Th actress’s revived Committee for the First Amendment is taking aim at industry mergers as well as threats to the freedom of expression.
Jane Fonda speaks at the Women’s Media Awards in New York.
(Cindy Ord/Getty Images for The Women’s Media Center)
The Instagram clip opens with Jane Fonda walking into a movie theater. In an homage to Nicole Kidman’s now iconic AMC theater “we come to this place of magic” monologue, Fonda says, “We come to this place for mergers…where content is chosen by the best billionaires we have.” But before she can reach Kidman’s rapturous acclaim for the theatrical experience, she’s ejected from that theater because its proprietors are tearing it down to build a data center.
Spare and scrappy, Fonda’s parody clip lambastes the current mega-mergers overtaking Hollywood—notably the recent attempts by the streamer giant Netflix and Paramount Skydance to buy out Warner Bros. Studios (WB). Paramount Skydance won that bidding war last month; now it has to amass $111 billion to meet the purchase price for the WB studio and its subsidiaries, and then clear multiple regulatory hurdles. The prospect of this merger—of the public and the filmmaking community losing a major studio in WB and putting a vast chunk of the media in the hands of a very vocal Trump ally, Oracle’s Larry Ellison—has set much of Hollywood on edge.
Fonda’s sketch is part of the first wave of resistance from the new Committee for the First Amendment (CFA)—a revived version of the organization her father, Henry Fonda, helped launch in the 1940s. For a brief shining moment, the original CFA rose up as the only real resistance to House Un-American Activities Committee. It sponsored two ABC broadcasts featuring members Judy Garland, Groucho Marx, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall in sketches and monologues defending everyone’s right to free speech. Its members also included John Huston, Katharine Hepburn, and Billy Wilder. They understood that celebrities can be most effective as activists by amplifying an issue, heightening public awareness about government abuses.
When Jane Fonda discusses the tectonic shifts currently convulsing the movie industry, you realize just how much Hollywood history she has seen. Now 87, Fonda made her first movie for WB, Tall Story (1960), back when an actual person named Warner ran the studio. Fonda was also there when this modern era of merger buyouts began, when her ex-husband Ted Turner sold his Turner Broadcasting Company to TimeWarner. “I kept saying to him, Why? Why? CNN is successful. TNT is successful. You’ve got a lot of successful pieces here. Why do you need to sell? He said, ‘Because if I don’t sell to a company that’s bigger, I’m going to get eaten.’ Of course, that’s the late-stage capitalist rule. You got to keep getting bigger.’”
Late-stage billionaire capitalism certainly plays its part in it for Fonda, but it’s safe to say you don’t marry Ted Turner if you’re just out to crusade against billionaire media moguls. Fonda’s more often seen working with organizations like One Fair Wage, which currently seeks to raise the minimum wage in Michigan this year to $15 and $25 in Maryland and Washington, DC. “The Democratic Party must become defined by putting money in working people’s pockets,” she says of a current Democratic leadership that has lost its way.
What caused Fonda to shift her activism to our billionaire class and the First Amendment is the direct role President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies took in these recent mergers to crush dissent in the news and entertainment divisions of media corporations. After his reelection, Trump brought suits against ABC News and CBS News on flimsy grounds that would have resulted in abrupt dismissals in a less-cowering climate of free expression. Instead, the corporate masters at both networks approved big-ticket settlements of the suits.
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At CBS, the payout doubled as a de facto blackmail payment to ensure that the Trump White House would permit the Ellison family’s Skydance to acquire Viacom, which then owned Paramount and CBS. Tacked on to the merger’s approval at the last minute was the suspiciously timed cancellation of The Late Show, which stars relentless Trump critic Stephen Colbert. Then the Ellisons bought conservative Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, and installed her as CBS’s first editor in chief to push the news in a MAGA-friendly direction.
“They’ve already bowed to the demands of the regime,” Fonda says of Paramount Skydance, “We know that they’ve already caved in terms of what can be said and criticism of the regime. Free press means you can criticize the government. That’s in the Constitution.… They’re hiring people according to what Trump wants. So very obviously there, we have a problem with the First Amendment.”
Once again, Fonda’s front-row seat to so much Hollywood history has given her an inside vantage on how Skydance-Paramount operates. One of WB’s prospective new owners, David Ellison, produced her seven-season sitcom with Lily Tomlin, Grace and Frankie. “I like him,” Fonda says of David Ellison. “I don’t think he is MAGA, no. I just wanted to say that because he’s my friend. There are several people who are working at Paramount Skydance now, very progressive women, and they say, no, he’s different. David is not his father.”
