Trump Demands Rush Hour 4

27:16Millie Bobby Brown, who plays Eleven, the original shaving-haired girl who escaped from the lab, she has a separate deal. Yes. We don't even... She has a deal with Netflix. She's really interesting, and this is a whole new... This is very specific. She is a massive star on Netflix. If she does a movie, if she does one of her Anola Holmes ones, or she does The Electric State, which she did with the Russo brothers, all of those are enormous on Netflix. So she is a huge star on Netflix. I really question whether she could open a movie in cinemas. But she doesn't need to. Exactly. If you can open a show on Netflix, that's all you need to do.

27:52Yeah, it's very interesting. But nonetheless, the Duffer brothers who created this, and you'd think, you know, it became this enormous show and this massive kind of cultural phenomenon. They are going to Paramount. Netflix offered even money than Paramount offered, but they decided to leave because they still, they want to make theatrical movies, which you can't really do at Netflix. Did somebody say Rush Hour 5? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, hopefully they'd be at least in the mix. Nice to be considered. In terms of like, there's lots of interesting things about. First of all, what does Netflix do now?

28:23You can't, obviously, you just can't replace something like this. They do have the rights, I think, to spin off universe stuff which the Duffers can't take to Paramount. And I suppose what you always want to do with something like this is what Star Wars or Marvel do, which is you kind of keep the franchise alive in some way or another so that it can constantly be producing for you. Maybe that will work for them. But there is a sort of sense that, and they have lots of big creators, But I wonder, in terms of what particularly works and what these big hit shows are, these kind of teen ensembles, I think, work.

28:58If you look at Wednesday, Wednesday is another big, big thing for them. Obviously, Squid Game, but that's finished. You don't know when. I think that teen ensemble format, the sense of spectacle, things that you might have previously only seen in movies, which, you know, these huge special effects. And world building, very, very immersive world building, which is what particularly you have on something like Wednesday or on this. so one thing I do think has been problematic and this is just I mean everybody says this and we've talked about it before on the podcast but I do think it's significant is the sheer gaps between the seasons of these tv shows Game of Thrones was the last show to religiously release a series at about the same time every single year and they did it for you know whatever it was eight or ten years Wednesday that was two and a half years between the seasons Euphoria which has yet to come back is going to be four years you know stranger things was a very long time i mean it'll be interesting to see what they do with harry potter and whether they really do well they're going to have to because you say stranger things the thing is you know you've got kids in it and that's so it's it's you do sort of have to make it fairly quickly the disappointment of this for me which is that i mean not to sort of get into the critical side of it but i do think that with this with the season which i've watched what they've dropped so far there's not really you know they're still playing Dungeons and Dragons and riding around on their bikes and it's kind of like this is ridiculous they're 10 years older and they look at and I know that you can and the same in Euphoria they I think there is going to be a time jump in Euphoria but otherwise what she's going to have a mortgage and kids I don't know I just Zendaya is going to have it's going to be a very different phase of her life and it's difficult why these gaps happen there's some sort of sense that it's a some kind of mystical modern form of quality control because we live in an age of such amazing television that they can't possibly get it back that quickly I don't think that's the case because there's things like The Wire or Seinfeld or The Sopranos that didn't release like that.

30:49People literally can't remember what happened in previous series of things anymore, and they really can't. But equally, there are shows that have released on a really tight schedule, and I'm thinking about something like Slow Horses that my brilliant friend Will Smith did. But it is so punishing, the schedule. Oh my God, that's crazy. You know, Will has left after season five. It is so punishing, the schedule, because you're always in pre-production, writing or shooting or in post-production at any one time you're doing two of those things. And also just on a contractual level, you have to have Jack Loudon, who everyone wants to be in everything.

31:26You have to have Gary Oldman. You have to have Kristen Scott Thomas. They have to be available, like, for such a large part of every single year. It's very, very hard to release a big show once a year and it's amazing that slow horses have done it and it's not surprising that other you know with stranger things you know when you start out you've essentially got some untried talent even the duffer brothers they're not you know they haven't really done an awful lot which i can talk about in a moment and so you can say oh and we're doing this and then we're going to do series season two or three back to back but the second the first one breaks everyone is getting offers from everywhere sure but you are if it but you will have it they will have in their contract that they're contracted for seven seasons or whatever the standard thing is.

