Hollywood’s marginal-film production network is now financed through private equity and banks

Evidence

Annapurna works primarily with directors signed to CAA, the famed talent agency acquired by TPG in 2014, which has since been assembled into a vertically integrated “shadow studio,” as discussed above. Annapurna has worked closely with The Weinstein Company, bankrolled by Goldman Sachs. Another of Annapurna’s partners is MGM, the once iconic studio that was taken over by PE firms in 2004, filed for bankruptcy in 2010, sold to a different consortium of PE firms, and has since been acquired by Amazon. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 276

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s whole project of tracing financial instruments from Wall Street into specific cultural artifacts; this is the patronage-structure layer above the texts.
• QUESTION: Worth tracing: CAA’s TPG acquisition as a ‘shadow studio’ — what formal features of CAA-packaged films does this ownership produce?