by TWY

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More often than not, a young cinephile today loves cinema by first “loving” the film industry. Seducing us with trailers, social media coverage, panels at comic-cons and award campaigns, the contemporary Hollywood imposes its machine on the spectators, an advertised passion in which there is a bit of true passion inside. Make no mistakes, this promotional culture may nonetheless leads us to a real understanding of cinema, since there remain the films which must stand as singular experiences. But the reality is that there is little to be expected from Hollywood today, except perpetual anticipations for upcoming releases, often ending with the inevitable feeling of letdown. One only needs to examine the fanatic reaction videos captured at the high profile announcements of Marvel Studios, always more exciting than the films themselves. Meanwhile, for filmmakers and critics, to work inside or around the film industry means to deal with this very modern “love” for cinema, an impure love. The Studio is about exactly that, and, for better or worse, the structure of this comedy series somehow mirrors not filmmaking, but the marketing scheme of such, full of grand illusions, eureka moments, with a touch of forgetfulness.

The Politics of Pitching

With the duo of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg directing all ten episodes of the first season (the second season has already been announced), and Rogen playing Matt Remick, an impassioned but insecure executive at the fictional Continental Studio, The Studio dramatizes the conventions of the movie business in front and behind the camera. The Hollywood Reporter indicates that “it’s safe to assume that the head of Continental Films is an amalgam of every beleaguered exec Rogen has encountered”, while his predecessor, played by Catherine O’Hara, was clearly modeled on Amy Pascal, Rogen’s “mentor” and former chairwoman at Sony Pictures. No one doubts Matt’s love for the movies, and while he wishes to make it big by making his studio auteurs-friendly, he compromises that within the first days on the job, since his employment is conditional: to make a family blockbuster based on the Kool-Aid soft drink to rival the success of Barbie (2023). Thus, the first five episodes each centers around the conception or production of a particular film, and the experience of watching them often resembles hearing a “sales pitch,” where a filmmaker presents to the studio their idea of a film in the hope to get it “green-lit.” This is what Robert Altman expertly demonstrated in the opening shot of his satirical The Player (1992), combining formulas like “it’s Movie A meets Movie B” and “it’s funny but a thriller”, with a touch of “but it’s got a heart”, etc. While only the first episode is structured around an actual pitch, ending with an already notorious scene with Martin Scorsese himself, all other episodes would introduce a particular feature of each respective film, with the punchline being the presence of its celebrity director: Sarah Polley’s romantic drama ends on a complex “oner” – Hollywood’s slang for long takes – shot exteriorly during the sunset, a.k.a “magic hour”; Ron Howard’s thriller with Anthony Mackie features a Shyamalan-style twist with a prolonged, slow-cinema-style final sequence; Olivia Wilde directs a film noir with a tyrannical, Fincher-like perfectionism…… 

Although the series has an uncynical flare, thanks to Rogen who excels at directing jokes towards himself, each episode has a bomb under the table: public relation catastrophes, award season drama, actors going AWOL, battles on final cut; political correctness are tackled, racial and gender politics are provoked… These are hardly industry secrets, but this form of episodic comedy also means that all the films produced by Matt are never seen beyond their pitches. The films become gags. Throughout most of the season, as soon as another episode begins, the previous film is immediately forgotten: another pitching session will commence, and other problems from other films will arise to erase the previous ones. Since the idea of the films outweighs the end product, the logical endpoint for all these projects are their presentations at the CinemaCon, the national convention where theater owners meet the studios – a pitching in public. 

The sole recurring project throughout the season is the Kool-Aid film, but across the four episodes (1, 7, 9, 10) which featured it, the project has already forgotten its past in rapid succession: first, as a Martin Scorsese gangster epic based on the Jonestown Massacre; some episodes later, as a Black-themed animated film voiced by rapper Ice Cube, who then exits the project publicly amid AI-related scandal (perhaps Rogen enlists the former N.W.A member just to hear him say “Fuck AI“); finally, at the CinemaCon, the project is a blob of nothing except its attached IP, with an anonymous director blabbing promotional word salad. This self-conscious critique encoded in the form marks both the honesty of the satire and its limitation, as it hardly goes beyond, and finally loses its energy. Hence, the season finale is fittingly drug-fueled. We must discover cinema outside this dull neoliberal machine, while not resorting to numbing psychedelic frenzy.

