Memoir Fakery and Publishing Ethics

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That's the octopus energy, entourage that they have built around you. A great satisfaction not having to tell your story for new every single time, which I think most major celebrities also feel. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina High. And me, Richard Osman. Good day to everybody. Good day, Marina. Hello, Richard, how are you? I'm not too bad. We're uh gonna be talking to Steven Spielberg this week, so we're still looking for questions. If you want to send your questions to therest is entertainment at goalhanger. dotcom com, we would love to hear them. We'll put them to uh to Spielberg. But how's your week been? Not too bad. You I mean you know, it's not it's ups ups and down. Too hot. Too hot. Too hot, I'm gonna come out and say it. But I wish uh people would tell the truth. Sometimes both saw a brilliant film. Yes, we both have to. And that is one of the things we're going to be talking about in a sort of wider . We are. We're going to be talking about backrooms and obsession for a number of reasons. We're also going to be talking about what I would say for our podcast and our listeners might be quite a fun story, which is uh the story of Mobland. Has Tom Hardy been fired or not fired from Mobland? Good hanger. And we're also going to be talking about the Bell Burden memoir of her marriage breakdown, strangers, is like an absolutely monster hit. And like all monster hits, it has now got a backlash. We're gonna be digging into why. Yes, is it salt path or is it more than sea salt path? Yeah. Essentially that. But now, Backrooms is uh it's a horror movie. It came out this weekend and we talk a lot about tracking on this show. Hot Hollywood tends to be able to predict how a movie is going to open, how what it's going to do. And it's a very cheap movie this, 10$ million . And the tracking first came out and said, this movie is going to make twenty-five million dollars. And everyone's like, whoa, this is crazy. On his opening weekend. And then about two weeks after that, they said, Oh no, hold on. It's not going to make twenty five million . We reckon it's going to make $45 million . This super cheap movie, which we're going to talk all about, we think it's going to make $45 million. It opened this weekend. It did not make $25 million doll.ars It did not make $45 million dollars. It made eighty one million dollars, the third biggest opening of the year behind Mario and Michael Jackson. Where has this movie come from? Why has it been so successful and what does that mean? Okay, well, this is an A24 movie. It's actually A24's biggest opening now of all time. It's gonna be their biggest movie by a long time. Yeah, it's the second biggest horror opening of all time. Only after Stephen King's It. It stars Chibertell Edgefor and Renato Ryan's Finn. It's directed and created by a guy called Kane Parsons. This is where it gets interesting. This is where it gets interesting. By the way, he's 20. He is not only the youngest director ever to have been given a studio film, so beating people like Brian De Palmer or some Wells, he is the youngest director ever to have a number one film. He is an unbelievable YouTube native and he was called Kane Pixels on YouTube and he made lots and lots of interesting things, including music. He co-creates the score for this film. And one of the things that he made was called the Backrooms Found Footage. Uh, when he was 16, it's a sort of nine And it's based off of a single still posted on the internet, isn't it? Fascination with liminal spaces, which I suppose are sort of empty spaces, sometimes transitional spaces, abandoned spaces. Strangely purposeless. Like the like you'll open a little iron door and a tube station and wonder what's behind it. The backrooms was an aesthetic and it grew out of a 4chan thread in tw twenty nineteen . Where somebody said post disquieting images that just feel off and they added this photo is bas ically the entire uh And by the way, it is an unbelievable production design. I thought it was the art direction is beyond it's but it's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous. I think it was it was an abandoned store in Oshkosh. Well, you didn't. It was abandoned. It was not clear at that light. It's like was it abandoned offices, a hotel? Yeah, they later discovered it was an abandoned furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. And there are all these things. I would like to live in Oskosh. Sorry this is that's an absolute sidebar. Yeah. But that's a that's a cool place name. Yeah. I I I wouldn't like to yeah, anyway. But someone had said about it and it had this sort of weird yellow light and a kind of Dutch angle to it all. And somebody said, if you're not careful and you knew no clip out of reality, no clip is a gaming term where you kind of can walk through walls or whatever it is, in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the backrooms where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum humbuzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby because it has sure as hell heard you. And by the way, that's the movie. Yeah. Well that's me but they call it creepypasta, but it's kind of like one of those urban legend online ghost stories. And it was collaborative and everyone could add to it and people expanded this whole it became this whole universe and people were posting their own sort of liminal spaces. It really took off in about in the sort of early 2020s this particular thing. And the idea of these kind of creepy limited spaces. Yeah, when we can go anywhere. And there had been a website that I'd remembered from honestly 25 years ago called UK Entrances to Hell. And I had to check this weekend, is it still there? Go online in it's like this incredibly like basic website, and you'll see what someone's done. They just people kept adding weird doorways or blocked-in things, and they give them names and they say that they're entrances to hell. So there's a sort of element of that, like every one can join in, everyone can whatever. But it became a sort of subculture of popular imagination. And Kane Parsons, he's like extremely online, said he's interested in why people are drawn to that, because it's kind of like you've been there before, like he But yeah, exactly. But you can see how influential it is because Dan Erickson , who created Severance, and if you've seen Severance and you haven't seen the backrooms, you'll understand that idea of these kind of corridors, lot of weird office space, whatever it is. And