WEBVTT - The Studio - Seth Rogen’s smash-hit series that skilfully skewers Hollywood 0:00:11.400 --> 0:00:15.360 This is the weekend edition of The Front. I'm Claire Harvey. 0:00:17.079 --> 0:00:20.080 There's an image of the romantic artist churning out works 0:00:20.120 --> 0:00:24.040 of complete genius while living in poverty, the greatness of 0:00:24.079 --> 0:00:27.319 their work only being discovered long after their death, like 0:00:27.520 --> 0:00:31.120 Vincent van Gore or Emily Dickinson. Then you have popular 0:00:31.200 --> 0:00:34.360 artists who understand the power of self promotion and believe 0:00:34.520 --> 0:00:38.519 there is a product, like Mandy Warhol, who, when asked 0:00:38.640 --> 0:00:41.760 how he knew a work was finished, replied when the 0:00:41.760 --> 0:00:47.440 Czech clears. The battle between art and commerces raged for centuries. Now. 0:00:47.520 --> 0:00:51.200 In Apple TVs Smash It show, The Studio, Seth Rogen 0:00:51.280 --> 0:01:07.759 and Evan Goldberg take a brutal and hilarious look at Hollywood. Well, 0:01:07.760 --> 0:01:10.360 I'm joined by the France Christen Amiot and Bianca far 0:01:10.440 --> 0:01:14.440 Marcus to talk about Apple TV's latest parody of Hollywood. 0:01:14.480 --> 0:01:16.919 It's called The Studio and it's made by Seth Rogen 0:01:17.040 --> 0:01:18.160 and Evan Goldberg. 0:01:21.160 --> 0:01:27.160 Yeah, honored, Obviously, you know I love movies, but now 0:01:27.200 --> 0:01:33.240 I have this fear that my job is to ruin them, 0:01:33.360 --> 0:01:34.600 the job as a meat gracker. 0:01:36.600 --> 0:01:38.880 It comes in the tradition of a long line of 0:01:39.120 --> 0:01:43.520 satires of Hollywood made by Hollywood, often featuring superstars. My 0:01:43.640 --> 0:01:47.360 favorite of the genre is Tropic Thunder Ben Steeler's Tribute 0:01:47.400 --> 0:01:50.240 to Hollywood, starring Tom Cruise and a whole host of 0:01:50.280 --> 0:01:53.200 other stars. But let's start by talking about the studio. 0:01:54.000 --> 0:01:57.200 Film is my life ever since second of the studio 0:01:57.280 --> 0:01:59.600 as a kid and went on the tour. Being the 0:01:59.600 --> 0:02:02.440 head of Nenel is the only job I've ever wanted. 0:02:03.080 --> 0:02:05.920 That is adorable. All right, Well, listen. 0:02:07.080 --> 0:02:10.520 The show starts with a famous studio producer who's been 0:02:10.560 --> 0:02:13.120 sacked and the people who were jostling for her job, 0:02:13.240 --> 0:02:14.960 one of whom is seth Rogen. 0:02:15.520 --> 0:02:20.320 Oh I've heard you are really into artsy, fartsy filmmaking. 0:02:20.360 --> 0:02:22.160 Bullshit Me. 0:02:22.639 --> 0:02:25.079 Yeah, that could not be further from the truth. 0:02:25.160 --> 0:02:28.160 I am as bottom line oriented as anyone in this town. 0:02:30.160 --> 0:02:32.720 The character who's been sacked is called in the show Patty. 0:02:33.440 --> 0:02:36.239 We find her at her home in the Hollywood Hills, 0:02:36.480 --> 0:02:38.600 throwing down cups of tea as if they have vodka, 0:02:38.639 --> 0:02:41.720 because of course, this being Hollywood, she is a sober alcoholic. 0:02:42.639 --> 0:02:45.440 She's based on Amy Pascal, who was famously the boss 0:02:45.480 --> 0:02:48.080 of Sony Pictures, who were sacked after Sony's big hack 0:02:48.400 --> 0:02:51.800 and she's played to perfection by Katherine O'Hara. It's a 0:02:51.840 --> 0:02:54.000 remarkable performance, isn't it. 0:02:54.000 --> 0:02:57.200 It is a remarkable performance. Katherine O'Hara, she is a 0:02:57.240 --> 0:02:59.760 titan of the industry. She has some of the best 0:03:00.080 --> 0:03:03.040 medic timing I think you will find anywhere, and I 0:03:03.080 --> 0:03:05.320 think a lot of her contemporaries would probably say the 0:03:05.320 --> 0:03:05.839 same thing. 