Welcome back to More of a Comment, Really…, a weekly interview podcast hosted by Clint Worthington! Every episode will feature interviews with actors, filmmakers, producers, and more, giving you the skinny on the latest films and TV.

In this age of huge, million-dollar tentpoles and audience-pleasing spectacle, it’s important to remember how we got here in the first place — two little films called Jaws and Star Wars. Coming off the later years of New Hollywood, where auteurs handled studio money for increasingly sophisticated, niche projects, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg ushered in a new era of populist entertainment that would change the film industry forever.

But how did they get there? How did two enthusiastic kids from USC Film School with a huge love for B-movies and science fiction serials become the godparents of popular culture? That’s the subject of Blockbuster, a six-episode audio drama podcast courtesy of Epicleff Media (the minds behind Score: The Podcast) — which dramatizes Lucas and Spielberg’s early friendship, their struggles for success, and the rivalry that came with it.

Drawing from extensive research and hundreds of hours of archival material, Blockbuster crafts an intimate portrait of the two iconic filmmakers’ rocky road to cultural immortality — an outcome they couldn’t have possibly anticipated.

For this week’s podcast, I sat down with series creator Matt Schrader (who also directed the excellent doc Score: A Film Music Documentary) to talk about Blockbuster, Score, and the struggles of adapting such an intriguing Hollywood story to the narrative podcast medium. Along the way, we discuss John Williams, what composers are on our respective bucket lists and the American landscape that helped make something like Star Wars possible.

(More of a Comment, Really… is a proud member of the Chicago Podcast Coop. Thanks to Lagunitas for sponsoring this episode!)

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You can also listen to a promo for Blockbuster here: