Joe Coscarelli

Sure, Ray Charles might be an amazing musician, but stop trying to shove this IP down my throat, though I did not yet know the term.

I did not yet know the term that would come to define culture in our lifetimes.

Right.

Learning to play an instrument, just any sort of stunt that then becomes the driving force of the campaign, right?

It's sort of like losing an extreme amount of weight or putting on some crazy prosthetics.

Like if you can learn to mimic the magical skills of a legendary musician, then you are somehow like transcending the craft of acting.

Yeah, the hero's journey of music stories.

And, you know, this applies outside of biopics, fictionalized music stories, sort of behind the music run again where everyone knows the shape of the arc.

And that familiarity, I think, works twofold in these cases when it's about very famous musicians and the –

in that the songs themselves are familiar, the people are familiar, and the beats are familiar, and then put that together and you get a crowd pleaser.

I do think it's not a coincidence that even in the streaming era, the most documentaries we see are also about music or sports, two things that follow these very set paths and have built-in fan bases to sort of flock to the content about pulling back the current.

Don't erase Adam Lambert's queen.

I actually thought that the real win for A Complete Unknown was...

exactly that, how crowd-pleasing it was.

It did a really expert job of taking this mythic figure who has a ton of music, not all of which is equally beloved, and it really boiled down not only the greatest hits and picking the most obvious stuff, but deploying it pretty well.

Like, when he plays Blown in the Wind, like, you can get chills because it feels new, even though you've probably heard this song a

but both the songs they focused on, usually the best ones, the crowd-pleasiest ones, the ones agreed upon to be the classics, and then even which sections of those songs they used.

I'm really fixated on the editing of the songs in A Complete Unknown.

It's just like the best parts of the best songs, and I thought that was a really good way to...

to both remind people that, hey, I know there's a lot of noise around this guy, but, like, at the core of it, like, it's just bangers.