The Ringer: All Posts by Alan Siegel2024-03-20T06:30:00-04:00https://www.theringer.com/authors/alan-siegel/rss2024-03-20T06:30:00-04:002024-03-20T06:30:00-04:00The Oral History of “I’m the Juggernaut, Bitch!”
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<figcaption>Illustration: <a class="ql-link" href="https://rappart.com/artists/aldo-crusher/" target="_blank">Aldo Crusher</a></figcaption>
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<p>As ‘X-Men ’97’ hits Disney+, it’s time to look back on a different time of the internet, when two friends from Chicago made a dub of the original ‘X-Men: The Animated Series’ and created something deeply funny, crass, and unforgettable</p> <p id="m9yyZP"><em>“O, it is excellent </em></p>
<p id="5dPKEC"><em>To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous </em></p>
<p id="kbtKNY"><em>To use it like a giant.” </em></p>
<p id="1Gv78l"><em>—</em><a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Complete_Works_of_Shakspere_Revised/ShdWFu4KQhcC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=O,+it+is+excellent+To+have+a+giant%27s+strength%3B+but+it+is+tyrannous+To+use+it+like+a+giant.&pg=PA148&printsec=frontcover"><em>William Shakespeare</em></a><em> </em></p>
<p id="HsI31w"></p>
<p id="0fSSPh"><em>“I don’t give a fuck. I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” </em></p>
<p id="It5H2E"><em>—The Juggernaut </em></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="nLlFLK">Eric and Julia Lewald discovered the viral video the way that most baby boomer parents did: Their kid showed it to them. “You’ve got to see this,” their tween son said one day in the mid-2000s, pulling it up on the family computer. </p>
<p id="g0f67a">Someone had taken scenes from <em>X-Men: The Animated Series</em>, the cartoon that the couple<strong> </strong>had developed and overseen for Fox back in the 1990s, and transformed them into material that was <em>very</em> unsuitable for children. The clip featured the Marvel villain Juggernaut—an impossibly big bad guy with superhuman strength and a domed metal helmet—wreaking havoc. On its own, the sequence was appropriate enough for Saturday morning TV—but with overdubbed dialogue, it became R-rated, and the Juggernaut was turned into a spandex-wearing, wisecracking, lecherous psychopath. One bit of the video stood out from the rest: the giant repeatedly yelling, “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!”</p>
<div id="xHvDca"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 152px; position: relative;"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/1mkIhdHsAfzY4sSxaroPyj?utm_source=oembed" style="top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute; border: 0;" allowfullscreen="" allow="clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture;"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="zgvLqT"><br>The Lewalds thought it was, underneath the vulgarity, clever. “It is so gratifying to have worked on anything that other people have taken to and said, ‘I want to play with this, I want to have fun with this,’” Julia says. “As long as it’s done from a place of appreciation and fun versus snarky and nasty.” She admits that the montage occasionally veers off toward the latter, but one thing saves it: “It’s funny!” </p>
<p id="8SZzlp">“I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” quickly became inescapable in the Lewald home—and beyond. “It was really popular for about a year or two with our kids’ friends because we were kind of a hangout party house,” Eric says. “So there’d be six or seven teenagers hanging around, and you’d hear in the background, ‘Yeah, I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!’” </p>
<p id="H8XSRb">In 2006, the parody racked up millions of views on what was then a new video-sharing platform: YouTube. Its most memorable joke became <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-the-juggernaut-bitch">a meme</a>, ended up in rap songs, and even landed in an actual <em>X-Men</em> movie. Today, those four words bring millennials back to a bygone internet era when young people with too much time on their hands could create something, post it, and, if they were lucky, watch it catch fire. By then, big tech was well on its way to capitalizing on DIY content, but for a short stretch, the web felt like a creative Wild West. Two decades later, with their favorite childhood cartoon finally getting a reboot with Disney+’s <em>X-Men ’97</em>, the two regular guys behind “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” are excited to revisit their viral moment. Of course, when they came up with the video, they weren’t thinking about being on the cutting edge of digital creation. They were just trying to make each other laugh. </p>
<h3 id="LnObUr">Part 1: “Press Record and Go Crazy” </h3>
<p id="vgPlIN"><em>Xavier Nazario and Randy Hayes grew up together in the Chicago neighborhood of Humboldt Park. Like millions of other ’90s kids, they loved </em>X-Men—<em>and messing around on their computers. </em></p>
<p id="2ACqNY"><strong>Xavier Nazario (video cocreator):</strong> He would always come over and we would just hang out, play video games and whatnot.</p>
<p id="v3KscG"><strong>Randy Hayes (video cocreator):</strong> It was really just to eat his mother’s cooking because it was delicious.</p>
<p id="k15LrB"><strong>Nazario: </strong>I grew up with the internet since, I think, ’99 or 2000. I remember I had to sell it to my parents, like, “I need a computer. No, it’d be great for high school.” So they got me a computer through Gateway. It came with all this stuff for school. All this software and programs that I never used.</p>
<p id="AnN2yi"><strong>Hayes: </strong>Fooled them. </p>
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<cite>Matt DiGirolamo</cite>
<figcaption>Xavier Nazario and Randy Hayes</figcaption>
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<p id="MvR16R"><strong>Nazario: </strong><em>X-Men</em> was a big part of our childhood. That’s what technically introduced us into the Marvel Universe. <em>X-Men</em>, <em>Spider-Man</em>, <em>Iron Man </em>… </p>
<p id="jskfam"><strong>Hayes: </strong>I’m pretty sure you got a couple of wounds for trying to be Spider-Man or something like that. Everybody does.</p>
<p id="EeMLoB"><strong>Nazario: </strong>I remember the [<em>X-Men</em>] episode we used was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_X-Men:_The_Animated_Series_episodes">the [third] episode of “The Phoenix Saga,”</a> which aired across a whole week. All five episodes.</p>
<p id="9kky5j"><strong>Hayes: </strong>You was lucky because your school was right across the street from the house. I had to run home.</p>
<p id="5YkMpc"><strong>Nazario: </strong>It was a big deal. It was such a big deal that my brother—and he’s over 10 years older than me—was asking me, “Hey, can you please record all these episodes for me so I could watch them?”</p>
<p id="h0pqXu"><strong>Hayes: </strong>Should you tell them that? Ain’t that some kind of piracy? </p>
<p id="VqDnkJ"><strong>Nazario: </strong>If anybody young hears this and doesn’t understand VCRs. … We didn’t have the luxury of like, “Oh, it’s going to be on the streaming service later.” No! You wanted to see something continuously, you had to be there. You had to record it on the spot, and that’s it. </p>
<p id="KT1CRe"><em>Fast-forward a decade, when the longtime friends were both living at home without much to do for fun. One day, the two 20-somethings had an idea … </em></p>
<p id="SMzQVj"><strong>Nazario: </strong>It was actually in November of 2005. Just a really boring November.</p>
<p id="ZGUHRK"><strong>Hayes: </strong>We didn’t feel like shoveling snow. That’s what it was.</p>
<p id="cj1iFW"><strong>Nazario: </strong>The idea for the video came actually from watching other dubs. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Fensler dubs. They were [fake] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8K08AcVru0"><em>G.I. Joe </em>PSAs</a>. </p>
<p id="PNWH7L"><a href="https://www.ericfensler.com/"><strong>Eric Fensler</strong></a><strong> (visual artist and filmmaker): </strong>I worked at a postproduction house. I was an editor. I went to a Virgin Megastore on my lunch break. You could just say, “Hey, can I listen to music?” You could just say, “Hey, can I listen to the CD?” They’d open it up, and you could go listen to it. That’s how it was back then. Or they’d have a station for DVDs. </p>
<p id="Q6NUWd">The <em>G.I. Joe </em>movie was in there with 25 of the PSAs as bonus features. I watched the movie, and then I found more entertainment in the PSAs. I really had a visceral flashback of growing up and watching all that. And I was like, “Gosh, these are so weird.” … So that started spinning some ideas—how to repurpose them and give them new dialogue and new meaning and make art.</p>
<p id="IJwYh1"><strong>Nazario: </strong>And then we also watched one called <em>Old School Afternoon</em>, where somebody took <em>He-Man</em>,<em> Voltron</em>, <em>ThunderCats</em>, all of those characters, and mixed them together. I don’t know how they did this in 2005, but literally mixed them all together, had them talking.</p>
<p id="UZ6OLQ"><strong>Nazario: </strong>These things were hilarious to me. And I had editing software that I had gotten from a teacher in high school. Ms. Mohammed, thank you very much. Ms. Mohammed started my whole freaking thing. She gave me this <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegas_Pro">Sony Vegas</a>. From then on, I’ve just been on this software ever since. We had a crappy little computer mic. </p>
<p id="aAFIxp"><strong>Hayes: </strong>Oh,<strong> </strong>I remember that.</p>
<p id="AiYcwE"><strong>Nazario: </strong>I’m happy someone had “The Phoenix Saga” available for download back then because there was no other way to watch it unless I still had the VHS, which I didn’t even know if I did. So I asked Randy one day. He came over, and I was like, “Hey, you want to dub an episode of the <em>X-Men</em>?” He was like, “Yeah, fuck it.” </p>
<p id="Ry4QUA"><strong>Hayes: </strong>Got nothing to do.</p>
<p id="lROHvM"><strong>Nazario: </strong>That episode, one of the things you see is Juggernaut throwing Charles Xavier. Randy’s behind me playing video games. He looks at it, and the first thing that comes out of his mouth is “Yeah, it’s the Juggernaut, bitch!” </p>
<p id="9lkD02"><strong>Hayes: </strong>It was hilarious to me. It caught me off guard.</p>
<p id="paNpvu"><strong>Nazario: </strong>I was dying laughing, and I said, “Let’s do that. Let’s record that real quick.” And we just went on from there. </p>
<p id="yKFFoA"><strong>Hayes: </strong>Just press record and go crazy.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><div id="546tt4"><div data-anthem-component="aside:11489171"></div></div></div>
<p id="rfmBRn"><strong>Nazario: </strong>I think our take on dubbing is trying to interpret what we’re seeing. Once the X-Men came in, it was like, “OK, we’re going to have to dub these X-Men voices.” It’s basically me doing everybody.</p>
<p id="4vCv1G">I just went and took every scene with the Juggernaut in it and just recorded it. The images. The body language, the facial reaction. That’s what he <em>looked like </em>he was saying. “Yeah, it’s the Juggernaut, bitch!” It was perfect.</p>
<p id="dJ0ApL"><em>That wasn’t the only memorable line in the video. Off the top of his head, Hayes came up with several Juggernaut gems. When he has to withstand an attack on his helmet, Juggernaut says, “I got this shit in fourth grade!” And when Charles Xavier telepathically induces flashbacks, Juggernaut yells, “What the fuck is this shit? I’m tripping off acid!” None of Juggernaut’s anguish slows him down.</em></p>
<p id="QiFXMM"><strong>Hayes: </strong>He’s always just destroying everything. He doesn’t care about anything. </p>
<p id="82v950"><strong>Eric Lewald (</strong><em><strong>X-Men: The Animated Series </strong></em><strong>co-showrunner): </strong><em>X-Men </em>didn’t have a lot of humor. We thought it had dry humor, like action movies have understated humor. Juggernaut was one of the places we could play more than we could with some of the characters. Because of his size.</p>
<p id="xT5nE3"><strong>Nazario: </strong>He’s Charles Xavier’s stepbrother. We know the lore and everything because of the series. We knew how cool he was. </p>
<p id="TZNot9"><strong>Lewald: </strong>The great thing to play with was the emotional stuff, the sibling anxieties between him and Xavier. It was nice to be able to bring this guy to his knees over stuff that happened in their boyhood. It’s much more fun than if he was just a skinny secondary character. It’s the Juggernaut, and he can’t deal with what happened when he was 9.</p>
<p id="itotS0"><strong>Nazario: </strong>We knew how cool he was. But it was after we dubbed the episode and created the lore of the Juggernaut that we realized, “Wow, he’s a real badass.” </p>
<p id="iHtnbY"><strong>Hayes: </strong>He’s unstoppable. </p>
<h3 id="aE6nKT">Part 2: “Everybody Was Loving It. Everybody Was <em>Quoting</em> It.” </h3>
<p id="KQxYFG"><em>Looking back, Nazario and Hayes acknowledge that some of their overdubbed dialogue would be considered, well, pretty offensive today. After all, their Juggernaut was a true predator. But back then, their friends thought the “Juggernaut, bitch!” video was hysterical. The response gave the duo the confidence to send it into cyberspace, where absurdist comedy clips were finding an audience.</em></p>
<p id="vRxlmX"><strong>Rosecrans Baldwin (journalist and creator of </strong><em><strong>The</strong></em><strong> </strong><em><strong>New York Times Magazine</strong></em><strong>’s </strong><a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/the-digital-ramble-military-investigation/"><em><strong>The</strong></em><strong> </strong><em><strong>Digital Ramble</strong></em><strong> blog</strong></a><strong>)</strong>: The platforms were new, and lots of pockets of the web were still silly and homemade. We didn’t really have social media. The mainstream media was still marveling at blogs. For those of us who’d been making—and playing on—websites for a while, it felt like another outgrowth of similar fun.</p>
<p id="IHhk1R"><strong>Fensler: </strong>It was the Wild West. The term is thrown around all the time, and it is actually a good representation of that. You really were on your own on this thing. And it was really just kind of, like, you’re just digging and looking and trying to find out where you fit and where you land.</p>
<p id="k8Cdav"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/GameSocietyPimps"><strong>Aaron Yonda</strong></a><strong> (comedian and cocreator of the web series </strong><em><strong>Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager</strong></em><strong>): </strong>I just think it was more free. I think we all knew that there was going to be a time when advertisers would start getting their hands in it and it would become more constrained, and that’s exactly what happened. But there was this brief window where we all could basically just do anything we wanted and find people doing just about everything ever imagined.</p>
<p id="jaydtL"><strong>Nazario: </strong>The humor back then was kind of edgy. It was of the time. And we were younger. I remember having people over and we were like, “Hey, you want to see a video?” That was the real test. I never expected a female audience to like it.</p>
<p id="W492H3"><strong>Hayes: </strong><em>At all.</em></p>
<p id="PxVkkP"><strong>Nazario: </strong>When we showed it to a female audience ... </p>
<p id="MzAwfM"><strong>Hayes: </strong>… they were laughing.</p>
<p id="MAmnOV"><strong>Nazario: </strong>In February of 2006, I found out about YouTube, Dailymotion, and I think Vimeo. It was Valentine’s Day, and I just said, “Hey, why not put this out there?” </p>
<p id="RmgsT7"><strong>Hayes: </strong>Let’s see what happens.</p>
<p id="wlXyOA"><strong>Nazario: </strong>That was it. The video just exploded.</p>
<p id="SSQ0cR"><strong>Hayes:</strong> He actually texted me like, “Hey, you see the numbers?” I was like, “What?” And I looked and I was like, “Oh!” </p>
<p id="XLzhEI"><strong>Nazario: </strong>I think we hit in the millions. Everybody was loving it. Everybody was <em>quoting</em> it. Everybody was going crazy for it. It was amazing. It’s still surreal to this day, how quick it blew up.</p>
<p id="jO2aby"><strong>Hayes: </strong>They like it. So OK, here we go.</p>
<p id="z5InVw"><strong>Nazario: </strong>It was on the news. They had a segment about how viral videos and viral memes were affecting Hollywood. And it was <em>Snakes on a Plane </em>and us. I think we were over at a friend’s house and I was like, “Yo, what was that? They just mentioned the Juggernaut video making it into the new <em>X-Men</em> movie.” And I’m like, “Yo, did I just hear this?” </p>
<p id="6vHasU"><em>The report was right: In </em>X-Men: The Last Stand<em>, which hit theaters in May 2006, Juggernaut shouts, “Don’t you know who I am? I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” </em><a href="https://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-brett-ratner-allegations-20171101-htmlstory.html"><em>Now-disgraced</em></a><em> director Brett Ratner was likely a fan of Nazario and Hayes’s video. In the underwhelming blockbuster, the character was basically reduced to a one-liner. But it was the most memorable thing about the movie.</em></p>
<p id="CGUFpe"><strong>Simon Kinberg (</strong><em><strong>X-Men: The Last Stand</strong></em><strong> cowriter, to </strong><a href="https://www.polygon.com/23846994/invasion-season-2-simon-kinberg-interview-x-men-star-wars"><em><strong>Polygon</strong></em></a><strong>): </strong>That was a reshoot Ratner line.</p>
<p id="KGWmI2"><strong>Vinnie Jones (Juggernaut in </strong><em><strong>X-Men: The Last Stand</strong></em><strong>, to </strong><a href="https://comicbookmovie.com/x-men/x-men_3_the_last_stand/vinnie-jones-finally-sets-the-record-straight-on-x-men-the-last-stand-role-i-got-mugged-off-exclusive-a177141#gs.6eq19m"><em><strong>Comic Book Movie</strong></em></a><strong>): </strong>It wasn’t the same Juggernaut as I signed on for. They took his story line away; they’d taken his character away, his dialogue. I had two big meetings with Brett about it, and he said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s coming. They’re writing stuff for you as we speak.” And it never fucking happened.</p>
<p id="U2KvfQ"><strong>Nazario: </strong>Word got around that the line was being added. I mean, it would’ve been even crazier if we went to the movies and it’s like, “What the fuck?” </p>
<p id="0YQixg"><strong>Hayes: </strong>We’ve got to go back in time. I know we was together [when we eventually saw it].</p>
<p id="gXlHDe"><strong>Nazario: </strong>I think there was people clapping one night. Going crazy.</p>
<p id="feIQRc"><strong>Hayes: </strong>I said I was going to say something, then I got shy when it popped on the screen. </p>
<p id="wxaEx1"><strong>Nazario: </strong>I think you just said, “Yeah!” </p>
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<h3 id="hqVVHV">
<br>Part 3: “The Juggernaut Is Literally Connected to Us Now.” </h3>
<p id="rQFEDD"><em>Nazario and Hayes took advantage of the popularity of the original video by quickly making a sequel that they released in June 2006. By that fall, their take on the Juggernaut was a pop culture phenomenon. Killer Mike even sampled Jones saying Hayes’s famous line in </em><a href="https://genius.com/Killer-mike-the-juggarnaut-lyrics"><em>“The Juggernaut.”</em></a><em> The two friends had created a viral hit. But, as the story goes for so many early internet triumphs, the victory was bittersweet. They didn’t have any money to show for it. And then YouTube spoiled their fun.</em></p>
<p id="KaCAPa"><strong>Nazario: </strong>This was even before YouTube started doing revenue.</p>
<p id="z9VICg"><strong>Hayes: </strong>Things didn’t change too much, sir. I was still taking the garbage out at my mother’s house.</p>
<p id="r5QzkE"><strong>Nazario: </strong>We had internet clout, but our lives were still the same.</p>
<p id="iXLFw7"><strong>Hayes: </strong>I know we went to go click on a video and a big red notification said it was deleted. “I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’” </p>
<p id="a3yx8O"><strong>Nazario: </strong>It started happening toward the end of 2006. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._YouTube,_Inc.">Viacom started attacking YouTube</a> and started forcing videos to go down. It wasn’t even the “Juggernaut, bitch!” that was the main thing that first got removed from our channel. It was these anime music videos I did for the <em>Avatar: The Last Airbender</em> show. And once that happened, it started a chain reaction that led to not only the “Juggernaut, bitch!” being taken down, but our whole channel.</p>
<p id="3FCrqU"><strong>Yonda: </strong>With <em>Chad Vader</em>, there was always the threat of Lucasfilm. So there was a bunch of time there where we weren’t even sure if we were going to be able to keep making it. In fact, we’d had the idea before that, but nobody would touch it. They were like, “Oh, Lucasfilm will come after you.” </p>
<p id="tudnGW"><strong>Nazario: </strong>We had so many views and so many subscribers. I just had to redo the channel. The channel was under my name, Naztradamix. When I did it again, it was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/mywayentertainment">My Way Entertainment</a>, which is still there now. It was a letdown, but it was a gateway for me to start over.</p>
<p id="t69rFF"><em>Nazario and Hayes continued to collaborate through the late 2000s. Even after “Juggernaut, bitch!,” they didn’t lose their internet clout. In 2010, </em><a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/digital-culture/youre-accidentally-famous-now-what/article4328219/"><em>at ROFLCon at MIT</em></a><em>, they appeared on a panel with Yonda and </em>Chad Vader <em>cocreator Matt Sloan, as well as with Dan Walsh, the man behind satirical comic strip </em><a href="https://garfieldminusgarfield.net/">Garfield Minus Garfield</a>. <em>The phrase that the friends made famous has lived on long after YouTube took down their original video. Other users have managed to re-upload it; </em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSuvOVH0aSQ"><em>one such video</em></a><em> has 9 million views. Today, Nazario works as a ramp agent at O’Hare Airport. Hayes works for his uncle’s cleaning agency. They still hang out and laugh over the Juggernaut. </em></p>
<p id="IACMpj"><strong>Nazario: </strong>YouTube is what it is. It’s now a business. </p>
<p id="WUMnAo"><strong>Yonda: </strong>There were basically no restraints in 2006. </p>
<p id="lZEftn"><strong>Baldwin: </strong>YouTube was intended to be a dating site, similar to Hot or Not. It had big-deal founders, with incredible tech, but did anyone envision Mr. Beast? I remember the first time I saw a YouTube video embedded on a blog—this was the era of crappy Flash—I was blown away. A lot more impressive, at least to me, than somebody doing <em>Squid Game</em> in real life.</p>
<p id="BBFE3Z"><strong>Fensler: </strong>I was making art to share and make people laugh. I didn’t think of them as viral web videos. End of story. </p>
<p id="BlEFOp"><strong>Nazario: </strong>Back then it was a lot more freedom. I remember there was so many people who were vloggers. It was just a fun community. </p>
<p id="KIdhwA"><strong>Hayes: </strong>More organic.</p>
<p id="eUCsUl"><strong>Nazario: </strong>Now it’s just another form of media. It’s crazy because there are accounts that have our video.</p>
<p id="Y1nwLf"><strong>Hayes: </strong>They haven’t been taken down. </p>
<p id="eIyp4W"><strong>Nazario: </strong>Everybody to this day is still mentioning that we should get <em>something </em>for that. It is what it is, man. It happened.</p>
<p id="f6tABO"><strong>Hayes: </strong>I’m appreciative of what happened. It’s still part of pop culture. I don’t know what else there is, man.</p>
<p id="wmh4PG"><strong>Nazario: </strong>Everybody who mentions the Juggernaut, it’s “the Juggernaut, bitch!” </p>
<p id="GNH94j"><strong>Julia Lewald (</strong><em><strong>X-Men: The Animated Series </strong></em><strong>co-showrunner): </strong>Going to cons these days, it’s still a popular line.</p>
<p id="Lqe4v9"><strong>Nazario: </strong>I just saw this artist that I’ve been following for years, <a href="https://www.bosslogicinc.com/">BossLogic</a>, and he’s done great digital art. His art has even been picked up by Marvel Studios. He just posted a digital image of the Juggernaut, and on his chest was a sticker and it’s like, “Hello, I’m the Juggernaut bitch.” And I was like, “Yo, coming from the creator, to see you do this and reference us? That was amazing.” Then he found out about me and started following me. So it’s come full circle. </p>
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<p id="dw95rc"><strong>Hayes: </strong>It’s relevant.</p>
<p id="3tlSMw"><strong>Nazario: </strong>The Juggernaut is literally connected to us now.</p>
<p id="dL1baq"><strong>Julia Lewald:</strong> We’re talking about him now 30 years later.</p>
<p id="dQPvYM"><strong>Nazario: </strong>I remember our first convention where we were guests. We were just going to go eat something at the hotel, and these guys passed us by and they were like, “Oh, it’s the Juggernaut guys. Say it! Say, ‘It’s the Juggernaut, bitch!’”</p>
<p id="yhjmUz"><strong>Hayes: </strong>I was like, “No!” And I went to go eat. It’s got to be in the right location. I can’t be at church like, “Hey, I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” Like, <em>what</em>? </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="8LWyXd"><strong>Nazario:</strong> The Lord’s here!</p>
<p id="n3PRMk"><em>Interviews have been edited and condensed. </em></p>
<aside id="chwpFf"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside><p id="UhIlXq"></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/tv/2024/3/20/24105071/x-men-juggernaut-viral-video-oral-historyAlan Siegel2024-02-29T13:56:34-05:002024-02-29T13:56:34-05:00Remembering Richard Lewis, Comedy’s Proud Prince of Pain
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<figcaption>Getty Images/Ringer illustration</figcaption>
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<p>The stand-up icon, who passed away at the age of 76 on Tuesday, was perhaps better than anyone else at mining personal torment for laughs</p> <p id="F55OHX">Richard Lewis wasn’t the first neurotic stand-up comic, but he was one of the best—and, as contradictory as it sounds, probably the most comfortable. “When I’m on stage, I’m the happiest I could ever be,” he told me in 2022, during an interview about <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2022/10/28/23426969/warren-zevon-late-show-david-letterman-anniversary">his friend Warren Zevon</a>. “I’m just in touch with who I am, and want to express it. It’s just calm. It’s like the eye of a hurricane.” </p>
