The Business

This week, Van Dyke Parks sits down with The Business Showrunner Joshua Farnham to look back at a career that stretches from childhood acting to collaborating with Brian Wilson, and scoring films for Jack Nicholson. He also recalls his first arranging job, The Bare Necessities for Disney’s The Jungle Book, and how Harry Nilsson talked him into spending five months in Malta for Robert Altman&...

This week, Kim Masters speaks with actor Malcolm McDowell about his six-decade career and the long journey to finally making his latest film, the western Last Train to Fortune . McDowell reflects on his friendship with mentor and director Lindsay Anderson, shares stories from the set of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange , and looks back at the chaotic production of Caligula , including ho...

This week, Kim Masters speaks with Sharon Horgan about her HBO series Youth . The writer, actor and producer reflects on taking control of her career by creating her own material, building the production company Merman , and working across broadcast networks and streaming platforms. Horgan also explains why she returned to the idea for Youth after years spent making Bad Sisters, and how a brief pi...

This week, Kim Masters reports on the newly formed U.S. Film and Television Production Coalition and its push for a federal tax incentive to stem the loss of production overseas. Members representing studios, producers and unions lay out the industry’s unusually unified campaign, the backing of President Donald Trump, and the details that still have to survive Congress. Plus, Masters and Mat...

As CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss prepares to unveil a new era of 60 Minutes , questions are mounting over what America’s most-watched news program will look like under her leadership. Following the exits and firings of several correspondents and senior producers since Weiss arrived at the network, newly installed executive producer Nick Bilton faces the challenge of reshaping the show...

This week, Kim Masters talks to Lilly Wachowski about making Bound, the directorial debut she co-directed with sister Lana. Wachowski recalls the wild experience of working with legendary producer Dino De Laurentiis, and how she and Lana went from living paycheck to paycheck as carpenters to having producer Joel Silver beg them to sell him The Matrix.    Plus, Masters and Matt Belloni di...

This week, Kim sits down with filmmaker Eric Goode to talk about his HBO documentary series, Monsters of God. Goode discusses how he pivoted from a successful career in New York’s hospitality world to making documentaries about the extinction crisis, exotic reptile smuggling, and eventually, a little project called Tiger King. He also talks about self-financing his animal-conservation projec...

Eric Deggans speaks with Desi Lydic, a longtime correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show . She talks about how a pandemic-era segment satirizing Fox News evolved into her Emmy-nominated digital series Desi Lydic Foxplains . Lydic also shares how The Daily Show’s post-Trevor Noah rotation of hosts has opened the door for more voices, and jokes about how her conservative parents...

Kim Masters talks to Hannah Einbinder, who is up for another supporting actress Emmy for Hacks . But her role in the new film Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma takes her far from the lavish Las Vegas home of Deborah Vance, to a weird and gory place. Einbinder tells Masters about coming-of-age as the child of two show business professionals, making the segue from stand-up comedy into acting, and...

Kim Masters talks to Lilly Wachowski, co-creator of The Matrix movie franchise, about her new artist-owned, non-profit studio. They discuss how Lilly juggled multiple international film and TV productions while she was transitioning, why she stepped away from the business, and how she’s working to launch the studio, Anarchists United, to showcase marginalized talent. [ In part two of the int...

Eric Deggans talks to Hiro Murai, lead director and executive producer of the Apple TV horror-comedy series  Widow’s Bay . They discuss how Murai helped maintain the tricky tone of the Emmy-nominated series, his work with Donald Glover on the FX series Atlanta , and how he keeps the initial spark of creativity alive when dealing with the realities of TV production. Plus, Kim Masters and...

Kim Masters talks to Kori Adelson, whose company produced Backrooms , and Roy Lee, producer of Weapons , about the hunt for the next hit YouTube IP. Adelson and Lee share their observations about the effect movies like Backrooms , Obsession , and Iron Lung have had on what studios are looking for; the filmmakers behind those three had large followings on YouTube. Adelson and Lee also explain how t...

Kim Masters talks to Dale Cohen, special counsel to PBS's Frontline , and director of UCLA Law School's Documentary Film Legal Clinic, about the threat of litigation filmmakers face from the wealthy and powerful people they choose to cover, such as Donald Trump. Cohen laments that so few investigative films are being produced right now, a situation that wasn’t helped when Disney and CBS paid...

Kim Masters talks to LA Times Awards Columnist Glenn Whipp about the Emmy nominations announced this week. Whipp thinks this was not a stellar year in television, meaning that top nominees, The Pitt and Hacks, are likely to feast at September’s Emmys. But Whipp is pleased that stand-out new shows, Widow’s Bay and Pluribus, got some nods. And he says give Harrison Ford an Emmy already!...

This week, an encore presentation of Kim Masters’ interview with Alexandria Stapleton, the DGA Award nominated director of Sean Combs: The Reckoning . The Netflix docuseries examines the rise and fall of the hip hop mogul. Stapleton discusses partnering with executive producer 50 Cent, her approach to telling the story without turning it into a hit piece, and the care required when working w...

Kim Masters talks to John Carney, who after his 2006 indie breakout film Once , has made a career of making movies about musicians making music. Generally, the ones who never got famous. His new film, Power Ballad , stars Paul Rudd as a wedding singer alongside Nick Jonas, who plays a flawed former pop star. Carney discusses his struggles to raise money for his films, and reveals what he says to -...

Kim Masters talks to screenwriter David Koepp about Disclosure Day , his latest collaboration with director Steven Spielberg. After Spielberg sent Koepp a 40 page treatment for the movie, which Koepp gave notes on, Spielberg emailed him back that “it’s your problem now.” Koepp also reveals the downside of his early success, which included writing the Jurassic Park screenplay when...

This week, Kim Masters talks to Alvaro Bedoya, a former FTC Commissioner, about why he objects to the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger. Bedoya says it will mean fewer jobs, higher subscription fees for consumers, and more censorship when the Ellison family - who own Paramount Skydance - control both CBS News and CNN. Bedoya also addresses a surprising accusation from Paramount’s Chief Counse...

This week, Eric Deggans talks to Eric Kripke, creator of the Amazon Prime series The Boys , about criticism of the show’s final season. Elon Musk went online to trash the finale of the politically provocative superhero satire, and some of the show’s less wealthy fans also didn’t care for it either. Kripke also talks about how The Boys managed to be pretty prescient about the curr...

This week, Kim Masters talks to Jack Thorne, who won all the prizes for writing the Netflix series  Adolescence , about his new series, an adaptation of the novel Lord of the Flies . They also discuss how Adolescence revealed Netflix’s stunning global reach, and why series star Stephen Graham has a co-writing credit, even though Graham doesn’t actually write. Thorne also tells Kim...

This week, Eric Deggans talks to Courtney Kemp, co-creator of the Netflix crime drama Nemesis, about the changing TV landscape, and whether she sees Hollywood standing by diversity initiatives despite the pushback from the Trump administration. She also explains how some executives who give her notes don’t necessarily grasp what matters to her audience. After signing an overall deal with Net...

Kim Masters wraps up her two-part conversation with legendary actor William Shatner and famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Shatner reflects on his deeply emotional journey to space at age 90 and Tyson shares why he isn’t picky about the show biz gigs he takes. The pair also reflect on technological disruption, including how the rise of AI inspired Shatner to record a heavy metal album...

This week, Kim Masters speaks with legendary actor William Shatner and famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson about their upcoming two-night live event, The Universe is Absurd . In the first installment of a sprawling two-part conversation, the pair reflect on how syndication helped solidify Star Trek as a cultural phenomenon, why studio executives don’t know what they’re doing, and...

This week, Kim Masters speaks with director Kirk Jones and actor Robert Aramayo about I Swear , the BAFTA winning film about Tourette’s advocate John Davidson. Jones talks about using his own life savings to self-finance the project after potential backers pushed him to tone down the film’s language, and how that decision allowed him to cast Aramayo in the lead without studio oversight...

This week, Kim Masters speaks with Ben McKenzie about his documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money , which examines fraud in the cryptocurrency world. The actor discusses leaning into his popularity as Ryan on The OC as a narrative device in the film—one that helped get him in the room for a cringe-inducing interview with now-convicted crypto figure Sam Bankman-Fried. McKenzie also exp...