Speaker 1: This is the weekend edition of The Front. I'm Claire Harvey.
Speaker 1: There's an image of the romantic artist churning out works
Speaker 1: of complete genius while living in poverty, the greatness of
Speaker 1: their work only being discovered long after their death, like
Speaker 1: Vincent van Gore or Emily Dickinson. Then you have popular
Speaker 1: artists who understand the power of self promotion and believe
Speaker 1: there is a product, like Mandy Warhol, who, when asked
Speaker 1: how he knew a work was finished, replied when the
Speaker 1: Czech clears. The battle between art and commerces raged for centuries. Now.
Speaker 1: In Apple TVs Smash It show, The Studio, Seth Rogen
Speaker 1: and Evan Goldberg take a brutal and hilarious look at Hollywood. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm joined by the France Christen Amiot and Bianca far
Speaker 1: Marcus to talk about Apple TV's latest parody of Hollywood.
Speaker 1: It's called The Studio and it's made by Seth Rogen
Speaker 1: and Evan Goldberg.
Speaker 2: Yeah, honored, Obviously, you know I love movies, but now
Speaker 2: I have this fear that my job is to ruin them,
Speaker 2: the job as a meat gracker.
Speaker 1: It comes in the tradition of a long line of
Speaker 1: satires of Hollywood made by Hollywood, often featuring superstars. My
Speaker 1: favorite of the genre is Tropic Thunder Ben Steeler's Tribute
Speaker 1: to Hollywood, starring Tom Cruise and a whole host of
Speaker 1: other stars. But let's start by talking about the studio.
Speaker 2: Film is my life ever since second of the studio
Speaker 2: as a kid and went on the tour. Being the
Speaker 2: head of Nenel is the only job I've ever wanted.
Speaker 2: That is adorable. All right, Well, listen.
Speaker 1: The show starts with a famous studio producer who's been
Speaker 1: sacked and the people who were jostling for her job,
Speaker 1: one of whom is seth Rogen.
Speaker 2: Oh I've heard you are really into artsy, fartsy filmmaking.
Speaker 3: Bullshit Me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that could not be further from the truth.
Speaker 4: I am as bottom line oriented as anyone in this town.
Speaker 1: The character who's been sacked is called in the show Patty.
Speaker 1: We find her at her home in the Hollywood Hills,
Speaker 1: throwing down cups of tea as if they have vodka,
Speaker 1: because of course, this being Hollywood, she is a sober alcoholic.
Speaker 1: She's based on Amy Pascal, who was famously the boss
Speaker 1: of Sony Pictures, who were sacked after Sony's big hack
Speaker 1: and she's played to perfection by Katherine O'Hara. It's a
Speaker 1: remarkable performance, isn't it.
Speaker 3: It is a remarkable performance. Katherine O'Hara, she is a
Speaker 3: titan of the industry. She has some of the best
Speaker 3: medic timing I think you will find anywhere, and I
Speaker 3: think a lot of her contemporaries would probably say the
Speaker 3: same thing.
Speaker 2: I just want to come by, you know, see how
Speaker 2: you're doing.
Speaker 5: How I'm doing?
Speaker 6: Oh I you know, I gave forty years of my
Speaker 6: life to the studio and then the Griffin Mill, some
Speaker 6: dime store. Bob Evans comes in and wants to put
Speaker 6: a stamp on the place, like is your an ending
Speaker 6: at a hydrate?
Speaker 1: It's so brutal, it is, but guess what, you're even worse.
Speaker 4: Heart.
Speaker 3: The amazing thing about the casting of the studio is
Speaker 3: obviously you have Seth Rogen.
Speaker 1: You have people like Katherine o'hari.
Speaker 3: You have Katherine Hahn, who is having a bit of
Speaker 3: a moment herself.
Speaker 1: She plays a crazed a marketing executive, which you know
Speaker 1: she does particularly well. You got Ike Baronholtz, who he
Speaker 1: and Seth Rogan. Their chemistry together in comedy is amazing,
Speaker 1: and you also have all of these amazed using cameos.