<p id="h9KL5F">Lewis, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/arts/television/richard-lewis-dead.html">who died of a heart attack on Tuesday at 76</a>, wasn’t being hyperbolic. Over the course of his career, he <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/richard-lewis-interview-curb-your-enthusiasm/2020/02/28/a546dbe0-4de1-11ea-9b5c-eac5b16dafaa_story.html">spoke</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Other-Great-Depression-overcoming-disfunctions/dp/1586486047">wrote</a> candidly about his <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/richard-lewis-on-the-end-of-curb-your-enthusiasm-parkinsons-and-his-mom">strained relationship with his parents</a>, drug use, alcoholism, depression, body dysmorphia, the pain caused by multiple surgeries, and most recently, his experience with <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/richard-lewis-parkinsons-disease-1235400053/">Parkinson’s disease</a>. That the Jewish guy with the poofy mane of black (and eventually gray) hair withstood that barrage is both extraordinary and admirable. But what made the self-described “Prince of Pain” special wasn’t his tolerance for personal torment. It was his ability to spin angst into affability. Self-deprecating jokes poured out of Lewis, but the sweat of a desperate hack never did. After all, his act wasn’t a put-on. It was just him.</p>
<p id="zWqTJt">Lewis was a paranoid person: “On my stationary bike, I have a rearview mirror,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXA-_PxFiL4">he once quipped</a>. His childhood was rough: when<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ZukCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA42&dq=new+york+magazine+richard+lewis&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjRjYOewc-EAxVEEUQIHXDzDh8Q6AF6BAgIEAI#v=onepage&q=new%20york%20magazine%20richard%20lewis&f=false"> <em>New York </em>magazine<em> </em>asked him</a> about his most memorable meal ever, he said, “It was in 1981—the first Thanksgiving I ever had without a social worker present.” And he always found himself in bad situations: in fact, Yale credited him with popularizing the phrase <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080603034014/http://yalepress.typepad.com/yalepresslog/2006/10/yale_gives_rich.html">“the (blank) from hell”</a> after <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/arts/television/richard-lewis-from-hell.html">his ’70s routine</a> about a cursed date. </p>
<p id="Lnp2nz">For the last 25 years, Lewis happily turned his inner turmoil outward as a recurring character on <em>Curb Your Enthusiasm</em>. In the HBO sitcom, now in its final season, he played an even <em>more </em>miserable version of himself opposite his real-life friend Larry David. Whenever Lewis popped up on <em>Curb</em>, something memorable happened. His delivery of the simplest lines were laugh-out-loud funny. Like when Larry dipped his nose into Lewis’s coffee in <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/curb-enthusiasm-season-10-premiere-040738356.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAD4oVSjG7flTo3vgdrs625Z09WHtpTykAErEWM8eHroNkljAc1405Xtp43el4Iyr_1aIYNi6cbcCtcz3nxV_Ak368V8mb5maScE33jMtCEYua46Yo6zYJ1kQ49BQY9U92hxsv3cBt3G_MpV4fxmkJZ8yU_qG07mwvWxeQ3qbNMY8">Season 10</a> and Lewis bellowed, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B8KQwORgCFr/?hl=en">“What are you, a fuckin’ goose?”</a> Or when Lewis was shocked to find Larry selling cars at a dealership and shouted, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/curb/comments/14edvsn/larry_takes_a_job_as_a_car_salesman_richard_lewis/">“What are you, fuckin’ Willy Loman?”</a> None of the show’s guest stars, it seemed, were better at <a href="https://twitter.com/lperiofficial/status/1762950393598800163">breaking David</a>. Often, when the two were meant to be arguing in a scene, you could tell how giddy they both were to be going back and forth with each other. “Richard and I were born three days apart in the same hospital and for most of my life he’s been like a brother to me,” <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C36JWjBvcJo/?hl=en">David said in a statement on Wednesday</a>. “He had that rare combination of being the funniest person and also the sweetest. But today he made me sob and for that I’ll never forgive him.”</p>
<p id="us6JH8">Lewis was good at making other comics laugh. He was a regular on <em>The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson</em>, <em>The Howard Stern Show</em>, <em>Late Night With Conan O’Brien</em>, and <em>The Daily Show</em>. He was also one of David Letterman’s favorite guests, appearing on <em>Late Night </em>48 times. To Lewis, Letterman’s support was a miracle. But it made sense. “It was just an amazing break for me that he <em>understood</em> me,” Lewis told me. “I bring that up because I’m so self-deprecating, and so is David. He’s so hard on himself.” </p>
<p id="yHkxwA">Lewis’s late-night ubiquity and his first two stand-up specials, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0283571/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_I%27m%2520in%2520pain"><em>I’m in Pain</em></a><em> </em>and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1013912/"><em>I’m Exhausted</em></a>, combined to help make him famous. By 1989, he was costarring in a sitcom with Jamie Lee Curtis called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anything_but_Love"><em>Anything but Love</em></a><em>, </em>a will-they-or-won’t-they rom-com that ran for four seasons on ABC, in which Lewis played a magazine columnist named Marty Gold. The fact that an anxious comedian could carry a hit show about a journalist is a bitterly hilarious reminder of the hold both of those professions used to have on America. It’s also proof of how likable Lewis was, even when he wasn’t spilling his guts in a comedy club.</p>
<p id="Et6Pbm">I was too young for his comedy back in the early ’90s, but I remember seeing Lewis in commercials for one of the decade’s strangest products: <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/richard-lewis-boku-commercials.html">BoKu</a>, a juice box … but for grown-ups. In the long-running campaign, the eternally black-clad comedian basically just did his stand-up act, simply holding one of the soft drinks in his hand for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JEbnWl8iz0">30 seconds at a time</a>. When I interviewed him, he said that he had a hand in writing the ads—and he had a ball doing it. Leave it to Richard Lewis, the only man who could sell non-alcoholic juice boxes to adults.</p>
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<p id="HpRf1g">Lewis could relate to people who’d gone through hell. Listening to him talk about Zevon, it was obvious that he revered the musician, and obvious why. “Some of the songs were very self-deprecating,” he said. “He was an exquisite writer.”</p>
<p id="bd7hXR">“A couple years before I bottomed out and got sober, I remember I was at the Palm restaurant in L.A., and there was a great table of a lot of rockers,” Lewis continued. “Warren was there, and I had never met him before. I wasn’t <em>at </em>the dinner, I was just wandering around the restaurant. It was about six guys, and I knew most of the table. But when I saw Zevon, I was just thrilled that I had the chance to just tell him what I thought about him.” </p>
<p id="cRTqJ4">It turned out that Lewis and Zevon were practically neighbors. They even shopped at the same expensive Laurel Canyon grocer. “I loved it when I ran into him at the store buying $20 granola,” Lewis said. “I would walk around with my cart with him, and try to keep him there as long as possible. When I would make him laugh, I could see his face. He would laugh so loudly, but he took that first one or two seconds to breathe and take it in. Then he just let it out. It was like he really appreciated funny. I knew that, as a friend. Of course I loved that he admired me. You feel like a million bucks.” </p>
<p id="ADYW0x">Toward the end of Zevon’s life, when he had cancer and had fallen back into his old habits, he stopped talking to Lewis. It was the singer’s way of protecting his friend. “Because he knew I was sober …” Lewis said. “He was a tough guy, but that was what he did to me, and I understood it, and I loved him for it. I didn’t want to force the issue and call him. I did email him, though, and tell him what I thought about him, and that I understood, and that I loved him.” </p>
<p id="pZ6ZvB">Lewis compared Zevon to someone else he’d gotten to know in New York. “I used to hang out at Mickey Mantle’s bar and restaurant,” Lewis said. “It was near my hotel in Central Park South. Mantle and I were both alcoholics. I would often times bring my work with me and sit at the bar or in a booth, and go over concert material for hours and drink. He really dug me, Mantle. He had two pictures of me hanging. I say this with a great deal of pride: I was the only non-sports figure to be in that restaurant. There were hundreds of pictures of ballplayers, and me. What’s wrong with this fucking picture? It was crazy.” </p>
<p id="e5CS39">Lewis recalls watching <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=Hm_Ybn4JMxM&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY&feature=emb_logo">Bob Costas’s emotional</a> TV interview with Mantle. It was 1994, about a year before <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/14/obituaries/mickey-mantle-great-yankee-slugger-dies-at-63.html">the Yankees great</a> died of liver cancer. The Hall of Famer spoke openly about his alcoholism and failings as a parent. “Here’s the guy going out and wanting to tell people that he might have been worshiped,” Lewis said, “but he could have lived his life a much better and a much healthier way.” <a href="https://twitter.com/TheRichardLewis/status/1422696387041370113">That summer</a>, Lewis told me, “I got sober.” </p>
<p id="ucc5Se">As permanently anguished as he was, Lewis knew he was fortunate to have an outlet for his pain. It’d be a cliché to say that comedy saved him, but it did seem to keep him going until the very end. In the face of a Parkinson’s diagnosis, he returned for the final season of <em>Curb</em>. In last week’s “Vertical Drop, Horizontal Tug,” Larry and Lewis are in the middle of a golf round when Lewis tells Larry that he’s putting him in his will. Larry, of course, is mad about it. He doesn’t need his friend’s money. He says he’ll just donate it to charity. The incredulity, of course, leads to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJcI1Shd75A">another delightfully familiar argument</a>. </p>
<p id="YMlLit">“I’m giving it to you anyway, pal,” Lewis says. </p>
<p id="6IkHVP">“Oh my God, fuck you,” Larry replies. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="G1diQd">That was Lewis. Even when life was cursing him out, he refused to give up.</p>
<aside id="CEiK2Y"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside>
https://www.theringer.com/tv/2024/2/29/24086818/richard-lewis-obituary-comedian-curb-your-enthusiasmAlan Siegel2024-01-18T06:30:00-05:002024-01-18T06:30:00-05:00How ‘True Detective’ Became an Alaskan Horror Story
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Q-7m2h7b-yFsjJ7d3f6xzrgsMdE=/231x0:2898x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73064768/TD_Carpenter.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="https://www.harrisonfreeman.com/" target="_blank">Harrison Freeman</a></figcaption>
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<p>Taking over HBO’s ‘True Detective’ series for ‘Night Country,’ showrunner Issa López relied on the classics, from John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ to David Fincher’s ‘Se7en’</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="2iUwik">Issa López’s long, icy road to <em>True Detective </em>began with a coffee table book and a videotape. Growing up in Mexico City in the 1980s, she loved scary movies. So, as a gift, her father gave her a tome filled with still photographs from horror films. When she flipped through the pages, one image stopped her cold. </p>
<p id="pKWXp4">“Are those legs coming out of someone’s head?” López recalls asking herself. The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKH8VjR6muA">grotesque creature</a> she saw, a disembodied head with long spider legs, was from <em>The Thing</em>. And as soon as she laid eyes on the assimilating alien, she knew she had to see that movie. “The moment I could get my hands on it on VHS, I got it,” she says. “Then I went to my friend’s house and watched it. And I think she was very mad at me because she couldn’t sleep for weeks. And I couldn’t sleep for weeks.” </p>
<p id="3bGcXY">But unlike her pal, López’s insomnia wasn’t caused by fear—it was caused by excitement. The tale of Antarctic researchers being methodically stalked and inhabited by an unseen extraterrestrial force blew her mind. John Carpenter’s opus is more than a showcase for its spectacular practical effects. It’s an excruciatingly tense sci-fi scarefest that refuses to wrap up neatly. “It’s such a perfect movie, with that uncertain ending,” López says. “I love it.”</p>
<p id="MNd0jo">Four decades later, the filmmaker came up with her own polar mystery. She created, wrote, and directed <em>True Detective: Night Country</em>, which is set in <a href="https://www.alaska.org/destinations/region/arctic-far-north">Far North Alaska</a>. The fourth season of the anthology series centers on two cops, played by Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, attempting to solve the grisly murders of scientists at, you guessed it, a desolate scientific research station. </p>
<p id="VAPgjL">López’s take on Nic Pizzolatto’s bleak HBO drama is claustrophobic and gnarly, and it doesn’t just <em>feel </em>dark—it’s set during one of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_night">Arctic’s sunless winters</a>, when there’s absolutely no natural light. The inescapably ominous, pitch-black tundra is an ideal setting for a show trying to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2o2FRwn_hg">curdle blood</a>. </p>
<p id="7Z66lc">López understands that the premise might sound familiar. But she isn’t running away from that. “If you’re going to do something in the Arctic and it’s going to have a sprinkle of the supernatural …” she says, “you realize that you’re basically referencing <em>The Thing</em>. So instead of fighting it, you embrace it.”</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="RzUsuc">When it came time to hire a cinematographer, it was no coincidence that López chose <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_Hoffmeister">Florian Hoffmeister</a>. He shot <em>The Terror</em>, a niche AMC miniseries about a doomed 19th-century Arctic voyage, and their early discussions set the tone for <em>Night Country</em>. “The conversation was ‘Let’s not try to escape the darkness,’” López says. </p>
<p id="Un55rh">For López, embracing the darkness meant also embracing surreality in a way that most gritty cop shows don’t. “It is a tall tale,” Hoffmeister says. “So she sometimes would say, ‘Well, we’ll do this because of the magic of cinema.’ We are not going into literalism.” </p>
<p id="Gln7L9">In the fictional mining town of Ennis, Alaska, there’s an ever-present sense of dread—a mood knowingly borrowed from <em>The Thing</em>. Hoffmeister used one of the film’s first and most unnerving wide shots, of a helicopter chasing after a sled dog, as a point of reference. <strong>“</strong>There is a certain iconic quality to the horror elements and to the photography and to the tension and the atmosphere,” he says. “There’s a very rough edge to it.” </p>
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<p id="CjVMrS">In the opening scene of <em>Night Country</em>, a herd of reindeer hurtles off a cliff. It’s ghastly. And though it initially goes unexplained, it’s the kind of moment that gives you an idea of what you’re in store for. The show is a whodunnit filled with strange and scary phenomena. There are dead bodies found in ice, frozen in a state of terrified rigor mortis. There’s a ghostly man who appears, barefoot and without a coat, seemingly out of thin air. There’s also someone’s loose tongue, and not the metaphorical kind. It’s the kind of realistically gross prop that would’ve made legendary <em>Thing </em>makeup effects creator Rob Bottin proud.</p>
<p id="LYYmRK">Of course, López wasn’t influenced <em>only </em>by <em>The Thing</em>. While developing the series, she turned to several chilling pieces of pop culture for inspiration. One was David Fincher’s <em>Se7en</em>, because to her, a pair of hardboiled detectives is always more interesting than one. “I always feel that having two people coming back and forth with the untangling of the mystery is so much more yummy than having a single genius,” she says. “Because then they become insufferable. You want two, fighting.” </p>
<p id="EOwfHl">When she got the <em>True Detective </em>job, López rewatched <em>Se7en </em>for the umpteenth time. A few minutes in, she had a minor epiphany. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this would have never existed without <em>Silence of the Lambs</em>,’” she says. “So I rewatched <em>Silence of the Lambs</em>, which is still excellent.”</p>
<p id="NSjN1Z">Foster’s performance in Jonathan Demme’s gory thriller made her character, FBI agent Clarice Starling, into a cinematic archetype. But López wasn’t afraid of casting the two-time Oscar winner. “The whole ethos of <em>True Detective</em> is to bring a huge movie star you hadn’t seen in TV before, right?” she says. “And it was like, well, this is a no-brainer if I’ve ever seen one.” </p>
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<p id="Kfmu3y">During their first conversation, they talked about the <em>Night Country </em>scripts and López’s movie <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigers_Are_Not_Afraid"><em>Tigers Are Not Afraid</em></a>. Eventually, Foster acknowledged the elephant in the room. “She said, ‘Let’s not pretend for a second that people are not going to watch this and think of Clarice,’” López recalls. “I was like, ‘Let’s not.’” </p>
<p id="2oFSI5">Foster told López that she’d received offers over the years to play detectives but never took any of those parts—they understandably could never live up to Clarice. Liz Danvers, the bitter officer at the heart of this season of <em>True Detective</em>, caused Foster to rethink that stance. “This might be it,” López remembered Foster telling her. </p>
<p id="iqyix1">“And it was,” López says. “So here we are.” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="hMd782">Christmas songs and car commercials have led us to believe that snow is always beautiful. But anyone who’s lived in a cold-weather climate knows that when those so-called “pretty” flakes accumulate, they become crusty, dirty, inconvenient, hard-packed piles of junk. “The fantasy of beautiful snow?” López says. “That’s bullshit. Snow is disgusting.” </p>
<p id="chEMaS">Ennis may be located north of the Arctic Circle, but it’s far from a winter wonderland. It’s as if the hellishly rainy, unnamed city in <em>Se7en</em> froze over. For a <em>viewer</em>, the cold and darkness feel exhausting, and living there in the winter can be unrelenting. There’s no way to fully escape the elements. That weighs on everyone, especially the most vulnerable. </p>
<p id="CwMoZU">For filming, Iceland stood in for Alaska. But because preproduction took place during the endless sun of the summer, Hoffmeister had a hard time imagining just how cold and dark the island nation would get when shooting started in the fall and winter. He looked for visual references he thought might inspire him. “I was trying to find some material that would show how it does really feel in those places that are so harsh, so remote,” he says. “Of course there is great horror cinematography, but we wanted to create something new, obviously.” </p>
<p id="PVHGbp">At one point, production designer Daniel Taylor showed Hoffmeister <a href="https://gronsky.format.com/endless-night#15">a collection of photographs by Alexander Gronsky</a> called “Endless Night.” “He did amazing photography in the polar regions of the former Soviet Union in mining towns,” Hoffmeister says. The images captured what it was like in the region in the winter: pitch-black nights lit by blinding artificial light.</p>
<p id="s8tXYY">“That was a reference that we looked at, pointed at, and said, ‘That’s really interesting.’ Let’s find a way to transfer that kind of feel into moving images,” Hoffmeister says. “If you think about it musically, the lights should be like a screaming feedback guitar. They should just really <em>go</em>. When they’re on, they should scream at you. And when they’re off, it should just be black.” </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="Ji0Mse"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Who Done It? Breaking Down the Premiere of ‘True Detective: Night Country’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2024/1/14/24038269/true-detective-night-country-season-4-episode-1-recap"},{"title":"What Is ‘True Detective’ Without Its Original Architect? Hint: Still Very Good.","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2024/1/12/24035000/true-detective-night-country-season-4-review-nic-pizzolatto"},{"title":"It’s Still Jodie Foster’s Time—Even Half a Century Into Her Career","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2024/1/11/24033104/jodie-foster-true-detective-night-country-hbo-kali-reis"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="3UusWh">For more inspiration, López and her team also watched two wildly different procedural crime dramas: Michael Mann’s <em>Heat</em> and Denis Villeneuve’s <em>Sicario</em>. She also leaned on mood music. Billie Eilish’s eerie “Bury a Friend,” which asks, “When we all fall asleep, where do we go?” ended up as the <em>Night Country</em> theme song for a reason. </p>
<p id="4v6ZfI">“Melancholy was very much at the center of the show, because in the end, the show is about loneliness and about loss,” López says. “And that was informed by the pandemic and by Billie, no doubt.” </p>
<p id="6Esh9B">López also listened to a lot of Radiohead, and though none of the band’s gloomy tracks made the final cut, she says that “there’s a lot of Radiohead in it. And you can feel it.” </p>
<p id="4l59ls">When I ask López which Radiohead record she played most while making <em>Night Country</em>, she says <em>Kid A</em>. The often surreal 2000 album’s cover art, fittingly, is a painting of a snowy mountain range, and one of its best-known tracks, “Idioteque,” features Thom Yorke issuing a warning: “Ice Age coming / Ice Age coming …” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="2VMFok">López was warned. Shooting a TV series in Iceland in the winter, when there’s limited <a href="https://guidetoiceland.is/nature-info/midnight-sun-in-iceland#so-what-are-the-winters-like">daily sunlight</a>, would be challenging. “Everybody had told us, ‘This is going to get tough, you need to get your <a href="https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/seasonal-affective-disorder/in-depth/seasonal-affective-disorder-treatment/art-20048298">SAD lamp</a> with light,’” she says. “And also, ‘It’s going to get so freezing that the monitors would have a delay because the fluids inside of them were half frozen.’” Still, she felt ready. “We have the right clothes, we have the right heaters, we know how to breathe in the Arctic.” </p>
<p id="NswJ0W">The weather added natural tension to an already frightening series. “It became part of the mood,” López says. “I think that the actors really absolutely imbibe the fact that they were freezing their butts off out there.” </p>
<p id="VWMtX6">The hard part for members of the cast, she says, was actually having to fake being cold when they weren’t. “There’s a couple of instances, specifically when the characters have no clothes on and they’re outside, where we didn’t shoot outside because that’s inhuman to do,” López says. “So for those, they had to pretend to be very, very cold. And I learned in my previous movie that acting fear is the most challenging thing for an actor, trained or not. But I learned in this that acting cold is hard. It’s such a physical thing, it’s hard to simulate.” But most of the time, frigid conditions were not simulated: “Usually the exteriors are exteriors, and the Arctic is the Arctic, and they were actually freezing themselves.” </p>
<p id="x7NHpG">Shooting in remote locations in the middle of the night also presented technical difficulties. To see, the crew had to use headlamps. To avoid elaborate lighting setups that would look way too bright, they also occasionally used an infrared camera. Hoffmeister remembers filming one scene on a frozen lake on a brutally cold evening. “There’s a moment of doubt that when you stand there for a second, and you think, ‘Is it really worth it?’” he says. “But then when you look on the ground in shots in that sequence, the force of the wind would just fly past these people. You would never be able to generate that artificially on a stage.”</p>
<p id="Ewig2d">In real life, the Arctic Circle can be a terrifyingly unforgiving place. It is on-screen, too. “We wanted to tell the story that this is a vast landscape and that people disappear in it,” Hoffmeister says. </p>
<p id="NJyzqx">As the season progresses, the dread never thaws. It builds and closes in on Ennis. Just as López intended, <em>Night Country</em> is an ice-encrusted, sci-fi-tinged horror story. The show doesn’t shy away from that. There are references, subtle and unsubtle, to <em>The Thing</em>. In the premiere, you can see a copy of the DVD right on a shelf inside an empty research station. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="BTVUHp">“I grew up in a moment when Carpenter was basically inoculated into the veins of a generation,” López says. Like the Thing itself, the director is in her filmmaking DNA, always ready to pop out and scare the hell out of the audience.</p>
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https://www.theringer.com/2024/1/18/24042224/true-detective-night-country-show-horror-the-thingAlan Siegel2024-01-12T06:30:00-05:002024-01-12T06:30:00-05:00Hang On … I Have to Have Peacock to Watch Chiefs-Dolphins?!
