Marc Andreessen on the State of Film and Hollywood | a16z Podcast

I think movies play the role in our culture that myths and legends used to play in ancient cultures or that novels used to play 100 years ago.

They're the art form that is capable of basically containing and expressing and making permanent the most important aspects of a culture or of a civilization.

There were a lot of great films in 2019 and then like just a memory hole of like what great film has come out since then.

Like, something happened in Hollywood.

The scripts that are being written, the types of things that are being made today, are very, very different than what was happening in 2018, 2019.

Hollywood is changing fast and for once, not because of a new technology, but because of a cultural reset.

On this episode of Monitoring the Situation, Catherine Boyle and I are joined by Marc Andreessen to talk about what really happened to the movies over the past decade.

From the dominance of the message to the quiet revival of real art, comedy, and creativity.

We talk about our post-woke cultural moment, the economics of streaming and why AI could unleash a new generation of filmmakers.

People with no studio access, no camera, the big ideas.

And we end on the question every creative industry is now asking.

What happens when the tools to make movies belong to everyone?

Let's get into it.

Mark, you've been known to monitor a situation or two.

Welcome to the program.

Eric, how would you characterize me as a situation monitor-er extremely eager.

You know I picture you with Thoreau.

I picture you with security cameras, extensively monitoring, you know.

All hours of the night.

So basically, Catherine Howard Hughes in the penthouse.

You're an elite situation monitor, which is why you're here.

We're so happy to have you.

Well, speaking of movies, I'm watching all the James Bond movies with my 10-year-old and we just got to Diamonds Are Forever, which is the one set in Las Vegas.

And it turns out the producer, Harriet Saltzman, of the Bond movies was a close personal friend of Howard Hughes at the time.

So they set the movie in Vegas and had all this cooperation from Hughes.

And there's actually a Hughes character in the movie, but I'm just going to give a spoiler alert.

Blofeld has kidnapped Hughes and is holding him hostage and has sort of substituted in and is pretending to be Hughes.

And James Bond scales the side of Hughes' big casino in Vegas at the time and drops down through the skylight into essentially Howard Hughes' bathroom.

And the bathroom is literally set up with, like monitors and, like you know, computers and like typewriters, an elaborate phone system and then a single golden roll of toilet paper.

And Patton drops into it and he's like, hmm.

And I was like, that's the perfect bathroom.

Our new media team has a Twitter group chat called Monitoring the Situation, where that's the room that they want in the office.

Exactly.

Exactly, all the things happening on Twitter.

And did they ask for it to be the bathroom?

Was that part of it?

Yeah, that'd be the next evolution.

Would that just be an add-on feature?

Yes.

Okay.

All right, let's proceed.

Mark, not everybody knows this about you, but you are an extensive movie buff and movie aficionado.

And you've been having some commentary in our group chats lately over some films that you think are worth watching right now and kind of broader commentary around what's been happening in films.

Why don't you share that with us?

Yeah, so let me start by saying like, why this topic matters, you know, because this does matter a lot.

So first of all I'll say like I've got like enormous respect for anybody who does anything creative.

And so like every time I see a movie, I'm just kind of marveling.

Like I know what it takes to make one.

It's like making a tech startup or something.

It's just like this incredible labor of love and effort and blood, sweat and tears on everybody's part.

And it's just like a minor miracle, I think, whenever any of these things actually show up as a two-hour executed film.

And I think that's amazing.

And so you know none of what we're about to talk about.

You know, should be considered a knock on filmmakers per se or the people who put all this work into it.

And then the other thing I say is look in the last you know, whatever five years decade, 20 years, there have been a tremendous number of what you could call, you know, highly entertaining movies, right?

And some that I think are, like, jaw-dropping, right?

So, like you know, one of my favorite genres action, you know the John Wick movies are, like you know, the best action movies of all time.

They're all on the last, whatever, 15 years.

You could name that for a lot of different kinds of movies.

You know, the entertainment factor remains very high.

Having said that, you know I think movies and Catherine, I see if you agree with me on this or not I think movies play the role in our culture that myths and legends used to play in ancient cultures, or that novels maybe used to play, you know, 100 years ago, or that maybe songs used to play, or something like that, which is basically they're the art form that is capable of basically containing and expressing and making permanent the most important aspects of a culture, of a civilization, right?

So sometimes you'll hear the term, like there's this term called the great american novel, and there you know this idea, there are these certain novels, like the great gaspier to kill a mockingbird, that kind of capture the spirit of a times and kind of become a moral through doing that.

When i love novels but, like you know, the idea that novels do that, i think is probably at this point, you know, pretty unlikely for a variety of reasons.

You can have a whole separate podcast on that.

But for the last, let's say, at least 60 years and probably 100 years, movies have been the way that our culture is able to express itself in a way that is going to really deeply stand the test of time, where people 100 and 200 and 500 years from now are going to look back and kind of say this is what these people are about.

Catherine, would you agree with that?

Yeah, no, no, definitely.

I mean, I think it was in slow decline probably the last 25 years.

Probably the 90s was the last decade where everyone watched the same movies and the Oscars were indicative of what's a great film that everyone has to see.

I would love to hear when you think it started bifurcating.

But it does feel like there's been this sort of bifurcation of, if you know, maybe you could say the Tarantino films of the last 20 years were widely watched and mattered in cinematic lore, but it feels like there was a lot more.

To say it's like the next great American novel is actually the next great American movie.

That feels like maybe that ended in the 90s.

Yeah, so it's possible, although you could also say it is interesting because, as we've discussed in other forums, it's not that there aren't cultural artifacts that everybody participates in.

I am told there's this young lady named Taylor Swift who is apparently extremely popular.

And I am told that other than me, everybody follows her with a great deal of avid attention.

And I'm told that she has a new, I guess, what album and movie and album.

Yeah.

And there's a new movie coming out too, I think, right?

I believe.

I remember her breakthrough.

Her first movie was the movie a couple of years ago that came out that was so popular.

She had a thing on Netflix that was sort of following her around.

Okay.

So, okay.

Here's something I know about Chandler Struth that you don't, which is the only time in my life I'm going to be able to utter those words.

She did a famous thing actually in Hollywood and the movie industry.

She released, I think, whatever that was.

She released that actually in the theaters.

And it was actually very significant that she did that, because she cut the deal directly with the theater owners.

But I think it was a straight 50-50 revenue split with the theater owners.

And she booked it directly.

And it was like a huge release.

It was like on 4,000 screens.

And it was like extremely popular.

And, like a lot of you know, Taylor Swift fans and a lot of families with young girls you know went to see it.

And I...

I remember it at the time because it went big the same week that Martin Scorsese's movie Killers of the Flower Moon was in theaters.

And if you remember the reviews and Martin Scorsese is one of these filmmakers who's made these mythical movies you know that will for sure stand the test of time.

And so you know, Killers of the Flower Moon was a movie that he intended to do that and I don't think it did, and we can talk about why not.

But it was this movie about you know.

You know, evil white people.

But it was a three-hour movie and I didn't see it.

But apparently it was extremely slow and then apparently it had these extremely long stretches of silence because he was trying to get across the sense of like awe and grandeur and like emotional impact.

And apparently what would happen is that movie would be playing adjacent to the Taylor Swift movie and the Taylor Swift movie was so loud that whenever he would go to the silent part, you would just hear Taylor Swift pounding away on stage.

Probably helps the movie out.

Probably moves the fun a little bit.

Yeah. arguably improved the movie, from what I heard, you know, filled in the missing soundtrack.

So anyway, there are still mechanical issues with reproduction of these things.

So anyway, the point is, we do have cultural artifacts that sort of have almost universal attention.

To me it's just a question of like.

Okay, like true art, like with a capital A is the thing that not only captures the popular imagination, like not only that people really experience, but also is the thing that actually has the lasting impact, such that in 10 years and 20 years and 50 years and 100 years, like people are still discussing it.

And then, you know, maybe a couple of things you could say.

One is like, as time passes, the sort of most important cultural artifacts are sort of continuously reinterpreted, right.

And so the way that it comes across when it's released is not the same way that it comes across five or 10 years later, and then 20 years later, and then sort of each new generation that discovers it, you know, maybe interprets it and talks about it a different way.

