America, meet “Shark Week guy.” He parties with Bono, out-hypnotizes Bill Clinton, and has the skills to become the heir apparent to Bob Iger
Hollywood is suffering from a serious personality deficiency.
There’s a vacuum of standout characters running studios these days with the public name recognition of recent (now mostly retired) moguls like Jeffrey Katzenberg, Bob Iger, Barry Diller or David Geffen. Tinseltown now has more pencil pushers and less flash for an industry built by over-the-top personalities and ruthless power grabbers.
Enter David Zaslav, the longtime Discovery cable television chief whose $43 billion acquisition of WarnerMedia instantly makes him a dominant player in the streaming wars.