Have Gucci Made The World’s Worst Film?

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Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Restors Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde.

And me, Richard Osmond.

Hello, Marina.

Hello, Richard.

How are you?

I'm very well.

So it's, I listen, just pulling the curtain back briefly.

It's sort of nine o'clock on a Monday morning, and I don't wish to reopen the Spotify snack drawer annals.

But

what have you just eaten before we went on air?

I've had my breakfast, but I've also had a packet of pork scratchings.

Yeah, some sort of off-brand pork scratchings as well.

Yeah, like four grams the fact on the front that, you know, it contains no carbohydrate.

It's like, yes, but it is a pork scratching.

I mean, ultimately, it's a pork scratching that I'm eating at 8.55.

Yeah.

It's the sort of pork scratching you'd see on Dragon's Den.

Yeah.

What are we talking about this week?

We're in the middle of fashion weeks, Richard, and we're talking about, there wasn't a Gucci fashion show this time.

They have a new designer at the helm who is Beyon Zoolander, and they had a 30-minute film, which we're going to talk about.

I have to say, I had not heard of this gentleman.

I had obviously not heard of this film.

I have now heard of him.

I have watched this film.

I am very, very, very much looking forward to talking about it.

It's quite something.

There's quite a lot there.

We're also going to talk about chicken shop dates.

Oh, why it's been a huge hit, what it means for talent, all that kind of stuff.

And we're also going to talk about critters, a new animation that's being made that's got something very significant about it that might just blow everything apart.

Anyway, we'll get to that bit in the second half.

That's really good.

You're really learning that sort of

not giving so much.

You know, just saying,

oh my goodness.

And you will not believe number seven on this list.

One of the things you said to me while I was eating the scratchings was that I was unproducible.

And

look what you made me do.

And now look at you.

Now look at me.

That was really impressive.

With my producer's hat on, I think we ought to start the podcast now.

Let me talk to you about...

Gucci and Gemna, right?

We're in the middle of all the fashion weeks and Gucci traditionally shows in Italy at Milan Fashion Week, but this time it didn't have a fashion show.

It had a 30-minute movie, fictional, with a whole story, you know, directed by Spike Jones and Helena Rain.

It stars Demi Moore, Edward Norton, Ed Harris, Kiki Palmer, Elliot Page, Alya Shawcat.

Kendall Jenner.

Kendall Jenner, yeah.

And so instead of a fashion show, they had this premiere and all the stars sort of turned up and then they went in and they watched this movie.

Gucci has a new designer at the helm, a guy called Demna.

And he launched his own label originally.

And then he went to Balenciaga.

Gucci is owned by Kering, which is a luxury brand sort of umbrella.

And they're the biggest brand under that thing.

And they get mentioned on the earnings call.

And their sales have been doing really, really badly.

Okay.

So they need to have a strong message with this guy out of the gate.

There's a hilarious New York Times profile of Demna, which I strongly recommend reading.

He's with Nicole Kidman.

They each have their, they've only just met each other.

They each have their hands on the other person's heart.

And they stay like that silent, staring at each other for two minutes.

It is her preferred way of connecting with someone, apparently.

When you say connecting with somebody, she'll do that in the street if you go up to her and say, I'm a big fan.

I think her bodyguard will take you down, will cut you down like a scythe.

I bet that's a hurtful thing.

I think if you're Bonnie Valenciaga, I think you're okay.

He has compared his job on previous occasions to Demner to Christ carrying the cross.

One of the fashion shows, I thought, these models had to sort of wade through, I mean, what looked like slurry.

It was absolutely mad, looking absolutely horrendous and ill.

And there were horrible things like big piles of mud Kanye West.

This is before the descent into performative Nazism, but they had to sort of encounter him along the cat.

He's very, very avant-garde.

Well, that, but

he is a genius at marketing.

Yeah.

And when he joined Balenciaga, revenue was $350 million.

And when he left, it was $2 billion.

Okay, so let's talk about the film because that's why we're talking about that.

It's called The Tiger.

It's called The Tiger.

It appears to be based on some central question like if you're in a room with a tiger would you try and sort of fight it or let it devour you i have to say the stabs at profundity are desperate yes it's set in a a slightly kind of a near future an imagined future where demi moore is a Gucci.

She's a barbara Gucci.

And she runs Gucci, but she was also chief executive of California.

Gucci had bought California at this point.

Her children.

Have children.

Elliot Page, who's her sort of chief exec.

Edward Norton, who is her stepson by a previous marriage, who believes in the rapture and we're all about to get picked up by aliens.

Ed Harris turns up as a Vanity Fair journalist.

Yeah, Vanity Fair still matters in this

Vanity World, isn't it?

I mean, AI has taken over the entire world, but still a Vanity Fair journalist is on a network.

But honestly, it still matters.

I mean, it matters again, because let's face it, it doesn't matter Vanity Fair isn't what it was.