And then, so basically like capital A art is the ability to do that.

And so, For sure, it's true that the audience overall has fragmented.

For sure.

It's true that the internet is sucking away just enormous amounts of time and attention from movies.

It's certainly true that the business pressures in Hollywood which we can talk about are probably more intense than ever.

But it is still true that I think it is still possible to do what we're describing.

And we'll talk about this more, but I think we'd all agree Tarantino was able to do this with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, not that recently.

So anyway, maybe we can say, I still hold out hope that this is possible.

I think this is the thing that the best filmmakers in the world and in the country really ought to be able to do.

Would you agree with that?

Or do you think that's too optimistic?

I hope.

I'm a little more pessimistic than you.

That I do think Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the last American movie.

But for different reasons, probably.

Like I think, not only you know.

It's like again like Tarantino is, you know?

I think he has one more film in him, as he says, but that was really his final opus, right?

Like the penultimate film.

That was what he had been kind of moving towards and I think he said his last film is going to be a much kind of scaled-down, smaller sort of film when he decides to do it.

But, like, I think there's something about 2019 in particular.

There were so many great films in 2019.

There was 1917.

Parasite won the Oscar, stole it from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in my opinion, but still was like a decent film.

Like there were a lot of great films in 2019.

And then just a memory hole of like what great film has come out since then.

Something happened with COVID, where we stopped going to the theater, and it does kind of map to that.

You know, no one goes to the theater anymore.

But it's also like something happened in Hollywood where, which I know we want to get your take on what happened in Hollywood, because it does feel like the scripts that are being written, the types of things that are being made today, are very, very different than what was happening in 2018, 2019.

Yeah, so just spend a moment on the state of Hollywood for people who don't track it.

And so there's a bunch of things.

So yeah, the theater business has obviously taken a giant hit kind of in the wake of COVID.

COVID was this big step down because the theaters were closed long and everything else.

And then there's been this question ever since of kind of how to reengage those audiences and get them to go back to the theater.

And maybe that's just a secular change that goes with people being on their phones or whatever.

You know.

Having said that, it's not quite you know, I don't think a complete explanation for what's happened to the art form.

And the reason for that is the length of time that it takes to actually make a movie, right?

And so the movies that showed up in the theater in 2019 got greenlit in.

You know, call it 2015 or 2016.

You know they got staffed in 2016, 2017 and then they got executed in like 20.

You know, basically 2017, 2018.

And then they went through, you know, editing and post-production and so forth.

And you know, for big movies that's, you know that whole process is like a two-year process.

Um, and then, and then there's the long run up to release, with the marketing campaign and you know all the you know put the actors on the road and and do all the stuff, and so there's like whatever, a four-month ad campaign or whatever.

And so you know, by the time you go through that process, you know, start to end, it's like four or five years, and so, for once upon a time, to i don't know exactly when it was greenlit, but for it to, for when it took, for it to show up in 2019 method basically it the, the making of it, the backstory probably starts, you know no, no later than 2015, and And I just bring that up, which means the movies that hit the theaters in 2021 started in like 2017, right?

And the movies that are showing up today started in 2020, right?

And so the COVID explanation is not sufficient for what we've seen in the last five years, because those movies weren't greenlit under conditions of COVID.

Those movies were greenlit under conditions of pre-COVID.

And so whatever changes have taken place which we can talk about, I think probably started around 2015, right?

And what is your theory around why things really started changing in the 2020 decade of film?

Yeah.

So again let me give you know again sort of maximum, you know kind of respect here which is like there's no question.

So just the secular changes.

So one thing is, look, the streaming revolution has had a very big impact.

And the streaming revolution hit Hollywood incredibly hard, very positively, for a stretch, basically through the 2010s, because all the companies that were engaged in the streaming wars started spending just unprecedented amounts of money on televisions and shows and movies of all kinds.

And so there was just a giant flood of money And I would say the mood in Hollywood, I don't know whatever eight years ago or something six years ago was you might even describe as euphoric from a business standpoint, just because, like I mean, the big thing was when Netflix scaled up to the point where they were spending like 20 billion a year on content, which was just like this, you know this giant budget and everybody else.

And they were, like you know, whatever a dozen streaming companies or whatever all the different platforms that wanted to compete.

And so that money kind of took off like a rocket.

And then what's happened is, as the streamers are consolidating, as the streaming wars are kind of rationalizing, that money got pulled back.

That was a big kind of financial blow.

And then the other thing that streaming did that has really affected things a lot in Hollywood in a very negative way, which is streaming cut off the financial upside to films and TV.

And so films used to.

When they were hits, first they would sell a lot of box office, And then they would sell the television rights or ultimately, the streaming rights.

And then they'd have this long aftermarket where they would sell DVDs.

You know, videotape rentals in the 80s, 90s, and then DVDs in the 2000s and 2010s.

And so if you had a movie that was a hit, it could run.

And, you know, it could run for years, generating just, like, enormous amounts of revenue and cash.

And then, same thing with TV shows.

You know, it used to be a successful TV show.

The line I think was six seasons and a movie where, if it got to like whatever 100 episodes or something, it would enter syndication and then you could sell it for hundreds of millions of dollars and there would be all this upside for the people involved in creating it.

And what happened with streaming and the economics of streaming is those forms of upside just vanished, because what happens is the streamers just buy the projects online with like a cost plus model a lot of the time.

And so you make the movie and you turn around and you sell it for like a 10 profit margin to a streamer.

And then there's no aftermarket because it's just a tile on the streaming service, right?

And there's no, you know, there's no DVD sales.

There's no, you know, there's no TV syndication rights.

Those concepts are irrelevant.

You know, the streamer just has sort of a perpetual right or a 20 year right or whatever to be able to show it at that sort of fixed fee.

And so the upside got cut off.

And that removed, I think, a lot of the economic incentive for kind of the wildcatting thing that Hollywood used to do more, which is to really take these chances on things.

Hollywood used to work a lot like the venture capital model, which is you put 10 lines in the water, you get four bites and you get maybe one grand slam.

And if it works like that, it's a spectacular model.

But the grand slam has to be able to scale economically in order for that to happen, and that's been cut off.

So that did not help.

And then there's the big thing capital B, capital G, capital T.

The big thing that happened, of course, which is Hollywood being on the vanguard of culture, got hit by the thing the cultural change of the last decade, like incredibly hard.

And you know we've talked a lot about how tech, you know, got hit by that incredibly hard and Hollywood got hit by it in a very intense way.

You know, nobody's ever quite figured out the right way to talk about this.

You know, sometimes you say things like wokeness or whatever you know.

In the 60s they would have called it the new left.

There's actually a term, there's actually my favorite term for it in Hollywood is there's a YouTube channel called Critical Drinker uh, where he's a uh, he's a movie reviewer um uh, is is quite funny and and the critical drinker has been documenting basically the thing uh, that hit hollywood and he and in in quite scathing terms um, this whole time um, and what he calls it is.

He calls it the message um, and it's right, it's the message with a capital m and it's actually really funny because for a long time, people who watch the critical drinker, he would never actually define what the message was, you know.

He would basically just say you know this this, this movie has been affected by the message right and, of course and you guys are laughing because, of course, you already know what the message was everybody knows the message was right.

All white people are racist, all men are, you know, sexist.

You know everybody's a transphobe.

And you just go, America's, you know, a force for evil in the world, right?

And you just go like right down the list of like, everything that you know, everything that you would expect you know from the last decade.

You know, America's, you know, an incipient fascist regime.

Like just the entire package, you know, basically.

You know, like whatever's on the front page of the New York Times that day, right.

Just the message.

And so, you know, movies transform themselves.

You know, a very large percentage of movies that could have been, you know, in some alternate world could have been.

These great works of art just basically became in some form political propaganda.

Or you could, if you wanted to be more generous, you could say that you know those will be the lasting artifacts of this last decade, right?

Which is historians will look back and they'll be like holy you know, holy Lord, like these people were really like wrapped around the axle on like a bunch of political issues.

Like my, you know, my goodness.

Yeah.

And so they got hit hard by that.

And then that led to, in Hollywood, what can only be described as a reign of terror.

