“If we mess up, just keep going!” Seth Rogen, wearing a tuxedo with a rust-colored jacket, is giving a pep talk to a group of actors about to sweep into a ballroom at Los Angeles’ Wilshire Ebell Theatre on the set of his Apple TV+ show The Studio. It is June 2024 and the actors are playing doctors walking into a fundraising gala beside Rogen’s studio mogul, Matt Remick, in a dialogue-driven scene shot in one long, continuous take, also known as a “oner.” “It’s good to just finish the first few [takes], for morale,” Rogen tells his castmates.
The high-stakes cinematic device of the oner, memorably deployed in movies like Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman, recurs throughout The Studio, most impressively in episode 2, “The Oner,” all 25 minutes of which were shot in one take. That episode centers around a disastrous visit that Matt, head of the fictional Continental Studios, makes to a set where director Sarah Polley, playing a version of herself, is trying to capture a oner of her own.
As the “Oner” episode illustrates, cinephiles revere the complicated shots, which must be meticulously planned and which rely on everyone on a set doing their jobs perfectly, including the camera operator, the actors and the sound crew. The use of oners throughout this season of The Studio serves to amp up the anxiety that fuels the show’s core conflict, which is Matt’s genuine love of movies, and the fact that his job often involves destroying them in the name of commerce.
“A oner creates a feeling of stress and tension that is part of the show,” Rogen says, stopping beside a monitor to talk before filming starts. “And it’s a welcome departure from my earlier career experience of figuring things out in post.”
There’s a certain earnestness about filmmaking that Rogen and his show’s protagonist share — when a viewer expressed skepticism about The Studio‘s oners on social media, Rogen activated his Threads account to share videos from set.
Rogen, who directed all 10 episodes of the series with his longtime writing partner Evan Goldberg, says he had the idea for The Studio while making Steven Spielberg’s 2022 coming-of-age drama The Fabelmans. But a lot of the core ideas in the show derived from a meeting Rogen and Goldberg had with a studio executive who was giving them notes on a project. “He said, ‘I got into this business to make movies,’” Rogen says. “‘Now I ruin them.’” (Though Rogen declined to name the executive while shooting this scene, he has since identified him as president of 20th Century Studios Steve Asbell).
As part of their research for the show, Rogen, Goldberg and the writers, including the writer of this episode, Veep‘s Alex Gregory, interviewed studio executives and filmmakers about their wildest and weirdest Hollywood moments. “Everybody’s got stories,” Rogen says. Those stories have fueled scripts for Matt and his movie industry colleagues, played by Kathryn Hahn, Catherine O’Hara, Ike Barinholtz, Chase Sui Wonders and Bryan Cranston, as well as a star-studded guest cast playing themselves that has included Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron, Zoë Kravitz and Ron Howard. Industry-savvy audiences have been having fun trying to match the fictional characters to their real-life counterparts.
In the episode being filmed on this June day, episode 6, “The Pediatric Oncologist,” which Apple dropped April 25, Matt is attending the cancer fundraising gala with his new love interest, Sarah, a pediatric oncologist played by Rebecca Hall. Inside the bubble of the entertainment industry, Matt’s day-to-day decisions about movie greenlights, script notes and just how much diarrhea to show in the new Johnny Knoxville trailer feel like life or death. But among Sarah and her doctor peers, people who are actively engaged in the business of saving lives, Matt’s insecurity–and his grandiosity–flare.
Matt’s fragile ego is punctured when the conversation veers to whether his signature franchise, Continental’s MK Ultra, or “the exploding head movies,” as one doctor calls them, can be considered “art.” “It is art,” Rogen as Matt bellows as the camera follows him and the cast walking across the ballroom. “All movies are art. Can’t really pick which movies are art.”
The average number of takes required to get a oner right this season, Rogen says, has been about 16. With one take down, Rogen calls “Cut!” and the cast return to their starting marks.
The half-hour comedy’s 10 episodes debuted on Apple TV+ March 26, with one episode dropping weekly through May 21.