32:08And absolutely, by the way, but if you're Millie Bobby Brown, you can have that seven season contract, but you are such a huge deal to Netflix that if you say after two seasons, oh no, I am... I'm doing Enola Holmes. I'm doing... Yeah, but you're doing it for them. I'm taking two years off or whatever it is. There's not a lot you can do about it. But this doesn't service the fans at all. And I do think that's interesting. You know, the difference between TV and movies is that TV was a continuity medium. You know, it was always on and things returned. And obviously we know in the old days in America, they used to have like 22, 24 episodes or something and they would release every year.

32:40But it's not producing what consumers want. It's interesting because podcasts, of which this is one of the always on types, people always say to me, and do you even do it on holiday? It's like, yes, because that is really what people want. That's what people want it to be available every week. People don't want there to be two and a half years, four years between series of things they love that they genuinely can't remember what happens anymore. We now live in an era where there's a huge recapping industry, just people who basically just do... The recapping industry, yeah. It's part of the entertainment industry, it's the recapping industry of people who do TikToks or YouTubes who are dedicated to it.

33:18I noticed, which is really interesting, that Prime is now trialing an AI recap button. So you used to be able to get text recap, but now you can get AI video recap of a series. It's not just clips. The AI identifies kind of key plot points. Then it matches them to clips. Then it might even have soundtrack to the trailer rather than just bits of the soundtrack on top. Then it generates a voice narration. And Amazon say that will be theatrical quality. Samsung have now added co-pilot to their TVs, which is a recapping thing. Recapping is so enormous, but it's not... Skip recap. Yeah, skip recap.

34:00Yes, but you wouldn't be skipping the recap when you're watching Stranger Things. Because, you know, I watched every one of that last series. By the way, some of them, it was preposterous. They were all episodes that were over two hours long. Just the absolute high watermark of indulged creators thinking that they're making a feature. And actually, like, there's absolutely no way this episode needed to be, you know, an hour 48, two hours 20. This is a nonsense. As a sidebar on recaps, whenever there's a big crime novel that gets adapted for TV, and you know a lot of twists and turns and stuff like that and i don't really know what you do about this it's very hard but ai certainly won't help in any big crime story there are you know the idea is you tell people who did the murder like you know it's the clues are all there yeah but in the recap you sort of have to put in things you know because you're you're hiding these things somewhere in inconsequential scenes and suddenly in the recap you're thinking why is this inconsequential scene with the shopkeeper in there.

34:58That's weird. Why is he going and buying a packet of Rolos? That seems weird. And then you're like oh, so that must be important. That shopkeeper must be important. And that's, I think, with twisty-turny crime things, the recap industry is, I would say, an issue. Hamstrung. You are hamstrung, which, by the way, is my new detective, John Hamstrung. I love him already. And there is also a sense where where these worlds have become kind of deliberately complicated and they're full of Easter eggs and all this sort of thing. I mean, there was some suggestion now that some TV critics were saying to people, can you tell us what happened in the Stranger Things play?

35:36It's like, oh, right, this is where we're going, is it? Which is the first shadow, which is like, okay, do we... It's like that Marvel feeling where there was just so much homework and if you hadn't watched WandaVision, then you didn't really understand the next movie. And we know with Marvel, they completely overexploited that aspect of things and people are just like, I've had enough. There was too much TV. There was too much whatever. This is almost the opposite problem. It's a slightly different problem. But people simply don't want this long between things. And it doesn't serve the fans. And actually, what a lot of other sort of producers are saying is, this is just destroying.

36:09You know, we spend so much money on this television. And people have really just like got bored. They're not going to go back to it. They may not. Stranger Things is its own kind of giant phenomenon. And I'm not saying that this is the case here. I'm sure it isn't. People are heading back to that. There's a lot of great stuff that people just say, yeah, you know what? It's two and a half years now. I don't think I'm going to get back into that one because a lot of other stuff's come along. And so we're killing some of our best stuff because we just can't get it out there in a manageable release schedule.

