child support and $1,500 (£1,100) a month in spousal support in September last year. 

However, Alice has claimed the $4,500 (£3,300) fee was not sufficient to live in LA, and that money raised from the sale of their old marital home has slowly dwindled away, citing legal fees.

In March, the Vampire Diaries star slammed Ioan in a court filing for saying he “does not really believe” she was facing eviction and that she secretly had the money to pay for it, saying it was an effort “to make him look bad.”

Dark turn

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Last month, the rift took another dark twist when Ioan claimed he saw Alice try to give their children cocaine after leaving the door of their family home unlocked so a drug dealer could enter.

The bombshell revelation came in the Welshman’s latest court bid to extend the aforementioned restraining order against him and his new wife, Bianca.

Alice and Ioan married seven years after co-starring in the Disney sequel, tying the knot in Mexico in 2007 during an intimate service attended by close friends and family who had “travelled from all over the world for it”.

They welcomed their first daughter Ella in 2009 before Elsie arrived four years later.

But in January 2021, the pair announced their separation, and it was New Jersey-born Alice, who was brought up in the UK, who revealed the news in a typically blunt style, kick-starting their public feud.

She wrote: “Sad news. My beloved husband/soulmate of 20 years, Ioan Gruffudd, has announced he is to leave his family, starting next week. 

“Me and our young daughters are very confused and sad. We haven’t been given a reason except that he ‘no longer loves me’. I’m so sorry.”

But the rift turned really ugly when Ioan went public with new love and A Ray of Sunshine co-star Bianca, 32, nine months later, sharing a snap of the pair on Instagram alongside the caption: “Thank you for making me smile again.”

Previously, Ioan requested a restraining order against Alice in February 2022 after accusing her of harassment, making up “false stories about him”, and sending his mother “threatening emails.”

The actor’s daughter, Ella, then filed a domestic violence restraining order against him in June 2023 following an incident at his Los Angeles home, which was later rejected.

Two months later, Ioan accused Alice of keeping their children from him and had not seen them in three months, which his ex-wife denied.

She said he was to blame, claiming the actor had not bothered making contact with their daughters for 11 weeks.

Over the last two years, Alice’s complaints have centred around her financial struggles in the wake of their split.

She has said she’s relying on “food stamps”, while Ioan continues his “lavish lifestyle”, buying Rolex watches for his new partner, and is now reportedly considering working at Starbucks.

There have been worse angles for a reality show.

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About 80 years ago, guitarist and inventor Les Paul built a home recording studio in his Hollywood garage on North Curson Avenue and began developing his “new sound,” which incorporated cutting-edge recording techniques such as overdubbing, close miking, echo and delay.

Dissatisfied with the quality of the day’s commercial recordings, Paul, who’d worked with pop stars including Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, and was a guitar virtuoso and bandleader, endeavored to push the practice forward — to make recording a kind of erudite art form. His instrumental single “Lover” became the first commercial pop record to incorporate multiple layers of music, all of which were performed by Paul’s dexterous fingers. “Sextuplet guitar-ing,” Billboard magazine declared in its Feb. 21, 1948, review, “… technique so good it’s ridiculous.”

Today, a new studio in Hollywood celebrates the former Angeleno’s legacy as a recording pioneer. Over the last three years, the Les Paul Foundation and a team of engineers have gone to extraordinary lengths to build the Les Paul Recording Studio, housed in United Recording on Sunset Boulevard. The facility includes Paul’s original equipment, such as the first-ever multitrack Ampex tape machine and multitrack recording console, as well as a selection of Paul’s customized guitars, including his namesake model for Gibson.

Paul’s recording equipment is monumental for its historical value but also because it still works. “We have the Wright Brothers’ plane in there and it actually flies,” said Michael Braunstein, executive director of the Les Paul Foundation, by way of comparison. The new studio is essentially a rare hands-on museum where students and commercial artists may study and perform the same techniques Paul employed, using his tools.

Los Angeles-based musician Dweezil Zappa interviewed Paul on MTV in 1987, which created a fondness between the pair. During a phone call from the road — Zappa was on a tour celebrating his father’s album “Apostrophe” — he explained the importance of Paul’s innovations. “He was so far ahead of the game in so many ways, not only as a great guitar player, but also how he figured out ways to record music live,” he said. “The foundation of the sound capture is still better than anything else that you would find today. The products that were put into use and the way that it was machined … it’s unmatched.”

Zappa says he’s visited the new studio and intends to use it to record some of his own music after his tour concludes. The studio also has an educational mission.

“This is also a real opportunity for students to learn about analog recording from the master,” said Steve Rosenthal, a Grammy-winning producer who serves as the head archivist and music producer for the Les Paul Foundation. Rosenthal’s also known for his Manhattan recording studio the Magic Shop, which closed in 2016, where he worked with David Bowie, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Ramones and many others.

Tom Camuso, director of audio engineering at the Les Paul Recording Studio, is photographed in Hollywood on May 15.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Groups from Carnegie Mellon University and Syracuse University have already participated in seminars at the studio led by Rosenthal and Tom Camuso, a Grammy-winning engineer who’s also the Les Paul Foundation’s director of audio engineering. “The console looks like it’s from a battleship, and we let students record on it and see how hard it is compared to today’s digital audio workstations,” Camuso explained. “The connection they make is that this is where it started, this is the first of all of it.”