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<p>As the Streaming Wars rage on, more and more companies are desperate to get into business with the NFL. That’s bad news for Chiefs and Dolphins fans.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="k6vAVJ">With three elegantly simple words, Josh Bowen spoke for millions of NFL fans:</p>
<p id="l6MWpF">“This shit sucks.” </p>
<p id="vNJIs1">The Kansas City native, who owns <a href="https://www.johnbrownbbq.net/">John Brown Smokehouse</a> in Queens, had no clue that Saturday’s Chiefs-Dolphins wild-card game was airing exclusively on Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming service, until we spoke this week. When I told him, he didn’t believe me at first. “I was just assuming this was gonna be on TV like a normal playoff game would be,” he said. “So I’m gonna have to pay for a subscription to watch a playoff game?” </p>
<p id="8V8ExB">The idea of being forced to sign up for a streaming service in order to show playoff football to the hundreds of Chiefs fans packing his restaurant doesn’t just annoy Bowen. It <em>offends </em>him. “It’s un-American to be charging for playoff games,” he says. </p>
<p id="XQOAHc">On the other hand, money grabs <em>are</em> actually an American tradition (as is complaining about paying for something that used to be free). But this specific money grab is new. Last year, NBCUniversal reportedly shelled out <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/peacock-to-carry-one-nfl-playoff-game-exclusively-next-season-fb339027">$110 million</a> to the NFL for the rights to broadcast one playoff game on its digital platform. Unless you live in the Kansas City or Miami areas, there will be no way to watch Chiefs-Dolphins on traditional, local television. It’s the first NFL playoff game that will only be available on a streaming service. </p>
<p id="WG9Ll9">Sure, having to pay <a href="https://www.peacocktv.com/?gclsrc=aw.ds&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAnfmsBhDfARIsAM7MKi2z3LIw5r1bDAZJlf_KkE_A7r6CMvC6Vn-2LP_n80icfed7wmXafIYaAn9BEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds">six bucks</a> to catch a single game (and then maybe a few episodes of <em>The Office</em>) isn’t a grave injustice. But pay-per-view football is impossible<em> not</em> to rail against. It’s the kind of nakedly cynical concept that unites us all. <a href="https://nypost.com/2024/01/08/sports/chiefs-player-stunned-by-110m-peacock-exclusive-nfl-playoff-game/">On his podcast</a>, sports radio legend Mike Francesa dubbed it an “utterly disgraceful, greedy reach by the NFL.” <a href="https://twitter.com/ringer/status/1744473688194662455">Founder of <em>The Ringer</em>, Bill Simmons</a>, called it “one of the all-time sports television disasters.” <em>Wichita Eagle </em>opinion editor Dion Lefler <a href="https://www.kansas.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/dion-lefler/article283971178.html">opened his column</a> on the subject by quoting Tom Petty’s “The Last DJ”: “As we celebrate mediocrity, all the boys upstairs want to see / how much you’ll pay for what you used to get for free.” </p>
<p id="Sba7Hf">Hell, even Chiefs defensive end Charles Omenihu weighed in: “Us playing on peacock ONLY is insane I won’t lie,” <a href="https://twitter.com/charless_94/status/1744216703360442827">he tweeted</a> before <a href="https://twitter.com/charless_94/status/1744914921085702226">offering to pay</a> for three-month subscriptions for 90 people. And right on time, apoplectic fans started to <a href="https://awfulannouncing.com/peacock/chiefs-dolphins-taylor-swift-nfl-playoffs.html">blame Taylor Swift</a> for the NFL’s decision to put the weekend’s marquee matchup on a platform that <a href="https://variety.com/2023/streaming/news/peacock-30-million-subscribers-peak-losses-1235820372/">most of the country</a> doesn’t have. </p>
<p id="2ZFTRI">The numbers-juicing conspiracy theories are exhausting and easy to dismiss, but it’s just as easy to understand the anger behind them. As the entertainment industry has fractured and live events have become the last remaining reliable draw for mass viewership, sports leagues—particularly the NFL, which astonishingly accounted for <a href="https://www.sportico.com/business/media/2024/nfl-posts-93-of-top-100-tv-broadcasts-2023-1234761753/"><em>93 </em>of the 100 most-watched programs in 2023</a>—have found themselves in a position of pure leverage. They’re the last working well in town, and everyone’s thirsty. But by letting the NBCUniversals, Amazons, and Netflixes of the world break their bank accounts for broadcast rights, leagues like the NFL have also jeopardized the viewer experience.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="Z6FL70"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Ringer Staff’s 2023-24 NFL Playoff and Super Bowl Predictions ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2024/1/11/24034283/nfl-playoff-super-bowl-predictions-ravens-bills-49ers"},{"title":"The Key to Every NFL Wild-Card Matchup ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2024/1/8/24030120/wild-card-round-cowboys-packers-matthew-stafford-lions-keys-to-the-game"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="Gg3YRw">“It’s all take and no give,” says Leigh Nelson, a Chiefs fan who lives in Denver. She’s not naive. She understands the NFL’s digital push. It’s 2024, after all. “That part isn’t necessarily new,” she says. But she can’t shake that this is a <em>playoff game</em>. “There’s something about a playoff game that feels like it kind of belongs to the fans a little bit more than a regular game does.” </p>
<p id="jzMeYb">The fact that fans are basically being given no choice but to buy a Peacock subscription is, of course, ironic. The promise of streaming was that it would give viewers endless choices. But in practice, the shattering of TV’s old (yet profitable) model has led to an impossible one in which being a (law-abiding) completist requires a host of recurring monthly payments. To watch the full slate of NFL games this season, you needed access to the major TV networks, Amazon Prime Video, ESPN, the NFL Network, YouTubeTV (the only place you can buy the Sunday Ticket package), and sometimes Peacock (the streamer broadcast a game between the Bills and Chargers during Week 16). The league has also stretched out its schedule like pizza dough over the last decade, strategically sprinkling games throughout the week. Simply figuring out how to watch can be a pain in the ass. </p>
<p id="I61kuS">“While most of humanity is benefitting from the shift to streaming, sports fans are sort of fucked,” says Alan Wolk, cofounder of the media analysis firm <a href="https://www.tvrev.com/">TVREV</a>. “It’s like, ‘Where do I watch the game? Where is it? Do I have to subscribe to this new service now that I don’t really care about? And I don’t even know where it is.’ And all that. There’s a lot of anger.” </p>
<p id="mZNlAT">This season, Bowen had to keep his restaurant open on Christmas because his team had an afternoon game that day. “The person who made this year’s Chiefs schedule is hereby banned from John Brown,” <a href="https://www.facebook.com/JohnBrownBBQ">he wrote on Facebook</a>. “Next year we expect a game in Europe at 3 a.m., on a Wednesday, on CSPAN. … Merry Christmas to each and every one of you. Except Raiders and Broncos fans.” </p>
<p id="uIFKKc">Bowen knows that streaming is “the future,” but the way the NFL treats its viewers bothers him. He also knows that it could be worse. “There are Chiefs bars out there that don’t even have HD TVs yet,” he says. And then there are the millions of aging fans at home who haven’t made the switch to streaming yet. They want to watch the damn game, too. </p>
<p id="GKDtdt">All of this leads to one obvious question for the NFL: “Is it eventually going to bite them in the ass?” Wolk asks. “Because fans, I think, see it as a money grab. It’s not like you’re making it convenient for me. You’re just trying to make more money. And then that could translate to, ‘Well, to hell with this.’” </p>
<p id="aQngFx">It <em>could</em>. Then again, it hasn’t yet. In 2023, NFL ratings <a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/media/nfl-posts-highest-regular-season-tv-ratings-since-2015-1817bd5f">shot up</a>. At this point, there may be no controversy that will curb our ravenous hunger for football. No matter how irritating and difficult it’s becoming to consume it, simply not watching isn’t a real option. Our loyalty isn’t to the league. It’s to a sport that, despite its well-chronicled ugliness, gives us more surprising, exciting moments than anything else on TV. It’s to our teams, which are part of our identities. Not tuning in feels like an act of self-betrayal. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="XTpJyi">So on Saturday night, fans in Patrick Mahomes and Tua Tagovailoa jerseys across America will be scanning the channel listings, screaming “Where the fuck is the game?!” at their 70-inch flat-screen TVs. After a few minutes, though, they’ll forget that they had to subscribe to a streaming service to watch. And the next day, all they’ll think about is who won and who lost. They probably won’t even remember to cancel Peacock.</p>
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https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2024/1/12/24035355/nfl-playoffs-kansas-city-chiefs-miami-dolphins-streaming-peacockAlan Siegel2023-12-27T06:20:00-05:002023-12-27T06:20:00-05:00How ‘Ferrari’ Was Forged
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<p>Michael Mann delves deep into his newest film, a biopic that has been decades in the making</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="m4aWQ0">Michael Mann doesn’t just make movies. He builds them from scratch. The director tells me that, before shooting <em>Ferrari</em>,<em> </em>he and his team put together a packet containing the specifications needed to assemble a fleet of 1950s race cars. “Here’s a picture of it, if you’d like,” Mann says during a video call in November, holding up a page with specs of his favorite vehicle of the bunch, the Ferrari 335 S. </p>
<p id="uYPbPR">The amount of detail is staggering. There’s a neatly organized table filled with typed notes about the bodywork, hood, trunk, windscreen, lights, exhaust, wheels, tires, steering wheel, shifter, seats, tank, fuse box, pedal box, switches, tachometer, and other gauges. The chart has a column outlining the 16-step process of constructing the roadster and getting it ready for filming. “This is what we did for each car,” Mann says. </p>
<p id="mcdizT">To film a realistic biopic about Italian national hero Enzo Ferrari, the founder of the eponymous automaker and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuderia_Ferrari">racing team</a>, there was no other way. Mann had zero interest in making a highly stylized sports movie. That would’ve been pedestrian. “You’re seeing images and angles and pieces that we really haven’t seen before, especially with the intensity of the action that we’re doing with the cars,” says stunt coordinator Robert Nagle. “And I think it really keeps you in the story.” </p>
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<p id="R3bswB">Watching <em>Ferrari</em>, released on Christmas and starring Adam Driver in the title role, is a visceral experience. “What I did not<em> </em>want was beautiful pictures and long lenses of cars weaving through wonderful Tuscan roads,” Mann says. “The artistic objective was to impact the audience in a way that they feel the experience of being in the car. I wanted to put them in the car, not be removed observers.” </p>
<p id="skud3x">But Mann’s goal was not <em>only </em>to bludgeon the audience with verisimilitude. To him, fidelity is simply the best way into the life of a man obsessed with his craft. During the period covered by the movie, Ferrari’s company, his racing team, and his marriage are in trouble—and he’s fighting for a way to save them all. “The only reason this had viability for me was because of the unique history of Enzo Ferrari, that happened to be three months in 1957 in which there’s so many tempestuous, operatic events occurring in his private, intimate life,” Mann says. “I would not have been interested in some kind of a linear biopic that crossed decades.” The way Mann sees it, the story is “a deep dive behind the giant representational figure, very stoic and distant with the sunglasses. And you don’t know what’s going on beneath.” </p>
<p id="KkiZcW">The now-80-year-old Mann always has been interested in showing what makes a certain kind of emotionally distant, hyper-driven guy tick. From safecracker Frank in <em>Thief </em>to bank robber Neil McCauley in <em>Heat</em>, the filmmaker’s most memorable characters start off as both highly principled and deeply flawed. They also tend to end up that way. “In drama, typically when people are in conflict, they resolve the conflict,” Mann says. “Bullshit. You don’t resolve conflict in your life. Usually both things are true, and you carry the contradiction to your grave.”</p>
<p id="ndu0kt">The director’s latest protagonist fits that mold. And it’s why he’s been chasing the project for <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/dec/16/michael-mann-interview-enzo-ferrari-biopic">three decades</a>: The movie isn’t just a window into Enzo Ferrari’s mind—it’s a window into Michael Mann’s.</p>
<p id="UxGNmP"><strong> </strong></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="bxPZWO">The road to <em>Ferrari </em>was as long, twisty, and treacherous as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mille_Miglia">Mille Miglia</a>. It started in the late ’50s. Back then, Mann was a teenage gearhead. The day after his 16th birthday, he bought himself a bike. “Some strange two-stroke motorcycle or something on the South Side of Chicago,” he says. The first car he owned was a 1957 Chevy that used to be a taxicab. It had 200,000 miles on it, he recalls, and “a $19 paint job.” </p>
<p id="0nI0B0">As Mann got older, his taste in automobiles matured, even if he couldn’t afford a nice one yet. While attending film school in London in the ’60s, he was “absolutely stone-cold broke. And London is a miserable place to be broke because it’s moldy, cold, damp.” But one day, as he stood on the corner of Brompton Road, someone drove by him in a car that took his breath away. “Aesthetically, I sensed a harmony of it,” Mann says, “like a spectacular piece of architecture. It was like a moving piece of sculpture, like some beautiful black panther.” </p>
<p id="J7pywm">It was a 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB four-cam. “I wondered why it did have that effect on me,” he says. First off, it was a beautiful car. There’s a reason, Mann points out, that the MoMa had <a href="https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/411">a Ferrari exhibit</a>. “They belong in museums,” he says. Mann also realized that when it comes to Ferraris, form follows function. “Their aesthetic appeal is based not just on aesthetics,” he says. “It’s not <em>just </em>the shape, but what the car does<em> </em>is so strong that they’re highly prized, and appropriately so.” </p>
<p id="tgDFv2">The director drove a Ferrari for the first time in the early ’80s, not long before Sonny Crockett got behind the wheel of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari_Daytona">Daytona Spyder 365 GTS/4</a> in <em>Miami Vice</em>. Mann bought a 1983 308 GTB in Europe and brought it back to the United States. When I asked him whether it lived up to his expectations, Mann just smiled and said, “Yeah.”</p>
<p id="pcwnbl">The history of Enzo Ferrari and his company, which the ultra-competitive retired race car driver founded in 1939, has intrigued Mann for a long time. “He wasn’t doing racing to sell cars, he was building passenger cars to finance the racing and was constantly in financial trouble, which sounds analogous to being an architect,” he says, before pausing and turning inward. “Or a film director.” </p>
<p id="KFLFqe">Mann has been trying to make a movie about Ferrari since late last century. He was going to collaborate on it with two friends: Academy Award–winning filmmaker Sydney Pollack, who was attached to produce, and writer Troy Kennedy Martin, who based his screenplay on journalist <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/381455">Brock Yates’s Ferrari biography</a>. “Troy was a very, very witty Irish writer living in London and spending too much time in the pubs,” Mann says of Kennedy Martin, whose credits include the first version of <em>The Italian Job</em>. “That was Troy. And he’s a wonderful guy.” </p>
<p id="aqPIt0">The script ended up going through several drafts. And the movie’s development dragged on and on. “I’ve watched him try and get this project off the ground for 20-plus years and have been pulled in and out of it,” Nagle says. Every time the stunt coordinator heard that <em>Ferrari </em>was revving up, it fizzled. The film gestated so long, sadly, that its original brain trust never got to see it get the green light. In 2008, Pollack died at 73. In 2009, Kennedy Martin died at 77. </p>
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<p id="wCjIzG">Even without his initial partners, though, Mann remained committed to the movie. A decade ago, it looked like it was finally going to happen: <a href="https://deadline.com/2015/08/christian-bale-ferrari-michael-manns-enzo-ferrari-1201502529/">Christian Bale signed on</a> to play the lead in 2015. But he dropped out <a href="https://deadline.com/2016/01/christian-bale-exits-michael-mann-enzo-ferrari-over-health-concerns-1201684066/">a year later</a>, reportedly because he was concerned about having to gain weight to play the aging automaker. <a href="https://deadline.com/2017/03/hugh-jackman-michael-mann-noomi-rapace-ferrari-1202039278/">Hugh Jackman</a> then slid into the role, and <a href="https://deadline.com/2020/06/hugh-jackman-ferrari-michael-mann-movie-stx-amazon-cannes-1202962040/">by 2020</a>, <em>Ferrari</em> seemed like a <a href="https://memes.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/453a5ab4-98f7-405f-9ba7-ba6951b40aab">go picture</a>. Then <a href="https://deadline.com/2022/02/adam-driver-penelope-cruz-shailene-woodley-ferrari-michael-mann-1234929563/">news broke</a> last February that Jackman was being replaced by Driver, who had just come off playing the head of another iconic Italian company in <em>House of Gucci</em>.</p>
<p id="AeMlhL">“Adam’s lived life, and so did Enzo Ferrari,” Mann says. “Adam’s rooted in a realistic perspective on the facts of life. He’s not inherited a network of contacts because his family was in the film business. Everybody knows he was a veteran. He was in the Marine Corps. He grew up in the real world and has a powerful ambition to be an actor. … He understood that drive and that ambition in Enzo. Adam made himself into something. He made himself into this. It wasn’t gifted.” </p>
<p id="2ObZ2u">From their first meeting, Mann knew he finally had his man. “I just thought, ‘This is Enzo,’” he says. “And for me, when I’m deciding on casting or building character, everything’s from the inside out. That’s where it begins. They have to have it inside of them.” </p>
<p id="o2ATE5">In the reportedly <a href="https://variety.com/2023/film/global/michael-mann-ferrari-adam-driver-venice-1235705525/">$95 million movie</a>, Driver plays a man almost 20 years older and much heftier than he is in real life. It’s not easy embodying a famous person whom you don’t exactly resemble. But like Christopher Plummer’s portrayal of <em>60 Minutes </em>correspondent Mike Wallace in Mann’s <em>The Insider</em>,<em> </em>the director thinks that Driver’s performance feels true. “Adam’s work, you almost have to have a SAG card to understand how spectacular it is,” Mann says. “Because the degree of difficulty is huge. It’s transformational. To think like, walk like, move like, talk like, breathe like [Enzo]; building Enzo from light, athletic, much younger Adam is a real high bar.” </p>
<p id="fKwyvQ">When Mann was casting Laura—Ferrari’s wife, business partner, and foil—Penélope Cruz made his job easy. “I considered a number of different actresses for the part, we always do,” he says. “But on the Zoom with Penélope, I knew by about minute six that she’s going to be it. I restrained myself from saying anything until about minute 20. Then I said, ‘You want to do this?’ Because it was just so apparent that viscerally, in the corner of her being, there was nobody else that could do Laura the way she could. That kind of no-bullshit certainty, that attitude of somebody who has opinions and would never doubt them.” </p>
<p id="utGz9d">Laura and Enzo, while grieving the 24-year-old son they recently lost to muscular dystrophy, have a marriage fraught with passion and resentment. “Their relationship continued to be hostile and romantic at the same time until they died,” Mann says. “There was never any resolution to it. Her doctor showed us some letters that Enzo wrote to her in the ’70s—she died in ’78—that are affectionate, romantic, and everything. They couldn’t live apart; they couldn’t live together.” </p>
<p id="YiRntB">In the movie, Laura learns that her husband isn’t just having an affair with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley); he has a child with her. “He has another home, another wife, and another son you didn’t know about, and the rest of Modena does …” It was infuriating to Laura, one of the most prominent women in the insular northern Italian city. “It’s a very unusual place,” Mann says. “Nobody ever emigrates. <em>Why would you go anywhere else?</em> <em>Everything’s here in Modena</em>.” </p>
<p id="fvH3Vc">In <em>Ferrari</em>, rival automakers even go to the same barbershop. “By the way,” Mann says, getting excited, “when Adam goes and sits in that chair, <em>that’s </em>the chair Enzo sat in. The guy playing the barber is the son of the barber who shaved Enzo. And the decor of that barbershop is exactly the same as it was in 1956 or ’57.” </p>
<p id="byKQlY"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="vaL60L">In the world of <em>Ferrari</em>, Modena’s second religion is automaking. During an early scene in the movie, set during a mass at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Biagio,_Modena">San Biagio</a> church, the priest pretty much says so: “If Jesus had lived today, and not 2,000 years ago, he would have been born in a small town like Modena. He would have been not a carpenter, but a craftsman in metal. Like yourselves. So a God who understood, as a carpenter, the perfection of the adze, appreciates as an engineer, the precision of your lathe, the nature of metal. How it can be forged, shaped, and hammered by your skills into an engine holding inside it fire to make power to speed us through the world. Which is why we give thanks to him today.” </p>
