Buffy, Michael Sheen & MacGuffins

0:00The Rest is Entertainment is presented by Octopus Energy. Now remember, Octopus Energy do something really great. If they've got your birthday, when you call in for whatever reason to Octopus, the Hold Music is the number one selling single from that year, the year of your 14th birthday.

0:20Richard Osman:And we discovered, didn't we, that yours was The Only Way is Up by Yaz and the Plastic Population. We're going to discover mine now. yours is i just called to say i love you by stevie wonder okay yes i prefer yours do you think it's weird to have whole music which is i just called to say i love you because listen and you know that i love octopus energy but i will rarely ring them to tell them i love them yeah yeah i would usually but you know i just want to chat to them about something to do with my energy and i don't mean that sort of energy well look they can but surface the number one single of that year for you and you can always choose not to have the music you can choose for no but I think only animals do that as I've said and I want to go on the record as saying that

1:09hello and welcome to this episode of the rest is entertainment questions and answers edition

1:14Richard Osman:I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman hello Marina hello Richard how are you yeah I'm not too bad at all can i start with some any other business after our um oscars chat and my main contribution was working out if more people from casualty had been nominated for an oscar than from the bill stewart ian burns has uh has written in and said thank you so much for crunching the numbers uh on the bill and casualties oscar alumni i love crunch i really genuinely love but people loved it but i love people do it has a crunched numbers of his own can i put you in the direction of another BBC stalwart, Doctor Who, which has 15 acting nominations.

1:51Oh my gosh.

1:52Richard Osman:Andrew Garfield, Carey Mulligan, Daniel Kaluuya, again, who has been in all three of these. The centre of our van. He is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Eric Roberts. I was thinking, and of course he was, he was nominated for Runaway Train, wasn't he? Way back when, Best Supporting Actor. Felicity Jones, Ian McKellen, Imelda Staunton, Jim Broadbent, John Cleese, John Hurt, Olivia Coleman, Pauline Collins, Richard E. Grant, Sophie Okonedo, and Mare Winningham all nominated for Oscars. I will say this, Stuart Ian Burns, if I may call you that, some of those people were in Doctor Who after they were Oscar nominated because Doctor Who was a very, very big franchise and nothing against casualty in the bill, but it's harder for them to get Oscar nominated actors in them.

2:34Richard Osman:So absolutely, it takes the crown, but I think it has a little asterisk next to that crown. Agreed. I think it has to be the stepping stone. Yes. But anyone - Actually, I don't want to denigrate the shows at all, but it has to be an early part of the CV. Well, because it's about the skill of a casting director, which is spotting... It's like if you go back and watch Prime Suspect and every kind of minor character, you're like, oh my God. Yeah, I know. Like I was watching one the other day, there's a 14 year old Danny Dyer in it. Just every time, it's someone you go, like a young Peter Capaldi, stuff like that.

3:08Richard Osman:So it's about the skill of the casting director. But Stuart, thank you for crunching numbers as well and keeping me company. And anyone out there, whoever wants to crunch any numbers and send me any sort of list, I will, honestly, that is grist to my mill. Shall we start with a question about Buffy? There's so many questions about Buffy. Yes. So Jen is asking this. I saw that Hulu has decided not to take up the highly anticipated Buffy reboot. It seems a strange decision given the appetite from the fandom and with both Sarah Michelle Gellar and Chloe Zhao involved. How did they arrive at this decision?

3:43It is genuinely remarkable this because it got so far. This is the beloved series starring Sarah Michelle Gellar which ran for seven seasons between I think 97 and 2003. That was when that would have been two seasons these days but anyway created by Joss Whedon who is now in the league of sort of semi-canceled gentlemen so he is no longer part of this but it was going to be at Hulu Disney Plus for our purposes. It was called Buffy New Sunnydale they had you know a sort of great recipe in lots of ways the showrunners were the sisters Nora and Lilla Zuckerman who are brilliant who are the showrunners on Pokerface who've also worked on lots of other sort of big tv things like Agents of Shield and stuff like that the pilot was directed by Chloe Jad.

4:21Richard Osman:The director of Hamnet and Oscar winner and all of this. Nomadland and all these things yeah. And Sarah Michelle Gellar was heavily involved. Yeah she's executive producing she didn't appear she appeared a tiny amount actually in the pilot as short which to me makes sense like she's in right at the very end maybe she just has one line i think that's cool yeah and it's the next generation but she is showing that it's okay okay yeah so it felt like it has the yeah exactly the blessing and the bloodline if you can say that so sarah michelle getters on board you've got an oscar-winning director you've got two great showrunners okay so what and it's beloved it's a beloved piece of ip you would think it was the biggest shoe-in in hollywood history yeah and they've pulled the plug on it remarkably late and it's absolutely shocking to everyone involved in it what they have sort of leaked that the problem is is that they said it was small in scope it's more suited to network tv you know they're really i mean they're really i mean they sort of said it's bad yeah they said it's bad um so i think what they might mean is, you know, it's costing us a fortune.

5:27There's only gonna be a few episodes of it. And with these particular heavyweights involved, it took them too long to say no. But I thought I would lay out, because I think it's quite interesting if you don't know this, how something gets to even a pilot being made. And so what are the stages that it had to get through to get to this point, which is, and it might, you know, throw into even sharper relief how late this is to cancel. Okay. I don't know exactly how they did this one, but this would be a typical pathway. So you shop a pilot or a commission, you say, I've got an idea. But in this case, it's this beloved IP related.

6:01So they will have had millions of people for a long, long time pitching, saying, I'm interested, even big names that you've heard of, coming to them, why now, modern takes, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.

6:13Richard Osman:So if it's not Buffy and you're someone with a name and with an agent, you have your idea, you will do a deck on that idea of what it might be. You will then shop that round various of the streamers and they say yes or no. In this particular instance, you have got some real heavyweights. It's almost like they are desperate to have the meeting with you rather than the other way around. So many people have said to them, I have a really great Buffy pitch if you're ever interested at the Oscar. Yes, usually you are trying to sell to a streamer with something like Buffy and with the people involved, the streamer is trying to sell to you, which is yes, we want this with us, what can we do for you.

6:50Yeah. Anyway, they got a pilot script and Nora and Lilla Zuckerman wrote it and Chloe Jawa's on board and they all developed it together. There will, at this stage, when you have a pilot script, there'll be masses and masses of to-ing and fro-ing and redrafts. There will be many redrafts of the pilot script. You know, why now? What's new about this? Why should we do that? You know, what's the kind of...

7:09Richard Osman:What's Hulu about it? Yeah, exactly. All of that stuff. Remind me of what Hulu is again. Yeah, basically. Yeah, exactly. Because I remember last week you said it was this and now you seem to have changed your mind. But anyway, of course we're going to change it. I mean, I've literally just won an Oscar, but of course. If they go for it and they say they're going to make a pilot, then it's all the way back to the drawing board again because then they will have had a writer's room with lots and lots of writers. Then you would have had world building. You would have said, who are actually the characters?

7:35Do we like what we've done with the script? Maybe not. Then you would map out the season, everybody's arcs, the whole thing, how it all ends, right?

7:43Richard Osman:That's the important thing is if you are doing a pilot, almost always alongside a pilot, you would also be doing a series Bible. An outline, yeah. Which is, listen, anyone, not anyone can make an amazing pilot, but you can make an amazing storyline across an hour. You have to then go, oh, by the way, here are the next seven, eight, 12 hours. This is the arc. Yeah, and it ends here. This is where we're going. And by the way, of course, you're going to get another six seasons out of us. And those Bibles are incredibly detailed. And you'll often spend much more time on the Bible than you would on the actual script.

8:12Absolutely. And so they will have done that. Then they will have said, okay, we're ordering the pilot. So they will shoot the pilot and then maybe they will say, okay, in conjunction with that, we'd like to do a script order, not an episode order for the rest of the season. So then all the scripts for the rest of the season will be worked out or they'll be at a certain draft stage. And you'll have to go back to the writer's room for all of that.

8:36Richard Osman:If, by the way, this sounds like a pain in the ass, you are absolutely right. Oh my God, it takes a long time. It's so awful. And by the way, in America, with American money, at this point, millions has already been spent on this thing. And it will have been already on this Buffy thing. And more to the point, an awful lot of opinions have been put in. So many opinions. Now, Variety have got the draft of the shooting script. So what was actually shot? No one has actually seen the pilot, apart from the people who have seen it. It hasn't leaked. And they did it last summer. Hulu sources were saying things like it's unsalvageable, it's undershot, there's no exposition, there's no coverage.

9:13It's under-directed. I mean, this is a mega drive by on Chloe Zhao. Buffy's just at the end. Anyway, they did a rewrite even after that saying, okay, we could reshoot. There could be more actual original Buffy in it of Sarah Michelle Gellar. And there's an acknowledgement always with... They'd made it quite young that the fandom has aged now. So perhaps we could have something a bit more for the age group of the fandom. Sarah Michelle Gellar has come out completely swinging and said, there's an executive at Hulu, who wasn't even familiar with the original, said he'd never watched it all the way through, didn't even care.

9:45She's named him or confirmed that it's him.

9:48Richard Osman:Like Craig Irwitch, right? I mean, he'll be having some death threats against him right now, let me tell you. But you know the thing with Craig Irwitch, right? Who was at Hulu. And so this is made by 20th Century Television. They pitched to Hulu. Craig Irwitch says, do you know what? I'm not a Buffy fan. This is not for me. By the way, it happens sometimes. The exec is not the right person. So what you do then is you go, well, look, it's still Buffy. So we come back as 20th century television. We take this elsewhere. However, Craig O 'Reilly has just left Hulu and has a new job as the head of 20th century television.

10:21Richard Osman:So the guy who just said no to it is now in charge of, should we take this elsewhere? Yeah. That's bad timing. It's really bad timing. And it's really hard. And it's got so, I mean, as I say, it's got so messy. It's interesting now because you've always had this in science fiction, but you've got 90s IP is absolutely massive because we live in a reboot world. And so you've got lots of people who were fans of the original thing when they were young and teenagers, like, I don't know, Phoebe Waller-Bridge doing Tomb Raider or Chloe Zhao doing this. And you've always had this in science fiction, you know, lots of Star Trek people came through and lots of, you know, J.J.

10:52Abrams did the first reboots of Star Wars. So it's difficult. You have got people who are huge names who are suddenly like, oh, well, I would, you know, I want to do Buffy.

11:02Richard Osman:Well, if you can imagine the amount of projects that Chloe Zhao was offered after winning the Oscar. I mean, the world would have been her oyster and she's just done Hamnet. So, you know, everyone wants her to do stuff. Well, maybe she should. I mean, it's difficult. No, the thing I want to do, because it's really meaningful to me, the thing I want to do is Buffy. Well, she wanted to do a Marvel film as well. And she had an absolute nightmare on that. I wonder whether these properties are totally suited to these kinds of directors. But anyhow, it's quite difficult to see what will happen now because she was obviously very, in terms of like, are we going to get another one?

11:35It's hard to see how, because Sarah Michelle Gaddell was so aligned with this and was so part of it all. She might be persuaded if you're really clever to go with somebody else, but that is a big talent management job after this now. I mean, this is such a big blow up. It's quite difficult to see. And I think you do need her involved. You're dealing also with very, very difficult fandoms and they know that from the start. They don't want to put something out that will enrage the fandoms. It really helps if Sarah and Michelle gallery is involved. In fact, you definitely need it because it's an obsessive fandom.

12:03But I don't know. I think this is a big blowout and it should never have got as far as it has. And obviously, they've annoyed lots of great talent. Zuckerman's, you know, lots of them.

12:14Richard Osman:And one of the things about it is, you know, the new economics of television and things do have to get cheaper and cheaper. And they say that the budget for this pilot was about 17 million. And, you know, the per hour cost of the series would not be far off that as well. and 10, 15, 20 years ago, you could have got away with it. You can't get away with it now. I mean, now you can get away with 9 million, which still is absurd, but 17 million was a lot. And yeah, you get it. Maybe they left it to the last minute because there were so many powerful people involved and it felt like such a slam dunk.

12:44I think it's hard.

12:46Richard Osman:They were like, well, surely we can't say no. And how do we say no? Who's going to say no to Chloe? Who's going to tell Sarah? And so maybe they sort of chickened out of saying no to it until the very, very last minute. I think they did it like two days before the Oscars. And they said, poor Chloe Zhao. She just had this news just before the Oscars. You're like, she's all right. She did the Oscars. She doesn't mind. I think it'll be one of those ones that goes on the back burner for a long time now, unless they manage to do an unbelievable, savage job with Sarah Michelle Gellar. They'll make it one day.

