You are listening to The Next Best Picture Podcast, and this is our interview with the screenwriter for the film Bombshell, Charles Randolph.

Hello, everyone, you are listening to The Next Best Picture Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Neglia, and joining me today, I have Academy Award winner for the 2015 film The Big Short and the

writer of the new film Bombshell, Charles Randolph. Charles, how's it going today?

It's going well. Good. Yeah, the film is set to open up, actually, here in a few days' time. It's got a very, very star-studded cast. It's also tackling some very, very important issues. And I want to first start off by asking, what was, you know, your hot off the heels of winning an Academy Award for the Big Short. What was the interest in this particular story to you?

Well, you know, I obviously have heard from female friends over the years stories of harassment.

One in particular, who was a server and a restaurant, had some pretty horrifying stories.

So it's always sort of been something I've been thinking about. And, you know, so that's first

and foremost that, you know, then the characters, you know, the people at Fox were just so

fascinating. You know, they, they were the least likely people to stand up and do this thing that they did, the women there, in some ways,

and part because they came from a community, a culture where it was not part of the culture to be overtly feminist in any way.

So that was interesting.

They were complicated and engaging characters, you know, who did sort of a brave thing, even though,

even though, and sometimes very brave, even though, you know, you would not expect it.

And they were quirky and unique and proved that this is an issue that transcends partisanship.

Yeah, I definitely think that that is true, personally speaking, especially when I watch

the movie.

There are a lot of people out there that don't, and they don't agree with that.

And I imagine you were consciously aware of that probably when writing that you knew there

would be some people who would never view these women as people.

They would always be the women who work at Fox News. So where was the line for you in treating

these characters as human beings who had something horrible happen to them versus the people

that we see on our television screens that work at Fox News.

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