In the pilot of Apple TV+’s The Studio, the half-hour comedy points the lens back at Hollywood, taking aim at its foibles and follies with as much frequency as Seth Rogen’s Matt Remick — the bumbling yet passionate newly appointed head of the fictional Continental Studios — shoots himself in the foot.
The first installment sees Matt struggling to gain his C-(suite) legs; in his frenetic attempts to please everybody, he accidentally kills Martin Scorsese’s final film about Jonestown, driving the auteur to tears and leading Charlize Theron to exile him from the hottest party in Tinseltown (both excellent cameos). In the second, the newly minted top brass fumbles his way through a daylight-dependent indie shoot starring Greta Gerwig and featuring a “oner,” which reflects itself in the way the episode itself is shot.
The fast-paced satire, co-created by Rogen and longtime partner Evan Goldberg — along with Pete Huyck (Veep), Alex Gregory and Frida Perez — explores the tension inherent in filmmaking as both an art form and a business. As a team of infighting executives (Chase Sui Wonders, Kathryn Hahn, Ike Barinholtz, as well as Bryan Cranston and Catherine O’Hara) at Continental form their slate in an ever-changing movie ecosystem, they succumb to both the glittering promises of success and dooming pressures of career catastrophe.
Below, the multi-Emmy-nominated executive producing, writing and directing duo behind fare from Superbad to The Boys chat with Deadline about the “high stakes” world of entertainment and what inspired them to hit a home run with their inside baseball workplace comedy.
DEADLINE: In the pilot, your character Matt Remick kills Scorsese’s final film, and in the show there’s this frenetic energy and stress of the Hollywood ecosystem informing his decision as an executive coming up against his genuine love of movies. Could you talk about your approach to this show and what made you want to tell the specific story?
EVAN GOLDBERG: All of our best work, pretty much, is based off of real life experience, that we’ve been living this for the last 20 years. All we do is talk about how crazy it is and how silly it is, and how intense it is for something so silly—
SETH ROGEN: How high stakes it feels all the time, how important it is. As we’ve gotten older, we run a company, and it’s not a studio [cannabis lifestyle brand Houseplant], but we find ourselves in moments of deciding which movies to kind of champion and which ones not to and giving directors notes on movies, notes on their edits, and giving actors notes, and having to get people we idolize to work with us, and then being afraid we’re going to disappoint them—
GOLDBERG: and disappointing them.
ROGEN: Yes, and then, actually, just disappointing them, so it really was based on our own kind of experience in Hollywood.
GOLDBERG: Yeah, there’s also the sense that people are always curious about behind the scenes of Hollywood and we very, very, very much felt that besides The Larry Sanders Show, which was a huge inspiration, nothing’s ever done that, nothing’s ever shown you a truly realistic portrayal of any of it.
ROGEN: The Comeback.
GOLDBERG: Ah, yeah, touché.
ROGEN: Doesn’t get enough love, but it’s about something very different.
DEADILINE: Speaking of that, there’s been some shows that have cannibalized Hollywood in this way: Entourage, 30 Rock and more recently Hacks. In addition to The Larry Sanders Show or other previous iterations on the topic, did you look at anything specific, or was it mainly driven by personal experience?
GOLDBERG: It was The Larry Sanders Show, The Player [from 1992]. There’s some inspiration, more visually from Birdman, which is about a play, still not the same.
ROGEN: It’s, again, like the stakes and pressure of putting on good entertainment; I think [Birdman] is something that we looked to for that a lot. But yeah, it mostly was our own very stressful, but not that important lives.
DEADLINE As you said, obviously people are really interested in the inside baseball of it all. Were there any jokes you had to cut or pull punches here and there?
ROGEN & GOLDBERG: No, we just touched on the topics we wanted to. [Laughing]
ROGEN: We, at times, had actors express discomfort in making fun of some of this stuff, and we hired different actors. [Laughing]
GOLDBERG: But most of the actors actually were like, ‘Let’s go harder.’ Not just game, but wanted to go deeper, crazier, get into it.
DEADLINE: Speaking of actors, there’s plenty of cameos in the show, great usages of people viewers already know. I know with The Boys, you had Charlize Theron come in, and she’s here again. Was it a mix of calling in favors, or were people really excited to jump in?
GOLDBERG: Very few favors at this point, we’ve used most of our favors.
ROGEN: Charlize was our biggest favor. [Laughing] I could say Charlize was a favor, but everyone else did it because they liked the role. And we guaranteed that her joke would be funny.
GOLDBERG: And it was!
ROGEN: And she got to hang out with Martin Scorsese.
GOLDBERG: Some people wanted to do it because of the script, some people wanted to do it because they wanted to work with us, some people wanted to do it so they could play with their own personality. Like, everyone kind of had a different reason, but everyone who came was really game to play.
ROGEN: We had never even met a lot of them. I think I’d met Olivia Wilde once or twice, Zoë Kravitz once or twice.
DEADLINE: What’s great about this show is it speaks to the adage that every film is a miracle. Can you speak to how film is always at odds with the business side of things in an ever-changing industry that cannot always or doesn’t want to accommodate good art?
GOLDBERG: I think what you just said is the case from day one of Hollywood, like it’s not a new scenario. It’s always been this way. People who deeply love this art form, and they’re trying to make it work, but it is a business, and the dichotomy is never-ending and difficult.
ROGEN: It’s an industry that’s inherently in conflict with itself, and I think that’s something we’ve come to terms with as people who have dedicated their whole lives to it, basically, but it’s something that causes constant turmoil and crisis and conflict and arguments.
