Naked and Unafraid to be Funny

I'm gonna skip the box office report a little bit, and I want to talk a little bit about what's going on right now with like the government cracking down on television, cracking down on the Copyright Office, the Librarian of Congress gets fired, all this kind of stuff. What's going on, Well, let's start with the head of the Copyright Office. Her name is Shira pull Mutter. She's like

a professor type, appointed prior to Trump's administration. And basically I think it is is just this woman doesn't mix with President Trump, and he wants to get rid of a lot of people. So this one you got rid of. And sometimes you know, when you fire the person or how they reacted, you go, oh wow, I think I did the right thing there. I think this is a case like that, because she fired he fired her, and he said, well, I'm going to take you to court that you cannot fire me and I have to work

for you. All right, come on, you maybe got an argument. Everybody's got an argument. So he didn't say why he fired her. But what people are saying is that it comes right after he fired the Librarian of Congress, someone named Carla Hayden. So he fires this lady, this lady appointed she ra a pull Mutter. Now, her argument for suing him is saying, you can't fire me because my position is under Congress, so Congress has to fire me.

And yeah, well maybe, but the president appoints the Librarian of Congress, and the Librarian of Congress hires the head of the copyright department called the copyright Registrar. Now, so if he can fire the person that hired her but can't fire her, it's a little weird. And so I mean, of course he can fire her, and he's going to fire her, and then she's going to sue and waste a lot of taxpayer money, and she's not going to

come back in and work for him. But what people are saying is this stems from an Elon Musk situation where Elon Musk said, I don't like her because she's not granting, She's not just rubber stamping. The issue where the copyrights are they protected in a way where the AI companies can't use them to train their AI models. Now, these large language models that operate or that drive the AI machines, is you put a bunch of stuff in them,

machine learning, the input all this stuff. You input everything in the world, everything on the computer, everything, everything everywhere goes into these machines, and then that's how they know how to do things for me. And you. Now, the copyright offices or the copyright holders book publishers, music publishers, movie library publishers, they're saying like, don't feed our copyrighted stuff in there because we own that. You can't. I

don't know, can you. What if we were making a Encyclopedia Britannica and we wanted to read a bunch of books before we wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica, then we would not be allowed to read those books unless we had the permission of the publishers of those books. It's a

good question. How now, if you're going to train these AI models, are you going to how is it going to work if you have to get a copyright license for every single thing that you put in there, so you can only put in things of people that would strike deals for you or with you, and then pretty soon you have an incomplete AI training model. Now maybe that's what the copy right owners want because AI is seen as a threat to copyright because AI can write

music and AI can write stories. I've worked with AI a lot, and I got to tell you, I can't beat a good story out of them. You know, it's just like but eventually it will be and eventually it'll be a threat. But for now, man, so many limitations, so many hallucinations. It doesn't scare me at the moment, but you know, maybe it will now. Some people say, how are you going to be able to tell if something is an AI song or not? Or a natural song written by a person I don't know. Do you

like it? If you like it, listen to it. Some lawmakers want there to be laws that say they all have to be everything has to be labeled if it involved AI, And you know, maybe that's a solution. I don't know right now, it's a bunch of high people that want to sound smart sit around and say AI is going to ruin everything, and AI is fake. I've

heard people say it's fake. Of course it's fake. So some people, I think, you know, they don't want to learn anything about AI or computer science, so they can sit back and say this is fake and it's wrong, and we've got to make much of laws against it. So I don't know, be careful. I mean, are we going to ruin something that's really cool that we're all going to want to rely on, or are we going to let it flourish? And if we let it flourish, maybe it's better for everybody. If we don't, then we

restrict it and then it's a half ass technology. I don't know what that does either. But it's funny because people that are you know, want to protect copyrights and want or think that. Let me take that back, people that think there's these people that think copyright should be free and there should be no such thing. Someone creates something, it should be available for everybody. Somehow, I think this is kind of the same crowd that thinks AI companies

