The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood

Hey, before you listen to this week’s episode, do me a favor and watch the short film we’re going to be discussing. It’s only 17 minutes long, and if you’re between the age of 31 and 45 or so, I think it’ll trip a lot of your nostalgia circuits. (It’s fun for all ages, but Yourgo said this was the age range that best responded to the movie.) Here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snpT2i7B6Mk Fun right? OK, now you can listen to the episode. It’s a good chat about the nature of online trolling and a simpler time when we believed our votes (for the top songs on Total Request Live) really mattered. If you enjoyed our discussion, share all this with a friend, would you?

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Nate Soares to talk about his new book, cowritten with Eliezer Yudkowsky, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. It’s a fascinating book—some will say fearmongering and sensationalist; I, frankly, think they’re overly optimistic about our ability to constrain the development of general intelligence in AI—in large part because of how it’s structured. Each chapter is preceded by a fable of sorts about the nature of intelligence and the desires of intelligent beings that look and think very differently from humans. The point in each of these passages is less that AI will want to eliminate humanity and more that it might do so incidentally, through natural processes of resource acquisition. This made me think about how AI is typically portrayed in film; it is all too often a Terminator-style scenario, where the intelligence is antagonistic in human ways and for human reasons. We talked some about how storytellers could do a better job of thinking about AI as it might actually exist versus how it might be like us; Ex Machina is a movie that came in for special discussion due to the thoughtful nature of the treatment of its robotic antagonist’s desires. If this episode made you think, I hope you share it with a friend!

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Matt Roller, the creator and showrunner of the new Netflix animated show Haunted Hotel. We discussed his background in television, how it helped prepare him for the long (shockingly long!) process of creating a full season of animated television, and why he is reading the comments. The show is live on Netflix now and I hope you check it out … and give it the preferred two (not one!) thumbs up, for the reasons Roller laid out in this episode. And if you enjoyed THIS episode, I hope you share it with a friend! (I could also use a thumbs up or two myself, you know.)

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Tony Gilroy to discuss his work on Andor, the hit Disney+ series that’s a prequel to Rogue One but has ambitions beyond telling the backstory of the Death Star. It is, in a very real way, a TV show about our moment and the mounting tension felt throughout the political order: from Imperial troops on the streets of civilian cities attempting to provoke conflict to Luthen Rael’s (Stellan Skarsgård) campaign of violent resistance, one can’t help but draw parallels to this increasingly fraught point in American history.

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Rep. Laura Friedman, the congresswoman from the area we colloquially refer to as “Hollywood,” to discuss her push for a national film tax credit of the sort used by the United Kingdom and other countries to lure production of movies back to the United States. We discuss her career in the TV and film industry before her move into politics, how DC is not unlike Los Angeles, and why the U.S. needs a national film tax credit more than a cost-increasing tariff on movies. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Tim League, one of the founders of the Alamo Drafthouse and the man behind Metro Private Cinemas in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. It’s a pretty cool concept—half fine dining, half private cinema auditorium—and I was excited to discuss the evolution of movie theaters as both viewing and gastronomic experiences. League is planning to open the theater in a few weeks, and they’re accepting reservations now; you can check out the offerings here. If you go, let me know: I’ll be very jealous, as it will likely be a while before I am able to make it up to New York again. But when I do, it’s the first stop on my tour of the city.

On this week’s episode, I’m thrilled to be joined by Toby Huss, star of the summer’s most surprising smash hit, Weapons, as well as the rebooted King of the Hill on Hulu and Americana, in theaters and VOD now. We talked about all those, plus his weird and lovely photography book, American Sugargristle, which you can (and should!) order here. Toward the end of the episode, I went full Chris Farley and did a “Hey, remember The Adventures of Pete and Pete and Carnivale? You were awesome in those” segment. Luckily, Mr. Huss was insightful and, frequently, quite poignant while discussing his work as an artist across multiple disciplines, from acting to music to photography. If you enjoyed the episode—and I hope you did—please share it with a friend!

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by New York Magazine’s Bilge Ebiri, who has an enormous, career-spanning interview with Ron Howard in the latest issue. We discussed what makes a Ron Howard movie a “Ron Howard Movie,” the incredibly under-appreciated Thirteen Lives, and that movie about J.D. Vance. And then we talked a bit about his fascinating history of a key element of film technology in the latest issues of Mubi’s quarterly film journal, Notebook. Why is 24 frames per second the accepted frame rate? And why does our eye revolt when the image, paradoxically, gets closer to “reality”? If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

I asked David Poland (read his Substack!) to come on this week to pick his brain about the state of the big studio comedy, a genre that has diminished in recent years as international grosses became more important and a lot of comedy releases shifted to streaming in an effort to reduce advertising costs. Which led to us talking about the states of various genres (including horror and superhero pictures) as well as the state of play around the world. If you learned something this week, I hope you share this episode with a friend!

On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by Puck media correspondent Julia Alexander to discuss the absurdities of Jubilee. You might not recognize the name of the company but you’ve probably seen some of their clips; most recently, Mehdi Hasan went up against 20 self-described far-right conservatives that resulted in at least one of the participants losing his job after he proudly declared himself an autocrat and downplayed Nazi crimes during the Holocaust. Is this brand of debate spectacle lucrative? Maybe! Is it bad for society? Undoubtedly. We examine why on this week’s episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend!

