The Rise & Fall of Mr Beast

26:18it doesn't even really flow The Most Dangerous Games it should always be in the singular in a title, shouldn't it? I think there is a short story called The Most Dangerous Game that doesn't matter but it's a phenomenon it's a phenomenal one it's not burning too brightly Knowing our listeners, there will be someone who fits this. Anyone out there who has an ironic book club? Hi. And also, just hit me up because I'll be there. Yeah. An ironic book club reading of the most dangerous games. Mr. Beast and James Patterson. I'm looking forward to talking about Julia Donaldson. After the break, we will be talking about Gruffalo Granny.

26:59Yeah. First, we'll be talking about Nicola Peltz, but then we'll be talking about Julia Donaldson. The palate cleanser of Nicola Peltz. Hang on one second before we go to a break. This week is the final episode of this tranche of our Bond story. We're doing a huge sort of overarching... The Sean Connery years. The Sean Connery years. It all goes wrong for Sean Connery. No spoilers. No spoilers. It happens in Japan, but no spoilers. But that is for our members. So if you want to join, it's theresistentertainment.com for ad-free listening and all these bonus things. Otherwise, shall we go to a break?

27:27Yeah.

27:33This episode is brought to you by Lloyds. Now, show business loves a club. I love all these sort of unofficial groupings of people. There's two Bratpacks that I'm a big fan of. There are two Bratpacks? Yeah, there's two Bratpacks because there's the movie Bratpack, all of the Judd Nelson and, you know, Rob Lowe and Charlie Sheen and all those guys. Everyone in the Breakfast Club. And then there's also the Bratpack of those kind of turn-of-the-90s novelists, Bretty Snellis, Jay McInerney, Donna Tartt. And that's the thing, creatively, it's actually very, very useful to hang out with other people who are incredibly talented because you drive each other on to do things.

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30:34welcome back everybody lovely to have you here nicola peltz marina tell me more yes um it's just been the venice film festival among various others it's part of the sort of festival season at this time of year now nicola peltz friend of the podcast uh wife of brooklyn beckham and daughter of billionaire activist investor, Nelson Peltz, relevant perhaps. Isn't it funny when people, because normally when you say the word activist, you think of, you know, someone up in a tree stopping a bypass. But as soon as you put investor on the front of you, you think, oh, okay. This guy just likes to screw companies.

31:11You think nuclear bunker. Yeah, this is a guy who just likes to... It very quickly goes from treehouse to nuclear bunker. Make trouble at your company. Anyway, so Nicola Peltz appeared to win the Rising Star Award at Venice. Now, well, let's get to that. Can I immediately clarify? She actually won the Rising Star Award in Venice, in the city, but at a festival that takes place at the same time as the Venice Film Festival, but is not in fact the Venice Film Festival or indeed affiliated with it in any way. It's called Cineo. And it has no official ties. But if you saw this thing, if you saw the pictures of it, there's a big, big red carpet.

31:50She's in a big old dress. There's Brooklyn. you know it looks for all the world as though it's part of the big Venice Film Festival which is you know one of the huge sort of it's that in Cannes really which although as we've said before on the podcast that people are getting scared of taking their films the big studios to those so again crucially this was not the Venice Film Festival it's just a film festival in Venice happens to happen at the same time as the Venice Film Festival. So it's like saying my band is playing at Wembley, but it's not the stadium, it's a pub. Yeah, so Kineo said she's attracted increasing international attention through her work as an actress, screenwriter and producer.

32:26Oh, yeah. We talk about little else, do we? Yeah. She's also 31, which is, dare I say, not the age of a... In fact, she first won a Rising Star Award at CinemaCon, which is a sort of nothing sort of thing, in 2014. Wow, what does the con stand for? She's been acting a long time. Now, her next film, and this is sort of relevant, and by the way, it's called Prima. It's about a ballerina. She's in it. Faye Dunaway is also in it. Again, it's been written by Nicola Peltz. Wow. Directed by others, but funded by, well, I can't imagine. No one knows who it's funded by. She's got some kind of production startup bunny films, which I think we can assume could be traced financially back to her father.

33:14She did one other film, which she I think even directed and starred in called Lola in which she played a sort of impoverished stripper which I think we can all live without the daughters of billionaires doing they should bid for their film rights for the most dangerous games yeah yeah be a marriage made in heaven yes but I think projects in which Nicola is centre stage are the only things that they bid for any she could play Mr Beast she's yeah there is a deadness in the eyes that's similar perhaps but she's been acting for almost two decades So I suppose the question is, what has happened here?