0:03:06.520 --> 0:03:08.720 I just want to come by, you know, see how 0:03:08.800 --> 0:03:09.320 you're doing. 0:03:09.680 --> 0:03:10.360 How I'm doing? 0:03:10.919 --> 0:03:14.280 Oh I you know, I gave forty years of my 0:03:14.360 --> 0:03:17.639 life to the studio and then the Griffin Mill, some 0:03:18.040 --> 0:03:20.120 dime store. Bob Evans comes in and wants to put 0:03:20.160 --> 0:03:23.119 a stamp on the place, like is your an ending 0:03:23.680 --> 0:03:24.360 at a hydrate? 0:03:25.280 --> 0:03:31.600 It's so brutal, it is, but guess what, you're even worse. 0:03:33.160 --> 0:03:33.720 Heart. 0:03:35.000 --> 0:03:39.520 The amazing thing about the casting of the studio is 0:03:39.600 --> 0:03:41.160 obviously you have Seth Rogen. 0:03:41.280 --> 0:03:42.640 You have people like Katherine o'hari. 0:03:42.680 --> 0:03:44.720 You have Katherine Hahn, who is having a bit of 0:03:44.760 --> 0:03:46.200 a moment herself. 0:03:46.440 --> 0:03:50.120 She plays a crazed a marketing executive, which you know 0:03:50.560 --> 0:03:54.080 she does particularly well. You got Ike Baronholtz, who he 0:03:54.120 --> 0:03:57.360 and Seth Rogan. Their chemistry together in comedy is amazing, 0:03:57.960 --> 0:04:01.400 and you also have all of these amazed using cameos. 0:04:02.080 --> 0:04:05.560 The premise is that seth Rogen gets the job from 0:04:05.680 --> 0:04:11.200 a sinister and frankly terrifying studio boss, Brian Cranston, and 0:04:11.880 --> 0:04:15.520 then he has to immediately wrestle with the problem that 0:04:15.640 --> 0:04:18.440 lost Patty her job, which is that she refused to 0:04:18.520 --> 0:04:24.000 make big budget, entirely commercial movies as vanity projects for 0:04:24.080 --> 0:04:27.800 big brands. The one that he's immediately asked to make, 0:04:27.839 --> 0:04:30.320 he's a movie about kool Aid, the soft drink, which 0:04:30.360 --> 0:04:32.000 is kind of like being asked to make a movie 0:04:32.040 --> 0:04:34.360 about Fanta and. 0:04:34.279 --> 0:04:37.160 A great film fantastic. 0:04:37.240 --> 0:04:40.080 He initially thinks he can do it while remaining true 0:04:40.080 --> 0:04:40.800 to his values. 0:04:42.400 --> 0:04:45.920 It is a very chaotic viewer experience to see him 0:04:45.960 --> 0:04:49.200 go through this kind of emotional process coming to the 0:04:49.240 --> 0:04:52.080 realization that he, Okay, I need to do this if 0:04:52.120 --> 0:04:55.680 I want to enable these other projects that quote unquote 0:04:55.720 --> 0:05:00.400 deserve to be made. He takes a diversity angle to it, 0:05:00.880 --> 0:05:04.880 where he kind of reviews the people that have been 0:05:05.040 --> 0:05:09.080 cast in the kool Aid movie and realize that they 0:05:09.080 --> 0:05:11.720 are all very white, and so they decide that, okay, 0:05:11.880 --> 0:05:14.640 we'll give it a more diverse cast. And then they 0:05:14.680 --> 0:05:18.599 realize that kind of leads them into a very tokenistic area. 0:05:18.680 --> 0:05:21.000 And then the writer than the director realized, well, then 0:05:21.120 --> 0:05:23.080 are we the right people to be doing this? And 0:05:23.120 --> 0:05:28.960 it's this insane cat and mouse process of just getting 0:05:29.000 --> 0:05:31.320 this thing to cinema con so they can understand how 0:05:31.360 --> 0:05:32.600 the audience feels about it. 0:05:33.200 --> 0:05:35.240 He comes up early with what he thinks is a 0:05:35.240 --> 0:05:37.880 genius plan when Martin Scorsese comes in to pitch a 0:05:37.920 --> 0:05:41.719 movie to him, which happens to be about the Jonestown massacre. 0:05:42.880 --> 0:05:45.880 Johnstowne Johnstown. 0:05:47.600 --> 0:05:54.080 Now, correct me if I'm wrong. Is that the massacre 0:05:54.160 --> 0:05:59.440 where everybody committed suicide by. 0:05:58.960 --> 0:05:59.800 Drinking kool aid? 0:06:00.040 --> 0:06:00.520 Exactly? 0:06:00.760 --> 0:06:01.560 That's the phrase. 