In today’s episode, Variety’s Todd Spangler and Gene Maddaus discuss the latest legal moves for AI heavyweights Anthropic and Midjourney in their copyright infringement battles. And Variety’s Ethan Shanfeld describes comedy’s annual “mad dash” as “Saturday Night Live” finalizes its Season 51 cast.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome to Daily Variety, your daily dose of news and
analysis for entertainment industry insiders. It's Tuesday, September ninth, twenty
twenty five. I'm your host, Cynthia Littleton. I am co
editor in chief of Variety alongside Ramin Setuda. I'm in
LA He's in New York, and Variety has reporters around
the world covering the business of entertainment. In today's episode,
(00:30):
we'll talk with business editor Todd Spangler and senior media
writer Gene Mattis about the latest in Hollywood's legal fight
with big AI firms. And we'll hear from reporter Ethan
Schanfeld on the comings and goings at Saturday Night Live.
But before we get to that, here are a few
headlines just in this morning that you need to know.
Wendy McMahon, the former head of CBS News and Stations,
(00:53):
has joined Beehive as a consultant and advisor to Tyler Dink.
Dink is the founder of the publishing platform for inde
pennant journalists. Netflix has ordered a new series from Black
Mirror creator Charlie Brooker. It's an untitled four part crime
thriller starring Patty Considine, Georgina Campbell, and Lena Heady. According
(01:13):
to Netflix, a quote contains blood and frowning end quote
from Elizabeth Banks to Catherine Zada Jones. A whole host
of starry names are lined up as presenters for Sunday's
seventy seventh Emmy Awards. The early reviews are in. People
seem to be loving Leonardo DiCaprio's latest from director Paul
(01:35):
Thomas Anderson Warrier Brothers, One Battle After Another, opens on
September twenty sixth. You can find all of these stories
and so much more on Variety dot com. Right now now,
it's time for conversations with Variety journalists about news and
trends in show business. Today we're talking to Todd Spangler
(01:55):
and Gene Mattis about two big developments in AI litigation
involving the firms Anthropic and mid Journey. We discuss what
it all means for copyright protection and showbiz. Gene Mattison,
Todd Spangler, thank you for joining me here today, Helo,
and we've had a couple of interesting court rulings and
(02:16):
some movement. The time has come to talk big picture
about AI and the state of the litigation that is
going on within the entertainment industry. There's a lot going on.
Rulings are coming in from various quarters. There's been there's
two big cases that have really been getting a lot
of attention in Hollywood. One is involving a company called
Anthropic based in San Francisco, one of the one of
(02:39):
the bigger AI firms, and a firm that is really
trying to position itself as friendly to creative industries, friendly
to copyright based industries. And then on the other spectrum,
there's a company called mid Journey, which has really animated
the biggest Hollywood studios Disney, NBC, Universal and now Warner Brothers.
(03:00):
Last week, Warner Brothers Discovery joined the lawsuit against mid Journey.
The studios are accusing Mid Journey of just the latant
copyright infringement. Let me start with Todd as somebody who
covered YouTube and so many other things over the years.
What do you think is going on here?
Speaker 2 (03:18):
You know, the wheels of justice grind slowly, and technology
famously always is ahead of where the legal standards are.
But there is a parallel to what YouTube went through.
They put in their copyright flagging system in order to
make peace with the copyright holders.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
The big question on that people have been trying to
understand is is AI training itself copyright infringement And there
are a lot of people, certainly in Hollywood unions, who
think that it is. And there's something called the Human
Artistry Campaign, which is sort of a coalition of a
lot of creative people, including the unions, that are sort
of pushed for you know, if you're going to train
(04:00):
on our work, then you need to pay us. And
the legal cases that we've seen so far have not
supported that point of view. There were two federal cases
in June, both of which is held that fundamentally AI
training is transformative and therefore it's fair use. And that's
not an absolute license to go do whatever you want
(04:21):
to do, but it is a pretty strong indication that
courts are looking at this as a transformative use that
is not inherently copyright protected.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
The keyword there is transformative. So let's talk specifically about
what happened with Anthropic again, one of the biggest AI
companies based in San Francisco. A big week for the
company last week they settled this lawsuit. They also announced
that they'd raise thirteen billion dollars in investment money, which
brings the company's valuation to one hundred and eighty three
(04:54):
billion one eight three billion. That is astounding but also
indicative of the moment that we're in for AI. I
don't know if you could cash that in the bank.