must pay for these copyrights. I haven't done any research in that area, but it sounds like the same crowd. So people think that the Copyright Office lady was gonna, you know, bend over for the technology companies, so she had to go and Elon Musk influenced Trump to fire her, and that could be true. All right, Now, what else is going on with the public airwaves? Well, you've seen CBS bend over for Donald Trump and give them a bunch of money for chopping up that Kamala Harris interview

and making her this US. They're accused of making her sound smart so that she could beat President Trump, and I think that's true. I think it's objectively, we could say they interviewed her on sixty minutes, she sounded terrible because she usually does, and then they said, well, we got to fix this interview so she doesn't sound like an idiot, because otherwise Trump will win. And we're all around here, we all agree Trump should not win, right, yeah, okay,

well let's help her so Trump doesn't win. Now, wait a second, If that's really what they did, that is a violate of That is a violation of the public airwaves principle, The idea that broadcasters have a special obligation to the public and it's rooted in the fact that

the radio or the TV spectrum is a finite public resource. Okay, we own it, and broadcasters receive licenses from the government basically from the people, to use the resource, and in exchange, they are expected to serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity. And historically this principle led to regulations aimed at ensuring fair and balanced political discourse. Now, if you're violating that principle,

you're spending the talkspayers money to violate the principle. So a lot of and it's usually the conservatives that the media hates. So a lot of conservative presidents like Nixon, Reagan and now Trump have been you know, trying to get them either to be fair or lose their federal money. Well now Trump has taken away their federal money, and you know, things like Colbert got fired, CBS had to pay up for the sixty minutes thing, and other networks

are nervous. And Jimmy Kimmel invites Greg Guttfeld, his Republican talk show rival, onto his show to say, hey, look I'm fair over here. So all that stuff is happening right now. And is it a good thing? Well, it depends. Do you hate Trump and then it's a bad thing. If you like Trump, it's a good thing. That's how most things shake out these days. Let's check the traffic and come back with more. Joe Scalante Live from Hollywood.

Joe Sclante back live from Hollywood. If by Hollywood you mean Burbank, Let's get to the box office right now. For the weekend of August eighth to the tenth, twenty twenty five, US theatrical box office saw two new releases compete with the returning superhero film. First one of the new releases, which is number one, Weapons, It's a horror film directed by a horror director, Zach Kraiger. He made

a movie called Barbarian. You might have seen. I got a forty million dollar weekend out of a horror film really good, exceeding the pre release predictions and making it number one and a big win for Warner Brothers. Strong critical reception suggesting it's like a minus cinema score could

have a long run. Number two what's called a legacy sequel Freakier Friday, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan second place, estimated thirty million at the box office, and it met expectations and considered a success for Disney, especially given its relatively a modest budget of forty two million dollars and it's already made thirty million the first weekend. This is how you make money Disney. Small swings and also positive

audience reception and a cinema score. So Disney's losing a lot of money on their big movies and then they make a small movie and they made some money. But you can't run a company like Disney with small movies, so you got to keep making these big movies. Fantastic Four held the top spot last week, but a significant decline this week, had significant decline last week, another drop of over sixty percent in its third weekend. I got about fifteen million, and that's starting to cause some concern

from Marvel and for Disney. Other notable films, Bad Guys Too and The Naked Gun round out the top five twelve million and ten million, respectively. Superman, continuing its strong run, estimated seven point eight million this weekend, fifth at the box office and thirty three hundred and thirty million overall overall. The box office for August was off a little bit from last year. But you know, no one's really panicking. Now, let's good to the Let's get to the what what

I saw? I saw Naked Gun. Naked Gun too. Okay, let's just talk about how much better it is then Happy Gilmore too. All the people that worked on Happy Gilmore should be forced to watch Naked Gun and they should know that you can make a movie funny. It's not that hard. You just need better writers. I don't know what kind of writers they had on Naked Gun, or if it's I know it's not the original guys.

