How Jane Fonda Is Rethinking the Hollywood Resistance
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Activism
/ March 11, 2026
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.
Ben Schwartz
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Jane Fonda speaks at the Women’s Media Awards in New York.
(Cindy Ord/Getty Images for The Women's Media Center)
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 …
Temporary powers never stay temporary.
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How Jane Fonda Is Rethinking the Hollywood Resistance
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Current Issue
Activism
/ March 11, 2026
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.
Ben Schwartz
Share
Copy Link
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Ad Policy
Jane Fonda speaks at the Women’s Media Awards in New York.
(Cindy Ord/Getty Images for The Women's Media Center)
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 …
How Jane Fonda Is Rethinking the Hollywood Resistance
Temporary powers never stay temporary.
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How Jane Fonda Is Rethinking the Hollywood Resistance
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Politics
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Economy
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The Nation
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Current Issue
Activism
/ March 11, 2026
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.
Ben Schwartz
Share
Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Email
Ad Policy
Jane Fonda speaks at the Women’s Media Awards in New York.
(Cindy Ord/Getty Images for The Women's Media Center)
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 …
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