The Murdoch family’s own private ‘Succession?’; Encore: Writer Justin Kuritzkes on ‘Challengers’

from KCRW I'm Kim Masters and this is the business this week we revisit our chat with writer Justin kiskis whose latest film queer just debuted at the Venice Film Festival that's his second collaboration with LCA guano we talked about the first which was actually his first movie The Spicy zende DEA tennis romp Challengers when you write a script on spec you're really just writing it for yourself and you have no idea who's going to eventually collaborate on it with you and in the case of this movie it all came together incredibly fast to the point that from the time I had finished the first draft of the screenplay to the time we were in pre-production was only a couple months Justin kurisus talks about how Challengers starring and DEA was inspired by a particular US Open match that turned him into a tennis obssessive and he shares how he and his wife Seline song known for her Oscar nominated past lives managed to keep their work separate from their relationship and we ask him about some of his quirkier creative efforts over the years but first we ban her stick around it's the business from KCRW I am joined by my teammate and banter Matt bellany hello Matt hi there so I think we may be on the same wavelength about a topic that we want to discuss because I was going to start out by saying to you Matt what is the definition of hutzpah and see if you could guess what I'm referring to yeah I think when you look up that phrase rert Murdoch's face appears in the dictionary yes uh this has to do with an attempt it's already been reported that rert and we can cue the succession theme song here that rert wants to cut out three of his children Elizabeth James and Prudence who we never hear from and put the power over his estate when he finally passes on he's 93 years old and still kicking uh he wants to give basically everything the keys to the kingdom to Lachlan and the preliminary issue that both of us are referring to is this move by the murdocks to seal everything no cameras in the courtroom everything private what is the rationale for that I mean given who the murdocks are and the many things they have done what is the argument in favor of that uh it's a long shot here because yes this is a proceeding in a Nevada courtroom near Reno where they are battling over Rupert's supposedly irrevocable trust where he is now wanting to revise the trust to change the manner in which his estate will be determined after he dies currently each of his four adult children gets one vote which essentially puts the power in the hands of the non- llan children he wants Lachlan to be in charge so he wants to change it and his argument is essentially that Lachlan is the only one of of his children that understands the conservative nature of his media Empire and how important it is to maintain the political bent of the content in order to safeguard the entire family now obviously the other children don't agree with that front and yet in this proceeding and it's not just rert we know that lachan is also on board with this strategy and at least one of the board members of their companies is on board with this strategy they want not just no cameras in the courtroom they want the entire records of the proceeding kept secret and not revealed to the public they want the doors potentially barricaded during any testimony that is given in this case they want the media absolutely excluded from this procedure and obviously the murdocks have a very well-known reputation for owning media Outlets that would take the opposite St on that issue well and obviously I seem to remember rert getting a pie in the face in a parliamentary hearing because of the hacking Scandal that still isn't fully resolved they did appalling things to people and kind of got away with it and now they're whining about their privacy rights it seems like the absolute height of hypocrisy it does I mean one need only go on New York post.com to the page six column to see today's episode of invasion of priv privacy but whatever they argue that the specific history of this kind of proceeding is justification for keeping it private this is why they filed in Reno Nevada in the first place because it has a reputation for keeping things private there is actually a uh an activist involved in this case now who is trying to shine more light on proceedings in these Nevada courts um and he's opposing these efforts and the Murs are essentially arguing that if they don't get the secrecy they want it's going to set a precedent where these cases are no longer going to be filed in Nevada they'll be filed in other courtrooms around the country where they will get that kind of secrecy it's extraordinary lengths they are going to to keep this stuff private yeah now I'm going to attempt like a tricky segue here because among the heartless disregard and invasion of people's privacy in the history of the Fox News Channel there was the Seth Rich case this poor young man who was murdered and who Sean Hannity made a whole sport of that he was secretly murdered there was this ridiculous theory that because he had worked at the Democratic National Committee that he was it was Hillary who did it the clintons did it it was all nuts and the family sued The Grieving parents and that Rel leades me not only to this case in the hutzpah of it but to the