I wonder if you're the only person in Britain who has said said vanity fair is not what it used to be within minutes of eating a bag of pork scratches

yeah so she's in the beautiful house the family all come for a meal everyone takes some sort of mild hallucinogenic they have good and bad trips there's like conversations about money uh style taste what is life meaning what is fashion what are clothes what would you do in a room with a tiger all of what they were wearing is what were the clothes in the collection that's that's the that's the point point, isn't it?

So instead of a catwalk.

All of the family are wearing it, the fake family are wearing the clothes.

And he showed it at Milan Fashion Week, and they all turned up again in the clothes.

And they had

Gwyneth Poucher, other people.

I mean, I have to say, more people turned up to that than you would get to a premium.

This is the thing that most people have talked about.

This is the breakout of all the fashion weeks.

What's fascinating about it is that we've talked about this how many times before.

When you can get people to do your publicity for free, they used to spend, they've obviously spent a lot of money on this because they've got big stars and they've got big director, very big directors.

Because in the end, ads, whilst beautiful, some people flick past them.

In fact, a lot of people flick past them.

By the way, the clothes in this, there's not really a coherent theme to any of it at all.

This is sort of memeable.

If it's not memeable,

does it even work?

And as I say, lots of these brands are in trouble and they've got to find a way, pseudo-organic moments where everyone feels like, oh, hang on.

It'd be really fun if I tagged myself and said I was Las Snob or whoever it is.

It's like, by the way, everyone's doing that.

They already know that you're going to do that.

You could interview Demi more about this.

You could interview Ed Harris.

You could, I don't know, you could interview the directors.

I've got a couple of questions for them for sure.

Yeah.

Why did you do this?

I'm assuming A, they got paid and B, that Gucci gave them clothes, right?

And that's probably nice.

Some actors love getting clothes, right?

Some actors, you think, I think your favourite thing about acting is that you get given clothes afterwards.

Well, as we discussed when we were out on Friday night,

a lot of rich people just cannot stand stand to pay for things.

You could use your salary

to buy the stuff.

But now people are saying, oh, lots of

actors on the awards ceremony circuit are wearing stuff that you haven't yet seen on the catwalks.

And that's because why wouldn't you put it on an actor who someone's going to talk about and, you know, and you see, oh, my goodness, you've got a real amazing look at the Cannes Film Festival.

And then we're going to later see that.

That was, it was totally sacrosanct, the debut of the fashion collection, of the fashion show.

It's not anymore because you need those cultural moments, like all of these things.

You might have felt different about that kind of selling out in the 90s.

People now don't feel the same about so-called selling out.

You've got generations who've grown up being advertised to all the time around the things they're watching or in the middle of them, just like with a kind of rude stop.

You've got to watch an advent, you carry on.

The idea of product placement is such an antiquated term to that generation.

I'm still from the TV generation where you'd have to put a letter P in the corner of the screen if you, you know, if there was product placement or something.

And now this whole thing, as you say, this really, really A-list a-list talent behind the camera and in front of the camera there's no one's dressing up the fact that it's anything other than a Gucci advert right at the beginning we see that the people are called Gucci everyone is dressed in Gucci

and that that seems to be absolutely fine.

No one seems to mind about that.

It gives me some hope for our beleaguered content industry.

So the phenomena here is adotainment, which is these days brands have to create product.

They have to create their own content that people will willingly watch and willingly share you have to create the vibes it almost doesn't quite matter what the thing is but if you ask what is fashion it's something what what is it it's something that's in the air it's wanting to be part of something it's a sort of compulsion you you will rarely go a day on television without there being a documentary which is behind the scenes at ms or asda at christmas yeah or you know all of the supermarkets have branded content on channels which they are part funding as well this is this is the world that all of these brands have to get into.

And at one end of it, you have the tiger with Demi Moore and Ed Norton and this absurdness.

And on the other hand, you have pound shop wars.

But it's the same thing.

It's about brands and it's about brands understanding that you cannot put just a stationary advert in a newspaper or even online these days.

No one's clicking, you know, people are

clicking off after five seconds.

It is about creating something that people are watching through choice,

sharing through choice, and this world now where you will not find a brand which does not have a content division now.

You will not find a brand who isn't employing agencies to make them content which are designed not to go out as bumper adverts or not to go out as print adverts, but to go out as pieces of content which can be shared by other human beings.

That's that industry now.

The one good thing about it is, I think, is someone's got to make all of that stuff.

And coming from an industry where people are losing their jobs, those are the people who are very, very, very good at making it.

And it's so shallow.

Yeah.

Because, like, all of these things, I actually read a really interesting article the other week, which I'll try and find and put in the show notes.

I can't, about how everything,

all interior design trends now have just had to become a sort of two-word tag.

And they're not really, you know, because people want to just tag and make every single aesthetic simply communicable in two words, which is an antithesis of depth.

And it's not about about sort of deeply understanding people.

It's just like a sort of, it's like these little glib postmodern jokes where you're like, oh, I get it.

I get it.

I get it.

It's all, it's scroll culture, and there's no depth to it at all.