But if you know people in Hollywood, basically it's through that, especially the last eight years.

You know they just they felt like if they made one misstep on you know casting, or on the details in the script or use of words or the themes of a movie or anything you know.

They just felt like they were in danger of just like a lightning strike from, you know, from the sky, just like striking them dead on the spot.

Like you know, and they had, like you know, everybody in Hollywood had like friends whose careers just got like completely detonated.

And again, people have different opinions on this and you could argue it was long needed or whatever, but it became a thing.

And it basically changed the process of how projects were selected.

It changed the process of who made projects.

It changed the process of staffing.

It changed the process of screenwriting.

It changed acting.

It changed aesthetics.

It changed almost every aspect of how these projects get executed.

And I just go through that because...

I think that's changing again right now.

If you talk to the same people in Hollywood, what they'll tell you basically is it's basically this year that the fever has broken, and there's a bunch of indications for that, and we're entering the post-message era.

And, you know, we don't know what era we're heading into.

Maybe there's a new message or something, but, like, there's a phase shift that's underway.

But that phase shift is going to take time, because it takes time to make movies, right?

The movies that are greenlit today right, are not going to come out, you know, until like whatever 20 Yeah, it's like 2027, 2028 soonest, and so we?

So we're in this like liminal period, or this interstitial period where for the next like three years, we're gonna get like a thousand movies that have like the message and they're all gonna act like the message is like brand new and fresh and nobody's ever heard it before.

Because they, you know, they all pretend that this is like some big revelation that, like all white people are racist right um, like in every movie um, and there's gonna be like a thousand more of those the next three years and they're just gonna land like an absolute thud, right like, because it's just like, If you wanted that message, you got it right.

If you already saw a thousand movies, the next thousand movies don't contribute to that, right?

And just to knock on one and he's a brilliant filmmaker, but I just saw the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie One Battle After Another and it's literally like a time capsule.

It's like a 2022 time capsule.

It's literally like time froze in 2022, And in 2022 this movie would have been like oh my God, like this movie is like got the message right.

It's just like everything about it.

We could spend hours just on this movie.

And it lands today and you're just watching, you're just like, wow, that was a weird time.

Like, oh my goodness.

I want to talk more about this movie because I think it was Bret Easton Ellis who came out and was the first person you know, because it's getting all the Oscar plot.

It's like it's definitely in line for the Oscar.

Right.

And he came out.

He's like, it feels musty.

Right.

And I should get the actual like language he used because it was much worse than that.

But he said it's like a musty film.

It's exactly what you said.

It's musty.

2022.

Like this was greenlit at a very different time and now it's come out and like the world's moved on.

And so I'm curious like do you think that we're still gonna pretend these movies are great, even though they don't match with our time?

Or is there gonna be sort of a three-year period where we are allowed to say actually, like that doesn't make any sense anymore and like maybe that movie shouldn't have been made?

Yeah, so this one is a complicated scenario.

So just on the movie itself.

The movie itself is actually, and it's quite like, I quite enjoyed watching it.

I quite enjoyed watching it, not just for ironic reasons, but just also watching it of like how this happened.

And there's a bunch of reasons.

And again, the filmmaker is one of the great filmmakers of the era Paul Thomas Anderson.

You know he made There Will Be Blood and he made, you know, Boogie Nights and like all these you know.

By the way, right there we'll name two movies.

Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood are two movies that are like in the.

They're going to be in the hall of fame of the art form where it's like you know, a hundred years from now, people are going to be like wow, you know, that's what that culture was about.

And so he is one of those guys.

And clearly that's what he's going for in this movie.

It is a weird movie in that it's partially based on a famous Thomas Pynchon novel called Vineland, which is Thomas Pynchon's movie.

Is Thomas Pynchon's novel basically about the.

It's essentially I mean it's essentially veiled through whatever, but it's basically like about the days of rage.

You know the Brian Burrow book or the.

You know the Weather Underground.

You know basically the violent social revolution you know basically from the far left in the 60s and then sort of what happened in the aftermath of that.

And so like that's the theme of the novel, but it's very much a novel of and about the 1960s.

It's not considered.

You know most people don't consider it maybe the best Pynchon novel, but like it's a good mid-tier one and it's, It's in the Pantheon and it turns out it had been Paul Thomas Anderson's favorite novel.

He'd been trying to make a version of it for 20 years or whatever.

But what he did basically was he kept the very basic kind of plot framework set up, but then he completely updated it for the message right.

And so like it has like specifically, it has a whole bunch of like, it has this whole.

Basically it's a racial, you know, it has a whole racial kind of plot structure to the whole thing and sexual in ways that are fairly amazing, that are completely based on the current moment, you know, circa 2022.

And so it's a little bit like the 1960s.

It's like the early 2020s filtered through the 1960s.

And so it's just a little bit odd with that.

And arguably it is kind of salient to our times, because I think if you were to retitle the movie you would just title it Antifa the movie.

Like.

It's like a full-throated celebration of basically violent social change, violent social revolution.

Like, and it's completely unapologetic.

Like, I'm going to spoil it.

I'm going to spoil it.

I'm just going to... Spoiler alert.

Spoiler alerts for monitoring the situation.

Everyone's already seen it here, so...

So it's a two hour and 45 minute movie that I went by the way and I went to the theater and I paid full price and like I smuggled in my snacks and like the whole thing.

I go through the whole thing and I'm like, oh, he's such a brilliant filmmaker.

I'm hoping it's a subversive movie, right?

And so I'm kind of hoping that the whole thing is like by the end.

He's like really like.

He's like okay, like these weather underground people who like, went on the run for 20 years and destroyed their lives.

And, like you know, we're always you know basically, just like you know, crazed privileged children like raging out against their you know they're basically their parents and blowing shit up and killing people.

And the whole thing was a giant mistake.

And I was kind of hoping that that would be kind of the way that you could tell the story.

No, no, no.

He's just like, oh, no, that was great.

Like, that was fantastically good.

These people are amazing.

Like, these are the myths and legends of our time.

He clearly wants to make these people into mythical figures.

And then at the end it's just very clear.

At the end he's like yes, and I completely endorse and support all of this.

And this is exactly what you know.

These are the role models that children should have, and it's fantastic, right.

And so you know, this is one of those movies where, in a perverse way maybe, it stands the test of time, that way where it's just like wow, these people had.

Like these people are constructed to mythos, you know, in which violent robbery and murder basically, is great right.

Like, it's wonderful.

Yeah.

Right.

And so you know, maybe that's you know, I don't know, maybe it's like reading Emma Goldman essays a century later, or something.

It's just like, wow, these people kind of really got carried away.

But like, you know, it's not what it could have been.

Anyway, this is the, okay, so one is it's out of time.

Although, you know, hopefully it won't become more relevant.

And then the other is again the business aspect of it, which is, you know, being a great filmmaker.

You know, this is the one that he got like the real budget for.

So this is, like, a much bigger budget than any of the other movies that he's made.

And with that, he was, you know, the cast is, like, just incredible.

Like, so it's.

You know Leo DiCaprio and Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro, and like all these amazing, you know actors and actresses.

But as a consequence I don't have the numbers at the top of my head, but you know it was estimated it cost something under the order of 200 million to make.

Um, and then it's, it's more money on top of that, um, for, um, uh, you know, for, for advertising.

Um the the challenge, and then you know it's got Leo and you know he's by the way, he's fantastic in it.

Uh, very entertaining, but, um, by the way, what, again, spoiler alert.

One of the things about the message, um, it's got the message.

So the Leo character uh, plays one of these.

Basically he's a bomber, basically in hiding for like 18 years or whatever, and he's got this daughter, the daughter of his, his lover, who's this was this, you know, great.

Like basically you know, violent revolutionary in the era and they've been in hiding for 18 years and he's like completely fried his brain on, like you know, drugs and alcohol.

It's just like you know he's completely blown out as a person.

He spends the entire movie running around like in his bathrobe, like you know basically, you know basically high, and if you actually watch the movie carefully all the way through, it actually turns out nothing he actually does at any point in the plot ever actually matters and like he, like he plays no actual role in the plot um, and so it's this like incredible performance and it's incredibly.