other case that is in Delaware that you know about in Road and Puck which is a fight over the gigantic numbers that fox has paid and likely will pay because of other lies that have been spread about on the channel including famously the Dominion case where they had to pay the better part of a billion dollars and as you know a the smartmatic case this is the voting machine stuff is lurking and is likely to be significantly bigger almost triple I think what the Dominion case was and I guess the shareholder argument is that the board should have to pay these numbers because they were sloppy and allowed all of this to go on and on and their job was to prevent this kind of screwup yeah that's essentially the argument they were negligent and were not minding the store essentially when all of these politicians and Fox's own commentators people like Sydney Powell Maria bartter Romo were going on the network spreading the election lies and the shareholders are essentially saying that the board is responsible for this and the shareholders shouldn't be suffering these payouts it should be all are partly paid for by the board which is obviously something the board is very much objecting to Yes uh you know it'll be interesting to see if the judge in this case deems the behavior by the fox board members to be so negligent as to violate what is usually a business judgment rule where that if you're using normal business judgment you cannot be held liable for things personally that you do as a board member but that rule let me just interject it gives them a lot lot of latitude these board members is like the court defers to their judgment basically unless they do something really bad right but then the question begs how many of these massive payouts do there have to be for someone to finally say what were you guys doing allowing this well I will say as someone who has seen things about what fox is doing on social media it seems clear to me that what they do now is they make sure to do this stuff with people who aren't going to sue them you know with people like President Biden or KLA Harris they every time they do this kind of uh conspiracy mongering it's what I would say they would call a safe plaintiff not going to court well and the other thing they're doing more now is they are not airing things live I mean when they have Trump interviews for the most part unless he's calling in on a debate night or the DNC night um they had a Hannity interview that was tape recorded so they can review it if Trump starts putting out you know a lot of falsehoods they can edit or they can properly couch it yeah well let me just make one more stop here as we banter which is a piece in the Wall Street Journal about Josh deoro who is the head of the Disney theme parks he is one of the competitors in the bake off that is going on because Bob Iger really will have to retire this time I think so Dana Walden who runs the television stuff Jimmy pataro ESPN and Josh dearo and this piece it was a very very positive piece and Josh dearo has kept normally kind of a low profile suddenly he's out there and you know one of the wraps against him is he's not a creative executive in fact he has the job that Bob chapek had and we saw how well that went the piece even says well he Doodles he's a doodler so I doodle too I don't know if that qualifies me as a creative exec but uh I just think that Disney Watchers will be looking at that and going hm what's going on with this well I think in some ways tomorrow needed to respond because Dana Walden who uh co-runs the entertainment group she you know has a background as a publicist and she's pretty effectively managed the media and her own narrative in this and you know we see stories all the time about how she's beloved in the creative community and she goes on walks with Bob Iger and you know I think dearo if you know he is being treated internally as a serious candidate he needed to do something and this was sort of the shot across the bow for that Jimmy pataro as well has been doing tons of press and you know he's out there talking about the future of the company in the Stream business something that is you know got to be something the board is paying very close attention to I honestly don't think the board cares that much about the media jockeying amongst these Executives the only way it could matter is if it becomes such a narrative and there is such a presumption in the community that someone is a front runner that when they ultimately make their decision on whether to go with an outsider or whether to go with internal people or some mix of both that it's not a shock to the community and then all of a sudden everyone's like whoa what happened there so I think just you know keeping these Executives out there and having a dialogue with the media I think is probably the smart move for all of them yeah I mean the one thing about that article as you know the theme parks are not having a Shining Moment at Disney that theme parks were soft and that pulled down the stock price and the piece was like you know the prices have been raised but no one blames Josh deoro but I feel like does no one blame Josh tomorrow they blame Disney I mean maybe they blame Bob Chic but he's been gone for a while now and that is the issue for him right his piece of the pie there is not doing so well yeah and it's coming off of a period during the aftermath of covid