13:13Richard Osman:I think lots of the publicity around also shows that people really want this reboot to happen. So, you know, there'll be a way. Craig Gellar, which just needs to take Sarah Michelle, get her to lunch. Just some detente needed. Well, anyway, that Buffy stuff is interesting, so we'll be carrying on to see how that story develops. But Richard, I have a question for you. From JP Jones, he says, Hello both, I read that the original film of Daphne DiMario's Rebecca was so popular in Spain that the particular cardigans worn by the unknown heroine are still called Rebecca's there today. Are there other examples where Hollywood or British films left that kind of mark on everyday life or language in another country?

13:50Richard Osman:Thank you, JP. I had not heard that, but yeah, I've looked into it. And yeah, cardigans in Spain are called Rebecca's. And it is absolutely because of that. Films absolutely leave their mark culturally all the time. We talked before about, you know, the mafia just talk like everyone talks like in Godfather. But my favorite ones, I think, are so paparazzi, you know, we know paparazzi very, very well. And that comes from a character in La Dolce Vita who was a press photographer and his name was Paparazzo. And so we call them the paparazzi. and it literally just comes from that one character in that one film.

14:26Richard Osman:And that's a lovely one. I think Bucket List, which comes from the film The Bucket List. The Bucket List was not named after the fact that everyone had bucket lists. It was just called a bucket list, and now we call those things a bucket list. This is the Morgan Freeman, Jack Nicholson movie from 2007. But my favourite one, very, very well known now, but it comes from a 1944 film. It's about a man who psychologically drives his wife insane, Lain lies to her, bends reality so she has a nervous breakdown. And that film is called Gaslight. That's the best one of all, isn't it? Strangely, sort of fallen completely out of use and then in this political era became a massive word that's used almost all the time.

15:07Richard Osman:Imagine if people now went to look that up and it didn't exist. Oh man, they'd be furious with me. The whole thing based on a Patrick Hamilton play, but the movie is where that term came into being. So paparazzi, bucket list and gaslight would be my three favourites, but I'm going to add Rebecca to that as well. Rebecca, that's a great fact, isn't it? Rebecca's cardigans. That is fascinating. Shall we now go to a break? I would love to. Afterwards, I think we've got a question about House of Games. We have. Remember that show?

15:45Richard Osman:welcome back everybody marina a question from sophie sophie says de moi are reporting that zendaya and tom holland have tied the knot in secret without any photos leaking how is that even possible with such high profile names ah well yeah i think they definitely have got married and that's nice yeah it's lovely yeah It's lovely. And it's sort of been confirmed hilariously by the only person who actually opened his big mouth is Law Roach, who is Zendaya's stylist. And he accidentally confirmed it all. Having said that, I mean, she looks incredible at all times. She simply can't lose him over this.

16:22He's just too good. He's too good.

16:24Richard Osman:He's got too much in the bank. But you can keep these things small and secretive, and many have. Brad and Angelina did it, Beyonce and Jay-Z, Margot Robbie and Tom Ackley, Rachel Weisz, Daniel Craig. I mean, lots of people do it. You can either do it like you're doing it at home or on your vineyard that you're now fighting about in the divorce, in the case of Brad and Angelina, or you can do it in an apartment. The English countryside is quite a popular one. Like, you know, Cumberbatch did that. But you take people's phones, you do NDAs, or you just... I would have thought they kept it very small, to be perfectly honest.

16:55But it's quite interesting. When I think of all of these things, I do think that there is a big divide opening up because we live in an influencer culture and we live in a, you know, a culture where there's a whole new massive, massive, massive middle class of so-called celebrities who are really influencers, who are always on and they are always sharing everything about their lives. and it's almost as if stars have worked out that the one thing that they have, the clever ones, even someone like Timothee Chalamet, who if you're telling me that that guy isn't so online, I can't believe it. That guy is extremely online.

17:31And yeah, he managed to keep his relationship with Kylie Jenner effectively secret for about two years. So it's interesting. There is a divide opening up between people like Zendaya and Tom Holland and Timothee Chalamet and people like that who still think that, okay, the one thing I can have because I simply can't be always on in the way because it just denudes my work of all value, is that I can have an air of mystery and I can be secretive and the not knowing can be the always on part. And it's quite interesting and I definitely see that we're opening up because you're dealing with otherwise just this entire trying to put blue water between yourself and people who are just a completely different kind of celebrity.

18:09So I find it quite interesting that people are still being secretive and trying to say that secrecy and privacy is a prestige quality.