0:06:01.640 --> 0:06:04.040 They drank the kool aid, drink the kool aid, whatever 0:06:04.080 --> 0:06:06.839 it is, that's the phrase. That's the climax of the picture. 0:06:06.839 --> 0:06:08.200 It's a big, big sequence. 0:06:08.240 --> 0:06:12.520 That's so in a sense, I guess you could say 0:06:12.640 --> 0:06:16.279 that your film is about cool aide. 0:06:18.120 --> 0:06:25.880 Well, I mean yeah, coming up our in house film 0:06:25.920 --> 0:06:29.160 school grad pokes around under the hood of the studio. 0:06:41.360 --> 0:06:45.080 Let's talk about cinematic technique. Episode two is called Waner, 0:06:45.279 --> 0:06:49.480 and it's about a movie being shot in one take 0:06:50.000 --> 0:06:52.320 and the director played by Sarah Polly is very proud 0:06:52.320 --> 0:06:55.760 that this is a true oner. It's very self referential, 0:06:55.800 --> 0:06:59.000 isn't it, Because much of the studio is shot in 0:06:59.080 --> 0:07:02.800 one take? Banky, you're a film school grad? Is it 0:07:02.880 --> 0:07:07.120 fun to see a Hollywood production parodying the nerdy tendency 0:07:07.120 --> 0:07:10.640 of Hollywood to try really difficult things like these one takes? 0:07:11.320 --> 0:07:14.400 I think what's fun about it is the idea that 0:07:14.720 --> 0:07:17.600 finally we can reclaim the art form people have turned 0:07:17.640 --> 0:07:20.320 away from things made with CGI or you just get 0:07:20.320 --> 0:07:22.840 a bit over it. There's that fatigue that everything can 0:07:22.880 --> 0:07:25.880 be more or less manufactured or engineered in the back end, 0:07:26.400 --> 0:07:28.160 and you know, no one wants to learn about that 0:07:28.200 --> 0:07:31.640 because it's boring. But the idea that you do see 0:07:31.680 --> 0:07:34.920 these idiosyncrasies come out, and this is like the process 0:07:34.920 --> 0:07:39.160 that you get to lampoon and also understand is just 0:07:39.200 --> 0:07:40.240 so entertaining to me. 0:07:41.080 --> 0:07:44.360 Seth Rogen is very lovable, and that brings us to 0:07:45.000 --> 0:07:49.480 what kind of treatment this production is giving the Hollywood 0:07:49.520 --> 0:07:52.520 executives who are able to say yes or no to projects. 0:07:53.160 --> 0:07:58.000 Previous versions of this kind of idea, like tropic thunder casts, 0:07:58.120 --> 0:08:01.880 Hollywood decision makers is basically pure evil. This is not 0:08:01.960 --> 0:08:03.040 like that, is it, Chrissy. 0:08:03.640 --> 0:08:06.360 It's not. And that's probably got a lot to do 0:08:06.520 --> 0:08:10.040 with seth Rogen himself. Maybe he has encountered a lot 0:08:10.040 --> 0:08:12.600 of executives who are in this exact predicament in that 0:08:12.640 --> 0:08:16.280 they do want to create art, but the commercial interests 0:08:16.280 --> 0:08:18.680 of the industry in which they've chosen to build a 0:08:18.680 --> 0:08:21.800 career simply does not allow that if they want to survive. 0:08:22.640 --> 0:08:25.120 Yeah, I think it's probably like anything, isn't it. Any 0:08:25.200 --> 0:08:29.080 pursuit involves a compromise between what you really want to 0:08:29.120 --> 0:08:31.360 be doing and what you must do to pay the bills. 0:08:31.960 --> 0:08:33.800 What does that say about us as the audience? Though 0:08:33.880 --> 0:08:36.160 we can all objectively say that a movie about kool 0:08:36.200 --> 0:08:41.120 aid is dumb, and yet that's what keeps getting made. 0:08:41.240 --> 0:08:44.440 So you think there's this disconnect between audience members like 0:08:44.600 --> 0:08:47.280 us who do want that kind of you know, level 0:08:47.320 --> 0:08:50.200 of kind of originality and ingenuity, that's what you expect 0:08:50.240 --> 0:08:52.839 from these people. Yet then you see the studio bus 0:08:52.920 --> 0:08:54.800 as saying, Okay, well, this thing's going to make a 0:08:54.800 --> 0:08:59.880 billion dollars guaranteed. These two groups, the audience and the entertainer, 0:09:00.640 --> 0:09:03.320 seem to want the same thing, and yet we keep 0:09:03.360 --> 0:09:06.560 coming back to this safe, popular medium. 0:09:07.040 --> 0:09:08.439 But what's wrong with popularity? 0:09:08.600 --> 0:09:08.800 You know? 0:09:09.000 --> 0:09:11.600 Social media feeds now are full of teenage boys packing 0:09:11.679 --> 0:09:14.600 out cinemas. And I've been in one of these cinemas, 0:09:15.200 --> 0:09:18.520 throwing popcorn in the air and singing along to the 0:09:18.840 --> 0:09:20.760 Minecraft movie. 0:09:21.000 --> 0:09:23.760 It's the latest rallying cry from millions of. 0:09:23.720 --> 0:09:26.040 Moviegoers, strick and trucking. 0:09:28.040 --> 0:09:31.720 Those two little words, sending teenage fans of a Minecraft 0:09:31.840 --> 0:09:36.880 movie into a frenzy, resulting and screaming, popcorn throwing and 0:09:37.000 --> 0:09:39.680 soda flying through the air in at least. 0:09:39.480 --> 0:09:42.200 One And I kind of think, although I find the 0:09:42.200 --> 0:09:45.559 teenage boy's a bit annoying, isn't it wonderful that they're 0:09:45.720 --> 0:09:49.000 enjoying the experience of sitting in a cinema together and 0:09:49.080 --> 0:09:49.560 having fun. 0:09:50.120 --> 0:09:52.520 Yeah, And I think that's where the Barbie reference is 0:09:52.559 --> 0:09:56.920 particularly poignant. It was very commercially successful, but ultimately it 0:09:57.040 --> 0:10:01.199 did in many ways start a conversation a the experience 0:10:01.240 --> 0:10:04.360 of women living in the world today and about feminism 0:10:04.400 --> 0:10:08.400 and about the patriarchy through some very funny Ryan Gosling moments, 0:10:09.200 --> 0:10:12.800 and Margo Robbie quite explicitly said we wanted to make 0:10:12.840 --> 0:10:15.640 a movie that would bring people back to the cinema. 0:10:15.800 --> 0:10:18.199 That experience of going to the movies with your friends, 0:10:18.200 --> 0:10:21.760 with your family, seeing something that you either enjoy or 0:10:21.760 --> 0:10:23.400 didn't enjoy it, and that you can talk about it 0:10:23.440 --> 0:10:26.200 after it becomes part of the culture. So I don't 0:10:26.200 --> 0:10:29.560 think there's something negative about that, except maybe for the 0:10:29.600 --> 0:10:31.440 poor people who have to go and clean up the 0:10:31.440 --> 0:10:32.959 cinemas after the Minecraft movie. 0:10:33.960 --> 0:10:38.200 The fact that this critique of Hollywood and exploration of 0:10:38.240 --> 0:10:42.400 all those issues is showing on television screens at home 0:10:42.880 --> 0:10:44.920 where we stay because we don't want to go out 0:10:44.960 --> 0:10:48.800 to the movies anymore is also one of those circular 0:10:48.840 --> 0:10:50.320 self referential moments, isn't it. 0:10:50.840 --> 0:10:52.400 They even say it in the show where he says, 0:10:52.400 --> 0:10:54.080 we should have just made this with Apple so they 0:10:54.120 --> 0:10:55.520 could give us all the money and we have to 0:10:55.600 --> 0:10:56.240 change nothing. 0:11:05.400 --> 0:11:08.200 Kristen Amiott is a producer on the Front and Biancophile 0:11:08.280 --> 0:11:11.320 Marcus is a journalist and videographer at The Australian. You 0:11:11.360 --> 0:11:14.600 can read here and see their work anytime at Beaustralian 0:11:14.720 --> 0:11:17.600 dot com dot a you. This episode of the Front 0:11:17.640 --> 0:11:20.560 was hosted by me Claire Harvey and co produced with 0:11:20.679 --> 0:11:24.120 Jaska League, who edited the episode and also wrote our theme. 0:11:24.400 --> 0:11:26.760 Thanks for joining us on the front this week. Our 0:11:26.800 --> 0:11:30.880 team also includes Leat Sammaglu, Tiffany Dimac, Josh Burton and 0:11:31.000 --> 0:11:31.920 Stephanie Coombs.