It's incredibly um, you know, a dynamic and entertaining performance and the movie, the movie's gonna sell do well overseas as a result of that because people love leo.

Um, but like again, it's consistent with the message.

Of course, of course, the white male lead can have no actual role to play in the plot like it is.

You know that's definitely not allowed.

And like, it's like all over, right?

Like everybody's dead.

Like it's all, it's just done.

So anyway, it's going to do reasonably well because, you know, because it has Leo, but it's still going to lose like 100, 120 million are, you know, the estimates that I'm hearing which is, you know, a pretty big loss.

Um, you know for for for a movie like this, the the.

The fear in Hollywood always is when there's when there's a movie that loses that much money, what would you know will the executive?

Green green light.

New original movies.

Um, and, and, you know, so hopefully they drew, hopefully the lesson is drawn from this is, you know, basically it's, you know, is, is, is the, is the Brad Easton Ellis point, which is the, the, the, what is, what do you say?

The fustiness or the, um, Musty, he said it's a musty film.

Mustiness, yeah.

Hopefully the conclusion is don't make movies that are gonna be musty when they're released, right?

Like you know you didn't have.

You know you didn't have to green light the thousandth movie with the message in 2022.

Like that was a choice, you know?

So maybe don't do that anymore, you know, but maybe it's time to move on.

Let me highlight the movie on the other side that I think is very underappreciated and I think has you know you can say maybe at best right now it's becoming a cult classic.

It's just not that big of a hit, but like I have hopes for it and I hope it becomes one of these mythic movies which is Eddington.

Thank you.

And let me start by asking, have you guys both at this point seen Eddington?

I haven't.

Okay, well, you're in for a treat.

So my opinion, my opinion, personal opinion.

Eddington is the first capital, A art great, art movie I feel like I've seen since Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and I think it clears the bar.

And I would start by saying it's not a perfect movie.

Like you know, there are things about it that I'm sure, five years from now or whatever, even the maker of the movie might look back and say you know, could have done things differently.

But it's like, it's...

It has the opposite of the musty feeling.

It has the feeling of, oh, I'm actually finally seeing on screen real people again.

Like, finally.

Like, real people set in the real world doing real things where you're just like, wow.

I'm actually seeing the world that we've actually spent the last five years living in, and it's the first movie like that that I've seen in a long time.

And specifically, it's the first movie and it's amazing that this is the case even with the timescales that we're talking about.

It's the first movie in which the George Floyd riots actually happened.

It's the first movie in which COVID actually happened.

It's the first movie in which social media actually happened.

It's the first movie in which wokeness actually happened.

It's the first movie in which Trump actually happened.

And it's actually and this is why I'm sort of having the reaction to the movie that I'm having which is just like it's the only movie in which any of those things actually happened in the universe of the movie.

Because, like I don't know unless I missed something, like every other movie that's come out that's been significant over the last five years, like it's as if none of that ever happened.

And my explanation for that is these are all the hot button issues that if you screwed them up in Hollywood, you got your career destroyed, right.

So if you said the wrong thing about COVID, lockdowns or vaccines, if you said the wrong thing about Trump, if you said the wrong thing about the Floyd riots, if you said the wrong thing about wokeness, like your career, get obliterated.

So we have like a generation of creatives who basically just like, got taught do not touch the stove.

And the auteur who made Eddington.

It's an auteur movie this guy, Eric Astor.

Who's this young auteur, very talented guy.

He basically was like I'm just going to grab the stove with both hands.

And I'm just going to, like, hold it up for dear life.

And it's like a rollercoaster ride through every crazy fucking thing that happened in the last five years.

And I was just, like, howling with laughter.

I'll put it this way.

Me and the other four people in the theater who are watching it were just like, wow!

It's amazing.

It's finally happening.

The other bright side of this, too, is that it's not unknown actors, right?

It's Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone.

And what's really interesting about it.

As you said, most movies try to kind of gloss over social media or things where it's actually hard to depict it on a screen.

There's nothing really interesting about looking at your phone.

But getting a COVID nostril test is actually very funny.

And I know the trailer begins with pulling up in this old car and getting the nostril test.

It's just like...

It's just, like, a funny thing.

And so it's like it's good that some of these more like absurd things that have happened in the last couple years, like they're actually very cinematic.

And they should be put on like they should be put, like great filmmakers should be showing them, because they're so funny.

So I'll do a couple again.

I'm going to blow through the spoilers.

Yeah, so the opening scene is Joaquin Phoenix.

Joaquin Phoenix plays this, basically this crusty sheriff of this small town in New Mexico called Eddington, which actually kind of reminds me of the town I grew up in.

And the key thing for the thing is Eddington, like there's just nothing in the town.

Like it's like 600 people.

It's just like the streets are empty.

The stores are empty.

I mean, it's like a town that was empty before COVID, right?

And then the lockdowns hit and then it became even more desolate.

But like, there's nothing happening and you can just walk around and there's nobody there.

And so Joaquin Phoenix plays the sheriff who's like this crusty, unreconstructed, and he's not really a Trump supporter per se, but he's like this sort of crusty, you know, kind of traditionalist, you know, kind of guy.

He's the kind of guy who just really does not want things to change that much.

And like everything is changing around him.

And it starts in COVID, it starts in like April of 2020.

And he's sitting in his pickup truck in the middle of nowhere and he's like eating a sandwich or whatever.

And this other truck pulls up next to him and it's these, you know, it's set in New Mexico.

And so there's these, the town that he's in are adjacent to these tribal lands.

And so these two young tribal cops you know Native American cops pull up in a pickup truck next to him.

And they're like, you know, they're like young and, you know, let's say cooler than he is.

And they're both wearing their masks, right?

And literally, they're like, roll down your window, and he rolls to the window.

And literally, from their pickup truck into his, they're like, you have to put your mask on.

And you know, it was like literally, it was like.

For me, it was like you know, it was like you know the heaven has opened.

The angels are singing.

I'm finally seeing a capital M movie.

Like, this, and, you know, like, he's a brilliant actor.

And so, like he gets across, like in one look, the feeling that I think we've all had for the last five years, which is like what the fuck?

And that's just the opening scene.

And then it cascades through all the COVID.

And then it cascades through, and then you know spoiler alert again, or spoiler it cascades through the Floyd, so the Floyd riots hit midway through the movie.

And then all the, and then you know the.

Of course, you know the local high school.

It's like you know, the local high school is like 100 white.

You know, it's New Mexico.

And you know, and then the white kids basically become like obsessed with racial justice, even though they literally don't know any black people.

And they start like basically having like full-blown riots, like you know, in the main street and like breaking store windows and like crashing everything.

And there's one black person in town who's the sheriff's deputy, who's Joaquin's deputy, who's a military vet.

And he's just like, what the hell?

Like why do I have to defend the grocery store from the white kids?

Like trying to burn it down on my behalf.

Like, what the fuck?

Anyway, so the whole movie is like that.

And then maybe just one more thing about it that's just hysterical.

Eric, this is a good time for you to take a drink of water because you're going to love this part.

This is good for the spit takeout.

Pedro Pascal is in it.

And at first you would think, Pedro Pascal plays the mayor.

And at first you're like oh, this is going to be a clear setup where you know Joaquin Phoenix is like the retrograde right winger and you know Pascal is like the voice of reason.

It's like, no, no.

It doesn't mean anything.

He's Gavin Newsom.

Like, I swear to God, he's Gavin Newsom.

Like, 100% Pedro Pascal is playing Gavin Newsom.

What does he do?

I don't even want to like.

I'm not even intending to badmouth Gavin.

I'm just saying, like... Or just every other politician.

Whatever is your idea of a politician who's like Gavin Newsom, like Pedro Pascal plays him.

And just, like, could not... be looking down on the sheriff character with more contempt.

Like just absolutely just like, you know, and vice versa.

And then basically what happens is that you know they effectively.

So the sheriff gets frustrated by the whole thing, the lockdowns and everything.

And so he decides to run for mayor.

And so then it becomes a fight, you know, between the two of them.

Which, by the way, is just the beginning of the movie.

Like, it then gets actually quite a bit more elaborate after that.

But the big thing about it is it just it's like a full.

It's just like an absolute full frontal examination from top to bottom.

