The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood
Sonny Bunch hosts The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, a new podcast featuring interviews with folks who have their finger on the pulse of the entertainment industry during this dynamic—and difficult—time.
Episodes
October 10, 2025 • 32 mins
On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) to discuss his new documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5. We talked about his upbringing in Haiti and having to flee a dictatorial regime there, how social media and AI manipulations help degrade the idea of objective truth, and what can be done to combat this scourge. If you enjoyed the episode, I hope you check out his documentary: it’s playing in New York City and ...
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October 3, 2025 • 47 mins
Hey, before you listen to this week’s episode, do me a favor and watch the short film we’re going to be discussing. It’s only 17 minutes long, and if you’re between the age of 31 and 45 or so, I think it’ll trip a lot of your nostalgia circuits. (It’s fun for all ages, but Yourgo said this was the age range that best responded to the movie.) Here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snpT2i7B6Mk
Fun right? OK, now...
Fun right? OK, now...
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September 26, 2025 • 53 mins
On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Nate Soares to talk about his new book, cowritten with Eliezer Yudkowsky, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. It’s a fascinating book—some will say fearmongering and sensationalist; I, frankly, think they’re overly optimistic about our ability to constrain the development of general intelligence in AI—in large part because of how it’s structured. Each c...
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September 19, 2025 • 53 mins
On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Matt Roller, the creator and showrunner of the new Netflix animated show Haunted Hotel. We discussed his background in television, how it helped prepare him for the long (shockingly long!) process of creating a full season of animated television, and why he is reading the comments. The show is live on Netflix now and I hope you check it out … and give it the preferred two (not one!) thumbs...
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September 11, 2025 • 46 mins
On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Tony Gilroy to discuss his work on Andor, the hit Disney+ series that’s a prequel to Rogue One but has ambitions beyond telling the backstory of the Death Star. It is, in a very real way, a TV show about our moment and the mounting tension felt throughout the political order: from Imperial troops on the streets of civilian cities attempting to provoke conflict to Luthen Rael’s (Stellan Ska...
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September 5, 2025 • 40 mins
On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Rep. Laura Friedman, the congresswoman from the area we colloquially refer to as “Hollywood,” to discuss her push for a national film tax credit of the sort used by the United Kingdom and other countries to lure production of movies back to the United States.
We discuss her career in the TV and film industry before her move into politics, how DC is not unlike Los Angeles, and why...
We discuss her career in the TV and film industry before her move into politics, how DC is not unlike Los Angeles, and why...
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August 29, 2025 • 39 mins
On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Tim League, one of the founders of the Alamo Drafthouse and the man behind Metro Private Cinemas in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. It’s a pretty cool concept—half fine dining, half private cinema auditorium—and I was excited to discuss the evolution of movie theaters as both viewing and gastronomic experiences. League is planning to open the theater in a few weeks, and they’re accepting ...
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August 22, 2025 • 62 mins
On this week’s episode, I’m thrilled to be joined by Toby Huss, star of the summer’s most surprising smash hit, Weapons, as well as the rebooted King of the Hill on Hulu and Americana, in theaters and VOD now. We talked about all those, plus his weird and lovely photography book, American Sugargristle, which you can (and should!) order here. Toward the end of the episode, I went full Chris Farley and did a “Hey, remember The A...
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August 15, 2025 • 53 mins
On this week’s episode, I’m joined by New York Magazine’s Bilge Ebiri, who has an enormous, career-spanning interview with Ron Howard in the latest issue. We discussed what makes a Ron Howard movie a “Ron Howard Movie,” the incredibly under-appreciated Thirteen Lives, and that movie about J.D. Vance. And then we talked a bit about his fascinating history of a key element of film technology in the latest issues of Mubi’s quarte...
