Matt Remick on 'The Studio' Is Every Entertainment Journalist These Days
The quest for relevancy in a time when art seems to mean nothing.
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I’ve been catching up on the last few episodes of Apple TV+’s amazing inside Hollywood series The Studio, and trying to stretch out the experience for as long as I have. (I haven’t seen the finale yet so no spoilers in the comments, please and thanks.) But after watching episode 8, “The Golden Globes,” I came to a painful realization: that the series about a Hollywood studio also is just as bittersweet about the state of my own industry.
If you haven’t seen “The Golden Globes” episode The Studio I’ll throw up a spoiler warning. Though you should just watch the series regardless because it’s wonderful.
As the title implies, Continental Studios President Matt Remick (Seth Rogan) is on his way to the Golden Globes where one the movies he greenlit, Zoe Kravitz’s Open, is nominated. His goal is to have Zoe thank him in her acceptance speech, aware that it’s the only time studio heads are even heard about. His mad attempt to convince Kravitz to do it, unsurprisingly, leads to hilarious consequences.
Or, at least, it should be hilarious but it honestly was a painfully bittersweet episode. Matt has spent the entire series—as he says in the next episode, “CinemaCon”—trying “desperately to be cool.” He wants to bring back old school appreciation of movies, as well as the moguls whose names became as synonymous with filmmaking as the directors themselves. He also understands something everyone won’t admit to but feels inside: that, plain and simple, this job is cool. Who wouldn’t want to be apart of it?
There’s a reason why so many people, my dad included, simultaneously say they wish they had my job and also how easy it is. It’s another thing The Studio deconstructs so skillfully. Matt devotes his whole life to running the studio yet everyone around him blithely thinks he does nothing. Matt has spent the entire series saying he’s an artist, assuming himself part of the team of creatives who make movies, only for everyone to say he’s delusional.
A trip to the bathroom sees him run into Netflix’s CEO Ted Sarandos, who argues with Matt over whether they’re artists or bean counters. Historically, moguls weren’t the ones behind the camera but they were involved in shaping the movies that got made, for good and ill. If Hollywood is such a collaborative medium—what is a director’s part of the film vs. the cinematographer vs. the screenwriter, etc.—then aren’t studio heads part of that? It’s something I’ve been asking while watching The Studio: when did the Old Hollywood mogul die? I’d assume Weinstein was the last person whose name you’d know synonymous with his studio. Sarandos tells Matt the only reason anyone thanks him at the awards is because they’re contractually obligated. Public validation, like a social post, is itself a type of currency for entertainment writers.
But Matt’s desire to see himself as an artist resonates with us entertainment critics and journalists for the sheer fact that there’s a tendency to undermine our contributions. I struggled for years to say I was a journalist or critic, routinely telling people “I just write about entertainment,” as if it was fluffy and pointless. It wasn’t until I started working at IndieWire, and seeing the impact my writing could have on a reader, that I realized my journalistic work was journalism, just in a different medium. However, in Hollywood-associated jobs specifically, there is a desire to underplay contributions if they aren’t front and center. This is something Matt’s dealt with on The Studio already.
The episode “The Pediatric Oncologist” heartbreakingly lays out the trod on nature of filmmaking today, and Matt’s role within it. Matt is dating the aforementioned pediatric oncologist (Rebecca Hall) who, alongside her friends, poke fun at Matt’s job. They don’t know what he does, make fun of the silly movies he’s involved in, and have a moral superiority that they, as doctors, are more valid to the world than him and entertainment. As Matt tells the doctors, before going on a tear that eventually puts him in the hospital, movies have a power to define people’s lives. What is in every hospital room? A TV, so for a few minutes someone’s pain can be distracted by something that makes them feel better or has meaning to them.
Matt has been on a quest to make himself relevant in the industry since the beginning and it all comes to head in “The Golden Globes.” Matt becomes obsessed with getting Zoe to thank him after his mom tells him everyone is coming to watch the Globes because a movie he’s made was nominated.
No one understands Matt’s world and its significance to him or other people, and if he can’t even convince his own mother that he’s important in his job, who else will believe him? Which brings it all back to the world of entertainment journalism. At the episode’s end, Zoe does thank him but her words are drowned out by the play-off music ushering her off-stage. His mother grouses that no one heard him being thanked and Matt is left to drive him, still feeling insignificant despite his prestigious position.
I left a highly toxic, though prestigious, job at a trade last April and since then I’ve felt myself at a professional crossroads. Know the Hollywood saying, “When you’re hot, you're hot and when you aren’t….?” Well, that’s true in entertainment journalism because the minute I left my job it felt like all the work I’d put in with regards to relationship and access went up in smoke. And there are countless people now in that same boat with the influx of layoffs going through the industry.
Watching Matt Remick sit in that limo, unacknowledged, hit me hard. Entertainment journalists are also questing for relevancy. Relevance that our words are important, relevance that we’re in the Hollywood bubble, if only adjacent to it. If a man at the top of the industry, running an entire studio, can’t feel relevant? The quest feels like Don Quixote chasing windmills. We’re never as relevant as we want, and even when we’re at the top we’re still not doing exactly what we want to be doing. Everything feels so illusory at the same time that it’s slipping and fading away.
The Studio is a comedy, and yet so much of it feels painfully accurate in its awareness of Hollywood in a time of such great upheaval. We aren’t at the highest echelons of the world like Matt, but Matt’s feelings of inadequacy in a world of power, beauty, and glam, hits like a ton of bricks. Now I’m gonna watch that finale!