Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste
Apple TV+’s The Studio is a strange blend of very real Hollywood touchstones and some blatant fan-fiction stuff that seems to exist largely to make actual film executives paranoid. (THR ran a piece recently purporting to name which real-world executives Seth Rogen’s Matt Remick and his fellow suits are most likely to be based on, and it’s a pretty ridiculous pile of guesswork and names you’ve only dimly glimpsed in credits; take it as read that they’re mostly all just an amalgamation of every soulless or stupid thing anyone in power at a studio has ever said to Rogen or his friends.) All of the creatives that pop up in the show, though, are real: No fake actors, writers, or directors, just actual people playing themselves. It’s what gives the show some of its fascinating sense of outrageousness—where else are you going to see Martin Scorsese break down sobbing, or Ron Howard playing a mean-spirited tyrant?—but it also imposes some pretty serious restrictions on how the show gets made.
Per IndieWire, Rogen and co-creator Evan Goldberg got into the topic of hyper-specific cameos on a recent episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, noting, for instance, that the selection of directors Owen Kline and Parker Finn for a recent episode—where both are in contention for a an obvious cheap knock-off of Finn’s Smile movies—wasn’t just a matter of finding some vaguely known names to slot into the script. “Not only are they famous people, but the role they occupy in Hollywood is very specific for each person,” Rogen noted, saying that, with Finn, “There’s him and no one else. We needed the director of a horror franchise that is replicable in another, shittier way. And we were like, who does Smile? Parker Finn! We thought, M3GAN maybe, but it’s not quite the same thing. What we liked about Smile is that he kept doing them. If Parker Finn had said no, I don’t know what we would have done. But that happened a lot — there were a lot of people who, if they said no, we’d have to reimagine the whole episode to some degree.”
That is some incredibly narrow casting, and it’s reportedly caused a couple of problems for the series, even though most people Rogen and Goldberg have approached have been game. “The only people we didn’t get,” Goldberg noted, “Were [due to] a couple scheduling issues, and then there were two people who just fundamentally were not interested in playing themselves.” Still, there’s at least one script for the series that had to be just straight-up tossed out (or at least held in reserve for season 2), for no other reason than the perfect celebrities weren’t available. “None of them could do it when we needed them,” Rogen revealed. “So we literally didn’t shoot the episode.”