And like it pulls in like Catherine.

It doesn't have it's interesting, it doesn't have a lot of like, it doesn't have like a lot of on-screen graphics of like people on social media, but it does have this recurring thing which again is just it's incredible how rare this is in movies.

Or maybe other filmmakers haven't figured out how to do it, which is, these characters live in a world of social media.

And so he does this great like.

When a character in this movie wakes up, he rolls over and he checks his phone.

Like, it's our world.

And he does, I think, a very good job of showing the interleaving back and forth of how people are and again, this is like a rural town in the middle of nowhere.

People are living this double life that we all now live, which is we've got our in-person life and then we've got our online life, and there's this question of which one is more real um, and and this is the first movie i've seen that actually just and it doesn't incorporate that like it's not social media.

The movie, like that's not what the movie is about, but it's just kind of it just kind of shows naturally, how the nature of reality has changed around that and then how how it influences real world behavior um, as anyway, so i i can't recommend it highly enough.

Isn't Emma Stone's character like taken by conspiracy that she finds online?

Or, like, what is her role in the movie?

Yeah well, so this is part of the.

So at this point I'm like grabbing the stove with both hands also.

Like, she plays, like, the upper middle class white woman who's just, like, wracked with anxiety.

And this is, like, this is the plot arc.

Like, she's just, like, she's, like, incredibly deeply unhappy.

And so, yeah, so she gets locked into, like, online conspiracies, and then there's this whole thing.

I don't even want to spoil the thing that happens with her, because it's quite something and it's quite a plot arc of its own.

But, you know, she has her own kind of parallel life that kind of unfolds through this.

She's Joaquin Phoenix's husband and he loves her and has absolutely no idea what.

He has absolutely no clue what's going on in her head.

Like...

He like married to her.

He loves her.

She's clearly extremely depressed.

She's clearly extremely anxious.

He has no ability whatsoever to understand her, communicate with her.

And then her.

You know her, her mother, you know her mother.

She's, you know, very close with her mother.

Her mother keeps showing up, you know, lives in town.

Just and just fucking hates him and just is like staving towards him.

And he's like, what the, you know, what the fuck I'm doing my best.

I can't read her mind.

Like, I don't know what's going on.

And so you know it's not that you know it's it's got like a whole, it's got like a whole, it's got like a whole arc there.

Um, and then, and then it's got another one more.

It's got the uh there's, there's the uh in the little, in the little high school um, there's a uh, there's a a a, a very attractive you know black high school girl uh, who basically like becomes like completely committed to social justice um, and it's going on and she's got like all the you know patriarchy.

She's got all the talking points like she's you know she's ready for her.

You know sociology degree Um, and and then all the, all the like boys and men like orbiting around her, basically like become obsessed with like there's a, there's a, there's a white uh, uh male high school kid who just like is like just generally oblivious.

And he, he like has a thing for her.

And so like he starts reading Angela Davis um like in, in an attempt to basically become attractive for her.

Um and uh and uh anyway, so like, and he and he starts spouting off about white privilege and the whole thing.

Does it work?

Uh, um, Cause that's always the question.

It doesn't work for the purposes that he, It doesn't work for the purposes that he intends it for, but let's say he ultimately.

Yeah, he has a very successful, I would say, plot arc of his own.

Yes, he actually plays a major role in the end.

He goes in his own journey and plays a major role at the end of the movie.

Anyway, so it's just like... It's one of these movies and people...

I was, like you know, different critiques of it and it's a little bit of a you know, I don't know what they call it like a shaggy dog story where like, as the movie goes, like increasingly crazy things are happening and things get kind of you know, they get kind of deranged in sort of a way that you know is, you know, you could argue, is like truly reflective of how deranged things got.

It's such direct engagement with our times.

And to me it was just like wow, I'm actually seeing on screen our world, as opposed to either this manufactured view of a world that doesn't exist or this sort of manicured view where these topics have just become untouchable.

And so anyway, so my hope is it's the beginning of a wave of...

There's so much material.

This is the old Tom Wolfe thing, which is like, most Tom Wolfe's term, he said, what was his term?

Is the beast with eight billion feet, or what was his term?

The mass of humanity.

He had this term where he's like Tom Wolfe, always had this point of view.

The great novelist journalist.

The most interesting topic in the world is the human race.

The collective behavior of eight billion people on planet Earth is the most interesting thing in the world.

And the eight billion people on planet Earth are always getting up to the craziest shit.

And like if you want to like, write great fiction.

He was always telling people who wanted to write fiction.

He's like if you want to write great fiction, you want to go out and you want to be with the people and you want to actually observe what's happening.

And it's so crazy that if you just like write it down, you know that's how you, that's how you like write the great American novel.

Like that's what you do.

And so he would famously do this.

And so when he did Bonfire of the Vanities, he immersed himself in Wall Street.

And when he did Man in Fall, he immersed himself in you know Atlanta real estate.

And when he, when he, you know he did all that, you know back back to blood, he immersed himself in the miami.

You know the miami culture and you know he, he would go do this.

And of course, you know his critique was you know, the new generation novelists.

They sit in their apartment in brooklyn, you know, you know uh, you know with their typewriter, you know, and and they, they introspect, right and and and that's why there's no more great american novels.

And so, Like Ari Aster is like the filmmaker who got that.

I don't know if he ever got, you know, Red Tom Wolf or not, but like, he understands that.

He's like, oh, go immerse yourself in what's actually happening in real life and translate that.

And he was, I don't know, uniquely able to do it, uniquely able to get away with it.

I'm hoping he's the beginning of a wave of these and you know they don't.

It doesn't all have to be about COVID or the Floyd riots or whatever.

There's many, many other topics you could do but, like you know, there should be a great.

There should be a great movie for every basically significant social, cultural thing that happens.

And, and, and that, and there's those opportunities are just laying all, there's like hundreds or thousands of those opportunities just laying on the ground right now, you know, for, for, for the creatives who can go pick them up.

And again if and, by the way, every creative writing this or hearing this is going to say yeah no, no shit.

But this, you know, well, the studio is green light and pay for it.

And that's that would be my other hope, which is, you know some combination of of the bolder executives at the streamers and at the, at the, at the studios.

You know example you know David, David Allison.

You know who's clearly very, very you know brilliant guy, you know taking over Paramount and maybe maybe, buy more studios.

Like you know, guys like him are in a position to green light an entirely new generation of of of movie that could be both commercially successful and could be true art.

Yeah, no.

So I guess, is it your view that, like we'll have this like five- to seven-year window of musty films that people like kind of pretend are decent, but then like we kind of get the Eddingtons as well, where you're going to see things open up again, so we'll have this sort of like nice period of weirdness?

I actually think, looking back 50 years from today, it'll be fun to look back at these films and be like that was wild, that that was what we were talking about at the time.

But your view is that it is going to open up, that there will be more Eddingtons, there'll be more extremes, and it's not just going to be one battle after another, kind of the message.

Yeah, so just quickly, one more thing on one battle after another.

So the critics are rapturous about this movie.

Right?

And so if you read Rotten Tomatoes, the critics are, you know, it's like 98% or whatever.

And the critics are just like, this is like the most brilliant movie of all time.

It just completely captures, you know, yes, this is like, this is like the ultimate chronicling of like America's, you know, descent into being, you know, the fourth Reich.

Like, you know, this is, yes, this is like absolutely glory.

Yes, absolutely revolutionary violence should be glorified.

Like the critics are like all in, right?

And you know, the movie critic community has like gone hard in on this, just like you know, just like so many other creative communities.

And so they're all in.

By the way, this movie, I don't know if it's going to, but like it wouldn't be surprising if it sweeps the Oscars.

Right.

It's just like, you know, the best, the best, the best movie ever made.

You know and and but, but now it's going to, it's going to be like everybody everybody, everybody who has been out, been through this, you know, spin cycle for the last eight years is, you know, and people are onto it, you know, including the audience.

And so I, and I think even the people participating in kind of what is already kind of an orgy, of kind of hyper exaggerated critical admiration, are probably all realizing that they're, you know, fundamentally being dishonest.

But you know, like so so Catherine, your point like yeah, that machine, like the the, the sort of the message machine, like that machine is continuing to spin.