That may be, but for now it looks like a moot point. In addition to presiding over CBS News’s MAGA makeover, David Ellison was the indefatigable Trump lackey South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham’s guest at this year’s State of the Union address. Fonda’s friendship with Ellison has not stopped the CFA from taking aim at his decisions. Paramount Skydance announced that it would do Trump a favor by distributing Rush Hour 4, a film he wants to be directed by his friend, the notoriously #MeToo’d Brett Ratner. Ratner had been unhirable since multiple women accused him of sexual assault, but Trump’s own record as a confessed and court-certified sexual assaulter prompted him to revive Ratner’s career. First he allowed Ratner to helm the Amazon-produced Melania documentary, and then he pressured the Ellisons to take on the Rush Hour 4 project just when they need the president’s approval on the WB deal.
The CFA’s Instagram parody shows Fonda, Ed Begley Jr., Yvette Nicole Brown, and others auditioning for roles doled out in a movie industry dominated by a newly merged Paramount-Skydance-WB behemoth. “I was in Rush Hour 17 and 23,” Anthony Ray Davis tells a casting director. “I would love to be part of the Rush Hour universe,” says Kristen Vangeness. As Fonda makes her own pitch for a Rush Hour gig, a clueless casting director asks the two-time Oscar winner, “Have you been taking any acting lessons?”
Assuming that Skydance’s acquisition of WB goes forward to completion, the Ellison family will add WB and CNN to its media holdings, which include Paramount, TikTok in America, CBS, CNN, and a billion-dollar stake in Elon Musk’s X.com. Perhaps most important to Trump, this would bring CNN into his orbit, as the Ellisons have already done with CBS. Just weeks ago, CBS strongly “advised” Stephen Colbert, not to broadcast an interview with a Democratic candidate for the Senate in Texas, James Talarico. Colbert ran the interview on his website, to avoid the petty gangsterism of Trump’s FCC chief, Brendan Carr.
“Unlike the first go-around with this administration,” Fonda says, “we now have unequivocally, we have an authoritarian clique who has control of the trifecta of the government and the Supreme Court, and they’re consolidating very fast. Meaning they’re quickly removing all the democratic guardrails that allow us to express ourselves and defend ourselves. It’s different now. I think we’re all much more conscious of the attacks on the First Amendment. I think that’s why there’s been an uprising against many things, but including the mergers.”
Fonda has no rooting interest in who wins this round of MAGA Hollywood mergers. She argues that the mergers themselves are the problem, not the personal politics of studio owners. “I am, along with my colleagues at the committee and everyone in Hollywood that I’ve spoken to, generally against the mergers. The Writers Guild in 2021, they analyzed five major media mergers that took place between 2011 and 2018,” she says. “Every one of them led to lower wages, less innovation, less diversity of content, higher consumer prices, fewer consumer choices, and for a lot of them, fewer jobs. I mean, 2,000 people were laid off at the Paramount thing.”
Online sketch comedy might seem a quixotic way to organize resistance to a $111 billion media deal. But Fonda and the CFA view this in an opening salvo in a sustained campaign to dramatize the public’s own democratic stake in a boardroom- and Oval Office–driven consolidation of the media and entertainment industries. With the new CFA, Fonda and her allies hope to make that point both entertaining and fun. It’s something she learned back in the 1970s, in her most polarizing era of activism as an entertainment-industry critic of the Vietnam war.
In 1971, Fonda and Donald Sutherland led a sketch-comedy show that toured the same military installations that USO shows did. “We went to Hawaii, Okinawa, the Philippines, Japan. Yeah. US military bases,” Fonda says. The show emphasized working-class members of the military who opposed the war they had to fight. They shot a documentary FTA (as in “Fuck The Army”) to parody Bob Hope’s highly rated annual pro-war Christmas shows from Vietnam. “The pillars of support have to be weakened, the pillars that hold up the regime,” Fonda says. “That includes the military. During the Vietnam War, I worked within the military pillar with active-duty GIs. You have to weaken the pillars of support, and then the regime is less strong.”
“We’re thinking about doing a traveling tour like that,” she continues. “We’re going to be doing a dramatic reading of Eric Bentley’s play, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?, based on the HUAC scripts, trials. We’re going to perform that in DC. We’re finding ways to use our members. We’ll be going out and interviewing the man on the street or the woman on the street about the First Amendment.”