The original guys is Zucker, Sucker Brothers, whatever. They weren't involved because they don't known it like they're known for it, but they don't own it. You know. That just goes back to the studio and then they can do whatever they want with it. Okay, So what we got in

Naked Gun. We got this guy Frank Rebbin Leslie Nielsen's role, and this one is Frank Rebin Jr. It's the son of the original bumbling detective and the plot goes like this, Frank Dreben Jr. Must follow in his father's footsteps to solve a new case and prevent the closure of the iconic police squad unit. The plot, as in the original, is secondary to the constant barrage of ssideketics, slapstick and wordplay.

Directed by this guy A. Kiva Schaffer, a member of the company group Lonely Island and known for his work and Saturday Night Live and the movie pop Star Never Stop Popping or Never Stop Stopping. Yeah, maybe that's it. Pamela Anderson's in there, doesn't wear any makeup early, so that's still disturbing, but you get over it. Seth McFarlane from Family Guy and Ted is a co producer who he had something to do with it, and he's a funny guy. The David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abraham's

not involved anyway. This makes you laugh from the beginning. You laugh out loud, hysterical. Joe. I don't even want to give them away. But if you want to see a comedy, there aren't that many of them. Now, you got to see this, and it's worth it, and it's making money. Fifty six million in the first week. Couldn't cost that much to make, and it's not low budget. It is a beautiful, funny movie. So I can recommend Naked Gun too, but actually maybe you might think I'll

think anything's funny after watching Happy Gilmore too. Now in the TV world, what's going on. Streaming continuing to dominate the TV landscape, as had a report from Nielsen in June that streaming hit a major milestone. For the first time, streaming share of total television usage surpassed the combined share of broadcast and cable, so more streamers than broadcasting cable combined. This is not really news because this is where we knew it was headed, but this is where it's going.

And as far as cable news goes, I mean, we know, usually we hear that's going down, but Fox is going up. Now, Fox went down. I read one report that said it was thirty percent down. Sometimes I don't remember. I don't believe these reports because usually the people compiling these reports want Fox News to go down. But that was the

number I heard this week, thirty percent down. And people, you know, they just get their news from YouTube and other places, and so cable is depending on a bunch of old people that don't want to get rid of their cable and just like the way it works, and they don't know how to get their news from YouTube and places like that, and so as people as those people die off, I mean, all the news organizations are going to do something. I mean, Fox has a giant op.

It's an empire, but if it's crumbling around the edges, pretty soon, it's going to crumble away. We'll see big hits on Netflix are Wednesday, a new second season of Wednesday with Jenna Ortega, and these things are like, you know, hard for the fans because you have to wait two years in between seasons a lot on these Netflix series because they use big stars that they can't tie up

to contracts that make them work right away. When I was making TV contracts for CBS, I would get a contract from an actor that would tie them up for six years. They couldn't make movies unless we gave them permission during the offseason. And so that's why you had a difference between a TV actor and a movie actor. Now a TV actor can be a movie actor, it can be a TV actor. It doesn't matter because they're

making flexible deals. But the people who lose in that are the fans of the series that you watch it. You know, eight episodes of a series and then you wait two years for the ninth episode, it's a different experience. In the highly anticipated movie section, we have the Dark Knight, another Dark Knight on the Horizon, another resident evil on the Horizon, Nobody too with Bob Odenkirk. Did you see

Bob Odenkirk and nobody won? That was pretty cool. He plays a badass Liam Neeson type, getting revenge and beating people up. So number two probably going to be pretty good. And then a quiet Place Part three I don't really need it and the Roses. That's what I want to see though. The Roses, it's kind of like Wore the Roses, but a new version with Benedict cumber Patch and Olivia Coleman.

Now here's something you know about. If you have two big prestige stars like Benedict cumber Patch and Olivia Coleman, you know you have a winner, because they're not going to get involved unless there's a a list writers and a list directors. If you've seen the trailer, you know that's what they got. Okay, let's take a break. Joe Sclante Live from Hollywood. Then we're back. Joe Sclante Live

from Hollywood. The business end of show business Here in Keib eleven fifty on your AM dial and the podcast comes out just after the show's over at seven pm, and then you can listen to whenever you want. There's still commercials. Hey, what's going on with Sean Diddy Combs? We heard about this guy. He's now in the I'm being treated unfairly phase of his saga if you ask me, And as you know, on this program, we predicted they would not be able to convict him of these serious charges.