For now it's just very clear that like there's just like smoke and parts flying off of it, like it's just like you know it is, it is, it is gonna, it is gonna rattle to a stop.

And then if you, if you talk to people in hollywood, basically what they'll tell you is, by the way, independent of people's politics what the sort of, I would say, sharp people in Hollywood generally all say is yeah, the cultural fever has broken.

You can now get movies greenlit today that you could not get greenlit two years ago.

Specifically, and this is amazing, then this is good, but like, you can have comedies again.

They actually say, by the way, they say this.

They're like, we can now make comedies again.

You can have funny movies.

Right, because to have funny movies, you need to poke at sacred cows, right?

The thing that makes comedy funny is when it's subversive, when it touches a nerve.

That's what great adult comedy is.

And you just could not make a funny movie for the last eight years.

It was impossible.

It was way too risky.

But what they're saying now is that you can then maybe the other signal indicator catherine, of what's happening, which is uh, mel gibson finally got greenlit to do his sequel to, um uh, bachelor the christ, which is the resurrection movie and which he's, which he's making right now.

Uh, at least my friends in hollywood are like yeah, that never would have happened um, like that never would have happened under a kamala administration, that never would have happened without the election result.

And again it's.

These are not even people who are pro-trump, it's just okay, like the national mood is shifting.

We're not yes, mel gibson, of all the, of all people, being like one of the clearly great filmmakers of our time.

And, you know, having all of the issues that Mel Gibson has.

Like, yes, that guy should get to make a movie.

And specifically, that guy should get to make that movie.

And that's an example of what I'm talking about is that that's possible this year in a way that it wasn't before.

And the other thing, I think yesterday Young Washington came out the trailer which Joel studios, which again is not Hollywood, it's based in Provo but has proven that they can make very successful films for a different pocket of the country that actually likes patriotism.

But I think in some ways the Top Gun success story Yes, it's nostalgia but, like the fact that it did so well at the box office, shows that there is an appetite for totally different content.

Like 50 of the country would love to see movies that are patriotic or about something you know, a biopic in history that's really interesting, about George Washington.

So I think in some ways it's like there is sort of this business case too, of wow, like 50 of the country that's been starved for the content they want will actually pay to go to the theater, and maybe we should support them.

Yeah.

To that end Mark, do the executives appreciate the Rotten Tomatoes phenomenon, or just how distinct sort of the critics, or even their own staff, are from the actual audience?

Yeah, so they live it.

They live it.

And so, like I said, for the last eight years, it's basically been a reign of terror.

Yeah.

Because these critics, and who the people these critics represent, had the power of life and death over people's careers.

And then they know the critics kind of went nuts.

But this is the problem.

There's not that much they can do about it, right?

The critics were able to succeed in their own field.

It's just like everything else that happened in media.

The critics were able to succeed in their own field by kind of going arbitrarily wild.

And then you know there was basically nothing, that if you're a movie studio executive there's really nothing you can do about it, because you know what do you do about it.

If you ignore them, you know, they attack you.

If you engage with them, they attack you.

If you attack them, they attack you back.

And so, you know, there's been very little to do.

And then, you know, the critics are not, well, okay, so that's been happening.

And so, you know, there's this self-referential thing.

And so, when you know, when the mood, when sort of opinion shapers, you know, move against you, you know, it becomes a real problem.

And in Hollywood, you know, people get fired, right?

Like, you know, every studio executive kind of knows that at some point they're going to get fired.

People get fired off of projects all the time.

When people get fired by the way off of projects in Hollywood like they may not, you know, they may not eat, they may not get another job for five, you know, for two years or five years or ever.

And so, you know, it's a high tension environment.

And so, yeah, I think they don't understand that.

By the way, I also think that you know, especially the sort of you know, the boomer executives, the Gen X executives.

You know they'll also tell you the same thing.

You'll hear.

You know that you heard in the Valley and in Washington and elsewhere, which is wow, the young staff is really radicalized right.

And so, you know, so they're also afraid of their young staff.

And then by the way, you know, these are mostly public companies.

They're also afraid of their boards.

The boards are afraid of the public shareholders.

You know, the public shareholders radicalized.

And so it was a very similar phenomenon to what happened in tech, which is kind of this sort of collective I don't know like wildness or you know kind of this intensity thing.

You know kind of happened.

And then it really couldn't be openly discussed for a long time and probably still can't.

Like they probably still really can't talk about it in public.

A few of them are starting to, but like not really.

So for the most part, the conversations are kind of in the background.

But again, but against that, it's just like, okay, that's broken a bit.

And part of it also is just the business.

You know the kind of business aspect of it which is, I mean, the classic is, you know, the big moneymaker in Hollywood for the last 20 years has been superhero movies.

And let's just say, coincident with the beginning of the message is the.

You know the results of those movies collapsed.

And at some point, they need to go sell some movie tickets.

At some point, they need to deliver revenue.

And I think they've gotten, I don't know, the message of the message, which is, if all you are is on board with the social trend, especially Catherine, to your point, especially when that social trend gets old and it's no longer au courant, you can't run a public company based on reviews.

At some point, butts do have to show up in seats.

Right.

And so I think that that's also kicked in.

And so the financial pressures are very painful right now.

They're probably not helpful.

I don't know.

The financial pressures in Hollywood are...

It's hard to say because on the one hand, when there's financial pressures in Hollywood, of course the argument is fewer movies get greenlit and then the executives become more risk averse and the kinds of movies are willing to greenlight.

But I think it also means that they are also less willing to greenlight projects that are being greenlit only for political reasons, or only for social, cultural reasons, or only out of a sense of fear.

And so I don't know exactly how that balances, but hopefully things get more exciting.

By the way, of course, the other big topic in Hollywood is AI.

I was just going to add that.

Yeah.

So that's the, you know, that's the 800 pound thing.

And, you know, and, and, you know, to their credit, they're, you know, they're highly aware of it.

They're highly alert, uh, alert to it.

Um, and then, by the way, there are a bunch of filmmakers, including some folks that I know, that are like super excited.

Um and so there there are, including some, like I know, of like two, like a triple a list like director filmmakers uh, you know, top end people who are like very excited about what's possible and are gonna fully embrace it.

And there's a bunch of other people who are, you know, very excited.

And so there's gonna be an embrace by at least part, but there's also, you know, there's a lot of, you know, Hollywood has always had kind of a fear driven reaction to new technologies.

And there's some of that.

And then there is this attachment, and Hollywood is actually very acute.

There's this attachment of like AI politics to like woke politics.

And so if you're still super woke, you're also like super anti-AI.

And there are these like basically, it's basically like the woke activists have picked up AI as the new thing that they're going to agitate about.

And so, and they're mounting basically already like pressure campaigns on the studios to like basically vow to never use AI.

And, at least so far, the studios, to their credit, are like no, we're not going to do that.

Um, like we're we we, you know the studio.

So far, i think the studio executives have all been consistent, which is like look, we've always used technology.

Um, you know the.

The movie camera itself is technology.

Special effects, like we've always used technology.

You know videotapes, dvd streaming these are all technologies.

Um, you know, every movie has cgi.

You know, like that's.

Yeah, one of my little fun facts about history of movies is tron.

Tron was the first.

There's a big sequel for tron that's out this week.

The original Tron was 1982 from Disney and it was the first movie that had integrated use of computer graphics, which was the big thing at the time.

And as a consequence of that, Tron was disqualified from the Oscars because they cheated by using computer graphics. right um right and so and so you know to go from that world to the world in which every movie has cgi and for the most part you don't even know that there's cgi in it but you just see a romantic comedy and they're using cgi to do all kinds of things in it and you don't even notice and it's just taken completely for granted and so like i i i think the studios the studios i think understand that i think they're gonna they're gonna actually embrace it enthusiastically but there's gonna be this there's gonna be this like at least there's an attempt to like gin up a moral panic around it um and try to you know basically keep it out and i i don't think it's gonna work because i think the economics are too compelling But then the other thing with AI is, of course, AI is going to be super helpful to existing filmmakers, but the other thing is AI for sure, and we see this especially in this last couple of weeks with the new version of Sora and a lot of these other new things that are coming out, AI is going to make a whole new kind of filmmaker possible to exist for the first time. which is the filmmaker with no visual skill, right, or access to a set or to a camera or to actors, but with an idea.

