the monitor – The News Desk

Collectively, separately, Netflix’s film nerds mourn. On X/Twitter, and in think pieces, and in private moments, they let out a collective sigh knowing that they’ll never see a red-wrapped DVD in their mailboxes again. For some 25 years, the period after Netflix all but obliterated Blockbuster and most mom-and-pop video rental stores, it was the best place to get truly obscure films. Now, it’s gone. Netflix says it'll send out its last DVD today. For sure, this was always destined to happen. In the early days, the company’s cofounder and CEO, Reed Hastings, would often tell people, “There’s a reason we didn’t call the company ‘DVD-by-Mail.com.’” Netflix was always going to become a streaming giant; it just needed bandwidths to catch up. Before it became a place for people to rewatch class...

Frank D. Gilroy, the father of Andor creator Tony Gilroy, went on strike in 1960. The elder Gilroy, a Bronx-born screenwriter who would later win a Pulitzer Prize for his play The Subject Was Roses, was part of the union effort that secured residual payments for screenwriters for television reruns. That strike was also the last time, prior to this year, that Hollywood writers and actors walked off the job at the same time. Ronald Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild. Tony Gilroy was 4 years old.Last weekend, the younger Gilroy grabbed a microphone on a New York City sidewalk to tell the story of how the “Writers Guild and SAG linked arms … and that sacrifice was to win all this shit we take for granted.” He also spoke of how previous Hollywood strikes—those after 1960—tried to ...

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Netflix Just Shipped Its Last DVD. The Algorithms Won

The Creator of ‘Andor’ Is Fired Up About the Streaming Wars