The idea for the studio began in 2022 amid Rosenthal’s quest to source, organize, curate and restore Paul’s vast catalog of music from the Library of Congress archives. “It became clear to me that the best solution would be to mix the music on Les’ original gear,” he said. He brought in Camuso, a longtime associate who’d worked at the Magic Shop, and the pair endeavored to repair the eight-track recording console nicknamed “The Monster” that Paul built with engineer Rein Narma, which featured leading-edge in-line equalization and vibrato effects.

They also retrieved Paul’s Ampex 5258 Sel-Sync multitrack tape machine, familiarly known as the Octopus, which sits alongside the console, and was the first-ever eight-track. The studio also has a three-track machine that was in Paul’s home in Mahwah, N.J., which he used to play tapes recorded at other studios. At the time, Paul was the only person with eight-track capabilities. “That was his way of communicating with the outside world, so to speak,” Camuso said.

The first-ever multitrack tape machine, called “The Octopus,” resides at the Les Paul Recording Studio in Hollywood.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

The equipment was in varying stages of disrepair, and there was no documentation accompanying it. Many of the recording console’s wires had been cut, and some of its modules were missing. Camuso and a group from Thump Recording Studios in Brooklyn spent 10 months replacing and repairing pieces that were missing or had failed, without changing anything about the way the machine was originally made. “We had to source old stock parts from the ’50s,” Camuso said, “and there were little plastic pieces that had disintegrated. The team would drum scan those and then 3D print them in their original form.” An Ampex expert from Canada broke down the tape machines and then rebuilt them from the ground up, exactly as they were when Paul used them.

Before he used the multitrack tape machine and recording console, Paul’s early experiments with overdubbing, or what he called “sound on sound,” involved two recording-cutting lathes, a record player, a mixer and hundreds of blank wax discs, all of which he used to layer tracks manually. In 1948, Bing Crosby gave Paul his first mono Ampex recorder, to which Paul added a second playback head, which enabled him to record multiple tracks on the same reel of tape. He and his second wife, Mary Ford, took this machine on the road, recording their songs in hotel rooms and in apartments.

Ford was a skilled singer with perfect pitch who could execute lead vocals and harmonize with herself in very few takes using Paul’s early version of multitracking, which was revolutionary but primitive and didn’t allow for mistakes. Given the analog nature of Paul’s setup, she had to sing everything live and unmanipulated. The pair recorded a string of 28 hit singles between 1950 to 1957, beginning with a cover of the jazz standard “How High the Moon.” They were so popular that Listerine sponsored a widely syndicated television show, “Les Paul & Mary Ford at Home,” during which they performed their intricate songs live.

A photograph of Les Paul inside his recording studio in New Jersey is displayed at the Les Paul Recording Studio in Hollywood.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

“Their discs sell like dimes going for a nickel,” Florabel Muir reported in the Los Angeles Mirror in January 1952. The pair’s “Vaya Con Dios” spent 11 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Best Sellers in Stores chart (which was discontinued in favor of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1958). Paul and Ford’s sultry version of “Smoke Rings,” released in 1952, features in Todd Haynes’ 2015 film “Carol.”

“The only singer I’ve encountered in my life who can compare to Mary is Aretha Franklin,” said Gene Paul, Les’ son from his first marriage, who became a recording engineer for Atlantic Records. “Neither one of them ever hit a bad note. You couldn’t pay them to.” The younger Paul learned about recording in his father’s home studio in Mahwah and played drums in his touring band from 1959 to 1969. “It took me years after my dad died to realize he was a genius,” he added. “Yes, he had a studio in his house, and built his own guitar and his own eight-track, but I thought every dad did this.”

Rosenthal and Camuso are in the process of restoring Paul’s original recordings, including his hits with Ford. The pair is using demixing and speed correction software to create new stereo mixes of the songs, which don’t have any of the crunchiness or distortion that were a byproduct of Paul’s original experiments in multitracking. It’ll be the first time any of Paul’s music has been released in stereo. The project has created a library of multitrack stems, which is another singular feature of the new studio. “Lana Del Rey could come in and sing with Mary Ford, or she could sing ‘A Fool to Care’ with the original Les Paul guitar parts,” Rosenthal said.

Guitars on display inside the Les Paul Recording Studio in Hollywood.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Camuso says a number of famous musicians have already expressed interest in using the new studio. “There’s lots of people who would be in your record collection for sure,” he said. Its historical significance and superior sound quality is a major draw, but the Les Paul Recording Studio also provides a chance for musicians to work more intentionally. Though its equipment was once cutting-edge, by today’s digital standards — in which there are unlimited tracks and effects and every mistake is erasable — Paul’s console and tape machines are limited. To work with them, musicians must think about what they want to record ahead of time. “The average person may not know what they’re hearing, but they will feel it because the performances will be better,” Zappa pointed out.

He views the new studio as a welcome counterpart to the too-perfect sonic monotony that can occur from every commercial recording artist using the same software. “There’s just so much music that’s disposable today,” Zappa added. “We’ve never had as many amazing tools to make stuff, and then have it be used in the lamest way possible.”