Dan Erickson says that the internet sort of subculture of the backrooms really influenced severance. Yeah, yeah, I mean you can see. You can see. But also those things are influenced by kind of our cultural memories of things like the shining, which is full of corridors. Again, there's a lot of sort of weird space in that film. The artist uh Mike Nelson used to just fill sort of whole rooms with just so you'd be in an unusual weird backroom that wasn't quite right. Things that are slightly off. His shorts by the way were were digital animation. Yes. Yeah, he used like Blender and something else to kind of And now they've built it and they've built like thirty-three thousand square foot of these sets and it's all you know they've they've realized it and it's all a practical set. Uh but there is obviously some CGI and what have you. But obviously so many people have gone they've spent very little on the marketing. They've spent about ten million, but they've done it all in the native areas where this thing sprung from. So when I went on Friday, I went to the earliest possible screening I could find, which was at three forty five on a Friday, the cinema was full of I would say 18 to 25 year olds like obsessed, really wanting to see it. We're gonna talk more about horror in general as this thing as a place where the things that we want to happen are are happening. Well, th here's the other thing. You know, one film is a phenomenon, two films is a movement. Uh, and the other film is obsession. And that's made by Curry Barker, who is at twenty six. He must have thought he was pretty cool. Yeah. Making a movie at 26. Now, Obsession cost $750,000, which is very, very, very cheap for a movie. It has in the last three weeks made over a hundred million dollars. Three weeks in a row, its box office take has gone up. And the you you might vote go, yeah, but that happens with lots of films because people go see them and then they like them. Everything does best in week one. Everything. To do better in week two is almost unheard of. To do better in week three, do you know the last film to do that? To go up three weeks Is it something E.T.? E.T., nineteen eighty two. Occasionally Christmas, Christmas movies go up. But other than that, that's the last movie to do it. An obsession, seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds it cost. It has made over a hundred million dollars. Again, a twenty-six-year-old director who absolutely honed his skill on YouTube. And it's a horror. Again, it's a horror. It's part of the sort of YouTube to cinema pipeline that obviously includes Kane Parsons, but we talked about Markiplier who made that film Iron Lung, which I think actually was quite expensive by some standards. It was three million dollars, it made fifty-one million dollars. Uh Haley Boston, who does the TV show for Netflix called Something Very Bad's Gonna Happen. The Philippine Brothers in in Australia. Hailey Boston had only ever been on a film on a set once, on a sort of two-week placement as a runner. She is now the show runner of a massive Netflix show. Well cat the thing I love most about Kane Parsons is he said, Oh well I didn't really watch films because why would I? Because I I had all the entertainment I needed. I saw it an inter I think it was in the New Yorker and he committed to not watching Blue Velvet and they'd gone, Are you kidding you haven't watched Blue Velvet? And do you know what? Right there, right there is the issue about why cinema went wrong and and where it has to go next. It's interesting that lots of them start in the found footage horror um genre and they're all really young. One of the things that I think is very interesting about these people is that they massively understand audience because if you put things on YouTube , you sadly c cannot kid yourself about audience. You understand a lot of things very quickly. Well it's the Beatles playing hamburg for two years, isn't it? You see exactly what works and what doesn't work and why. And they've had you know without even thinking about it, it's just what they've been doing in their bedrooms for five, six, seven, eight years. And every single time they see exactly what works and what doesn't. And that's not a, by the way, a sort of cynical eye. It is actually, if you're a creative person at all, getting that kind of feedback is incredibly instructive sometimes because you're still being your creative self. You're just going, oh And a lot of these things they built you know it's really interesting. Kane Parsons was still making background stuff for YouTube for two years of the development of this movie. I think they shot it in about six weeks last summer, and he kind of stops in about May, because they're obviously starting to shoot in July. But he wants to then expand it. He will now wants to make a maybe a nine part limited series about it. But what's fascinating, I definitely agree with you, is that they haven't often seen any of these things. They've weirdly, they've seen like the parody is of things. Yeah. Like Curry Barker said, he had seen, you know, the Treehouse of Horror, which um the Simpsons do at their Halloween episode every year. He saw a nineteen ninety-one one, which is a a monkey's paw thing, and said, Oh, that changed my life. Because in in the same way that have they seen The Shining? Not really. But they've seen you've seen so many takeoffs of The Shining and the Ready Player One scene where all the players like storm the Overlook Hotel and they're all making in jokes about room two, three, seven, whatever it is. It's conceivable that maybe they've had those experiences. But they often haven't seen the original thing. And the reactions, I think, to the work is quite fascinating. It's really weird. This film obviously is a huge hit, but it's By the way, that's the cinema score is you ask people who've been to see the movie what they thought of it. The critics like it. Yeah, the critics like it. Of course they do because it's gonna save Hollywood. But he's had to serve two audiences. The incredibly invested sort of fan community who say, oh no, but then he didn't , or he should have included that, or he's deviated here. We had a few walkouts in our screening of people who literally couldn't sit still at any point before they walked out and then walked out. I think it was just I I think they couldn't take how long it was and how you know I think I think they found something about that. I mean and there are people saying, well, he doesn't own this, which is kind of like okay, well that Stephen Spielberg doesn't own sharks. No, and no