They're a private company, but that's the valuation. So Anthropic
took the step. They reached a settlement paying one point
five billion to a group of authors after a legal
(05:16):
case found that they did in fact illegally download a
bunch of books early on when they were training in
their AI service with the cuddly name of Claude Gene.
You've followed this case, tell us what's significant about the
settlement and what else has been significant about the litigation
around and trop.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Well, the dollar figure is pretty significant. The one point
five billion figure the PLANETFF lawyers were touting as the
largest ever copyright recovery and so you know, I've had
larger verdicts, but that they actually collect on it, and
they're going to actually collect on this one point five billion,
So that's significant. And we mentioned the ruling in June
(05:58):
where the judge had said basically training is fair use. Well,
he also said at the same time that doesn't mean
you can just go ahead and download pirated books from
shady websites on the dark web or whatever, which is
what they were doing initially. They don't do that anymore.
The way they get books now is they buy paper
copies of used books and then have them scanned. And
(06:21):
the judge basically said, if you do that, then that's legal,
and you can go and scan them and use them
to train Claude, and that's all fine, and that's fair use.
But if you illegally downloaded these books in the first place,
then that's infringement in the same way that if you
illegally download a movie, that's infringement. So that was what
they were paying for. That's the one point five billion.
(06:42):
And I think there's an open question of how many
others may have done this in the sort of early
days of AI training, and maybe they'll be on the
hook too. But going forward, they should know well enough
to do this in the legal way and not in
the illegal way and avoid this kind of judgment.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
But now let me ask you both. If I understand this,
If I go to a garage sale and I buy
ten books for fifty cents, and then then I then
take those books, scan them and to put them into
my digital large language model. That's okay because I did
acquire those books legally.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Yeah, And basically the argument is when you're making a
large language model, that's a transformative use, and you're not
going out and selling a duplicate of the books that
you bought, which would be copyright infringement. You're creating something new,
and that's what copyright is there to incentivize, is creating
something new. It goes to the point of fair use
being a very complicated. Yeah, the factor test, there's like
(07:39):
four different factors, and transformative transformativeness is one of the factors.
But there's also a question of market harm.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Let's talk about mid Journey, which is they've got they've
got the big guns of Hollywood. They've got Disney, NBC, Universal,
Warner Brothers, Discovery. You know, that's a lot of corporate
studio firepower saying hey, you're using the line of copyright.
What do you think it is about mid Journey. There's
a lot of companies out there, But what is it
(08:06):
about mid Journey that you think has attracted so much
attention from the studios?
Speaker 3 (08:11):
I mean, I think mid Journey is big enough to
be significant, but small enough that it's something they can
prevail a cast. They're not going after Meta, They're not
going after Google. They're going after a relatively small, bootstrapped
company that is nevertheless quite popular, quite successful. So the
feeling is that, you know, if they can win here,
(08:32):
they make a point, and then everybody else has to
kind of fall into line.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
And then the other point about it is that mid
Journey is actually they have a business model that's set
up to profit from this activity where they're charging people
to use the system, whereas right now Google and Meta
are not per se charging people to use it.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
So mid Journey you pay a subscription fee to mid
Journey to be able to use their large language model
and create create things out of their AI database, which
the studios and others are saying is rife with copyrighted
material that they have no right to use.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
It's not argue that there's a copyrighted material in the
training data. It's that the what the users are able
to generate is copyrighted material. Right, So if you prompt
it to say, can you show me Superman fighting with Batman?
