Author Richard Osman has claimed the US’ popular culture is controlled by “billionaires”. His comments, made on a recent episode of The Rest Is Entertainment, came after Amazon pulled Luca Guadagnino’s film about OpenAI boss, Sam Altman.
The biopic, called Artificial, “will be better served if it were released by a different studio and [we] are working closely with the film-making team to find the film a new home,” Amazon said after deciding to ditch its release.
The nearly-finished film stars Andrew Garfield as Altman and comedian and actor Ike Barinholtz as co-founder of OpenAI, Elon Musk.
The Hollywood Reporter said that its depiction of the two men are not understood to be “wholly flattering”.
And the Guardian noted that the cancellation came “in the wake of a significant partnership struck between Amazon and OpenAI”, a detail Richard Osman and co-host Marina Hyde also mentioned on their podcast.
The Thursday Murder Club author said: “It’s interesting who is passing on [the biopic] because a lot of people have passed on it...
“So whatever Amazon is worried about showing Sam Altman in that light or Elon Musk in that light, other people seem to be as well because people are saying it’s not a bad movie, but almost everybody is passing on it. And that’s almost more depressing.”
He continued: “We are 100% definitely in an era where American popular culture is under the yoke of about five people, all of whom are billionaires and all of whom have quite thin skins”.
Co-host Marina expressed worry about a culture of “self-censorship” meanwhile, adding: “It’s just a different calculus when people are talking about, ‘We can’t make this project because of our cloud partnerships.’ This is something we haven’t been thinking about before but you can see it across all sorts of things.”
For their part, Amazon previously said in a statement: “We have the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino as an award-winning filmmaker – not to mention a longstanding relationship that we hope to continue.”
HuffPost UK has reached out to Amazon for further comment.
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