Am I Matt Remick?

There are so many things I love about the recently released show The Studio. Seth Rogen plays Matt Remick, recently appointed head of fictional film production company Continental Studios. Matt is a simple, spineless man who has spent his entire life wanting to become the head honcho at Continental only to discover that it is, in fact, his worst nightmare. Because Matt is, at heart, a cinephile - he got into the movie business because he really really cares about making great films. And it’s only when he gets the top job that he realises that what he’s actually being asked to do (asked by Continental’s CEO, played by Bryan Cranston as a man you do not wish to cross) is make films that make a lot of money, regardless of their quality.

There are so many exceptional moments in the show. The second episode entitled The Oner is proper old school farce, ratcheting up the ridiculousness as the episode goes on. The Pediatric Oncologist sees Matt dating a doctor who has to make life and death decisions every day and trying to somehow convince her and her doctor friends that his job is just as important as theirs. Casting features Matt and his colleagues desperately trying to work out if their casting decisions for a particular film are racist whilst surrounded by a wide-ranging and contradictory set of opinions on the matter from many quarters. All so good.

But the one that really caught me off guard was The Golden Globes. Much silliness ensues at the titular awards ceremony, including Adam Scott and one of the other Continental executives randomly creating an internet meme, and a cameo from Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos when he and Matt meet in the men’s toilets. The main action of the episode circles around whether nominee Zoë Kravitz (who has made a film for Continental) will thank Matt in her acceptance speech, should she have to give one. The episode starts with a phone call from Matt’s mother who clearly doesn’t think very highly of his career choice but is expecting him, at the very least, to get a thank you live on TV to compensate for her lack of grandchildren.

So Matt runs around trying to work out if he’s made it into the speech, and gets increasingly irritated by the regular paeans to Ted Sarandos that the Netflix winners speeches’ feature. In the aforementioned encounter with Ted in the gents he asks him how he manages to get all those people to thank him in their speeches, and Ted reveals to him that it’s contractual - because without having it in the contract, it would never happen. In an attempt to explain to Matt why stars won’t say thank you to executives unless legally obliged to, he tells him: “They’re the artists. We’re the bean counters.”

And my goodness, something about this struck a chord with me. Because this is how the kind of jobs I do can get described and thought of within our sector. As I’ve written about before, CEO and Executive Director roles are not infrequently described as “pen-pushers” “management” or “corporate”, all words which, in my experience, bear little relation to the difficult, nuanced and, yes, creative job that these roles are.

Theatre company Improbable have recently announced an open space event (part of Devoted & Disgruntled, which I’d encourage everyone to take a look at) about the future of the Executive Director role. In their invitation which describes the question that will be discussed and worked on during the event, they say the following: “Often perceived as the bad guy that has to say no. The enemy to creativity, when so often creativity is at the heart of the role. While others get the spotlight, we are expected to carry the load - gracefully, endlessly, quietly.”

CEOs and Executive Directors are often the people who have to deal with the messy realities of money. I remember once going to an event where audience members were invited, in groups, to design, from a blank slate, what an ideal theatre would look like. At the time I was in a leadership position at a venue, and, whilst myself and the colleague that I went with didn’t disagree with the spirit of what was being proposed (free tickets, open access, lots of community work), it was hard not to revert to the question that I spent most of my days dealing with - but where will the money come from?

The job of the CEO or Executive Director is, in part, to make things financially possible. This means thinking about things like hiring out venues to people who might have a non-artistic use for them, like a conference, or a wedding. It involves a hard analysis of costs, like how many actors you can have in any given production, or whether that incredibly beautiful but very expensive piece of set can be cut in order to make the numbers add up. And it involves ticket prices, the eternal balance between wanting to make art affordable and recognising that, as costs rise and subsidy and grants fall, there is more and more pressure to make a profit that you can then reinvest back into other work. Without people to think about and look after these things, there would be no money to make the art in the first place.

At the end of The Golden Globes episode, Matt Remick gets miserably into his limo. You hear the voice of the driver say, sympathetically, “You lose?” and Matt Remick replies, with a sad sigh, “No, we won”. If you don’t feel part of the wins, then, truly, what’s in it for you? As Improbable point out in their invitation to their forthcoming event, there are many Executive Directors who are stepping away from the sector, or from that role, altogether - because even the successes don’t really feel like ours, despite the fact that we have worked our guts out and, often, are the ones who have advocated for projects or productions to happen in the first place. To accept and acknowledge the importance of this role means we also need to really see the realities of the world we’re operating in - that government funding has been in significant decline for more than a decade, that alternative sources of income don’t grow on trees, and that there are far more great ideas for artistic projects and work than there is money to make them. Perhaps let’s not take our frustrations about the circumstances we find ourselves in out on the people that are desperately trying to navigate them.