Because that's what advertising has always had to be, necessarily.

You've got 30 seconds to get, you know, you're making a vacuum cleaner in the same way that five other companies are, and you've got to get across a vibe, a two-word vibe, as to why this would be the one you'd buy tomorrow.

But now that's writt large across these sort of the big works of art.

But if you're saying that it could get, then

it will demeanor that, yes, it will.

Because the generation growing up now have grown up with that and they'll have fun with it and they'll play with that.

They understand that perfectly well.

And they will make things that play on that and they will bend the culture to what they would like it to be, which has always been the way.

You know, we absolutely,

we're a product of the sort of television and the sort of advertising that happened in the 50s and 60s and 70s.

And, you know, we were absolutely informed by that.

And we we made our programs in reference to that.

And, you know, the pendulum swings, you know, one way or another.

And this generation will make extraordinary things, I suspect, with the clients' own money, but that speak to the climate in which they grew up.

I don't think that will be possible.

And I think that

I'm actually going to recommend something when we get to the recommendation section.

Is it Pork Scratchings?

It is Priscilla.

Because, by the way, we've been paid a lot, and I don't think anyone would notice that we've been paid quite a lot of money by those Pork Scratchings people this morning.

I can't even remember their name.

It's like a fancy company.

It's a Pretendkin company.

It's not a real company.

None of the people in the snap basket, you've never heard their name before.

They all feel like somebody just left Eaton and their dad knew a venture capitalist and their dad's.

Yes.

And he said you can run your pork scratching company for two years and then you have to get a job.

And then you have to come and work at my venture capital firm.

I think it's interesting.

I think the proof will be in whether Demnet is able to revive the fortunes of Gucci and make people.

I think to some extent, I mean, it's quite a good start in that just by doing this one thing, it's by far the most talked-about thing.

And because lots of people thought, Is he actually any good?

I don't know if he's actually

very, very good at marketing.

My God, he's ridiculous.

He's ridiculous at marketing, at virality, understanding that kind of essential.

He's a very interesting guy.

The more I read about him, the more I sort of liked him.

He's he's he's

a love view, and And he gets results, and you have to admire that.

The two directors who made the film, they're just a great quote.

I'm not saying they took it seriously, but I think this is in Vanity Fair, actually.

It might have been in the New Yorker, but the interview said, what was it like having two people direct a film?

Spike Jones.

First, we did a kind of mind-meld, a kind of six-week meditation, like eight hours a day.

to foster non-verbal communication.

I recommend it for any kind of collaboration.

Maybe they had their hand on the heart for eight hours a day instead of two minutes.

But we live

weight Nicole Kidman is we live in an absolutely absurd world.

It is mental.

The tiger, it is called.

You can find it on YouTube.

The tiger.

You can find it everywhere.

Do let us know quite how far you make it through.

Join us in the completists club.

Exactly.

We will be sending out badges to anyone who can get all the way through.

Shall we go to our break?

Yes, we shall.

What are we going to be talking about afterwards?

Chicken Shop Date, which is, I'd say, an entirely different proposition to the Gucci Tiger film.

It might be the exact inverse of it.

Quite right.

Okay, see you after the break.

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Welcome back, everybody.

Now we're going to talk about 10 years of chicken shop dates.

Yes, 10 years old chicken shop dates.

It's when you looked at what the future content was going to be, I didn't think it was going to be quite so poultry based but uh with this and hot ones the two of the big

formatted bits of youtube content so people who don't know chicken shop date this amelia demoldenberg who's an actor comic writer and she takes interviewees on a date in various london chicken shops very very garishly lit and interviews them over chicken nuggets.

The light conceit is she's looking for love and she's taken people for a date and this is a funny place to take uh people for a date but she has now been going 10 years it's huge she's got three and a half million subscribers she did one recently with andrew garfield which went

wildly viral and that got kind of 10 million views and

firstly absolute fair play to amelia demoldenberg for putting this together and running this for 10 years and being quite so successful.

But I'm interested in it in terms of what it means for because she started it when she was 21 on YouTube.

She was a student.

She grew out of

a youth club magazine column

that she'd had.

The idea of sort of being

a character, I suppose, looking for love and going on dates with people.

And chicken shots being a very, very bad place to have a date.

She instinctively understood that was funny.

And you start interviewing people in that context and it builds from there.

Now, in every other generation, so when she's 21, she decides to do this as a YouTube thing.

So she's filming it as well.

Very first one with a British rapper called Getz, who she recently did a revisit with, which is really, really worth watching.

And if you've not seen it, it is, I think she records for 45 minutes or so, but the actual episodes are about eight minutes, 10 minutes, occasionally a little bit longer.

Heavily edited.

Her interviewing somebody, a little bit of flirting, lovely kind of background stuff of people frying chips and things.

The interstitial stuff is like fries going down and stuff, which I love.

She's got a very strong visual identity.

And off the back of this, because it is so huge, she is now hugely in demand with brands.

