The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood

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FILM INTERVIEWS
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Sonny Bunch hosts The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, a new podcast featuring interviews with folks who have their finger on the pulse of the entertainment industry during this dynamic—and difficult—time.

6 DAYS AGO

Everything There Is to Know About Star Wars

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Brandon Wainerdi to discuss DK’s hefty and handsome new reference book, Star Wars Encyclopedia: The Comprehensive Guide to the Star Wars Galaxy. We discussed how he broke into writing about Star Wars, researching his entries for the book, and why so much of what we obsessives know about Star Wars comes not from the films but the surrounding products. Brandon’s interview podcast, Talking Bay 94, is a must-listen if you’re a fan of the series. I’ll just say, on a personal note, that this is a really beautiful book: lots of illustrations, tons of information. If you have a precocious tween who loves Star Wars in your life, you could do much worse than this as a gift for them this Christmas. And if you enjoyed this episode, I hope you share it with a friend!

50 min
14 DEC

Bringing Novels Into the Internet Age

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by novelist and Broadway producer Michael Wolk to discuss his new interactive novel, Devil’s Game. You can check it out yourself here; it’s an interesting mix of web-first design and apocalyptic airport thriller. We talked about what drove him to write this novel and also discussed the state of Broadway and live theater more generally. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

30 min
7 DEC

The Copyrighted Material Being Used to Train AI

On this week’s episode, I talked to Alex Reisner about his pieces in The Atlantic highlighting the copyrighted material being hoovered into large language models to help AI chatbots simulate human speech. If you’re a screenwriter and would like to see which of your work has been appropriated to aid in the effort, click here; he has assembled a searchable database of nearly 140,000 movie and TV scripts that have been used without permission. (And you should read his other stories about copyright law reaching its breaking point and “the memorization problem.”) In this episode, we also got into the metaphysics of art and asked what sort of questions need to be asked as we hurtle toward the future. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

40 min
23 NOV

Comcast Is Spinning Off Its Cable Assets: What Does that Mean?

This week I’m rejoined by Sean McNulty of The Ankler’s morning roundup newsletter, The Wakeup, to discuss the big news in cable land: ComcastNBCUniversal’s decision to spin (most of!) their cable properties into a new, separate company, called SpinCo for now. What does this mean for MSNBC, USA, and the rest of the impacted channels? Why is Bravo staying under the Comcast umbrella? What impact will this have on NBC? All of these questions are asked and some answers are given. Warning: There is a fair amount of rank speculation in this episode, but that couldn’t be avoided.

40 min
16 NOV

Melding Video Games and TV Shows

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. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

59 min
9 NOV

The Christmas Movie Industrial Complex

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!

53 min
2 NOV

Alfred Hitchcock, Master of Fear and Desire

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!

34 min
26 OCT

The Four Horsemen of the Media Apocalypse

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). Phew! If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

1h 3m

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Sonny Bunch hosts The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, a new podcast featuring interviews with folks who have their finger on the pulse of the entertainment industry during this dynamic—and difficult—time.