It will show you Superman fighting with Batman. And it's
pretty much identical to the you know, copyrighted versions of
(09:30):
those images, right if it would be a different conversation
if you know that if mid Journey had guardrails that
didn't allow you to do that. But nevertheless, Superman and
Batman are still in the training data. But what Disney
and Warner Brothers and a Universal are all saying is like,
whatever you're doing, it's generating copies of our work and
(09:51):
you're charging people for it, and you can't do that.
And whether it's AI or a photocopy er, you're not
allowed to do that.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
The studios want to be able to use generator YI
if and when it makes sense for that, and so
by drawing these lines around this particular case, they don't
to tie their own hands so.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
Much to follow. Thank you both for pouring through complaints
and rulings. I so appreciate the two of you talking
us through this in very simple terms. Really appreciate it,
and certainly more to come.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
Thank you, yep, thank you.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Now we turn to Ethan Shanfeld. He describes the rush
over the past few weeks in the comedy world as
Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michael's settled on the final
cast lineup. For season fifty one. It's a mad dash
for sure. Ethan Shanfeld, intrepid reporter in New York. Thanks
for joining me.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
Thanks for having me, Cynthia.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Ethan. You've been reporting in the last couple of weeks
on all of the comings and goings at Saturday Night Live.
It's an annual late summer ritual. There is cast turnover
at the show that, remarkably, after fifty one season, still
holds a special place in pop culture. You've written a
number of stories about this. What are you hearing out
(11:07):
there from people in the comedy world.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
The main thing is that this type of turnover in
the cast happens every few years. We've had one major
player leave the show, which is Heidi Gardner. She was
on the show for eight years. And then aside from Heidi,
we had Devin Walker, Emil Wakim, Michael Longfellow. They've left,
and Please Don't Destroy, which is the comedy trio that
(11:33):
did a lot of the digital shorts. They've been split
up by the show. Ben Marshall has been up to
be in the main cast. John Higgins has left the show,
and then Martin Harley he will stay on as a writer. Well,
you know, they've become known for these sort of oddball
digital shorts, sort of reminiscent of the Lonely Island that
have featured Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny, a lot of
(11:55):
the celebrity hosts.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Right, the things that extend the SNL to be talked
about throughout the rest of the week, right.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
And in the last season, their sketches have noticeably been
on less than they were in the past, so you
could see the trajectory there.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Tell us about the newcomers who made the cut this.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
Year, absolutely, so, there's five new cast members. The cast
of the show just keeps growing and growing, which could
be a problem for some of these new members as
it's harder to break through. So the new faces are
Tommy Brennan, Jeremy Colhayne, Cam Patterson, and Veronica Slowakowska. I
hope I'm pronouncing that last one right. Some of them
(12:39):
have risen online on Instagram and TikTok doing these sort
of short videos that have gone viral. Especially Veronica has
broken out as one of those new voices in internet comedy,
and Cam Patterson, I think is notable because he's a
stand up who's mostly known as a frequent guest of
(13:00):
the Kill Tony podcast, and kill Tony is definitely a
little bit more raunchy, a little edgier than where a
lot of the SNL cast comes from. A lot of
the SNL cast comes from more of the old comedy scene,
more of the improv scene. So Cam comes from from
sort of a more club atmosphere where you know, you
(13:22):
can't say some of the things that he says on
stage on network television. I think that hiring Cam points to,
you know, Lauren wanting to get more of the bro
comedy audience watching maybe a little bit more of the
centrist or even more conservative audience, not to speak of
Cam's politics, but just as far as the audience that
(13:45):
watches Kill Tony, I was.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Wondering if the podcast world would start to seep in there.