36:35And as I say, I don't think it's about like, oh, television is so good now that that's the only way you can do it. I don't think that is the case. And there just must be a better way that serves the viewer, the consumer better than this way. And can I talk about this interesting thing of when you have an enormous hit and it goes away, how do you replace it because that's a particular issue if you're on netflix and something you know you are almost punished for your success because if you have as you say squid game or a stranger things at some point they do have to come to an end and how do you replace something that is so iconic and it sits right on your home page and that people are buying their subscriptions for and the temptation has always been or well let's try and copy stranger things let's try and copy squid game and then you realize of course well what was squid game copying nothing that came out of a clear blue sky what was stranger things copying nothing you know the duffer brothers had made one movie they made hidden which a very good movie but it's not it's a low budget you know made three hundred thousand dollars worldwide you know if you were thinking okay how do we have a definite juggernaut definitive like absolute cast iron hit you would not go to the duffer brothers but of course that is the thing you do and so you have to replace it by just having good people in good places looking for great creatives and trusting their instincts you can't do kind of, you can't do copycat television because all of their huge hits, perhaps Wednesday aside come out of somewhere where you think oh well that's completely unexpected but it's every time one of these ends, people are sitting around going I mean we need a billion dollar franchise here and billion dollar franchises are hard to come up with I completely agree.

38:13But as I said earlier, I do think there's just in the vaguest terms, those elements in the same way that we've talked about how young YouTubers or whatever are bringing people into these old formats like Dancing with the Stars or maybe even Strictly or whatever it is. I do think that having something that appeals to teens, and we know that kind of teen ensemble casts or people playing teens credibly or otherwise do appeal in that sense. And also that those very immersive worlds are particularly engaging. Very, very easy to get wrong though. Very, very hard to get right. Very, very easy to get wrong.

38:47By the way, again, sidebar Dancing with the Stars, the final was huge in America last week. So it just goes to show they're doing something very right over there. And how much did Stranger Things grow with its audience? Did it get more sort of horror-based? Because, you know, the Duffer Brothers come from a horror background and suddenly they're making this thing that feels kind of pop-culturally. But did it become scarier and darker as it went on? Actually, it was much more scary and dark in terms of sort of... In the first one, I thought more successfully almost because it was almost like in Jaws, just the hint of it and the upside-down world and the kind of weirdly, the kind of ethereal grimness of it that you didn't understand, it has become more overtly horrible with characters like Vecna or what have you, who it's a much more obviously kind of, there's a much more obviously horror background there and I suppose that grows with the audience.

39:43I do think, as I said, that it's difficult that the characters really should be worrying about slightly different things now. And there have been sort of almost like deplots about emergent sexuality and things like that, but it's kind of odd that they've preserved them in aspic. You're in your early 40s now. Yeah. Come on. I think we should have gone some slightly different places here. I just think reducing the ISA ceiling from 20 ,000 to 12 ,000, I just think that it discourages saving. It discourages saving. I don't know what Rachel Reeves is doing. Yeah. There's not one of those discussions.

40:17Yeah. Anyway, on to something and someone utterly timeless, an absolute one-off, Tom Stoppard, who passed away last week. This is such an enormous last week. It's such an incredible life he had. Most extraordinary playwright. I mean, I'll just give you, I mean, I'll give a tiny little pricey in case people aren't familiar with his work. But I mean, a lot of this is going to be a recommendation to familiarize yourself with his work because he's so wonderful. He was born in 1937 in Czechoslovakia and he was Jewish, but he didn't discover this until middle age, which is sort of very significant. And they've got out just in time.

40:50They fled for Singapore. Then he ended up in India. And then his father died and his mother married an Englishman who I think was slightly anti-Semitic. And they came here and the mother very much underplayed the ancestry. So I think he thought he perhaps had some very distant Jewish relatives. and eventually he discovered the full story of, which is the most extraordinarily awful story where almost all the other, someone, one of his relatives who had survived the Holocaust came and drew him a family tree and I mean all of the ends of the roads were in, you know, Auschwitz and Dachau or on death marches.

