The Studio, Seth Rogen’s cosy Hollywood satire which dropped on Apple TV+ earlier this year, features a glut of industry figures cameoing as themselves: Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron, Zac Efron, Ron Howard, Zoë Kravitz, Nicholas Stoller. Unless you also happen to work in the movie business, that last name probably won’t mean much: in the show Stoller is introduced as a reliable writer of kid-friendly fare – The Muppets, Captain Underpants – who can make a decent job of the IP-driven film (“the Kool-Aid movie”) that Rogen’s studio head, Matt Remick, has been forced to pursue.
In real life, Stoller did indeed write those films. Yet he’s also a key figure in the later years of the Judd Apatow-abetted Frat Pack era, responsible for a number of box office hits including Sex Tape, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek and Neighbors, which starred Rogen and Rose Byrne as a couple warring with the fraternity next door. Pairing lowbrow farce with zingy dialogue and hapless beta male protagonists, these were out-and-out comedies made at a time when the genre occupied a significant slice of the cinematic zeitgeist.
