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Paul Fischer’s new book, The Last Kings of Hollywood, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema, came out in February, but the number of separate stories that have combined to make it uniquely relevant in the months since are almost… eerie.

The book depicts a period, roughly spanning the decade of the seventies, when the older executives who ran Hollywood had begun to realize that they were suddenly struggling to turn a profit on projects that had once seemed like lay ups: screwball comedies, westerns, song-and-dance vehicles for aging musical stars.

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At the same time as this was happening, there was a crop of younger filmmakers, many of whom had come up through film school programs – which were then very new and widely viewed as the frivolous pursuit of dilettantes (in Fischer’s words, “finishing schools for nepo babies”). Instead, many of these “movie brats” were making their own movies on the cheap, and in many cases, finding new audiences, and making the old Hollywood product seem out-of-touch and corny at the same time.

Sound familiar?

Back here in 2026, The Mandalorian and Grogu, presumably the lay up of all lay ups, landed to widespread indifference in May. This past weekend, Supergirl debuted to $38 million on a reported $170 million budget. (Which is actually worse than the infamous Jared Leto flop, Morbius).

Meanwhile, two of the yea’rs biggest hits have been out-of-left field, low-budget horror movies directed by 20-something YouTubers – Obsession and Backrooms. It’d be premature at this stage to call the YouTuber generation future Spielbergs, but the way that they made an entire system of assumptions about what makes good movie business suddenly seem both corny and misguided feels very much like an echo of the movie brats.

For many of us who’ve been writing about movies for 10, 15, 20 years, the last few years have made movies as a whole feel as culturally irrelevant as they’ve ever been (the handful of legit great movies still managing to get made notwithstanding).

One of the most uplifting aspects of The Last Kings of Hollywood is realizing that the 2020s isn’t the first time that this has happened, and that it’s also potentially reversible.

A few weeks after Obsession and Backrooms became the Zoomer horror Barbenheimer came Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s conscious attempt to bring back “movie magic” and bookend the alien trilogy he started with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and ET (1982).

Aside from the background on Spielberg, one of the most compelling portraits Fischer paints in The Last Kings of Hollywood is of Melissa Mathison. Mathison’s connection to the Coppola-Lucas-Spielberg scene was initially through a friend of Coppola’s, for whom Mathison babysat as a teenager. There’s a gross, typically problematic 1970s scene in which the friend gets Mathison to dress up in a maid’s costume for a dinner party at which Coppola is a guest, knowing it will get him riled up. Mathison eventually becomes Coppola’s mistress, arguably less important as a scandal than it is as her eventual connection to this group of filmmakers. She goes onto write ET and win an Academy Award (as well as marry Harrison Ford, generally acknowledged as the coolest, handsomest man alive in the mid 1970s).

If you watch Spielberg’s alien trilogy, it’s hard not to conclude that ET stands head and shoulders above the other two. And harder, in turn, not to conclude that the reason for that was Mathison. She had a rare talent for writing complicated children, which adds a distinctly human touch to ET that the others, impressive displays of Spielberg’s virtuosic command of the cinematic language though they are, arguably lack. (The kids in Close Encounters are all basically insufferable brats, making Richard Dreyfuss’s decision to just f**k off to space at the end feel almost justified). There are a handful of other great movie books covering some of the same period – memoirs by William Friedkin, Julia Phillips, and Griffin Dunne, to name just a few – but The Last Kings of Hollywood is the first to really give Mathison her due.

Fischer’s book also does a similar thing for Marcia Lucas, who died May 27th of this year. George Lucas’s first wife and collaborator, she edited THX 1138, American Graffiti, and Star Wars (receiving an Oscar nomination for Graffiti and a win for Star Wars), as well as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver for Martin Scorsese. While there have been some assorted hot takes about Marcia Lucas being the true reason for George Lucas’s success, or the only reason George Lucas did anything at all, Fischer paints a fuller picture – of a budding filmmaker who loved designing worlds and fiddling with gadgets, and his wife-collaborator who was often his better angel, pushing for more heart and humanity in his work.

I spoke with Fischer this past week. You can listen above, or read the condensed version below.

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So the story that I’m sort of used to hearing about the ‘70s Hollywood is that Bonnie and Clyde came out and then the youth movement changed everything. You’re going a little later than that, and I think making an interesting case for the Movie Brats Generation as the true inflection point.

Kind of, yeah. You’re right that the ‘70s tends to be Bonnie and Clyde to Heaven’s Gate. And so when you frame it that way, the idea is like, oh, these East Coast, younger film school, kind of edgier, darker, bleaker, depraved, whatever filmmakers come in and they make these films that are more violent and more dark.

There’s that great Pictures at a Revolution book that Mark Harris wrote that contrasts this idea of, there’s one Hollywood that’s The Sound of Music and Dr. Doolittle, and then there’s a new Hollywood that’s Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate and all that kind of stuff. So these guys come in and they make those films and then it gets out of control and it’s the sex and drugs kind of generation and the budgets get bigger and you end up with stuff like Apocalypse Now, New York, New York, and Heaven’s Gate, where these filmmakers are blowing budgets, nearly sinking studios and then have to be reigned in.

And it’s not that that framing is false necessarily, but I remember reading all these books and watching all these films and thinking that it feels like it’s missing something. I was a kid in the ‘80s, and the filmmakers that were the most influential of that group were Spielberg and Lucas and Coppola and Scorsese, to some degree. And if you set Scorsese aside, you’ve got three guys there who, they’re in the sex-and-drugs kind of generation, but they don’t do drugs and they’re kind of sexless (Coppola excepted). They didn’t feel like guys who were out of control in their budgets and stuff, but more guys who actually had a very clear idea of how financial freedom and creative freedom and the way the industry was built were related. And so this book started with this idea of, oh, maybe there’s a different framework there. Which is, it’s not Bonnie and Clyde to Heaven’s Gate, it’s maybe George and Francis meeting, up to Return of the Jedi.

When I think about the cultural forces that we’re still living with and that the movie industry as a whole has been shaped by, I’m not really thinking about Bonnie and Clyde. I’m definitely thinking about this sort of crop starting with Lucas and Coppola and Spielberg and Scorsese.

Yeah. And every HBO show has the DNA of The Godfather and Scorsese movies and every kind of Marvel franchise blockbuster tentpole thing. The DNA is Star Wars and Indiana Jones and all these things. Even that idea of, how do I come into an industry that feels kind of closed and there’s technological tools that could be the thing that give me freedom to make my films or it could be my downfall because money controls them. That’s what people are dealing with now if you want to be a filmmaker, and that’s exactly what they dealt with in 1968. And so their kind of arc felt like it had more to say about the long tail of what happened to the film industry and our film culture.

There’s an irony to this story, where, when I and most people my age think about George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, we probably think, oh, these are the two most commercial filmmakers alive. But when they started out, it seemed like their goals were, we want to create our own industry that’s basically completely separate from the studio system.

It’s one of the things I loved from a storytelling standpoint. We have this idea of Coppola, he’s the guy who will gamble everything, loses money, makes films his way. He’s like, the filmmaker’s filmmaker. But in 1968, when the book starts, people think of him as a sellout. He’s got a Porsche, he’s got a gold watch, he’s a screenwriter on assignment, he works for the studio writing and churning out whatever they want him to do. And then on the flip side, Lucas, who we think of as the guy who makes films to sell toys, in the late ‘60s, he’s actually like, I hate capitalism, I hate the studios, I hate working for anybody else, I hate narrative, I hate emotions. I just want to make abstract mood poems and be experimental. And Spielberg, who we think of as this almost idiot savant who understands the camera and can plug into childlike emotions, in the ‘60s he’s actually both kind of a dark kid who’s experienced Anti-Semitism and feeling unloved but also, and I don’t mean this in a bad way necessarily, very calculated.

Spielberg seems like he has a desire to be accepted in a way that some of the other filmmakers that you profile maybe don’t.

Fully. I think Lucas and Coppola – you don’t want to be a pop psychologist, but they’re those artists who are kind of like, “I have something to say. I am brilliant. I’m going to impose it upon you and you will all see that it is brilliant.” And Spielberg on the flip side is the guy who’s kind of like, “I want you to accept me because I’m like you.”

So shifting gears to another character, there’s a lot of strands of this story that I’ve heard before, whereas I think the Melissa Mathison story in particular, that was very new and sort of a revelation for me.

Melissa Mathison, so she co-wrote E.T., co-wrote The Black Stallion, wrote Indian in the Cupboard, married Harrison Ford, died quite young, tragically. So she’s clearly important to the story, but giving a sense of Melissa Mathison as a person also meant addressing this sort of open secret, which was very challenging from a storytelling standpoint. Peter Biskind had named her once in a Vanity Fair article, but basically she was involved romantically with Francis Coppola for a decade before writing those films.

She was his babysitter, originally, or his friend’s babysitter?

This sounds so bad and it should sound bad. She was his friend’s babysitter. She was still in high school. And one New Year’s Eve dinner party, that friend went, “Hey, Missy, Melissa, you and your friend dress up as French maids, and come and serve dinner for Francis.”

And Coppola, who’s already married with children, starts a relationship with this 18-year-old. So there’s no way to really dress it up in a way that sounds good. And then the relationship essentially is for 10 years, as Coppola grows in stature and in power and he encounters tensions with Eleanor, his wife. The relationship became more and more in plain sight. A lot of what falls apart in Apocalypse Now and a lot of what happens in Hearts of Darkness, Eleanor Coppola’s behind-the-scenes documentary thing – it’s not just that the film’s going badly and there’s a typhoon and they’re losing money and Martin Sheen has a heart attack. All this stuff is happening, that’s true, but also Francis has brought Melissa to the Philippines with him and this is when his wife finds out that he’s been having this long affair. And then after Apocalypse Now, when he’s had to break it off with Melissa Mathison, his kind of goodbye gift is, “I’ve been telling you, you should be writing, you should be a writer. Can you go to the set of this film I’m producing called The Black Stallion and help them write this? “

And so in a way he gives her this career. I think Melissa Madison is a very private person and was very happy with no one talking about any of this stuff, but I encountered this kind of scenario writing this book where it’s like, okay, if I write about Apocalypse Now without writing about that bit, then I’m not telling the full story. I’m erasing her.

