HeyJaredThe Continental Congress
Highly opinionated cultural commentary from a 30-year Hollywood veteran delivering dissident analysis of the kind you won't see in the Penske owned trade rags... if you want to know how (and why) movies are really made, these essays will make you smarter.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 4
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- Aug 28, 2026
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- Jul 6, 2026
Latest issues
The Lost Art of the Blockbuster Movie Opening (opens the original)
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A few weeks ago on a random Saturday afternoon, my wife and I were making a long drive across Southern California… technically all drives in Southern California are long thanks to our city’s legendary traffic problems, but some drives are long both in terms of time and in miles driven… this was one of those. I was streaming an 80’s classic rock station on Pandora when the algorithm served up “Shakedown” by Bob Seger. Instantly, within my strangely-wired movie brain where my superpower is the abi
On "Biological Warfare: A Scenario" (opens the original)
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Annie Jacobsen’s new book “Biological Warfare: A Scenario” is a companion piece to her previous book on nuclear war called, appropriately enough, “Nuclear War: A Scenario.” Like that previous outing, this book too is absolutely face-meltingly terrifying, but in a slightly different way… one that feels a little too familiar for comfort.“Nuclear War: A Scenario,” which I wrote about here and here, describes how America’s nu
How Hollywood Lost the Hollywood Press (opens the original)
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Corporate money very rarely mixes well with art. Nowhere has this axiom been road-tested more often than in Hollywood. Plenty of ink has been spilled lamenting the corporatization of the major movie studios and the engineered by-committee franchise products and fan service slop which now makes up the bulk of what the big studios produce. But less well-covered has been the effect of corporate investment on other Hollywood industry sectors… like the big talent agencies and, for the purposes of thi
The Jack Trainer Principle (opens the original)
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There is a particular line from “Working Girl” which I quote all the time, here on Substack, on X and in my personal and professional life, because I think it’s one of the most subversive and transgressive lines of dialogue in Hollywood history. It’s a line from the scene where Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford) meets Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) for the first time. Sitting next to Tess at a bar, Trainer gives her the old once over and declares that Tess is like no other woman he’s met before in his
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