In ‘Mountainhead,’ a Copper Pot Offers a Subtle (and Silly) Display of Wealth

A low-key weekend with the boys appears a bit of completely different when the boys have a mixed web value of $342.5 billion. For starters, it may be safely assumed that almost all attendees will arrive by personal jet. And when you truly make it to the dangle, you might discover that the whiskey bottles are resting on little whiskey plinths.

With all these billions — and egos — swirling round, it may well assist to set a number of floor guidelines. “No offers, no meals, no excessive heels,” Steve Carell’s character reminds his buddies shortly after they’re reunited in “Mountainhead,” HBO’s new satire about 4 tech titans on vacation whereas a disinformation disaster of their very own making threatens to destroy civilization as we all know it.

As for Rule No. 1, truthful sufficient; nobody desires to be pitched whereas off the clock. But it surely’s Rule No. 2 that Souper (Jason Schwartzman), who welcomes the group into his 21,000-square-foot, new-build Utah ski lodge, appears to have probably the most constant bother with.

Because the try-hard “poorest billionaire within the gang,” his internet hosting impulses consistently run afoul of the informal poker-night vibe that his masters-of-the-universe friends are searching for. Someplace alongside the road, Souper appears to have discovered that the best way to a tech bro’s pocketbook is thru his abdomen, and one of many film’s finest recurring gags is the considerable but untouched unfold of snacks, which slowly proliferate like an algal bloom, first overtaking one kitchen island, then the one proper behind it.

Souper’s eagerness to impress ultimately prompts one of many movie’s most subtly ridiculous questions. Is turbot, a bottom-feeding European flatfish with eyes on the left facet of its head, a meal in and of itself, or is it merely “a choosing fish”?

Huh?

“What’s a choosing fish, dude?” asks Jeff (Ramy Youssef), a man-made intelligence entrepreneur and turbot skeptic. “That is poker evening. There’s no employees, no cooks. That is speculated to be, like, membership sandwiches, heart-attack burgers, rooster buckets.”

Undeterred, Souper presses on together with his plans for the “six-man line-caught turbot” (spectacular!) he acquired for the event. Naturally, these plans necessitate what could also be described because the fifth character of “Mountainhead”: the kite-shaped, two-handled copper-and-tin turbot pot, or turbotière, that he makes use of to arrange it.

Few issues scream privilege fairly like hyper-specific, single-purpose cookware — a incontrovertible fact that Jesse Armstrong, who wrote and directed “Mountainhead,” would certainly know because the creator and showrunner of “Succession,” which took a equally unsparing take a look at the excesses of the 1 p.c. Over that present’s 4 seasons, he fleshed out the world of the ultrawealthy Roy household with assist from the manufacturing designer Stephen Carter, who additionally joined him for “Mountainhead.”

Nailing the small print are important for somebody like Mr. Carter, who, by his personal admission, doesn’t himself journey in such rarefied circles. Had he ever heard of a turbotière earlier than beginning work on “Mountainhead”?

“Completely not,” he stated with amusing. As a result of the film was shot totally on location close to Park Metropolis, Utah, Mr. Carter enlisted Monica Jacobs, a fellow “Succession” alum residing in New York, to assist the movie’s Utah-based prop grasp “hit the correct notice for the high-end, you realize, luxurious of all of it.”

Given the movie’s tight manufacturing schedule, Mr. Carter didn’t have time to be terribly choosy. “It was the primary one which they discovered that appeared plausibly good sufficient that they might get their palms on in time,” he stated, including, “It’s a quite particular piece.”

And the way. Ms. Jacobs in the end discovered the classic turbotière that was featured within the movie at Sterling Place, a house items store in Brooklyn not removed from the place Mr. Carter lives. Ms. Jacobs snapped a number of images of her discover, which a tag recognized as a “Turbot Fish Pot in Copper & Tin” (worth: $750), and despatched them alongside to Mr. Carter in Utah.

Though different, extra impressively worn-looking models may be discovered on-line for as a lot as $1,600, it’s most likely for one of the best that Mr. Carter didn’t maintain out to comparability store: He might need been ready some time. Even on their web sites, main cookware retailers don’t inventory the extremely specialised turbotière — by that or some other title.

“Williams Sonoma, Sur La Desk won’t ever, ever have something that particular — they’re too mainstream,” stated Fotini Tsiramanes, who works on the Loaves & Fishes Cookshop in Bridgehampton, N.Y. Reached by telephone on Sunday, Ms. Tsiramanes stated the shop outfitted an amazing many kitchens within the Hamptons, usually staffed by skilled cooks cooking for a number of the nation’s wealthiest and most exacting. Retaining a turbot pot on their cabinets, she recommended, could be a waste of area.

“It’s one thing that we might by no means usher in,” Ms. Tsiramanes stated, “as a result of you’re the first individual in my 14 years of working right here who has ever requested one.”

For a backside feeder, the turbot has a wealthy historical past of touching off questions of sophistication and standing. Within the Nineteen Sixties, the matter of which flatfish had been entitled to bear the proud title turbot aroused the attentions of the State Division, the Supreme Courtroom and the Danish Embassy.

“Is it a prince of the piscatorial kingdom or a discount counter bonanza?” The New York Occasions asked in 1972, because the status of “true” turbot (a luxurious fish discovered within the English Channel and the North Sea and imported from France) was being tarnished by an inflow of lower-grade “Greenland turbot” (truly halibut) in supermarkets.

Its admittedly peculiar anatomy however, turbot might simply be ready in a extra standard pan. However for sure gourmets and strivers, that might be inappropriate.

“On this case, it’s extra about Souper eager to impress these buddies of his that come over to his home for the primary time,” Mr. Carter defined. “Like, ‘What would a kind of insecure tech-bro millionaire have round attempting to impress his tech-bro buddies?’”