where the parks were literally the profit engine for the company and that has slowed down a little there's also a lot of gripes about some of the things they are doing you know their rebranding of Splash Mountain was something that people griped about of the parks they're raising prices they are changing up the ride reservation systems they're taking away a lot of the things that used to be free and charging for them things that are pretty unpopular amongst Park super fans they have been criticizing him now when he goes and walks around the parks yeah he is a celebrity and he's got an Instagram presence and he is a charismatic guy but to say that Josh dearo is not bearing uh the brunt of some of these criticisms of the parks is I think a little bit disingenuous yeah maybe a little fanciful thank you Matt thank you that's Matt bellany founding partner of Puck news and I of course am editor at large of The Hollywood Reporter the past couple of years have been wild for writer Justin kitzis and his wife Seline song her first film past lives was up for two Oscars and kitus his first screenplay made The Blacklist and was quickly snatched up by producer Amy Pascal and director Luca ganino Challengers with Zenda starring alongside Joshua Conor and Mike Feist saw a theatrical run in April of this year and is now streaming on Prime video kitus wrote the screenplay for another guadino project an adaptation of William Burrow's queer starring Daniel Craig that film got a rapturous reception at the Venice film festival and is set to be distributed by a24 opening later this year in Challengers best friends and doubles Partners Patrick and art played by OK Conor and Feist respectively are both swooning over Star tennis player tshi Duncan Patrick finds that she may be beautiful but her words are biting hitting a ball with a racket is a great way to avoid having a job well that's also your problem cuz you think the tennis is about expressing yourself doing your thing that's why you still have that serve it works yeah but you're not a tennis player you don't know what tennis is what is it it's a relationship kitus actually wasn't that crazy about tennis until he watched a match that inspired him to try writing a screenplay about it I I wrote the script on spec towards the end of 2021 and then I I gave it to my agent and and we shared it with a few producers and um eventually I decided to work with Amy Pascal and Rachel OK Conor and then through them the script eventually got into the hands of Zinda and Luca and uh Luca was somebody who you know was always very deep in my mind as as somebody who could make this film because I had been such a fan of his films for so long and he was somebody who Amy had a relationship with where they had been trying to find a way to work together for a long time and so she sent him the script and he responded to it and that was it so Zena was first uh yeah I had met Zena about the script through Amy before I had met Luca this may seem like a sort of a strange question but were you surprised to come roaring out of the gate like that you know you've done plays but a screenplay is a different thing obviously and most people struggle forever and we had one guest who took him 12 years to get his thing made and here you are it was completely surprising I mean you know when you write a script on spec you're really just writing it for yourself and and you have no idea who's going to eventually collaborate on it with you you know who's going to to join you on this path towards actually making it a movie so you're really just trying to see the movie on the page because it's a movie you want to see that doesn't exist yet and you're hoping in doing that that you'll make other people see it there on the page and in the case of this movie it all came together incredibly fast to the point that from the time I had finished the first draft of the screenplay to the time we were in pre-production was only a couple months wow which is completely abnormal yes don't try this at home kid because it doesn't work that way it doesn't no it's completely crazy and uh I feel very very spoiled by it so I suppose the tedious question I must ask that everybody probably will ask is do you actually play tennis I played for a bit as a kid and as a teenager and um it was so frustrating for me because I could tell exactly how mediocre I was and that I was never going to get much better and so I quit um and and then I really didn't even watch Tennis for most of my life I I wasn't even much of a sports fan and then I sort of randomly turned on the US Open in 2018 because it happened to be on and it was the final between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka and there was this really controversial call from the Umpire where he said that Serena Williams had received uh coaching from the sidelines and she got very upset and said I I didn't do that I would never do that and I had never heard of this rule before but immediately it struck me as intensely cinematic you know that you're all alone on your side of the court and there's this one person in this massive tennis Stadium who cares as much about what happens to you as you do but you can't talk to them and what if you had to talk about something really important that was beyond tennis you know that was personal between the two of you and between the person on the other side of the Court how would you