<p id="DWs3Yr">As the priest is speaking, some of the parishioners listen for the starting gun at the autodrome in the distance, then take out stopwatches to track what turns out to be a driver’s record lap time. The men, including Enzo, can’t help it. They’re obsessed. </p>
<p id="u9YzWy">Ferrari isn’t the city’s only car manufacturer with a racing team. Maserati, De Tomaso, Pagani, and Lamborghini were all based in the area at one point. “Those crafts are still alive in Modena,” Mann says. For that, he’s lucky. To make <em>Ferrari</em>, the director needed to build 11 working replica race cars. “And I mean from scratch,” he says. (There’s one automobile in the film that Mann didn’t have to recreate: the 1957 Maserati 250F; <a href="https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/cars/article/pink-floyd-nick-mason-car-collection">Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason</a> let him borrow his.) </p>
<p id="ErwWhK">In early 2022, with preproduction fast approaching, Robert Nagle called vehicle supervisor <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5615866/">Neil Layton</a> about a possible gig. “Straightaway, we hit it off,” says Layton, who worked on the last three James Bond<em> </em>films. “We were both on the same wavelength.” When Nagle told him about the project, Layton was blown away by how ambitious it was. They were fully building cars, not just customizing ones that came off an assembly line. </p>
<p id="750No6">“The biggest challenge was that we all wanted to deliver a vehicle that Michael would see from the word ‘Go’ and would tick all his boxes,” Layton says. “Many people had told me that Michael’s attention to detail is exceptional.” Adds Nagle: “I know Michael well enough and he’s going to want these cars to really run <a href="https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/driving-flat-out.55592/">flat-out</a>, which is as hard as we can run them.” </p>
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<p id="GzDBhO"><br>The process started with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar">laser scans</a> of actual classic Ferraris. “Then when we have the exact—down to the millimeter—shape of the car, we put that into a computer program,” Mann says. “And then reverse engineer what the chassis has to be.” The goal was to make race cars that looked like they were from the ’50s but ran like modern vehicles. The custom Ferraris had contemporary engines, brakes, transmission, and suspension. “The cars had to be fast,” Mann says. But, he adds, “They had to be reliable. They had to be totally safe.” </p>
<p id="6KuhDr">Layton, Nagle, and Co. did much of the design and construction work in England. It wasn’t easy. When it came time to make the <a href="https://www.ferrari.com/en-EN/formula1/801-f1">Ferrari 801</a>, they had to improvise. After all, there was no real-life example of the single-seater left on earth to use as reference. “I went online, I found a one-eighteenth-scale model car, I purchased it from America,” Layton says. “It turned up and we scanned the car, and we times-ed everything by 18. Then from that model—and I’m actually looking at the model now, in front of me, on my desk—we created the car.” </p>
<p id="H1EANy">The team built the 801 in a single week, a remarkable turnaround. According to Layton, they needed only 212 days to complete the entire fleet. “We were doing split shifts,” he says. “We were working seven days a week for 22 weeks, revolving the crew.” </p>
<p id="o8gH7i">But after they’d finished, there was still a lot to be done. That’s where <a href="https://www.campanaonorio.it/">Campana</a> came in. “We are the oldest body shop still in business in Modena,” says owner Rita Campana, whose grandfather founded it in 1947. The family business mostly does work on modern cars for private customers. It had never been involved in a movie production. </p>
<p id="wPGvG6">But it turned out Rita’s father and Mann have a mutual friend: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/gianluigi-longinotti-buitoni/">Gianluigi Longinotti-Buitoni</a>, the former president of Ferrari North America. A year ago, on behalf of the director, Longinotti-Buitoni approached the company about assembling the film’s cars. “We decided to accept the challenge and to dive into this project,” says Campana, whose shop was also tasked with crafting period-appropriate speedometers, brake lights, pedals, and steering wheels. After meeting Mann, she felt confident about the decision to come aboard. “He knows the cars,” she says. “So we had in front of us someone who understood the work, who understood the problems, who understood the timing.” </p>
<p id="tcLSjT">About the timing … “We recreated nine cars in three months and a half,” she says. “Normally, for a real historic car, it would take one, two years to completely recreate the car, so it was really challenging. We called a lot of artisans in Modena and around Modena to help us.” </p>
<p id="zGZGiV">When principal photography began in the summer of 2022, the cars were ready to roll. “When the bodywork went on and all the cars got painted, they came complete,” Layton says. “Once they got painted red, they then became the Ferrari.” </p>
<p id="LCknET">Before filming, Mann visited <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiorano_Circuit">the test track</a> his crew used near Modena. “It was probably the only, dare I say it, downtime that Michael had spare,” Layton says. “But I think that was his escape.” That day, the director inspected each car. “I was expecting Michael to say, ‘This is wrong, that’s wrong,’” Layton says. “But he went ’round, and Michael saying nothing was probably the best compliment that I could have received.” </p>
<p id="wr2vlg">The only thing Layton remembers Mann asking him to address was the depth of the grill on the Ferrari 315 S. It was off by five millimeters. </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="zdY8Wf">The Ferraris in <em>Ferrari </em>don’t just look good. They can <em>move</em>. “They are probably the best picture cars I’ve ever driven,” Nagle says. “If you had your own little race series, these cars would be running up front. They were fast, they handled well—they did everything you asked that a 1957 Ferrari couldn’t do.” </p>
<p id="KXtjBr">To truly capture the speed of the vehicles, Mann mounted cameras on and inside them. “There would be 30 to 40 different configurations of where I wanted to put the cameras,” he says. “And then we devised a system, like rails, where I could have a camera moving on a car. Not just a stationary mount, but a camera moving on a car, as well as panning and tilting. All the controls over it from a remote vehicle that also had to be very quick, that could be half a kilometer away, let’s say. And we could control what that camera’s doing. So it could slide up from the right front fender, up the side of the car, come up the passenger [side], pan left, and see the car next door. We were able to have all that function at significant speed—110, 120, 130 miles an hour—and not have the stuff fall off. That’s the big thing.” </p>
<p id="xqoLzV">For Campana, watching the cars her company worked on in action was thrilling. “When you see a movie, it’s maybe two beautiful hours, but it’s done,” she says. “When you’re on set, it’s 300 people working together.” </p>
<p id="wjyXKh">During shooting in Italy, it was hard for Nagle not to get lost in his surroundings. One stretch of road, through the Apennine Mountains, took his breath away. “And then you inject these beautiful cars driving through there and the contrast of the green with the red of the cars,” he says, “which was just breathtaking.” </p>
<p id="rgVo8A">But as picturesque as Erik Messerschmidt’s cinematography is, dread looms over <em>Ferrari</em>. Car racing in the ’50s was a disturbingly dangerous pursuit. In that era, several of Enzo’s Scuderia Ferrari drivers lost their lives. “The attrition rate of drivers back then was just crazy,” Nagle says. “Rarely did you get a driver that retired. They usually died. And they didn’t wear seat belts. I mean, there was a whole litany of safety features that just did not exist.” </p>
<p id="6TNTT9">Hell, it wasn’t even easy to safely <em>recreate </em>a race from that period. The 1957 Mille Miglia, a 1,000-mile trek that serves as the film’s extended climax, was particularly brutal. “These are open-top vehicles. No roll cage,” Nagle says. “We did have seat belts in them to keep my guys safe, but I can only do so much practically for crashing these [cars] before it becomes too dangerous.” </p>
<p id="N9iRfc">For Mann, it was important to take the audience on a ride that was both profoundly exhilarating and terrifyingly perilous. That’s what life was like for a race car driver. As Enzo himself says, “It is a terrible joy. A deadly passion.” </p>
<p id="mlbLuL">“It is addictive,” Mann says. He knows from experience. For years, he raced cars at an amateur level. One day, while doing practice laps at <a href="https://www.roadatlanta.com/track-info/about-mrra/our-story">Road Atlanta</a>, he correctly drove through three tight <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicane">chicanes</a> before the track’s back straightaway. Once. “If you get it right once out of 75 times, if you’re a director or an actor, you understand, it becomes a fractal of an experience,” he says. “And so you can project and extrapolate and imagine if I had that feeling I had at that moment all the time, that’s what it would be like to be an actual professional race car driver. And so then it becomes a certain harmony, a certain unity, of yourself and the machine. You all become one organism.” </p>
<p id="kBmlRB">The sensation was fleeting. But Mann is fascinated by the kind of person who routinely risks his life to feel that way. Being an elite professional race car driver requires ignoring your own survival instinct. It’s completely unnatural. “The only risk you may be aware of is ‘Am I taking the car beyond the limits?’” the director says. </p>
<p id="ErOTNB"><em>Ferrari </em>has no shortage of death and destruction, but it’s not about mortality. It’s about a man who pushes himself to the limit—consequences be damned. Even at 80, that’s still how Mann makes movies. The director doesn’t consider the painstakingly detailed biopic he spent decades developing a crowning achievement. He sees it as his latest challenge. “There’s only one thing that kept me involved in this, and that is the story,” he says. “The unique passion and operatic volatility of these people’s lives in this period is so authentic to me.” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="S2xnPd">When I ask him whether he’s walking on air just <em>a little bit </em>these days, he manages to smile. “In a way,” he says before quickly changing his answer. “Not really. Because I don’t have dream projects.” And when he says it, I believe it. To Michael Mann, there’s no point in having a good idea if it can’t actually be realized. </p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2023/12/27/24015354/ferrari-movie-how-it-was-made-cars-michael-mannAlan Siegel2023-12-20T08:10:01-05:002023-12-20T08:10:01-05:00Hope and Heartbreak: Stories From the Hollywood Strikes
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<p>In a year of extended work stoppages by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, plenty was gained—and plenty was sacrificed </p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="wX8d42">David Krumholtz hadn’t worked for 16 months straight. He’d been a Hollywood actor since he was a teenager and wondered whether the ride, finally, was over. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, well, they’ve seen enough, and I’ve come to the end of something wonderful, and all good things come to an end,’” the 45-year-old tells me in late November. “And that was my perspective on it, and it hurt. But I was trying to remain hopeful.” </p>
<p id="UDX4JC">Not long after that, his agent dropped him. “Which was a bummer,” he says. Then, miraculously, he heard from a big fan: Christopher Nolan. They’d connected in the 2000s when Krumholtz was starring in the CBS crime drama <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_(TV_series)"><em>Numbers</em></a>. “He approached me and told me he loved the show,” Krumholtz says. “You meet really amazing artists throughout your career, and if you’re lucky, they say really wonderful things about your work. And then you just hope that they remember you.” </p>
<p id="SsOhDC">A decade and a half later, that faint hope became a reality when Nolan began casting a biopic about the father of the atomic bomb. The filmmaker needed a huge team of character actors to portray the scientists who helped J. Robert Oppenheimer achieve his terrifyingly consequential goal. He asked Krumholtz to read for one of the theoretical physicist’s closest confidants. “He gave me four runs at two scenes, which is a lot,” Krumholtz says. “Usually you get two. And after the third take, he said to me, ‘Now do it again and do it like you’re driving home from this audition thinking,<em> I should’ve done it that way</em>,’ which was absolutely petrifying. But I think he wanted to see how I handle it. And I laughed it off in the moment. It was such a bold thing to say. And Chris, I’ve come to learn, is a very funny guy. Brilliantly funny, actually. So I rolled with that punch. That didn’t mean that I didn’t fall apart after the audition and think, ‘My God, I screwed the whole thing up.’”</p>
<p id="1EQexh">Later that day, Krumholtz was told that he got the part. He was then summoned back to read the full screenplay, which was being held under lock and key. “The script was printed on dark red paper with black lettering so that it couldn’t be Xerox copied, I suppose,” he says. “And that’s when I realized the part was as substantial as it was.” He was playing Nobel Prize winner <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isidor_Isaac_Rabi">Isidor Isaac Rabi</a>, and he’d be sharing the screen with lead Cillian Murphy more than a few times. </p>
<p id="LxtTNt">At that point, Krumholtz broke down. “I was emotional in front of Chris,” he says. “I didn’t know how to thank him for believing in me enough to give me such an important part. And I still don’t, really.” </p>
<p id="uwB5DS">But despite being in one of the year’s biggest hits, Krumholtz couldn’t talk about it in the press. When <em>Oppenheimer </em>came out in July, the Screen Actors Guild had been on strike for a week, and SAG rules prevented him from promoting the movie.</p>
<p id="FC0S2Y">A little media attention would’ve been nice—and judging from reviews and social media reactions, plenty of people would’ve wanted to talk to Krumholtz around <em>Oppenheimer</em>’s release—but to him, solidarity was more important. The work stoppage, he says, “was worthy.” Even if it robbed him of his moment in the California sun. “I don’t regret that I wasn’t able to speak much about it,” he adds with a laugh. “I probably would’ve said stupid stuff that made me seem way less intelligent than the character I was playing.” </p>
<p id="YtUGPn">Krumholtz knows that most actors had it much, much worse in 2023. “I’m speaking from the perspective of being a very, very, very lucky person and being aware of how lucky I am,” he says. “I’ve learned over time that this business is the farthest thing from meritocracy.” </p>
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<p id="efSJNd">For the entertainment industry’s rank and file, the year was profoundly difficult. Starting in May and July, respectively, the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA went on strike against the enormously profitable studios that by many measures had grown increasingly exploitative. Both <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/business/media/sag-aftra-writers-strike.html">the WGA and SAG struck for</a> pay increases, streaming residuals based on viewership, staffing minimums, and the regulation of the use of artificial intelligence. Each union cut a deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that yielded gains this fall, but not before months of picketing, forfeited paychecks, and ice-cold stonewalling by CEOs. The end result was uplifting, but the road to get there was punishing. “You don’t <em>have </em>to grind people down,” says writer David Hemingson, whose first theatrically released feature, <em>The Holdovers</em>, came out in October. “Just give them what they’re owed, give them what’s fair. We weren’t asking for anything more than what’s fair.” </p>
<p id="XsYa3b">Now that the dust has settled and Hollywood is back up and running, the toll of the AMPTP’s hard-line stance is coming into view. The protracted labor dispute didn’t just throw the show business calendar <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2023/8/28/23848709/dune-part-two-delay-box-office-hollywood-strikes">into disarray</a>—it led to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/hollywood-strikes-sap-economy-industry-readies-revamp-2023-11-15/">billions of dollars</a> of lost wages and emotional exhaustion. But the writers and actors who sacrificed what little career stability they had for a greater cause knew it was necessary. This is what 2023 was like for them. </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="sNUqeH">Andra Whipple never expected to become a labor leader. The Dayton, Ohio–raised writer and performer moved to Los Angeles a decade ago with hopes of breaking into television. She started as a production assistant at the comedy content factory CollegeHumor in 2014 before getting hired as a PA on TruTV’s <em>Adam Ruins Everything</em>. Host Adam Conover’s playfully didactic show was, in Whipple’s words, “<em>Last Week Tonight </em>meets <em>Curb Your Enthusiasm</em>. The episodes were actually kind of a sitcom with regular characters/relationships that developed over time.” </p>
<p id="Lw3h5C">Whipple liked her job, but it was not a glamorous existence. “The writers on average were making more than three times what I made,” she says. “And they had health care and dental. I had none of that. I was scraping by.” </p>
<p id="INYmt2">By 2018, Whipple had worked her way up from PA to staff writer. She joined WGA and immediately began to see the union’s benefits. “That’s a show that is very much about the transformative power of what we do with our lives. It is very much about changing your perception of the world,” she says. “A lot of the writers there were really enthusiastic about the union. I was an assistant first, so I saw the difference between being non-union and having no protection and being a writer and being in a union.” </p>
<p id="vyPEyC">TruTV canceled <em>Adam Ruins Everything </em>after three seasons in 2019, leaving Whipple without steady work. “I mean, the perilousness of the business has really dominated my career,” she says. “I did of course have moments like, ‘What if this is it?’ watching everything feel like it’s crumbling.” </p>
<p id="9H5NUP">When Whipple finally felt like things were looking up for her this year, negotiations between the WGA and the AMPTP stalled. “Just as I started to claw back, we look at what the companies are willing to offer us, and it’s so incredibly bad that the only logical decision to make is to go on strike,” she says. “And for me and my values and my dreams about this career, the only logical thing to do was to throw myself into that strike.” </p>
<p id="HxDbI8">Whipple decided to become a strike captain. She led pickets at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radford_Studio_Center">Radford Studio Center</a>. Soon, the owner of the property <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/radford-studio-center-allows-picketing-at-main-entrance-1235547059/">relegated her group to the facility’s shade-free rear entrance</a> alongside a busy street. “It was 130 degrees on the sidewalk,” Whipple says. “Cars were barreling through, and we had several close calls with people almost getting killed by big trucks, which was obviously terrifying.” </p>
<p id="ajb66h">Whipple’s days were draining. “I would do a little dance routine with everybody, and then I would walk off into a corner and I would hold someone’s hand while we talked about the fact that they had $1,000 left in their bank account,” she says. “And then I would go call the Guild and see what we could do. And then I would have a dangerous situation because of the way the lot had placed us. And I would look at my own bank account and feel worried, and then I would wake up and do it all over again.” </p>
<p id="O5rFvf">After a while, Whipple got used to the tumult. But talking about it now makes her emotional. “On the one hand, it is crushing,” she says. “And on the other hand, it becomes super normal. It’s kind of gratifying to explain it to other people, just because I think it looked fun from the outside.” </p>
<p id="iZzMDH">During the strike, <em>Holdovers </em>star Da’Vine Joy Randolph often wondered whether anyone outside the Hollywood bubble was even paying attention. “I remember asking people, ‘Do you think that the rest of the world is aware?’” she says. “I wonder if they notice, ‘Huh, none of my shows are on. I’m just watching reruns.’ Because to us, we’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, the world changed.’” </p>
<p id="3Xh4DV">But more so than the last writers’ work stoppage in 2007-08, it <em>did </em>seem like the outside world supported these strikes. “Everybody feels that they are getting screwed at work,” says Adam Conover, a member of the WGA negotiating committee. “Everybody feels [like], ‘We are not getting a fair shake,’ or ‘My boss is getting richer, but I’m not.’ And so the public saw our fight as representative of theirs. They said, ‘Yeah, these people are getting screwed, and they’re standing up for what they want.’” </p>
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<p id="HjkhwM"><br><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/13/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcript-disney-ceo-bob-iger-speaks-with-cnbcs-david-faber-on-squawk-box-today.html">Whether it was Disney CEO Bob Iger</a> claiming that the writers’ demands were “just not realistic” and “dangerous,” AMPTP president Carol Lombardini <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/writers-strike-2023-wga-explained">reportedly saying</a> that “writers are lucky to have term employment,” or an anonymous studio executive <a href="https://deadline.com/2023/07/writers-strike-hollywood-studios-deal-fight-wga-actors-1235434335/">telling <em>Deadline</em></a> that “the endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” the people running showbiz seemed, at best, hopelessly out of touch. “Whereas a previous age, they could have fucked with us and nobody would’ve batted an eye,” Conover says, “they so much as wiggled a finger and the entire country jumped down their throats and supported us. You can’t expect that every time you’re waging a labor struggle, but certainly we had the wind at our backs.” </p>