If I’m writing about this ecosystem, Coppola and Lucas and Spielberg and DePalma and all these people, a big part of how they connect to one another and have the stamina, a big part of the emotional ecosystem of how they do that is Francis has got Eleanor Coppola and Melissa Mathison. George works with his wife, Marcia, who’s his editor. Steven’s perpetually looking for a kind of mother figure and DePalma is writing films for Margot Kidder, who’s his girlfriend who has this house where they all gather that they’re all horny for Margo and Martin Scorsese can’t help falling in love with every person who stars in his films. And so you kind of go, okay, well, I can’t talk about these guys without talking about the women who are emotionally propping them up.

No, you gave her her due instead, which really complemented watching Disclosure Day. Watching Spielberg’s alien trilogy, I do think ET stands above the other two specifically because it has a way of writing children with empathy, and I have to think that comes down to Melissa Mathison.

For sure, and even Spielberg, to his credit will say no, that’s her screenplay. You can tell, “Oh, this is a woman who understands insecure little boys.”

And whether that insecure little boy is Elliot or Francis Coppola or whoever, that was kind of her thing, being very good at being empathetic. And being such a sounding board, that it was almost like “okay, I’ll take this stuff that’s in your head and write something that is so you that people will assume forever that you’ve come up with every part of this, that this is about your childhood.” And the reality is that she was often just quoting kids that she had babysat.

There’s a similar thing with Marcia Lucas, which is another unfortunately very timely thing that she just died, but you have her in there being the person who pushes George Lucas to be a little more humanistic and give people actual emotions and interpersonal reactions, which he doesn’t want to do, it seems like.

We were talking about narratives earlier, and you had this whole weird period where the perception is that Star Wars came out of George’s head, like Athena out of Zeus’s skull. But then later, the prequels come out and the pendulum swings in the other direction where there was this weird overreaction of like, “no, actually, Star Wars would be s**t without Marcia, she was actually the one who made it all work.”

And so I got to delve back into this thing where, actually, it’s a soup of a bunch of different people. She contributed, he contributed, stuff worked, maybe she was right about this, he was right about that. It’s also just about the difficulty of living with the people you work with. I find it very touching and it’s only slightly in the book because the book kind of ends at that period, but there’s also a framing where, these are two people making these films for kids, who don’t have a family of their own the way that they want to have it, really.

There’s also this aspect where George Lucas seems like a guy who at a basic level hates the act of directing. He doesn’t seem to enjoy that part of it. And then when I watch a Spielberg movie, I feel like I can imagine him running around with a bullhorn and telling people where to go and what to do and moving the pieces around and he’s just living his best life in that moment.

It’s totally that. It’s kind of like, if you’re John Milius, you’d say, “You’ve got to be a general and run your army.” And if you’re Coppola, you’d say, “Well, it’s a dinner party and you got to entertain everybody.” And I think Lucas would’ve been like, “Well, I don’t want to lead anybody and I don’t want to have a dinner party, just leave me alone with the editing machine.”

When I’ve been on film sets, it’s like you’re making 8,000 decisions every day and any one of them could be the one where everything kind of falls apart. I really related to that stuff [Lucas] talks about, of shooting Star Wars in England where he’s like, “The food was s**t, my house was s**t, the weather was s**t.”

People think, “Oh, you’re a filmmaker. You’re going to turn up every day and it’s the same,” but he’s actually like “It’s drafty. I’m cold. I haven’t had a burger in ages. Can’t get a good cup of coffee. There’s nothing on the TV.”

It’s all the stuff that people don’t think about, that’s the stuff that makes you miserable.

Has it struck you that executives today seem out of touch in a lot of the exact same ways as they did in the period you were writing about?

When I spoke to DePalma, he had this really interesting point where he said, the thing that set us apart as a group was that the work was the only thing that mattered. We only had one allegiance. Whereas you go to an executive and he’s worried about what his peers think, what his wife thinks, if he’s going to keep his job, if he’s going to get a raise, what Variety’s going to say, what the Hollywood Reporter is going to say, what the shareholders are going to say, and all that stuff is the enemy of creativity. Whereas [De Palma was saying], we made good s**t because we stuck to our guns, because there was only one thing we had to be loyal to and it was making the film we had in mind the best way we can make it.

Maybe the best part of the book was knowing that that has happened before, where people thought movies were no longer important or a major part of culture, and then some people with passion got their shot and they were able to change things.

I think part of the reason we can’t see the horizon is we’ve got a bunch of 40-year-old columnists asking 60-year-old film executives what the future is going to be and we’re just having the wrong people ask the wrong questions to the wrong people.

I think in a weird way, the systems made the culture so impoverished that we’re back to craving and valuing that stuff the way we used to. That’s where I kind of am with the book. There was that period between the late 40s and the late 60s, there was a dark ages where stuff didn’t work. People were like, “Is the film industry dead?” And I think that’s where we’re at now.

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The instant I heard someone was making a documentary about To Catch A Predator I knew I had to see it. While it may seem like something of a weird novelty now, it’s hard to overstate what a phenomenon To Catch A Predator was in its own time. The clips of personalities like Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart praising To Catch A Predator star Chris Hansen for the “important work” he was doing attest to that. Those are just some of the reminders for us in David Osit’s new documentary Predators how instantly successful the Dateline segment was. In other clip from the early aughts, Hansen testifies before congress.

