Trump Demands Rush Hour 4

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Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde. And me Richard Osman. Hello everyone, hi Marina. Hello Richard, how are you? I'm alright, how has your week been since I saw you last? It's getting...

Crazy Christmas busy. Do you know what? It's getting crazy Christmas busy. I believe somebody had a birthday, so now we're allowed to talk about Christmas. We are allowed to talk about Christmas, exactly. Thank God we've had permission. I am now 55 years young and Christmas ready. Yeah. That's so old, isn't it?

And talking of Christmas, who are we interviewing next week? Simon Cowell. We are indeed. So if you have any questions for Simon Cowell, and I'm sure you do, please send them to thewrestlesentertainment at goalhanger.com. You can ask him about anything from his long and varied career. What was he thinking with red or black? For example, that would just be my, listen, I don't want to throw questions out there. But very much. I've got a number of questions. Anyway, do join us for that.

What are we going to be talking about this week? Oh, and occasionally a story comes along and you think, well, this has got our name written all over it. And of course that story is that they're finally making Rush Hour 4. mainly because Donald Trump has personally intervened and told them to do it. So you think that's...

There's a lot of meat on that bone for us, I think. Let's gnaw on that. And a lot of characters in that that we have a lot to say about. A lot of our problematic faves in there. We're also going to talk about Stranger Things, which I believe... Crash Netflix when it came out last week and we're going to talk about the kind of Enormo franchise. It's almost 10 years since the first season.

aired where does it all go now we're also going to be talking about tom stoppard the extraordinary playwright who uh died this weekend uh i mean he meant like everything to me so i feel that i just There's so much to talk about. And in the same way, I know that Tom Stoppard meant a great deal to you. I'm like that with Chris Tucker, which brings us to Rush Hour 4. Well, this is the story of Rochelle 4, Paramount, which has been newly acquired by the world's richest man, Larry Ellison.

and his son, Kendall, I'm so sorry, I mean, of course, David Ellison, has agreed to release Rush Hour 4, which hasn't yet been made, but we'll get to that. You'll remember Rush Hour, the buddy cop franchise.

Starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. And Chris Tucker. Described by variety, and I would agree with this, as formulaic but raucously entertaining. Particularly... the first couple well they were all directed by um Brett Ratner and I hear you saying well hang on a second isn't Brett cancelled surely a cancelled man hasn't become uncancelled Do you know there's a lot of it about? Wow. Should we retire the phrase cancelled and call people postponed? Yes. Don't you think? Yeah.

Like a football match that's been snowed off. Hereford v Newcastle United has been postponed. It will now be replayed next Tuesday. Brett Ratner has been postponed. He will be making rush hour for in a couple of years. If we can... Go back to the causes of his postponement. He was accused by multiple women of sexual assault in the 2017, in the first wave of Me Too. And there were a couple of legal actions. And in the end, he... went to Israel and he said he was never coming back to America.

big friend of Benjamin Netanyahu. There also seemed to be a number of deals in percolation with the Saudis. So he had a sort of equal opportunities Middle East strategy. But he has been desperately trying to, despite having sort of thought there was no way back. I mean, a lot of people have sensed...

the world has turned a little bit. And he's been desperately trying to get himself uncancelled. He pulled off a masterstroke. He has directed... I mean, this is, by the way, this is... As you say, the world seemed to shift a little bit when Trump was re-elected and an awful lot of people in an awful lot of industries, not just entertainment, are doing everything they can to try and ingratiate themselves with Trump because they know there's an almost immediate...

kickback. You know, it's very transactional, his relationships with people. And Ratner is thinking, how do I get in with Donald Trump? I mean, I'm certainly someone that I know he would like. You know, I move in kind of circles that he would appreciate. But he thinks, I need a masterstroke to really get my feet under the table with the trumps. And so he... Really fan one. You're so right. It's so cynical. He has directed a documentary about Melania, which covers post 2024.

election and the sort of transition to her second term as First Lady in the White House. Amazon have paid $40 million. for this documentary which is an absolutely nuts price for a documentary i mean nuts beyond it's almost like they're paying for something else i'm not i'm not suggesting they are oh my god because i love jeff bezos and he i know that he's a stand-up guy and would yeah so perhaps it's you know what we

haven't seen it perhaps it's like amazing perhaps bezos is in his office and someone brings in the melania doc and he's like yeah listen we could purchase a melania doc if you can what would be 150 grand 200 and then um he watches it he goes I have to take this off the table for anyone else. This is the greatest documentary I have ever seen in my life. Why don't you offer them 40 million? 40 million. Yeah, it's a real Dr. Evil number. Anyway, $40 million has been offered.

They gave Brett Ratner apparently an eight-bedroom house at Mar-a-Lago. There's a load of other property. Even that little detail was like, hang on a second. I just really need to see an absolute aerial of this place and understand where everything goes. But they gave him an eight-bedroom house at Mar-a-Lago. Apparently, Melania, who's, let's face it, never been any friend to the sisters.

Liked the fact that he was cancelled. Persponed. Persponed, I'm so sorry. Liked the fact that he was postponed and sort of had been cast out temporarily. And they shot for something like 30 days. And as I say, it's about this kind of transitional period. It's going to get a brief theatrical release, which, as you know, Amazon doesn't always do. But for this, obviously, for this incredible prophecy. Listen, Bezos has seen it. We haven't. So he's in a position of power. We're not.

Oh, I don't think he's seen it. Why would you bother? I don't think it's about watching the documentary. So in the States, definitely less so here, but in the States, Me Too is being so rollback. It's sort of extraordinary that... you know, Harvey Weinstein will obviously stay in prison because others, it's very difficult to say anyone is sort of permanently cancelled. To give you these kind of, it's like they're...

captive miscreants being released back into the world, like sort of Free Willy, but for sex cases or domestic violence cases. Which we'd have to call Free Willy. Yeah, which we'd have to call Free Willy. So you've got Louis C.K. He was the fifth highest grossing comedian in October. He made 1.7%. million dollars in october wow with the emphasis on grossing yeah gross yeah

Chris Brown, again, number one grossing, super gross. He's the number one great musical act in the world in October. 46 million for seven shows. Yeah? Because, I mean, you sell nearly 300,000 tickets. Nobody remembers that he beat up Rihanna, apparently, or maybe doesn't care about it. The Amazon documentary is quite interesting because almost all the top executives who are going to have to market and release this documentary are women.

at Amazon particularly. And I think, you know, they're generally sort of regarded to be kind of quite good eggs. They will not like this one bit. But, you know, anything for the Donald. It's certainly very good news that they don't release the sort of... detailed statistics as to how well things do. You can bury it in the prime data that you're never going to see. It's interesting, the relationship between Trump and Ratner...

goes back quite a long time. Brett Ratner directed a film called Tower Heist, which was originally going to be called Trump Heist. I know. That's mad, isn't it? Absolutely mad. So Tower Heist is a heist in a big... skyscraper as ben stiller and eddie murphy and every comedian was in or out of this movie over the development period everyone sounds like a great idea it's actually quite a disappointing movie but yes originally it was written as and eddie murphy was on board when it was trump heist

And the whole idea of the thing was Trump's employees are so mad at him that they pull off a heist in Trump Tower. By the way, he was fine with it, which I find sort of incredible. I guess the portrayal of just giant mogul. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not going to worry about the details. I'm showing I've got a tower. I'm showing I'm the Nakatomi of New York. So yeah, so Brett Ratner directed that. It was supposed to be Trump Heist turned into...

Tower Heist. Brett Ratner said it would have been a bigger hit if they kept the name. Yes, I'd agree with that. Yeah, I mean, and Trump would, I'm sure, say, if my name had still been on the ratings as he calls anything, it would be better. I think also it would have been a bigger hit if it had been better. Yeah.

Yeah, the movie, I've seen it and it's not very good. It's really not good. He did, Trump did lease them a lot of buildings and I think everything that's in that film is filmed in kind of Trump New York property so I'm sure he did quite well out of it so often. This deal that he's trying to push is for Paramount.

to release Rush Affle, which, as I say, hasn't yet been made. Can I just say, can we talk about the two stars? Chris Tucker is now 54. Jackie Chan is 71. But listen, that's the gerontocracy in action. Why shouldn't he be an action movie star? Yeah, maybe lose the word rush. Can I set you a very quick quiz for you and for our listeners at home? Knowing everything you do so far about Brush Hour 4 and what's happening around it. Chris Tucker.

Do we think he played the Riyadh Comedy Festival or didn't play the Riyadh Comedy Festival? I think he played it, Richard. He did indeed. He did. Of course he did. Well, he hasn't headlined a movie for a... since probably the last one. No, he really hasn't. He hasn't had a big hit movie since then. You know, his comedy career is still going great. But yeah, he played at Comedy Fest. He was good pals with Michael Jackson. He was on...

the Epstein plane with Clinton and Spacey. So he's ticking a lot of boxes there, I would say. Paramount will release it, but somebody's actually got to make this movie and finance it. And obviously everyone, it's been shopped around many times before Russia 4, because it's a long time since the last one. And maybe they're saying...

Warners, which if you remember in our endless M&A quest, is the next target for the Ellisons to buy and put together with Paramount. So maybe Warners will finance the movie. It's not clear, but again. You can see how that could be posted. But someone's going to. Someone's got to approve the Warner's purchase if it happens, Richard. And somebody's going to need another sweetener for that. So it's interesting. What is Trump doing? Because...

Who cares about Rochelle? You know, is it just like a favourist friend? What's he doing in entertainment? We know he wants to destroy late night. He's obviously successfully managed to get something happen to Jimmy Kimmel, have him taken off air temporarily. People say that the cancellation of the Colbert was to do with getting that Paramount deal over the line.

We know he's made massive attacks on Seth Meyers, all of them, really. So we know he's at war with that. We know he is mounting an ongoing assault on news. I don't know if you saw this, but last week, the new thing has appeared on the White House official website, which is a sort of...

visual and a graphic and a chart called Media Offender of the Week, in which they call out news organizations for supposed misreporting of him, media bias, etc. And I mean, anyone can be on it, even CBS News, which is now...

which is part of Paramount and is now widely believed to be sort of tacking much closer to him as a sort of force in news media, was named last week as having overstepped that. I can't remember what they'd done wrong. Okay, so this is obviously fictional entertainment, but...

If you think of Rush Hour 4 as a vibe, it's like an uncomplicated, non-woke action movie. And it slightly reminded me all of this because I went back and I was like reading about Hollywood in the 1940s. I was like, this is a bit like America during the war, you know, where all the studios were kind of co-opted. In Americanism, you had to make sort of a certain amount of patriotic films. And...

Some of the stories are hilarious. I've probably told this one on the podcast before, in which case, sorry, but Jack Warner at Warner Brothers, they were all made a sort of lieutenant colonel in the army, even though they were working on their lots in Hollywood. Jack Warner was like, well, where's my uniform? They said, yeah, obviously.

It doesn't come with a uniform. It's kind of an ornery title. So he got the wardrobe department to knock him up a uniform, which he wore all the time around the lot. But when an actual more senior officer in the American military came and visited it, they said to Jack Warner,

Actually, you should have saluted me. Vaughn was so angry he never wore the uniform again. Don't laugh. Well, it reminds me of more than anything. You would not be shocked. For example, this is 100% a news story that we would mock. till the ends of time that North Korea have decided to fund and remake Under Siege 4 with Steven Seagal. Yes. I mean, 100%, that's the sort of thing that they would absolutely do. Just say that, you know, that we're going to have a huge hit with this. Yeah.

I don't know why Putin hasn't got into it myself, because he's certainly got lots of the actors. You know, he's got Deputure now, hasn't he? He's definitely got Seagal. There's quite a lot of people are resident there. Yeah, if Putin decides to do Police Academy... Mission to Moscow 2. Which I would certainly watch. Brackets get me Gutenberg. To go back to my point about that thing of Hollywood during the war, I think that Trump sees...

the culture war like that, that the enemies are within. And so he is, I definitely can see a world in which he is demanding certain things like this. And it's not just a sort of favour for... my postponed friend it's an actual it's actually more more of a strategy because um so in that way the idea of this event it reminds me much more in some ways of the sort of red scare and that

trying to root out a kind of corrosive and secretive influence, you know, woke culture or whatever it is in Hollywood. And it reminds me much more of that. But I do think that he has... quite clear cultural plans now and it's quite difficult to avoid saying that he hasn't when you think of the attack on news late night. Things like this, which are so sort of extraordinary that it's not difficult to extrapolate and think that there is actually method to the madness. Yeah, a part of me is...

Glad that this is where he's spending his energy. There's a lot of other really bad things he could do that wouldn't be, somehow would not be. Rush Hour 4 would not be as bad as. But also when it comes out, he has a lot at stake there. He needs that to open big and he needs it immediately for Rush Hour 5 to be announced. Well, it will... Rush Hour 5, I mean...

Jackie Chan, how old? Russian nine to five. Yeah. But he could push it. You can push it. And as we've seen in lots of faith-based filming, there are ways that if people feel they have to turn out because it's about something different. than just like, do I want to see this thing or not? If they feel there's some sort of moral or quasi-moral obligation to see this, it will be interesting to see what the Melania documentary does. I mean, I think that's a...

harder sell than this. But you can definitely see that this could be pushed. Anyway, I do think he has cultural plans that we don't really talk quite so much about.

I genuinely think there is a distinction between interfering with news, and I would include satire in that, and this side of things, which is forever there's been ridiculous rich people with money who've tried to... put films on i mean that's the whole history of hollywood is that and that i don't mind put on whatever film you want because there'll always be other amazing films alongside it dismantling the structure of network news and of cable news that is

genuine harbinger of something very dark. This I prefer. This is less bad, definitely. Poor Jackie Chan sort of getting a call saying, we need you for Rush Hour 4, and him going, oh, God, I really don't want to do Rush Hour 4. And then the money keeps going up and up and up, and he goes, all right, okay, I'll do it. I loved his quote on the first one, which is,

He said, I don't like the way I speak English and I didn't understand anything Chris Tucker said. Jackie Chan is so successful and so rich and so popular that he's sort of uncoachable. He'll say whatever he wants at any given time.

So I look forward to his comments on this. I look forward to the press tour. Yeah, I look forward to the press tour very much. Dying for the press tour. What I didn't realise was I sort of knew in the back of my head that Ratner started out making videos for Public Enemy. Yeah. And Wu-Tang and LL Cool J, and then he moved on to Madonna and Mariah and stuff like that. But that's how he got his break into the movie business.

The other story, I think maybe we did it on a bonus episode, because I was looking at the Rotten Tomatoes scores of the first three Rush Hour movies, which, by the way, all of which did very well, all of which did over a quarter of a billion dollars. They're big movies. In those days, money. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the Rotten Tomatoes scores are not bad. But I forgot that Rotten Tomatoes only exists because of Rush Hour.

Which is Rotten Tomatoes was set up by that guy, Xen Duong, who was a huge Jackie Chan fan and would rank his movies. And when Rush Hour came out, he went, oh, no, I need to standardize how this works. So he set up Rotten Tomatoes just so he could rank Rush Hour. And now, you know. He thought that it would become quite so culturally central to everything that happens. Anything can happen in the current timeline. Yeah, sure can.

Anyway, speaking of timelines, after the break, we will be delving into the universe of Stranger Things, which jumps back and forward. And also paying tribute to the great Tom Stoppard. This episode is brought to you by Apple.

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Welcome back, everybody. Now, Stranger Things, biggest show in the world, probably the most profitable show in the world as well. Its final season is now well underway. Marina, I have never seen a single session of Stranger Things.

I have never got involved because, you know, you're either both feet in or you're nothing. I'm shoulder deep and I can give you a rough overview. Excellent. You're going to give me a masterclass. I'm going to give you a very... brief pricey because it's and then we can so i didn't mean a master class just like i can't give a half ass pricey yeah half ass pricey yeah it's set in hawkins indiana which is a sort of anywhere usa town and there's

There's some little geek, well, they were quite young at the very start of it, and we'll get to all that. Geeks at school. But strange things are afoot. A shaven-headed girl escapes from a lab. There's a missing boy. This is all in the first season. And then we get the emergence of this sort of parallel world, the upside down. And we discover that...