What's interesting now is, of course people can come up
through TikTok, through YouTube. There are so many avenues to
get your comedy out. Is doing doing this incredible show
and getting this showcase? Is it going to be limiting
to other things? What do you hear on this from
talking to professionals and talent managers in the comedy world.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
So I've also talked to agents and managers who have
had clients that have turned down SNL, have been offered
to be a part of the cast and have decided
that it would be better for their careers not to
be in SNL. We are in an era where fewer
comedy movies and fewer comedy TV shows are being produced
than they were ten years ago, and so I still
(14:32):
believe that SNL is one of those comedy institutions that
people will tune in for every week. So it's really
just you have to weigh all of these things. With
the Internet being an instant distribution channel for all these people.
You know, you can film yourself on your iPhone and
go to directly to your audience on TikTok. SNL has
(14:52):
to compete with not only other studios, but they have
to compete with TikTok and Instagram and every funny person
their bedroom.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
I got to believe that these last couple of weeks
for people in the comedy business, this is just like
the mad Dash of the year because the decision they
have domino effects for other people. Is this the type
of year where people are just have the phones glued
to their ears and their thumbs.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
Yeah, I think because this year more cast members left
than in years prior. There was certainly more of an
opening for people. And I know that during the audition
process a lot of agents and managers were eagerly waiting
to hear about how their clients did, even just texts
that went around the town, like oh, Lauren was in
(15:39):
the room today, It's still a big deal you hear
these almost mythical stories about the SNL audition process.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Ethan, thank you for being one of now generations of
Variety reporters to cover SNL.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
Pretty cool, Thanks, Cynthia.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
As we close out today's episodisode, here's a few things
we're watching for. The Murdochs announced the settlement of the
big family fight over the family fortune. At first glance,
it looks like Lachlan Murdoch one and his siblings are
in retreat. Jesse Armstrong was so right. The family dynamics
here are the stuff of great drama. Before we go,
(16:20):
congrats to Christine Mana. She's joined indie film studio Bleeker
Street as executive vice president of Home Entertainment. She's previously
worked for Newline Cinema, Relativity, and STX. Thanks for listening.
This episode was written and reported by me Cynthia Littleton,
with contributions from Todd Spangler, Gene Mattis, and Ethan Schanfeld.
(16:41):
It was edited by Aaron Greenwald. Stick Snack's hick Picks.
Please leave us a review at the podcast platform of
your choice, and please tune in tomorrow for another episode
of Daily Variety
Welcome to Daily Variety, your daily dose of news and
analysis for entertainment industry insiders. It's Tuesday, September ninth, twenty
twenty five. I'm your host, Cynthia Littleton. I am co
editor in chief of Variety alongside Ramin Setuda. I'm in
LA He's in New York, and Variety has reporters around
the world covering the business of entertainment. In today's episode,
(00:30):
we'll talk with business editor Todd Spangler and senior media
writer Gene Mattis about the latest in Hollywood's legal fight
with big AI firms. And we'll hear from reporter Ethan
Schanfeld on the comings and goings at Saturday Night Live.
But before we get to that, here are a few
headlines just in this morning that you need to know.
Wendy McMahon, the former head of CBS News and Stations,
(00:53):
has joined Beehive as a consultant and advisor to Tyler Dink.
Dink is the founder of the publishing platform for inde
pennant journalists. Netflix has ordered a new series from Black
Mirror creator Charlie Brooker. It's an untitled four part crime
thriller starring Patty Considine, Georgina Campbell, and Lena Heady. According
(01:13):
to Netflix, a quote contains blood and frowning end quote
from Elizabeth Banks to Catherine Zada Jones. A whole host
of starry names are lined up as presenters for Sunday's
seventy seventh Emmy Awards. The early reviews are in. People
seem to be loving Leonardo DiCaprio's latest from director Paul
(01:35):
Thomas Anderson Warrier Brothers, One Battle After Another, opens on
September twenty sixth. You can find all of these stories
and so much more on Variety dot com. Right now now,
it's time for conversations with Variety journalists about news and
trends in show business. Today we're talking to Todd Spangler
(01:55):
and Gene Mattis about two big developments in AI litigation
involving the firms Anthropic and mid Journey. We discuss what
it all means for copyright protection and showbiz. Gene Mattison,
Todd Spangler, thank you for joining me here today, Helo,
and we've had a couple of interesting court rulings and
(02:16):
some movement. The time has come to talk big picture
about AI and the state of the litigation that is
going on within the entertainment industry. There's a lot going on.
