The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood

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. 

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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).

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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!