The US military originally sort of opened, once again, have made one of their bishes and opened the gate to this world. Guys. And have been sort of managing the problem secretly and malign elements from that world or who've crossed over from that world. into our world seek to sort of disrupt. We don't know. All of these ends will presumably be tied up. So it's got that sort of Spielberg-y Stephen King sort of thing of small town America multiplied by...

It's not even got that sort of thing. It is an unbelievably detailed homage to that. You know, if you think about E.T. and the basement and all of those things, I mean, it really is beyond a tribute, really. And that whole aesthetic. It just hit right. I mean, the first one came out in 2016, the first season. And I suppose...

We do live in an era of intense sort of nostalgia and retreading things. And it's interesting, the Duffer brothers who created it, who were twins, who created this, it was retro to them. They didn't live during that time. Well, that's why it can be an homage, I think.

not ripping something off it is it is literally in the same way that you know directors from our generation would make westerns yes it's like i'm this is something that I've grown an aesthetic which I want to play with which is sort of metamorphosed that aesthetic exactly um westerns now seem quite sort of left field whereas before they were the mainstream geek culture which this show delves right into has sort of become cool

and it definitely helps with the kind of multi-generational thing if you've got I don't know parents who might think oh my god yes I remember all this I remember watching shows like that I remember I lived through this was very bingeable it had these great cliffhangers um and it had kind of really timeless themes like um kids knowing best and adults not really getting it um and outsiders but also i think trauma which i do think is

I think they've talked a lot about it being really about, you know, untreated and unacknowledged trauma. And that is definitely something more of our age than other things. But in terms of what it's done for Netflix, like you said. People say that it's made them a billion. I would put it almost double that. I saw the number a billion and I thought, I mean, start at a billion and go up. I mean, even the play has made...

I mean, hundreds of millions. Stranger Things, the first shadow, which opened in London and then is now on Broadway as well. They say it's brought 2 million new subscribers. I would have thought, I don't know, I would have thought a lot more. And the merchandisers are obviously very popular.

it's a lot about retention and you'll you see that in their release schedule for these things now because of course what people used to do when things um like they thought oh i'm not gonna have you know i mean now a lot of people a lot more people have netflix but at the time they thought i'll get netflix i will watch stranger things in one go and then i will um get get rid of my subscription you know that's what they call churn and the way they they sort of

drop it in four episodes and then there'll be another wait and then you'll get another four. So it really helps with retention. So you can see what it's given them. And it has become just this enormous behemoth. And I mean, I was reading about that. salaries for the final. I find this quite, I'm not sure I've agreed with this. Certainly compared to the, you know. Yeah, the salaries for the final. Winona Ryder and David Harbour, who were the sort of adults, getting $9.5 million.

The kids, as we would call them the kids, but we'll get to the age problem in a minute. They're now sort of Jackie Chan age. Yeah, they're on seven million. The kind of young adults like Nancy and Steve and Robin and Jonathan, they're on six million. Millie Bobby Brown. who plays Eleven, the original shaving-haired girl who escaped from the lab. She has a separate deal. She has a deal with Netflix. She's really interesting, and this is very specific. She is a massive star on Netflix.

If she does a movie, if she does like one of her Enola Holmes ones, or she does The Electric State, which she did with The Reason of Brothers, all of those are enormous on Netflix. So she is a huge star on Netflix. I really question whether she could open. a movie in cinemas. But she didn't need to. Exactly. If you can open a show on Netflix, that's all you need to do. Yeah, it's very interesting. But nonetheless, the Duffer brothers who created this...

And you'd think, you know, it became this enormous show and this massive kind of cultural phenomenon. They are going to Paramount. Netflix offered even money than Paramount offered, but they decided to leave because they want to make theatrical movies, which you can't really do at Netflix. Did somebody say Rush Hour 5?

Yeah, I mean, hopefully they'd be at least in the mix. Nice to be considered. In terms of like... There's lots of interesting things about, first of all, what does Netflix do now? You can't, obviously, you just can't replace something like this. They do have the rights, I think, to spin off universe stuff, which the Duffers can't take to Paramount.

And I suppose what you always want to do with something like this is what Star Wars or Marvel do, which is you kind of keep the franchise alive in some way or another so that it can constantly be producing for you. Maybe that will work for them. there is a sort of sense that, and they have lots of big creators, but I wonder in terms of what particularly works and what these big hit shows are.

These kind of teen ensembles, I think, if you look at Wednesday, Wednesday's another big, big thing for them. Obviously, Squid Game, but that's finished. You don't know when... I think that teen ensemble format, the sense of spectacle...

things that you might have previously only seen in movies, which, you know, these huge special effects and world building, very, very immersive world building, which is what particularly you have on something like Wednesday or on this. So one thing I do think has been. problematic and this is just i mean everybody says this and we've talked about it before on the podcast but i do think it's significant is the sheer gaps between the seasons of these tv shows

Game of Thrones was the last show to religiously release a series at about the same time every single year. And they did it for, you know, whatever it was, eight or 10 years. Wednesday, that was two and a half years between the seasons.

euphoria which has yet to come back is going to be four years you know stranger things was a very long time i mean it'll be interesting to see what they do with harry potter and whether they really do well they're going to have to because you say stranger things the thing is you know you've got kids in it and that's so it's

you do sort of have to make it fairly quickly. And that's the disappointment of this for me, which is that, I mean, not to sort of get into the critical side of it, but I do think that with this season, which I've watched what they've dropped so far, there's not really...

you know, they're still playing Dungeons and Dragons and riding around on their bikes. And it's kind of like, this is ridiculous. They're 10 years older and they look at, and I know that you can, and the same with Euphoria. I think there is going to be a time jump in Euphoria, but otherwise.

what, she's going to have a mortgage and kids. I don't know. Zendaya is going to have, it's going to be a very different phase of her life. And it's difficult why these gaps happen. There's some sort of sense that it's a... some kind of mystical, modern form of quality control because we live in an age of such amazing television that they can't possibly get it back that quickly.

I don't think that's the case because there's things like The Wire or Seinfeld or The Sopranos that didn't release like that. People literally can't remember what happened in previous series of things anymore, and they really can't.

But equally, there are shows that have released on a really tight schedule, and I'm thinking about... something like slow horses that my friend my brilliant friend will will smith did but it is so punishing the schedule it is so punishing the schedule because you're always in pre-production writing and or shooting or in post-production at any one time you're doing two of those things and also just on a contractual level you have to have

jack loud and who everyone wants to be in everything you have to have gary oldman you have to have kristin scott thomas they have to be available like for such a large part of every single year it's it's very very hard to release a big show

once a year and it's amazing that slow horses have done it and it's not surprising that other you know with stranger things you know when you start out you've essentially got some untried talent even the duffer brothers they're not you know they haven't really done an awful lot which i can talk about in a moment and so you can say oh and we're doing this and then we're going to do series season two or three back to back but the second the first one breaks everyone is getting offers from

Sure, but you will have it, they will have in their contract that they're contracted for seven seasons or whatever the standard thing is. And absolutely, by the way, but if you're Millie Bobby Brown, you can have that seven-season contract, but you are... such a huge deal to Netflix that if you say after two seasons

Oh, no, I am. I'm doing Enola Holmes. But you're doing it for them. I'm taking two years off or whatever it is. There's not a lot you can do about it. But this doesn't service the fans at all. And I do think that's interesting. You know, the difference between TV and movies is that...

TV was a continuity medium. You know, it was always on and things returned. And obviously we know in the old days in America, they used to have like 22, 24 episodes or something and they would release every year. But it's not. producing what consumers want. It's interesting because podcasts, of which this is one of the always on types, people always say to me, and do you even do it on holiday? It's like, yes, because that is really what people want. That's what people want it to be available.

every week people don't want there to be two and a half years four years between series of things they love that they genuinely can't remember what happens anymore we now live in an era where that they There's a huge recapping industry. It's part of the entertainment industry. It's the recapping industry of people who do TikToks or YouTubes who are dedicated to it. I noticed, which is really interesting, that...

Prime is now trialing an AI recap button. You used to be able to get text recap, but now you can get AI video recap of a series. It's not just clips. The AI identifies kind of key plot points. Then it matches them to clips. Then it might even have soundtrack to the trailer rather than just bits of the soundtrack.

on top and then it generates a voice narration and Amazon say that will be theatrical quality Samsung have now added co-pilot to their TVs which is a recapping thing recapping is so enormous but it's not skip recap

Yes, but you wouldn't be skipping the recap when you're watching Stranger Things. Because, you know, I watched every one of that last series. By the way, some of them, it was preposterous. They were all episodes that were over two hours long. Just the absolute high watermark of indulged creators thinking that they're making...

feature and actually like there's absolutely no way this episode needed to be you know an hour 48 two hours 20 this is a nonsense this um as a sidebar on recaps whenever there's a like a big crime

novel that gets adapted for TV and you know a lot of twists and turns and stuff like that and I don't really know what you do about this it's very hard but AI certainly won't help in any big crime story there are you know the idea is tell people who did the murder like you know the clues are all there yeah but in the recap you sort of have to put in things you know because you're you're hiding these

things somewhere in inconsequential scenes and suddenly in the recap you're thinking why is this inconsequential scene with the shopkeeper in there that's right why is it why is he going and buying a packet of rolos that seems weird yeah and then you're like

Oh, so that must be important. That shopkeeper must be important. And I think with twisty-turny crime things, the recap industry is, I would say... an issue hamstrung you are hamstrung which by the way is my new um detective john hamstrung i love him already And there is also a sense where these worlds have become kind of deliberately complicated and they're full of Easter eggs and all this sort of thing that, I mean, there was some suggestion now that some TV critics were saying to people.

can you tell us what happened in the Stranger Things play? It's like, oh, right, this is where we're going, is it? Which is the first shadow, which is like, okay, do we, it's like that Marvel feeling where there was just so much homework. And like, if you hadn't watched WandaVision, then you didn't really understand the next movie.

And we know with Marvel, they completely overexploited that aspect of things. And people are just like, I've had enough. There was too much TV. There was too much whatever. This is almost... the opposite problem it's a slightly different problem but people simply don't want this long between things and it doesn't serve the fans and actually what a lot of

other sort of producers are saying is this is just destroying you know we spend so much money on this television and people have really just like got what they're not going to go back to it they may not stranger things is

its own kind of giant phenomenon and i'm not saying that this is the case here i'm sure it isn't people are heading back there's a lot of great stuff that people just say yeah you know what it's two and a half years now i don't think i'm going to get back into that one because a lot of other stuff's come along and so we're killing some of our

best stuff because we just can't get it out there in a manageable release schedule and as I say I don't think it's about like oh television is so good now that that's the only way you can do it I don't think that is the case and there just must be a better way that serves

the viewer, the consumer better than this way. And can I talk about this interesting thing of when you have an enormous hit and it goes away, how do you replace it? Because that's a particular issue. If you're on Netflix and something, you know, you are almost punished for your success because if you have, as you say, a squid game.

or Stranger Things, at some point they do have to come to an end. And how do you replace something that is so iconic and sits right on your homepage and that people are buying their subscriptions for? And the temptation has always been, well, let's try and copy Stranger Things, let's try and copy Squid Game. And then you realise, of course, well, what was Squid Game copying? Nothing. That came out of a clear blue sky. What were Stranger Things copying?

nothing you know the duffer brothers had made one movie they made hidden which is a very good movie but it's not it's a low budget you know made three hundred thousand dollars worldwide you know if you were thinking okay how do we have a definite juggernaut definitive like absolute cast iron hit you would not go to the duffer brothers and but of course

That is the thing you do. And so you have to replace it by just having good people in good places looking for great creatives and trusting their instincts, right? You can't do kind of... You can't do copycat television because all of their huge hits, perhaps Wednesday aside, come out of somewhere where you think, oh, well, that's completely unexpected. But it's every time one of these ends.

People are sitting around going, I mean, we need a billion dollar franchise here. And billion dollar franchises are hard to come up with. I completely agree. But as I said earlier, I do think there's just in the vaguest terms, those elements in the same way that we've talked about how young YouTubers or whatever are bringing people into these old formats like Dancing with the Stars or maybe even Strictly or whatever it is.

I do think that having something that appeals to teens, and we know that kind of teen ensemble casts or people playing teens credibly or otherwise do appeal in that sense. And also that those very immersive worlds are... particularly engaging and very very easy to get wrong though very very hard to get right very very easy to get wrong yeah by the way again sidebar dancing with the stars the final was huge in america last week so it just goes to show they're doing

They're doing something very right over there. And how much did Stranger Things grow with its audience? Did it get more sort of horror-based? Because, you know, the Duffer brothers come from a horror background, and suddenly they're making this thing that feels kind of... pop culturally but but but did it become scarier and darker as it went on actually it was much more scary and dark in in terms of sort of in the first one i thought more successfully almost because it was

almost like in Jaws, just the hint of it and the upside down world and the kind of weirdly, the kind of ethereal grimness of it that you didn't understand. It has become more overtly horrible with characters like Vecna or what have you, who it's a much more obviously kind of there's a much more obviously horror background there. And I suppose it's.

that grows with the audience. I do think, as I said, that it's difficult that the characters really should be worrying about slightly different things now and there have been sort of almost like deplots about emergent sexuality and things like that but it's kind of odd that they've preserved them in aspic you're in your early 40s now

Come on. I think we should have gone to some slightly different places here. I just think reducing the ISA ceiling from 20,000 to 12,000, I just think that it discourages sailing. It discourages sailing. I don't know what Rachel Reeves is doing.

Yeah, there's not one of those discussions. Anyway, on to something and someone utterly timeless. An absolute one-off Tom Stoppard who passed away last week. This is such an enormous last week. It's such an incredible life he had. Most extraordinary playwright. I mean, I'll give a tiny little praise to you in case people aren't familiar with his work.

This is going to be a recommendation to familiarize yourself with his work because he's so wonderful. He was born in 1937 in Czechoslovakia and he was Jewish, but he didn't discover this until middle age, which is sort of very significant. And they've got out just in time. They fled for Singapore.

then he ended up in India a bit and then his father died and his mother married an Englishman who I think was slightly anti-Semitic and they came here and the mother very much underplayed the ancestry so I think he thought he... perhaps had some very distant Jewish relatives.

And eventually he discovered the full story of, which is the most extraordinarily awful story where almost all the other, someone, one of his relatives who had survived the Holocaust came and drew him a family tree. And I mean, all of. The ends of the roads were in, you know, Auschwitz and Dachau or on death marches. But he didn't know of any of this until middle age. And it's very interesting. And he anyway, but he was a news reporter in Bristol. He never went to university.

I mean, he was the most extraordinarily clever man beyond, beyond, but wore it so lightly. And it's really sort of fun that all the tributes have been from people like, you know, Mick Jagger. saying, you know, he was just, he was the best fun because his mind was... He was super handsome as well, wasn't he? Which I know is not important, but it's... Nice to have. Yeah, exactly. Nice to have. Anyway, he broke out...

in 1966 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, which is such a weird idea. It's these two completely minor characters in Hamlet who we only really know about because there's a line, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. dead it's just like a sort of almost as an aside but he kind of and he told their story um and mashed up with

Waiting for Godot, basically. It's an incredibly modern thing to do, by the way. There's now lots of things that, yeah. But I like that. So much of that way of looking at things came from him. And I'm going to talk about something in a bit, which I thought was a coincidence. But he gave actually the king the perfect quotation. There's a line in that, look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else. And so that's the great line that the king was able to say.

to make comment on his death. But that's from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern because the full line was, you know, we keep to our usual stuff more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off, which is a kind of integrity if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.

So it's like an inside-out play. And it's completely brilliant and beautiful. So he's verbally incredibly ingenious. His ideas were incredibly... ingenious he could be funny he could be smart he did incredible things with language he just did stuff that no other writer was

able to do and richard we when i was growing up we never literally we never went to the theater nothing we never did anything like that and i came to his writing via the reading of it and i would get these plays out from the library and eventually you know Over the many years, I now own them all. And I mean, almost every line in these books is underlined by me. Which one don't you underline? They're so, so good. And it must have been...

