The Studio is a chatty show. A very chatty show. Each scene comes at the audience with a torrent of dialogue at screwball pace and impeccable comic timing. That energy is matched by great directing, from star Seth Rogen and his longtime creative partner Evan Goldberg. Inspired by Robert Altman’s The Player and its extended opening shot, almost every scene in The Studio is done in a single, dynamic long take, with the camera constantly moving and whipping around to stage the action and enliven the comedy. It often feels like watching a great high-wire juggling act, appearing chaotic and balletic simultaneously. Then, at the climax, Seth Rogen—playing Matt Remick, the likably buffoonish, newly-appointed head of Continental Studios—has a baseball cap thrown at his face by Ron Howard and trips over a snack cart full of M&M’s and pretzels in a pitch-perfect pratfall. It’s Rogen as both studio exec and circus clown.
Physical comedy doesn’t need any defense. The Pope is Catholic and a guy slipping on a banana peel is funny. It’s the lowest form of comedy, but almost certainly the oldest, the purest. Low does not mean easy, though, and there’s a reason names like Chaplin and Keaton loom large. They were artists, filmmakers, performers, who understood the inherent tensions that make physical comedy, and slapstick especially, work on screen. Slapstick exists at the intersection between the shocking surprise of violence and the acknowledged trickery of performance. Its name is derived from the slap stick—two wooden slats hinged together, like a clapper—used in 16th century commedia dell’arte to lend loud sounds to onstage punches and pratfalls. A character tripping over is the surprise, the falseness transforms the tragedy of violence into comedy, and if you get the staging and timing just right, the audience laughs.
Rogen is better known for onscreen improv comedy in the Apatovian mode, which involves throwing a lot of funny bits at the wall and seeing what sticks. Sometimes that’s included physical comedy, particularly during action sequences, but as he joked to me in an interview last month, “Early on in our careers, our movies were generally shot with two or three cameras pointing at us, and generally actors were standing there and not moving in any way, shape, or form.” The Studio marks a departure for Rogen into a far more cinematic style of comedy filmmaking. Rather than set up simple scenes for actors to throw around lines, the long-take shooting style of the show necessitated a lot more planning. In particular, not having the benefit of editing to adjust the timing on jokes required that Rogen company carefully think through every line and every movement.
Episodes of the show are structured as a series of escalations. The show’s Whiplash-like, rat-a-tat jazz score keeps the rhythm, while Remick’s hopeless attempts at wrangling his warring desires—to make real art, and also not get fired—get more and more absurd, until everything finally comes to clash. That’s when the show often deploys its moments of great slapstick. As the scripts layer comedic setups toward a cacophonous series of sudden payoffs, the action crescendos into pratfalls.
In the second episode, Remick’s intrusion on the set of a Sarah Polley movie results in constant screw ups in her own attempt at a long take. Running through the set after one particularly egregious fuckup, Remick bumps into a crew member and trips over a side table, falling on his face, and winds up with a bloody nose. “Can you believe how hard he just fell?” Greta Lee asks, to which Polley, dead serious, responds, “Yes, it was very funny. Go, go, go.” Only a few minutes later, having screwed up the take again, Rogen is once again running through the set and out the door to get to his car, bumping into a production assistant who spills iced coffee all over him. It’s a moment they had to film upwards of twenty times due to a malfunctioning camera attachment, changing shirts every time. Worth it for the comedy.