She does lots of

red carpet things.

She really likes doing red carpet, which she's sort of made for.

Yeah, she's amazing.

She's amazing at it.

She was the sort of official Oscar's social media person, but she made them put and red carpet interviewer on her job title.

And she's done lots and lots of those.

The Vandrew Garfield story is sort of amazing.

You know, they met a couple of times on red carpets.

And I mean, there is, you know, I always, you want to believe that she'll find love with him.

Yes.

There is there is a palpable chemistry.

Oh my god, it's amazing.

It's like, and someone's like, people were saying, oh my God, this is literally the best rom-com of the year.

And it's a 12-minute film or something in a chicken chop.

But she's qu that's quite a recognisable sort of heroine, isn't it?

There's something very much about that episodic that reminded me when I was sort of thinking about it a bit about something like, you know, the original Bridget Jones column or something like, you know, she's someone who's looking for love.

It's a persona that what she is on camera.

Well, that's the thing about a couple of things about it, because it does make you question.

So she, Amelia de Moldenberg, is very funny.

So she's a comic talent.

She is a comic talent.

Without question.

And she is not working on television.

She's not working on legacy television.

That's not a thing that she went into and it's not a thing that she's particularly interested in pivoting to.

And a couple of ways of looking at it, which are, well, then it means that legacy media is, you know, is crazy.

They've lost their minds if they don't have a a place for this.

But chicken shop date, she does one a month and they're eight minutes long.

So if you are legacy television, you can't do anything with that.

You can't do anything with something that's eight minutes long that's on once a month.

So it's not like, oh my God, you missed that or you missed chicken shop date.

You think, what we missed this eight minutes once a month.

Of course we didn't miss it.

We don't have a place for that.

But if you are a creative, and I've always said the fascinating thing with any creator, especially at the start of their career, they think, what's the possible shortest journey between me having an idea and people seeing that idea?

And if you wanted to do Chicken Shop Date as a television program,

I would say probably two years between having the idea and it being on.

And the 50 people have given you their opinion on what it should be.

Another 50 people have told you who your first guest should be.

Another 50 people are in the edit.

But if you're a media de Moldenberg or anyone from her generation or this next generation, you can go, oh, no, listen, I did it as a column.

There's cheap ways to do it.

It costs about six grand an episode.

I can fund it.

I can make it.

And the thing that I have in my brain can go straight to viewers.

And that's exactly what she's done.

She's created the thing that she wants.

So it has that authenticity, which is the reason it's been such a big hit.

One of the key points about this lovely route to market now and the lack of gatekeeping in this sort of community is good stuff has time to rise to the top.

If you get it right, you're rewarded.

And I think Amelia de Moldenberg, more than sort of anybody, only only because she's British and she's from a particular generation, shows what has changed for young creatives.

And certainly, if I was a young creative now, the avenue that I would be going down, which is doing your own stuff, finding a way to monetize it.

I totally agree.

And I think it's very interesting how

it's changed those traditional forms of interviewing.

I was trying to think when you were going to talk about this.

I was thinking, when was the last time I saw like a really epic moment on a legacy interview show?

I mean like that Andrea McGarfield thing is so epic

and Cher and things like that she's done, but she's also done lots of things and you think gosh something really amazing comes through in this.

But when was the last time you kind of maybe I'm just not watching enough of them but I don't really remember those things and I think it's really interesting that sorry to talk about the US but I think it's you know they're so market driven those network late night shows they've all incorporated essentially stuff from this type of YouTube sensibility okay things that are meant to go viral and that are short so you've got Seth Myers does

day drinking with Seth Myers, which is, so he'll, you know, he'll go out with a guest and he'll get drunk with him.

And it's not happening on the set, you know, it's a sort of design to go like that.

Obviously, there was Carpool karaoke.

Jimmy Fallon's got that thing, is it like the wheel of musical impressions or whatever?

They're all trying to do these little things that are left field and that are designed to disrupt really the traditional interview process that they are kind of the masters of because they run those shows and they sit behind a desk and that's what those shows have always done.

But they're trying to disrupt themselves now within their own thing in order to go viral so that they're like these people who, I mean, we're a billion years off having a late night show.

But if you're Seth Meyers or if you're Jimmy Fannin or any of these people, you are feeding a machine that eats money.

You know, if you have to have these viral things because someone is paying you an absolute fortune to make these shows and someone is, you know, and the cost of making them is huge and you're working for a corporation corporation that needs to return value to its shareholders.

If you are just a regular 21-year-old creative, you can do these things and you're doing it for £5,000 an episode

and playing by entirely different.

You get the questions in advance.

The publicists, you know, the reason someone goes on a chat show,

an actor often who is maybe not, you know, who often says other people's words, and then they come out with these perfect anecdotes is because they know what they're going to get asked.

And everyone sort of knows that and it's it's phony.

And the whole point of Amelia de Moldenberg's thing is that, I mean, some of the questions, and she deliberately edits it to make it look even more awkward and even more, you know, she'll let them talk, but then that anecdote will just, she'll happily kill her darlings.

And unless it's funny, it doesn't get in.

And you can edit in a different way than you can if you're sitting down with someone opposite the desk on a late-night show and doing the normal interview or even on the sofa.

All of those things, she deliberately has disrupted it.

They don't know what's coming next.

When you hear her say it, you almost think she doesn't know what's coming next.

And sometimes it's improvised.

She's incredibly well prepared, actually.

That's the key.

Which is the same

Sean Evans on Hot One's.

Oh, my God.

I mean, his research is ridiculous.

Cookies look ramshackle, but do the work.

And that's always been the key on any of those great things.

It's like Graeme Norton.

The reason Graham Norton is a brilliant chat show is he has done...

all of the work but then he sort of throws it away and pretends he

doesn't have yeah that that's the absolute key the tv producer in me looks at her doing 10 years which is very very impressive and you can see her thinking and you hear her talking about it a bit sometimes about what's next which is interesting she's 10 years into this what is quite a new profession the idea of being a youtuber and being someone who essentially is is their own brand and and their own creator and her things you say they're eight minutes long and they're once a month and you know it's it's harder for her to do like a half hour chat show because she is slightly still playing a character because the very very beginning of this the genesis of this when she's 17 is oh I'm slightly going to take one step aside from who I am and slightly pretend I'm doing a date I am doing a date but I'm also pretending I'm doing a date yeah and so she's never quite been able to be exactly herself the bits where you see her being herself which you see more and more often these days in the in the interviews she's unbelievably good at and at some point she will work out oh do you know what i can actually just be me

writing a rom-com and i wonder if that's true and she said it's in the chicken chop date space and that made me think, I mean, sorry, this is a real sidebar and we'll have to talk about this on a completely separate item at another time.

But are YouTube going to do like YouTube Premium where you're starting to have, because if she does do a romantic comedy, I mean, maybe YouTube would release it in theaters for one week for reasons as previously discussed.

But or

does it just, does she do something on YouTube?

Are they actually going to eventually?

Because all of these people, you can see like Mr.

Beast saying, oh, I want to go to Amazon because I want to do this game show and I want to do things that they still slightly believe legacy media or films or whatever it is, they still all have that hankering for something a bit like that to some extent.

Are they just going to bring it all under the YouTube umbrella and they're going to have something like YouTube?

I say YouTube Premium, I know you can have YouTube Premium, but what I mean is, is they're going to be in some of that as well because you know we already said that they won the Streaming Awards Netflix, but now they're

obviously we know their major competitor is YouTube and as I said Ted Sarandas got really prickly when asked about it because that's the one time I've ever seen him lose lose his call because he knows it's coming.

And I wonder whether they will move into something like that.

Yeah, well, I think as production costs, I think it'll sort of have happened the other way around, which is production costs are going to absolutely come down so much with new technologies and AI and things like that that it's going to make things look premium at a much cheaper price point.

But if I'm Amelia De Molderberg, the one thing I feel when I see her is it makes me feel quite tired because I think, my God, she's had to graft.

And it's all on her.

And it's her company.

I know she's got a very small team, but it's she has been selling herself every month.

It's this new thing: how do we promote this?

How do we promote that?

And the one thing you have in legacy media is somebody else is looking after a lot of that stuff for you, and somebody is paying you, and you know what you're getting paid.

And it doesn't matter if you get half the ratings this week that you did last week, the money is still coming in.

So, she's had 10 years now of having to do that, not only doing the creative stuff, but doing the business stuff, and recognizing that all of her money depends on who she is, which is quite a scary

place to be, I would say.

And also that they say, I think this is changing, they say that the median age at which people sort of slightly change from, you know, watching their screens to watching the big TV is kind of 27, late 20s or something like that.

And she's got an audience who's grown up with her, who are sort of in that demographic.

So it's, do they follow her?

My view would be they absolutely will follow her, that that median age will go up and up and up and up.

And maybe they're watching things on the big screen, but they're watching YouTube on the big screen.

But I think she's like a perfect example

of doing something very, very smart at the age of 21, 10 years ago, that other people were not doing, and now everybody is doing.

But she's got a 10-year head start.

And I think, honestly, absolute hats off to her for many.

So completely charming and wonderful, and a real British success story.

Exactly that.

Making great content, doing it on her own terms.

And

yeah, it's here's to another 10 years of it.

And, you know, maybe romance with Andrew Garfield.

I just want to say that.

That would be nice.

That would be nice.

The dream.

Now, talking of AI and lower production costs, we want to talk about, say, a little animated film called Critters.

Critters.

Now, OpenAI is making a movie.

It had to happen.

Critters was a little movie.

It was a short written and directed by a guy called Chad Nelson, who's a sort of creative at OpenAI, which I think is interesting and but also somehow, you know, potentially very sinister department.