<p id="cNvOVz">Conover spent the year doing interviews to explain the WGA’s fight. A stand-up comedian by trade, he paid his bills in 2023 by performing at clubs across America. “I’d be touring in <em>Batavia, Illinois</em>, and I’d be walking down the street and people would honk their horns and stick their heads out of the window and yell, ‘We’re with you!’ I would open my sets by saying, ‘Hey, you may have heard I’m on strike,’ because so many people knew me from that. … And when I would say that, I would get a 60-second-long applause break because people were so on board with it. Again, this is <em>suburban Illinois</em>.” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="l1QXzi">Working in Hollywood means dealing with a nauseatingly high level of uncertainty. Studios often treat projects like they’re disposable, tossing them aside after years of development. </p>
<p id="ul6CXV">In 2023, writer Samy Burch was <em>supposed</em> to have two<em> </em>movies come out. <em>May December</em>, released in theaters and on Netflix in November, is one of them. In director Todd Haynes’s <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2023/12/6/23990104/may-december-todd-haynes-natalie-portman-julianne-moore-charles-melton">gasp-inducing satire</a>, Natalie Portman plays an actress who ingratiates herself with a woman (Julianne Moore) she’s preparing to play: a tabloid curiosity who became infamous two decades prior for having sex with a 13-year-old boy, whom she later marries after serving time in prison. Burch and her now husband Alex Mechanik came up with the idea—which is loosely inspired by the disturbing real-life case of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Kay_Letourneau">Mary Kay Letourneau</a>—all the way back in 2018. “I’m always thinking about these tabloid cases because not only were they sort of fundamental to me as a child, but also we were in this period of reassessment and it feels like every single one is getting a miniseries or a movie,” Burch says. “And I think that’s interesting, and I question if it’s helpful.” </p>
<p id="vzSxg9">Burch spent the early part of 2019 writing <em>May December</em>, her first feature-length film. She eventually passed the screenplay to producer Alex Plapinger, who that year helped her set up with her current managers. From there, the script made it into the hands of Will Ferrell’s producing partner Jessica Elbaum. “She just totally got the potential of what it was,” Burch says. Burch incorporated notes from Elbaum and Ferrell for a draft that was sent to Portman. “That was life-changing, obviously, when she said she wanted to play that part,” Burch says. “And then she sent the script herself to Todd Haynes.” </p>
<p id="BCJPFG">It was early in the pandemic, and Burch had been thinking a lot about <em>Safe</em>, Haynes’s 1995 film about a housewife, played by Moore, who develops a mysterious sensitivity to common chemicals. In January 2021, she had a Zoom call with Haynes and Portman. “There was a kinship and everyone was kind of interested in the same stuff in the script, and obviously that was very exciting,” Burch says. Soon after that, Haynes sent the script to Moore. <em>May December </em>was shot last fall in Savannah, Georgia, over just 23 days. </p>
<p id="KSfnol">The movie is now getting <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2023/12/oscars-2024-may-december-memes-its-way-into-the-race.html">Oscar buzz</a>. So is <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/samy-burch-may-december-screenwriter-interview">Burch’s script</a>. “Dream-come-true stuff,” she says.</p>
<p id="4RvbM7">But the story of Burch’s other 2023 movie isn’t quite as fairy-tale-like. In addition to helping her find management back in 2019, Plapinger also connected her to director Dave Green. A meeting over coffee led to Burch writing <em>Coyote Vs. Acme</em>, Green’s live-action–animated <em>Looney Tunes</em> hybrid starring Will Forte and John Cena. The Wile E. Coyote–centered comedy was filmed, completed, and scheduled to hit theaters in summer 2023. But last year, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that <em>Barbie </em>would be taking over its July 21 release date. And this November, in the wake of the strikes and about a week before the release of <em>May December</em>, <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/john-cena-coyote-vs-acme-movie-shelved-1235643235/">news broke</a> that the studio would be shelving <em>Coyote Vs. Acme </em>completely for <a href="https://deadline.com/2023/11/coyote-vs-acme-shelved-warner-bros-discovery-writeoff-david-zaslav-1235598676/">a reported $30 million</a> tax write-off. </p>
<p id="R76RxG">The extreme cost-cutting measure came two months after Warner Bros. <a href="https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/warner-bros-discovery-strikes-500-million-earnings-loss-1235713393/">reportedly stated in an SEC filing</a> that the strikes would cost the company between $300 and $500 million, reducing its earnings to a paltry amount: between $10.5 and $11 billion. While helping prolong the work stoppages, the studio decided to make up the deficit by axing a potentially profitable movie. It’s yet another reminder that even when you’re riding high in Hollywood, an anvil can come <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=132XmBjsOiE">crashing down on your head</a>.</p>
<p id="sXRgz6">Since negotiations are still ongoing, Burch couldn’t talk about <em>Coyote Vs. Acme</em>. But she did acknowledge the extreme ups and downs of 2023. “This has been a wild year,” she says. “I mean, it’s hard to even see clearly. I feel like I’m in the eye of the storm at the moment.” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="bfMcl9">Immediately, Warner Bros. Discovery’s decision to bury a comedy that, by multiple accounts, is quite clever, caused <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/news/general-news/warner-bros-coyote-vs-acme-creatives-backlash-twitter-1234925244/">a backlash</a>. “I don’t know how you see the movie and then go, ‘That couldn’t happen to me,’” director Brian Duffield, Green’s friend, <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/coyote-vs-acme-wb-warners-canceled-reversal-shop-film-1235645372/">told <em>The Hollywood Reporter</em></a>. </p>
<p id="tzP4Ah">In reality, though, the move wasn’t all that surprising. This, after all, was the same studio that <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2023/7/18/23798504/christopher-nolan-oppenheimer-barbie-face-off-david-zaslav">alienated Christopher Nolan</a>, one of its most bankable filmmakers, so severely that he took <em>Oppenheimer </em>to Universal. It’s also the same studio that’s made a habit of trying to save money by mothballing completed movies: “When I look at the health of our company today, we needed to make those decisions,” <a href="https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/zaslav-warner-bros-discovery-cutbacks-courage-hollywood-strikes-bad-1235813198/">CEO David Zaslav said in November</a>. “And it took real courage.” </p>
<p id="Ox6wps"><em>Coyote Vs. Acme </em>is the third film, after <em>Batgirl</em> and <em>Scoob! Holiday Haunt</em>, that Warner Bros. has killed under Zaslav. But it’s the first that the company actually changed its mind about. </p>
<p id="c2hz1j">Less than a week after the <em>Coyote Vs. Acme</em> debacle made headlines, Warner Bros. reportedly decided to allow Green to shop his movie around to other studios. It hasn’t found <a href="https://deadline.com/2023/12/coyote-vs-acme-paramount-amazon-contenders-1235658240/">a home</a> yet, but the fact that it might is a sign that pressure from a strike-weary creative class works. </p>
<p id="STZTr4">Audiences will now have to wait to see <em>Coyote Vs. Acme</em>, though the year’s box office receipts proved that there’s an appetite for unique popcorn flicks. <a href="https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/?ref_=bo_nb_in_tab">The highest-grossing movie of the year</a> globally was Greta Gerwig’s <em>Barbie</em>, a blockbuster that, as <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2023/7/18/23798504/christopher-nolan-oppenheimer-barbie-face-off-david-zaslav">Keith Phipps put it in <em>The Ringer</em></a>, “is rooted in IP but can’t be easily mistaken for the fashion-doll equivalent of <em>The Super Mario Bros. Movie </em>or a <em>Transformers </em>sequel.” Hell, <em>Oppenheimer</em>, a three-plus-hour-long biopic, made almost $952 million, pulling in more than <em>Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3</em>, <em>Fast X</em>, and <em>Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One</em>. </p>
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<p id="5e9MqW"><br>“People are suffering from franchise fatigue,” David Hemingson says. Coming into 2023, the longtime TV writer and producer hoped that his first feature would find an audience amid the tentpoles. In <em>The Holdovers</em>, Paul Giamatti plays a dyspeptic teacher who gradually bonds with a student (Dominic Sessa in his big-screen debut) and the school’s grieving head cook (Randolph) over Christmas break at a New England boarding school. It started with a pilot Hemingson wrote about five years ago. “I gave it to my agent [Matt Solo], and he’s known as having the best taste and the worst bedside manner in Hollywood,” says Hemingson, who went to the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. “He read it and he was like, ‘Oh, I like it. It’s really emotionally resonant. It seems deeply personal.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, thanks.’ And he goes, ‘Of course I don’t know who’s going to make a prep school pilot set in 1980, so it’s basically useless.’” </p>
<p id="72iA4T">Hemingson thought that the idea was dead. Then Solo remembered hearing that Alexander Payne had been thinking about making a prep school movie. While driving home from LAX one day, Hemingson’s phone rang. “I picked it up and a voice says, ‘David Hemingson, Alexander Payne,’” he recalls. “And I thought it was my buddy Bob fucking with me. So I almost told him to fuck off. Because Bob would call up and say, ‘David Hemingson, Francis Ford Coppola.’ And one time I believed it. So he engages me for about 45 seconds in conversation before he goes, ‘You’re an idiot, why would Coppola call you? I’m just wanting to see you and have a beer.’ So I thought I was getting pranked again.”</p>
<p id="AlaQPz">But Hemingson looked down at the screen and noticed an Omaha area code. “I realized that it was actually Alexander Payne,” he says. “And I said, ‘Are you really Alexander Payne?’ ‘Yeah, last time I checked.’ I said, ‘So why are you calling me?’” </p>
<p id="5xar25">Payne had read Hemingson’s pilot. But he didn’t want to make a TV show about prep school in 1980. He wanted to make a movie about prep school in <em>1970</em>. “It’s about this sort of ocularly challenged kind of odiferous professor stuck over Christmas with these kids at a prep school,” Payne told him. “You seem to know the prep school thing very well.” Hemingson quickly explained why: He went to prep school for six years, and his dad was a teacher. “I remember it like the back of my hand,” Hemingson says. “It’s the most formative years of my life.” </p>
<p id="fGqn8Q">Payne asked Hemingson to write a new script, which Hemingson agreed to before even hearing how much he’d get paid to do it. The screenplay was finished in 2020, <a href="https://deadline.com/2021/06/alexander-payne-paul-giamatti-the-holdovers-new-film-cannes-market-1234774662/">Giamatti joined the cast in 2021</a>, and Payne shot the movie in 2022. </p>
<p id="O0V0zy">“It made me spoiled because I was like, ‘This is what I want moving forward,’” Randolph says. She spent months perfecting a Boston accent for her part, working with Nicole Kidman’s dialect coach Thom Jones and watching interviews with Black Bostonians like Donna Summer for research. “Hopefully I can attract this kind of quality storytelling because there’s nothing antiquated about it,” Randolph adds. “You know what I mean? I just think it’s a skill and a reverence to the art form at large. A lot of stuff is fast food, and I’m not really into that.” </p>
<p id="AbY88N">But in the weeks leading up to <em>The Holdovers</em>’ release, Randolph was striking—not being interviewed about a movie she loved. “I get it,” she says. “But that was hard. You’ve got to make certain sacrifices in order for people to take you seriously. And I guess it worked.”</p>
<p id="C3p8z7">“I’m WGA through and through, 27 years in the Guild,” Hemingson adds. “So I honored every single moment, and picketed consistently. I believe to this day that we did the right thing.” </p>
<p id="YAq8Bk">When the well-reviewed <em>The Holdovers </em>was making the festival circuit this fall, it was strange for Hemingson. “My wife was saying to me, ‘So we’re not going to Telluride? So we’re not going to Toronto?’” he says. “And I’m like, ‘No.’ Friends of mine who weren’t in the Guild, from back East, from Hartford and New York, [said], ‘Why don’t you just fly to Telluride and sit in the back of the theater? Wear a fake mustache and glasses. And I was like, ‘I just don’t feel right.’ … It was weird, and stomach-churning, and necessary. I think I’m proud of my decision not to have promoted the film during the strike, and I stand by it. And [it was] brutal, because this thing is the love of my life.” </p>
<p id="QjLTym">For Hollywood’s middle class, the final stretch of the strike was an emotional roller coaster. No one knew exactly how long it would last. “I was lucky because I had enough money to pay my rent for those months,” Burch says. She recalls hearing whispers of the stoppage going until February 2024. “I remember when it felt like it was going to end in August when there were all those talks,” she says. “And then the crash when it didn’t. What surprised me was the feeling of hopelessness. Of course, this is a labor dispute. They end.” </p>
<p id="aH223z">In September, the WGA and the AMPTP had a deal; <a href="https://apnews.com/article/writers-strike-hollywood-contract-actors-negotiations-43a57ce4783a5615c359db1091e0fa89">99 percent</a> of Guild members who cast ballots voted to ratify the contract. SAG-AFTRA’s agreement came in early November; <a href="https://deadline.com/2023/12/actors-strike-deal-approved-ratification-vote-sag-aftra-1235649206/">78 percent of union members who cast ballots approved</a>. “When it was announced, it was jubilation, and people just freaked out,” Conover says of the writers’ deal. “So happy. People went to <a href="https://www.idlehourbar.com/">Idle Hour</a> and partied.” Alas, Conover couldn’t go to the bar—his girlfriend got COVID. “I was able to join the rest of the celebration later in the week,” Conover says. “A couple days later, we had a giant member meeting at the Palladium theater, and it was just one of the best experiences of my life. I mean, we had a 15-minute standing ovation.” </p>
<p id="dvKd8w">Burch was elated. “I’m so proud to be a member of WGA, and I’m thrilled at the result,” she says. “I’m happy for SAG. For me, it was very lucky. I mean, it was strike over and I got on a plane the next day, and we had our premiere at the New York Film Festival. So it’s been kind of like that.” </p>
<p id="QEfX7X">When she heard the SAG strike was over, Randolph was preparing a closet sale. “Me and my assistant were in my garage and in my attic going through clothes and she was like, ‘Oh my gosh, the strike is over,’” says the actress. “Immediately, my phone started blowing off the hook, and within less than 24 hours, we were doing a press tour. … I’ve been going nonstop ever since. But I’m so grateful. It feels good to be back in the swing of things. ” </p>
<p id="gJbhGy">Hemingson was also excited to start promoting <em>The Holdovers</em>. “We don’t see these movies in theaters anymore,” he says. “So asking people to go out and see something in a theater that is very different than <em>Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania</em>? You need some context for it. … Like I’ve said before, I’d pull a dogsled in the Iditarod for this movie.” </p>
<p id="ZyWwVg">For Whipple, the end of the strike was bittersweet. Picketing had dominated her life for months. “It’s just a hard letdown because your whole schedule changes. Your whole life changes. Everything that you’ve built your life around shifts,” she says. “And I knew that the level of dedication that I was giving to the strike was not sustainable for my life long-term. And also, it was brutally hard and difficult and sad. It’s not like I wanted it to continue.” </p>
<p id="DUurN8">As happy as Whipple was about the deal, she knew that it didn’t guarantee employment. Being a TV writer isn’t like being a factory worker. You can’t just go back to the assembly line. “Some people already had work lined up, and I don’t know what that was like,” Whipple says. “I didn’t. So I have had to go back to taking meetings and living in the uncertainty of, <em>I don’t know when I’m going to get my next job</em>. I don’t know. I believe that what we gained will affect me, but I don’t actually know if I’ll ever work under this contract. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to taste what I achieved. And that’s really weird. I think that it makes the financial devastation of going on strike harder because 80 percent of the people I know are still under immense financial pressure.” </p>
<p id="cVk0yz">At this point, things don’t seem to be getting any easier for people trying to make a living in the <a href="https://deadline.com/2023/12/hollywood-jobs-losses-2023-strikes-study-1235656524/">contracting</a> entertainment industry. During the strikes, <a href="https://deadline.com/2023/06/warner-bros-discovery-tv-layoffs-begin-whos-leaving-1235420736/">Warner Bros.</a>, <a href="https://deadline.com/2023/11/netflix-layoffs-drama-overall-deals-1235591224/">Netflix</a>, and <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/paramount-lays-off-25-percent-of-staff-as-mtv-news-shuts-down-rcna83781">Paramount</a> all laid off chunks of their workforce. <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/news/business/why-studios-suspending-overall-deals-wga-strike-1234905106/">Studios suspended overall deals</a> with creators, <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-lists/20-tv-shows-canceled-hollywood-strikes-the-idol-the-great-streaming-1234851019/">canceled TV shows</a>, and <a href="https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/netflix-reportedly-cancels-nancy-meyers-rom-com-movie-paris-paramount/">shelved movies</a>. All while playing hardball with the people who actually make all of their programming. </p>
<p id="sgJphJ">Nothing the WGA and SAG could do will ever prevent Hollywood callousness, but the unions’ collective action showed executives that continuing to devalue writers and actors comes at their own peril. </p>
<p id="uj9b8v">That’s why Whipple still has hope for the future. “What gave me peace about it during the strike was really making the agreement with myself that I wasn’t doing this for me,” she says. “That I was doing this for something much bigger than myself. For the idea of writing as a career, for the idea that artists deserve to be paid for the idea, that people deserve respect, and that workers deserve respect, and that labor is valuable. We can’t just be willing to let the yacht owners of the world continue to suck our blood forever. And so I still have to tell myself that that’s why it was worth it. And if it ends up being worth it for me, which I really hope it does, that’s gravy.” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="SG5FzF">When we spoke this fall, David Krumholtz said that he felt like the strike was absolutely worth it. He’s hoping to see more residuals for <em>Numbers</em>, and he’s looking forward to working more. Before <em>Oppenheimer </em>was released, he landed roles in a handful of TV series. He’s thankful Nolan came calling. “He kind of saved my ass, which was really nice,” Krumholtz says. The actor is happy he can talk about <em>Oppenheimer</em> now. “It’s not too late,” he says. “The movie still has quite a bit of life. It’s still trending on Twitter. There’s a good chance we’re going to win a lot of very wonderful accolades. I’m thrilled that I got to say anything about it. I mean, if I’d had a less substantial role, then perhaps people like you wouldn’t be asking me these questions.” </p>
<aside id="9vUaSI"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2023/12/20/24008156/hollywood-strikes-2023-wga-sag-aftraAlan Siegel2023-09-27T08:01:06-04:002023-09-27T08:01:06-04:00Nothing Is Better Than This: The Oral History of ‘Stop Making Sense’
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/oJcpqNItq2i7__W6KS_R1oV4vKQ=/168x0:1033x649/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72692812/Stop_Making_SenseFinal.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://www.iverillo.com/" target="_blank">Michael Iver Jacobsen</a></figcaption>
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<p>The Talking Heads’ 1984 concert movie—which A24 recently rereleased in theaters—is as propulsive today as it was the day it came out: an ingenious, joyous celebration of music and the iconic band captured in it </p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="trHtbr">David Byrne is showing me why a lamp isn’t usually a good dance partner. </p>
<p id="dqggwV">“A normal floor lamp is meant to go alongside a chair,” he says, springing up and placing his hand on an imaginary object level with his seat. “So it would be about <em>that </em>high off the ground, which, if you’re standing, that’s not a good place for illumination of your face.” Then he points above his head. “We want it to be about <em>here</em>. So we had to artificially extend the lamp to still have it look like a floor lamp.” </p>
<p id="cbMUcZ">Talking Heads guitarist and keyboardist Jerry Harrison, who’s been watching this demonstration from across a marble table in an airy Los Angeles conference room, smiles and then distills his old bandmate’s explanation: “A floor lamp for Shaq.” </p>
<p id="FAAbOG">Byrne’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faN0kPOQykM&t=75s">Fred Astaire</a>–esque, extra-tall light fixture routine, scored by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekBt4XllATg">“This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),”</a> is still understandably fresh in his memory. Four decades later, it’s one of the many surreal moments in <em>Stop Making Sense </em>that are impossible to shake. Shot over the course of a handful of Talking Heads concerts at the <a href="https://www.broadwayinhollywood.com/venues/detail/pantagestheatre">Hollywood Pantages Theatre</a>, the late Jonathan Demme’s film is as transfixingly propulsive today as it was when it came out in 1984. </p>
<p id="XoQaDX">There are no interviews, no breaks, and <a href="https://genius.com/Talking-heads-life-during-wartime-lyrics">no fooling around</a>. It’s pure performance. But the way Byrne sees it, the show isn’t just a show. It’s a journey toward selflessness. “As the show builds, the music becomes funkier, and it becomes harder to maintain this self that’s outside of that,” he says. “You just have to surrender to it.” </p>