33:49There is no shortlist for this award disclosed. We are going to broaden this to a wider discussion in a minute about awards and how much one has to essentially pay to play. No shortlist has been disclosed. No vote tally. We don't even know the process by which the Rising Star Award at Cineo, a festival in Venice, but not Venice, happens. We don't have access to the transcript of the jury. No. So in a way, it's more of a question about how these satellite film festivals work and who funds the film festivals themselves and what sort of PR draw is needed for them to continue to exist as kind of going concerns.

34:30What's interesting about this award, I mean, you can hear how careful I'm having to be when I'm talking about it, but it's not tied to a specific performance. However, at the same festival, Faye Dunaway, who I recently mentioned is starring in this upcoming Nicola Peltz film, she got a Lifetime Achievement Award. So the Rising Star was given to Nicola and Faye Dunaway got the Lifetime Achievement Award. I don't know quite how to put this. It is certainly helpful marketing for a film that has yet to be released. So I thought that was quite interesting. You know, everyone to sort of clutch their hankies to their noses is sort of ridiculous because so many awards across entertainment are effectively pay to play and you often see um very small movies which suddenly have these posters which have like 15 laurels on them all the way inside say you know silver winner xx film festival which essentially is a is an everyone gets medals type situation right absolutely and these festivals want to continue to exist and they have to be funded in one way or another.

35:35But if we look at sort of general for your consideration campaigns, by the time you listen to this podcast, the Emmys will have happened or will just happen, you know, tailing off. You don't know when I'm going to listen to this podcast. Yeah.

35:50And Emmy campaigns can easily cost a million dollars for a show, easily, easily. But in that, you're including like trade ads and billboards, events, PR, screenings, full-time campaign staff. The combined total of what they think people spend on the Emmy campaigns is maybe 100 million. Maybe it's even last time they looked in about six years ago. I mean, maybe it's closer to two now because there's so many different. And so many of the big streamers who are kind of effectively tech companies have huge amounts of money spent and want those things. And, you know, no offense, Apple have got lots of great shows, amazing shows.

36:27But it helps to have, that cachet is very important for television shows. They really care about that. And remember, they all have films now that they release one way or another, even if it's only for a week into theatres, so they're eligible for these things and then put them onto their services. So Oscar campaigns, you're really in the big leagues. It is tens of millions to push a movie. And sometimes people, you know, if you were Apple or Amazon or whatever and you had a film that you wanted to be pushed for awards, they think people have spent over 60 for a significant push for one of them.

37:02Over 60? Million. Over 60 million. For one film. But, you know, you're a phone company. You're the everything corporation. You want awards. Now, what they spend it on for the Oscars, and you know how long those campaigns go, and they've gone for absolutely months, depending on when your film comes out. Start it out, really, hasn't it? Yeah, well, it starts, maybe it starts at Cannes, and maybe it starts at Venice in the old days, because you put your big films there and then you'd essentially get your talent out there campaigning for months. I saw I Play Rocky at the Toronto Film Festival, I think yesterday maybe, or at the weekend, and people are already going, oh, this feels like...

37:42I cannot wait. That's not until November for us here. Yeah, that's not until November. And a good example of this, what you do if you haven't got 50 million to throw on your film. So Andrea Risborough, you'll remember this story. there was a film called To Leslie. I mean, it is a brilliant performance. If you want to see movies about alcoholics, they're a brilliant performance. I can tell you people don't particularly, which is why it took$400 ,000 at the box office. But it is a brilliant performance. But no one watched this film and it didn't cost, you know, it probably cost about a million dollars to make.

38:15But because a film company who spends a million dollars in the film does not have anything, cannot possibly compete with the studios in this way, that there was a sort of celebrity-backed campaign for Andrea Risborough to get a Best Actress nomination, which is organized by the director and his wife, who are very well-connected in Hollywood. And they did hire some publicists. And lots of people, lots of kind of big-name celebrities, say Gwyneth Paltrow or someone like that, said, oh my God, this performance is so brilliant, stuck it on their Instagram. And there was a really big scandal about that.

