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How Jane Fonda Is Rethinking the Hollywood Resistance

Th actress’s revived Committee for the First Amendment is taking aim at industry mergers as well as threats to the freedom of expression.

Jane Fonda speaks at the Women’s Media Awards in New York.

The Instagram clip opens with Jane Fonda walking into a movie theater. In an homage to Nicole Kidman’s now iconic AMC theater “we come to this place of magic” monologue, Fonda says, “We come to this place for mergers…where content is chosen by the best billionaires we have.” But before she can reach Kidman’s rapturous acclaim for the theatrical experience, she’s ejected from that theater because its proprietors are tearing it down to build a data center.

Spare and scrappy, Fonda’s parody clip lambastes the current mega-mergers overtaking Hollywood—notably the recent attempts by the streamer giant Netflix and Paramount Skydance to buy out Warner Bros. Studios (WB). Paramount Skydance won that bidding war last month; now it has to amass $111 billion to meet the purchase price for the WB studio and its subsidiaries, and then clear multiple regulatory hurdles. The prospect of this merger—of the public and the filmmaking community losing a major studio in WB and putting a vast chunk of the media in the hands of a very vocal Trump ally, Oracle’s Larry Ellison—has set much of Hollywood on edge.

Fonda’s sketch is part of the first wave of resistance from the new Committee for the First Amendment (CFA)—a revived version of the organization her father, Henry Fonda, helped launch in the 1940s. For a brief shining moment, the original CFA rose up as the only real resistance to House Un-American Activities Committee. It sponsored two ABC broadcasts featuring members Judy Garland, Groucho Marx, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall in sketches and monologues defending everyone’s right to free speech. Its members also included John Huston, Katharine Hepburn, and Billy Wilder. They understood that celebrities can be most effective as activists by amplifying an issue, heightening public awareness about government abuses.

When Jane Fonda discusses the tectonic shifts currently convulsing the movie industry, you realize just how much Hollywood history she has seen. Now 87, Fonda made her first movie for WB, Tall Story (1960), back when an actual person named Warner ran the studio. Fonda was also there when this modern era of merger buyouts began, when her ex-husband Ted Turner sold his Turner Broadcasting Company to TimeWarner. “I kept saying to him, Why? Why? CNN is successful. TNT is successful. You’ve got a lot of successful pieces here. Why do you need to sell? He said, ‘Because if I don’t sell to a company that’s bigger, I’m going to get eaten.’ Of course, that’s the late-stage capitalist rule. You got to keep getting bigger.’”

Late-stage billionaire capitalism certainly plays its part in it for Fonda, but it’s safe to say you don’t marry Ted Turner if you’re just out to crusade against billionaire media moguls. Fonda’s more often seen working with organizations like One Fair Wage, which currently seeks to raise the minimum wage in Michigan this year to $15 and $25 in Maryland and Washington, DC. “The Democratic Party must become defined by putting money in working people’s pockets,” she says of a current Democratic leadership that has lost its way.

What caused Fonda to shift her activism to our billionaire class and the First Amendment is the direct role President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies took in these recent mergers to crush dissent in the news and entertainment divisions of media corporations. After his reelection, Trump brought suits against ABC News and CBS News on flimsy grounds that would have resulted in abrupt dismissals in a less-cowering climate of free expression. Instead, the corporate masters at both networks approved big-ticket settlements of the suits.

At CBS, the payout doubled as a de facto blackmail payment to ensure that the Trump White House would permit the Ellison family’s Skydance to acquire Viacom, which then owned Paramount and CBS. Tacked on to the merger’s approval at the last minute was the suspiciously timed cancellation of The Late Show, which stars relentless Trump critic Stephen Colbert. Then the Ellisons bought conservative Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, and installed her as CBS’s first editor in chief to push the news in a MAGA-friendly direction.

“They’ve already bowed to the demands of the regime,” Fonda says of Paramount Skydance, “We know that they’ve already caved in terms of what can be said and criticism of the regime. Free press means you can criticize the government. That’s in the Constitution.… They’re hiring people according to what Trump wants. So very obviously there, we have a problem with the First Amendment.”

Once again, Fonda’s front-row seat to so much Hollywood history has given her an inside vantage on how Skydance-Paramount operates. One of WB’s prospective new owners, David Ellison, produced her seven-season sitcom with Lily Tomlin, Grace and Frankie. “I like him,” Fonda says of David Ellison. “I don’t think he is MAGA, no. I just wanted to say that because he’s my friend. There are several people who are working at Paramount Skydance now, very........

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