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August 1, 2025 • 46 mins
I asked David Poland (read his Substack!) to come on this week to pick his brain about the state of the big studio comedy, a genre that has diminished in recent years as international grosses became more important and a lot of comedy releases shifted to streaming in an effort to reduce advertising costs. Which led to us talking about the states of various genres (including horror and superhero pictures) as well as the state of...
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July 25, 2025 • 50 mins
On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by Puck media correspondent Julia Alexander to discuss the absurdities of Jubilee. You might not recognize the name of the company but you’ve probably seen some of their clips; most recently, Mehdi Hasan went up against 20 self-described far-right conservatives that resulted in at least one of the participants losing his job after he proudly declared himself an autocrat and downplayed Nazi ...
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July 18, 2025 • 42 mins
On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by Crunchyroll EVP Mitchel Berger to talk about anime’s increasing popularity with those yearning for community. We reference a report on the state of anime several times; you can read it here. The long and the short of it, though, is that anime is increasingly popular with Gen Z and Gen Alpha, which will likely come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the wall of manga in their local Bar...
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July 11, 2025 • 35 mins
On this week’s episode, I talked to Christian Swegal, the writer-director of the new film Sovereign, about his new film and its focus on the cult-like behavior of the Sovereign Citizen movement. We discussed Nick Offerman’s commanding lead performance, how you adapt a movie with an ending and setting as tragic as this one, and the difficulty of finding compassion even for those who seem to deserve it least. If you enjoyed this...
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July 3, 2025 • 46 mins
Always glad to talk to the Entertainment Strategy Guy (read him here!) about the state of play in the world of streaming and beyond. Among the topics discussed this week: Whether or not F1: The Movie is a hit (and what being a “hit” means for a $200 million original for Apple as opposed to a different type of movie for a different type of studio); whether F1, the sport, is a butts-in-seats phenomenon in the United States; why ...
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June 27, 2025 • 13 mins
On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Daniel Drezner—cohost of the Space the Nation podcast with Ana Marie Cox and proprietor of the Drezner’s World Substack—to discuss the eternal popularity of zombies (most recently via the hit movie 28 Years Later, which I reviewed here) and the continued relevance of his book, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, which is now in its third edition. We chatted about the ways diffe...
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June 20, 2025 • 43 mins
On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by Bart Weiss to discuss the evolution of the iPhone-shot movie from Tangerine to 28 Years Later and his recent book, Smartphone Cinema: Making Great Films with Your Mobile Phone. You have the power to make a movie in the palm of your hand: will you use it? If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!
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June 13, 2025 • 38 mins
On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Lane Brown of New York magazine to discuss his feature on an increasingly rare phenomenon: the film or TV show shot in Los Angeles. From foreign tax credits to the cost of permits, Los Angeles is getting more expensive to shoot in, meaning that more productions are moving out of Los Angeles altogether. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to read Lane’s piece. And please, share this with...
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June 6, 2025 • 46 mins
On this week’s episode, I’m joined by New York Magazine features writer Lila Shapiro to discuss her feature story on the growing utilization of generative AI by Hollywood studios to cut costs and speed up production times. From a party hosted by an AI studio to the work being done by Runway to the growing sense that, hey man, this is just The Future, it seems like AI is, as several folks in the piece put it, “inevitable.” If y...
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May 30, 2025 • 64 mins
On this week’s episode, I strayed a bit from Hollywood to talk to David C. Lowery of the bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven about his new album, Fathers, Sons, and Brothers. You can check out the album here and peruse the accompanying Substack here. We had a fascinating chat about how the industry has changed over the last 40 years (for better and worse), how folks discover new music, and how his experiences growing up hel...
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May 23, 2025 • 28 mins
I’m joined by Ann Foley this week to discuss her work as costume designer on the hit HBO show The Last of Us. From sourcing vintage clothes to weaving the infected’s fungal-explosions in with the clothes they were wearing when they died to her graduate school on the sets of Agents of SHIELD, Ann’s insights into translating the world of the game to the world of the screen are pretty fascinating. At the end of the episode, Ann m...
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