Anyhow, and the premise of this little short was that a David Attenborough-type voiceover comes to a jungle or a forest of little woodland creatures who are, you know, they're not, they're not recognizable, they're not squirrels or anything, they're kind of

like pixel creatures.

I only call them critters, critters, they're critters, with a Z.

By the way,

in case it's not obvious, it is critters with a Z.

Listen, we were all assuming that.

Yeah,

you could hear the Z.

It was a hard Z.

So they combined the visuals from Dal E with

their old one, yeah.

With human voice actors, and they showed it at lots of festivals, and then he later remastered it with Sora, which is kind of the next generation version of it.

And they are now going to use this as the basis for, or a jumping-off point for a feature film, which uses AI throughout pre-production, production, and post.

It will have human voice actors.

And they're doing it with Vertigo films who are based in London.

And two of the people who wrote Paddington in Peru are going to write it.

And what's interesting about it, well, lots of things are interesting about it, but they're sort of saying, oh, in the way that Toy Story revolutionized animation, this is like the next level of that.

And also they're saying, oh, don't forget when Toy Story came out, everyone's going, oh my God, CGI, you know, we want traditionalized animation.

And again, it's...

It's exactly the same as that.

It's just a new technology.

This is what they're saying.

But what it means, obviously, is that animation, as we know, is incredibly expensive and it takes a very, very long time to do, even with computers, even when they're not drawing the cells painstaking by hand as they used to in the heyday of Walt Disney.

So it's going to affect timing and labor.

Now, what's fascinating about it is they say we're going to make it in nine months, which for an animated film is, I mean, you know, like, I think something like Coco for Pixar took, which I love, by the way, took seven years.

Elio, which for Pixar, it took five years.

They kind of knew they had a turkey, which was I had to move the release date so it didn't interfere with an earnings call.

And it involved thousands of people.

And

it was their lowest opening ever.

It probably cost them $200 million without marketing.

And it was their lowest opening ever for Pixar.

Nobody saw it.

It was like Pixar's worst ever.

So this is nine months.

They want to dictate.

$30 million.

$30 million, okay?

It still sounds like quite a lot.

Yeah.

Well,

they're going to take it.

They want to take it to Cannes, so we'll see if French cineasts have something to say about that.

I think they'll be fine about it.

They're all so relaxed.

Yeah.

And maybe they'll find a distributor there.

Maybe they'll already have one.

Well, the family genre, as we know, is doing brilliantly at the box office.

Kids sort of keep the lights on in cinemas to some extent.

But

animation, original animation, is not.

Original animation is all of this stuff that's doing really well is known IP or it's based on video video games, or it's sequels, or whatever, like Inside Out 2.

But actually,

animation, original animation, is in trouble.

And films are, they take so long to do.

Anyone who wants to just do a simple animation story, it's almost anathema to them because they're spending so much money on them.

They take so long that the idea, and actually, you know, lots of people who, I've talked to people who've written quite deep into these and then just come off them and said, I can't do it anymore because everything has to be so detailed.

Like they don't leave anything to chance because it's so expensive.

They've become these things that by virtue of how expensive and how long they take.

every sort of and again that that idea that if you're creative what you want is the shortest possible route between your joke and an audience and something like animation it's the exact opposite of that how can you make a zeitgeist film how can you do something exuberant something that just

unless you're south park and you're deliberately low for and that's different and that's TV.

And, you know, how can you have low-budget indie hits in animation?

You can't, and they don't exist.

They're about to.

They're about to.

Well, yes, because this is going to cost $30 million.

Another interesting thing, actually, in Scott Galloway's news,

Prof.

G newsletter recently, he compared the cast and crew of Fantastic Four with the staff of a number of public companies.

There are 3,271 strong crew of Fantastic 4.

And I appreciate they're going to hopefully go on to other work.

But, like, Coinbase, the crypto exchange, has only slightly more than that.

Like, they have so many more employees than Lyft, than TripAdvisor, than Reddit, than like asset management companies.

You know, Mr.

Beast

employs 50 people.

Yeah.

So you're thinking this is such a mad industry where there are that many people on this.

And also you're thinking, hang on a second, a lot of those people on Fantastic 4 are in effect and they're in post-production.

So, people think computers are making films already.

They're very, very used to superhero things and animation films that they believe are essentially made by computers.

Vertigo films, they say it's human-led, but it's AI-assisted.

And they are, as I say, they're casting it as a sort of experiment to say, who knows, does this $30 million work?

Can we do it quickly?

Can we get it done in that time?

And I think they're also saying that all the artists involved will have something in the back end, which is we haven't heard that since the Clinton administration, Richard.

I think that AI is going to take over animation.

It just is.

And lots of the big studios are not able to make a fully AI animated film at the moment for lots of, you know, for political reasons.

And guild-related reasons.

And good-related reasons.

So you need a smaller player to break the seal, which is what's happening here.

So Vertico could be.

You don't want the little old underdog open AI.

