From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters, and this is the business.

We moved production offices three times.

We took everything that we were doing offline, and we're doing all of our editing between

hard drives.

And I began to understand more and more how serious this was and essentially where it went

to, that there wasn't much separation between

Gregory and Putin. Brian Fogle's plan was to make a documentary about pervasive doping and cycling

by becoming a human guinea pig to see whether he could dope and evade detection. He recruited

chemist Gregory Rodchenkov in Moscow to guide him, and then the plot

thickened. Rodchenkoff was revealed as the architect of Russia's massive state-run doping program,

and he was ready to blow the whistle. With that, Rodchenko feared he was no longer safe from

Russian authorities and apparently with good reason. Fogel helped him flee,

and then things got really scary. Fogel tells us about taking extreme precautions while

working on his movie Icarus and explains why all the unanticipated twists of the story

meant that a $5 million sale at Sundance didn't come close to covering the cost of making the

film. But first on the news banter, independent film is riskier business than ever. Stick around. It's

the business from KCRW. I am joined by my comrade in banter, Matt Bellany of the Hollywood reporter. Hello, Matt.

Hi there. So this past week, we've had a kind of vivid illustration of the vagaries of the movie business.

Open Road, the company that just a couple of years ago was celebrating a best picture win for Spotlight,

has basically had to sell itself at the brink of destruction

because this business of making and distributing movies, it's just incredibly risky.

It's extremely risky and it's getting riskier because you're seeing pressure put on both

...