38:45She did get a nomination in the end, Andrea Risborough. The Academy didn't find her guilty of any... They did have a whole big inquiry into this. ridiculous. It's mental. She was not found guilty of anything and they didn't rescind her nomination, but it was quite unpleasant. The backlash against it was so unpleasant when really all it is was that some screeners were sent out to people in the entertainment community and if they liked it, they said, wow, this is amazing and she's a brilliant actress. So it was a kind of ridiculous scandal. Yeah, I think it was a supposed scandal which actually reflected the real scandal.

39:17You know, because you're not supposed to lobby directly and it's like, have they broken rules? It's like, please, if anyone is spending$60 million, for me, it's so much worse to do that than it is to... I always thought that scandal was the other way around. It was. When Andrea Risborough got nominated, the fury that someone who hadn't played the game had got nominated. Yeah. The money, the industry, the money they're paying. You look at the Emmys. There are certain shows every year that go, oh my God, it's got 17 nominations, it's got 60 nominations. Year after year after year. And nothing surprising ever manages to get through the door.

39:47I didn't care less that we were doing it the morning after. that we were doing our podcast effectively recording it the day before the night of the Emmys because you're never going to talk about it. It's just, it couldn't... It's a close shot. That's one of the most interesting things is that you don't really want to discuss it because it's just, it just feels like something that's been long decided just playing out. Yeah, and what you, because what you want in, say, an Oscar is Andrea Risberg does this performance in a film that people didn't really go and see, but because the Academy is made up of filmmakers, they have noticed this, enough of them understand the quality of that performance that she gets nominated.

40:19That's not what happens. What happens is, you know, they get sent to screeners, they get to see huge billboards all over town. Oh my God, it's months of it. Lunch is breakfast. And the second that somebody breaks through that, does it in a different way and gets through, they were so angry because they had wasted so much money. Yeah, so let's conclude this item by saying, in very generalized terms, it is a racket one way or the other. I really have to say, I mean, it is a racket, all this awards business, one way or the other. Yeah, normally in any industry, you have to pay for a table, you have to pay to be there.

40:52You know, they make a lot of money. And listen, awards ceremonies are fun, they're fun to watch, and they're very political. But for lots of the smaller ones, you are paying an awful lot of money for the privilege of, you know, having a table and being nominated or, you know, whatever it is. It's a money-making thing. It's pay-to-play. It's pay-to-play. Yeah, so let's conclude that item tactfully there. Yes. but I look forward to seeing if Nicola is up for an Oscar anytime soon because that would prove that this slightly off-brand Venice jury was right yeah or it would just prove that some more money had been spent further down the line well I see I don't have that cynicism I believe in artistry now to happier and heartier affair a celebration of the wonderful Julia Donaldson so Gruffalo Granny is out this week it's a follow-up to the Gruffalo books it's going to be an absolute enormous seller I mean like beyond huge I believe you bought it I bought a copy at the weekend it's extraordinary and we'll get on to why I think it's extraordinary later now Julia Donaldson is the best-selling British author of the century she has sold over 50 million books she's much beloved by generation after generation of children So I just wanted to look into how you become the best-selling author of the century, because it's an interesting story.

42:20So Julia Donaldson, who is the most wonderful woman, I mean, she's incredible. She was at university in Bristol in the late 60s, studied drama and French. Her and a friend went to Paris for a year and started busking on the streets of Paris. She's always been a songwriter. That's the thing that Julia Donaldson loves to do. while at Bristol she meets a man called Malcolm Donaldson who will be another hero of this story and they start playing songs together and this that or the other they form a after university form a theatre troupe they tour plays around council estates and she started writing things where people who came to the members of the audience could have roles in them she started to understand what it is that kids liked and tried to get them involved and stuff so very participatory so she's writing songs very very interested in the imagination of children you see where all this is going yeah you see the the foundations you have to lay a very very very long time uh before anything else happens um started busking around europe with malcolm uh with their guitars they got married in london she uh she composed an operetta for their wedding uh which she and the other guests all performed including by the way this This is a real nice sidebar for fans of I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue.

43:43Colin Sell, who plays the piano on that. He was Malcolm's roommate at university and a very good friend of Julia Donaldson. They moved to Brighton. Her husband is a paediatrician, Malcolm, so he's always moving around and start playing in the local folk scene. So that's, you know, writing folk songs, this, that, the other. Someone suggested that she start sending songs to Children's BBC. so this is like the 80s so they've been touring around you know she's been doing these plays and all sorts of things so she starts writing songs for Playaway and Play School sorry if you were a child of the 80s like me Playaway is amazing well actually it's like the turn of the 70s to 80s but it was absolutely brilliant I loved Playaway and so at some point by the way at this point in the 80s Floella Benjamin would have sung one of Julia Donaldson's songs.