In modern-day Hollywood, weakening the pillars of support means emboldening actors, writers, and directors to speak out and lampoon the most powerful people in the business. While thousands have signed up online in support of the CFA, not everyone wants a reputation as an anti-MAGA malcontent in the current atmosphere. After all, whoever wins or loses today’s merger war will still own the studios and streamers that will back their projects and hire them tomorrow. If they went after Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, who is safe?
Before Paramount Skydance, the last major Hollywood merger was the Disney buyout of 20th Century Fox from Rupert Murdoch. Few spoke up. The results were a disaster that cost a minimum of 4,000 jobs. As the Writers Guild mergers report notes, Disney “announced that it would close the Fox 2000 film label and reorient some of 20th Century Fox studio’s output toward streaming distribution. Disney later also closed Fox’s Blue Sky animation studio, which competed with Disney-owned Pixar and Disney Animation studios. Disney has also removed popular Fox library titles from circulation, depriving many independent theaters of key content.”
“Lesson learned,” Fonda says with some regret. “I mean, we should have taken a stand during the 20th Century Fox and Disney merger. That was a really difficult thing for our industry. I personally was not involved in any effort to stop that. I think probably some were; I wish I had been involved.”
More people have spoken up over the Paramount Skydance–WB deal, but much of the criticism so far has come from politicians and journalists. At first, WB rebuffed Paramount’s unsolicited bids, but as the offers kept increasing, WB announced that it would entertain offers. It came down to Netflix and Paramount Skydance, and the Ellisons won with their $111 billion offer. A collective of A-list Hollywood filmmakers wrote a letter to Congress to oppose the Netflix offer—but they diluted the force of their dissent by remaining anonymous. Here, too, career calculations muffled a Hollywood resistance campaign—the filmmakers in question knew that they would be working with WB’s new owners, whoever they turned out to be. What’s more, they knew that a loud opposition to both bidders would put them squarely at odds with Trump’s administration, which is keen to impose MAGA orthodoxies on media properties and seek retribution on dissenting, unruly talent.
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This sort of preemptive self-censorship, occurring as major government and industry figures collude to control the politics of our media, calls to mind the climate of fear stoked by the House Unamerican Activities Committee and the blacklisting campaigns of the late 1940s. That crisis prompted the first version of the Committee for the First Amendment. And like the mid-century Red Scare, the MAGA assault on free expression feeds off its own authoritarian impunity. After CBS canceled Colbert, Trump’s FCC nearly coerced ABC and Disney to do the same to Kimmel. The Trump Justice Department has arrested journalists like Don Lemon for covering ICE resistance in Minnesota. Like the CFA her father joined, Fonda’s organization focuses on the protection that First Amendment freedoms provide against the excesses of an inquisitorial federal government. Protecting everyone’s right to free speech should be a cross-partisan issue, bringing together Republicans and Democrats. So far, though, few Republicans have signed on with Fonda’s CFA, and when I asked who they are, she replied, “I’m not going to tell you that.”
That partisan resistance looks like the film community fraying under federal pressure as it did in the 1950s. Yet after the Red Scare subsided, Hollywood could accommodate divergent political views amicably—even at the height of New Left and anti-war protests. In 1970, Fonda sat in the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion on Oscar night, having won her first nomination for Best Actress in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?. Bob Hope emceed the show—a dedicated Nixon supporter and backer of the Vietnam War. Her brother Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper sat not too far away, nominees with Terry Southern for Best Original Screenplay for their counterculture blockbuster, Easy Rider. Hopper himself had also appeared in True Grit that year alongside right-wing reactionary John Wayne, whose performance in that film won him the evening’s Best Actor award. And Hopper kept crossing those aisles all his life: He went on to support Reagan, both Bush Sr. and Bush, Jr, and then backed Obama.
Has that Hollywood disappeared? “Right now, I don’t think it has disappeared,” Fonda says. “I think it may disappear. We may lose that the way we have in Washington, DC, but right now, we still have it.” Of the conservatives backing the CFA, she will say this: “There are two media people [in the group] who used to be Republicans, and we’re celebrating that. This is a nonpartisan issue. There’s no question. But they’re scared. Right now, that is the worst thing. We cannot allow ourselves to be scared.”
“A lot of it depends on what happens, and we don’t know what’s going to happen. Right now, we’re building our resistance muscles,” Fonda says. “It’s very important that we all understand the reality. We have the same understanding of what we’re facing.… It’s an authoritarian regime that has assumed control of the government, and they’re consolidating fast, and so we have to work fast before all the guardrails are gone.”
“Fuck it,” Fonda says. “If there’s enough of us who stand up and resist, and we can make that contagious, we’re going to win. This country does not want to be taken back. We want to move forward.”
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