Speaker 1: The premise is that seth Rogen gets the job from
Speaker 1: a sinister and frankly terrifying studio boss, Brian Cranston, and
Speaker 1: then he has to immediately wrestle with the problem that
Speaker 1: lost Patty her job, which is that she refused to
Speaker 1: make big budget, entirely commercial movies as vanity projects for
Speaker 1: big brands. The one that he's immediately asked to make,
Speaker 1: he's a movie about kool Aid, the soft drink, which
Speaker 1: is kind of like being asked to make a movie
Speaker 1: about Fanta and.
Speaker 5: A great film fantastic.
Speaker 1: He initially thinks he can do it while remaining true
Speaker 1: to his values.
Speaker 3: It is a very chaotic viewer experience to see him
Speaker 3: go through this kind of emotional process coming to the
Speaker 3: realization that he, Okay, I need to do this if
Speaker 3: I want to enable these other projects that quote unquote
Speaker 3: deserve to be made. He takes a diversity angle to it,
Speaker 3: where he kind of reviews the people that have been
Speaker 3: cast in the kool Aid movie and realize that they
Speaker 3: are all very white, and so they decide that, okay,
Speaker 3: we'll give it a more diverse cast. And then they
Speaker 3: realize that kind of leads them into a very tokenistic area.
Speaker 3: And then the writer than the director realized, well, then
Speaker 3: are we the right people to be doing this? And
Speaker 3: it's this insane cat and mouse process of just getting
Speaker 3: this thing to cinema con so they can understand how
Speaker 3: the audience feels about it.
Speaker 1: He comes up early with what he thinks is a
Speaker 1: genius plan when Martin Scorsese comes in to pitch a
Speaker 1: movie to him, which happens to be about the Jonestown massacre.
Speaker 7: Johnstowne Johnstown.
Speaker 4: Now, correct me if I'm wrong. Is that the massacre
Speaker 4: where everybody committed suicide by.
Speaker 2: Drinking kool aid?
Speaker 7: Exactly?
Speaker 1: That's the phrase.
Speaker 7: They drank the kool aid, drink the kool aid, whatever
Speaker 7: it is, that's the phrase. That's the climax of the picture.
Speaker 1: It's a big, big sequence.
Speaker 2: That's so in a sense, I guess you could say
Speaker 2: that your film is about cool aide.
Speaker 7: Well, I mean yeah, coming up our in house film
Speaker 7: school grad pokes around under the hood of the studio.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about cinematic technique. Episode two is called Waner,
Speaker 1: and it's about a movie being shot in one take
Speaker 1: and the director played by Sarah Polly is very proud
Speaker 1: that this is a true oner. It's very self referential,
Speaker 1: isn't it, Because much of the studio is shot in
Speaker 1: one take? Banky, you're a film school grad? Is it
Speaker 1: fun to see a Hollywood production parodying the nerdy tendency
Speaker 1: of Hollywood to try really difficult things like these one takes?
Speaker 5: I think what's fun about it is the idea that
Speaker 5: finally we can reclaim the art form people have turned
Speaker 5: away from things made with CGI or you just get
Speaker 5: a bit over it. There's that fatigue that everything can
Speaker 5: be more or less manufactured or engineered in the back end,
Speaker 5: and you know, no one wants to learn about that
Speaker 5: because it's boring. But the idea that you do see
Speaker 5: these idiosyncrasies come out, and this is like the process
Speaker 5: that you get to lampoon and also understand is just
Speaker 5: so entertaining to me.
Speaker 1: Seth Rogen is very lovable, and that brings us to
Speaker 1: what kind of treatment this production is giving the Hollywood
Speaker 1: executives who are able to say yes or no to projects.
Speaker 1: Previous versions of this kind of idea, like tropic thunder casts,
Speaker 1: Hollywood decision makers is basically pure evil. This is not
Speaker 1: like that, is it, Chrissy.
