This is the weekend edition of The Front. I'm Claire Harvey. There's an image of the romantic artist churning out works of complete genius while living in poverty, the greatness of their work only being discovered long after their death, like Vincent van Gore or Emily Dickinson. Then you have popular artists who understand the power of self promotion and believe there is a product, like Mandy Warhol, who, when asked how he knew a work was finished, replied when the
Czech clears. The battle between art and commerces raged for centuries. Now. In Apple TVs Smash It show, The Studio, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg take a brutal and hilarious look at Hollywood. Well, I'm joined by the France Christen Amiot and Bianca far Marcus to talk about Apple TV's latest parody of Hollywood. It's called The Studio and it's made by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.
Yeah, honored, Obviously, you know I love movies, but now I have this fear that my job is to ruin them, the job as a meat gracker.
It comes in the tradition of a long line of satires of Hollywood made by Hollywood, often featuring superstars. My favorite of the genre is Tropic Thunder Ben Steeler's Tribute to Hollywood, starring Tom Cruise and a whole host of other stars. But let's start by talking about the studio.
Film is my life ever since second of the studio as a kid and went on the tour. Being the head of Nenel is the only job I've ever wanted. That is adorable. All right, Well, listen.
The show starts with a famous studio producer who's been sacked and the people who were jostling for her job, one of whom is seth Rogen.
Oh I've heard you are really into artsy, fartsy filmmaking.
Bullshit Me.
Yeah, that could not be further from the truth.
I am as bottom line oriented as anyone in this town.
The character who's been sacked is called in the show Patty. We find her at her home in the Hollywood Hills, throwing down cups of tea as if they have vodka, because of course, this being Hollywood, she is a sober alcoholic. She's based on Amy Pascal, who was famously the boss of Sony Pictures, who were sacked after Sony's big hack and she's played to perfection by Katherine O'Hara. It's a remarkable performance, isn't it.
It is a remarkable performance. Katherine O'Hara, she is a titan of the industry. She has some of the best medic timing I think you will find anywhere, and I think a lot of her contemporaries would probably say the same thing.
I just want to come by, you know, see how you're doing.
How I'm doing?
Oh I you know, I gave forty years of my life to the studio and then the Griffin Mill, some dime store. Bob Evans comes in and wants to put a stamp on the place, like is your an ending at a hydrate?
It's so brutal, it is, but guess what, you're even worse.
Heart.
The amazing thing about the casting of the studio is obviously you have Seth Rogen.
You have people like Katherine o'hari.
You have Katherine Hahn, who is having a bit of a moment herself.
She plays a crazed a marketing executive, which you know she does particularly well. You got Ike Baronholtz, who he and Seth Rogan. Their chemistry together in comedy is amazing, and you also have all of these amazed using cameos.
The premise is that seth Rogen gets the job from a sinister and frankly terrifying studio boss, Brian Cranston, and then he has to immediately wrestle with the problem that lost Patty her job, which is that she refused to make big budget, entirely commercial movies as vanity projects for big brands. The one that he's immediately asked to make, he's a movie about kool Aid, the soft drink, which is kind of like being asked to make a movie about Fanta and.
A great film fantastic.
He initially thinks he can do it while remaining true to his values.
It is a very chaotic viewer experience to see him go through this kind of emotional process coming to the realization that he, Okay, I need to do this if I want to enable these other projects that quote unquote deserve to be made. He takes a diversity angle to it, where he kind of reviews the people that have been cast in the kool Aid movie and realize that they are all very white, and so they decide that, okay,
we'll give it a more diverse cast. And then they realize that kind of leads them into a very tokenistic area. And then the writer than the director realized, well, then are we the right people to be doing this? And it's this insane cat and mouse process of just getting this thing to cinema con so they can understand how the audience feels about it.
He comes up early with what he thinks is a genius plan when Martin Scorsese comes in to pitch a movie to him, which happens to be about the Jonestown massacre.
Johnstowne Johnstown.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong. Is that the massacre where everybody committed suicide by.