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Did T-Cap (as it comes to be known in Predators) always give me the ick or did the inherent grossness of the concept only become clear in 2007, when an assistant DA in Texas killed himself with Dateline camera crews swarming outside his house, just after a SWAT team had breached the door?

That guy, the “perp,” had shared lewd chats with a decoy posing as a 16-year-old boy. It escalated to a phone conversation. The decoy had pushed for a meetup. The DA had first stood up the decoy, then broken off contact. The camera crew, along with some participating police, had figured out who he was and went to his house instead, where he shot himself.

The show got sued for $105 million and only ran for six more episodes. But Chris Hansen’s shtick remains as a meme, and has gone onto spawn an entire genre of copycats on YouTube and social media. Hansen, his copycats, and Osit’s own journey as an abuse survivor and one-time T-Cap obsessive are the three central storylines in Predators, which breaks down so much of what I find unsettling about both the format and Hansen personally.

I got to speak with Osit this past week and wrote about it for GQ.

It’s comforting to imagine every that perp nabbed (or driven to suicide) was a genuine child predator (and some undoubtedly were), but others seem now like the same type of people susceptible to being driven crazy by AI chatbots.

Does it matter whether the people netted and publicly smeared in these kinds of stings are genuine pedophiles, or just guys (basically always guys) living at the same intersection of loneliness and untreated mental illness that seems to cause AI psychosis? Does it matter that the people they chat with, reveal perverse fantasies to, and sometimes try (or are baited into) meeting up with aren’t actually underage, but adults, participating, in some way, in this fantasy scenario? Does it matter that the thing they’re selling, the fantasy of a sexually available teenager trolling chat rooms for an older sexual partner, may not actually exist outside of this dual fantasy?

If that sounds dark, it is, though Predators is also darkly comic, especially in its segment about copycats.

In its second segment, Predators follows a Hansen copycat YouTuber who goes by “Skeet Hansen” and refers to the Dateline segment colloquially as “T-Cap.” Skeet Hansen performs a passable, if tawdrier imitation of T-Cap, using a heavily-tattooed, 37-year-old decoy named “T Coy” to capture an alleged pervert before delivering what seems to be his signature catchphrase, “you’ve just been Skeeted.” A plaque commemorating 100,000 YouTube subscribers hangs on his wall.

Anyway, I don’t want to spoil the entire, thoughtful (I hope) write up I did over at GQ, which you can read over there, along with a condensed version of the interview. You can hear the full audio of my chat with David Osit above.

As for the A24 To Catch A Predator movie we reference, it’s called Primetime.

The project, which has a script by Ajon Singh, is said to center on a journalist who takes on the underbelly of crime in a unique way and changes television forever. At this stage, Pattinson does not have a deal to star, only produce.

Sources say that the film draws inspiration from To Catch a Predator, the popular and zeitgeist-buzzing 2000s reality TV show in which host Chris Hansen partook in sting operations luring adult men to homes under the pretense of sexual encounters with minors. A24 is not confirming any connection to the show. [Hollywood Reporter]

That article was from 2024, though some alleged photos from the set dropped in March. They don’t come from any sources I would recognize as legit, though the timing certainly lines up with when Primetime would’ve been shooting. And if they’re real, it definitely appears that Pattinson is playing someone who looks like Hansen.

In an additional wrinkle, the director of Primetime is none other than Lance Oppenheim, a multiple-time #Content Report and Frotcast guest, who previously directed the brilliant documentaries Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld, and Ren Faire. There’s a good chance we’ll be able to get him back when Primetime comes out. Serendipity, baby.

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What this is is the most comprehensive behind-the-scenes interview about The Smashing Machine (2002) that I could conduct. Did you know it was originally supposed to be called “The Specimen?” That HBO considered calling it “The Bloody Punch?” That Hyams wrote his own scripted version of it that was once intended as a vehicle for Mark Wahlberg? That in a roundabout way, it would go on to evolve into what became Warrior? All of these things are true, and we know them because John Hyams was cool enough to sit in for an hour-plus interview. A handful of quotes made it into my GQ retrospective (definitely read that, it’s up there with my Freddy Got Fingered oral history in terms of things I’m most proud of having written) but I always intended to post the whole conversation. Feel like I owed it to posterity.

Funny that Dana White and the UFC are now gung ho on Dwayne Johnson playing Mark Kerr--as Hyams recalls it, Zuffa used to try to scrub every mention of the documentary back when the UFC was still fighting for legitimacy (perhaps understandably so). The original came from a different time, when MMA fighters were far more concerned with convincing the public that they were legitimate athletes and not scary monsters (let alone trying to do rightwing demagoguery or whatever). That’s what makes it such an incredible time capsule, and Hyams was more than game to let yours truly Remember Some MMA Guys, specifically from the PRIDE days. Not always successfully, mind you, but that’s why editing exists. Hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I did, and don’t forget to check out some of John’s other great movies like Universal Soldier: Regeneration and Sick while you’re at it.