41:24But he didn't know of any of this until middle age and it's very interesting. And he, anyway, but he was a news reporter in Bristol. He never went to university. I mean he was the most extraordinarily clever man beyond beyond but wore it so lightly and it's really sort of fun that all the tributes have been from people like you know Mick Jagger um saying you know he was just he was the best fun because his mind was he was super handsome as well wasn't he which I know is not important yeah it's uh nice to have yeah exactly nice to have anyway he broke out um in 1966 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead which is such a weird idea but and just it's these two completely minor characters in Hamlet who we only sort of really know about because there's a line Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

42:08It's just like sort of uttered almost as an aside. But he kind of, and he told their story and mashed it up with Waiting for Godot, basically. It's an incredibly modern thing to do, by the way. There's now lots of things that, yeah. So much of that way of looking at things came from him and I'm going to talk about something in a bit, which I thought was a coincidence, but he gave actually the king the perfect quotation, that lie. There's a line in that, look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else. And so that's the great line that the king was able to say to make comment on his death.

42:39But that's from Raising Cranston, Gildenstown, because the full line was, you know, we keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off, which is a kind of integrity if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else. So it's like an inside out play. And it's completely brilliant and beautiful. So he's verbally incredibly ingenious. His ideas were incredibly ingenious. He could be funny. He could be smart. He did incredible things with language. He just did stuff that no other writer was able to do. And Richard, when I was growing up, we never, literally, we never went to the theatre.

43:15Nothing. We never did anything like that. And I came to his writing via the reading of it. And I would get these plays out from the library. And eventually, you know, over the many years, I now own them all. And I mean, almost every line in these books is underlined by me. Because which one don't you underline? They're so, so good. and it must have been late into my 20s as to when I could first buy a ticket and go and see one of his plays and I loved him even more. The minute I read him, I came to him via reading him and you can read the plays right now and they are extraordinary. Of course, it doesn't take you long to read them.

43:52Where would you start if you were someone who didn't know him at all or if you're a youngster who wants to write? Well, I'd start with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and I'd read Jumpers and then Arcadia. I mean, this is the thing. He taught me about these extraordinarily complicated things like chaos theory or moral philosophy or all of these sort of things. Yeah, so there's a lot of that in there with a very lightness of touch. And it's a bit like reading a book, like when Michael Lewis writes a book about money. And while I'm reading it, I'm like, I fully understand the most complicated financial instrument.

44:22And then, you know, a few weeks later, you're like, nah, it's gone, completely gone. But someone once said to me, actually, about Tom Stoppard, oh you know I'm not so keen but he I think he makes people feel cleverer than they are and I remember thinking oh you'd hate that wouldn't you people are just feeling that they actually are clever and that they can understand things simply because of the magical and funny way that Tom stuff sorry what's wrong with that I remember thinking so much more about you than me I after you know exactly you you want to put references in that make people you want you want people to be going away and looking stuff up yeah and and thinking the world is bigger than they thought it was before they started that's a lovely thing to do whilst entertaining them which is which was always his number one priority can i just say it's so he was he is like he will always be so completely alive to me and it's just odd because when we were leaving here when we're leaving here last week i was going down the escalator at embankment and i thought oh look they're reviving indian inc which is one of his places and it's got felicity kendall in who was one of his great muses and in fact they had a long relationship together and I thought oh I must go and get tickets to that but to show how alive he was can I talk to you about two conversations I had last week and bear with bear with because okay one of them was about someone was saying to me oh you know have you have you met Tom and I said well I've had this I once had I've had a couple of great letters from him which are very much my treasure box but there's a jumpers his play um which is interesting.

45:51He wrote it in the wake of the moon landings. And he thought that what the moon landings signified was that it would cause some sort of great unmooring or kind of moral discombobulation amongst people. Because this thing that they'd set up as this romantic trope, the moon, and it had always been this distant sort of sense of longing thing. If they knew that men had sort of trampled on it, that something would happen. Anyway, he gave an interview in which he said, and of course, that didn't happen at all. I was completely wrong. And I thought, It was so funny. Of course, it was so self-deprecating of him.

46:21And anyway, but not long after that, I read an interview with, I think, Buzz Aldrin, who said that honestly, sometimes like at night, he'd be going out and putting the rubbish out. And he'd look up at the moon and say, I went there once. And I just thought, oh, my God, that's so funny. That's so exactly what, you know, to me, the normalization of the fact that we went there is almost madder than the fact that we did. So I cut out this article and I sent it to him saying, I saw this and thought it would make you laugh. and he wrote me about this really long and incredible letter. So I was telling someone about this last week.

46:52The other thing I was talking about, and I am going to land this plane eventually, but the other thing I was talking about was he wrote this brilliant play called Travesties, which I absolutely love. This is such a Stappardian thing. I'm going to say Stappardian. He discovered that in Zurich in 1917, both James Joyce, Lenin, and the Dadaist artist Tristan Zara were all living in Zurich at that time. And Joyce was writing Ulysses. Lenin obviously had a revolution on his mind. And Dada was this crazy new art form that was coming up. So he also mashed that up, very Tom Stoppard, with The Importance of Being Earnest.

47:28And he wrote this amazing play. Anyway, last week I was listening to this interview with James Cameron, the director of, obviously, Terminator and Aliens and Titanic and Avatar and all of those things. And he's so clever. He's such a fascinating person to listen to, by the way. And in the course of this interview, who has asked a little bit about his relationship with Elon Musk. And he said, well, of course, we knew each other from the Mars Society in the 90s. And I thought, hang on a second, what's that? And I thought, I must get into this because I think that's fascinating. So I looked at the Mars Society and it's in LA.

48:02It was founded out of this sort of underground movement who really believed in Mars exploration and colonization. And it's obviously it's utopian and escapist and a kind of underground movement. and I thought, my God, well, that's so interesting. So in the 90s, he would have been on the cusp of releasing Titanic, which would have been this kind of, when he went stratospheric, James Cameron. Elon Musk was not really Elon Musk then. He had founded Zip2. It was just kind of CityGuide, a mapping software. And I was thinking, well, who else was involved in it? Because, of course, I was always looking for my third character.

48:37And I was, Buzz Aldrin. Now, Buzz Aldrin was huge in the society And I was thinking, well, that's a fun sort of thing. But of course, the fact that I can't hear an interview with James Cameron just mentioning that sort of association without going off down this imaginary side alley and thinking, oh, hang on, who else would have been there? And what would that have been like as a sort of play? That way of looking at the world completely was given to me by Tom Stoppard. That's not a form of original thought. That's lock, stock and barrel. But it conditioned my thinking so much, I guess, because I read them at a particular young age.

49:08And so I always think like this now. and it's impossible for me to hear those kind of interviews. It's interesting, I thought, how funny, those are the two conversations I had last week. They're sort of, it's so typical because it's funny and it's fantastical. Both go so directly back to his plays. And in a weird way, maybe there's this linking figure in the personage of Buzz Aldrin. I can't really put my, it's just, anyway. And so that play is called Buzz. And, you know, also interestingly, he was, you know, incredibly unsnobbish and he did a lot of work in Hollywood. He wasn't one of those people who was too cool for school.

49:40He'd always get his hands dirty. There's a story, it's absolutely apocryphal, but you can believe it, where on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, they say, oh, Sean Connery had said to Tom Stoppard, I need you to work on some of my lines because they're not very good. And so he'd had these amazing lines. And then Harrison Ford would come in and say, sorry, why are your lines so amazing? and Sean Connery would say, well, because Tom Stoppard is writing them. And he said, well, could he write some for me? So Tom Stoppard starts writing for Harrison Ford. And then the next day Spielberg comes in and goes, sorry, why is the script so good suddenly?

50:17And they go, oh, it's Tom Stoppard. So he goes to Stoppard. Nonsense, because he'd worked with Stoppard on Empire of the Sun and he knows exactly what Tom Stoppard does. But yeah, he would write on that. He did Revenge of the Sith. There's an amazing thing in that book that you recommended, the Ed Zwick book about Hollywood, where he's talking about Shakespeare in love. Oh, did you read that? Oh, my God. I was rereading it yesterday for this. It's a brilliant book. It's really, really so readable. And Edswick's putting together this Shakespearean love thing. And the only person who can write this is Tom Stoppard.