The Politics of “The Oner”

The Studio does have another pitch to its audience in its omnipresent use of long takes, clearly an homage to Altman’s film, but also Soviet filmmaker Mikhail Kalatozov, revealed by the show’s creators when visiting the closet of The Criterion Collection. What is a key difference between the two referents? If a long take displays, by definition, singular piece(s) of action in a continuous time and space, then its function would be to signal unity within the various subjects in the shot. That unity, for Kalatozov, suggests the collective consciousness of a socialist nation, and for Altman, the lacking of such, which is also intensified by surround sound, isolating each voices in its place. But while The Player used a telephoto zoom lens to impose a sense of paranoia, filming its characters in long distance through shades and windows, Rogen and company use a handheld Steadicam to follow characters around its studio lot, allowing the immersed audience the comfort of privileged access – paparazzis who dare filming in close proximity. 

Although gone was the looming conspiracy of The Player, what remains here is still a deliberate display of technical might. Just as Altman made his opening shot a clear homage to Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), “The Oner”, for Rogen and Goldberg, is also the shorthand for cinematographic excellence. In fact, this cliche of the long take equaling technical mastery was long running, and recently seen in a most obnoxious way in Netflix’s British miniseries, Adolescence (2025), which features an similar one-take-per-episode gimmick. There, the shallow gaze of the camera serves somehow like government personals, with its central tragedy of the modern youth flattened by the perspectives of the police, the education system, psychology, and parents: a sickening society analyzing its faults but incapable to truly examine the source of trauma. To talk about formal techniques of a long take is to talk about the ideological machine of a Netflix show, which presents social issues as abject, expensive mise-en-scene, resulting in a formal dominance directed both at the subjects filmed and the audience. We are trapped in the duration of a shot, since there are no “reverse shots” or ideas from outside. If the camera in such context becomes truly the brain of the work, then The Studio often finds its long takes invoking powerlessness, as the characters are stranded in their businesses with no escapes, with the camera locked on to them no matter which direction they move. The second episode of the series, titled “The Oner”, was a suspenseful depiction of the filming of an “epic, magic-hour oner” going haywire, thanks to Matt making an unscheduled visit to the set, causing a domino effect that led to the shot’s failure – the irony being that the episode itself was also a 24-minute long take. But the “two” shots that waltz around this episode turned out to be hilariously different: Are we supposed to laugh at the fact that, while we see the episode itself unfold in almost documentary fashion, the actual oner of the film, “to be shot with zero margin of error,” ends up looking like a perfume commercial?

Irony and Love

As The Studio enters its final stretch, one begins to wonder the meaning of it all. In front of this big budget, Apple-funded, cameo-filled production, it’s hard to not notice the gradual tiredness of its satire. Witnessing the problematic scenarios that filled today’s film industry, they quickly became too familiar to be actually funny. And yet, at first, the series invites us in by presenting itself as “a love letter to the movies.” The vanity it exposes quickly becomes a melancholy, particularly in the sixth episode, as Matt helplessly wandered amongst a party of medical professionals, arguing that his work on violent action franchises and other entertainments are equally important as that of a pediatric oncologist. Later, the eighth episode sees him desperately wanting the actress-director Zöe Kravitz, portraying a version of herself, to thank him at another big party, The Golden Globes. This episode faithfully recreates the award ceremony, not only reminds the audience of its financial might, but also the theatricality of the award season itself. A young cinephile also tends to love the award shows, following its convention and its films like a season of television, but most importantly, to have the feeling to being close to cinema, its industry and glamour, including the delight (and false sense of power) in judging whether the Academy Awards had made the right choices, even dreaming themselves making acceptance speeches. It is here, for the only time in the series, it dares to enter a truly surreal territory: Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz), Continental’s vice president and Matt’s best friend, starts to be repeatedly thanked by various Globes winners, after the actor Adam Scott thanked Sal for letting him crash on his couch when he first arrived twenty years ago, to which Sal responded in ecstasy, much to the confusion of Matt. 

Here, a strange love appears and intertwines with its irony: a young cinephile’s dream. By doubling down on this scenario, each “thank you, Sal Saperstein!” brings the episode closer towards pure impossibility, but also pure comedy, beyond both parody or social commentary. By making an award show the abstraction of itself, The Studio reveals a secret to its success: to love cinema, one acknowledges first its shadow.