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Did you know Pedro Pascal gropes women to deal with his anxiety? If you were online at all in the past week or two, you might have noticed this narrative going around, or people making memes about it, or sharing supposedly damning video evidence of such a thing. Maybe involving Vanessa Kirby, or possibly Willem Dafoe's wife. And yet, when did Pedro Pascal ever actually say anything about anxiety? Who was making the accusations? The narrative didn't quite pass the smell test from the start, and as it turns out, that's probably because it seems to have been some kind of strange astroturfing campaign.

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Kat Tenbarge wrote all about it in Spitfire News this week, and in this bonus podcast, I interview her all about the Pedro Pascal campaign, where it started, why it's happening, and what it tells us about bots, the slop internet, and why it's easier to manipulate celebrity news for bespoke political ends. In Pascal's case, it all seems to trace back to his trans sister and some rabid JK Rowling fans (though possibly also Bella Ramsey and The Last of Us).

Of course, the Pedro Pascal smear campaign is only the latest in a line of these odd, fake-grass-roots social media influence campaigns which seem to have no higher goal than to make you think that, say, Blake Lively is kind of a b***h or whatever. It's only when you dig a little deeper that you discover what seems to be the true motivation, like a messy legal battle between Lively and her former director. Something I actually got drawn into myself when a post of mine appeared to get artificially boosted, possibly as part of a larger influence campaign. Are these mini-viral moments just a way for reputation management firms to justify their paychecks, or is there actually legitimate damage being done?

And did this particular kind of shady reputation management begin with the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial, or does it go back even further? Even before Depp/Heard, why did writing about particular celebrities (Hugh Jackman, Tom Cruise, Kamala Harris) always seem to summon a flood of uncanny-seeming replies?

All this is Kat Tenbarge's particular beat, and she hangs around for a wide-ranging discussion of celebrity culture and niche smear campaigns.

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This past week I was offered the opportunity to speak with this season’s Top Chef finalists — Bailey Sullivan, Shuai Wang, and Tristen Epps. This being The #Content Report, I’m always loathe to turn down an opportunity for #content, so I said yes. I don’t generally love interviewing more than one person at a time, which makes it harder to have a natural conversation, but I figured it would be nice to have some additional Top Chef material leading up to this week’s finale.

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I also had them for 10-15 minutes, which meant we weren’t going to get to delve deeply into anyone’s childhood traumas or desert island discs. With this many people it ends up being more like a company conference call that we’re trying to pretend is a natural conversation than actual natural conversation (these guys just don’t know how to constantly interrupt and talk over each other like seasoned podcasters). Still, it was one of the last chances we’ll get to hear from these competitors, and a good opportunity for them to confront the guy (me) who’s been making fun of them for the past three months face to face. Well, face-to-screen, anyway.

I managed to ask what it was like going from back-of-the-house worker to reality TV character, got Shuai to weigh in on mise-en-place-gate, aka Mise-en-Trash (when he dumped all of Henry’s mise-in-place in the trash by accident during the pickle episode), and asked the chefs who they thought their biggest competitor was going to be when they first showed up to the competition. Oh, and of course, I got to find out what “The Massimo Experience” was like first-hand.

It ain’t Frost/Nixon, but hopefully you enjoy a few more minutes of Top Cheffery before this season fades into history. I meant to sign off the competition “Justice for Big Cabbage,” but I got flustered and forgot.

Official Bios:

Shuai Wang

Hometown: Queens, NY

Current city of residence: North Charleston, SC

Occupation/profession: Chef/Owner at Jackrabbit Filly & King BBQ

Born in Beijing, China, Shuai Wang was raised in Queens, N.Y., from the age of 9. Even though he was surrounded by the delicious meals his grandmother and mom prepared, his excitement for getting into the craft came only after he took a culinary class in high school and read Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential.” Shuai attended the Art Institute of New York, where he dove into his future profession head on, taking a hefty course load while still finding the time to volunteer at the James Beard House whenever his schedule allowed. Following his tenure in New York, he and his wife moved to North Charleston, S.C., where his notoriety in the industry continued to rise. Shuai was a winner of the 2016 Eater Young Guns and Best New Chef awards and his food truck Short Grain was named one of the America’s Top 50 Best New Restaurants by Bon Appetit. In 2017 he was nominated for a James Beard Award for Rising Star Chef. Shuai is the owner and chef of Jackrabbit Filly, a heritage driven New Chinese American Restaurant in Park Circle, North Charleston, and King BBQ, a Chinese BBQ restaurant with southern smoke, which won Top 10 best new BBQ restaurant of 2024 by Southern Living Magazine and 2024 Top 20 Best New Restaurants by Bon Appetit. Shuai and his wife, Corrie, won StarChef Charleston Restauranteur of the Year 2024 and most recently, Shuai was named as a 2025 South Carolina Chef Ambassador.

