Bring Back Fin-Syn? The Forgotten Rule That Could Save Hollywood

Matt Belloni (0:05)

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It is Friday, October 16th. Lots of news this week. I broke some news yesterday in my Puck newsletter on a big shake up at Netflix. Bela Bajaria, the content chief is out. Peter Rice, formerly of Disney, is in. Lots of reasons for that change, and we'll get into it on Monday with Lucas Shaw. But today, we're going a different direction. We're talking about FinCEN.

What is FinCEN? We've actually talked about this briefly on the show before. It refers to the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, which sounds pretty wonky, but it was an FCC regulation enacted in the 1970s that prevented the big three TV networks at the same time from owning the primetime shows that they aired. Thinking was that they were an oligopoly and they should be forced to buy from outside producers. It limited their power and it created amazing opportunities for producers to actually own the content that they make. Those rules were abolished in the 90s as cable TV kind of upended that oligopoly and created hundreds of new outlets. But over the next 30 years, the TV business has basically reconstituted itself, vertically integrated, meaning all those broadcasts and cable networks and now streaming platforms are owned by just a few companies that both produce the shows and air them globally. So much so that it sparked a renewed push for a return to some kind of modern FinCEN law. Enter something called the American Entertainment Alliance, which I know sounds like a front for a drug cartel or something, but it's a group of talent agencies and producers and others that have come together to push for a new law requiring the big streamers like Netflix, Prime Video, Disney Plus, and the newly consolidated HBO Max slash Paramount Plus owner Skydance to spend at least 50% of their budgets on independent productions. Fifty percent. That would pretty drastically remake the Hollywood economy. And in response, a coalition of these streamers called the Streaming Innovation Alliance. Again, how is that not a crime syndicate? They criticized what they called a push for blunt government mandates governing the green light process and other aspects of production. Okay. A really interesting debate. So I asked a couple of the big proponents of this new push to come on the show. Cathy Schulman is a veteran film and TV producer, everything from Crash to The Idea of You. And for the legal perspective, we have Rich Shuter. He's the head of business affairs for UTA, the talent agency. Today is the push for a return to FinCEN. Preserving competition or welfare for producers. From The Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Belloni, and this is The Town.

All right, we are here with Cathy Schulman, producer extraordinaire and Rich Shuter, the head of business affairs at UTA. Welcome.

Cathy Schulman (4:34)

Thank you so much for having us.

Rich Shuter (4:35)

Thank you so much, Matt. We really appreciate you having us.

Matt Belloni (4:38)

Okay. So I want to get into this because FinCEN is a topic that seems to come up a lot when I talk to smart and veteran people in the industry who know the glory days and see what is happening and can see the direction that the industry is going in. And so I want to give, I want to start with two questions.