So the new developments from this week or A judge has denied a renewed request from Combs to set bail, even though one of the alleged victims submitted a letter in support of Diddy. Combs's legal team had previously sought his release on a fifty million dollars bond, arguing that his swinger's lifestyle did not justify his continued incarceration, and

they're probably right about that. His problem is this, He's spent seen on TV beating one of these victims, So that's a problem, but should it be The rapper faced five charges across three federal indictments, but was acquitted of the most serious charges of six trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. He was convicted only on two charges of transportation to

engage in prostitution. Okay, not a serious charge. I think if you went and looked at what happened to people who got other people who got convicted of that, they were not held in jail without bail. I mean, I don't think he's I think he's a gross person. He doesn't. He's really offensive to me. But people that are offensive to you, you can't treat them like this, and I think he's being unfairly treated. Is one of many attempts the defense has made to get Ditty the ability to

go home to his mansion. Meanwhile, he remains behind bars at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he claims he's being served maggot infested foods, but the judge won't budge. The judge is like, maybe you deserve maggot infested food. Sentencing is now scheduled for October third, twenty twenty five, so he's got to sit there for like another month

and a half. His legal team is actively pursuing an acquittal or a new trial, asserting that his actions involved the production of quote unquote amateur pornography for personal gratification rather than a legal prostitution. This legal strategy aims to redefine the nature of the alleged conduct in court. They're always coming up with new angles of this guy's thinks, and it's like, guy, he's just a swinger. I make it at he's an amateur pornographer. And that might be true.

But when you got video of you beaten this woman on the while she's on the ground, no one cares. I don't want They just want to lock you up. Now. I hope this doesn't happen to bust A Rhymes. I don't really care. But he's been sued by his former assistant, Dashiel Gables. What my name is that? It took me a long time to realize. It's the name of a man, Dashiel Gables, an assistant, a personal assistant named Dashiel. You're thinking woman, but no, it's man.

a countersuit. So if you file something like that against your employer and he's powerful like that, yeah, he's going to file a counterclaim and sue you for defamation. Right, but defamation usually doesn't like if you're filing, you're protected in court. If you file these things, you protect it. You can't. They can't come after you for defamation when

you're like if they're part of court proceedings generally. In the suit which is filed on Tuesday, just last Tuesday, Dashiel Gables accused Ryme's his real name is Trevor Smith. You never want your real name as you're a rapper in these things. You know things are bad when they're putting your real name out there. He He accuses him of assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and several violations of minimum wage, overtime and wage statements. They

will get him on that. Gables asked for unspecified damages. I have been made aware of the claims made by Dashel Gables and I completely and categorically deny these allegations, Rhyme said in a statement on Thursday. For a very brief period, Dashiel assisted me, but it did not work out. Apparently Dashiel has decided to respond to being let go by manufacturing claims against me in an attempt to attack and damage my reputation. Well, that would be a good way to do it. But did he do that or not?

We'll have to find out. Gables claimed in the suit to have been employed by Raims Starting or Rhymes starting July of twenty twenty four, so not that long ago, and he says that Rhymes routinely degraded, screamed at him, and made unreasonable demands and other employees. He alleged that Rhymes had assaulted him on January tenth, twenty twenty five, at around four am. That's when you don't want to be assaulted. That's time for rest, right, And he was

at Rhymes's residence in New York when this happened. He claimed Rhymes punched him in the face twice after Gables was using his phone on the job to text his daughter. Okay, so he's texting his daughter at four to you. This sent Buster Rhymes into a rage. The suit alleges he screamed, stay off your effing phone, or stay the f off your phone. And then Gables explained that it was his daughter who had called him. He declined the call but texted her instead to make sure it wasn't an emergency.