Tristen Epps-Long

Hometown: Virginia Beach, VA

Current city of residence: Houston, TX

Occupation/profession: Chef/Owner at Epps & Flows Culinary

Tristen Epps-Long is a Caribbean-American chef who focuses on neo Afro-Caribbean cuisine in a fine-dining format. Raised in a single parent military family, Tristen discovered his love for cooking at an early age. After graduating from Johnson & Wales’, he honed his craft in Michelin-star restaurants, eventually earning his own Michelin recognition as the executive chef at Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster in Miami and receiving Star Chef’s Rising Star Chef award. Tristen also served as executive chef of Cooks & Captains in Brooklyn, NY and Ocean Social by Tristen Epps for the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami where he earned a James Beard Nomination for Best Chef of the South. Dedicated to bringing recognition to Black foodways and elevating them within fine culture, Tristen aspires to be a trailblazer and role model for the next generation of chefs. His diverse travels—from Guam, to Stockholm, to West Virginia to New York—have shaped his worldview and profoundly influenced his culinary approach. After relocating back to Houston with the goal of opening his own restaurant, Tristen founded Epps & Flows Culinary, a platform for collaborative dinners showcasing his neo Afro-Caribbean cuisine. He is currently laying the groundwork for two exciting concepts Buboy, a woodfired Afro-Caribbean tasting menu, as well as a casual hot dog bar that reimagines the beloved staple with bold flavors and unique toppings.

Bailey Sullivan

Hometown: Chicago, IL

Current city of residence: Chicago, IL

Occupation/profession: Chef Di Cucina, Monteverde

Chicago native Bailey Sullivan was born into the hospitality industry. Growing up in her dad’s pub Goldyburgers, she always knew she wanted to pursue a career as a chef. While attending culinary school at Kendall College, Bailey interned and worked at a two Michelin-starred restaurant in Chicago, before working under Chef Matthias Merges at Yusho Logan Square, where she developed an appreciation and passion for Asian ingredients and ramen. After graduation her path continued at “Top Chef” alum Beverly Kim’s Michelin-starred restaurant Parachute before joining Monteverde Restaurant and Pastificio to learn the art of hand-made pasta and regional Italian cuisine under James Beard Award-winning chef and “Top Chef” finalist Sarah Grueneberg. Known for embracing seasonal produce and global flavors with an Italian hand, Bailey has earned a reputation for embracing the “atipica” side of Italian cuisine—blending tradition with bold whimsical twists. When she’s not in the kitchen, Bailey enjoys singing karaoke or spending time with her two cats, Giuseppe and Arthas.

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Joey Devine from Roundball Rock/our Top Chef podcast returns to the Frotquarters this week to talk Thunderbolts*! Joey liked it more than I did (not saying much!) but agrees about there being way too much banter. He likes Marvel soy banter even less than I do, but hates the therapy speak slightly less. Something for everyone, I guess.

After we finish discussing Thunderbolts, aka The New Avengers, we move onto our thoughts on the new Mission Impossible, and how many movies ago we believe this franchise jumped the shark (if at all!). I briefly digress into Hurry Up Tomorrow being one of the worst movies I've ever seen in a theater (review forthcoming), plus a little talk about A Working Man and me trying to convince Joey to see The Accountant 2, the latest installment of the best action franchise of the last 10 years. If you love movies, there's at least a 50/50 chance you'll love this podcast! If you like some movies but love the sound of two guys talking, you will LOVE the Frotcast Bonus movie talk starring Joey Devine! Enjoy, and as always, no refunds.

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We discuss all the other topics on our mind, like Ken Lee returning for his (I believe) only other television appearance (he claims on the show that he got interviewed by Howard Stern, but as far as anyone can tell that doesn’t exist anywhere). Meanwhile, the contestants all seemed to gang up on Tiffani. Were they being too mean or did Tiffani start it when she kept trying to steal Dave’s thunder? At one point, she stormed off the stage crying, saying “I don’t want to be someone’s monkey,” at which point someone else onstage says “oh, she just walked off again,” while Dave says “oh, she’s gonna throw up,” which really underlines how drunk everyone is.

Then there’s an editing package lovingly dedicated to Brian’s sexual harassment. Gail Simmons grills Harold about whether he’s single, and finally, season one’s MVP, Stephen, apologizes to Candace for their big fight. And then Ken Lee interrupts him by laughing, and Ken and Stephen get in a big yelling fight. Stephen calls Ken Lee “White Trash,” (which is a weird insult for an Irish guy, but sure) and Ken Lee calls him… a “piece of muck?” I thought I heard “wog” in there, but maybe I’m imagining things. Either way, we analyze the game tape.

Should Top Chef bring back the reunion show? We say yes.

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Joey, Joey, and I Monday Morning Quarterback the dishes, reminisce about the hottest food trends of 2006, and play overhated/underhated, in which we name which food/restaurant trends that get hated unfairly, and which ones don't get hated enough. That's right, we're coming for you, hot chicken.

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In this week’s Top Chef season 1 rewind, the five remaining competitors (season one had only 12 chefs, as opposed to later seasons which usually had 15) were challenged to cater a 100-person wedding. That sounds challenging, perhaps, but not necessarily cruel.

Ah, but that’s not all: the chefs were told to prepare a cold prawn canapé, sketch a cake, and pitch a menu for the couple about to be married, who would then choose the pitch they liked best, and the contestants would then work together to cater the wedding based on the winning menu. Again, challenging, but not mean. It was only after all the chefs had whipped up their best prawn w****s deserve’s (do not correct my French) and pitched their most pie-in-the-sky catering concepts that Tom Colicchio introduced the big twist: Oh yeah, the wedding to be catered is tomorrow.