On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by Crunchyroll EVP Mitchel Berger to talk about anime’s increasing popularity with those yearning for community. We reference a report on the state of anime several times; you can read it here. The long and the short of it, though, is that anime is increasingly popular with Gen Z and Gen Alpha, which will likely come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the wall of manga in their local Barnes and Noble. From theatrical rollouts in the United States and around the world to the 17-million-subscriber-strong Crunchyroll streaming service to the sold-out Anime Expo in Los Angeles earlier this month, it’s an enormous segment of the market that holds a deep attachment to younger audiences. If you enjoyed this week’s episode, I hope you share it with a friend!

On this week’s episode, I talked to Christian Swegal, the writer-director of the new film Sovereign, about his new film and its focus on the cult-like behavior of the Sovereign Citizen movement. We discussed Nick Offerman’s commanding lead performance, how you adapt a movie with an ending and setting as tragic as this one, and the difficulty of finding compassion even for those who seem to deserve it least. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to check out Sovereign, which is in theaters and on VOD now. And please, share this with a friend! Movies like this don’t have huge ad budgets; they need word of mouth to thrive. It’s a tough story with some great performances by Offerman, Jacob Tremblay, and Dennis Quaid. If you want to see something a little different from the standard franchise fare flooding the multiplex, you have to support movies like Sovereign.

Always glad to talk to the Entertainment Strategy Guy (read him here!) about the state of play in the world of streaming and beyond. Among the topics discussed this week: Whether or not F1: The Movie is a hit (and what being a “hit” means for a $200 million original for Apple as opposed to a different type of movie for a different type of studio); whether F1, the sport, is a butts-in-seats phenomenon in the United States; why the streaming wars are tightening and other streaming services are closing the originals gap with Netflix; and how sports rights are going to shake out over the next few years as the ESPN streaming service comes online and regional sports networks start to dwindle. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Daniel Drezner—cohost of the Space the Nation podcast with Ana Marie Cox and proprietor of the Drezner’s World Substack—to discuss the eternal popularity of zombies (most recently via the hit movie 28 Years Later, which I reviewed here) and the continued relevance of his book, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, which is now in its third edition. We chatted about the ways different political theories might confront waves of the undead and discussed how this book can help explain basic problems of international relations to even lay audiences. If you enjoyed this episode, I hope you share it with a friend! (And, as a bonus, here’s a link to a video starring Dan, me, and Across the Movie Aisle’s Alyssa Rosenberg that asked what Star Wars would have looked like if it had been shot in the style of Ken Burns’s Civil War. Enjoy!)

On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by Bart Weiss to discuss the evolution of the iPhone-shot movie from Tangerine to 28 Years Later and his recent book, Smartphone Cinema: Making Great Films with Your Mobile Phone. You have the power to make a movie in the palm of your hand: will you use it? If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Lane Brown of New York magazine to discuss his feature on an increasingly rare phenomenon: the film or TV show shot in Los Angeles. From foreign tax credits to the cost of permits, Los Angeles is getting more expensive to shoot in, meaning that more productions are moving out of Los Angeles altogether. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to read Lane’s piece. And please, share this with a friend!

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by New York Magazine features writer Lila Shapiro to discuss her feature story on the growing utilization of generative AI by Hollywood studios to cut costs and speed up production times. From a party hosted by an AI studio to the work being done by Runway to the growing sense that, hey man, this is just The Future, it seems like AI is, as several folks in the piece put it, “inevitable.” If you enjoyed this episode or learned something in it, please share it with a friend!

On this week’s episode, I strayed a bit from Hollywood to talk to David C. Lowery of the bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven about his new album, Fathers, Sons, and Brothers. You can check out the album here and peruse the accompanying Substack here. We had a fascinating chat about how the industry has changed over the last 40 years (for better and worse), how folks discover new music, and how his experiences growing up helped shape his musical tastes and self-conception as an American. If you enjoyed the episode, I hope you check out his album and his Substack. And please share this with a friend!

I’m joined by Ann Foley this week to discuss her work as costume designer on the hit HBO show The Last of Us. From sourcing vintage clothes to weaving the infected’s fungal-explosions in with the clothes they were wearing when they died to her graduate school on the sets of Agents of SHIELD, Ann’s insights into translating the world of the game to the world of the screen are pretty fascinating. At the end of the episode, Ann mentions Ellie’s Converse sneakers; you can see what Bella Ramsey scribbled on them here. And if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

I’m joined by Matthew Specktor, author of The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood. Part novel, part memoir, and entirely entertaining, Matthew’s book is a revealing look at life in Hollywood when you’re not on the A-list but occasionally adjacent to it. In addition to relating the drama that makes any family intriguing, Matthew’s book is a keen look at Hollywood in a time of flux, as the rise of the super agencies and the internationalization of the Hollywood studios radically altered the American cinematic landscape. If you enjoyed the episode, I hope you check out his book. And please, share this with a friend!