When a satire of the movie industry takes a big swing, it can succeed only if it connects in a piercingly funny and bold way. It has to offer us an eye-opening new take on how Hollywood works (or, increasingly, doesn’t work). And that’s the bar “The Studio” has set for itself. I think Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Apple TV+ series about the inner workings of a contemporary movie studio triumphantly clears that bar. “The Studio” isn’t just addictively entertaining — it’s wickedly perceptive. It has a bead on the film business today like nothing you’ve seen. Yet the series, which just aired its sixth episode (there are four more to go), has come in for some dismissals. That’s partly because of its in-your-face style, which some find obnoxious (the rushing-camera single takes, the jazzy percussive score that plays under the scenes and helps give them their manic drive).
Yet it’s also because there are viewers who look at the show and see something broad and derivative rather than new and insightful. I’m here to tell you that they’re wrong! But since “The Studio” bears the imprint of so many iconic antecedents (Robert Altman’s “The Player,” most obviously, and also “Entourage” and “Birdman”), if you give the series just a superficial glance you might not see what’s so scaldingly original about it.
Matt Remick, the anxious, fulminating, eager-beaver Continental Studios head played by Rogen as equal parts dick and dork, has the essential quality you’d expect to see in a person of his position. He knows how the game works and he wants to win it — to launch megahits, to be a player’s player. Yet Matt is also fundamentally and hilariously deluded. He views himself as a Man Who Cares About Movies. He keeps jabbering on about the good old glory days, about his commitment to shooting on film, about the prestige projects he wants to make. He thinks he loves cinema, the same way that he loves his vintage Corvette (which he sells to Zac Efron for $2 million).
But actually, he doesn’t. What Matt loves is the signifiers of cinema. He’s a wide-eyed starfucker crossed with an aging fanboy in a suit. If you listen to him, his taste is total crap (the films he looks back on as “classics” include “Mannequin” and “Encino Man”). Okay, he’s a commercial vulgarian, hooked on the junk of his youth. So what else is new? But here’s the thing: Matt is so wrapped up in the idea of himself as a “creative” studio head who wants cool filmmakers to like him that he’s the first movie executive in a Hollywood satire whose entire personality is performative.
You could say that about each and every character in “The Studio.” Sal (Ike Barinholtz) the depraved snake of a production VP, Quinn (Chase Sui Wonders) the fake-ingenuous creative executive, Maya (Kathryn Hahn) the marketing guru who’s like a walking id of gonzo publicity malarkey — everything that comes out of their mouths is calculated and political and probably a lie, never more so than when they’re being “sincere.”
That’s true, as well, of the directors and actors who appear on “The Studio” as themselves. They’re lying through their teeth, whether it’s Anthony Mackie buttering up Ron Howard, his director on “Alphabet City,” a film that looks like an abysmal “Taxi Driver” knockoff meets “Midnight Run” (and that’s before it reaches the endless motel sequence Matt spends an entire episode working up the nerve to ask Howard to cut), or Zoë Kravitz calculating the most micro “spontaneous” reaction to her Golden Globes win right along with the deal points for her next project. The juicy premise of “The Studio” is that every character speaks with the casual treachery of a corporate sociopath. Even in the great episode where Sal and Quinn engage in a war of backstabbing, which culminates in the two raging at each other and Sal bursting into tears to save his career, everything that happens — the screaming matches, the crying fit — isn’t what it seems. It’s all positioning.
And this sets up the killer joke of the series, which is that Hollywood, in the age of social media, has become a place where the lust for positioning is so insanely all-consuming that it has crossed over to the movies themselves. In “The Studio,” every film on the Continental slate is less a movie than an assemblage of signifiers. That’s true of the studio’s bad films, like “Kool-Aid,” a franchise blockbuster that’s supposed to do for the Kool-Aid Man what “Barbie” did for Barbie. (The episode in which the film somehow ends up with an all-Black cast is an exquisite study in how “woke” performative anxiety builds on itself.) And it’s true of the studio’s “good” films, like Howard’s cheesy ’70s gloss or Sarah Polley’s romantic drama that ends with a look-ma-no-hands single-take “oner” as pointless as it is tricky to execute (mostly because Matt, on set, keeps getting in the way, and the only reason he wanted to be there in the first place was to congratulate himself for backing a movie with a oner in it).
Hollywood, and inspired Hollywood satire, has always spun around the primal tension between art and commerce. In the best of times, a studio head like Robert Evans will believe in both those things. In the worst of times, filmmakers battle executives who believe in test scores and following “what the audience wants.” But “The Studio” is about a new state of mind. Matt Remick thinks like a suit programmed by AI, but part of the programming is that he really does think he wants to be Robert Evans. His way of doing business is to cosplay his loyalty to the very values he exists to destroy. “The Studio” says: When this is what the people in charge are up to, how can the movies themselves be doing anything but cosplaying at quality?
From Variety US