Speaker 3: It's not. And that's probably got a lot to do
Speaker 3: with seth Rogen himself. Maybe he has encountered a lot
Speaker 3: of executives who are in this exact predicament in that
Speaker 3: they do want to create art, but the commercial interests
Speaker 3: of the industry in which they've chosen to build a
Speaker 3: career simply does not allow that if they want to survive.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's probably like anything, isn't it. Any
Speaker 1: pursuit involves a compromise between what you really want to
Speaker 1: be doing and what you must do to pay the bills.
Speaker 5: What does that say about us as the audience? Though
Speaker 5: we can all objectively say that a movie about kool
Speaker 5: aid is dumb, and yet that's what keeps getting made.
Speaker 5: So you think there's this disconnect between audience members like
Speaker 5: us who do want that kind of you know, level
Speaker 5: of kind of originality and ingenuity, that's what you expect
Speaker 5: from these people. Yet then you see the studio bus
Speaker 5: as saying, Okay, well, this thing's going to make a
Speaker 5: billion dollars guaranteed. These two groups, the audience and the entertainer,
Speaker 5: seem to want the same thing, and yet we keep
Speaker 5: coming back to this safe, popular medium.
Speaker 1: But what's wrong with popularity?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 1: Social media feeds now are full of teenage boys packing
Speaker 1: out cinemas. And I've been in one of these cinemas,
Speaker 1: throwing popcorn in the air and singing along to the
Speaker 1: Minecraft movie.
Speaker 6: It's the latest rallying cry from millions of.
Speaker 1: Moviegoers, strick and trucking.
Speaker 6: Those two little words, sending teenage fans of a Minecraft
Speaker 6: movie into a frenzy, resulting and screaming, popcorn throwing and
Speaker 6: soda flying through the air in at least.
Speaker 1: One And I kind of think, although I find the
Speaker 1: teenage boy's a bit annoying, isn't it wonderful that they're
Speaker 1: enjoying the experience of sitting in a cinema together and
Speaker 1: having fun.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think that's where the Barbie reference is
Speaker 3: particularly poignant. It was very commercially successful, but ultimately it
Speaker 3: did in many ways start a conversation a the experience
Speaker 3: of women living in the world today and about feminism
Speaker 3: and about the patriarchy through some very funny Ryan Gosling moments,
Speaker 3: and Margo Robbie quite explicitly said we wanted to make
Speaker 3: a movie that would bring people back to the cinema.
Speaker 3: That experience of going to the movies with your friends,
Speaker 3: with your family, seeing something that you either enjoy or
Speaker 3: didn't enjoy it, and that you can talk about it
Speaker 3: after it becomes part of the culture. So I don't
Speaker 3: think there's something negative about that, except maybe for the
Speaker 3: poor people who have to go and clean up the
Speaker 3: cinemas after the Minecraft movie.
Speaker 1: The fact that this critique of Hollywood and exploration of
Speaker 1: all those issues is showing on television screens at home
Speaker 1: where we stay because we don't want to go out
Speaker 1: to the movies anymore is also one of those circular
Speaker 1: self referential moments, isn't it.
Speaker 5: They even say it in the show where he says,
Speaker 5: we should have just made this with Apple so they
Speaker 5: could give us all the money and we have to
Speaker 5: change nothing.
Speaker 1: Kristen Amiott is a producer on the Front and Biancophile
Speaker 1: Marcus is a journalist and videographer at The Australian. You
Speaker 1: can read here and see their work anytime at Beaustralian
Speaker 1: dot com dot a you. This episode of the Front
Speaker 1: was hosted by me Claire Harvey and co produced with
Speaker 1: Jaska League, who edited the episode and also wrote our theme.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us on the front this week. Our
Speaker 1: team also includes Leat Sammaglu, Tiffany Dimac, Josh Burton and
Speaker 1: Stephanie Coombs.