Starter for 13

Co-showrunner Shawn Ryan on how he teamed up with Ted Griffin for the FX show Terriers:

"We said to Ted: 'Hey, if you ever have a TV idea, come to us," Ryan recalls. "We told him that we'd love to hear it and maybe work with him on it. And after a certain amount of time, he said he did have an idea. It was very loose at the time, but he talked about classic '70s buddy movies. He also talked about The Rockford Files. I don't think he used this word, but I did — 'vibe.' He kept talking about a vibe, and he kept trying to explain [the show's] tone and how the tone was more important than the story in some ways, although the story had to be good. So I think I just said, 'Why don't you just write some pages?' And he did. A lot of the magic that was in the show was in those early pages. I just loved the writing from the beginning."

Popper

Ex-UBS commodities analyst Julien Garren on what makes AI a bubble:

"So, in summary; you can't create an app with commercial value as it is either generic (games etc), which won't sell, or it is regurgitated public domain (homework), or it is subject to copyright. It's hard to advertise effectively, LLMs cost an exponentially larger amount to train each generation, with a rapidly diminishing gain in accuracy. There's no moat on a model, so there's little pricing power. And the people who use LLMs the most are using them to access compute that costs the developer more to provide than their monthly subscriptions."

Going, going...

Patrick Modiano on the fading city:

"In Baudelaire's time the whole Carrousel area was destroyed. He wrote a poem about it ... nowadays Paris is rather aseptic and everything has become more uniform, yet there is still something strange and mysterious about certain quartiers ... I often have a sense of Paris being covered by a layer of cellophane and I feel as though my own memories have become almost imaginary. It's rather like a favourite pet – a dog or a cat – that has been stuffed and sent to the taxidermist. You recognise it, but it's no longer alive."

Traffic

Putting the finishing touches on something no one cares about.

Now playing: Sequel nearly finished

1. Billie Toppy – 'Men'
2. The National – 'Tropic Morning News'
3. Babe Roots feat. Milly James – 'Falling'
4. Bar Italia – 'Calm Down With Me'
5. T Rex – 'Cosmic Dancer'

Slop stars

Speaking of what used to be movies, the real-life Charles Pulliam-Moore on a new animated character:

A lot of Tilly Norwood's rollout feels like a stunt that could easily be ignored. But buzz-generating stunts like this can also lead to nonsensical ideas like "AI actors" becoming normalized in people's minds.

Pulp lives

Shane Black will not be the last filmmaker to make a movie based on books by Donald E Westlake (1933-2008):

Westlake [as Richard Stark], who created the Parker character, started in the '60s, and he continued writing the character all the way through to his death in 2008. So each generation seemed to have a Parker movie for them. There was Lee Marvin's Point Blank, and he was indelibly stamped in that 1967 production. There was a progression from Robert Duvall's The Outfit in 1973 to Mel Gibson's Payback in 1999. Each new movie that came out was slightly more modern, and so rather than go back in time and try to capture the vintage Parker, our job was to now do our version for this generation.