have that conversation that was really how my connection to tennis started and parallel to the seed of the movie being planted in my head I started becoming a legitimate tennis obsessive yeah I fell into this deep deep rabbit hole You didan you know yeah I mean it's an intense concept we won't see anything about what happens in the movie but once people have seen the movie they will understand what you mean certainly I I hope so yeah yeah and I imagine I mean you may not know this but I have to assume that Zena you know is very much the rising star and they're looking for something great for her to have a fa meaty role in and there you come along with your script at the perfect moment yeah it did feel like it was I mean meant to be I I don't know what's meant to be but it but it did feel like a a Kismet in a sense you know I think uh you never especially when you're writing a script on spec and it's your first script you can't write with somebody like Cinda in mind because there's no reason for you to believe it will ever get to her you know um but once I had finished the script and I was thinking about this character and who could play her it's it's really hard to think about anyone who could do it besides Zenda so it it did feel very natural when we first spoke about the role that she just understood this person so completely and had this relationship to the character that um was already there you know it was already sort of in her which was really thrilling and the Luca element which is so fortuitous as Anda was first I mean did he read the script and just say I'm into it it certainly has the kind of you know he has a knack for portraying sexually fraught situations let's say yeah well Luca and I spoke um you know on the phone after he had read the script like immediately after he had read the script because he really responded to it and um a week later I was on a plane to Milan to go hang out with him and a shame yeah I know yeah what a bummer um yeah and and we we just spent a week really feeling each other out and then seeing if we could Vibe and collaborate together and seeing if I could make space within this movie for Luca to find what he needed creatively inside of it you know so that uh it could be his own so that he could feel like it was a Luca guadagnino movie um and that was this kind of joyous process uh between the two of us where we really clicked immediately and trusted each other immediately uh because we could tell that we spoke the same language and that we were excited by a lot of the same things in film generally but when it came to this film specifically so I I just immediately kind of knew that he he really loved and cared about these characters as much as I did were there many changes I mean you're a firsttime filmmaker as we've noted it's it's I don't know how common it is to get to sit with a very established director and uh make sure you like him well I mean yeah it it's there are many changes that happen in any film when you go from bringing it to something that's really meant to be an exciting and meaningful reading experience and then all of the sudden you're trying to make it exist in the real world with real people you know that's a sort of natural part of the film making process right with this film in particular we had an interesting thing where we didn't really have a traditional development process we kind of just went right into pre-production and so we were tailoring the script to the cast that we had and to Luca as we were building a schedule and starting to go on location Scouts and all that kind of stuff you know we were really uh doing everything at once and that was a kind of crazy and condensed process that I think the energy of that actually really benefited the movie that we ended up making coming up after the break Justin kitus talks about how a goofy video he made in college years ago on his MacBooks Photo Booth app unexpectedly turned into a viral sensation you're listening to the business from KCRW this is the business and I'm Kim Masters we're revisiting our conversation from April with writer Justin kitzis whose second film queer just received one of those long Ovations at the Venice Film Festival his first movie now streaming on Prime video is the Luca ganino directed Challengers starring Zena Josh o Conor and Mike Fe long before Challengers kitus unexpectedly made a splash with something completely different let me step back a minute though in your career you were a playwright in New York yes before you did that you were a sort of successful YouTuber making comedy videos I saw the one called potion seller uh oh cool it went viral I think it has like 11 million views news potion Cella enough of these games I'm going into battle and I need your strongest potions my strongest potions will kill you traveler you can't handle my strongest potions you better go to a Cellar that sells weaker potions how did that happen oh god um I'm just as confused as you are uh how those started was that I was in college and I was uh working on my senior the which was a a play that I ended up performing later in New York uh and I would at night when I was sort of exhausted from working on this thing I started just messing around with the photo booth app on my uh MacBook and you know that's the app that distorts your face right and as I was messing around with it I sort of realized that if you moved your face