Latest news with #Amoeba
New York Times
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
With ‘The Studio,' Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg Grow Up. Sort of.
Amoeba Records, on Hollywood Boulevard, isn't the best place for someone of Seth Rogen's visibility to shop hassle-free. Located just blocks from the Chinese Theater, right by Dr. Phil's and Dr. Oz's stars on the Walk of Fame, there may be few places worse. But when Rogen wasn't being interrupted by his admiring bro-fans, who were legion — one wore toe shoes and a Lil Dicky shirt; another cried — Amoeba was, however, a perfect place to dig through hundreds of vinyl soundtracks. It was the Tuesday before the Oscars, and we were there with Rogen's longtime creative partner, Evan Goldberg, to browse records and talk about their latest creation: 'The Studio,' an ambitious, celebrity-stuffed industry satire for Apple TV+ that premiered on Wednesday. Rogen had been tasked by his wife to stock more jazz — appropriate given the new show's jazzy score and improvisational feel, shot mostly in long single takes. But as Goldberg and Rogen, who have been friends since they were teenagers, noted, their taste in music had really been formed by their love for movies. So we found ourselves first among the soundtracks, where highlights included a reissue of 'The Three Amigos' — 'One of my favorite movies of all time,' Rogen said — and two copies of the soundtrack for 'Soul Man,' the 1986 comedy about a young white guy who pretends to be Black in order to get a Harvard scholarship. (Different times, as they say.) 'Dude, I was just telling some people at work about this yesterday!' Goldberg said. 'It has a good soundtrack,' Rogen ventured. Then, as if speaking with one mind, simultaneously: 'Is it racist to buy it?' 'Is it racist to own this?' It was, in retrospect, a layered moment: In their hands, Goldberg and Rogen, who for decades have tested the boundaries of mainstream comedy, held a veritable object lesson on what not to do. By comparison, these two men and their early brand of sweet-but-raunchy stoner comedy had managed to evolve and survive the vicissitudes of time, taste and social attitude, even as not every joke — nor every career among their cohort — survived with them. In many ways, 'The Studio,' in which Rogen plays the beleaguered head of a fictional major studio, speaks to their evolution. They are no longer the young Canadian outsiders; they're powerful producers in their 40s with the ability to make and break dreams themselves. You just might not guess that from the shorts and sneakers or their other big joint venture: a high-end cannabis accessories company. (Rogen remains one of Hollywood's most famous weed connoisseurs.) Staring down at the 'Soul Man' soundtrack, Goldberg took a more determined tone. 'We should get it,' he said. 'How much is it?' 'It's only $4,' Rogen said. 'We've got to get the 'Soul Man' soundtrack.' Goldberg nodded. 'Just so people ask, 'What is that?'' he said. 'Oh, I'll tell you what that [expletive] is …' Thus was the allegory of the 'Soul Man' soundtrack completed: Buying it felt a little dumb, a little risky, but also hilarious. They snatched it up with glee. GOLDBERG HAS IT GOOD. He gets to avoid a lot of the public-facing obligations that come with being Rogen. He openly cherishes the freedom. Rogen recently did a podcast interview in which the host said, ''I would be jealous if I was Evan.'' When Rogen relayed this at the record store, Goldberg said: 'Then you need therapy, my friend.' The many (many) celebrities in 'The Studio,' most playing versions of themselves, have so far helped insulate him from much of the buzz surrounding this latest endeavor, too, even as he and Rogen created the series and directed all 10 episodes. (Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez are also creators.) The premiere alone includes Steve Buscemi, Bryan Cranston, Paul Dano, Martin Scorsese and Charlize Theron. The main cast includes Ike Barinholtz, Kathryn Hahn, Catherine O'Hara and Chase Sui Wonders. 'There's so many famous actors in it that nobody wants to talk to me, and it's the best,' Goldberg said. 'I'm, like, the ninth person people want to talk to' — a luxury given that his and Rogen's fingerprints have been among the most visible on American film comedy for almost 20 years. Relatively speaking, it wasn't that long ago that Rogen and Goldberg were high schoolers in Vancouver, British Columbia, already hard at work on the script based on their lives that would become 'Superbad.' Their careers took off fast. At 16, Rogen was cast in an open audition for the critically beloved NBC comedy 'Freaks and Geeks.' The show was canceled after one season, but Judd Apatow, an executive producer, took a liking to Rogen and helped get him writing, producing and acting gigs while Goldberg stayed in Canada for college. Soon Goldberg joined Rogen in Los Angeles, where they landed writing jobs on Sacha Baron Cohen's 'Da Ali G Show.' Apatow liked Goldberg, too. 'Always very kind and sweet,' as Apatow described him later by phone — 'you know, shocked by what Hollywood was.' Under Apatow's wing, the two friends took writing and producing jobs as Rogen honed his acting. At the same time, Apatow was helping them develop 'Superbad.' 'They spent years trying to figure out how to improve the script while looking for somebody to make the script,' Apatow said. 'They were relentless.' Then everything seemed to happen at once. 'Knocked Up,' starring Rogen (with Katherine Heigl) and executive produced by him and Goldberg, debuted in June 2007 and grossed over $200 million. 