The Studio scrapped an entire episode because they couldn't land the perfect Hollywood cameo
"None of them could do it when we needed them," Seth Rogen said of his celebrity picks. "So we literally didn’t shoot the episode."
Ron Howard and Anthony Mackie in The Studio, Photo: Apple TV+
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.