Celebrate the 4th of July With 'National Treasure: The Musical'

I take a week off from Oscar chasing to tell you about the podcast where we take movies that shouldn't be musicals and do it anyway.

Happy Fourth of July!

In all honesty, I spent the last week shooting a short film which was both amazing and rendered me both exhausted and braindead, so it didn’t seem like the best time to try and cobble together a piece about Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, a movie I like very much but which is also a notably dense and controversial dramatization of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. 

So I’m taking this holiday opportunity to instead veer away from the Oscar Chaser vibe for a week to celebrate the launch of Season 2 of my writing partner Sam French’s and my podcast Insert Movie Here: The Musical, where we take movies that shouldn’t be turned into musicals and we do it anyway. Every episode is a real-time brainstorm session of how that week’s movie would be adapted into a musical, including structural changes to the plot, casting, what the songs would be, and where they would go in the story. At the end of every episode, I go away and actually write one of the songs we came up with, and we have some very talented friends of ours perform it.

Season One featured episodes adapting movies such as The Shape of Water, (ft. Erika Henningsen and Kyle Selig), Marriage Story (ft. Lesli Margherita), Fight Club (ft. Casey Cott and Joshua Grosso), The Room (ft. Grey Henson), The Blair Witch Project (ft. Alexis Floyd, Jonathan Christopher, and Ryan Vona), Space Jam (ft. Brandon Michael Nase, Blaine Alden Krauss, Jimmy Nicholas, Jon-Michael Reese, and Jason Veasey), No Country For Old Men (ft. Omar Lopez-Cepero) and Independence Day (ft. Reed Campbell).

Season Two launched yesterday with National Treasure: The Musical, and features ten brand new musical adaptations of the most unlikely films. Guest hosts include Ryan J. Haddad (Hold Me in the Water), Sam Gold & Ryan Bloomquist (“Riverdish: The Unauthorized Case Files of Riverdale”), and Harron Atkins. Musical performers include Molly Griggs (John Proctor is the Villain, Netflix’s The Residence), Tim Heller, Cameron Anika Hill (Elf, 42 Balloons), Arica Jackson (Goddess), Emily Koch (Kimberly Akimbo Nat’l Tour), Alessandra Levy, Jim Hogan (Kimberly Akimbo, T.3), Joe Mendick, Brian Muller (Jordans, @theredflagspod), Rocky Paterra (“I’m an Accountant”), Jackson Perrin, Noah Plomgren (Dead Outlaw), Scott Redmond (Oklahoma! Nat’l Tour), Clay Singer (Masquerade), Jason Weisinger, and Annie Yokom.

Weekly episodes drop every Thursday starting July 3, 2025 through September 4, 2025, and are available wherever you get your podcasts.

Subscribe, share, and tell your weirdest theater friends. Because if Babe: Pig in the City isn’t a musical yet, it’s only a matter of time.

Listen & Subscribe: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/insert-movie-here-the-musical/id1531050822

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0wINmRKTpkl5WjTpEAdhKD?si=6c436df17add4206

Episodes Direct: https://insertmoviehere.podbean.com/

RSS Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/insertmoviehere/feed.xml 

Follow + Share:Instagram: @insertmoviehere

Facebook: @insertmoviehere

Next week: Oscar Chaser is back with Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker follow-up, Zero Dark Thirty