The little studio that could.

could the little studio that could but you know that's why you know oh no vertigo are making it open ai aren't making anything okay um because somebody has to do that and as soon as someone's done it and then you you know rest assured there will be so critters is the first one we'll talk about there will be hundreds of these things and there's already hundreds of animated shorts i mean you know you can't move for them but these feature films you it will look very peculiar in five years time and people look back and go sorry why you why were you talking about ai making an animated feature film i mean that's they make they make all of them now.

But this is sort of the first cab off the rank.

So the second that this is acceptable, the legacy studios will have no other choice but to say, look, we have to compete on price now.

We also have to use this technology.

We have to use AI.

And so that's all they're waiting for, really.

They're waiting for this to become industry standard from some of the smaller players before they can jump in.

There is also an...

endless supply of money.

The one thing we know now is I think it's an absurd amount of venture capital money is going to AI at the moment.

I mean, trillions and trillions and trillions.

There is a huge amount of money here to make content, to improve the concept, all of those types of things.

So, AI is going to take over large bits of the entertainment business.

Certainly,

this would be the first one.

So, it is a question of how do you then protect the human element of it.

And funnily enough, Chad Nelson, the guy you were talking about, who made the very first critters inside the consulting on the I mean, he's heavily involved in in the feature version.

So, he, as you say, is a creative inside a big AI company.

I was watching an interview with him that I think had had 43 views, but it was one of them was me.

I found it very interesting.

It was like poster festival.

He was talking to someone.

And he was saying, Look,

my job is, he said, when you work this closely with AI, you realize quite how similar everything it produces is.

He said, I look at all this stuff.

I feel like I'm drowning in in a he describes it as a sea of sameness.

And that's what AI gives you.

And he said, my job is always to sit in rooms with people whose job is to code and to create these things.

My job is to essentially make this good.

My job is essentially to make this humor.

My job is to make this funny.

My job is to take this

in a human direction.

And that would be the optimistic view.

of where this goes.

And Critis, as you say, has got two of the guys who wrote on Paddington in Peru.

There's going to be lots of writers for hire who are doing these things in the near future.

And

my view has always been in editing, in writing, all these AI things.

There is an intangible thing that is not something that you can simply copy from what has gone before.

It's

just a human brain in the room thinking, how is an audience feeling?

So I think it's...

inevitable and we have to try and protect as much humanity within it as possible.

But the real thing is that that there is

still a massive unanswered copyright theft thing going on here.

All the time, all of this has been based on stolen work.

All of it is stolen.

So forget for a minute everything else and what's going to happen and we'll work out how that happens.

It is stolen.

I agree, but don't you think, I mean, do you sense any appetite with any of the governments to do anything about this?

They don't care.

I get approached almost every day by lawyers saying we're going to launch a suit against these big AI companies.

And quite rightly, by the way, because people are going to be able to do it.

I agree.

I want there to be a lot of people.

So you're just trying to work out which is the right company.

The best lawyer to go with.

Well, just the right way to do it.

What's the right approach?

Who are the right companies to sue?

Because

they are going to have to pay because they did steal it.

I mean, it is

there are laws in every country.

You're not going to get any help off the government, so it has to be legal.

Exactly that.

The government's quite, you know, and if I was a government, would I really want to, I mean, that's the problem these days.

These companies are so intense.

Well, the government is all captured.

And yeah, they've got enough problems.

But so, yeah,

it is stolen.

Theft has occurred.

And creatives who've, you know, it's all very about saying AI is making this.

No, AI is looking over every bit of animation ever made and copying it.

But if you look at something, okay, let's look at as an example, which you haven't probably talked about, but the Ellisons who have bought Paramount and now want to buy Warner Brothers Discovery.

and I think it's a strong likelihood that they will acquire it.

You've got Larry Ellison, who I think a couple of weeks ago became the richest man in the world.

They're always jostling, it was always up and down in those top four, aren't they?

Anyway, do you think he is buying it for his Nepo son, who, because they want to be

to run a legacy media studio, or do you think they're trying to do something much bigger?

I think they're trying to do something much bigger.

Well, the reason he became the richest man in the world, however, briefly, was the huge punts he had taken on AI.

Yeah, and Oracle is, I mean, so I think they want to join things up in a much more significant way.

And what they like about Warner's, obviously, is that it has a huge number of franchises.

Just as a sort of speculative idea about this, in saying, what are they going to do with the fact they've stolen everything?

Say they have Warner's and Paramount together and they start making these, because you're going to be saying, okay, well, try and make me a demon slayer.

Here's 30 million.

By the way, I'm the richest man in the world.

What's the difference?

Oh, I don't really like it.

I didn't really want it.

Do another one.

But this is what people have been saying all along, which once the thing, the films had become too big to fail, really,

and yet they did fail.

But hugely expensive animations or hugely expensive kind of studio temple movies or superhero factors or whatever it is that doesn't work out is a very significant problem if you have a few of them on the books.

So if you can try

seeding 10 of them and saying, well, I don't like this one, I don't like that one, or this one, you know, go back and do it again.

You can constantly adjust these.