At which point the chefs had to do their best to reproduce a speculative concept, pitched under partially false pretenses, using ingredients sourced from a regular grocery store, and prepped over the course of a single night. Wedding food is inevitably disappointing even under ideal circumstances, let alone this. And so this was essentially an impossible-to-succeed task, guaranteed to disappoint the two newlyweds who so helpfully allowed a production crew to shoot an episode of a reality show they’d never heard of on their most special day (I’m sure they saved a bundle on it, but still). This challenge was cruel to just about everyone!

Especially our beautiful big-tie knotted boy Stephen Asprinio, who ended up (spoiler alert) getting kicked off, despite preparing nowhere near the worst food of the episode and being the undisputed ratings MVP Top Chef season 1. Zero chance this show makes it to its soon-to-be-released 22nd season without Stephen Asprinio. How’s that for gratitude? I tell ya.

Helping Joey Devine (of the Roundball Rock NBA podcast) and I discuss Top Chef S1E8 is Jordan Mattox, of the Fresno’s Best Podcast.

Recording this week’s episode was made slightly more difficult on account of Peacock having summarily removed seasons 1-7 of Top Chef from the channel between the recording of our last episode and this one. You can now find it (with ads) on the Bravo app (if you have a cable subscription), or buy episodes on Prime Video. Remember when we thought “the internet is forever?” Ha! We were so naive. Can’t wait until corporations can decide to no longer offer software updates on our pacemakers or whatever.

Please share, comment, enjoy, and ENGAGE. Don’t forget to visit our sponsor, Blackwood Distilling, at Bourbon Outfitter (get it delivered!). ork together to cater the wedding based on the winning menu. Again, challenging, but not mean. It was only after all the chefs had whipped up their best prawn w****s deserve’s (do not correct my French) and pitched their most pie-in-the-sky catering concepts that Tom Colicchio introduced the big twist: Oh yeah, the wedding to be catered is tomorrow.

At which point the chefs had to do their best to reproduce a speculative concept, pitched under partially false pretenses, using ingredients sourced from a regular grocery store, and prepped over the course of a single night. Wedding food is inevitably disappointing even under ideal circumstances, let alone this. And so this was essentially an impossible-to-succeed task, guaranteed to disappoint the two newlyweds who so helpfully allowed a production crew to shoot an episode of a reality show they’d never heard of on their most special day (I’m sure they saved a bundle on it, but still). This challenge was cruel to just about everyone!

Especially our beautiful big-tie knotted boy Stephen Asprinio, who ended up (spoiler alert) getting kicked off, despite preparing nowhere near the worst food of the episode and being the undisputed ratings MVP Top Chef season 1. Zero chance this show makes it to its soon-to-be-released 22nd season without Stephen Asprinio. How’s that for gratitude? I tell ya.

Helping Joey Devine (of the Roundball Rock NBA podcast) and I discuss Top Chef S1E8 is Jordan Mattox, of the Fresno’s Best Podcast.

David J. Roth from Defector and The Distraction joins Vince and Joey this week to discuss season 1, episode 6 of Top Chef, "Guess Who's Coming for Dinner," with guest judge Ted Allen!

This episode could've been alternately titled "Miguel's Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" as it started with Miguel feeling like the whole world was against him, then he put Palmolive in the dishwasher, and then he put salt instead of sugar in his dessert, and then he ended up at judge's table, and finally he finished things off by calling Tiffani "A snake. SSSSSS" one of the all-time most memorable Top Chef trailer clips.

Dave cried red-faced into his wine glass and lots of other stuff happened too, but the important thing is that Andrea is finally gone. My God, it feels like it took forever, didn't it? it seemed like someone else was about to get sent home, but Andrea, who thought she was above this competition all along, basically decided to fall on her sword instead, making up some dumb b******t about green onions on her way out. Much like Joe Biden, the best thing she did was to leave the stage. Good riddance, Andrea! Have fun pooping!

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[This is a podcast episode newsletter. They’re different than the regular ones.]

The guest? Rachel Fisher from Hollywood Crime Scene. The show? The Top Chef Frotcast Post-Show. This week, all-star guest Rachel is helping me and Joey break down episode five of the first season of Top Chef (it premiered back in 2006!). Rachel was a Top Chef virgin before we asked her on the show, but she has since seen the first five episodes and now she’s hooked. Let that be a lesson to any of you non-Top Chef-watching #Content Report subscribers (PS, I love you!).

The #Content Report, By Vince Mancini is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Seriously though, this show was watchable as hell straight from the get-go and nothing has driven that home like watching these old-ass episodes. This week’s episode is “Blind Confusion,” which debuted the now de rigeur “Blind Taste Test” quickfire challenge. Which in this case was unfortunately won by Andrea, one of my all-time least favorite contestants. OH MY GOD, WHY IS SHE STILL HERE?!?

She got kicked off in episode two (which was already a gift! she should’ve been gone in week one!), then got brought back when Sylvia dropped out to take care of her dead father, and then she somehow landed in the top three last episode. This episode, she managed to win immunity in a blind taste test challenge (aka a non-cooking challenge!) and so we’re stuck with her for yet another episode. This even though she doesn’t seem particularly interested in the challenges, this competition, or even food in general. She strikes all of us as a “food is fuel”-style person, and as food TV enthusiasts, we hate those people.

