The Business With Kim Masters Podcast: The Ultimate Entertainment Industry Insider

There are some industries in business that can be entertaining, dramatic, have sex scandals, and be populated with the most flamboyant, erratic, and often narcissistic people. Nope, I'm not talking about U.S. politics, although Lauren Boebert has definitely elevated the trashiness and sleaze level of the U.S. Congress, with help from Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

It's the entertainment industry. And one of the best entertainment industry podcasts is KCRW's The Business with Kim Masters.

To be clear, it's not a TV review or film review show. Masters, a long-time journalist for The Hollywood Reporter, reports on the TV and film industry itself.

The Business is produced by KCRW, a National Public Radio (NPR) member station that broadcasts from the campus of Santa Monica College. KCRW airs original news and music shows, as well as programming from NPR and other affiliates.

KCRW has been aggressive in the podcast space for several years with an impressive roster of podcasts including Left Right & Center, The Treatment, and To The Point.

The Business podcast was developed by influential and ground-breaking KCRW producer / host Matt Holzman, who passed away at only 56 years old.

Since its inception, The Business has developed a loyal and sustainable following, largely due to Holzman’s prescience to tap Kim Masters to host the podcast. Masters, an editor-at-large for The Hollywood Reporter, has an impressive resume covering the entertainment business, working for The Daily Beast, NPR, Vanity Fair, Slate, The Washington Post‘s style section, and Time.

Masters is also the author of The Keys to the Kingdom: The Rise of Michael Eisner and the Fall of Everybody Else and co-author with Nancy Griffin of Hit & Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood.

In 2018, Masters accepted a Distinguished Journalist Award from the Greater Los Angeles Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

The format of The Business is the essence of clean design. First, Masters speaks to “her partner in banter” Matt Belloni, who is a founding partner of the digital media company Puck News. Interestingly, Belloni has hosted his own superb entertainment podcast, The Town, for the last two years, via The Ringer podcast network.

 

Belloni and Masters tackle topics that include Bob Iger's succession planning, the possible sale of Shari Redstone's Paramount company, the scandal on Nickelodeon children's shows, and FuboTV’s $1 billion lawsuit seeking to halt the development of the recently announced Fox, Disney, and Warner Brothers Discovery sports streaming service.

 

The Belloni-Masters bantering sessions exude a conversational ease and incisive sapience that enables listeners to understand the discussion topic, inspect the issues with surgical precision and infuse meaning into their insights. Unlike cable news talking heads where bantering means swimming in an overheated soup of bitter vituperation, The Business banter is decidedly low volume but high density in insights and eschews the rhetorical cage match for listening to two people with a lot to say with few distractions.

“On the banter, Matt and I decide on topics just before we banter,” Masters noted in a two-year-old interview, “but we are careful not to ‘pre-banter’ so the banter is pretty spontaneous.”

Masters and Belloni both possess the rhythmic cadence that makes them well-suited for an audio podcast. Master's voice modulation is pitch perfect and Belloni’s baritone always sounds controlled, thoughtful and nicely calibrated.

The second part of the podcast includes an interview with a prominent person (s) in the entertainment industry. Masters avoids the Jimmy Fallon “fawn all over the guests” template for interviewing and instead balances on the paddle board comfortably by asking tough questions and working to capture more than the platitudes and bromides that sports and entertainment people have become accustomed to spouting to the media. Masters doesn’t coddle her guests, but she also doesn’t rough them up, either. In essence, she’s her own “good cop and bad cop” rolled into an audience-friendly package.

“I try to keep balanced and the more relaxed the guests are, the better it works,” she observed in a two-year-old interview with Ear Worthy.

Unlike many entertainment podcasts and TV shows, Masters does not use the interview segment to plug upcoming movies or TV shows with gooey compliments and barely sincere well wishes. Instead, the interviews revolve around several key themes ranging from how difficult it was to finance or film a project, how the filmmaker handled interference with studios or governments, or how people in the industry – from actors to filmmakers – dealt with personal struggles before finally finding success.

The podcast has even covered critical and financial failures in the industry with an eye toward analysis and retrospection instead of the more typical denunciation and put-downs.

“I've had many favorite episodes,” Masters said, discussing the history of her podcast interviews.

Masters continued, “I'd say our two-parter with director Kevin Smith about Stan Lee, his heart attack and his interaction with Harvey Weinstein was a favorite, as well as the interview with Jeffrey Katzenberg about his new short-form video service called Quibi.”

Masters also cited her interview with director Lulu Wang about the challenges making the successful indie film The Farewell attempting to navigate the labyrinth of the Chinese government.

“When guests are fearless and honest, those are the best interviews,” Masters notes. “For example, director Tim Miller was very outspoken. He saw that Simon Kinberg had done the show after Dark Phoenix bombed and I think that inspired him.”

Masters isn’t shy about recounting one of her toughest interviews.

“Probably one of the worst guests I can remember was director Julian Schnabel who was on the show to discuss his latest film Miral. He was surly and pretended to know nothing about how his movie was financed, which is silly and his movie was pretty bad. “

Masters graciously praises her producer Kaitlin Parker, who fields pitches or comes up with ideas while collaborating with Masters, who contributes suggestions for her to pursue when she sees something interesting.

“Sometimes having two guests is better than one, Masters concluded. “Sally Field and Michael Showalter, for example, really brought out the best in each other. It's difficult when one person is too deferential to the other, or when one is so much stronger a talker, that I keep wanting to go back to that person.”

Masters also dishes on how she and producer Parker toil to tease out the best interview possible for their listeners.

Some of Master's most notable recent episodes include the April 5, 2024 episode where she speaks to director James Hawes about his film One Life, which tells the story of Sir Nicholas Winton, who saved more than 600 children, including Masters’ own mother, from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. 

 

Another episode of note was the February 16, 2024, show when Masters speaks to Oppenheimer writer and director Christopher Nolan and American Prometheus co-author Kai Bird about adapting the film’s Pulitzer Prize winning source material. Bird talks about the 25 years it took to complete the sprawling biography with co-author Martin Sherwin, and Nolan shares how he approached adapting their 700-page book into a summer blockbuster hit. After all, how do you make a three-hour film interesting that is essentially a science class on physics? Nolan discussed the decisions he made that crafted the film's oeuvre.

 

One of my favorite episodes of the year is the February 1st show when Masters speaks to writer-director Ed Zwick about his new memoir, Hits, Flops and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood. The filmmaker shared lessons learned from his decades-spanning career in the industry, and he read excerpts from the book, including stories from the making of the 1989 film Glory and how he nearly directed an early iteration of Shakespeare in Love, which he would later end up producing and winning an Oscar for Best Picture. Zwick's tale of actor Matthew Broderick and his entitled mother wanted to rewrite the script exemplify the runaway egos of performers and their entourage.

Who should listen to The Business? People who want to know about entertainment industry trends. People who crave information about the business of making films, streaming shows and TV. People who want a curated tour inside the inner workings of companies that dominate the industry. Finally, people who are fascinated by the artists who create, develop and market content and their personal stories. In short, it’s for listeners who just can’t mind their own business.