Like people are gonna be able to make.

You know it's gonna start with shorts and animated things and so forth, but it's gonna work its way up to full movies.

Um, and so you know, people with a people, people who otherwise would be limited to only being novelists, or being maybe, people who do graphic novels um, but are creative geniuses um uh, are going to be able to actually make full movies with AI.

And I, and again, I think, I think that's a reason for like profound optimism.

I think we're going to get like completely new kinds of, you know, basically filmed entertainment from people who otherwise never would have been able to to access the medium.

And I think that also is, I'm very positive on that.

Yeah.

Can we end because you brought it up on comedy?

I know you saw Naked Gun or the new Naked Gun film.

What was your thoughts on is comedy working?

Does it have to be nostalgic for it to work?

But maybe tell us a little bit about that film and whether it's a reason to be positive on comedies in the future.

Yeah, so I thought Naked Gun, I thought was actually a little bit of a minor miracle for a couple reasons.

So one is, look, it's a sequel to movies from, like, 40 years ago.

And so, you know, how many people even remember the original Naked Gun movies?

It actually turns out a lot of people do.

They're beloved movies.

But also, it turns out, like, you can make an...

It's great.

It's a great comedy.

It's a fantastic comedy.

It's very funny.

It worked.

It worked commercially.

It worked statistically.

It honored the original material, but it was also deliriously loopy in its own way.

I highly recommend it.

It's very funny.

But actually, it's striking to that point.

It also like anything.

It's also a post-message movie um, and and this is actually and maybe this is a reason for optimism which is again, if you go back through the time scale, like that thing was green lit no later than 22, probably in 21.

So at the height of every movie has to have the message um, that movie was still green lit and it got all the way through it out the other side and there's not a trace of it in it.

Um, and so, like it's, it's a pure, it's a pure comedy, It's a pure comedy.

It's like the original movies.

It's a pure comedy.

It's a pure absurdist, kind of modern Three Stooges style comedy.

Liam Neeson, of course plays against type and is of course a brilliant comedian and just kills it.

And then Pam Anderson, the great icon of 1980s femininity, Um it, you know, it's her big, it's her big, you know.

Starring role.

And she just like absolutely is just fantastic.

Like she's just like absolutely kills it.

She's hysterical.

Um, and she's just like, and she's just like there as a person and like she's not.

You know she's not wearing, you know she's just like, you know she's.

She's like, you know she's just like full woman.

Um, in natural form.

Um, and it's, it's, it's great. um and you know and it's you know it's a like there's any there's there's no there's no you know there's none of the casting let's say you know aspects that kind of cause problems um you know there's none of this there's no script it's just it's just like an extremely well executed like it very easily could have been made in 2012 or in 2008 or in 2002. um no look it doesn't you know it doesn't move the artistic ball forward you know It's a very well-executed example of a genre.

But it is a movie that it was somehow able to escape all of the traps that all of these other movies have gotten into and was able to make it out and be a big commercial hit.

And again, I think the executives are very encouraged by that.

The audience is still there for that.

I'll just give you the.

It doesn't really have any like racial politics or whatever, but it does have.

It did have one thing, which is for people who haven't seen it.

It was famously a movie originally that one of the major stars of it was OJ Simpson playing a character named Nordberg who got into all kinds of unlikely trouble.

And so they do this scene where, I'll just spoil one thing, because it was extremely funny.

Liam Neeson plays the son of the original main guy, Leslie Nielsen, in the movie.

So Frank Grubbin, and then Liam Neeson plays Frank Grubbin Jr.

And then Liam's sidekick plays the son of Leslie Nielsen's sidekick from the original movie.

And then there's a young black guy on the team.

And you know, normally in a movie it's like okay, of course there's like a black guy on the team, but they do it really well, which is they've got out in the hallway of the police station the movie.

They've got Leslie Nielsen's photo up on the.

You know he passed away.

So they've got his photo up and Liam Neeson does this thing where he like kneels down and he's like oh you know father, I'm trying to live up to your you know expectations and trying to be a great police officer.

And he's like sobbing and there's tears.

And, you know, next to it is like a sidekick with the sidekick's photo.

And he's like, oh, father, I miss you so much.

And I want to be a great cop.

And then there's, you know, the black kid and he's looking up at a photo of, and he just and he just looked at the camera and he just goes perfect perfection absolutely perfect yes so yeah comedies are good by the way let me put in a plug for one more movie um uh have either of you guys seen uh fantastic four no Probably not.

Fantastic Four is the most pro-family movie in Hollywood since I can't even remember.

Catherine in particular, I think you'll be astonished.

It's incredible.

What's that?

When did it come out?

It came out this summer.

And Marvel, just for context, it's one of the new Marvel tentpole properties.

And the Marvel machine you know did incredibly well, from like Iron Man in 2008 through Avengers Endgame and like whatever 2020.

But for the last five years many of the big Marvel projects have not done well, both the TV shows and the movies.

And you know again.

You can argue different reasons why, but like Critical Drinker would tell you it's because they became consumed by the message.

Fantastic Four, it's like a diverse cast.

It's got like a lot of the modern stuff in it.

But however Anne, it's just like 100 pro-family in like a very, actually quite deep and moving way.

And so again, it's just, it's a little bit like, wow, they greenlit this thing in 20.

And, you know, maybe again, maybe this reason, maybe I'm actually too cynical.

Maybe in 2022, they already realized, the filmmakers already realized what was happening.

And so maybe they actually had like their own version of the underground movement where they're like all right, it's time to start planting the seeds for what is going to come out of this whole thing when sort of the panic subsides.

And you can say, like Fantastic Four is like it's like a true audience pleasing blockbuster movie from a studio that has been obsessed with the message that comes out and doesn't have a trace of it in it at all.

And furthermore, it's like 100% above.

I wouldn't say it's like it's not.

I mean, it's a superhero movie, so it's not like a political.

I wouldn't say it has like political content per se, but it's like 100 pro-family in a way.

That's very touching.

Great, we'll put it on the list.

By the way, your kids will love it.

I took my 10-year-old, and he was like, yeah.

He doesn't react emotionally to things, but he was as close to crying in a movie as I've ever seen him.

Wow.

Do you think Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead could get made today and do you think there'd be an audience for it?

You know, it's funny.

Yeah, it's funny.

It's so funny, especially like Atlas Shrugged has become Atlas Shrugged.

You know, people don't know.

It's a sort of famous Ayn Rand novel.

It's kind of her most successful novel.

It's the novel that basically, it clearly is like a great mythic American novel.

Like it clearly, it clearly clears that bar that we were talking about earlier.

You know, it is one of the great American novels.

You know it's of a time and place which is sort of the, you know the sort of 1950s, but it's written in a way that can be kind of deliberately timeless.

It's actually kind of interesting how it's written, because it kind of It's like obsessed with railroads on the one hand, which makes it kind of look back to the 1800s, but it also has like science fiction elements.

And she kind of did that, I think deliberately, so that it would kind of have this timeless kind of.

She's really talking about, you know, some movie.

It's a novel, as the great novels.

It's a novel about people and the behavior of people And so.

But she does this thing where she kind of abstracts the specific content of it in order to kind of try to make it timeless.

And I think it works quite well.

And The Fountainhead is another version of that.

The Atlas Shrugged basically is about broadly, it's about American dynamism.

It's American dynamism in the movie.

It's about industrialization and progress and science and going to the stars and, like you know, achieving great things.

And, you know, and the shape of societies that do that.

The Fountainhead is more about, I would say, artistic achievement and artistic purity, and it's sort of similarly evocative.

And so both those novels are high up on the list of novels that will be very influential in a hundred years.

Both of those novels have been absolutely scathingly hated by every good cultural commentator and critic for the last basically, since they came out.

And those novels are just attacked in the most vicious possible terms.

Like, absolutely, absolutely.

In fact famously, Whitaker Chambers, the reformed communist, reviewed Atlas Shrugged for National Review when it came out in the 1950s and he basically called her a Nazi.

In National Review, Whitaker Chambers, who became this famous right-winger, basically calls Ayn Rand a Nazi.