one owns folklore. It's just one of those things and if you're the one who's made it. But I do think that the genre itself, horror, which we've talked a lot about on the podcast, it is the place that the thing we say we want to happen is happening. People are not spending huge amounts of money on films, even on the marketing. They are fill ing the theaters with people who want to have a communal experience, who are young, who are hyper-engaged. I think there's seventy-four percent under thirty-four the audience for backgrounds in the US. I was genuinely twice as old as pretty much as anyone else is. We were as well. Everyone was. I mean, like everyone was young. I went with a fifteen-year-old saying mine, so that was fine. Because normally I go and watch like art house things and w we're always the youngest people there. Oh this is nice, isn't it? This time it was like oh they but but but also no one on their phones, no one absolutely no nonsense, people who you know it was it was a absolute treat. This is what we say we want to happen. There are and it's really interesting how many of the kind of big name directors who were young who have done stuff in horror, Ryan Kugler, Zack Krager, Jordan Peel. I mean, you're doing things in horror. When people saw Get Out, they were like, all right, this is a horror movie, but it's sort of about race and it's you know, people are tackling themes in horror that it's not just slasher stuff. There's a movie I'm really looking forward to later this summer called Teenage Love. I don't know if you saw that as a trailer as yours, but I'm dying for that. Oh no, the trailers are yeah. Teenage Sex Sex and Death That Count Miasma. I'm dying for this. That you can see it's incredibly sort of creative and pr prestige. And this is why Well, we've got Scary Movie Six coming out next week, which again might do absolutely enormous numbers. But it's got so much to satirize because we are in the era, as we said before, of prestige horror. This is like auteurs are making horror and they always have done to some degree because people could get started cheaply in the genre. But actually also, you know, the shining is horror. And that's Cuba. I mean you know, people it's it's a it's it's gre aatat form for work in particular now where almost all of them with I would say uh someone like obviously Greta Gerwick hasn't it but a lot of the young directors are all the none have all done it's not a good idea which would be a way to go with it. But th so there's the horror thing, but I think in in some ways even more interesting is this idea of uh you know, cinema has been made by a certain generation for us for a certain generation for a very, very long time, and you know we, we understand where the sequels come from. And for a long time, they went, Oh no, we understand what young people like, they like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Great, we've got that covered. Uh, and actually, because that audience was not being served, they were serving themselves and they were doing something uh completely underground that anyone who was under sixteen was seeing day in, day out, uh but anyone who was over forty was not seeing. Uh and all of those nascent careers are now coming to fruition. And they don't have to, by the way, go into multiplexes, other than it's quite a nice way, Kane Parsons, let's assume he's gonna make twenty-five million dollars from this, something like that. So it's a nice way to make twenty-five million dollars if you built that stuff up online. But they don't have to. The message in music, in television, in film and everything these days is these people do not have to go mainstream. They don't have to do it. And also that they're not even that interested in going mainstream. That that fish you can dangle that says, Oh, you could come and do a a Channel Four series now if you want. They go, I'm so I'm literally driving a Maserati. I don't I I don't know what and also all of my audience, all the people I want to impress and entertain are on the platform that I'm on and they're not on the platform that you're you need me, I don't need you. And in the last few years, I know we've seen that happen gradually, but it is completely changed now. The ecosystem has completely changed. Yes, but surfacing stories and creators uh which people are already interested in, which is a form of known IP, you know, rather than the IP of just like, oh how about we find a different way to do Spider-Man. Yes, good idea. The known IP is kind of percolated through the internet. People see it all the time. And finding these people, but you have to say that Hollywood executives and the people with money, and you don't need much money as we're showing have not done a great job of finding those people. They are there. We know the audience is there. How many horror movies have to come out each year which do incredibly well and which make so many multiples of their budget back. Not like if another film, you know, if uh very expensive films do well, they might make three times the budget back. I mean this is these films that just has made up about 170 times its budget now. It's like those things like long legs or whatever those the the sort of micro budget that become absolutely massive. And it's almost without exception in this genre and young people are going to cinemas, as I say, all the things that people say they want to happen are happening, and yet to some degree they are still not being served and they're still not finding those creators. I think after this, surely it's somebody's job in every single studio to th to come up with people like this. I was talking to a TV producer the other day. He said, um uh when we spoke about microdramas a long time ago, he said it's the it's the first time I'd heard people talking about them, he said, I now do not go into a single meeting in any drama department of any company anywhere where they don't first start talking about microdramas. It's all anyone talks about. Now, the thing you can see about backgrounds, by the way, we haven't reviewed it, which which we should do. We'll get onto whether we enjoyed it or not. But the one thing you definitely know, firstly, there's going to be great opportunities for a new generation of filmmakers in the same way that you had that incredible generation of filmmakers who um who launched themselves in the seventies. This is a very different generation. But secondly, my God, there's gonna be some bad movies coming out of this. Yeah. Because everyone's gonna chase it. Yes. I mean that that's the problem. And they don't know what they're