How Real is ‘The Studio’? An Actual Former Studio Executive Has a Few Notes.

It’s a fine line, really, between craven and stupid. Studio executives are presumed most often to be the latter—gibbering idiots whose total absence of taste is exceeded only by their fathomless hunger for money. Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder, Jack Lipnick in Barton Fink, Griffin Mill in The Player: the rapacious industry machers we see onscreen are generally taken as an accurate reflection of reality. If anything, these characters, satirical figures all, might seem to undersell the reality. Surely the people who greenlight movies are even dumber than this, right? How else do you explain a world in which our gifted filmmakers are forced to make movies about children’s toys, or to strap themselves to the wheel of the MCU, instead of getting to make their versions of Five Easy Pieces or The Rules of the Game?

Speaking as a former studio executive myself, I get it. I’ve been in the room to see some truly dumb decisions get made. In fact, I’ve made some of those decisions myself. (Wanna meet the first person ever to pass on the rights to a novel called Fight Club? Swing by my house, I’ll mix you a martini while you point and laugh.) But it’s an underappreciated fact that what distinguishes these bean-counting bozos generally isn’t bad taste or damaged frontal lobes but, rather, simple fear. These people are chickenshits! (In fairness, you might be too if your job was the equivalent of being handed five hundred million in cash, a blowtorch, a can of gasoline, and a box of donuts, and being told to do something with it, using only the tools available.)

But it’s this, precisely, that makes Apple TV+’s The Studio so refreshing. Newly elevated Continental Studios head Matt Remick, excellently embodied here by Seth Rogen, isn’t a moron, some tasteless vulgarian who wouldn’t know William Wyler from William Friedkin. He’s a guy who genuinely loves movies, and who wants the creative community to know it. He’s the filmmaker’s friend—or he would be if he wasn’t also such a hopeless toady, terrified of looking bad in a meeting, saying no to a director, or telling Ron Howard the inscrutable hour-long coda he’s tacked on to his otherwise excellent urban thriller Alphabet City needs to be cut. (The vulgarian in this case is Remick’s corporate boss, played by Bryan Cranston, whose first directive is to tell Remick he needs to fast-track a Kool-Aid Man movie.)

It’s a fun premise—but I have to admit that, like any good bean-counter, I went in a little wary. What’s your second act? Altman aside, Hollywood satires never work, do they? I groaned, loud enough for my dog to give me a troubling look (it was almost a “you’re-about-to-get-fired” look, actually) when Cranston’s character turned out to be named, alas, ‘Griffin Mill,’ just like Tim Robbins’ heartless studio VP in The Player—a broad wink that would seem clever only to a millennial exec who’s only ever seen movies made before 1995 under heavy duress. But Cranston’s scene-gobbling impulses are put to excellent, and judicious, use here: we feel him a lot more than we see him, and by the same token the show’s initial One Good Joke—that Matt’s endless efforts to ingratiate himself to talent only make him ever more despised—successfully branches out into a world where both Matt and his various satellites and subordinates (particularly Chase Sui Wonders as Matt’s ex-assistant-turned-ambitious-development-girl and an excellent Ike Barinholtz as Matt’s second-in-command) are worthy of both our ridicule and our affection. Which, of course, presents a problem. Aren’t we supposed to loathe these people, or, at the very least, view them as barely worthy of our contempt? They’re studio executives, people who (what kind of executive would I be if I didn’t have a note of my own?) don’t deserve to live, let alone make us like them.

Truth be told, I’ve known—and liked—a lot of studio executives in my day. My former boss, the late Laura Ziskin, seemed to me as likeable as they come. Amy Pascal? I liked her too. Scott Rudin, who was President of Production at 20th Century Fox before he became a successfu producer? Well, Scott may have famously had his anger management issues—and he exercised them on people I loved—but my respect for his ample intelligence remains, and I’ve never been immune to his considerable, if selectively exercised, personal charms either. But before you accuse me of being a bad judge of character, someone as morally vacant as Griffin Mill (the original Tim Robbins iteration in The Player) just know it’s because these people love (or loved, in Laura’s case) movies, and understand them. They were and are passionate about cinema, and whatever misjudgments and mistakes they may have made, these people aren’t risible or foolish.