It’s fitting that creative partners Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg chose to premiere their Apple TV+ series “The Studio” — a scathingly accurate satire of the modern film industry — at the South by Southwest, a festival at once adoring of film culture and deeply irreverent about Hollywood.
“I think a lot of people wonder why so many bad films are made in Hollywood,” Rogen said in the Q&A following the two-episode premiere. “But what people should wonder is how any good films are made in Hollywood. So that’s what we’re trying to show here.”
Rogen plays Matt Remick, who is suddenly promoted into the job running the fictional Continental Studios (think Sony Pictures mixed with Warner Bros. and a dash of Paramount). While veteran actors and fellow SXSW attendees Catherine O’Hara, Kathryn Hahn, Ike Barinholtz and Chase Sui Wonders play members of Matt’s team, the show also boasts a cavalcade of top stars playing (versions of) themselves. The first episode alone features Paul Dano, Peter Berg, Nicholas Stoller, Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron, and Steve Buscemi, most of whom are wrapped up in Matt’s frantic quest to lock down a director for his first major project: a feature film adaptation of Kool-Aid.
At one point, Rogen said that he and Goldberg — who direct the show, and wrote the first episode with fellow executive producers Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez — told Scorsese that he should complain that he should’ve sold a project “to fuckin’ Apple.”
“And he’s like, ‘You guys say “fuck” too much,’” Rogen recalled. “And we were like, ‘We say “fuck” too much?!’”
Rogen said that he and Goldberg sought out to populate their film with as many top tier names that they could because “we wanted to paint an accurate picture of a Hollywood movie studio, and so we wanted to use people that you believe a studio would get excited about.”
He then cited the 2015 film version of the HBO series “Entourage,” which was similarly meant to take place in the heart of a Hollywood milieu. “They’re having a big party and, like, Bob Saget’s the most famous guy there,” Rogen said. “I love the guy, but it was always like, I don’t know if that’s how it would be.”
“The Studio” premiers on Apple TV+ on March 26.
