The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Brandon Wainerdi to discuss DK’s hefty and handsome new reference book, Star Wars Encyclopedia: The Comprehensive Guide to the Star Wars Galaxy. We discussed how he broke into writing about Star Wars, researching his entries for the book, and why so much of what we obsessives know about Star Wars comes not from the films but the surrounding products. Brandon’s interview podcast, Talking Bay 94, is a must-listen if you’re a fan of the series. I’ll just say, on a personal note, that this is a really beautiful book: lots of illustrations, tons of information. If you have a precocious tween who loves Star Wars in your life, you could do much worse than this as a gift for them this Christmas. And if you enjoyed this episode, I hope you share it with a friend!

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by novelist and Broadway producer Michael Wolk to discuss his new interactive novel, Devil’s Game. You can check it out yourself here; it’s an interesting mix of web-first design and apocalyptic airport thriller. We talked about what drove him to write this novel and also discussed the state of Broadway and live theater more generally. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

On this week’s episode, I talked to Alex Reisner about his pieces in The Atlantic highlighting the copyrighted material being hoovered into large language models to help AI chatbots simulate human speech. If you’re a screenwriter and would like to see which of your work has been appropriated to aid in the effort, click here; he has assembled a searchable database of nearly 140,000 movie and TV scripts that have been used without permission. (And you should read his other stories about copyright law reaching its breaking point and “the memorization problem.”) In this episode, we also got into the metaphysics of art and asked what sort of questions need to be asked as we hurtle toward the future. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

This week I’m rejoined by Sean McNulty of The Ankler’s morning roundup newsletter, The Wakeup, to discuss the big news in cable land: ComcastNBCUniversal’s decision to spin (most of!) their cable properties into a new, separate company, called SpinCo for now. What does this mean for MSNBC, USA, and the rest of the impacted channels? Why is Bravo staying under the Comcast umbrella? What impact will this have on NBC? All of these questions are asked and some answers are given. Warning: There is a fair amount of rank speculation in this episode, but that couldn’t be avoided. 

This week I’m thrilled to be joined by Jacob Navok, the CEO of Genvid Entertainment, to discuss his company’s new partnership with DC Comics, DC Heroes United. A combination mobile game and Justice League television show, DC Heroes United is a fascinating hybrid entertainment experience, one that Navok has been working on in various forms for years now.  The first 20 minutes or so of the show are largely about DC Heroes United; after that, we discuss the evolution of this sort of interactive gaming/viewing more broadly, including earlier experiments on Facebook and with properties like The Walking Dead and Silent Hill. It’s a fascinating new arena of entertainment, and I hope you learn something about how the next generation is interacting with media even if you’re not that interested in the properties themselves.  If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

This week I’m joined by Russell Hainline, the screenwriter of the forthcoming Netflix original Hot Frosty as well as a whole bunch of Hallmark original Christmas movies (including last year’s The Santa Summit and the forthcoming The Santa Class). I asked him on today to talk about the burgeoning market for Christmas movies on channels like Hallmark and streaming services like Netflix, and we had a great chat about how Hallmark resembles a cable network less than the old Hollywood studios like RKO and MGM. What lessons can the rest of the industry learn from them? If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend!

This week I’m joined by Mark Cousins, the writer and director of the new documentary, My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock. We talked about his movie’s unorthodox presentation, why Hitchcock remains eternally relevant, and how he puts together his incredible video essays. (If you’ve never seen his The Story of Film: An Odyssey, you really should.) And then he turned the tables on me with some closing questions! If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

Good show, long show today with the Entertainment Strategy Guy (subscribe to his Substack here). I’m going to offer up timestamps here, which I don’t usually do, because there’s a ton of stuff covered in this podcast.  Amongst the topics we discussed: Marvel vs. DC in the TV realm (:40); Tulsa King’s status as a surprise hit for Paramount+ (11:40); what the data about Netflix’s second season of Monsters suggests about its completion rate and why that matters (16:06); why horror has a lower streaming ceiling than theatrical ceiling (21:29); Prime Video’s moves into sports and news (30:56); the four horsemen of the media apocalypse (38:41); and a cautious defense of embattled WB-Discovery honcho David Zaslav (56:17). Phew! If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Thomas Negovan, who oversaw the reconstruction of Caligula: The Ultimate Cut. Combing through 96 hours of the original negatives, Tom rebuilt the film from the ground up in order to bring it closer in line with the vision of writer Gore Vidal, director Tinto Brass, and star Malcolm McDowell. We discussed some of the technical challenges of tracking down source materials, the challenge of reconstructing a film that felt entirely different from every version previously known, and how McDowell and costar Helen Mirren responded to the reconstituted picture. The Ultimate Cut debuted at Cannes last year and is available now via streaming, Blu-ray, and 4K from Drafthouse Films and Unobstructed View. (The Blu-ray and 4K sets also include a previous cut of the film; for more on that cut and its odd provenance, I’d recommend reading this note at Diabolik DVD.) And if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

I’m joined by Gabriel Sherman, the writer of The Apprentice, on this week’s episode. Sebastian Stan plays Donald Trump in this movie in theaters now about the future president’s relationship with noted legal fixer and possible evil supervillain Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). The movie’s path to distribution is almost as interesting as the film itself: following production and a decent response at Cannes, it found itself in limbo as the original financier got cold feet and studios worried about reprisals from Donald Trump if he were to win the presidency again. We discussed all that and more in our chat; if you found it interesting, I hope you share it with a friend!

On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by Parrot Analytics’s Brandon Katz to discuss a vexing issues for streaming channels and audiences alike: why do the services have such a difficult time helping people find more things on the service to watch? Our chat is based in part on his column in the Observer, and you should read it if you have a second. But the long and the short of it is that streaming services are dealing with customers signing up for a month or two, binging what they want to watch, and then canceling their sub, over and over, hopping from service to service. Is this anyway for folks to live? 

This week I’m talking to a friend here in Dallas, Bart Weiss, about the Ernie Kovacs Award taking place this weekend at the Texas Theatre. This year’s honoree is Jerry Casale from the band Devo, and we’re discussing his work both with the band and as a pioneer of the music video artform. Check out the links above for tickets to the various events (the screening tonight is going to be pretty fun, I think, as the movie is super-interesting). If you’re in the Dallas area I hope you check it out. And if you enjoyed this episode, I hope you share it with a friend!

NOTE: This is the correct audio file! Apologies, crossed my Audioboom streams the first time around. On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by Jason Pargin to discuss his latest novel, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, a standalone comic adventure about life in the age of interconnectivity. It’s out Tuesday; you can preorder it now. And I really hope you do: Pargin is among the most precise observers of life as it is lived in the digital age, and one of the things we really dive into in this episode is the way in which social media and smartphone living have really altered how we not only interact with each other but also ourselves. 

This week I’m joined by Amy Nicholson, the director of the documentary Happy Campers, which is now available for rental or purchase on VOD at Apple. We discussed the ragtag oceanside community Amy documented, how she came to find herself in a position to tell their story, and some of the stranger reactions to the film’s decision to be less didactic and more emotionally compelling. If you’re intrigued by what you hear here, make sure to check out the movie. And if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

This week I talked to Steven Watts about his new book, Citizen Cowboy: Will Rogers and the American People. Rogers was a fascinating figure, one who straddled America’s status as a largely agrarian, frontier-expanding nation to the more urban, cosmopolitan nation we have today. He helped people manage the cultural change with his humor and became one of the most famous (and beloved) men in America by riding the new mass media wave and gently sticking it to politicians of all stripes. If you want to learn more about Rogers, make sure to check out Steven’s book. And if you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend!

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by John Magary, editor of the new film Between the Temples. We discuss how he got into the editing business, the role of the editor in building the rhythm and flow of a picture, the aesthetic choices an editor can make in shaping the meaning of a movie, and a little about his work with the Criterion Channel. If you enjoyed this episode, try to find a theater playing the movie near you; it’s in 500 or so screens, which means there’s a decent chance there’s a showing somewhere in your neighborhood. And make sure to share it with a friend!

My guest this week is Valentina El Harizi, an 18-year-old first-time filmmaker who has an entry at the DIFF Shorts Film Festival. (If you get this email early enough and happen to live in the Dallas area, you can head over to the Angelika Film Center Dallas on Mockingbird Lane and catch the film; the “High School Shorts” program starts at 3PM local time.) We discussed her film, “Behind the Scenes,” as well as the difficulties of growing up in a world where social media is the first, second, and third option most kids have to interact with each other. If you enjoyed this episode—or think someone with kids surrounded by social media should hear it—please share it with a friend!

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Robbie Whelan, who covers the wide world of Disney for the Wall Street Journal. We talked about all the stuff Disney rolled out at D23 (Sequels! Theme park additions! New Cruise ships!) and discussed the ways in which the softness in Disney’s “Experiences” division (which includes, among other endeavors, the theme parks) may suggest general economic softness that’s hidden by the success of movies like Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

This week I met with novelist (and Bulwark+ member!) Brad Thor in a shadowy location (upstairs at Dallas’s magnificent flagship Half Price Books) to discuss his latest book of international intrigue, Shadow of Doubt. We also talked about the idea that men don’t buy novels, smuggling real-world ideas into the universe of his fiction while maintaining their entertainment value, and a potential adaptation of his Scot Harvath novels into a streaming hit. If you’re looking for a late-summer read, make sure to pick up Brad’s book. And if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

I’m joined this week by Thomas Doherty, Brandeis professor and author of Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, and Maria Elena de las Carreras, lecturer in film studies at the UCLA School of Film and Television, at the CSUN Department of Cinema and Television Arts,* to talk about the recent restoration and Blu-ray release of two documentaries by Herbert Kline: Crisis: A Film of ‘The Nazi Way’ and Lights Out in Europe. Doherty and de las Carreras provided commentary tracks on the films and were kind enough to join me to discuss the historical import and context of these two important films, which chronicled the German annexation of Czechoslovakia and the beginning of Hitler’s assault on Poland. Both movies are available on one Blu-ray directly from Flicker Alley (or Amazon), and they are must-owns for folks interested both in documentary film from the period and World War Two more broadly; I’d heard of Crisis before but had never seen it, and it was a real treat to finally get to watch it.  * Maria Elena de las Carreras’s title has been corrected.