chasing because they're not natives themselves. As in I'm talking about the mommy people and the big executives who are much, much older. Yeah. And you know, everyone's gonna be looking for the new Curry Barker and Kane Parsons now. And there will be some out there, but there will be more that are not, there'll be they'll' there'll oh my god, theres gonna be some shocking films coming out. But then there always have been. What did you make of the film? I absolutely loved it. I have it's a huge mood and I haven't stopped thinking about it since I think it''s theres something about it that's so sort of open ended. I can't say I won't say anymore 'cause I don't do any spoilers, but there's something about it that's so open ended. It's quite hard to give spoilers in a funny kind of way. Yeah. It's a real vibe of a movie. Just the aesthetic. And as I say, I thought the art direction, the production design was unbelievable. I f I mean extraordinary. And it it just it it seeps into you. It's Yeah, I th I thought it was um Ingrid watched lots of it, you know, you know there's always gonna be a jump scare, you know that memory you know there's gonna be a jump scare and she just had her head and her hands throughout those bits. But actually he doesn't use that many jump scares. But yeah, I thought I yeah, it's a mood, right? Yeah. It's a mood and I didn't look at my watch to see what time it was at any point and I I always do. usually look at my watch, even if it's the best film in the world about fifteen minutes in. I'm like, I've got another two hours of this. Think film film that I'm really enjoying. Uh I'm already out of pick and mix. Um but yeah I th I I thought it was great and it was great to be in a cinema full of young people. Yeah who were on day one and afterwards just hearing them all talking about it when they're coming out. Yeah. And you think that God, that's just what films used to be. Yeah. So I think I mean God, fair play to Kane Parsons. Um, and to A twenty four who really uh because uh it's it it's difficult to i i there's something very, very different about what he did on YouTube to to what they have created. Oh yeah yeah. And uh be very exciting to see what he does next. Yeah, it's really exciting. I just thought it w I felt excited and that it was something different and because I knew because I was slightly obsessed with those liberal spaces back those few years ago, I I I could I could see where it had come from and I thought it was such an interesting way to surface that story. Now do rom coms YouTube, please. That I'd like to see. Or heist movies. Oh. Oh, that's what I'd like. Come on, YouTubers, do some heist movies. There's not enough heist movies around. Verticals will do heist movies. Yeah, vertical heist movie. In the tower block. Um and you've seen Obsession as well. Yes. I really recommend seeing both films. This episode is brought to you by Lloyd. Now I love it when characters are part of a club. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you, Richard? Thursday Murder Club in some ways reminds me of the A Team. I would now like to map each of those characters onto the A-Team and feel I probably could. I mean Elizabeth is Hannibal and it's not even close. That's exactly right. And Ron is howling mad Murdoch. Well there are definite perks to being in a club. Just ask the members of Club Lloyds because with Club Lloyds you can bank on Lloyds to give you more wherever you you are. If join Club Lloyds, there's all sorts of benefits you can choose between. There's, for example, six-free cinema tickets. They've got an annual coffee club and gourmet society membership, which would be mine. And also something that uh the Thursday Murder Club would enjoy very, very much indeed. Uh to top it all off, uh you have fee free spending abroad, which means wherever you are, you won't be charged by Lloyd's uh to use your debit card when you're travelling. Now joining this club costs five pounds per month, but that is refunded in any month that you pay £2,000 into your account. Now that is a club that's worth being part of. Check out Club Lloyd's today. You'll need to be a UK resident and aged 18 or over to apply. It's nearly that time, everyone. The rest is football will be on Netflix every day for the world's biggest tournament. Join myself, Alan and Micah for daily debates, unfiltered takes, and the most special of guests, all from the heart of New York City. Yeah, that's right. We're excited too. See you soon . Welcome back everybody. Now , Mobland. Tom Hardy. Should he stay or should he go? What's going on there? There is drama on the set of Mobland. A drama. This is the Paramount Show about an Irish crime family in London that was co-created by Ronan Bennett and Guy Ritchie who directed some of the episodes of the first season. The show runner and EP is Jess Butterworth. One of our great playwrights. Yeah, one of our great yeah. It stars Tom Hardy, but also Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan. I was kind of held together by I would say having watched it um by the Tom Hardy performance. Anyway, but it's a huge hit for Paramount, really big hit for them. However, there's been some fallout. I read last week that Tom Hardy had been fired from Mobland, and it was this sort of like a sudden spilling out of all this stuff. Tom Hardy was said to be very angry. He didn't love the scripts. He didn't love that it was becoming more of an ensemble piece and his anger manifested itself. Again, all of this is reportedly and allegedly, because you'll see how it undermined it becomes later on in the story. It manifested itself by him apparently offering lots of script notes on Jess Butterworth's scripts. Uh Ronan Bennett and Jez Butterworth co-wrote the whole of the first season. I don't know if that's the but anyway, and by the way, season two, which is this is what we're talking about. Just as a recap, Jez Butterworth wrote Jerusalem. He wrote some of the best plays of this century. He's you know he's been a writer forever. Ronan Bennett wrote Top Boy. You know, again, these are both people are the absolute top of their profession. Tom Hardy , a great actor. Yeah. So I don't know who do you take script notes from? I would say the script writers. Anyway, the lateness thing supposedly particularly annoyed Dame Helen in some highly dubious bystander quotes that I read in the Daily Mail. Do you mean made up? Well, I'm just saying this is an insider who talks like all tabloid insiders. She expects better. She holds people to a high standard. She's eighty. She's been there and seen it all. The behind the