You know, late into my 20s is when I could first, you know, buy a ticket and go and see one of his plays. And I loved him even more. The minute I read him, I came to him by reading him. And you can read the plays.

right now. And they are extraordinary. And of course, it doesn't take you long to read. Where would you start if you were someone who didn't know him at all? Or if you're a youngster who wants to write? Well, I'd start with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and I'd read Jumpers and then Arcadia. I mean, this is the thing he taught me about these extraordinarily complicated things.

chaos theory or moral philosophy or all of these sort of things. A lot of that in there with a very lightness of touch. And it's a bit like reading a book like when Michael Lewis writes a book about money. And while I'm reading it, I'm like, I fully understand the most complicated financial instrument. And then...

you know a few weeks later you're like nah it's gone completely gone but someone once said to me actually um about tom stoppard oh you know i'm not so keen but he i think he makes people feel cleverer than they are and i remember thinking Oh, you'd hate that, wouldn't you? People are just feeling that they actually are clever and that they can understand things simply because of the magical and funny way that Tom's...

Sorry, what's wrong with that? I remember thinking it says so much more about you than me. You know, exactly. You want to put references in that make people... You want people to be going away and looking stuff up. Yeah. And thinking the world is bigger than they thought it was before they... started that's a lovely thing to do whilst entertaining them which was which was always his number one priority can i just say it's so he was he is like he will always be so completely alive to me

And it's just odd because when we were leaving here last week, I was going down the escalator at Embankment. And I thought, oh, look, they're reviving Indian Inc., which is one of his places. And it's got Felicity Kendall in, who was one of his great muses. And in fact, they had a long relationship together. And I thought, oh, I must go and get tickets to that.

to show how alive he was can I talk to you about two conversations I had last week and bear with bear with because okay one of them was about someone was saying to me oh you know have you have you met himself and I said well I've had this I once had I've had a couple of

great letters from him which are very much my treasure balls but there's a jumpers his play um which is interesting he wrote it in the wake of the moon landings and he thought that he thought that what the moon landings signified was that it would cause some sort of great unmooring or kind of moral discombobulation amongst people because this thing that they'd set up as this romantic trope, the moon, and it had always been this distant sort of sense of longing thing. If they knew that...

men had sort of trampled on it, that something would happen. Anyway, he gave an interview in which he said, and of course, that didn't happen at all. I was completely wrong. And I thought it was so funny. Of course, it was so self-deprecating of him. And anyway, but not long after that, I read a...

interview with I think Buzz Aldrin who said that honestly sometimes like at night he'd be going out and putting the rubbish out and he'd look up at the moon and say I went there once and I just thought oh my god that's so funny that's so exactly what you know

To me, the normalization of the fact that we went there is almost madder than the fact that we did. So I cut out this article and I sent it to him saying, I saw this and thought it would make you laugh. And he wrote me about this really long and incredible letter. So I was telling someone about this last week.

The other thing I was talking about, and I am going to land this plane eventually, but the other thing I was talking about was he wrote this brilliant play called Travesties, which I absolutely love. This is such a Stoppardian thing. I'm going to say Stoppardian. He discovered that in Zurich in 1970... Both James Joyce, Lenin and the Dadaist artist Tristan Zara were all living in Zurich at that time.

And Joyce was writing Ulysses. Lenin obviously had a revolution on his mind. And Dada was this crazy new art form that was coming up. So he also mashed that up with the importance of being earnest. And he wrote this amazing play. Anyway. Last week, I was listening to this interview with James Cameron, the director of obviously Terminator and Aliens and Titanic and Avatar and all of those things. And he's so clever. He's such a fascinating person to listen to, by the way.

And in the course of this interview, he was asked a little bit about his relationship with Elon Musk. And he said, well, of course, we knew each other from the Mars Society in the 90s. And I thought... hang on a second, what's that? And I thought, I must get into this because I think that's fascinating. So I looked at the Miles Society and it's in LA. It was founded out of this sort of underground movement who really believed in...

Mars exploration and colonization. And it's obviously it's utopian and escapist and a kind of underground movement. And I thought, my God, well, that's so interesting. So in the 90s, he would have been on the cusp of... releasing Titanic, which would have been this kind of, when he went stratospheric, James Cameron, Elon Musk

was not really Elon Musk then he had founded Zip2 it was just kind of city guide a mapping software and I was thinking well who else was involved in it because of course I was always looking for my third character and I was Buzz Aldrin. Now, Buzz Aldrin was huge in the society. And I was thinking, well, that's a fun sort of thing. But of course, the fact that I can't hear an interview with James Cameron.

just mentioning that sort of association, without going off down this imaginary side alley and thinking, oh, hang on, who else would have been there? And what would that have been like as a sort of play? That way of looking at the world completely was given to me by Tom Stoppard. That's not a form of original thought. That's lock, stock and barrel.

But it conditioned my thinking so much, I guess, because I read them at a particular young age. And so I always think like this now. And it's impossible for me to hear those kind of interviews. It's interesting. I thought, how funny that those are the two conversations I had last week. They're sort of... It's so typical because it's funny and it's fantastical. Both go so directly back to his plays. And in a weird way, maybe there's this linking figure in the...

percentage of Buzz Aldrin. I can't really put my... It's just, anyway. And so that play is called Buzz. And, you know, also interestingly, he was, you know, incredibly unsnobbish. I mean, he did a lot of work in... Hollywood, you know, he wasn't one of those people who was too cool for school. You know, he would always get his hands dirty. There's a story, it's absolutely apocryphal, but you can believe it, where on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, they say, oh, Sean...