44:37Who would have known? It's too iconic. It's too iconic. Absolutely too iconic. Becomes an English teacher because the writing work is drying up, the songwriter's drying up. You know, those shows are not showing anymore. And always in the teaching, she was writing songs and plays and getting kids to be in them. So she's this extraordinary woman. We know exactly the type of person we're talking about. Someone who actually cares. someone who's incredibly creative, someone who loves collaborating and someone who really, really cares about what it is they're doing. And in 1991, Matthew and the publisher say, you wrote a song in 1975 for Playboard and it was called A Squash and a Squeeze.

45:20And she's like, yeah, I suppose so. So we'd like to turn it into a picture book. And she's like, oh, okay. So this is 1991, by the way. This is not like 1978 or something. This is 16 years after she'd written this song that she'd long forgotten about. And Matthew went and said, could we turn that into a book? And she says, well, yeah, I suppose so. He said that, but I can't, you know, I don't have, would someone do the drawings? And they say, oh, we got this young guy from Hamburg called Axel Scheffler. He can do the drawing for you. And she's like, well, okay. So they publish Squash and Squeeze.

45:53Doesn't do enormous business, but it makes her think. I've been doing these plays for years. I've been writing these songs for years. I wonder if there's other ones that could be turned into books. And so she starts doing lots of things for kind of, you know, educational publishers and this, that, the other. So she does that throughout the early 90s. 1995, she comes across a Chinese folktale about a girl walking through a wood. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know this one? No, I forgot that it was based on a sort of Chinese folktale, but yeah, or inspired by. Inspired by a girl walks through the wood with a tiger, convinces the tiger, is terrified of the tiger, convinces the tiger that she's the queen of the jungle.

46:31And then as they go through the rest of the forest, or as they go through the rest of the jungle, the tiger sees how frightened all the other animals are and assumes that they're frightened of the girl. So that's the Chinese folktale. And Julia Dawson thinks, oh God, there's something in that, isn't there? Starts sort of kicking it around a little bit and her kids really help her out with it and, you know, says, oh, maybe a tiger's not right. And actually tiger doesn't really rhyme with anything uh so comes up with the idea of maybe you know being a monster uh and comes up with the Gruffalo she said look it's four years later she writes it okay so this is again this is the writing process she's thought it and thought she lights this tale but it's not right and anyone who knows the first Gruffalo understands some of the things she then did to that story to turn it into something um even more extraordinary so 1999 she writes it so it takes her two weeks and don't forget that two weeks is just writing that text she'd been thinking about it for four years sends it to a publisher but also goes oh that guy who did uh who did that book with me four years ago Axel Sheffler I wonder if he'd like it so sends it to Axel Sheffler as well and the Gruffalo is published and 18 million copies of that book later and many many other books Room on the Brooms og things like that she is the best-selling British author since records began and I do think when we think about writing and books right the way back to the late 1960s you could see what she cared about she could see that she was writing songs you could see she cared about kids you could see she cared about participation and that's how you do it i think you have to really mean it absolutely i think that there's so many interesting things she said that i find kind of fascinating the stories are sort of about storytelling and the new one which is sort of inspired by again by shahrazad from the arabian nights but you can it takes in all these stories from the Julia Donaldson and Axel Sheffler extended universe.

48:24There's a bit of room on the broom in there. There's a bit of monkey puzzle. There's the snail and the whale within the Gruffalo granny story. And it's incredible when you think, you know, I think the Gruffalo itself is like 700 words. You read these things on the internet now where people think they've done some long form journalism. It's like, my God, this isn't long form. It's just long. You'd have 5 ,000 words and it could have been said in 50. The amount that is packed into tiny amounts of words in these kind of children's books. She's very interesting. what she said was she doesn't like books as medicine she's got this kind of very something very distinct about she's got very 2020 kind of memory of what it's like to be a child and what children want and as you say through constant interaction with it um and so she's not rude about books about she said there are a lot of books about sort of feisty girls and climate change and things like that um and she says there's an awful lot of books about i love you mommy yes i love you too darling little bear we all know these and they do sell brilliantly and she said but there's so many books on that, which I think are probably quite reassuring for the parents.

