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Seth Rogen takes on Hollywood (and Martin Scorsese) with ‘The Studio’
Summary
‘The Studio’ satirises Hollywood while also letting it in on the joke, and there is an optimistic love of cinema driving this series
Creative organisations are divided into The Creatives and The Suits. In order to make something original, The Creatives are encouraged to think outside the box, but in order to make money doing it, The Suits have to keep boxing them in. This pugilistic dynamic drives commercial art, and the fact that The Suits make more money and take more decisions is best demonstrated by the way we now use the word ‘content’ to describe art-forms like film and music. The Studio, an Apple TV+ series created by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, aims at wish-fulfillment: What if a Creative became a Suit?
This is a thrilling thought: What if the head of a movie studio looked at artistry instead of bottom-lines? What if they prized an auteur’s vision ahead of a project’s marketability? What if artists were in charge of greenlighting art? Rogen plays Matt Remick, a film-loving studio executive thrust abruptly into the top position at Continental Studios. However, this man who claims to champion art over profit also loves expensive vintage convertibles and really, really wants to hear his name in a Golden Globe acceptance speech. Thus The Studio actually asks a sillier (and far more plausible) question:
What if a Suit thinks he is a Creative?
This is a series about loving the movies that is equally a series about the difficulty of loving the movies. How much can you love the sausage once you know how it is made? Rogen and Goldberg direct every single episode, and aided by Birdman drummer Antonio Sanchez, borrow that film’s trick to make every episode appear like a single-take. (Like Birdman, and unlike current Netflix hit Adolescence, these are not actual single takes, and feature jumps across time and space — except for one single-take episode, ‘The Oner,’ that is literally about the artistry and the indulgence of the unbroken sequence.)
The Studio, therefore, feels ambitiously cinematic. The series is studded with delicious cameos — from Martin Scorsese, who realises that someone is lying to him because “this performance, it’s inauthentic", to Sarah Polley (who directed Rogen in Take This Waltz) who is angling for a Rolling Stones song in her climax, to Netflix kingpin Ted Sarandos who says people thank him in their acceptance speeches because they are legally mandated. Dozens of famous people play themselves, and I don’t think a show has leaned on Hollywood cameos this cleverly since Ricky Gervais made Extras twenty years ago.
Remick manages negotiations and decisions with the grace of a man whose shoelaces are tied together — underlined by the spectacular ways he keeps falling down — and this may be the most hapless character Rogen has played. Even when he’s being evil, he (thinks he) means well. The irrepressible Kathryn Hahn plays the studio’s marketing head, hunting for “the perfect storm of nostalgia, kitsch, irony and stability" and Ike Barinholtz is the clearly commercial studio executive, saying he wants a horror movie that is “not an A24 movie. It’s not for a bunch of pansexual mixologists living in [the Brooklyn neighbourhood of] Bed-Stuy. This is a wide release for normal American people who like cool movies."
Cool movies. The Studio satirises Hollywood while also letting it in on the joke, and there is an optimistic love of cinema driving this series — it is, for instance, more romantic and less bitter than The Franchise (JioHotstar). That love goes a long way. In one episode, a few surgeons go on about how people don’t actually “need" movies, to which Rogen breaks into a screed about how all hospital rooms come with TV screens. In another, Ramy Youssef talks about the bleak state of theatrical releases and says “every trailer feels like a Kickstarter now."
It takes madness to make movies. The great Catherine O’Hara, playing a former studio head, doles out wisdom throughout the series. Speaking about directors who accord too much personal importance to a scene, she nonchalantly says “They project meaning onto the work, even if it’s imperceptible to anyone other than them." Writers, directors, actors will all recognise themselves in these affectionate but pointy barbs. Everyone is jaded, everyone is lamenting how things aren’t the way they used to be, everyone is hoping that somehow passion (for vision or for profit) will see them through.
“Nobody knows anything," William Goldman famously declared in his 1983 memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade. With those three words, Goldman (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid and All The President’s Men) summed up the industry’s dirty little secret: that no one, not cigar-chomping execs, not market-research fiends, not even revered directors with Cannes credentials, can truly predict what will succeed. After watching surefire films stumble and dismissed oddities hailed as classics, this was a frustrated yet gleeful confession from a man who had seen it all. With this one quote, he undressed the emperor, leaving Hollywood naked, confused — and still somehow greenlighting sequels.
Heavy lies the head that wears the studio crown. The first thing Matt Remick does is to kill one of his hero’s passion projects. “I love movies," he says in the first episode, “but now I have the fear that my job is to ruin them." Over the next nine episodes of this consistently entertaining comedy, he struggles with artistic and commercial intent, and his position feels increasingly and hilariously thankless — although he remains obscenely well paid. All who glitter are not Goldman.
Streaming tip of the week:
Novelist turned screenwriting rockstar William Goldman’s films All The President’s Men, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, and The Princess Bride can be rented on Apple TV and Amazon Video.