Rulings are coming in from various quarters. There's been there's
two big cases that have really been getting a lot
of attention in Hollywood. One is involving a company called
Anthropic based in San Francisco, one of the one of
(02:39):
the bigger AI firms, and a firm that is really
trying to position itself as friendly to creative industries, friendly
to copyright based industries. And then on the other spectrum,
there's a company called mid Journey, which has really animated
the biggest Hollywood studios Disney, NBC, Universal and now Warner Brothers.
(03:00):
Last week, Warner Brothers Discovery joined the lawsuit against mid Journey.
The studios are accusing Mid Journey of just the latant
copyright infringement. Let me start with Todd as somebody who
covered YouTube and so many other things over the years.
What do you think is going on here?
Speaker 2 (03:18):
You know, the wheels of justice grind slowly, and technology
famously always is ahead of where the legal standards are.
But there is a parallel to what YouTube went through.
They put in their copyright flagging system in order to
make peace with the copyright holders.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
The big question on that people have been trying to
understand is is AI training itself copyright infringement And there
are a lot of people, certainly in Hollywood unions, who
think that it is. And there's something called the Human
Artistry Campaign, which is sort of a coalition of a
lot of creative people, including the unions, that are sort
of pushed for you know, if you're going to train
(04:00):
on our work, then you need to pay us. And
the legal cases that we've seen so far have not
supported that point of view. There were two federal cases
in June, both of which is held that fundamentally AI
training is transformative and therefore it's fair use. And that's
not an absolute license to go do whatever you want
(04:21):
to do, but it is a pretty strong indication that
courts are looking at this as a transformative use that
is not inherently copyright protected.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
The keyword there is transformative. So let's talk specifically about
what happened with Anthropic again, one of the biggest AI
companies based in San Francisco. A big week for the
company last week they settled this lawsuit. They also announced
that they'd raise thirteen billion dollars in investment money, which
brings the company's valuation to one hundred and eighty three
(04:54):
billion one eight three billion. That is astounding but also
indicative of the moment that we're in for AI. I
don't know if you could cash that in the bank.
They're a private company, but that's the valuation. So Anthropic
took the step. They reached a settlement paying one point
five billion to a group of authors after a legal
(05:16):
case found that they did in fact illegally download a
bunch of books early on when they were training in
their AI service with the cuddly name of Claude Gene.
You've followed this case, tell us what's significant about the
settlement and what else has been significant about the litigation
around and trop.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Well, the dollar figure is pretty significant. The one point
five billion figure the PLANETFF lawyers were touting as the
largest ever copyright recovery and so you know, I've had
larger verdicts, but that they actually collect on it, and
they're going to actually collect on this one point five billion,
So that's significant. And we mentioned the ruling in June
(05:58):
where the judge had said basically training is fair use. Well,
he also said at the same time that doesn't mean
you can just go ahead and download pirated books from
shady websites on the dark web or whatever, which is
what they were doing initially. They don't do that anymore.
The way they get books now is they buy paper
copies of used books and then have them scanned. And
(06:21):
the judge basically said, if you do that, then that's legal,
and you can go and scan them and use them
to train Claude, and that's all fine, and that's fair use.
But if you illegally downloaded these books in the first place,
then that's infringement in the same way that if you
illegally download a movie, that's infringement. So that was what
they were paying for. That's the one point five billion.