scenes crew watch it all and believe that she no longer looks as happy working on scenes with him. It has all become quite personal between them. She's got a very interesting way of talking. It's like she's in Howard's End or something. I agree. She talks exactly like a tabloid by bystander, or it could be could have been a man. In fact, it would have been a man. We're gonna get to that later. But Helen Mirren then uh unfortunately put a picture of on Instagram of Tom Hardy and she said, Love you now and always Which seems to me like the bystander had got things a little bit wrong about the relationship Also, it seems that maybe Tom Hardy hasn't actually been fired and that the producers are going to have a sit-down with him and maybe they can work it all out. Richard, I would say two things. First, that this is very unusual that this much stuff has come out into the open. Yeah. And second, that this drama's so much better than Modbland. I mean, I mean just enjoy it, right? I this is I mean it's very, very watchable this particular drama. I you know, I w which I don't necessarily feel about Mobland. I've not seen Mobland, I have to say that. I'll I'll I'll say this which is trying to imagine the make a feel by election, but in a T uh in a fictional T V show set in about some Irish gangs in London. It's sort of like that, or you know, like those The thing I did notice is there's there's some big personalities involved. Jess Butterworth is a big personality, Guy Ritchie is a big personality, Tom Hardy is a big personality. There are twelve executive producers on that show. Um let me count how many of them are men. Hold on. One, two , three, four. All twelve of them are men. Uh and you uh you you sense that's the trouble often with men. If you've got a group of men in a room, they get so emotional. Well, that's what I you see, I guess. Listen, I am a huge supporter of the experiment, if I can call it that, of men in the workplace. I'm a huge supporter of it. I've been thrilled that they've had a go. Yeah. But I do sometimes wonder if they're too emotional for the performing arts. And I don't wanna say that because, you know It doesn't look really good. Can they have it all? No. When they're just like that. There's so much testosterone on that set. I've if I walked on that set, I would grow a beard. That literally just by w osmotically I would absorb it. Actually that's a misconception about Tom Hardy and Guy Ritchie and um Jess Butterworth. They don't actually have bids, they're clean shaven every single morning, and by lunchtime they've got these falls and things that you see them in. The same with Guy Ritchie and Tom Hardy's accents. Yes. You talked to lots of people who went to school with them. And they're like, oh that's interesting. They used to speak. Yeah, they did it it's something . Didn't used to wear those caps. There's something in the waters or in the something. And as I say, I mean it's very, very watchable. We don't know how this will play out, other than, you know, as I say, I would love the experiment of men in the workplace to continue. So I hop e everyone can work this out. But it's you know, lots it's happened lots of times before. It's interesting. If if an actor is really badly behaved, that's what we're talking about here. When the story first comes out, you're like, oh my god, he must have been so badly behaved. Because if you've got a big star like Tom Hardy, and he is brilliant. I mean he's he's so watchable in everything he does. Look at him in Peaky Blinders and all sorts of things. He can really carry pretty much any any scene he's in. So if you've got him in your show, then you're delighted. And the same with it if you've got Pearson Helen there as well. You're delighted. But you want to keep him in your show if you're paramount because they need these big shows that go on and on and on. Exactly. And that you build up big libraries of they did with Yellowstone. So you think, wow, you must have done something really, really awful . When the news first came out, it said he's definitely been fired. Now of course everyone's started backtracking governor we're gonna sit around a table and do this, that the other. So maybe it was just a warning shot. Because it doesn't happen very often that actors get replaced. Charlie Sheen, when he got replaced on two and a half. I mean the stuff he had to do to get fired was completely . I don't think we would have But you can see that on these on another Paramount show, look what happened on uh on Yellowstone, eventually Taylor Sheridan and Kevin Costner . Yeah. Again, you know, I'm just wondering about that hormone, but there was so much botting of heads that he wasn't there for the end. Uh Kevin Costner. Chevy Chase on community again. I mean you have to really, really impossible. I mean any always read about community, I think that was a troubled set in in for lots and lots of different ways. But I love the show so much. It's amazing what came out of it. Yeah, it really is amazing. Isaiah Washington and Patrick Dempsey on Grey's Anatomy, I mean any of these shows that had yeah. Any of these shows that are ensembles. Because that's the thing with actors is it's I think it's quite hard for the if if they've got something that's an enormous success, it's quite hard for them to accept that success might not be down to them. I think Catherine Hagel w was nominated for an Emmy for Grey's Anatomy and she publicly asked to have her name removed because um the work she was had been given to do wasn't good enough. Uh was she saying to Shonda Rhymes, No, this is this is tat. She did later admit that that was perhaps slightly unclassy. But uh yeah, it's quite hard. Roseanne Barr is another one that they you know, essentially she came back and then they removed her immediately, replaced her with every single other person came back from that show, they renamed it the Connors and uh you know it it continued. But you really have to do something pretty spectacular as an actor to get replaced on something. So I guess we'll watch this space with uh with Tom Hardy uh and Mobland . But um I mean it's a As I said it's very entertaining. Just enjoy it. Yeah, exactly. And it but it is you just think maybe maybe d maybe one executive producer who's a woman might be uh helpful. Do you know, by the the way, connection between Mobland and Backrooms that we talked about earlier? No, I don't. So in backrooms, uh there are two characters who work with the Chetto Edge of World in the furniture store. Uh you know the young Stoner guy. Yeah. He is not American. He's English. He's Finn Bennett. And