Connery had said to Tom Stoppard I need you to work on some of my lines because they're not very good and so he'd had these amazing lines and then Harrison Ford would come in and say sorry why are your lines

so amazing. And Sean Connery would say, well, because Tom Stoppard is writing them. And he said, well, could he write some for me so tom stoppard starts writing for harrison ford and then the next day spielberg comes in goes sorry why is the script so good suddenly and they go oh it's tom stoppard so he goes to stoppard nonsense because he'd worked with stoppard on empire of the sun and you know he knows exactly what

Tom Stoppard does. But, you know, yeah, he would write on that. He did Revenge of the Sith. There's an amazing thing in that book that you recommended, the Ed Zwick book, where he's talking about Shakespeare in love. Oh, did you read that? Oh, my God. And I was rereading it yesterday for this. It's a brilliant book. It's really, really so readable. I'm glad you read it. And Edswick's putting together this Shakespearean love thing.

The only person who write this is Tom Stoppard. So he flies over to London to try and get Stoppard to do it. And he said, I had just the best day of my life. As I said, I went to see him. Stoppard wasn't particularly interested. He said, let's go and have tea. And he describes him as he says, he's the most graciously well-mannered, self-deprecating, world-renowned genius I had ever met. I mean, that's a...

That's a nice epitaph, isn't it? Anyway, so he has fun with Tom Stoppard and he leaves at the end of the day and realizes that Tom Stoppard has not said whether he would do it or not. But he's assuming he's not going to do it, but he's thinking, I've got to spend a day with one of the...

greatest writers of all time so i'm very happy he then says like three days later they get a message from tom stoppard going oh yeah i'll do it yeah i'll do it it seems like fun and he's going oh that's amazing because um but it'll be a million pounds

And he's like, oh, no, I don't have a million pounds. And then literally the next day, Julia Roberts says she wants to do the movie, and suddenly he does have a million pounds. So he goes to Tom Starbender, here's a million pounds, will you write Shakespeare in Love for me?

And weirdly, that film has a very unusual gestation period, as you can tell, because Julia Roberts is not in it in the end. And it's many, many years later, and it's Harvey Weinstein and Miramax, and he fires Ed Swick off it and all of this stuff. Isric is sort of back on board for when the Oscars come along. And Tom Stoppard, literally at the start of his speech, he turns away from Harvey Weinstein and said, sorry, Harvey.

I want to thank Edswick. And you think, well, that's nice. That's classy, isn't it? But, you know, just somebody who can do the cleverest thing in the world, but also understands entertainment and also understands looking after people and that life and art is supposed to be fun. I think that it's so interesting to think of Leopoldstadt, which became his final play. But I think people all his entire career felt that he hid himself within his writing and his own story.

I didn't feel that ever because I feel like his mind is in every single line and that's the true thing, you know, the mind and it's all out there to see. But the story of that kind of... a Jewishness that was concealed from him and that he only discovered belatedly. he addresses in Leopoldstadt, which is his final play, which was extraordinary. And now I saw that just before that. It was directed by Patrick Marber. It was, I mean, it's...

It's got sort of 40 characters. It is extraordinary. And there's a character that's really very much Stoppard at the end of the play and, you know, who's sort of having to apologise for not really knowing and for just having this lovely...

English life and not being part of this charmed life. And he keeps saying, I didn't know, I didn't know. And then there's, as I say, the list of what had happened to all the other branches of the family. But funnily enough, I was able to talk to Patrick. I went to a shiver with, you know, the Jewish.

prayers after death for somebody and I was lucky enough to go back in a taxi afterwards with Patrick Marlborough and we were talking about it and I said, God, it meant such a lot to me and it was also just before the pandemic when all the kind of lights went out. And he said, yeah, it was great in London, but it was extraordinary in New York. It was such a different feeling because that was so many people's story.

in New York, there's so many of the Jewish people in New York had that kind of story of having escaped in time, which was so completely particular. And he said in, you know,

They really felt it in their souls there. And of course, it won the Tony for Best Play in 2023. I mean, what a crowning sort of to say when people told him he never wrote about where he came from, which I don't think is... remotely true by the way but to to end with that and that to be your final play i mean it is a sort of perfect career in every sense and i

I know that it's supposed to be absolutely amazing. Hermione Lee wrote a very long and amazing biography of him, which I have always been saving for when... there was definitely not going to be any more of him. And so I'm going to read that now. And anyway, it's been really nice to talk about it today. Yeah. And so no need to recommend anything this week other than get your hands on some Tom Stoppard. Yeah.

Read it, get tickets for it. Both have given me the greatest joy in my life. Thank you so much. We covered a lot of ground there. We did. We have a questions and answers episode on Thursday. Look forward to answering lots of your questions. We have for our members, we have a special, it's a look behind the scenes at the Lion King, which by the way,

It has a lot in common with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. The whole structure of the thing and Timon and Pumbo and all of that. Anyway, listen. So we have that on Friday as well. Don't forget to send in your questions for Simon Cowell as well. Please send in your questions. To the rest of his entertainment at goalhanger.com. We will ask him anything and everything. Well, I think with that, it must be goodbye. Yes. See you on Thursday, everyone. See you on Thursday.