back and forth you could create multiple characters depending on the way you were interacting with the distortion and as a theater person that felt like uh it had some relationship to mask work or clown work or you know improvisation and so it it really felt like this digital outgrowth of a lot of the stuff that I had been doing in theater and so I really just started making those to make myself laugh and make my friends laugh and I was sharing them I put them on YouTube really just to share them with my friends and then a year after I had posted potion seller somehow for some reason it got posted on some forum and then all of a sudden it went viral um and then all of a sudden people started watching all the other videos on the channel and this kind of mini fandom for it began you know I say mini because within the context of YouTube where like there are makeup tutorials that get 200 million views in an hour my stuff is pretty small change but um but I found it really exciting as somebody who was at that point living in New York working off Broadway as a playright that you know here I was working really seriously and for a long time on these things that if I was lucky a couple hundred or maybe a thousand people would see right and then these things I would make in five minutes and put online we're being seen by millions of people um and that that kind of delighted me sure I mean as long as it's not something where you know people ride down on you then it's all good right you don't want to like it yeah no I I see it as a thing that um makes it very hard for me to ever take myself seriously because there's there's evidence Forever on the internet that I'm a deeply not a serious person you are definitely a fountain of creativity clearly you have a couple of upcoming things one of which maybe I I don't know what the state of play is queer I think Luca gave you the William burrow book if I'm reading this right yeah I started writing during production on Challengers Luca Luca gave me the novel for queer one day when we were on set and said read this tonight and let me know if you want to write it for me read it tonight just read the whole thing tonight well it's a short novel it's only hundred and something Pages um yeah know if I'm that good but go on you were you had you certainly had an incentive to keep going yeah well and it's it is also the kind of Novel where once you start reading it it's very hard to put it down because it's this legendary you know brilliant book by a legendary guy and the prospect of doing that with Luca was so exciting to me so I I read it immediately and said yes I want to do it and and I started writing it while we were on set and then really finished it around when we wrapped and then we pretty quickly were able to put that movie together and we shot it last year in Rome done and dusted yeah I don't I don't have any information about the release or anything like that but the movie is already shot this is with Daniel Craig yes this is Daniel Craig and Drew starky and then uh a number of other amazing actors including Jason schwarzman and Leslie Manville so that was a that's a very I'm I'm really really excited for people to see that movie wow you are going great guns and just I guess to Brown the bend here a little bit on on the original so as you know in your wife's film the husband it's it's quite in some sense is autobiographical although it's not she doesn't say it's an a autobiography she says isn't the husband character which some people would clearly assume is you is a incredibly understanding and meanwhile in your work you did the wife album with some Choice words so do you guys just accept that you are dealing in totally in fiction or do you look at the character in past lives and say yes I am a great guy no I think it only it only does a disservice to the amazing work that Seline and her actor John mararo did in creating that character um for anybody to confuse it with me I would hate to have anybody conflate those two things because I think it it sort of can only serve to break the spell of that movie for you to all a sudden have this real guy in your head when you're thinking about that character I I gotta confess when I watched it I thought wow her husband must be a great guy but I mean sitting I'll take I'll take that okay and then your stuff doesn't say why are you thinking this is about your wife when I'm your wife and you just accept that you're both artists and you do things that are not about each other even if they're theoretically could be about each other yeah that's kind of one of the benefits of spending your life with somebody who does the same thing as you is that you pretty much understand how this all works and there's not the same kind of confusion you might have with somebody who's not in the Arts so I I think we really see our work as our work and our lives as our lives and and we don't really see much overlap between them Justin kitzis is the writer of Challengers the film is in theaters now thank you so much for talking to us today thank you I really appreciate it and that's the business Joshua faram produced and edited today's program with help this week from Phil Richards Michael Stark and Sue marges who mixed the show you can stream the business as well as other great KCRW shows on kcrw.com or wherever you get your podcasts I'm Kim Masters we'll see you next week on the business