Mountainhead

Hello and welcome to Obsessed, the podcast.

I'm Matt Wilstein from The Daily Beast, and my guest on the show today is an acclaimed actor who I have enjoyed getting to watch play real life figures like Chevy Chase in the film Saturday Night, and a super rich tech bro who seemed an awful lot like Elon Musk in the HBO movie Mountainhead.

His latest film, The Sun Never Sets, is on a slightly smaller scale, but he is just as brilliant in it.

Corey Michael Smith, welcome to Obsessed, the podcast.

Um, so I knew that a lot of the characteristics that this character would need, I sort of, um, I sort of already like claimed some of them.

And so I felt a little more comfortable.

The other reason why I felt like I could or I wanted to take the risk or felt like I was maybe like down to do this is I was filming Mountainhead at the time that I was offered this.

So every day I'm like working on set with Steve Carell and Jason Schwartzman and Rami Youssef, who were... amazing comedians and great guys.

You, you wanna feel, like, angry about the state of our world and what tech is doing? The reality is unfortunately much more disconcerting than, uh, the show.

Yeah, I mean, I kept thinking of Mountainhead, which you guys know-

Yeah, yeah

... is a movie I adore.

The Luigi corresponding character in Mickey 17 shoots at the Trump corresponding character.

And that all happened in the midst of Musk moving into the White House and the No Kings protests commencing, which had a thousand such protests across the country right after the movie Mountainhead came out.

Mountainhead being about a Musk character named Venice who who releases on his social media generative AI so good that the videos that are being created by people are starting war, starting violence and chaos and riots around the world.

So Mountainhead comes out.

It's overtly about Musk starting riots around the world.

And then the next day, no kings, thousand plus protests, Los Angeles burning from the anti-ice protests.

We're decelerationists.

This is why I tell you, you've got to see the movie Mountainhead.

Decelerationists.

Once you're a decelerationist, they want to kill you.