<p id="RAZgs5">The frontman starts out on a bare stage, alone with an acoustic guitar and a boom box, and ends up as part of a collective. “As a musician, you strive for that,” Harrison says. “You’re entirely in the moment of that music. You stop being self-conscious because you’re just all there.”</p>
<p id="crxG3c">This month, Byrne is back jiggling around in his big suit on the big screen. Thanks to the discovery of the movie’s original negative, A24 is releasing a restored version of <em>Stop Making Sense </em>in 4K in IMAX and standard theaters. Years of tension led Byrne to <a href="https://people.com/david-byrne-regrets-how-he-handled-talking-heads-breakup-exclusive-7643685">officially break up</a> the band in 1991, but the members of Talking Heads know that their film will always be around to bring the party. “We’re very proud that this is our legacy, that we have this,” says bassist Tina Weymouth, who’s been married to drummer Chris Frantz <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/rockers-chris-frantz-and-tina-weymouth-talk-marriage-242573/">since 1977</a>. “And we’re so grateful that Jonathan Demme was the one to approach us and say, ‘Hey, this needs to be shot.’” </p>
<h3 id="ioJDeD">Part 1: “What Is This Guy On?” </h3>
<p id="MrnhGT"><em>In the early 1980s, Jonathan Demme was still a decade out from receiving an Academy Award for directing </em>The Silence of the Lambs<em>, but he had already earned a reputation as an artful filmmaker. After his dramatic comedy </em>Melvin and Howard<em> won two Oscars, he was hired to make </em>Swing Shift <em>with Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Christine Lahti, and Ed Harris</em>. <em>The production was </em><a href="https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/swing-shift-making-of-jonathan-demme-directors-cut-comparison"><em>a disaster</em></a><em>: frustrated stars, rewrites, reshoots, and </em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uViZ7Avqk3w"><em>one miserable director</em></a><em>. Demme needed a palate cleanser. </em></p>
<p id="LdhhSF"><em>Around the same time, Talking Heads was preparing to go on the road to support its new album, </em>Speaking in Tongues. <em>The conceptual tour, which featured a series of slides and images on projection screens and an expanded lineup—including singers </em><a href="https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.128924590482378.9533.128789080495929"><em>Ednah Holt</em></a><em> and Lynn Mabry, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, guitarist Alex Weir, and percussionist Steve Scales—reflected Byrne and the band’s </em><a href="https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/how-talking-heads-got-their-name/"><em>art school roots</em></a><em>. </em></p>
<p id="D9YdbB"><strong>Adelle Lutz (creative consultant and Byrne’s former wife): </strong>The show had been on tour for quite a while. I’d been going to Lincoln Center, the <a href="https://www.nypl.org/locations/lpa">Library for the Performing Arts</a>, quite a bit. I said to Dave then, “Even if it’s only for our records, even if it’s only me with a VHS machine at the back of the theater, it should be documented for the library.” And so he said, “Well, let me talk to our manager.” <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kurfirst">Gary Kurfirst</a> was everyone’s manager—the Clash, the Eurythmics, Ramones—and so David mentioned to Gary the possibility of filming this. And one of his ideas was “Let me talk to MTV.” </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><div id="X4WG56"><div data-anthem-component="aside:11489171"></div></div></div>
<p id="yIkI2I">And so David said, “Before you talk to them, I have to watch concert movies on TV.” And so he watched everything. All we had was this little Sony Trinitron. And it had my sticker on it that said, “Kill Your TV.” It was seriously puny. And nothing looked good. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimme_Shelter_(1970_film)">Altamont</a> didn’t look good. <em>The Last Waltz </em>didn’t look good. And then he saw Neil Young’s <em>Rust Never Sleeps</em>. All of a sudden, he knew that it was possible to do a show and film it and project it. </p>
<p id="0B9qm7"><strong>Sandy</strong> <strong>McLeod (visual consultant): </strong>David actually made a concert tour that had a narrative to it, which was pretty unusual.</p>
<p id="ftYPEg"><strong>David Byrne (vocals and guitar):</strong> It starts with one person, various band members and their gear comes out bit by bit, as well as all the lighting equipment, and the screens for the slide projections. Everything you see comes out little by little. </p>
<p id="G8aqL7"><strong>Lutz: </strong>As far as Jonathan coming into the picture, my good friend in L.A. Nadia Ghaleb was <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/features/interviews/stop-making-sense-gary-goetzman-movie-re-release-1234897379/">[producer] Gary Goetzman’s</a> first love. She was one who said to me, “Let me take Jonathan Demme to Talking Heads at the Greek Theater.” And that did it. </p>
<p id="48BFPt"><strong>McLeod: </strong>Jonathan and I actually saw them <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1979/08/18/archives/rock-talking-heads-and-b52s-finally-get-together-in-concert.html">in Central Park</a> with the B-52s. I knew who they were and he knew who they were, but somehow that was such a seminal moment for us.</p>
<p id="IC02Dd"><strong>Chris Frantz (drums): </strong>I can’t recall any other director approaching us and saying, “I’d like to make a movie of this concert.” </p>
<p id="dz8PuZ"><strong>Tina Weymouth (bass): </strong>He was the only person. </p>
<p id="JJapth"><strong>Byrne: </strong>It wasn’t like we were going for some bold-faced star director. We went for somebody who really seemed to like what we were doing and was also doing really interesting, very human-oriented stuff.</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="XSfPcH"><q>“You just have to surrender to it.” —David Byrne</q></aside></div>
<p id="KGRVuU"><strong>Frantz: </strong>All four of us felt a real kinship with Jonathan right away. Not just personally, but also aesthetically. And we felt like he was a trustworthy guy and that we could put this project in his hands and have a pretty good chance of it coming out well.</p>
<p id="KsnqWH"><strong>Weymouth: </strong>Our largest trepidation at the beginning was “How are we going to pay for this?” </p>
<p id="7laYhp"><strong>Byrne: </strong>I’m surprised that a lot of people don’t realize this, that the film is basically a document of the tour that we were doing but with a few songs cut out to streamline it a bit. So it’s not like Jonathan came in with the concept. It was there. That’s not to take anything away from what he did, but what you see is what we were doing, and what he did was to bring out the relationships and interactions between all the band members throughout the show and the characters of each, as if it was acting, as if it was a story. </p>
<p id="skRbd8"><strong>McLeod:</strong> Even though it’s very subtle and not a narrative in any traditional sense, it still has this story that evolves with the lighting effects, the music, and the stories that David tells of the songs. I think Jonathan really got that, loved it, appreciated it, and helped bring that forward. </p>
<p id="A91QS6"><strong>Byrne: </strong>That’s what he saw, and I thought, “That’s not something <em>I</em> would’ve seen.” </p>
<p id="tiNO1T"><strong>Jerry Harrison (guitar and keys): </strong>It brought an intimacy to it. The camera blows up interactions that you wouldn’t see.</p>
<p id="XDlcQW"><strong>McLeod: </strong><a href="https://variety.com/1996/scene/vpage/cronenweth-d-p-on-blade-runner-dies-1117466473/">Jordan Cronenweth</a>, who shot<em> Blade Runner</em>, was our DP. He was phenomenal. </p>
<p id="buDlN4"><strong>Harrison: </strong>Bringing in Jordan was just a masterstroke for us. We were all fans of <em>Blade Runner</em>, so it’s like, “Oh boy, I feel a lot of confidence in this.” </p>
<p id="W4KF1T"><strong>Jeff Cronenweth (second assistant camera): </strong>I was in film school at USC at the time. And I think our winter break had already started, and I had done different projects over the years with my dad as a camera assistant. And so when this came up—with a multi-camera shoot—he asked me to be part of it. He kind of sensed that it would be something special.</p>
<p id="IAU0h5"><strong>Ednah Holt (backing vocals): </strong>I can tell you that I’m getting chills as I talk to you. This is years later, and I still get the chills.</p>
<p id="vnmeE2"><strong>Lynn Mabry (backing vocals): </strong>It was really a collective, of course. David being front and center—I think his take on his own style and music and the way he delivered it, or at least shared it with the audience, was very unique and very entertaining. Then you had the band, you had the musicians, and us, the singers, and we added a new flavor. It was a mixture of retro pop and rock ’n’ roll, and then you had R&B in there. It was soulful.</p>
<p id="dAN1iI"><strong>Frantz: </strong>We rehearsed on the West Side piers. Now they’re all fancy. They call them the Chelsea Piers. There were rats running around. But it was a great place to rehearse, and I remember <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Forbes">Malcolm Forbes</a> tied up his yacht there.</p>
<p id="BLy3y5"><strong>Weymouth: </strong>Right there in front of us. </p>
<p id="7adp1S"><strong>Frantz: </strong>His<strong> </strong>yacht would go out every day with <em>Forbes</em> magazine clients. But the crew happened to be Talking Heads fans, so they would listen to our rehearsals.</p>
<p id="RjslAW"><strong>Weymouth: </strong>We had the bay doors wide open.</p>
<p id="Y5gV0G"><strong>Frantz: </strong>They would send us trays of Bloody Marys. </p>
<p id="UkLHIj"><strong>Steve Scales (percussion): </strong>We rehearsed, and we rehearsed, and we rehearsed, but nobody inside quite could get what the heck the picture was in David’s head. </p>
<p id="R0tuDU"><strong>Mabry: </strong>At rehearsal I would be watching David performing, and then watch him in front of a mirror, coming up with all of those crazy moves. That was weird. It was like, “What is this guy on?” And he was completely straight. He never drank. He never smoked. Water and clean food.</p>
<p id="vxBGMC"><strong>Scales: </strong>He would be in my room at night, or somebody else’s room, doing these crazy little things. We said, “Man, you should do that in the show.” And he would do that in the show. He put it in.</p>
<div id="aGBChn"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 152px; position: relative;"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/2ZCOFNsdvm7nVWwTrwcmrD?utm_source=oembed" style="top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute; border: 0;" allowfullscreen="" allow="clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture;"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="0aN03b"><br><strong>Frantz: </strong>David had this idea that it would be a show with rolling risers, and it would be a show that would expand as the show went on. </p>
<p id="1qPVcR"><strong>McLeod: </strong>The crew is in black. They build the stage.</p>
<p id="crCzkQ"><strong>Byrne: </strong>On the previous tour, we ended up in Japan, and I managed to stay on and went to some traditional theater there. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabuki">Kabuki</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noh">Noh</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunraku">Bunraku</a>. </p>
<p id="ssdFVB"><strong>Lutz: </strong>I dragged him around to all of those things because I was living there.</p>
<p id="ok7sBz"><strong>Byrne: </strong>I noticed two things. One was the stagehands were plainly visible. They didn’t try to hide them, so that if there was a costume change, they’d come up quietly behind someone and just do the costume change right onstage. They dressed in black, and they didn’t try to hide. And I thought, “Oh, make a note of that.”</p>
<p id="pvHptC"><strong>Weymouth: </strong>I thought it was really weird. <em>Why do we have to anodize all the drum hardware black?</em> But that was part of the aesthetic. We just went to the amazing <a href="https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5582?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=ruscha&gclid=Cj0KCQjw9rSoBhCiARIsAFOiplk-Fs3QENgEjw_E6H9EBd0qvtDGR9_V4rPOnE8nYcJsAOY3KX5Rc5caAuDwEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds">Ed Ruscha retrospective at MoMA</a>, and I might be paraphrasing, but he said, “People say, why did you do it this way?” And he said, “Well, good art should make you <a href="https://www.arthistorykids.com/blog/2016/10/17/edruscha">scratch your head</a>.” </p>
<p id="yZTigb"><strong>Scales: </strong>When we did Forest Hills, Mick Jagger changed his seat five times trying to figure out what the hell we were doing. </p>
<p id="8RvcEv"><strong>Weymouth: </strong>This stuff does make you scratch your head. Why choose this? And it’s just sort of like, “Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s just part of the entertainment factor.” And so we just thought, “The people who are working with us, they liked it. The crew liked it. We liked it. Hopefully the fans will like it.” </p>
<p id="ynqac4"><strong>Scales: </strong>The first show we did was in Hampton, Virginia. When we finished playing, we were in the dressing room for at least an hour, and the crew said, “You got to come out and see this.” The upper deck of this arena, one side of it was still there, still singing. </p>
<p id="RbZxt0"><strong>Holt: </strong>We had fun every night. <em>Every night</em>. It was so much fun that I actually said, “We’re going to die. This is it. This is our last gig.” </p>
<h3 id="UVSC0t">Part 2: “Brilliantly Different” </h3>
<p id="S8S6bb"><em>The American leg of the Talking Heads’ 1983 tour built toward filming </em>Stop Making Sense <em>in December at</em> <em>the </em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantages_Theatre_(Hollywood)"><em>Pantages</em></a><em>, a historic former vaudeville theater and movie house. From the first song, Byrne’s solo rendition of the band’s sinister-sounding hit “Psycho Killer,” the movie</em> <em>is full of kinetic energy. But while they had prepared for the shoot for most of the year, it still took some time for the band and Demme to find their groove. </em></p>
<p id="Nvc2om"><strong>McLeod: </strong>We were going to shoot at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMC_Kabuki_8">Kabuki Theater</a> in San Francisco, and it just seemed too small.</p>
<p id="gi9Pew"><strong>Weymouth:</strong> All stages that we worked in had to be a minimum of 60 feet wide, 40 feet deep. And the Pantages was just so culturally beautiful. It’s part of the history of film. </p>
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<p id="aWAvH1"><strong>Frantz: </strong>We’ve always been a band who appreciated a good theater as opposed to an arena or a larger kind of venue. That’s why when we played in New York at the peak of our touring fame, instead of one night at Madison Square Garden, we played two nights at Radio City Music Hall. It’s more fun for us, and it’s better for the fans, too. </p>
<p id="1S940W"><strong>Harrison: </strong>David was in the challenging position of having to not only be the performer and play his own parts, but also having to run out all the time and see what it looked like.</p>
<p id="kLFPGY"><strong>McLeod: </strong>One of the backup singers decided to get her hair cut for the show, and, of course, their hair was really important in the movement in the show. </p>
<p id="Kc4c3G"><strong>Holt: </strong>I don’t even know what I was thinking. I had no idea that would be important for the movie.</p>
<p id="5uiL1H"><strong>Lisa Day (editor): </strong>David was so beside himself. </p>
<p id="fU5ZYX"><strong>Holt: </strong>David was real nice. He never showed me that side, but he said, “I think it’d be best if you put your hair back. Because it really worked.” I said, “OK.” He had Lynn find a hairdresser to match what we had.</p>
<p id="KdjZdd"><strong>McLeod: </strong>That’s an incredibly laborious situation, to replace the missing locs. It didn’t seem to impair her energy at all. She was incredibly vivacious on stage.</p>
<p id="Jh0GJS"><strong>Day: </strong>There were a lot of articles that said we shot four nights, but we didn’t. </p>
<p id="T06LUM"><strong>Frantz: </strong>Three nights of real filming. The first night was kind of a rehearsal. </p>
<p id="0MVkBz"><strong>McLeod: </strong>We had very little time to light the show, and Jordan, because he was a man of beautiful light, really couldn’t quite understand what David wanted for the first shot, which was what David called “gymnasium light.” Jordan wanted to put a bare bulb on the soundstage. A big, huge bulb, which would make it look very beautiful, but there would be no place from a narrative standpoint to go to from there.</p>
<p id="u50dGd"><strong>Lutz: </strong>My brother-in-law, William Chow, came out of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_opera">Peking opera</a>. And after he left China, he was teaching classical theater at Stella Adler’s in New York. So David and William sat down for dinner at our family’s restaurant, which still is called Mr. Chow, and William went over what David’s ideas were. He said, “You’re giving away too much at the beginning. You have nowhere to go if you start this way.” And that became David with a boom box. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="EcVMN6"><q>“I can tell you that I’m getting chills as I talk to you. This is years later, and I still get the chills.” —Ednah Holt</q></aside></div>
<p id="nsBL5H"><strong>McLeod:</strong> The first day of shooting, I went to dailies with David. He and I watched them at Technicolor on a wall. The first scene that came up was the one with the light bulb. David watched it, then he looked at me and he said, “OK, I’m pulling the plug on this because I don’t know who you are. You’re the only one who’s ever around. Jonathan only comes at night when we shoot, and this isn’t what I thought it was going to be at all.”</p>
<p id="ksvbRc">I was ready to faint, really, but I’m Scottish and David’s Scottish, so the only thing I could think to say was, “OK, you’re perfectly within your rights to do that. But no matter what, you’ve lost the money because we’ve committed to the Pantages for three days. We’ve booked the crew, we’ve booked the equipment, and we can continue and try to get it right, but if you pull the plug, then the whole thing goes down the drain. You lose your money.” I remember debating whether or not to call Jonathan because Jonathan was already in such a shaky place. </p>
<p id="GE4JLT"><strong>Day: </strong>He was finishing up <em>Swing Shift</em> at the time, and he was pretty depressed about it. </p>
<p id="ZpR4Wg"><strong>McLeod: </strong>To David’s credit,<strong> </strong>David said, “Let’s try again.” I talked to Jordy, and he got it. He got the gymnasium lighting thing. He understood it. It looks like a bare stage. Filmmaking is like that. It’s collaborative.</p>
<p id="tFA0wa"><strong>Holt: </strong>First, David comes out doing “Psycho Killer.” </p>
<p id="1lfqoX"><strong>Cronenweth: </strong>Just the bare set walls of the stage, naked. David and his little radio. </p>
<p id="cVvDpL"><strong>Byrne: </strong>That was my boom box. I used to travel with it. I remember going to Brazil with that boom box.</p>
<p id="L4i2qb"><strong>Mabry: </strong>We had a rehearsal for something, and he was in this little production room that was probably for ballet dancers. It was just, like, a barre and a mirror. He literally had his boom box, and he would play it, and he would just sit there and watch himself do certain things. And he would be like, “No,” and he would do something else.</p>
<p id="Qhlb9q"><strong>Byrne: </strong>It was one of those things where you find something really cool, some song on the radio. You just press record and later on go, “What is that? What is that music? What is that?” And we used it all the time when we were rehearsing. We’d just stick it on a table and press record. And as Jerry has pointed out, it has this built-in compression where it squishes the sound, brings some things up, and does all this stuff where it kind of sounds really good, even when you’re just jamming. It really flatters the sound. Drum machines <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2016/12/808-the-movie-is-a-must-watch-doc-for-music-nerds.html">like the 808</a> had come out. That’s what was used to program that beat. </p>
<p id="I9utYf"><strong>Mabry: </strong>He was coming up with things that were just brilliantly different, and it made you watch him. Then it made you appreciate it more because it felt right in the song. </p>
<p id="tDxDo9"><strong>McLeod: </strong>I remember when we were shooting that opening shot, seeing David standing behind the curtain with the guitar neck and the shadow on the floor, saying to Jordy, “Let’s start there. Let’s have the shadow come into the frame, and then we’ll bring him out.” Jonathan had already designed the shot where we dolly up to his face. It’s an embellishment. Everyone agrees on the basic sentence, and then you put in a little more punctuation and better wording.</p>
<p id="f91h88"><strong>Byrne: </strong>It’s me as a character—or me as myself—being anxious and isolated in the beginning, and then gradually finding himself with this little supportive community. And little by little, he starts to relax and become a little less anxious and has a little bit more fun.</p>
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<h3 id="ekw84H">
<br>Part 3: “We Couldn’t Keep Them in Their Seats Anymore.” </h3>
<p id="LvgQ7L"><em>After a rough first night, Demme’s film started to take shape. </em></p>
<p id="ONwJ3c"><strong>Weymouth: </strong>[Jonathan] was like, “It’s going to be great, guys. It’s just going to be great.” He was just in our corner the whole way.</p>
<p id="I7BzST"><strong>Mabry: </strong>We were instructed, “This is a show, just do what you do. Don’t do anything different.” </p>
<p id="9Uqwel"><strong>Weymouth: </strong>We were admonished not to look at the cameras directly, but I mean, David uses the camera, and so does Steve Scales. I mean, they play right to it. But otherwise, we became quite used to it.</p>
<p id="XfxIJB"><strong>Scales: </strong>Jonathan came to me after the first night, and he said, “Steve, keep doing what you’re doing.” He said everybody reacted kind of uptight with the cameras and stuff. He said, “Steve, you have a marriage with the camera. You just keep doing what you’re doing.”</p>
<p id="1wekRf"><strong>Harrison: </strong>We filmed it over multiple days, but one of the reasons for that was for dolly shots. One day was on the left, one day in the middle, one day down the right. </p>
