Barry & Shannon

What is the deal super-wealthy Hollywood ‘globalists’ cloning their dogs? First, we read of Barbara Streisand cloning hers, then we find out today that it was Barry Diller who convinced her, after cloning his own dog with its shiksa-like backstory: “He has three Jack Russell terriers cloned from his late, beloved dog Shannon, a Gaelic orphan he found wandering many years ago on a back road in Ireland.”

The amount of name-dropping in this NYT reporter’s question is a perfect embodiment of the incestuousness of the media business:

I ask Mr. Diller what he thought of Sacha Baron Cohen’s joke at David Geffen’s recent birthday party at Jimmy Iovine’s house in Los Angeles that Mr. Geffen, Mr. Diller and the other starry billionaires and millionaires there represented “the world’s third-largest economy.”

On the plus side, Diller believes Hollywood is becoming increasingly irrelevant, tipping his hat to Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings for having made that initial $100 million investment in House of Cards, which revolutionized the industry.

In the interview displays that Diller suffers from an extreme case of TDS, and I never cease to marvel at the NYT’s sheer presumption that its readers are all alike politically:

Given that Mr. Diller helped create the Fox Broadcasting Company with Rupert Murdoch — and blessedly greenlighted “The Simpsons” — I wonder if he feels like Dr. Frankenstein.

That sort of cockiness runs throughout the interview.

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