Steve Martin can't imagine 'Only Murders in the Building' without Selena Gomez

The Business

KCRW

Tv & Film

4.6 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Actor, comedian, musician, and producer Steve Martin had been invited to one of talent manager’s Sandy Gallin’s showbiz parties in New York. There, he recalls seeing a lot of actors, including three older ones, when Gallin suggested he should write something for them. “I thought, ‘That's a good idea: three older guys who live in a building and solve murders because they don't have anything else to do,’” Martin recalls. His premise was: “They're too tired to go downtown to investigate things, so they limit it to only murderers in the building, so they could just stay home to solve the crime.” From that idea, Martin was introduced to John Hoffman and the two created “Only Murders in the Building,” the biggest comedy hit on Hulu. Now, the duo share how they met, and what it took for them to get Martin’s idea from paper onto the screen. But first, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav cancels “Batgirl.” Kim Masters and Matt Balloni discuss what this means for the DC brand and the studio.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters, and this is the business.
0:05.0	After all his decades in Hollywood, Steve Martin is not really a fan of the Getting to Know You Business Meeting.
0:11.7	So he wasn't that excited about having lunch with writer-producer Dan Fogelman.
0:16.2	My agent, Danny Greenberg, called me, he said, you know, you're up in Santa Barbara,
0:20.0	you ought to meet with Dan Fogelman. And I said, Danny, I know what these meetings are. Everybody's fascinated with each other.
0:25.7	And as soon as you have a meeting, everybody's bored. And the fascination is over. And nothing ever
0:31.7	happens. But this time was different. That meal was the first step toward the creation of Hulu's
0:36.7	biggest comedy hit.
0:38.1	Only Murders in the Building co-creators Steve Martin and John Hoffman talk about the hit series
0:43.1	with 17 Emmy nominations. But first we banter. Stick around. It's the business from KCRW.
0:51.1	I am joined by my returned from vacation partner in banter, Matt Bellany.
0:56.1	Hello, rested Matt.
0:57.6	Hello.
0:58.3	I trust you are bursting with energy right now.
1:01.0	We're going to talk about David Zaslob and his team at Warner Brothers Discovery.
1:04.9	He has rocked the town by dumping a almost finished $90 million bat girl movie.
1:12.6	That is a rare thing to do.
1:14.6	Now, we are told that this movie was caught in a strategy change,
1:18.5	that Jason Kyler, who ran Warner Media and was all in on streaming famously,
1:23.3	had commissioned these movies,
1:25.1	and that David Zaslov sees the world very differently and sees
1:28.7	that streaming movies. And, you know, the world has also manifestly changed what with the,
	...

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