Sounds reasonable, right. Then he comes up with this, don't tell me about your fing kid. What the F does that have to do with me? All right, so he's got answer. That's a bad boss. I bet he goes down for the wages and they settle because he's not going to get out of paying those wages from the State Labor Commission and stuff. So and then this is bad publicity. It subtenly goes away if there's a trial, Oh good for us right now. When I was trained

in the entertainment industry, my boss was a tyrant. Okay, he was a tyrant, but he was like a brilliant tyrant in the television world, and we could all learn a lot from him, and he made a lot of but he was tough and he demanded a lot of you. You had to be there every day early, stay late, work hard, all that stuff. But if you got a call from your family in the middle of anything, he would say, take that check it. Make sure your family's okay.

If it's your family, go ahead. If you can't talk to me, if you can't get off the phone because you're talking to your family, that's fine. Family is everything?

How great is that? And that was like leadership and that made us want to follow him when he was doing like really aggressive deal making in Hollywood, making a lot of people mad, but you could tell he was a decent person and you kind of backed him and said, Okay, I'm going to follow this guy because he has morals and he he's looking out for my family, and so I'm more dedicated. That's a smarter way to lead. Buster rhymes. If he did do this stuff, you know, he just

these people aren't trained in business. You know, they're rappers. They didn't go to you know, law school or business school, or most of them didn't read self help books. They just this is how they act. He did. He's the same way. They're just uneducated and it's lawsuits like this that caused them to learn sometimes too late. Now we need to learn something right now as well. We need to learn about traffic on k e ib eleven fifty Am.

Joe Sclante live from Hollywood. Joe Ascalanti, here's my lawyer, go back joe'sclanate live from Hollywood. Let's go back to this. Celebrities behaving badly. This one comes from the world of sports, the Boston Celtics. The claims against the Boston Celtics and two of its star players, Jayalen Brown and Jason Tatum, have been dismissed by a federal court in Boston. The lawsuit, filed in twenty twenty four, ledged the defendants were involved

in a sex trafficking conspiracy. Okay, this woman, a Jane Doe, filed this claim without a lawyer, so it can be done. She obviously she couldn't get a lawyer to take it. So that's a bad sign, right there. Was it a good case? Probably not. She couldn't get a lawyer to take it, so she filed it. She alleged all kinds of you know, trafficking stuff, saying she was assaulted and she was they were trying to get her to traffic other individuals. So you don't know what happened. But they

dismissed it. And when I went back and looked at some of the stuff. The judge said. It said her claims were just kind of vague. She couldn't differentiate between who did what, and so they she didn't solidly lay out the elements of the crime. And this is a civil or the civil wrong because this was in civil court. So she might have gone to the police and the police said, you don't have any evidence. You're going to have to assume them in civil court if you want

to get any justice. Now that might be wrong. Maybe they didn't take her seriously, and maybe they're boxed in Celtics fans. Maybe they're corrupt. I don't know, but it seems like the judge agreed that this lady just didn't have it together and couldn't articulate what happened to her and who did it. So when you have allegations this serious, you got to have your ducks in order, or you have to, you know, seek therapy instead because you can't

get any justice because you can't articulate what happened. And that happens too. You could be so traumatized with what happened that you can't, you know, get it together, and then when you talk to a lawyer, you just don't sound right. And I guess that could happen, but the judges said, you don't know what you're doing and you're not doing it well. So I'm dismissing this. And so the Boston Celtics are like COVID probably really bad for them.

But you know what happened? What's their association with this woman? Why is she making this stuff up? If she's making it up, it just doesn't look good for anybody. Okay, there's what else doesn't look good? Missy Elliott set to face a copyright trial. This is interesting because there's a there's just a proceeding going on in Pennsylvania, and the judge said, we're not going to delay it anymore. Missy Elliot's to delay it, but he say no or she

say no, and they got to go forward. August twenty fifth, twenty twenty five, Missie Ellett is facing a trial overclaims that she did not properly credit producer Terry Williams for co writing certain songs. So what happens in a case like this. This guy alleges he was, you know, producing, and this the her early group Sista, and he collaborated