49:21And it's such an insight, isn't it? That she says, most children I would hope would take for granted that their parents or carers love them. They want a story where you're not with them and you're having some sort of adventure. And I just think, I know, just get to here, right? She's, and what, it's also part of the sort of, I'm not business story of it all, but how hard it is to break into that market. Because the children's book market is enormous. It's like whatever it is, a third of all books sold or something. But there's a huge amount of nostalgia within that market. So parents just want to read the books that they had when they were children and their children were like them too.

49:55So you're buying things like, you know, The Tiger Who Came, which is amazing. By the way, we could do a whole special on Judith Kerr as well. But you're buying books that you like when you're a child, you know, The Orbergs, Good Night Moon, all these sort of things that you had. So it is really hard with a market that's kind of like that to break through with something completely new. and rhyming by the way was really out of fashion because in order for it to make any money you basically had to translate it and as we've discussed before in musicals it's very difficult to translate but and especially someone who is obsessed with it as scantion as she is she's like she is she refines and refines and refines these books and i think it's really interesting that you know she managed to break in the in the hardest way really to break through with rhyme and new books and something that, as we say, isn't immediately like, oh my God, I love my kid.

50:47That's why this title is all about how much I love you. And two ways that she did break through and both of which I think are very, very interesting. And both of which, funny, the mirror image of this Mr. Beast thing of you really don't need social media followers. Because she toured for years, this marriage she had with Malcolm, who sadly passed away a few years ago, seems so beautiful. And the two of them, Don't forget this guy is like a very, very senior pediatrician. He's got a full-time job. He's working in hospitals. He's saving children. But they would tour the country, just the two of them, with their guitars and sing songs at schools and libraries, even when The Gruffalo was being published.

51:24That's the thing that they would do. So all of these places, people remembered them. People remembered exactly what they did. They left a great impression wherever they were. And so they built up this sort of groundswell. So there were enough people who sort of knew who they were. and she said you know after the first couple of weeks it is and it's true as true now as it was then it was word of mouth people read that book were like and every learning that she had got from that long career and every sort of ounce of love in her heart all of which come across in that book people just went oh this is great this this feels like it's a different level to other things and so that combination of things of going up and down the country really putting the work in and then people reading it and loving it turns you into the best-selling author in Britain and you know it's amazing that you know the book is out there and people heading up and down the country to their local bookshops to buy it and kids being able to buy it and libraries just being inundated with people wanting to get this book as well and what an extraordinary life and career she had and what what a testament to her these books are and how lovely we have someone like her right in the heart of our culture right absolutely i just i i couldn't admire it more and i just as i say the book is so sort of meta that it really in a way that whenever you read i mean i remember when i was reading my children stories like this you're thinking but what's really happening here you know the one thing that hasn't happened is a tiger hasn't come for tea okay what is this actually about you know whatever you of course one has come to tea but you're always thinking this but if you are a parent reading these to small children which i no longer am you will 100 % be deep in the meta of like how are all the other books fitting into this?

53:04It's so interesting. There's so much contained in so few words that I think it's a lesson to anyone who writes of how much you can do. Exactly. So I love to Julia. She lives in two other facts. She lives in the village where my granddad used to be, the village Bobby, many, many years ago. Her and her husband, when the post office was going to close down, they bought it so it didn't close down. That's what you want, right? Yeah. And her great niece is Lola Young, who sings Messi. I did not know that. Yeah. That's a family, isn't it? That's a family who knows how to write songs. Wow. Okay. Yeah.

53:38There you go. Any recommendations this week? I would like to recommend the second series of the paper. If you remember what happened at the end of the first series, and if you haven't seen the first series, it's technically like an office spin-off, but it isn't really. Oscar's in it, essentially. Oscar's in it. But if you remember what happened at the end of the first series, don't worry it didn't change anything and it's just it's a wonderful show about industry newspapers that are in a terrible terrible decline and I've got a simple recommendation which is if you live anywhere near an independent bookshop go in there and ask them what you should buy because they are the best of people and they'll suggest something absolutely amazing and every high street is better for having an independent bookshop and they're absolutely thriving and you will pay a couple of pound more for your books than you would do online.

54:29But that's because, as I always say, they pay rent and they pay taxes. But please, please, please support them. Which is so fascinating. I know. That's it for us, I think. Yes. Back with that Bond episode for our members tomorrow. And otherwise, see you on Thursday. See you on Thursday.

54:58Thank you.