Ayn Rand, of course, being a Jewish refugee from Russia, he said in a novel quote, has the whiff of the gas chamber about it. right and so like which by the way it doesn't but but anyway very unfair unfair um but um but anyway it's like it's like your diversions in the rotten tomato scores of the of the critics versus the versus the audience like basically everybody's red atlas shrug like loves it Um, and everybody who's, like, criticized her for a living just fucking despises it, right?

Just, like, completely despises it.

Um and so, and what's interesting about it and maybe this is the importance of the novel is, to your question like that, that that aspect of it has lives today.

So, like anybody today, who anybody today who, every time I've ever talked to anybody who's read Atlas Shrugged in the last five years, they're like wow.

It's like the novel about the world we live in.

Like, it's like, oh, I know that guy, and I know that guy, and I know that guy.

And Eric knows who I'm talking about.

Yeah uh right, like these are all people right, like these are all people, these are all archetypes of people.

We know who these people are, we know what they're doing.

Like it's just, it's amazing how receptive it is, you know, 60 or 80 years later, like how, how primal she made it, that it has that relevance, um it and, by the way, it's tremendously entertaining and it's like this sprawling narrative and it's incredible characters and so yeah, it like it very clearly ought to be a three-part movie or, you know, at a huge budget, or ought to be like an eight season.

You know, 10 episode, 80 episode total.

You know lavish HBO show or something.

I mean, it would be every bit as intense today as it was in the 1950s when the novel came out.

And so that would be the great, that would be the indication that we're in a really different world.

I've talked to some folks in Hollywood about it.

They all know it.

They all understand this.

They all know the novel.

They're all very familiar with it.

They all, by the way, love the idea of doing things that have preexisting brands and audiences built in, because that really reduces the risk.

But if you're really talking about it, it's a little bit like a hot stove.

Step away.

And, by the way, and again, it's very striking that a novel from like whatever 1953 can still be generating the hot stove reaction in 2025.

You know, it's pretty amazing.

And the flip side of that is because it's such a cult classic that people would come out and draw.

Like you know, it would make a lot of noise in a good way.

It would be the Silicon Valley version of the Minecraft movie, right?

Like, it would just be like, yep, we're all going.

Yeah.

But, you know, I don't know.

Maybe it's not a big enough audience or whatever to you know.

Maybe that's not a big enough cult classic thing.

But like, by the way, it sells.

Like, you know, it's one of the best selling novels of all time.

It sells, you know, enormously well today.

It sold well, basically, since it came out.

You know, it sells far better.

I mean, it's one of these things.

It'll sell far more copies this year than any well-reviewed novel ever that the New York Times Book Review talks about, right.

And yet it is just like, it is so completely politically unacceptable that it's like off the map.

Yeah, so that would be the ultimate test.

I would love to see it happen.

I don't know.

And by the way, maybe the answer here, maybe this is the AI, right?

Maybe the answer here is AI.

Maybe what we need is the AI system where you feed the novel in and it makes the movie.

By the way, now that I say that, for sure that's gonna happen.

And so maybe that's actually the answer.

Yeah, we were laughing offline about how someone was using Sora to make something that we thought was better than South Park.

And so it'll be interesting to see if a whole new crop of filmmaker sort of democratizes the industry a little bit, that it's not just Hollywood but it's people from all over.

And studios don't have this sort of monopoly over creation of high-quality stuff.

So, yeah, we'll see.

Yeah, so South Park actually, let's close on this, but just briefly on South Park.

South Park was very much like what you're seeing with AI filmmaking right now, but in 1993.

So I remember when South Park, the original South Park came out.

The original South Park came out in 1993, and it was significant.

It was the first internet viral video ever.

It was the first video and this was like pre-streaming pre-YouTube pre, you know, years before all of that.

And so it literally distributed at the time.

It was literally, it was like a QuickTime movie.

It was Apple's QuickTime video format.

And it was a downloadable thing.

And like, if you wanted to download it on a modem, you had to like leave the modem on for like an hour or something to like download this thing.

And what it was, was it was a digital scan of a video Christmas card.

So there was an executive in Hollywood at the time that wanted to make his friends a special kind of Christmas card.

And so he hired these two basically scrappy young, you know, basically film students, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who had no credits, and you know, they were just, you know, kids and hadn't done anything yet.

And he hired them to and he basically said make the most offensive.

Basically like three minute video Christmas card you can possibly imagine.

And so, and with these kids it was a technology at the time what they did was the camcorders.

Digital camcorders are brand new.

So they used digital camcorder, but then they did stop motion, they had no money.

So they did stop motion animation using little cardboard cart, using literally construction paper characters.

And so the reason the characters look like they do is because, literally in the original thing they were cut out of construction paper.

And they were literally moved by hand frame to frame.

And then the two kids did the voiceovers.

But it was from the very beginning.

It was the same characters Cartman and Kyle and Stan and Kenny right.

And in South Park, which is the town that these kids grew up in.

And then it was this three minute Christmas card and it was Santa Claus versus Jesus.

And Santa Claus versus Jesus ended up in a full Kung Fu fight, you know, complete with like blood and like body parts, right?

And so it was like this.

It was like you know it was intended to be like massively offensive, but it was like it was like really, it was really funny.

And so somebody got there and literally it was sent out on videotape right, it was a pre-dvd right, so it's not on videotape and somebody actually scanned the videotape, which is actually hard to do, and then it went super viral on the internet uh, and became big, and so it's an example of.

You know that that everything i just described the camcorder like that, that was the, the ai of its time.

It left these kids who had no access or no knowledge even necessarily of like traditional animation production methods to do this.

By the way, when those kids actually then got their, they then actually, you know, Salesforce is like a full studio now.

You know, it's been tremendously financially successful.

They now have a complete state of the art studio production facility.

And what they've used it for is they've used it to hyper optimize computer models of the optimal recreation of the aesthetics of a construction paper.

And so if you watch South Park episodes today you see actually the characters have, there's actually a depth to the animation that shows the layers of the construction paper.

It's not produced digitally today, but like they've used state-of-the-art digital tools to reconstruct the physics of construction paper.

You know, 30 years later.

And so, yeah, so they were able to do that.

And then obviously you know they were maybe the most successful like animation duo of the last 30 years.

And yeah, I think that the AI thing is we're right on the tipping point of that.

And your point, like maybe we actually just saw the first one.

It's so, let's say toxic that it's hard to recommend that people watch it.

Yeah, yeah.

But it is.

It is.

It is a, it's for sure, a South Park caliber level thing created in AI by somebody who didn't use any of the traditional.

You know they didn't use any.

They didn't use any traditional.

You know techniques to use for animating anything.

It was created entirely with Sora, scene by scene.

And yeah, it's just as a as a as a demonstration of technology.

It's just, it's obvious that that moment has now arrived.

And to your point Eric, like I do think.

For example, I think there's now actually a new form of political propaganda at Loose in the World which is, you know, basically the custom produced, you know basically South Park-ish, you know kind of you know, video series.

And AI is going to make that so easy for people to do.

You're going to be able to do.

You know anybody in any you know any electoral race is going to be able to hire some kid you know to do things like this.

And so it's going to be like this.

It's like, I don't know, decentralized satire or something like that.

And so, yeah, the moment has arrived.

The art form shifts again.

On that note, we got to let you go.

But this has been a fantastic episode of Monitoring the Situation.

Thanks so much for coming on, Mark.

All right, fantastic.

Situation monitored.

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[The Cultural Reset: Hollywood, Art, and the Post-Message Era]-[Marc Andreessen on the State of Film and Hollywood]

📋 Summary

The State of Hollywood: From Myth-Making to a Cultural Reset

The Rise and Fall of "The Message"

Economic Pressures and the Streaming Shift

Eddington and the New Wave of Art

The AI Frontier

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Cultural Reset: Hollywood, Art, and the Post-Message Era]-[Marc Andreessen on the State of Film and Hollywood]

📋 Summary

The State of Hollywood: From Myth-Making to a Cultural Reset

The Rise and Fall of "The Message"

Economic Pressures and the Streaming Shift

Eddington and the New Wave of Art

The AI Frontier

Conclusion

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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