he is the son of Ronan Bennett, who writes Mobland. Yeah. He's terrific as well. He's very good. Yeah, he's very good. But yeah, so there you go, a little connection. I won't always be able to do connection between our first two stories, but I have today. I love that. Have I blown your mind? Yes, you have. Yes. The more usual thing about actors being replaced, it's certainly uh way back when is because they asked for too much money. My favourite example of that is Valerie Harper, who wa who who was on the sitcom Valerie in the eighties, got paid a lot of money. It was a big hit the first season of that. Asked for too much money. So they fired Valerie from Valerie uh and uh replaced it with someone else and called it Valerie's family. That's bad. And also Monk, which is one of my fate favourite shows of all time, his assistant uh in the first few seasons, disappears mid season, completely disappears and is replaced. And she was amazing. And then you look it up, you go, Oh, it would have been a huge hit, so all the male actors got a raise, uh and she didn't. Uh so she asked for one and they fied her. So there you go. But again, that's um That's showbiz. That is showbiz, yeah. Well showbaz if you're a woman for sure. Uh talking of women. How's that for a segue? I love it. Uh Bell Burden. Tell us about Bell Bur. Right. Belle Burden is the author of a book called Strangers, a memoir of her sort of disintegrated marriage. Now it's been an absolute monster hit since it came out earlier this year. It's already gonna be adapted as a film for Netflix and Gwynneth Paltray's going to start. Yeah. I know she sort of plays just sort of meta versions. She's since her own retirement from action acting, she's sort of playing ironic meta versions of herself as far as I can see. That after that Marty Supreme role, which was sort of hilarious. Anyway, it is the story of an unexpected marriage split. If you haven't read it, um I've actually just read the magazine serialisation because I don't particularly read bullets like this. But it's a it's a I thought you were gonna saying I don't particularly read bo.oks No, I don't know. It's a story of a ma unexpected marriage spit. It's unexpected on a true story, by the way. A true story, yeah. He's a hedge funder, she is a stay at home mother, and during the pandemic they decide to move from their New York place for lockdown and they go to their waterfront house in Martha's Vineyard. Well yes. Okay. So th and and then during this time the husband of a woman rings her to say that her husband is having an affair. Her husband leaves her and says, basically you can keep the kids. She's completely hit for six emotionally He sort of leaves literally like the next morning without any of it and goes Yeah. And she's hit for sixth emotion either. She tells this I've as I say, I read the magazine Serialization, which I thought was sufficient for me, but m other people have been completely gripped by this book. And you know, going through and saying, were there signs ? But what she says is that she you know, part of the sort of stakes of the book is is she gonna go off a financial cliff edge? She's gonna lose her house. She has a prenup, which her lawyer before marriage has sort of advised her not ready to sign. Um, and what's clear from this is that she has kind of given over aspects of her financial control to her husband. I have kept up with a feverish discourse of this. There's There's now a new backlash. A New Yorker article came out l saying that there this wasn't the whole story and that actually Belle Burden had concealed her wealth. She has a number of family trusts. She's basically worth tens of millions. So she was never really in what anyone normal would understand as any form of financial jeopardy. And some people are saying, oh, this fatally undermines the book. Others are saying, well, she wrote about a very rich lifestyle all the way through. You know, they've got a waterfront house in largest India. Work it out. And anyway, the emotional truth and the devastation is the same. Um, and she clearly didn't pay enough attention to her finances or whatever, which is interesting. But other people are saying you you have to disclose everything and she you haven't made it clear. So I think this is interesting. So Belle Burden has responded in a statement that says that she tried to own her privil ege as much as she could when um she wrote strangers but she feels like you know the emotional truth of it is a book about her heartache and her betrayal um and also that a reminder that we should all pay attention women particularly to finances within their marriage. One thing I will say about this I've spoken by chance to completely to a number of very rich women about this book since they've come since since it's come out. They're all obsessed with it. Yeah. Like genuinely obsessed. And what I find fascinating is this kind of deep fear and the sense that they might , you know, they're gripped by the idea that she missed red flags in her own marriage. Yeah. Again, like this is the grinding agonies of the super rich. You know, a life of indolence can be quite exhausting. Because treating your marriage as a sort of detective story where you've got to keep and the whereas the female labour in that marriage, if because it's always the husband in these particular cases who are rich, has have got to sort of keep an eye on, you know, am I missing things? And maintaining this is almost like me it maintaining the interiors of somewhere, keeping them up to date. It's almost like owning a football club. Yeah. And they have a sense I what I found extraordinary of of the people I spoke to, the sense that does Jeopardy lie around the corner for them? So anyway, so to go back, like, okay, did she misrepresent it? I can see for her that she felt like there's there's such an ingrained class thing here that she wouldn't really be talking that it's not the Kardashians where like all the money's up there on the screen and they want to talk about it all the time. She's a sort of waspish um east coaster who clearly has massive generational wealth. Yeah, her grandmother was a famous magazine editor or something. She's from you know She's from she's from money. I think yeah, and I think she makes it, you know, to most people fairly clear that she's got lots of money. Having said that, the book does keep suggesting that she might lose the house or not be able to buy her husband down the house or whatever it is. See, I think again, this this happens. Same as sort path. Well, I think s sort path is slightly different because I I I think