The Mail Cart: Wednesday, September 16th

👋 Welcome to The Mail Cart. This is your spiritual guide and fake Hollywood therapist Warner. Connect with me here + follow our IG page for daily resources.

🎥 BREAKING: TODAY WE ARE INTERVIEWING RED FLATS QUEEN, THE ICON WHO TOOK OVER THE MET GALA with her iconic pitter patter controlling the chaos. Fun fact, this is by far the most viewed piece of content we’ve ever posted @ 26M eyeballs. Well 13M individual eyeballs give or take a few. But you get the point.

🍽️ Last night Rachel Karten, who writes one of my favorite newsletters Link In Bio, hosted a dinner with Google Brand Studios and got me to go out on a school night. There are A LOT of supper clubs and dinner series everywhere you look but Rachel is one of the most culturally in-tune people I know and last night gave me a lot of optimism for the brand/creator relationships. The room was full of creatives & execs from places like Netflix, the NFL, Press Publish, Unwell, plus my favorite internet follow Oren John. And a lot of Google execs obvi.

3 major takeaways:

A lot of brands still see the creator economy as a box to check. If you’re a brand handing a creator a script and asking them to post it, you’re missing the entire point of working with them.
Successful brands hire creators for their ideas, not just their audience.
The most successful brands let the creators cook, and listen to feedback. The real test is whether a brand lets a creator say, “my audience won’t care about this,” and actually listens. Their understanding of what people care about is a huge part of what they are paying for.

📝 Today we have an Emmys recap to make you sound smart at work and Ed Sheeran’s tour is a disaster.

💼 Looking for open Entertainment jobs? Scroll to the bottom of this email.

Our Job Board now has 225+ early career Entertainment roles as well.

Not subscribed yet? Join 39,650+ of your peers. Your future self will thank you.

For every US Open or New York Fashion Week, there are thousands of people behind the scenes making it all happen. But 2 of them stand out...

Erin Gillman went insanely viral last year (caring about likes is dumb but 26M on our reel is enough to care) for her iconic performance as the uncredited "red flats queen" controlling traffic and chaos at fashions other Super Bowl: The Met Gala.

Sharif Cobb has been with the US Open for 6 years, being promoted this year to Supervisor. But his biggest title? "The Riddler." He has been given riddles to players like Coco Gauff and Tommy Paul since he began working as a locker room attendant during COVID, and was credited as an unsung hero to many players trying to make it through the grind.

Wait but what do they have in common? They are both joining AvA LIVE tomorrow at 12:30 PM PT for a lineup that includes:

⭐ Mario Dedivanovic Founder & CEO @ MAKEUP BY MARIO

⭐ Hugh Evans - Founder & CEO @ Global Citizen

⭐ Jacqueline Coley - Awards Editor @ Rotten Tomatoes who will be breaking down what the Emmys tell us about where the opportunity is in Hollywood

AvA LIVE Lineup Booked In Partnership With:

⭐ The Emmys were on Monday. Here is what you need to know:

Talent doesn’t have an expiration date: 5 of the 6 women who won major awards were over 50. 4 of the 5 winners, Sally Field, 79; Jean Smart, 75; Allison Janney, 66; and Rhea Seehorn, 54, were slightly or well over 50.

❝

“The average age of last night’s winners in the female acting categories was 63. And the entire glittering evening was hosted by 62-year-old Mariska Hargitay.”

-Valerie Monrow (Allure)

We got a chance to interview Mariska during the carpet rollout. Icon.

Hollywood continues to have a diversity problem: No actors of color won a single of the 12 major awards at the Emmys last night
Apple TV won the most awards (28), with its show ‘Widow’s Bay’ sweeping the most trophies of the night (14). I still don’t know how it’s a comedy after watching it but alas.
Hiro Murai (also ‘Widow’s Bay’) is the first Asian director to win for directing a comedy, and led the way for the most wins ever by a comedy, dethroning ‘The Studio’ at 13
Jean Smart is the first woman to win an Emmy for every season of a show (5 with ‘Hacks’)
Sally Field became the oldest winner in her category at 79

Not that it’s a competition (it is)…which network won?

Credit: Gold Derby

⭐ Bonus: Amazon is in talks to air the Emmys next year which would make it the first time off of broadcast TV since it started in 1949

⭐ Steven Bartlett and Authentic Brands are launching OBSN to help creators turn audiences into consumer businesses. The partners plan to deploy up to four hundred million dollars into creator-led companies, pairing Bartlett’s media expertise with Authentic’s licensing and retail machine.

Authentic owns more than 50 brands: Reebok, Champion, Sports Illustrated, Nautica, Brooks Brothers, Juicy Couture, Elvis Presley, and Marilyn Monroe. Its model is largely asset-light: buy or invest in valuable brands, then license them to outside operators who handle manufacturing, retail and distribution while Authentic collects royalties

⭐ Universal Music Group sued DistroKid for deceptive practices and creating an ‘AI-slop pipeline’

⭐ The Motion Picture Association unveiled a report to support a nationwide film incentive that should get your attention

Their prediction: 20% federal film incentive would double the domestic industry by 2032, leading to $125.3 billion in additional expenditures cumulatively through 2035.

❝

“The story it tells is undeniable. We have to do this. We are going to lose the primacy of entertainment production if we don’t do this. That’s not hyperbole.”

— Sean Astin, President of SAG-AFTRA

⭐ Every opener from Ed Sheeran’s tour + even his own backing band bounced from his tour after Macklemore was removed for his “Free Palestine” comments

Macklemore’s thoughts on the matter are worth reading for you to have an opinion: