Hollywood Uncorked

Hillary Turner has worked on both sides of entertainment’s digital divide, having served as an executive at Disney in its traditional studio days and at streaming behemoth Netflix. She joins Tom, Ben and guest co-host Josh Shader for a fascinating conversation about how networks are using new levels of data in their programming decisions, her experience working on shows like Cobra Kai, Julie & The Phantoms, and Liv and Maddie, and a childhood spent on sets with her father, Joel Zwick, as he directed classic sitcoms like Full House, Family Matters, and Perfect Strangers.

In the mid-2000s, Allard Cantor was in his mid-30s and had a successful sales career in New York – with season tickets to every NYC sports team and $16 million in sales during his biggest year. But unfulfilled and wanting to try his hand in Hollywood, Cantor walked away from all of it and enrolled in film school at AFI. Now with his own management company – and having recently served as a producer on Judas and the Black Messiah – Cantor stops by Hollywood Uncorked to discuss his journey from corporate America to entertainment while helping Ben, Tom and guest co-host Arvind Ethan David drink through four affordable bottles of Chianti.

Want to remember what life was like pre-COVID? Tune into this episode (recorded in early March) with screenwriter Richard Smith as the Hollywood Uncorked panel engages in forbidden activity like sitting face-to-face, sharing several bottles of Italian Nero d’Avola, and wantonly leaving the house. Along the way they talk about Smith’s screenwriting career, which got off to an auspicious start when his very first film project, Leonard, went from British short to premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. This was followed by his feature-length writing debut, Trauma, starring Colin Firth, as well as Smith’s latest project, The Garden of Evening Mists, based on the acclaimed Malaysian novel and currently rolling out across HBO platforms in Asia.

In an industry where intellectual property is everything, Sara Moskowitz is sitting on a mountain of it as a VP at Storied Media Group, which represents dozens of top publishers around the world, including The Washington Post. Moskowitz stops by this episode to help taste three bottles of Rioja while discussing Storied Media’s dual role as content broker and producer (Amazon’s Modern Love), how newspapers and magazines are bolstering their bottom lines with TV & film projects, and how her job at SMG all started with an internship for founder Todd Hoffman while he was an agent at ICM. Producer Arvind Ethan David sits in as guest co-host.

In the world of drinking-based entertainment, there is one man who reigns as the unquestioned king: Zane Lamprey, whose alcohol-driven travel cable shows Three Sheets and Drinking Made Easy pretty much invented the genre itself. Lamprey joins this truly hilarious episode to help drink through three bottles of Ribera del Duero from Spain as he regales the panel with tales of his favorite filmed drinking adventures from around the world, his new beer podcast Crafts-n-Crafts, and his infamous on-air drinking tour of Tom’s college town of Missoula, Montana.

What’s the best way to backstop a career in the notoriously topsy-turvy world of screenwriting? Adam Jay Epstein (Not Another Teen Movie, Extreme Movie) does it with his “night job” of authoring best-selling fantasy and sci-fi books for the middle grades. While helping the panel drink through three bottles of wine from California’s fast-growing Paso Robles region, Epstein talks about the process and economics of creating book franchises like The Familiars, Starbounders and Snared, his love of executing on big ideas, and the time the his Revenge of the Nerds remake totally fell apart after four weeks of shooting.