<p id="AYCgnq"><strong>Cronenweth: </strong>Often in a concert film, especially a live experience, you have cameras on both sides. You have no choice, but the light is going to suck. On one side, it’s going to be flat. So what my dad did was: On one night, everything was lit one direction. On the next night, everything was lit in the opposite direction. People, including myself, copied that for years. </p>
<p id="V218iW"><strong>McLeod: </strong>Once the show started, the pact that we all made was that we would not stop it for any reason. We wanted the energy to build in the same way the narrative would build. That was a really smart choice.</p>
<p id="c9wjA4"><strong>Frantz: </strong>There’s one moment in the film that I adore, and that is the song “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel,” when it’s Tina and David and myself, the original trio of the band. I love seeing that because that’s how we began, just three of us. And those were the days. But the next song, when Jerry comes out, “Found a Job,” is really something.</p>
<p id="KiWUq6"><strong>Weymouth: </strong>That was Jonathan’s favorite shot, where it’s shot from the side and David and Jerry kind of go in and out. And the three of us, you see us. It wasn’t intended or choreographed. It’s one of those just beautiful things that just serendipitously happens.</p>
<p id="yWyDyo"><strong>McLeod: </strong>To me, it felt like a natural show. </p>
<p id="O0UzyO"><strong>Frantz: </strong>We figured out very quickly that these audiences don’t want you to be laid-back. </p>
<p id="ZGrmAo"><strong>Weymouth: </strong>We had the moniker “Thinking Man’s Dance Band,” and our fans already liked to dance. But when we got the big band, there was a lot more sort of joking and showbiz. </p>
<p id="J8I4V5"><strong>Lutz: </strong>To see Alex, to see Steve Scales just traversing the stage, and Bernie clacking his teeth up there. I mean, it’s so joyous. </p>
<p id="O16Lnt"><strong>Weymouth: </strong>Steve Scales was very effusive, with giant expressions. And then with Bernie Worrell, and with Lynn and Ednah singing, everything got bigger. And Alex Weir’s such a dynamic force to play with. It’s unbelievable that he’s playing like that and dancing like that, with those high kicks. And so that egged us on, too.</p>
<p id="nKAP3S"><strong>McLeod: </strong>The audience danced. They went wild. At a certain point, we couldn’t keep them in their seats anymore. That energy was great for all of us, especially for those on the stage. </p>
<p id="MZdWrv"><strong>Weymouth: </strong>When we went to England, I picked up this fanzine that had republished a letter to an editor. It was a complaint by a BBC viewer who said, “And then that woman did the most hideous dance and I dropped all the stitches to my knitting.” </p>
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<p id="IXPetv"><strong>McLeod: </strong>She was just adorable. There was something about the way she moved with the instrument. It was really, really good.</p>
<p id="dTdPqt"><strong>Scales:</strong> The way the songs went and built up, by the time I came on “Slippery People,” and Alex came out on “Burning Down the House,” and then “Life During Wartime,” it was over. We had them. They were in the palms of our hands.</p>
<p id="rssJco"><strong>Day: </strong>When David starts doing “Life During Wartime,” I’m like, “Who does that?” I mean, running around. <em>Continuing</em> to run around. </p>
<p id="6bhLa5"><strong>Mabry: </strong>I was in the best shape of my life by the time we did the film. All that running, whether it was around or in place—that took a lot of stamina. </p>
<p id="U17e06"><strong>Holt:</strong> Lynn and I actually ran around the stage. We were around the whole auditorium. We’d go out the door and come back and run around the stage. I said, “Well, call an ambulance after we’re finished.” </p>
<p id="2Qeur8"><strong>Harrison: </strong>On <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMS4_P6pbhw">“What a Day That Was,”</a> I’m behind Ednah and Lynn, and half my face is in the dark. It’s like the light’s coming up from the bottom to me. Sort of like up from the crypt in a horror movie. </p>
<p id="9odwHl"><strong>Byrne: </strong>It looks like the camera’s going to go down Ednah’s throat.</p>
<p id="qBdY7a"><strong>Harrison:</strong> That’s right.</p>
<p id="e30oxq"><strong>Byrne: </strong>You’re just going, “Whoa. That’s a point of view the audience does not always get.”</p>
<p id="F3uaDn"><strong>Lutz: </strong><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JoAnne_Akalaitis">JoAnne Akalaitis</a> was a theater director that came out of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mabou_Mines">Mabou Mines</a>. And she was the one who said, “I think we should put an armchair and a lamp there” for “(Naive Melody).” So David sat down in the chair and [said], “Excuse me, this is a rock ’n’ roll show.” It killed it. So funny. And so later, I said, “I think you have to lose that armchair, but you should do something with the lamp.” </p>
<p id="wHLzc1"><strong>Weymouth: </strong>He was watching old Fred Astaire films. In one film, <em>Royal Wedding</em>,<em> </em>he’s falling in love with the girl and he does an ecstatic dance with a coatrack. For this one song, David wanted to create the atmosphere of home. He thought a lamp would be appropriate, and he could do these dances. I mean, if you’re going to borrow, borrow from the best. So it is also an homage. It’s a synthesis of our pop culture.</p>
<p id="Fo6piC"><strong>Cronenweth: </strong>It<strong> </strong>was weighted so that it made those perfect tips and hung a little bit before it kind of fell. </p>
<p id="3khsRD"><strong>Lutz: </strong>What he did with the lamp … none of us would’ve thought of that lamp dance.</p>
<p id="rABTAy"><strong>Mabry: </strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqtTINkDH64">“Once in a Lifetime”</a> was definitely a favorite. The way Jonathan shot that thing with the light on the side of us and us having our arms out. That was amazing. </p>
<p id="2Bz5OE"><strong>Holt: </strong>Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Didn’t that remind you a little bit of <em>The Exorcist</em>?</p>
<p id="3d8Rol"><em>During </em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_of_Love"><em>“Genius of Love,”</em></a><em> an oft-sampled track by Frantz and Weymouth’s side project Tom Tom Club, Byrne left the stage for a costume change. When he returned to perform the final three songs of the night—“Girlfriend Is Better,” a cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River,” and “Crosseyed and Painless”—he was in the wildest formal wear the world has ever seen. </em></p>
<p id="0FoPxz"><strong>Byrne: </strong>In Noh, they’d come out with these really broad-shouldered outfits that were very rectangular looking, at least from the front. Like a band, they would perform facing the audience, rather than like a lot of times in Western theater, when they face one another. But anyway, that shape struck me, and then I thought, “But yeah, what if it’s a Western suit done like that?” </p>
<p id="4OdIYV"><strong>Harrison: </strong>I actually knew [artist] <a href="http://gailblacker.com/aboutme.html">Gail Blacker</a> and introduced Gail to David. It was like, “There’s this need for a big suit, where are we going to get it?”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="DmssON"><q>“When we did Forest Hills, Mick Jagger changed his seat five times trying to figure out what the hell we were doing.” —Steven Scales</q></aside></div>
<p id="NX46A7"><strong>Lutz: </strong>I was working with a designer who saw David’s shows, and he asked [David], “Are these clothes all going to be that big in the department stores?” And he said, “No, it’s stage. Stage is always larger.”</p>
<p id="o9kxJc"><strong>Byrne: </strong>We discovered things in touring and improvising and rehearsals. You discover that if you wiggle it—it’s made of linen—it would make all these weaves and wiggles, and all this kind of stuff. That’s just stuff you discovered, like, “Hey, that’s good. Let’s do that.” </p>
<p id="nGFEIC"><strong>Cronenweth:</strong> David in his fat suit dancing around, it’s pretty striking.</p>
<p id="yZmsgh"><strong>Holt: </strong>I thought it was great. He was so creative. We never knew what he was going to do. </p>
<p id="oeFS7A"><strong>Mabry: </strong>I thought it was goofy, but it fit David’s personality. It was like, “OK, that’s hilarious.” But see, I come from a different world. I have been with <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2022/10/26/23422717/george-clinton-profile-interview-one-nation-under-groove-tour">Parliament-Funkadelic</a>. If you’ve ever seen any of those outfits, I had no right to laugh. I did a show where I was literally a worm.</p>
<p id="UarVYI"><strong>Weymouth: </strong>He goes from so serious to being a total clown. And then somebody in the audience gave him a red hat, and he’s got his jacket off at this point, and he’s got that wide waist with that big—well, should I say it? The big ass.</p>
<p id="3O1ReQ"><strong>Cronenweth: </strong>I was on the center camera, so I got to watch more of it. But it was groundbreaking, then mesmerizing.</p>
<p id="sT5fbL"><strong>McLeod: </strong>You feel that in the film: goosebumpy moments. And that’s just because we captured what was really in the room. There was some alchemy going on there.</p>
<p id="gbUfKX"><strong>Lutz: </strong>The beauty of <em>Stop Making Sense</em> is that it’s a real celebration. And I don’t know if other rock ’n’ roll films are the same or have that same, frankly, joy to them.</p>
<p id="LAjDUh"><strong>McLeod: </strong>There is a process to creation, to thought, and to music. You start scratching things out on paper, picking them out on a guitar or piano, and the film shows the process. </p>
<p id="vMQ2WA"><strong>Byrne: </strong>And part of that process is this idea of losing yourself, losing your identity as a lone individual. It’s also your sense of “No, I belong to a larger group.” </p>
<p id="rz6vKT"><strong>Day: </strong>It’s like internal thoughts of some guy. And then his life goes on, and his life goes on, and it gets crazy and war breaks out. And then, finally, things settle down. He gets a girlfriend and everything’s happening, and then he dies at the end. <em>Take me to the river</em>.</p>
<h3 id="6xTFy6">Part 4: “There’s Something That Happens Between the Audience and the Performer That Can’t Happen Without Each Other.” </h3>
<p id="qORcnF"><em>After shooting,</em><em><strong> </strong></em><em>Demme and Co. had a little more than four months to get </em>Stop Making Sense <em>ready for its premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival in April 1984. That winter, Talking Heads played a series of shows </em><a href="http://talkingheadsconcerthistory.blogspot.com/2013/01/1984.html"><em>in Australia and New Zealand</em></a><em>. The band never toured again.</em></p>
<p id="3yAakg"><strong>Day: </strong>When I got a call to work on the picture, I had cut the Hal Ashby picture <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Spend_the_Night_Together_(film)"><em>Let’s Spend the Night Together</em></a>. It was the first thing I had a sole credit on as an editor. I was working on a TV show, and I got a call from, I guess, Gary [Goetzman]. They said, “We got your name from Hal, and we’re doing this Talking Heads show. We’re trying to get information about how Ashby shot <em>Let’s Spend the Night Together</em>,” because it was kind of unusual the way the cameras were lined up and the way they had transferred it to videotape. </p>
<p id="wU3JJ2">They said, “Can you come over this afternoon?” So I went in a room, and there were a lot of people hanging around. I met Jonathan. And then Gary started talking to me. When they explained what it was, I was flabbergasted. It was like I had drawn this thing to me. I said, “Oh yes, of course I’d be interested in doing that.” Jonathan said, “Where do you want to cut?” And they said, “We might as well cut out of Hal Ashby’s place because it’s all set up for it.” That’s it. I mean, from that time it was just plowing through to the end. It happened fast, but it was more intimate than other jobs I’d been on.</p>
<p id="FQBZ9i"><strong>Byrne: </strong>I remember being at Hal Ashby’s editing suite, and Jonathan invited us to come in. It was very generous of him because often it’s like, “No, the talent does not get to see the editing because they’re going to have all these opinions. It’s not their job.” But he was very generous about inviting us in there, which turned out, I think, to be really good because we knew the show so intimately that we could say, “Oh, oh, at this point Steve Scales is doing this really interesting thing. Did any of the cameras catch that?”</p>
<p id="FhsUrE"><strong>Day: </strong>When we had that first little screening and there was a big close-up of [David], I remember saying, “Do you find this a little scary?” He said, “Well, yeah.” He wasn’t joking.</p>
<p id="Ftj5iH"><strong>Harrison: </strong>We had great, great shots, and going out and seeing what Lisa and Jonathan were doing was fabulous.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="aMNUsn"><q>“What he did with the lamp … none of us would’ve thought of that lamp dance.” —Adelle Lutz</q></aside></div>
<p id="tZUKo5"><strong>Day: </strong>[Jonathan] would come in at the end of the day, and sometimes we would look at what I’d cut, and then we’d go out and get dinner. Other times we would look at it, we’d talk a little bit about it, and then he would leave and I would edit, and then we’d meet again the next day. </p>
<p id="wAevS5">I had a Polaroid camera, and I really liked taking these Polaroid pictures. And Jonathan would invite people to come by. There were always actors or musicians or people coming by, and they’d sit for a while and talk. But it resulted in a big board with all these Polaroid pictures on it. It was like a clubhouse. Ed Harris and Amy Madigan were there. And then Hal would come in once in a while. That’s when we still hadn’t decided what the name of the movie was going to be. We had a list up on the wall, and when people would come up with an idea, they’d write it down and write their name next to it. It was a long sheet of paper we had Scotch taped together. Whoever’s title was chosen, the prize was a date with Steve Scales.</p>
<p id="TUCeao"><strong>Scales: </strong>They were all putting in. </p>
<p id="VXp5th"><strong>Day: </strong><em>Stop Making Sense</em> was one that went up pretty early. I think it might’ve been Jonathan. It was probably an idea that a lot of us had. I don’t recall exactly who got a date with Steve Scales.</p>
<p id="oIJ1wE"><strong>Harrison: </strong>Once the whole thing was finished, we were very confident. </p>
<p id="TBjAAn"><strong>Day: </strong>We cut “Psycho Killer,” and then we cut “Heaven.” And we took that to Samuel Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood, and we put it up on that big soundstage and screened that much. We had whoever wanted to come. Maybe there were 20 people the first time. We’d have 10 minutes. Then the next week we’d have 15 minutes. And every time, there were more and more people coming in. </p>
<p id="FGh4D9">We were screening the whole thing, but it wasn’t completely mixed. And at the studio, they were saying, “You cannot have this many people in this room.” They probably should have had 60 people in the room—we had, like, 200. I walked out just to do something in the projection booth, and this red Porsche came zooming up right at the door. I thought, “You can’t park there.” And Rod Stewart and his wife got out. “Where’s the screening?” And I had to wiggle myself out of that door because his car was in the way.</p>
<p id="TOrlCn"><em>After hitting the festival circuit, </em>Stop Making Sense <em>was released in American theaters on October 19, 1984. At the time, </em><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160304123806/http://www.davidbyrne.com/archive/film/Stop_Making_Sense/s_m_s_press/s_m_s_pauline_kael_nyer.php">New Yorker <em>critic Pauline Kael</em></a><em> called it “close to perfection” and wrote that “seeing the movie is like going to an austere orgy—which turns out to be just what you wanted.” The film made </em><a href="https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0088178/"><em>$6.5 million</em></a><em> at the box office during its original run and, before long, became a cult classic. </em></p>
<p id="XLSrLg"><em>Demme went on to direct other slightly larger-scale classics, including </em>Something Wild<em>, </em>The Silence of the Lambs, <em>and </em>Philadelphia. <em>Talking Heads released three more studio albums before breaking up. A24’s rerelease of </em>Stop Making Sense, <em>which in addition to sharpened visuals features a new sound mix that Harrison oversaw</em>, <em>brings the band together since its </em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRNh_qdNB5c"><em>2002 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame</em></a><em> induction ceremony. The party kicked off in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, but without one of its guests of honor. </em><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/movies/jonathan-demme-dead-movie-director-oscar-winner.html"><em>In 2017</em></a><em>, Demme died of cancer at the age of 73. </em></p>
<p id="aPtj46"><strong>Byrne: </strong>It was a small independent movie, really. So we knew it was not going out like a blockbuster into thousands of theaters or anything like that. It was going to have to get out there slowly. </p>
<p id="aJuRD2"><strong>Weymouth: </strong>At that time, <em>The</em> <em>Rocky Horror Picture Show</em> was a cult favorite that showed every weekend, say, in Boston, in Cambridge. And so we thought, “Well, that’s the way for us to go.” And it was good to do it that way because then people, well, they’re in on it. That makes it more fun. </p>
<p id="lX5nRE"><strong>Harrison: </strong>We thought that that would probably extend the life of the film. I don’t think we had any idea that it would have such a lasting impact, or that we would be here in 40 years.</p>
<p id="8zoWlK"><strong>Frantz: </strong>I’m very grateful about that because it means that maybe we’ll get a whole new audience all over again while, of course, still retaining our much-loved audience that we already have.</p>
<p id="rAi9ez"><strong>Cronenweth:</strong><em><strong> </strong></em>Jonathan was a special talent, and my dad was really having a good time. And he gave him so much freedom, and I think he was very proud of it. And he was proud of it later, of course. And people would say it’s, if not the best, one of the five best concert films ever made. So that sticks with you, and you carry that. But I think if he could see its legs now, both him and Jonathan, I think they would be amused and shocked, you know what I mean?</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="9Il2CF"><q>“You feel that in the film: goosebumpy moments.” —Sandy McLeod</q></aside></div>
<p id="JyLo5P"><strong>Scales: </strong>I did <em>Something Wild</em> after that with Jonathan. Then I did <em>Philadelphia</em>. I went to the screening of <em>Ricki and the Flash</em>. He was with Meryl Streep. And the guards were in a little roped-off area. And I said, “Yo, Jonathan.” He said, “Hey, let him in.” He introduced me to Meryl. She hugged me. He hugged me. And I said to him, “Look, man, I need a movie.” He said, “You got it. I got one coming up.” And he passed away before I heard from him. He is a radiant kind of guy. Always smiling and talking about what we did. You get the feeling that he was extremely proud. </p>
<p id="IveGJ4"><strong>Lutz: </strong>There is not another rock concert film that I think captured what JD did and how much fun the band had. </p>
<p id="RWLi7O"><strong>Holt: </strong>That band was <em>kicking</em>. We would have so much fun. It was fun. <em>Fun</em>.</p>
<p id="5iDt36"><strong>Mabry: </strong>It is actually some of the most fun that I ever had playing with an artist or a band.</p>
<p id="KCqxml"><strong>Day: </strong>I so love the picture, and I so love to watch it. Maybe five years after I finished it, I put it on. I thought, “I haven’t looked at this for a while.” I was housecleaning, and I started saying, “This is really so fun to watch.” And finally, I just quit doing my housework. I just sat down and watched it.</p>
<p id="tQiSYu"><strong>Byrne: </strong>You can put it on like a record, and whether it’s in a cinema or somebody’s house, it’s like you’ve got a DJ there.</p>
<p id="vsxqpY"><strong>Harrison: </strong>You don’t even have to watch it—you could just dance to it.</p>
<p id="UDpaj2"><strong>Frantz: </strong>We did a premiere at the Toronto Film Festival back then [in 1984]. Then we came out here [to L.A.], and we did one at the Palace Theatre. And then we finally had one at the Ritz in New York. Not the hotel, the rock ’n’ roll club. Both of those parties, the one here at the Palace and the one at the Ritz, were really something because we could see that the audience was jumping up on their feet and moving toward the screen. I wouldn’t exactly say rushing the screen, but definitely getting up and moving down front and on their feet, hopping, dancing.</p>
<p id="RIRzt6"><strong>McLeod: </strong>Which is why we love to go to concerts, because that can happen. There’s something that happens between the audience and the performer that can’t happen without each other.</p>
<p id="h1YLhq"><strong>Harrison: </strong>We went to Florence. I have this picture that’s Susan Sarandon and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_Bertolucci">Bernardo Bertolucci</a> and me.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="dliDpV"><strong>Byrne:</strong> Jerry mentioned Bernardo Bertolucci. This was a screening at a film festival. And the audience, as they often do, got up and danced. And they filled up the space in front of the screen. And we’re all dancing around, and he was like, “They don’t do that to my movies.” </p>
<p id="Kin9Uh"><em>Interviews have been edited and condensed. </em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/music/2023/9/27/23891070/stop-making-sense-talking-heads-movie-oral-historyAlan Siegel2023-09-21T06:10:00-04:002023-09-21T06:10:00-04:00How Nirvana Became Its Own Vintage T-shirt Industry
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<figcaption>Getty Images/Ringer illustration</figcaption>
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<p>Thirty years after the release of ‘In Utero,’ T-shirts commemorating the album can go for four figures. The most iconic band of the 1990s—one that openly rejected the commodification of rock—is now one of the biggest brands in the vintage industry.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="rHwqym">Justin Bieber arrived at the 2015 American Music Awards in one of the most conspicuous T-shirts ever made. Every inch of it was covered in imagery tied to “Heart-Shaped Box,” the first single off Nirvana’s 1993 album, <em>In Utero</em>. The all-over print featured black, red, and blue hearts of varying sizes; gold lettering; an actual heart-shaped box; lilies; and the <em>In Utero</em> album art. </p>