There's nothing finished ever about these because you can just give it another prompt and it can change it slightly.

The same afternoon you got the notes.

What happens within Paramount where they say, well, we're just we've only used Paramount and Warner stuff.

Why shouldn't we be able to

train it on this?

And then we're going to, I think that's what will happen.

And the employees also feel like, well, where else am I going to go if I don't work for these companies?

There's a smaller and smaller number of studios that still exist.

They're all going to fold because it's Hollywood and they just care about the money.

It's up to the artists to push back.

And that's probably the last front here because it's not going to be the executives.

The hope is that

we have a sea change, and people do want human connection and human art.

And there will always be brilliant creatives.

There's never a generation that has fewer brilliant creatives than another generation.

Ever.

There's no, almost this generation are not creative.

There's always brilliant creatives and they will always be looking for something to do and they will always be looking to find their own niche.

And as production costs plummet, they will be able to make great art as well.

As you say, if you're Larry Edison and David Edison,

essentially it's going to be a license to print money.

But if you are a true great artist, hopefully there will be options open to you.

Either way, you know, we're talking about this.

People you might be able to make a fun animation that's zeitgeisty and that doesn't cost

$200 million without marketing.

Yeah.

I mean, but we're talking...

It takes seven years.

We're talking about critters here, and people will look back on this like the people who sat in the French cinema and thought the train was going to come out of the screen at them because we are at the very, very beginning of something that is about to become absolutely, humongously huge and the money is already baked into it.

Everyone's already positioned themselves.

That's what every single move in Hollywood is about at the moment is how am I going to take advantage of the huge cost savings and the huge marketing savings and the huge research savings that AI is going to bring me because it is going to be an absolute boomtown.

But I hope that the Amelia de Moldenbergs of this next generation and the writers and the creators and the artists also know that there will be enough people out there who will willingly pay them to make a different sort of art.

And you can see the beginnings of that industry starting now where people will, fandoms, will fund things.

And that feels like there will be a shadow industry, which hopefully will produce some extraordinary stuff as well.

Any recommendations this week?

I've got two recommendations.

One I meant to make last week, but I had COVID.

And this is for an essay, a treatise

written by James Marriott on his cultural capital substat.

Lots of people have talked about this.

It's called The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society.

It's so interesting.

If you haven't read it, it's a treatise, as I say, about how sort of culture is becoming post-literate.

We're losing the ability to read, to understand, and

it's all been killed and it's traceable to the smartphone.

And

it's making people stupid.

This is what I was thinking about a bit further up the show, which was

we can see that IQ is declining.

We can see that literacy.

I can feel mine go.

That substack, by the way, James Marriott substack, is one of the few things that makes me feel like my IQ might go up a tiny bit.

He's so brilliant.

Well, it's full of great ideas, and it's written in a way you think, oh, yeah, I get that.

So I doubt that.

I strongly recommend everybody reads this.

It's absolutely, it's fantastic.

And lots of people have talked about it anyway.

It's called The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society.

My other recommendation is, we don't talk enough about, like, I mean, maybe about Nathan Fielder in this country, but I'm just watching the rehearsal, which you can watch on Sky and now, it is so amazing.

I mean, he's...

I mean, it's obviously a genre of one.

I mean, talk about things that you might not pay people to do in the future, but it is the most extraordinary thing.

He helps people deal.

Have you seen it?

Yes, I have seen it.

It's very difficult to describe what it is.

He helps people prepare in the most sort of anal way for difficult life moments or conversations.

And the level of pre-planning to like close off all the different curveballs life might throw at you

in a 10-minute conversation is beyond.

If you haven't seen it, watch it because I just think he's so amazing.

And if you haven't seen Nathan for You, which is his earlier series, I mean, absolutely brilliant.

He's sort of in a category of one as well.

So

if you like the the first 20 minutes that you see of him, you've got an awful lot to enjoy.

Let's stay with it.

I mean, there's nothing else like it on Telly, let's put it that way.

And I'm heading to iPlayer for their new series of Freddy Flintos Field of Dreams, which is where he takes young kids who don't play cricket.

This makes it sound so boring and makes them play cricket.

But

it's about kids and it's about teenagehood and it's about awkwardness and it's about

love and respect and hope.

And about him.

And these days as well, the first series wasn't and now it is and you see what what he's been through he's he's an extraordinary presence at at the heart of this and you see you could see in the first series what he gave to these kids which was beautiful you now also see what they give to him which is also beautiful

it's a really it's a really wonderful watch right that about wraps us up we will be back as always for questions and answers on thursday And on Friday for our members, we are looking to the history of the Muppets.

We're literally looking into the history of everything that happened before they got successful,

which took a really, really, really long time.

Mopet Origin story.

I can't imagine how much I like it.

There's all sorts of twists and turns in that as well.

If you want to become a member, add free listening and so on.

It's the restasentertainment.com.

You can sign up there.

But for everyone else, we'll see you on Thursday.

See you on Thursday.

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