'Superbad' followed in August and grossed nearly as much. As important, the young Canadians had been able to make 'Superbad' 'exactly as they wanted to make it,' Apatow noted — no small feat for 20-somethings at a studio. 'It is 100 percent what they envisioned.' In person, Goldberg and Rogen are an entertaining pair — 'different, but not opposites,' as David Gordon Green, who directed their film 'Pineapple Express,' described them later by phone. Physically, Goldberg is balder and leaner; Rogen is hirsute and softer. Goldberg was more reserved, Rogen more boisterous. They seemed many times to share a brain, though, constantly riffing and often landing on the same punchlines. This harmony is one reason journalists rarely want to write about their partnership, they said. 'The problem is we don't hate each other,' Goldberg said. (Rogen: 'Exactly.') 'We don't have any beef, so it fundamentally is a little boring.' (Rogen: 'Fundamentally uninteresting.') Collaborators confirm that they do present an uncommonly harmonious front on set. There is little arguing, no good-cop-bad-cop. 'They have a sort of telekinesis, I think, and they trust each other,' said Wonders, who plays a cutthroat junior executive in 'The Studio.' Barinholtz, who plays the studio's No. 2, put it this way: 'They really make each other laugh, which is really important.' He added, 'That just makes us around them more excited.' Green, who himself regularly collaborates with longtime friends (including Danny McBride, who was in 'Pineapple Express'), recognized in Goldberg and Rogen the qualities needed to sustain a decades-long creative partnership. He described situations in which he and Rogen would be trying to crack a scene, and Goldberg would simply walk up quietly with a Post-it note, hand it to them and walk away. 'They know when to challenge each other, push each other,' Green said. 'And when to back off and when to support each other.' Outside Amoeba, as we toted our new LPs to our cars, we passed a ragged group of boomers sitting on the sidewalk. At first glance, they seemed homeless; it turned out they were lining up early for a Rick Springfield concert. They clocked Rogen immediately. One of the men flagged down Rogen for a selfie. Then he chased down Rogen for a better selfie. Rogen was as gracious as a person could be for someone who had already done this about 10 times that morning. Goldberg withdrew to a quiet remove, in what seems to be his default position at such times: pleasantly detached, mildly amused and visibly relieved to be the mostly invisible partner. UNSURPRISINGLY, 'THE STUDIO' is as much a love letter as satire. Since Goldberg and Rogen were in their mid-20s, they have worked mostly inside the studio system, which, for all the jibes it weathers in the show, has been very kind to them. A running gag in 'The Studio' has Rogen's character, Matt, a devoted cinephile, struggling to make a Kool-Aid Man movie without completely losing his soul. (How many of Matt's fears reflect Rogen's own? 'I'd say all of them,' Rogen said.) But Goldberg and Rogen insist they aren't so much skewering the industry as writing what they know. 'The truth is, they probably would make a Kool-Aid movie,' Rogen said later that week at the headquarters of their production company, Point Grey Pictures. Inside sat a framed still from a 'Simpsons' episode Goldberg and Rogen wrote ('Homer the Whopper'). The restrooms were labeled 'washrooms.' The conference room smelled like weed. 'We thank God we're in a position where we don't have to make the Kool-Aid movie,' Rogen added. 'But the funny thing about studio executives is they do. And that is something that just became entertaining to us.' Hunger for the types of comedies Goldberg and Rogen made in their youth has fluctuated over time; they have thrived by adapting. Exhibit A is Point Grey. The company's portfolio is diverse, claiming dozens of successful movies and TV shows, not all of them straightforward comedies. Many embrace other genres, like the Amazon anti-superhero series 'The Boys,' the Hulu docudrama 'Pam & Tommy' and the Peacock true-crime docuseries 'Paul T. Goldman.' In 2023, they made 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,' their most significant foray into a pre-existing franchise. 'Fifteen years ago, we would've made an R-rated high school movie,' Rogen said. 'And now the version of the high school movie that we are able to make for theaters currently, that is popular and people like, is 'Ninja Turtles.'' Such large-scale productions help them continue to produce indies, they said, though both were quick to note that they love the big stuff, too. They aren't snobs: They like comics; they like explosions. As James Weaver, the president of Point Grey, noted, even a movie as over-the-top as 'This Is the End' can be deeply personal. 'Even though it is an apocalypse movie where a demon with a giant penis comes in in the third act,' he said, the movie is 'at its inception about old friends and new friends.' 'The Studio' reinforces this point repeatedly, though with pointed self-awareness. 'All movies are art,' Matt tells a group of judgmental doctors in one episode. 'You don't get to pick which movies are art.' The scene serves as a kind of thesis to the show and to Goldberg and Rogen's career — particularly given that Matt is scrambling to finish the trailer for a satirical zombie movie … in which the zombie-making infection is spread by diarrhea. 'We've decided to participate in it rather than lament it too much,' Rogen said of the big shifts that have left many in Hollywood scrambling. 'To us it's not a drag. It's just like: The industry changes and evolves, and you must change and evolve.'
Yahoo
08-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Even Your Hobbies Aren't Safe From Trump's Tariff Chaos
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Perhaps you're tired of the nonstop flow of bad news since President Donald Trump's second inauguration, and you're unplugging a little with some hobbies. That might mean reading more novels or comics, collecting vinyl records or Blu-Rays, getting into knitting or art, or finally cracking that Wingspan board game that's been gathering dust on your shelf. Sadly, I have bad news: Even your hobbies can't escape global politics. Trump has been quite erratic in his trade wars with Canada, Mexico, and China this year. Yet even with all the confused delays and exemptions, the fact remains that the tariffs he's imposing on those three countries are universal. These import taxes are meant to attack every single product that originates from our bordering neighbors and our East Asian rival. Yes, there are loopholes, but the overall effect is clear: These countries are to be punished, and our dependence upon them means we'll be shouldering lots of pain as well. Our politicians are straight-up admitting that! Most urgently, the constant wavering on tariffs fosters a climate of uncertainty, anxiety, and scrambling that makes it so much harder for smaller businesses and more precarious industries to navigate the chaos. Plenty of attention has rightly been paid to the most necessary goods that reside in the crosshairs (fresh and frozen foods, energy, toilet paper, apparel). Less noticed are the resultant impacts on everything that gives joy and fulfillment: physical pages, artistic recordings, objects for creation and play. If you work in those very sectors, you've likely been on edge for a while now. Jim Henderson, a co-founder of the iconic California record store Amoeba Music, told me that he and his fellow indie-chain executives had been 'dreading Trump's tariff bonanza' since the 2024 election. Amoeba is best known for its ample vinyl and CD stocks, but its three locations sell a little bit of everything: books, DVDs and Blu-Rays, audiophile gear, and customized merchandise. 'Several vendors—from turntable manufacturers to apparel companies, on through some of our label partners—have either posted price increases or warned us of their imminence,' Henderson wrote in an email. 'With the doubling of the China tariffs, we can count on them revisiting the new cost and pricing structures that were presented.' Executives aren't the only ones feeling the peril. Scour the online spaces where niche hobbyists gather to chatter about their interests, and you'll find months' worth of casual questions and creeping fears. One Blu-ray forum post from the day after the election asked whether enthusiasts should 'Start hoarding now?' Reddit's vinyl community featured a postelection question about the 'potential tariff effect on vinyl,' which earned a grim reply: 'If tariffs are instituted on a grand scale in the States, you likely won't have money for hobbies anyway.' Blogs devoted to tabletop games have long been fretting about the tariffs, with one executive straight-up telling the media last month that 'board games are about to get more expensive.' (Grim timing, since we're coming off a couple of boom years for that sector.) The CEO of Blick Art Materials told Hyperallergic that the company had 'purchased more inventory than normal for a few product lines to hedge against higher costs,' such as paints, inks, and utensils. Bleeding Cool founder Rich Johnston has likewise been documenting comics-industry jitters for months on end. These have manifested in publishers' proclamations that cheap single-issue comic books are a thing of the past, as well as in a panic-sales spike for a new Brian K. Vaughan graphic novel that occurred just before the original tariffs were set to go into effect in February. The tariffs come during a rough patch for the comics industry in particular. Johnston told me in a phone conversation that late last year, the comics industry had mostly been 'reliable' and that 'people were very happy' with how things were chugging along—until Diamond Comic Distributors, once the top comics distributor in the world, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January. Publishers hurried to switch distribution systems and request emergency donations from concerned fans, while others (like the famed imprint Dark Horse) chose to preemptively cut costs through mass layoffs. Now the tariffs threaten to exacerbate these issues even further. 'Usually it's those component parts that go bust: the actual printers, the actual distributors,' said Johnston. 'The delay has helped, especially since the biggest publisher, Canada's Transcontinental,' has offered to absorb the cost burden of the tariffs instead of surcharging its clients. Part of the reason these tariffs hit these industries the hardest is because Canada is a leading supplier of paper products. 'It's not down to paying Canadians less or slave labor or having different governmental incentives,' said Johnston. 'It's literally cheaper to cut down a tree and turn it into print, because they've got huge forests that are very easy to access, and they have a lot more experience and skills.' There are American printing presses, of course, but those 'only have so much capacity, which makes their prices already higher,' Johnston explained. 'But now the Canadian advantage is being tariffed away, and it's all more expensive.' (And yes, the printing extends far beyond comics or even standard bestsellers. As Johnston cheekily informed me: 'Canada prints a lot of Bibles.') For Amoeba, the physical media industry has already been weathering headwinds, as media companies like Sony decide to stop producing blank minidiscs and Blu-Rays for personal recordings altogether, and studios like Warner Bros. dump a bunch of back catalog on YouTube instead of prepping any new video releases. The tariffs have not helped, due to the fact that both vinyl and video discs tend to be pressed and processed in bulk from Mexico, with the plastic boxes for DVD and Blu-ray sets manufactured in China. There are, however, some local saviors for music and movies. 'Over the last few years, a little bit more of our new vinyl has been pressed in the United States because of a few pressing plants that have opened,' said Jim Henderson. 'But by and large, so much of what we get from the labels is being pressed outside of the states.' With only a few major pressing plants out there for both discs and vinyl, and with all sorts of tangled relationships between labels and manufacturers and suppliers and distributors, it's also hard for Amoeba to change things up preemptively in anticipation of cross-border tariffs. (One hedge available to Amoeba: the used and secondhand vinyl and movies markets, on which the tariffs have little impact.) However, even if the temporary tariff reprieves may soften the blows, there is still the major question of China, where so much manufacturing of cheap goods and materials is based: toys, component bits, machinery, colors, and more. One raw-materials retailer told Hyperallergic that certain pigments, colors, and brushes that are offered for a wide variety of crafts, much like musical instruments, are largely sourced from China and will be subject to the price hikes. Tabletop gaming enthusiasts who want to use 3D printers to home-manufacture minis and figurines may find themselves stymied by the fact that 3D printers are largely produced in China, which also provides us with the large majority of our board games. When it comes to yarn and textiles you can use to knit and sew your own clothes, forget about it; China has even that on lock. Craft retailers stateside that already started to phase out China-made goods since the tariffs from Trump's first term and Biden's succeeding one may just be encouraged to further embrace that trend, though they won't be able to replicate China's manufacturing prowess by any means. The overall effects won't be limited to just these four countries, either. Since 'a lot of goods come to the world from America and then get distributed elsewhere,' Rich Johnston said, Canada might be inclined to set up its own global export facilities in order to get around the inevitable tariff—which will, of course, force a rethinking of Canadian trade relations with other nations, for all kinds of products. Mexico, the largest exporter to the U.S., will be eyeing such diversion tactics as well. Perhaps they'll both look to China as an example, which has long outsourced certain factories and parts to Southeast Asian countries (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia) in order to sidestep other nations' trade barriers. At the heart of it, though, what worries Jim Henderson most is that 'all this noise around tariffs has created an economic reaction and tension that is not easily unwound,' he wrote to me. 'People start talking/tweeting/commenting and hearing about inflation and the price of eggs or whatever and it causes many to pause or scale back on recreational spending, and that ripples on through retail and restaurants and all the different ways one would expect it to.' In lean times, 'people turn to selling more of their collections and private items' to stores like Amoeba—instead of buying more from them. Put it another way: Even with the delays, the damage has been done. Trump can pull back his tariff orders altogether, but consumers are already feeling the instability and distrust in the broader economy. If there's one bit of relief from the storm clouds, it's that these businesses have a deep and passionate community to lean on. 'We generally tend to try to accentuate the positive as well as the deep variety we have,' Henderson explained. 'People come to Amoeba for a variety of reasons: We do live shows, and we have sales and community events.' Everything's going to become a little more local, now.
