Can you be a “cool” friend to your colleagues and their boss at the same time? This question is at the core of a truly chaotic episode of television, the weakest of the first season of this (mostly excellent) show largely because it gets to 11 too quickly and stays there for a very long time. Having said that, there are still several great comedic beats in this chapter (many of them courtesy of Dave Franco).
You may be asking a reasonable question: What the hell is CinemaCon? Once known as ShoWest, it’s an exhibition put on by the National Association of Theatre Owners (a very different NATO) in Las Vegas every year, an event at which studios basically show off their trailers and clips to convince theater owners and members that they’re going to be swimming in money because of the creative decisions that they’ve made. Taking place in Sin City each spring, it’s the perfect place for Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg to set the show’s two-part season finale and put all of Matt Remick’s flaws in a bright spotlight.
As with most episodes of The Studio, Matt’s journey through this nightmare starts with nothing but promise. Continental is planning to show off their most robust slate of programming to date. And to be honest, if Continental’s presentation were from a real studio like Sony or Warner Bros., it would be legitimately impressive. They have a prestige project that feels likely for awards season in Sarah Polley’s The Silver Lake (Patty’s passion project), an adaptation of a hit-book franchise in Blackwing, Ron Howard’s likely-recut Alphabet City, and, of course, Nicholas Stoller’s The Kool-Aid Movie!, the tentpole film that will drive the entire studio. The presentation is going to climax with the return of Griffin Mill, which means Bryan Cranston gets to come back and cause some chaos, which he does in ways that Walter White fans couldn’t really imagine.
The wheels start to come off when Cranston’s Mill tells Matt that the reason he’s a bit surly is that the board of Continental is considering selling the studio to Amazon. The only way they can avoid being sold “to a tech company” is to wow them so much at CinemaCon that the board reverses course. And here’s where the core of Matt Remick’s personality crisis comes into play. Most people would cancel the plans to party with an “old school Hollywood buffet” (meaning drugs) in a Vegas hotel suite if they heard that everything that they have ever worked for is possibly in jeopardy the next morning. But Matt Remick needs to be liked more than he needs to be a success. He clearly has generational wealth—just look at the shots of his house this season—but he always responds instantly and irrationally when he thinks he might do something that isn’t “cool.” Canceling an all-night rager because you’re afraid of a presentation to theatre owners? That’s not money, baby.
And so Matt takes the mushrooms that he bought for the first time and puts them in the buffet at his party at the lavish Venetian hotel, one of the best on the Strip. Of course, everyone who’s seen a comedy knows that Matt is going to get the dosage wrong, which leads to everyone spiraling out to different degrees. Worst of all, Griffin, who Matt learns is actually in his eighties, gets higher than anyone possibly should ever be. Matt is getting nauseous, everyone is getting paranoid, and then the roller-coaster picks up speed. It turns out that Matt thought 2/8ths of a gram were in each dose when it was 2/8ths of an ounce, leading to some real Hunter S. Thompson shit. When Zoë Kravitz gets to the party and chows down a few shroom brownies, it gets even more mind-bending. Franco is so funny here, whether he’s cheering on Zoë puking in her purse or talking about Griffin eating nacho cheese with his hands.
They get Zoë somewhere safe and try and track down Griffin, following the trail of nacho cheese to find him in the casino with a headband of glowing penises and a lobster in his hands. He’ll eventually get ice cream, fall on a gondola, and end up in front of the Venetian, where the totally sober Patty sells him out, calling the Hedda Hopper of the 2020s to give him the scoop. There’s no high quite like vengeance.
It’s all so remarkably ludicrous, but the chaos doesn’t build like the best episodes of The Studio as much as scream at viewers for 20 to 25 minutes. As soon as the drugs kick in, this episode is non-stop, loud idiocy, which leads to some funny bits but nowhere near the intellectual hum of the top installments of the first season. It’s kind of insane to say that an episode this funny is the season’s weak point, but here we are.
That said, it’s worth noting how smartly The Studio built to this episode, laying the groundwork for not just the various projects that Matt and his team were working on to have ready to present at CinemaCon but revealing their character flaws along the way. Again, nothing is as poisonous to Matt Remick as being considered uncool. It’s the story of a man who wants to have it both ways: being the coolest guy in the room and the most successful businessman at the same time. One could even say that the overall theme of the show has been to highlight the impossibility of that. There’s nothing less cool than real show business.
Stray observations
- • Wonder who Matthew Belloni is? The host of the podcast The Town has become a power player when it comes to industry news and gossip.
- • The dosing of people at a party who don’t know that they’re taking drugs reminded me of this horrible story from the wrap party for Titanic, where someone drugged people with PCP.
- • There’s an amazing shot with all the fake posters for the movies within the universe of The Studio. How long before they start selling those in the real world?
- • Sal saying “you barely smoke weed” to Seth Rogen feels like a meta joke.
- • When Matt reaches for classic films that Quinn hasn’t seen, his choices are amazing, including Mannequin and Summer School. Not only are those funny titles to drop but it’s almost foreshadowing given how much this team is going to have to crib from another comedy of that era in the final chapter: Weekend At Bernie’s.
