“Millions are to be grabbed out here,” Herman J. Mankiewicz wrote Ben Hecht in 1926, “and your only competition is idiots.” Here was Hollywood, in particular the picture business, and Hecht, a former journalist and already the co-author of “The Front Page” and other plays, would take him up on it, writing or co-writing the screenplays for “Scarface,” “Nothing Sacred,” “Twentieth Century,” “Notorious” and “Wuthering Heights.” But he always had a bad word for the movies.
The idiots are in something not very much like control in “The Studio,” a terrific new series from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (“Superbad,” “Pineapple Express,” et al.) along with Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez, and directed throughout by Rogen and Goldberg. Premiering Wednesday on Apple TV+, it stars Rogen as Matt Remick, a creative executive who, after 22 years working for the fictional Continental Studios, finds himself suddenly, and one might well say improbably, in charge of the place when his former boss, Patty Leigh (Catherine O’Hara, who has happily decided to stick around television after “Schitt’s Creek”), is fired by newish Chief Executive Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston). The deal rests on Matt’s willingness to get behind Mill’s new IP acquisition — Kool-Aid — because “at Continental we don’t make films, we make movies — movies that people want to pay to see.” But having told Variety that his goal was to “revive cinema and make bold choices,” the news about Kool-Aid makes Matt a laughing stock.
Seth Rogen plays Matt Remick, whose former boss Patty Leigh (Catherine O’Hara) agrees to stick around for a production deal.
(Apple)
Griffin Mill is also the name of the murderous studio executive Tim Robbins plays in “The Player,” though whether he is meant to actually be that character, worse for wear 30 years on, is left to your imagination, if you happen to notice it all. Like most movies about the picture business, “The Player,” which premiered in 1992 — the same year as “The Larry Sanders Show,” which shared its strategy of integrating real-world stars upside-down into its fictional universe, an invention much copied since, including by “The Studio” — casts a jaundiced eye on its subject.
To S.J. Perelman, who co-wrote two Marx Brothers pictures and “Around the World in 80 Days,” Hollywood was “a dreary industrial town controlled by hoodlums of enormous wealth, the ethical sense of a pack of jackals, and taste so degraded that it befouled everything it touched.” In a strictly monetary sense, Hollywood was good to Perelman — it also gave him subject matter for his comic essays and playlets — but it has been very good to Rogen and Goldberg, who seem to have little trouble getting pictures made. Their mischievous, vulgar entertainments are essentially mainstream, though this may just be because their movies have redefined what is mainstream — “movies,” not “films.”
As these backstage movies and shows are made by insiders, one assumes there’s some truth to them, though the implication is that, in seeing things how they are, the creators somehow float above the fray. It’s also true that ego and incompetence are well-established tropes in movies about the movies, and that in a comedy, ego and incompetence count for more than selfless competence. (My own inside experience of the picture business stops with sitting in an office and being asked if I’d like something to drink. That, and the Universal tour. Both experiences are quite pleasant.)
If we regard Matt’s promise to Mill to play to the lowest common denominator as a Faustian bargain, it’s not one that seems to have any long-term consequences, only scrambling in the moment to keep his job and a modicum of self-respect. Not at all sure he’s the man for the job he so desperately craved — or that this is the job for the man, spiritually speaking — Matt is lonely and anxious and needy to the point of embarrassment, trying to ensure he gets thanked at the Golden Globes by monkeying with the teleprompter. (You will cringe.) He lives in fear — of being humiliated, of not being liked, of disappointing his parents, of confrontation — his disinclination to give Ron Howard a note on the length of his movie occupies one episode. The artists don’t trust but only humor him; he is merely a bag of money, or a boulder that stands in their way, or a golden retriever pawing at their leg while they’re trying to work.
The series features many cameos, including director Ron Howard, who plays a version of himself.
(Apple)
Aiding and abetting Matt are the continually buzzing, buzzed Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz), formerly in imagined competition for studio head but still the closest thing he has to a friend; Quinn Hackett (Chase Sui Wonders), the young, hungry assistant Matt promoted into his old job; and Maya Mason (Kathryn Hahn), the profane head of marketing, and the person who most understands what can and can’t be done. All throw themselves into their parts as from a high balcony; O’Hara is especially brilliant in her first scene, distraught and angry and sad but still capable of improving on Matt’s offer of a production deal. Real Hollywood people include Howard, Martin Scorsese, Sarah Polley, Charlize Theron, Anthony Mackie, Paul Dano, Greta Lee, Adam Scott, Zac Efron, Ice Cube, Dave Franco and Zoë Kravitz. Rhea Perlman plays Matt’s mother.
“The Studio” wants to celebrate the movies even as it lampoons the circumstances of their creation; this is a loud, fast, knockabout comedy that charges along like a Mack Sennett two-reeler, much of it shot in long continuous takes as tribal drums pound on the soundtrack. The seasonal arc might be described as “cumulative episodic,” in which discrete stories incidentally detail the assembly of a slate of pictures. Matt, dating a pediatric oncologist, goes to a fundraiser where he defends the movies against outsiders who declare, “It’s all superheroes and fighter pilots” and ask, “Have you seen ‘The Bear’?”; Sal and Quinn war to get their pictures made; the gang goes to the Golden Globes; casting the Kool-Aid movie raises the question of not wanting to be or, at any rate, “seem” racist; the mystery of a missing reel of film is presented as film noir, with Rogen in a fedora and trench coat, “narrating” into a tape recorder. (I didn’t notice whether the episode itself was shot on film, though in the spirit of metafictional self-reference, it should have been.)
It all comes together in the two-part finale, a breakneck farce set at a Las Vegas trade show, where the studio’s upcoming films are teased and in which everyone goes to extremes; Kravitz and Cranston are especially hilarious, and “hilarious” is a word I save for special occasions. Irony gives way — partway — to sincerity as Matt will come to understand it’s not all about him and the series goes out on a closing number that will mean something special to those who remember Disney’s Carousel of Progress. We know this is cheesy, but we choose to believe in it, to be moved by it. Which is, after all, just what the movies do.