(06:42):
And I think there's an open question of how many
others may have done this in the sort of early
days of AI training, and maybe they'll be on the
hook too. But going forward, they should know well enough
to do this in the legal way and not in
the illegal way and avoid this kind of judgment.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
But now let me ask you both. If I understand this,
If I go to a garage sale and I buy
ten books for fifty cents, and then then I then
take those books, scan them and to put them into
my digital large language model. That's okay because I did
acquire those books legally.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Yeah, And basically the argument is when you're making a
large language model, that's a transformative use, and you're not
going out and selling a duplicate of the books that
you bought, which would be copyright infringement. You're creating something new,
and that's what copyright is there to incentivize, is creating
something new. It goes to the point of fair use
being a very complicated. Yeah, the factor test, there's like
(07:39):
four different factors, and transformative transformativeness is one of the factors.
But there's also a question of market harm.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Let's talk about mid Journey, which is they've got they've
got the big guns of Hollywood. They've got Disney, NBC, Universal,
Warner Brothers, Discovery. You know, that's a lot of corporate
studio firepower saying hey, you're using the line of copyright.
What do you think it is about mid Journey. There's
a lot of companies out there, But what is it
(08:06):
about mid Journey that you think has attracted so much
attention from the studios?
Speaker 3 (08:11):
I mean, I think mid Journey is big enough to
be significant, but small enough that it's something they can
prevail a cast. They're not going after Meta, They're not
going after Google. They're going after a relatively small, bootstrapped
company that is nevertheless quite popular, quite successful. So the
feeling is that, you know, if they can win here,
(08:32):
they make a point, and then everybody else has to
kind of fall into line.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
And then the other point about it is that mid
Journey is actually they have a business model that's set
up to profit from this activity where they're charging people
to use the system, whereas right now Google and Meta
are not per se charging people to use it.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
So mid Journey you pay a subscription fee to mid
Journey to be able to use their large language model
and create create things out of their AI database, which
the studios and others are saying is rife with copyrighted
material that they have no right to use.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
It's not argue that there's a copyrighted material in the
training data. It's that the what the users are able
to generate is copyrighted material. Right, So if you prompt
it to say, can you show me Superman fighting with Batman?
It will show you Superman fighting with Batman. And it's
pretty much identical to the you know, copyrighted versions of
(09:30):
those images, right if it would be a different conversation
if you know that if mid Journey had guardrails that
didn't allow you to do that. But nevertheless, Superman and
Batman are still in the training data. But what Disney
and Warner Brothers and a Universal are all saying is like,
whatever you're doing, it's generating copies of our work and
(09:51):
you're charging people for it, and you can't do that.
And whether it's AI or a photocopy er, you're not
allowed to do that.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
The studios want to be able to use generator YI
if and when it makes sense for that, and so
by drawing these lines around this particular case, they don't
to tie their own hands so.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
Much to follow. Thank you both for pouring through complaints
and rulings. I so appreciate the two of you talking
us through this in very simple terms. Really appreciate it,
and certainly more to come.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
Thank you, yep, thank you.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Now we turn to Ethan Shanfeld. He describes the rush
over the past few weeks in the comedy world as
Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michael's settled on the final
cast lineup. For season fifty one. It's a mad dash
for sure. Ethan Shanfeld, intrepid reporter in New York. Thanks
for joining me.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
Thanks for having me, Cynthia.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Ethan. You've been reporting in the last couple of weeks
on all of the comings and goings at Saturday Night Live.
It's an annual late summer ritual. There is cast turnover
at the show that, remarkably, after fifty one season, still
holds a special place in pop culture. You've written a
number of stories about this. What are you hearing out
(11:07):
there from people in the comedy world.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
The main thing is that this type of turnover in
the cast happens every few years. We've had one major
player leave the show, which is Heidi Gardner. She was
on the show for eight years. And then aside from Heidi,
we had Devin Walker, Emil Wakim, Michael Longfellow. They've left,
and Please Don't Destroy, which is the comedy trio that
(11:33):
did a lot of the digital shorts. They've been split
up by the show. Ben Marshall has been up to
be in the main cast. John Higgins has left the show,
and then Martin Harley he will stay on as a writer. Well,
you know, they've become known for these sort of oddball
digital shorts, sort of reminiscent of the Lonely Island that
have featured Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny, a lot of
(11:55):
the celebrity hosts.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Right, the things that extend the SNL to be talked
about throughout the rest of the week, right.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
And in the last season, their sketches have noticeably been
on less than they were in the past, so you
could see the trajectory there.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Tell us about the newcomers who made the cut this.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
Year, absolutely, so, there's five new cast members. The cast
of the show just keeps growing and growing, which could
be a problem for some of these new members as
it's harder to break through. So the new faces are
Tommy Brennan, Jeremy Colhayne, Cam Patterson, and Veronica Slowakowska. I
hope I'm pronouncing that last one right. Some of them
(12:39):
have risen online on Instagram and TikTok doing these sort
of short videos that have gone viral. Especially Veronica has
broken out as one of those new voices in internet comedy,
and Cam Patterson, I think is notable because he's a
stand up who's mostly known as a frequent guest of
(13:00):
the Kill Tony podcast, and kill Tony is definitely a
little bit more raunchy, a little edgier than where a
lot of the SNL cast comes from. A lot of
the SNL cast comes from more of the old comedy scene,
more of the improv scene. So Cam comes from from
sort of a more club atmosphere where you know, you
(13:22):
can't say some of the things that he says on
stage on network television. I think that hiring Cam points to,
you know, Lauren wanting to get more of the bro
comedy audience watching maybe a little bit more of the
centrist or even more conservative audience, not to speak of
Cam's politics, but just as far as the audience that
(13:45):
watches Kill Tony, I was.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Wondering if the podcast world would start to seep in there.
What's interesting now is, of course people can come up
through TikTok, through YouTube. There are so many avenues to
get your comedy out. Is doing doing this incredible show
and getting this showcase? Is it going to be limiting
to other things? What do you hear on this from
talking to professionals and talent managers in the comedy world.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
So I've also talked to agents and managers who have
had clients that have turned down SNL, have been offered
to be a part of the cast and have decided
that it would be better for their careers not to
be in SNL. We are in an era where fewer
comedy movies and fewer comedy TV shows are being produced
than they were ten years ago, and so I still
(14:32):
believe that SNL is one of those comedy institutions that
people will tune in for every week. So it's really
just you have to weigh all of these things. With
the Internet being an instant distribution channel for all these people.
You know, you can film yourself on your iPhone and
go to directly to your audience on TikTok. SNL has
(14:52):
to compete with not only other studios, but they have
to compete with TikTok and Instagram and every funny person
their bedroom.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
I got to believe that these last couple of weeks
for people in the comedy business, this is just like
the mad Dash of the year because the decision they
have domino effects for other people. Is this the type
of year where people are just have the phones glued
to their ears and their thumbs.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
Yeah, I think because this year more cast members left
than in years prior. There was certainly more of an
opening for people. And I know that during the audition
process a lot of agents and managers were eagerly waiting
to hear about how their clients did, even just texts
that went around the town, like oh, Lauren was in
(15:39):
the room today, It's still a big deal you hear
these almost mythical stories about the SNL audition process.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Ethan, thank you for being one of now generations of
Variety reporters to cover SNL.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
Pretty cool, Thanks, Cynthia.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
As we close out today's episodisode, here's a few things
we're watching for. The Murdochs announced the settlement of the
big family fight over the family fortune. At first glance,
it looks like Lachlan Murdoch one and his siblings are
in retreat. Jesse Armstrong was so right. The family dynamics
here are the stuff of great drama. Before we go,
(16:20):
congrats to Christine Mana. She's joined indie film studio Bleeker
Street as executive vice president of Home Entertainment. She's previously
worked for Newline Cinema, Relativity, and STX. Thanks for listening.
This episode was written and reported by me Cynthia Littleton,
with contributions from Todd Spangler, Gene Mattis, and Ethan Schanfeld.
(16:41):
It was edited by Aaron Greenwald. Stick Snack's hick Picks.
Please leave us a review at the podcast platform of
your choice, and please tune in tomorrow for another episode
of Daily Variety
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