Luckily there’s also Stephen, one of the all-time great reality show characters, plus human cartoon character Miguel and constantly-flustered Dave. We love this gang. In this episode, they make fusion Latin-American food in San Francisco’s Mission District. Asian ingredients on a taco?! Can they DO that??

Please to enjoy, and check out our sponsor Blackwood Distilling. (Their bourbon and rye are really good, and I’m not just saying that because they’re our sponsor).

Thanks for reading The #Content Report, By Vince Mancini! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Sean Keane from the Roundball Rock podcast joins us this week to discuss Top Chef season 1, episode 4 -- "Food on the Fly." This episode challenged the chefs first to get all their quickfire ingredients from a convenience store and then to prepare an entree that could be reheated in a microwave. These days David Chang and all the hip chefs brag about all the things they cook in a microwave, but back in 2006 that was tantamount to telling one of these fancy chefs to shoot their dog.

"I haven't used one of these in 10 years," says chef Andrea, who is inexplicably still on the show. That is the “Oh, I don’t watch TV” of food.

Yet cutting the chefs down to size a bit seemed to all be part of the (producers’) plan. To get them to drop all the fancy talk and try to relate to some normal people. I guess we thought that's what foodies needed back then, to stop talkin’ so fancy all the time and just throw some normal slop in the microwave from time to time and give the piggies what they want (to cavort, mostly). They weren't entirely wrong. It was good TV, anyway.

This episode also featured possibly the meanest Top Chef guest judge ever, in Jefferson Hill — then the executive chef at the Rotunda at Neiman Marcus, yet another San Francisco location that doesn't exist anymore (we will stop reminiscing about these one week, but not this week). These days Jefferson Hill is... well, no one really knows! He seems to have disappeared from the internet record. Maybe he faked his own death, or lives in a really nice barn somewhere with a dog.

Other drama includes: Miguel stealing Tiffani's idea for Krispy Kreme bread pudding (which sounds disgusting, even though I like both Krispy Kreme and bread pudding), Miguel trying to get Stephen to understand that not everyone is a snob, and Dave being upset that Harold and Stephen clowned his lasagna. Can you believe they’d stoop that low, to ridicule a man’s lasagna? That’s low, boys.

The #Content Report, By Vince Mancini is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Candice ends up going home, and it feels like the producers were setting up a character arc for her that never quite panned out. The presumption was that she might be more than she first appears, but if so we never found out.

Then we try to figure out which classic Real World tropes each Top Chef contestant was cast based on, argue over who is the most successful Real World castmember, and try to imagine a season of Top Chef cast with ex-Real World people. Good times were had. Food was watched. Pack your knives, and also your headphones.

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More movie and culture stuff coming soon (as well as a new Frotcast, with Alice Fraser, in which we attempt to get to the bottom of the Australian breakdancer madness, which should be up in a day or so).

In the meantime, here’s a great Yaphet Kotto story about Robert Mitchum. Nothing like old character actors telling stories.

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This episode, the chefs had to make octopus, which apparently sounded weird and gross to everyone in 2006, even chefs. And then they had to make monkfish for little kids. Crazy how this episode turned out, because some people who went on to become food TV royalty probably should've gone home this episode. Justice for Brian! (Or, maybe not, maybe he deserved it).

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With all due respect to Danny and Dan, I felt like this season of Top Chef was a little anti-climactic, and arguably slightly lower in general entertainment value than previous seasons, especially the most recent ones. Joey has wondered if we’ve reached “peak James Beard Award.” That’s a subject we could debate, but I would also argue that some of this season’s most engaging characters got kicked off too early — Michelle, Soo, and certainly Rasika, who ended up finishing 11th.

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I thought she should’ve gone much further! Well, there’s always at least one raw deal (to go with all the ceviches and crudos). Rasika Venkatesa, a Chennai-born chef recently of Mourad in San Francisco, isn’t letting that get her down. She recently moved to New York to start her own pop-up restaurant business, Mythily, with which she hopes to reinvent Tamil cuisine. Sounds good to me.

She was also kind enough to sit down for a chat, about her time on the show, future plans, what the show means to the restaurant industry these days, and all other manner of chef-type stuff. We’re cookin’ up a conversation!! (I’m sorry). Anyway, hope you enjoy this bonus #Content. Joey and I will be back with a regular Top Chef Frotcast Post Show in a day or two.

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We get all the Top Chef inside info from Amar, including what his casting process was like, how much editors manipulate the show, and whether Top Chef winners still dream of opening new restaurants. He takes us back to when he first heard about the show, working alongside Ilan Hall (who went onto win Top Chef season 2) as line cooks for Charlie Palmer, and why he decided to be on it. He talks about the moment Top Chef stopped feeling like a reality show and started feeling like a legit cooking competition (it involved the Voltaggio Brothers), as well as the auditioning process, the psych evaluation, and more.

Finally, we made Amar go back and watch the first episode of the first season of Top Chef, and we discuss all the things that make it kind of hilarious to watch now, from Katie Lee being the host instead of Padma, to Tom Colicchio’s soul patch, to that crazy Irish guy who got kicked off for putting his finger in Hubert Keller’s sauce (Ken Lee). Uh, that’s DJ Hubert Keller to you.

As always, thank you to our sponsor, Blackwood Distilling Co. (Yes, the show has a sponsor, that’s why it’s free on all platforms).