50:49So he flies over to London to try and get Stoppard to do it. And he said, I had just the best day of my life. As I said, I went to see him. Stoppard wasn't particularly interested. But he said, let's go and have tea. And he describes him. He said, he's the most graciously well-mannered, self-deprecating, world-renowned genius I had ever met. I mean, that's a nice epitaph, isn't it? Anyway, so he has fun with Tom Stoppard and he leaves at the end of the day and realizes that Tom Stoppard has not said whether he would do it or not. But he's assuming he's not going to do it. But he's thinking, I've got to spend a day with one of the greatest writers of all time.

51:26So I'm very happy. He then says, like, three days later, they get a message from Tom Stoppard going, oh, yeah, I'll do it. yeah I do it it seems like fun and he's going oh that's amazing because um but it'll be a million pounds and he's like oh no I don't have a million pounds uh and then literally the next day Julia Roberts says she wants to do the movie and suddenly he does have a million pounds so he goes to Tom Starborder here's a million pounds will you write Shakespeare in love for me uh and weirdly that film has a very unusual gestation period as you can tell because Julia Roberts uh is not in it in the end and it's many many years later and it's Harvey Weinstein and Miramax and he fires Ed Edswick off it and all of this stuff.

52:02But Edswick is sort of back on board for when the Oscars come along. And Tom Stoppard, literally at the start of his speech, he turns away from Harvey Weinstein and said, sorry, Harvey, I want to thank Edswick. And you think, well, that's nice. That's classy, isn't it? But, you know, just somebody who can do the cleverest thing in the world, but also understands entertainment and also understands looking after people and that life and art is supposed to be fun. I think that it's so interesting to think of Leopoldstadt, which became his final play. But I think people all his entire career felt that he hid himself within his writing and his own story.

52:38I didn't feel that ever because I feel like his mind is in every single line and that's the true thing, you know, the mind and it's all out there to see. But the story of that kind of Jewishness that was concealed from him and that he only discovered belatedly, he addresses in Leopoldstadt which is his final play which was extraordinary and now I saw that just before it was directed by Patrick Marber it was I mean it's it's got sort of 40 characters it is extraordinary and there's a character that's really very much stoppard at the end of the play and you know who's sort of having to apologise for for not really knowing and for just having this lovely English life and not being part of this charmed life and he keeps saying I didn't know I didn't know and then there's as I say the list of what had happened to all the other branches of the family.

53:27But funnily enough, I was able to talk to Patrick. I went to a shiver with, you know, the Jewish prayers after death for somebody. And I went, was lucky enough to go back in a taxi afterwards with Patrick Marlborough. And we were talking about it. And I said, God, it meant such a lot to me. And it was also just before the pandemic when all the kind of lights went out. And he said, yeah, it was great in London, but it was extraordinary in New York. It was such a different feeling because that was so many people's story in New York. that so many of the Jewish people in New York had that kind of story of having escaped in time, which was so completely particular.

54:00And he said, you know, they really felt it in their souls there. And of course it won, and it won, you know, the Tony for best play in 2023. I mean, what a crowning sort of, to say when people told him he never wrote about where he came from, which I don't think is remotely true, by the way, but to end with that and that to be your final play, I mean, it is a sort of perfect career in every sense. and I know that it's supposed to be absolutely amazing. Hermione Lee wrote a very long and amazing biography of him, which I have always been saving for when there was definitely not going to be any more of him.

54:36And so I'm going to read that now. And anyway, it's been really nice to talk about it today. Yeah. And so no need to recommend anything this week other than get your hands on some Tom Stoppard. Yeah. Read it, get tickets for it. both have given me the greatest joy in my life thank you so much we covered a lot of ground there we did we have a questions and answers episode on Thursday look forward to answering lots of your questions we have for our members we have a special it's a look behind the scenes at the Lion King which by the way has a lot in common with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead the whole structure of the thing and Timon and Pumbo and all of that anyway listen so we have that on Friday as well Don't forget to send in your questions for Simon Cowell as well.

55:23Please send in your questions. To the rest of his entertainment at thegoalhanger.com. We will ask him anything and everything. Well, I think with that, it must be goodbye. Yes. See you on Thursday, everyone. See you on Thursday.