The Studio, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the age of cultural mediocrity (1969)

Plus, Charlton Heston as a quarterback for the New Orleans Saints?

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I.

Here is a trailer for a sports movie from 1969 that I did honestly not know existed until this week:

The movie is called Number One, and it stars Charlton Heston as an aging quarterback for the New Orleans Saints. Heston was apparently such a bad athlete that he struggled to throw a pass 20 yards; when they filmed a scene that involved Heston getting pummeled by Dallas defenders, he broke three ribs. The movie came and went without making much money, and then vanished from the culture, the way movies did back when a lot of movies actually got made.

But when you look deeper, it would appear Number One was not an actively bad film, at least in the sense of it being lazy and cliched. I haven’t watched it yet, but according to New York Times critic Howard Thompson, Number One offered “one of the most interesting and admirable performances of (Heston’s) career.” It may have missed the mark in the end, but at the very least, it was a departure from Heston’s usual roles; at the very least, it was an admirable effort by a movie star to attempt something completely different. And it is increasingly difficult to imagine a movie of that nature getting made right now.

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II.

The death of creativity in Hollywood (and beyond) is the central conceit of Apple TV’s The Studio, a television show about movies that recognizes from its first episode—revolving around a slapstick attempt to develop a film about Kool-Aid—just how much our creative institutions have essentially given up on the idea of art over commerce. The Studio’s lead character, played by Seth Rogen, is a middle-aged film executive who professes his admiration for great films but is too vain and cowardly to actually make those films. And so instead he defaults toward making bad films that make money out of a sense of self-preservation, even while recognizing that he is lost amid the vapidity of a culture that appears to have sold its soul for a TikTok reel.

The Studio, of course, is not the first artistic work to seize on Hollywood as a metaphor for a coarsening society. There is Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust and Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run and Robert Altman’s The Player (an explicit influence on The Studio), to name a few.¹ But as broad as The Studio can be at times, it’s still incredibly well-timed, because it feels increasingly difficult to express the sheer mediocrity of this cultural moment without resorting to broad satire.

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III.

About a decade ago, I spent some time in Pittsburgh, working on a long essay about the perpetual ineptitude of the city’s baseball team, the Pirates. At that point, the Pirates had suffered through 19 consecutive losing seasons (soon to be 20); after that story ran, Pittsburgh would actually make the playoffs in three straight years, but then they would take up losing again after 2015, to the point that they’ve had only one other winning season in the past decade. They are an increasingly miserable franchise with a bereft and dwindling fan base who lacks trust in the team’s owner and in the front office. Their farm system managed to produce the best pitcher in a generation, and they have virtually no chance of keeping him in the long term; even the relationships between their stadium ushers and their fans has broken down into Lord of the Flies-level chaos. They are inept and they are cheap, and despite being in a world-class sports city with a world-class ballpark, they seem content to accept that it doesn’t matter if they win or lose, as long as the money keeps rolling in.

“He was kind of comfortable stepping back and being mediocre” after those winning seasons in the mid-2010s, one former player said of Pirates owner Bob Nutting. “That permeates. That’s just what the organization is.”

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IV.

That could a cutting line of dialogue straight out of The Studio. And while there have always been and will always be cultural pressures that lead institutions to embrace mediocrity, it feels especially prevalent at the moment. Competence and wealth/power appear increasingly uncorrelated; no one wants to take a chance in a world where the mere act of speaking out can lead to cultural blowback, and where a decade of yo-yo-ing between performative wokism² and aspirational fascism has led pretty much everyone to bury their heads in the sand and wait for the moment to pass.

I remain hopeful that this moment will not last forever; I do believe that at some point we will regain our grip over the culture and wrest it away from the soulless oligarchs who led us down this road in the first place. In the meantime, the best we can hope for is a show that captures just how fearful and apprehensive and neurotic we all are about what comes next—a show about how easy it is to revel in being rich and mediocre, and how difficult it is to refuse to accept that mediocrity and take a chance on something real.

1. There is also Entourage, a show that somehow managed to satirize Hollywood by eclipsing the insipid nature of Hollywood itself.

2. Without spoiling anything, one of my favorite episodes of The Studio involves an attempt to cast a movie with the “proper” racial and cultural blend of stars. It felt almost like an epitaph for an era.

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