there were some factual inaccuracies there that were probably unacceptable. I think in the the case of this, again, I've I've only read this the sort of long form extracts in various places, but it's really well written. As you say, it absolutely touches a nerve because it's not about woe is me, I'm gonna lose my house. It's about have I been living with a psychopath all of this time and di h did I misread things? You know, have I been an absolute idiot? It's like an exhumation, it's like an autopsy going back to try and see what happened. And that is incredibly compelling to read. When she writes it , as you say, she is rich, but she doesn't particularly know that if you know in in the same way that sometimes rich people don't know that they're rich. But she's not professing poverty. There's obviously bits as you say where they say you're gonna lose that the the house. But that to me is like the editor has said And maybe maybe a time we should talk about they didn't trust in the emotional honesty of the the I think the f the reason people love the book is because it's about do I trust my partner? In a reality. And it's weird that and I bet it has come from the editor, that kind of the idea that Understandable. Yeah. Often when you're writing fiction or you're writing even TV fiction and they don't understand the stakes for your protagonist, they always say, Could she need money? It's like one of the things that people always say, could she have some sort sort of financial pressure put on here wanna you will never ever see a show where a good person is moved to crime where they don't have a relative and a care home. Yeah. I got no way of getting it. And they go, Hold on, didn't I have a chat yesterday with that guy? Okay, so let's get on to who the editor is. The editor is someone at Dial Press, which is a Penguin Random House imprint. I don't think we would be talking about this quite so much had this editor also been the editor for Oops another memoir that was huge but has since suffered a really big backlash and I'm going to talk about that one because my goodness. That was The Tell by A Amymy G Gririffffin. in is honestly one of America's richest women. She had illegal, because these things are not legal or not yet legal, although her husband is a big investor in psychedelics firms, she had a legal MDMA assisted regression therapy. Her memoir is about her recovered memory of being raped multiple times by her school teacher when she's in middle school. So it's starting when she's about 12. Now, this book was picked by Oprah for her book club, picked by Reath Witherspin for her book club, picked by Jenna Bush Hager for her book club. It's it's again, it's it's was on the bestseller list for a long time. Since then a lot of questions have arisen, including one former schoolmate is suing saying, These are my memories and you've stolen my story, um, saying she was the rape victim, and it it wasn't this teacher at all, it was a different teacher. The teacher who Amy Griffin effectively people have been able to identify him because you can work, yeah. There's never been any other complaints against him. He I think has had to sort of go into hiding. Both of these books, Belle Burden's one and Amy Griffin's one, were edited by someone called Whitney Frick at Dial Press, who understandably now is receiving quite a bit of pushback. What she said about um when Amy Griffin's memoir began to be questioned was book publishers are not investigators. This is Amy's story. We trust her and all of our authors that they are recounting their memories truthfully. Well, okay, this is a recovered memory under like psychedelics, but okay. And also this was exactly what they said about salt path. They said, no, we have to trust the author. I have to say that I think that if you know your book uh a book might even might be big. And lots of people have said this over the last week . If you know a book might be big and it might have a cut and monster hit, as I always say there is always a backlash because people do remember things differently. Maybe we're all unreliable narrators and we can get to that. But if you know that, but why can't they be fact checked to some degree? And that is a protection for the author as much as for the reader or whatever it is. I've got a theory as to why this is a bit of a Okay, I've I have a commercial I have a commercial theory, but you're not sure about why there's a memoir fakery issue. No, no, about about why it publishing never checks. Publishing never checks by Richard Osmond . No, I I honestly think that no one expects any books to be a hit. Uh I think when something comes in like this, they will do everything they can to make something a hit. Because hits are so few and far between in publishing. I mean vanishingly few and far between. One in thirty books might turn a profit, one in sixty might be like a And so statistically, the book you are currently working on, the Bellburden book, is not going to be a hit. No, but these books got massive advances. Much in advance, you should I think you should pay for some form of fact checking because you've actually essentially backed yourself. If you're giving m multimillionaires already a big advance and there's a bidding war, then you are backing yourself to say, I think this will be a hit. As much as I can know anything in publishing, which is not a lot, as you say, then in which case, why not invest in something that can help the author as well? Because actually, it's not clear that Belle Burden at all felt she was misrepresenting anything. It doesn't it doesn't sound like it doesn't like it. The influencers misrepresent. They give us they uh sort of invite us into their lives but they sort of don't. And they curate and they you know, downplay some things and they amp up others and yeah I think if you're Rayner Wynn and sort path and you're saying you don't have a property and you do, that's one thing. I think if you're saying I did worry about my financial security and the financial security of my children. I'm sure she did. I mean i anyone else in her situation wouldn't, because she's obviously backed up by quite a lot of money. But I imagine that's definitively what she felt. So she's a lot of people. Oh that's different. Is this not a red flag for publisher? I would have thought on on that case, yes, I definitely would have thought so. But again, they're probably thinking, well, this is unsuable because she's telling us that she had her memories recovered. And as you say, they'll go, Oh no, you'll never identify that guy. And that's that's the problem is we