on songs and that's very, very common with producers. Most producers are collaborating on songs and they're seeking co authorship and co ownership of those recordings, and that's how they make their money. So he insists that's what happened and he wasn't getting paid. She files a separate suit seeking a declaration that the songs are solely hers, and that's

that happens. Sometimes if you have people are that are udging that something's not the way it is, you could prove your own case ahead of time by getting a declaration from a judge, and then a judge at court would have ruled these are all her songs. She proved it over here in this court. It's called declatory relief, and she's trying to get that. But that trial's gilling, and it's not that exciting, it's not that sexy. But I just wanted to talk about the role of a

producer in the music industry. Most of them are writing songs. Some of them are writing all the songs. Sometimes you go to a producer to help you write songs because that producer has co written hits with people, people like John Feldman. I was just listening to a song the other day and I was like, what is this? Sounds like a good Charlotte hit? And then I zammed in or whatever and yeah, there it was. And then I looked at the producer, John Feldman, one of the writers,

co writer, John Feldman, and he's the producer. It's not in the band, but in the studio. He's saying, come on, guys, here's how you write a HiT's let's crank this up a notch. Here's a good chorus for you. Then there's some people who don't do much but they want to claim authorship. They call that change a word, take a third. But you got to get these documents kind of it's just one of those things. You got to get it done in advance. All right, we're going to be in

the studio together. There's first of all, the producer has to be up front and say, look, if I help you with these songs, I'm claiming authorship and I'm claiming ownership. So talk to my lawyer about what the raids are going to be. And you got to know it going in otherwise you get burned. And maybe he owns all the tapes, you know, the drives with all the info on, and he won't pay he won't release them unless you pay him. So don't get in that problem too, or

you got a Boogie Knight's problem. Right. Okay, here's a fascinating one nobody's talking about. Disney has settled with Gina Carano in a lawsuit, remember that she filed when she was fired. Former star of Mandalorian, one of the greatest TV series in the last decade, settled her lawsuit against Lucasfilm and Disney over her twenty twenty one firing. Krana was terminated after a series of controversial media posts, including one that compared the treatment of American conservatives to the

treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. Okay, with looking at this in hindsight, you're gonna just wonder how this happened, and you're gonna imagine she got a large settlement. Okay, So here's the details. She sued for wrongful termination and who's funding her lawsuit? Elon Musk, because there's a legal fund over at Twitter. I guess if you are attacked for exercising your right of free speech on Twitter. Suit alleged that she was fired over expressing her political opinions

and that Disney had damaged her reputation. While the terms of the settlement were not disclosed, both sides have agreed to dismiss the case. Lucasfilm released a statement acknowledging Carino's professionalism and stating that they look forward to identifying opportunities

to work together in the future. Lucasfilm removed Krono from the Star Wars streaming show Mandalorian in twenty twenty one over social media posts that the company at the time called abhorrent and unacceptable for denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities. Okay, really, the actor was previously in movies like Deadpool and Haywire, and she's a mixed

martial arts fighter. She appeared to compare the treatment of conservatives with the dehumanization of the Jews in Nazi Germany. I think this is one of her quotes because history is edited. Most people today don't realized that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews. Okay, the government first made their own neighbors hate them for simply being Jews. How is that any difference from hating someone for their political views? She

posted on Instagram. Now, if you're being attacked for your political views. I mean, and certainly people were. I don't know. I just think that it's just a harmless stuff that's being written now. It's just harmless, and no one she couldn't work. They said you can't work. You said that you cannot work. So anyways, she settled her case, probably got a lot of money, and that's not now. I also want to remind you before we go Sublime takeover

this weekend. I'm going to be doing tours at the Punk Rock Museum, So go to the Punk Rock Museum website and you can see my tours. On Saturday, we'll be there and you can sign up for one of two and the Sublime is playing both days at the Dobe Live. The Vandals are playing on Friday, the fifteenth and the sixteenth. It's the Atari's with Penny Wise and Sublime, Long Beach to All Stars some other bands too. Make sure you consider going out to Vegas. It's all indoors.

It's not going to be hot inside these places, and that's where I'll be. And I now leave you with just a taste of the greatest song ever written.