Like so many who have spent their lives around creatives, especially those of us fortunate enough to have actually been employed by a few, I looked forward to Wednesday’s dropping of the first two episodes of THE STUDIO, a spot-on satire from the fertile minds of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. I’m an unapologetic fan of theirs, having seen their savvy and at least their appreciation for the process that afforded me such access during several meetings they attended while working on an admittedly less ambitious project, the modestly received and niche-appeal Hulu series FUTURE MAN. If for no other reason than the mutual passion of the powers there and at Sony, we somehow coaxed three seasons and 34 episodes out of it, with Rogen’s only significant beef along the way being with my boss’ ill-fated timing of scheduling one of those pow-wows at 9:30 in the morning on April 21st. Even I knew enough about Rogen’s life priorities to know that wasn’t a brilliant move, and our recommendations weren’t the only fully baked elements that attended that particular meeting. But he did laugh at just about dumb joke I attempted, so I suppose it wasn’t a total loss.
And yep, I loved it–maybe not quite as much as the ASSOCIATED PRESS’ Jake Coyle, who held back little praise in his preview:
“The Studio,” the 10-episode series debuting Wednesday on Apple TV+, may be the definitive portrait of contemporary Hollywood. If movies like “Singin’ in the Rain” and “The Player” captured the movie industry in full swagger, “The Studio” belongs to a more desperate chapter where even the all-powerful feel impotent. Studio heads, too, must tolerate conversations with people who haven’t been to the movies in ages, but who loved “The Bear.”
In “The Studio,”…Seth Rogen’s studio chief is more Selina Meyer (“Veep”) than Louis B. Mayer. As much as Rogen’s Matt Remick, head of the fictional Continental Studios, sits in a sought-after seat of power, he’s helpless against larger trends in the film industry. He wants to be making “Chinatown,” but instead his most important task is getting a Kool-Aid movie off the ground. Bryan Cranston’s Continental chief executive asks: Can he do this? “Oh, yeah!”
And as THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER’s Carly Thomas noted in a story dropped earlier this morning, perhaps the reason this resonates is because while perhaps we haven’t seen something quite as ridiculous as a movie devoted to the story of a non-carbonated soft drink, we’ve seen and at times directly dealt with situations and executives that were somewhere close to it:
During a recent appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the star, co-creator and director of Apple TV+’s new Hollywood satire opened up about the show and his character. Colbert circled back to the Platonic actor’s comment about his character saying he got into the movie business because he loves them but that his job is to ruin them. The host proceeded to ask, “Is it true that you once had a Hollywood executive say that to you?”
“Very much so!” Rogen responded. “Me and my partner Evan [Goldberg] were in a meeting early in our career, we were rewriting a movie, and the executive said exactly that. He was giving us notes. We wanted to make it very R-rated and edgy, and he was telling us we couldn’t, and even though he thought it was funny, he hung his head and said exactly that: ‘I got into this because I love movies and now it’s my job to ruin them.” (As for who that executive was, he later confirmed it was Steve Asbell, the current president of 20th Century Studios.)
Colbert also asked if any other “producers or studio people” watching the series have called him up to say, “I know that’s me.” “Yes, I’ve been yelled at three times in the last week,” a laughing Rogen replied. “Some of them are pleased, some of them are not pleased, I will say.”
I wonder if any of them may have been folks who have been dealing with Amazon MGM Studios lately? Because mere hours after Rogen’s inspired but admittedly fictional work was dropped, this breaking news hit many of the same trades, with the intrepid Nellie Andreeva of DEADLINE among the quickest to hit “send”:
In a surprise move, Jennifer Salke is stepping down as head of Amazon MGM Studios after seven years. The news was just shared internally by Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios head Mike Hopkins in a memo, which you can read below. Salke is segueing to a first-look film and TV producing deal with the studio.
This is the first top executive change at one of the global streamers in years, since the 2020 shakeup at Netflix.
Former NBC Entertainment President Salke took the reins of then-Amazon Studios in 2018 after a lengthy, very public search, in which some of the top female TV executives in the business were considered. Features was a new area for Salke — a veteran TV executive who worked at 20th TV before NBC — when she arrived at Amazon, but she took to it and continued to oversee film even after the acquisition of MGM, which, in part, led to the exit of Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy.
“Took to it” may be an overly kind assessment of what Salke did during her tenure, To be fair, she actually did have some decent results with movies, as the clearly biased Andreeva was quick to note:
Relying on acquisitions early on, Amazon MGM Studios under Salke emerged as a major movie producer straddling theatrical and digital distribution. Some of the popular movie titles to hit the platform during Salke’s tenure include The Idea of You, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Saltburn, Road House and Spanish franchise Culpa Mia/Tuya as well as big-budget holiday release Red One, which transitioned to streaming after a modest theatrical run.
But the intrepid one’s seasoned colleague Mike Fleming, Junior yesterday noted that those modest wins fo Salke paled in comparison to her very big loss of trust:
Her inability to mesh with the gatekeepers of the James Bond movies might well have sealed her fate. While her exit from the executive suites officially is being regarded as an exit by choice into a producing deal, sources in town say it is closer to a firing. It was evident Salke had lost luster in the executive suite when she largely was absent from the deals that brought in Amy Pascal and David Heyman as the new producers of the next iteration of James Bond films, sources said. Those deals were made by veteran Warner Bros film executive Courtenay Valenti, who came in under Salke as Head of Film, Streaming and Theatrical. I’ve heard that a condition of Pascal and Heyman signing on was that they report to Valenti, and not Salke, even before the latter lost her job.
The 007 keepers of the flame, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, sold creative control over the franchise for around $1 billion in February. This was after Amazon MGM paid way above value when it spent $8.5 billion for MGM, a fee justified by the promise of a reinvented 007 franchise that should include line extensions into series for the Prime Video streaming service. Sources said that Broccoli did not get on well with Salke.
Maybe that’s because she noticed how free-wheeling and blindly supportive Salke was to a passion project she championed on the TV side called CITADEL? And if that seems like a familiar topic, that’s because we’ve mused about it before. In June 2023 we took particular note of the overly defensive tone Salke’s minions offered to other intrepid journalists when pressed for actual proof that the gambit was delivering on financial expectations. Six months later, in the wake of many of those minions now finding themselves unemployed, we offered up some telling data from objective third parties that Salke’s passions were dragging down her entire division.
We also offered up these observations, pious hopes and indeed now-prescient prediction:
I’d like to believe Salke saw this data. It sure sounds like someone else did, because a lot of the goals and visions that Hopkins alluded to sound like it came straight from the conclusions of that analysis, and probably a lot more data we’re not privy to.
It would appear she probably just wrapped fish with it.
(N)ow that she’s opted to sign off on gutting her team rather than take any ownership of the massive failures that called for some action, the spotlight should be squarely on her to make good on those “opportunities”.
And if she doesn’t deliver on the incredibly optimistic beliefs she has somehow convinced her leadership she can deliver, then, without question, her Amazon career should wind up with the same fate that she delivered to so many others at the outset of 2024.
Sleeping with the fishes.
In hindsight, that may have been a bit harsh. No one, certainly me, gloats when someone is actually fired, no matter how warranted it may have been. And having dealt with her and her balanced exec hubby Bert on more than a few occasions during our FOX days, I actually do wish her well in her “next chapter”.
Maybe now she’ll have the time to study Rogen, both in character and in real life. I’ll say this–he was far more receptive to the insights we offered him and his team than the ones we offered hers. Maybe he found a way to calm his inner passions enough to be more objective. That was certainly the case in our April 21st morning session. And if that isn’t an option, then maybe GOING fishing could prove to be good therapy. One never knows what one might catch.
Until next time…