live in a world where you can identify anyone now. That's anyone is a good thing. I agree. And so therefore this is something that we that it must be we said this was a thought path. You're gonna have to catch up with this work. Baby reindeer. Yeah. Yes. But I think we're the bo om in memoirs and obviously some of those are going to have question marks over them, I always think of it as like the my truth era. The books we're seeing published now or quite recently, they were probably bought at a point where the absolute moment of peak woke. US publishing in particular became so woke that even fiction was kind of fraught with danger, like, oh, can you really ventrelliquise the person of a different race, can you uh you know, a different gender, a different sexuality. In the end, you get to the point where first-person articles or memoir are the safest genre. Because you mustn't deny anyone's truth. You can't deny anyone's truth. The act of fiction itself is almost political and not in a good way. So what you're left with is people saying my first person story, very powerful, etc. Trevor Burrus, So not this is a thing that happened to someone, this is the thing that happened to me. I'm not sure what I can talk about it because I am me. And no I'm not allowed to tell any other truths. No one else is allowed to tell anyone else's. And I think that lots of these books were commissioned during that time and where a particular sensibility was abroad where almost nobody can pretend to be anything. And actually what's ironic is that some of these people seem to have been pretending some of the powerful fur quote unquote first person pieces uh seem to have been the least reliable and most questionable of all. I mean does anyone any of us truly know ourselves? No, probably not. And I but it's I think it's a function of that particular era where all m a memoir felt like a really safe genre because it couldn't suddenly become cancelled because everyone was saying, How on earth can someone pretend to be a Mexican woman or how can earth can someone Which is crazy because if you or I tell an anecdote about someone else It's usually fairly factual, or they will ramp up certain bits. If we tell an anecdote about ourselves, that's the that's the biggest lie we've ever told. I mean, honestly, the spin we put on that. And then yeah, I guess if I guess there was five guys with knives and they were all coming at me. Uh and it just is absolute nonsense. The the worst lies you tell are the are the lies about yourself. I agree. Um any recommendations, Marina? Yes. You know I've been banging on about microdramas and thinking, oh someone clever and someone brilliant. Even though I, you know, there's a lot that I've had sex with my billionaire CEO, werewolf boss, those are I knew that, but we were talking about microdramas, so we shouldn't. Sorry I know this whole thing. Confessional is like yeah. It's powerful though. That'll be powerful. That'll be the express. Yeah. So Issa Rae, who is the brilliant creator of Insecure and has now turned her attention to micro drama. She's produced a fifty-seven episode vertical microdrama called Screen Time that's about sort of two couples that are on a double date and things turn very weird. There's there's a hacking situation. I looked yesterday and it had 160 million views on TikTok. This is the first breakout, one of these things that is completely it that a very recognized creator who's brilliant has done it. People have been completely gripped by it, and it's the first one on on TikTok that has kind of blown up in this way. Because there are all these other platforms as I've talked to you about before, like things like Real Short or whatever. Yeah. Which are um well crunchables anime, but Oh yes, yeah. Things like Real Short that are um sp specifically dedicated mic microdrama platforms. But this is done on TikTok. It's a recognized creator and it has blown up completely. It's called screen time. Um have a look. And I would say if you if you add the success of that, which is a phenomenon, to the success of Backrooms and Obsession, we are in a moment, I would say, a transitional moment. It's not even a transitional moment. The transitional moment was two years ago. Now we're seeing that we were in a transitional moment and nothing goes back to what it was, which is why sometimes what the things we talk about about building you know BBC and all the different public service broadcasters together, why it's so important now. Because the because this this this the fight the fight is not what it was. It's not all these channels are against each other. It's the whole world has completely changed. And if we want some of the traditional jobs and some of the traditional media we've had, we have to understand that everything has changed. I'm gonna talk about traditional media though because um I just finished uh this later series of Amandaland, which is superb and reminds you of what terrestrial television at its very, very best can do. Beautifully written, beautifully acted, so British, so funny, very, very charming, feels fresh, feels new. Uh and uh so yeah, Amanda Land six episodes uh series two. Uh it's just yeah, I mean what a uh you know, 'tis joy to be alive in uh such a time that that is made. But everything has already changed. Things are not changing. Everything has already changed. And we just all have to get our mind around that. But lots of it is incredibly exciting. Exactly that. It's this there's still brilliant people working. Creatives are still doing the same things they were always doing. There's probably more money now for creators. There's probably more money for young creatives who didn't have a, you know, a an entry into the industry. There are lots of ways in which this new world is better than the old world, but we also have to try and protect and bulwark the bits of the old world which we know work . On that bullshit, on that clarion call. We will be back on Thursday with our questions and answers edition . And for our members, there's the third part of my series in which I was talking of talking to James Canagasorum. It's, I don't want to say, is Taylor Swift a basic bitch, but it's saying, is everything becoming generic? And if so, why? Are we all basic bitch? Are we all is everything bec yeah. Are we all becoming basic? I definitely am. I don't know becoming it. That's how I started. But it's a very interesting chat about genericism. That's if you want to join for ab free listening and um bonus episodes, it's rest the is entertainment.com. Otherwise, we'll see you on Thursday. See you on Thursday.