Drinking kool aid?
Exactly?
That's the phrase.
They drank the kool aid, drink the kool aid, whatever it is, that's the phrase. That's the climax of the picture.
It's a big, big sequence.
That's so in a sense, I guess you could say that your film is about cool aide.
Well, I mean yeah, coming up our in house film school grad pokes around under the hood of the studio.
Let's talk about cinematic technique. Episode two is called Waner, and it's about a movie being shot in one take and the director played by Sarah Polly is very proud that this is a true oner. It's very self referential, isn't it, Because much of the studio is shot in one take? Banky, you're a film school grad? Is it fun to see a Hollywood production parodying the nerdy tendency of Hollywood to try really difficult things like these one takes?
I think what's fun about it is the idea that finally we can reclaim the art form people have turned away from things made with CGI or you just get a bit over it. There's that fatigue that everything can be more or less manufactured or engineered in the back end, and you know, no one wants to learn about that because it's boring. But the idea that you do see these idiosyncrasies come out, and this is like the process that you get to lampoon and also understand is just so entertaining to me.
Seth Rogen is very lovable, and that brings us to what kind of treatment this production is giving the Hollywood executives who are able to say yes or no to projects. Previous versions of this kind of idea, like tropic thunder casts, Hollywood decision makers is basically pure evil. This is not like that, is it, Chrissy.
It's not. And that's probably got a lot to do with seth Rogen himself. Maybe he has encountered a lot of executives who are in this exact predicament in that they do want to create art, but the commercial interests of the industry in which they've chosen to build a career simply does not allow that if they want to survive.
Yeah, I think it's probably like anything, isn't it. Any pursuit involves a compromise between what you really want to be doing and what you must do to pay the bills.
What does that say about us as the audience? Though we can all objectively say that a movie about kool aid is dumb, and yet that's what keeps getting made. So you think there's this disconnect between audience members like us who do want that kind of you know, level of kind of originality and ingenuity, that's what you expect from these people. Yet then you see the studio bus as saying, Okay, well, this thing's going to make a
billion dollars guaranteed. These two groups, the audience and the entertainer, seem to want the same thing, and yet we keep coming back to this safe, popular medium.
But what's wrong with popularity?
You know?
Social media feeds now are full of teenage boys packing out cinemas. And I've been in one of these cinemas, throwing popcorn in the air and singing along to the Minecraft movie.
It's the latest rallying cry from millions of.
Moviegoers, strick and trucking.
Those two little words, sending teenage fans of a Minecraft movie into a frenzy, resulting and screaming, popcorn throwing and soda flying through the air in at least.
One And I kind of think, although I find the teenage boy's a bit annoying, isn't it wonderful that they're enjoying the experience of sitting in a cinema together and having fun.
Yeah, And I think that's where the Barbie reference is particularly poignant. It was very commercially successful, but ultimately it did in many ways start a conversation a the experience of women living in the world today and about feminism and about the patriarchy through some very funny Ryan Gosling moments, and Margo Robbie quite explicitly said we wanted to make a movie that would bring people back to the cinema.
That experience of going to the movies with your friends, with your family, seeing something that you either enjoy or didn't enjoy it, and that you can talk about it after it becomes part of the culture. So I don't think there's something negative about that, except maybe for the poor people who have to go and clean up the cinemas after the Minecraft movie.
The fact that this critique of Hollywood and exploration of all those issues is showing on television screens at home where we stay because we don't want to go out to the movies anymore is also one of those circular self referential moments, isn't it.
They even say it in the show where he says, we should have just made this with Apple so they could give us all the money and we have to change nothing.
Kristen Amiott is a producer on the Front and Biancophile Marcus is a journalist and videographer at The Australian. You can read here and see their work anytime at Beaustralian dot com dot a you. This episode of the Front was hosted by me Claire Harvey and co produced with Jaska League, who edited the episode and also wrote our theme. Thanks for joining us on the front this week. Our team also includes Leat Sammaglu, Tiffany Dimac, Josh Burton and Stephanie Coombs.