Sometimes people genuinely care about movies, and I think that’s something that’s a big misconception about Hollywood, is that the people who run these studios don’t give a sh– about movies and only care about money. But that’s not true.
GOLDBERG: If they only cared about money, they’d work in finance.
ROGEN: if they only cared about money, they wouldn’t have a job where they have to talk to me on a regular basis. [Laughing] They would have weeded that out a long time ago. And a lot of these people could probably get paid more money working in an actual corporation that didn’t navigate art in any way, shape or form. And so that was something that we’ve honestly always been exposed to. I remember meeting Amy Pascal for the first time, like, ‘Oh, she knows more about movies than anyone I’ve ever met.’ She has an encyclopedic knowledge of filmmaking technique and of structure and of all of it. And that, to me, was not how these people had ever been portrayed. So it was so interesting meeting her and Donna Langley and all these people, like ‘Oh, they love movies as much as I do.’ They just are at the center of this conflict between the corporate pressures and their love of film.
DEADLINE: From the theme to the costuming, there’s a retro style in play. Was that a nod to Old Hollywood, like the Golden Age?
GOLDBERG: Yeah. And just, it’s cool.
ROGEN: I think we learned, when we were doing Superbad, actually, that if you sort of anchor it in a time slightly different than the time it takes place, it gives it a more timeless feel. And Superbad, it was totally [director] Greg Mottola who did it on Superbad, but he gave it this ‘70s vibe from the music to some of the wardrobe and color palette, and I think it is one of the reasons that movie sort of feels like it’s not too anchored in a specific moment in time.
GOLDBERG: And to a lesser degree, but Pineapple Express kind of feels like an ‘80s movie.
ROGEN: Yes, David Gordon Green did the same thing. It was something we saw from the directors we were working with. We’re like, ‘That’s not how we pictured Pineapple Express at all.’And then I remember he was like, ‘Yeah, you should be in a weird, ill-fitting ‘80s suit, and the hair should be kind of ‘80s and it should have this out of time energy to it,’ and so that was a good lesson. Also, we liked this idea that we longed for days of yore and the ‘60s and ‘70s are, if you’re someone who loved film, a great time in Hollywood. There’s the succession with Robert Evans, especially among studio people — David Zaslav literally lives in Robert Evans’s old house, so you kind of idolize that time where it was a little more stylish, everyone dressed a little better, everyone’s car was a little cooler, and that was something that also my character would just idolize so he would want to be a part of it.
GOLDBERG: One other element is we wanted them to seem like a team, those who work at Continental. We had a palette that they could only exist within, more or less. There were some moments we broke out of it, but mostly it just felt like these people were like a sports team.
ROGEN: We liked the idea if you saw them in a big room with a bunch of other Hollywood people, they look different—
GOLDBERG: You’d be like, those are the Continental people.
ROGEN: It’s like they had their own uniform.
GOLDBERG: We should do that at our actual company.
ROGEN: We should just dress like this instead.
DEADLINE: This kind of coordinates.
GOLDBERG: Every blue moon, we show up in the same outfit—
ROGEN: The exact same outfit—
GOLDBERG: and it’s super embarrassing.
ROGEN: Pretty funny.
GOLDBERG: Mostly for you, because I dress like sh–.
ROGEN: [Laughing] I have an upscale version of whatever you’re wearing.
The Studio also touches on the divide between independent, prestige films and big tentpoles. In your career, you’ve kind of done both. What did you want to convey about how the two are often pitted against each other?
GOLDBERG: The thing we talked about a lot is, people are like, ‘Oh, why do they make this IP garbage? Why do they make these little things for theater that shouldn’t be [made]?’ It’s an ecosystem and they need each other and always have to survive, you have to make the tentpoles so you can make three other movies so that one of them can win an award and the other one can play for a long time.
ROGEN: It’s true, like an Emoji Movie allows another three great films, for them to take risks on another few good movies.
GOLDBERG: ‘Cause it’s a company. They gotta make money.
ROGEN: We also talked about how it’s such an allure to try to tick all the boxes. A movie like Oppenheimer comes out and you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s like, original screenplay, writer, an auteur is behind it.’ It makes a billion dollars, literally, and wins Best Picture. Just the fact that it’s possible makes it the obsession of some people, and it’s so hard to do, but you can do it. And I think that was something we talked a lot about with the character, is that he wants to tick all the boxes, and that is why he is in pain all the time. He doesn’t get that you should just make a sh—y movie and then make a good movie; he wants everyone to be successful, cool and viewed as [making] great art, and unless it’s all three of those things, he’s not doing what he wants to do, and that’s not a great place to operate from, but it’s a very tempting place to operate from. We’ve never made it to the biggest movie of the year, but we’ve made movies that sort of tick all those boxes, that are successful and well-regarded and kind of cool and when you do it, it’s all you want, it’s such a good feeling to have done it that I get why you would make bad choices in the pursuit of it.
GOLDBERG: Have we made some bad choices?
ROGEN: Yeah, probably.
GOLDBERG: Oh, no!
DEADLINE: I do think the Martin Scorsese Kool-Aid movie would be incredible though.
ROGEN: Oh, for sure. We asked, I was like, ‘If you had a Jonestown movie would you call it Kool-Aid, for like a $250 million budget?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah.’
GOLDBERG: It’s a cool title.
ROGEN: I know, he’s like it’s a good title. He kept riffing on it. [Martin Scorsese impression]: You can picture it, you start with a little ‘Kool,’ big ‘Aid!’ Little ‘Kool,’ big ‘Aid!’ You cut it real fast.
This interview has been edited and condensed for concision and clarity.