<p id="sogSNa">Seeing the singer of “Baby” draped in the regalia of grunge’s most iconic band provoked some strong reactions. Nirvana’s most sensitive fans <a href="https://www.usmagazine.com/stylish/news/nirvana-fans-mad-justin-bieber-wore-band-shirt-at-2015-amas-w158292/">expressed utter disgust</a>. <em>Spin </em><a href="https://www.spin.com/2015/11/justin-bieber-nirvana-t-shirt-amas-u-mad/">snarkily implied</a> that the pop star was a poser with the headline: “Noted Grunge Fan Justin Bieber Wore a Nirvana T-Shirt to the AMAs.” And Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain’s widow, actually <em>complimented</em> the teen idol, tweeting, <a href="https://www.musictimes.com/articles/55634/20151123/2015-amas-justin-bieber-wears-nirvana-t-shirt-courtney-love.htm">“You’re cool in my book.”</a></p>
<p id="p3gYaN">After the AMAs, graphic artist Bill Mooney was surprised to see news stories about Bieber’s Nirvana shirt. Scrolling through the photos was even more surreal. “It was a little strange,” Mooney says. Not because a massively popular, young artist wore an old band tee to make a fashion statement, but because of the particular tee he chose. </p>
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<img alt="2015 American Music Awards - Arrivals" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TnMov5WJQhUEMuI5QTx2c415A1U=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24939595/498813010.jpg">
<cite>Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Justin Bieber arrives at the 2015 American Music Awards in a Nirvana T-shirt.</figcaption>
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<p id="0GQnW5">The founder and co-owner of the music merchandise company <a href="https://www.tannisroot.com/">Tannis Root</a>, Mooney came up with the “Heart-Shaped Box” shirt in 1993. At the time, it was not his favorite concept, and he admits that it still hasn’t really grown on him. “I don’t think I saw another one out in the wild for another 10 years,” Mooney says. “And at some point, I saw one and again thought, like, ‘God, that’s not a great-looking shirt.’” </p>
<p id="o9PNBa">Collectors, however, disagree. An original “Heart-Shaped Box” shirt, depending on condition and variant, can go for between $1,500 and $3,500. Rarer, more valuable Nirvana merch exists—like some <a href="https://deadunion.com/products/1989-nirvana-blew-sub-pop-long-sleeve-bleach-era-australian-made-promo?_pos=1&_sid=7edb76a6b&_ss=r">Sub Pop–era</a> tees—but there’s no single piece coveted more by the typical T-shirt head. “It’s the most culturally significant vintage shirt in the community,” says Joe LaMonica, co-owner of <a href="https://fadedshow.com/">Faded</a>, a vintage clothing collective that just staged its second annual convention. “I think it actually even translates over to the masses. Not my<em> father</em>, but young kids who see that shirt will recognize it, as opposed to an old shirt from a Nirvana limited run that they only printed 150 of.” </p>
<p id="2BN9lU">The story of the “Heart-Shaped Box” T-shirt is, on the surface at least, about how commodified nostalgia and celebrity hype turned a maximalist eyesore into a Holy Grail. But it’s also about the power of Nirvana. Since the release of its last studio record 30 years ago this month, the trio has transformed from a beloved short-lived band to a ubiquitous lifestyle brand. Modern Nirvana apparel is available at a wide range of prices in countless stores, from <a href="https://www.walmart.com/ip/Nirvana-Men-s-Smiley-Logo-Graphic-Print-Tee/1750136007?athbdg=L1600">big-box chains like Walmart</a> to far more <a href="https://www.garmentory.com/sale/daydreamer/tops-tees-short-sleeve/1663076-nirvana-collage-reverse-gf-tee">expensive boutique retailers</a>. People from all walks of life identify with it, whether or not they can <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/MetalMemes/comments/mmvikr/name_three_songs_by_them/">name three Nirvana songs</a>. </p>
<p id="LJGHXr">“A Nirvana shirt has a different meaning for you or me, where we have a lot of experience with the band’s music or grew up with them. And so that shirt is just kind of an icon or a portal to all that meaning,” Mooney says. “But when I see somebody wearing a shirt that says ‘Nirvana’ and has a smiley face on it, it can just operate on the level of that word and that goofy, blissed-out smiley face. It just works on a level of a slogan and a simple image.” </p>
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<cite>Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows wears a Nirvana T-shirt while performing at Myth Live in 2013.</figcaption>
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<p id="gEzte3">Nirvana was both subversive and accessible, which gave the band something extraordinarily rare: dual appeal. “Even when they were mainstream, as popular as they got, the music still had an edge to it that transcended the popularity,” says <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-moe-9a67334b/">Rick Moe</a>, a longtime vintage band T-shirt collector and <a href="https://tyrannyandmutation.com">dealer</a>. “You can’t really say they sold out. At least I don’t. And then Kurt died and they stopped. [But] there was no fading out.” </p>
<p id="BNNPbF">Cobain was a punk-rock supernova, a mesmerizing explosion that burned so bright it left a permanent afterglow. He may be gone, but he still has <a href="https://genius.com/Nirvana-dumb-lyrics">a light</a>—and the ubiquity of Nirvana tees in 2023 proves that. Dropping thousands of dollars on a “Heart-Shaped Box” shirt may seem ludicrous to most, but if you can afford one, there’s no bolder statement piece. A record collection is cool, but as <a href="https://www.metropolisvintageonline.com/?p=14309">Richard Colligan</a>, the owner of Metropolis Vintage in New York City, once told me, “You can’t wear vinyl.” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="jcgraa">Every new band T-shirt collector has to get over the sticker shock. Seven years ago, LaMonica walked into Metropolis in the East Village and was greeted by walls lined with rare music tees. After geeking out and finally managing to compose himself, he asked the salesperson to see one: a 1986 Cro-Mags shirt that featured artwork from the band’s first album. </p>
<p id="A4OBiD">The price tag said $900. </p>
<p id="fhv5XO">“I quickly told him to put it right back on the shelf where it belonged,” LaMonica says. At that moment, he realized two things: (1) His hobby might be a pretty expensive one, and (2) old T-shirts mean <em>a lot</em> to people. “Pieces of clothing that are attached to specific cultural importance do have different values,” he says. “And the values of those do fluctuate pretty significantly.” </p>
<p id="ihZFq6">Three decades after their moms and dads got rid of all of their ratty grunge T-shirts, Gen Xers and elder millennials can now buy back small chunks of their childhood for hundreds of dollars apiece. To my bank account’s detriment, I’ve spent the past 10 years piling up a brand-new stash of Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, and Beastie Boys tees. Finding one on eBay that I’ve been looking for is a rush, even if I occasionally have to pay 15 or 20 times the original retail price for it. (I said <em>occasionally</em>, OK?) </p>
<p id="BfjRYI">These days, there’s nothing unique about my vintage habit. Secondhand clothing has become <a href="https://qz.com/the-secondhand-clothing-market-is-exploding-1850313653">a hundred-billion-dollar business</a>. That covers everything from sneakers to denim to militaria to workwear to streetwear to lingerie to dresses to bathing suits to <a href="https://www.etsy.com/market/vintage_snapback_hat">snapback hats</a> to jerseys. </p>
<p id="FquQz0">High-end vintage pop culture tees are a small but, in recent years, prominent part of that world. <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/6-000-for-an-aladdin-t-shirt-the-exploding-movie-merch-market-11600705795">In late 2020</a>, when pandemic boredom and stimulus checks led vintage prices to skyrocket, a T-shirt covered in a giant print of Genie from Disney’s <em>Aladdin </em>sold on an Instagram livestream for $6,000. <a href="https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/music/grateful-dead-t-shirt-from-1967-sells-for-record-breaking-17640">The next year</a>, Sotheby’s auctioned off a 1967 Grateful Dead tee for, expenses and fees included, nearly $20,000. And this summer, the luxury fashion house Yves Saint Laurent released an astronomically priced, curated vintage Nirvana collection that features <a href="https://www.ysl.com/en-us/nirvana-incesticide-black-t-shirt-in-cotton-777382YCL361000.html">a $4,450 <em>Incesticide</em> shirt</a> that you can find elsewhere for <a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524.m570.l1313&_nkw=vintage+incesticide+nirvana+shirt+black&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&_odkw=vintage+incesticide+nirvana+shirt&_osacat=0">far, far less</a>.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="uD30TO"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Nirvana in Bloom ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/music/2021/9/24/22690755/nirvana-night-before-nevermind-boston-concert"},{"title":"How Hot Topic Defined a Generation of Emo Kids ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/music/2022/7/27/23279552/hot-topic-store-emo-generation"},{"title":"How ‘Nope’ Became a Vintage Tee Wonderland ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2022/7/27/23280534/nope-movie-vintage-tees-jesus-lizard-rage-against-the-machine"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="Z5fyDy">People have collected merch since the dawn of rock ’n’ roll, but the current market for it was seeded in the ’80s. Touring acts back then sold $15 to $20 T-shirts by the bushel, flooding America with the kind of stuff for which vintage sellers now scour thrift stores, yard sales, and <a href="https://lavintage.com/pages/what-is-a-rag-house">rag houses</a>. In 1987 alone, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/1989/09/24/the-selling-of-rock-on-the-megabucks-music-circuit/f8c04849-abb7-4790-bd1e-4cf16c24babf/">fans reportedly bought $300 million</a> worth of pop music tees. With tons of money to be made, merchandisers started shelling out eight-figure sums for the right to produce T-shirts for the world’s biggest bands. In 1989, Brockum became the official apparel provider for the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels Tour—thanks to its parent company’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/1989/09/24/the-selling-of-rock-on-the-megabucks-music-circuit/f8c04849-abb7-4790-bd1e-4cf16c24babf/">payment of $70 million</a>. </p>
<p id="rhmSWV">In those days, Mooney wasn’t inking million-dollar deals. He was a teenager in Raleigh, North Carolina, who’d convinced his art teacher to let him do an independent study in screen printing. In the summer of 1985, not long after his high school graduation, one of his favorite bands came to town: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redd_Kross">Redd Kross</a>. On a whim, he presented the members of the group with sample T-shirt designs—one was a photo of Madonna that had just appeared in <em>Playboy</em>. The band liked them. “We wound up printing their dirty laundry one night,” Mooney says. “T-shirts, white pants, basically anything that they wanted to. And they wound up wearing that stuff.” </p>
<p id="BLz16P">Two years later, Redd Kross asked Mooney and his partners, Barbara Herring and Mike Carter, if they’d produce the band’s tour merch. “We just said, ‘OK.’ We didn’t have equipment,” Mooney says. “We just hand-placed the screens and did these really labor-intensive shirts that would be completely impractical to do if we didn’t have cheap rent and too much time on our hands.” </p>
<p id="c0iyPu">And that’s how Tannis Root was born. The fledgling company, named for a sinister substance used as a MacGuffin in <em>Rosemary’s Baby</em>, soon landed another indie band as a client. “Sonic Youth played Chapel Hill, and we took them some of the shirts we just made for Redd Kross, because we knew they were Redd Kross fans,” Mooney says. “They loved them and said, ‘Oh, well, we’ll be in touch.’” </p>
<p id="EASN4d">The alt-rock icons, who shared a manager with Redd Kross, hired Tannis Root to make their shirts. Then, in the summer of 1989, with the company set to deliver merch to a Sonic Youth show in Manhattan, guitarist Thurston Moore called Mooney. “‘Oh, you should come up at least a day early to check out these Sub Pop bands that are playing,’” Mooney remembers him saying. One of those bands was Nirvana. “They were amazing,” Mooney says. </p>
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<p id="92bUUn"><br>By then, Tannis Root had also started to make merch for Mudhoney. That December, the grunge pioneers played <a href="https://www.revolutioncomeandgone.com/articles/13/sub-pop-rock-city-sp-lame-fest.php">Lame Fest U.K.</a> with fellow Seattle bands Nirvana and Tad. Mooney designed the shirt for the show. The front print is a photo of a naked woman that he found in a sex shop at the back of the South Carolina truck stop South of the Border. “Most of the porno was just these black-and-white booklets that were stapled together,” Mooney says. “That photo, she’s kind of wearing a mod biker’s cap and a scarf. And it looked more like Swinging London than it did a South Carolina truck stop.” The back print is slightly less risqué: just the names of the three bands in tongue-in-cheek stars-and-stripes block lettering. Today, the shirt is worth <a href="https://freakscene.store/products/nirvana-tad-mudhoney-lame-fest-u-k">an absurd amount of money</a>. </p>
<p id="jjaLZw">Mooney continued to cross paths with Nirvana. When the band stopped in Chapel Hill on the 1991 <em>Nevermind </em>tour, a roadie who was also Mooney’s friend asked him to make some shirts. The resulting black long-sleeve tees featured Nirvana’s smiley face logos and the names of each member of the band and crew. “I think I literally printed one for each member of the band and crew. So it was probably 12 total,” says Mooney, who has only <em>one </em>of the shirts today.</p>
<p id="ziH6go">But Tannis Root didn’t <em>officially</em> collaborate with Nirvana until a few years later, after Cobain and Co. had shockingly become one of the biggest bands in the world. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/1989/09/24/the-selling-of-rock-on-the-megabucks-music-circuit/f8c04849-abb7-4790-bd1e-4cf16c24babf/">Brockum</a>, whose roster included the Stones, Metallica, and Pink Floyd, had signed Nirvana, but it didn’t feel like a good fit. The band may have been huge, but it wasn’t playing grandiose stadium shows like the merchandiser’s other clients. “Nirvana was probably a point of pride to have but not the biggest moneymaker,” Mooney says. “And they honestly didn’t know what to do with it.” </p>
<p id="wZnfGU">Cobain was punk. He preferred a more … DIY aesthetic. “He was unhappy when he would send his artwork to them, the look of it when it would come back,” Mooney says. “Just because [Brockum’s] style was just those hair-metal band shirts and classic rock.” </p>
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<img alt="UK- Bonhams Entertainment Memorabilia Auction in London" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/BPqqntTakU9ZIxuUzGU29lRHboQ=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24939602/525601072.jpg">
<cite>Photo by rune hellestad/Corbis via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Kurt Cobain’s Sonic Youth T-shirt, worn during his final stage performance, is displayed as part of the Bonhams Entertainment Memorabilia auction.</figcaption>
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<p id="D3zA1W">The Nirvana frontman was familiar with Tannis Root. He was often seen <a href="https://www.facebook.com/FarOut/posts/kurt-cobain-wearing-a-sonic-youth-t-shirt/5162749510440443/">wearing Sonic Youth T-shirts</a>. So with the blessing of the band’s management, Mooney and Cobain talked about collaborating on a design for Brockum. Mooney recalls that their phone conversations made him slightly uncomfortable. “Courtney would be yelling in the background, and he would be kind of snapping back, like, ‘I’m talking on the phone. Can you just give me a minute?’” he says. “I remember calling my contact at the management company at the time, just saying, ‘I don’t know about this. That wasn’t a very fun vibe.’ And to their credit, the person at the merchandising company was just like, ‘Kurt wouldn’t be talking to you if he didn’t want to. And this is good for him to work on these designs, to try to hash it out creatively.’” </p>
<p id="IrBXwi">One of Mooney’s ideas for Cobain, who took a hands-on approach to everything related to Nirvana, was an image of a fish wrapped in tabloid articles about the band. “I did a sketch of that and sent it, and he really liked the idea,” Mooney says. The concept stalled when Cobain insisted on including a snippet from <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/03/love-story-of-kurt-cobain-courtney-love">an infamous <em>Vanity Fair </em>article</a> about his marriage. “It wasn’t a forum where you could really address all of that,” Mooney says. “So I just kind of backed off on it and never finished it.” </p>
<p id="Kgxasa">The calls never led to a workable idea, but after the <em>In Utero </em>tour started, Mooney heard from Nirvana’s management again. They said that Brockum had just bought <a href="https://www.ambromanufacturing.com/belt-printing/">a belt printer</a>—an expensive piece of equipment that could produce oversized, multicolored, multilayered T-shirt designs—and wanted Mooney to come up with something that took advantage of the technology. </p>
<p id="qejVjT">Nirvana’s record label, Geffen, had sent Mooney a disk full of art from <em>In Utero. </em>One of the images, of a pink, heart-shaped box flanked by lilies, appeared on the <a href="https://www.discogs.com/release/1337726-Nirvana-Heart-Shaped-Box">international single sleeve</a> for “Heart-Shaped Box.” Mooney used that as the centerpiece of a new shirt design, which he created on his Mac. The color printout that Nirvana OK’d has a handwritten note by Mooney on it with a simple message: “Use this one.” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="bmEIoI">Soon, “Heart-Shaped Box” T-shirts were rolling off the presses and onto <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageTees/comments/i0f6sk/1990s_the_original_hot_topic_rock_wall_bringing/">Hot Topic shelves</a> across America. At the time, the design wasn’t a bestseller. Mooney still has no idea how many were printed, and Norman Perry, then-president of Brockum, remembers nothing about that particular tee. Brockum produced merch for only one Nirvana tour. It would be the band’s last. </p>
<p id="DZwivU">In the years following Cobain’s crushing death at 27, grunge’s overall popularity gradually waned. Fewer and fewer teens wore Seattle band tees, which weren’t old or rare enough yet to be worth much. And by the end of the decade, current artists had started to swap out big and bold T-shirt graphics with more understated art. </p>
<p id="vq8H2O">When he was working as a buyer for SoHo vintage boutique What Goes Around Comes Around in the aughts, Moe never saw ’90s stuff on the racks. “Whether it’s rap tees or grunge or anything, just because it wasn’t, quote, unquote, old enough,” he says. “But it was what <em>I</em> was. I listened to that music. I went to those shows. So whenever I would find that stuff—and we’re talking about a time [when] you could find that stuff really cheaply, certainly compared to now—I would always grab it.” </p>
<p id="ZOEwrU">In 2009, Kid Cudi came into the shop looking for music tees from his childhood. “I would always have a personal stash downstairs, a bag full of my own stuff I would sometimes sell,” Moe says. “He was one of the first clients I had that would buy into that. And if you have any client that’s buying in bulk, you start sourcing that same stuff.” </p>
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<img alt="Studio 189 - Front Row &amp; Backstage - September 2021 - New York Fashion Week: The Shows" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5rGUMQDxmf7qsekMUnjZ5xHbDPs=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24939605/1339679995.jpg">
<cite>Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Kid Cudi attends a New York Fashion Week event in 2021 wearing a Nirvana shirt.</figcaption>
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<p id="4qfBik">When Moe moved to Seattle in 2011 and later opened <a href="https://tyrannyandmutation.com/">Tyranny + Mutation</a>, he continued to pile up ’90s shirts. And despite his occasional non-buyer’s remorse—when offered 10 deadstock Pearl Jam T-shirts printed specifically for the “Alive” video shoot, he left thousands of dollars on the table by grabbing only one—Moe found his personal grunge gold mine in the Pacific Northwest. “It was like a dream,” he says. “I could source that stuff cheaply and plentifully there. … I could pull 100 tees, really good stuff, for a grand or two.” </p>
<p id="39I414">Around the early 2010s, Moe noticed that the T-shirts he loved were creeping up in value. Then, fashion designer <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/fear-of-gods-jerry-lorenzo-on-scoring-the-worlds-best-collection-of-vintage-rock-t-shirts">Jerry Lorenzo</a> contacted him out of the blue. The founder of the streetwear label Fear of God was building a collection of the kind of tees Moe had amassed. “That was the exact stuff that he was buying,” Moe says. “A real similar vibe to what Kid Cudi was buying, but Jerry was going all out. He was buying 60, 80 T-shirts at a time. And back then, I could do that. I could source all of that stuff.” </p>
<p id="nz0T6z">One of the T-shirts Lorenzo snagged was a Heart-Shaped Box. Moe originally bought it for $75. The designer chopped the tee’s sleeves, added <a href="https://hypebeast.com/2016/12/fear-of-god-boon-the-shop-resurrected-t-shirt-project-2016">Fear of God branding</a> in <a href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/recording-artist-justin-bieber-attends-the-2015-american-news-photo/498329334?adppopup=true">white</a> <a href="https://www.selahafrik.com/2015/11/about-justin-biebers-fear-of-god-nirvana-t-shirt-at-the-amas/">ink</a> to the front and back, and in 2015, <a href="https://www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/a13099/justin-bieber-stylist-interview/">put it on Justin Bieber’s shoulders</a>. </p>
<p id="ofuaJp">All of a sudden, Moe’s customers wanted that gaudy Nirvana piece. “I couldn’t keep that shirt in stock,” he says. “And every one I saw, I would buy, and it was totally worth the money.” By early 2016, he recalls resale shops selling it for $400 or more. Before long, it was up to over $1,000. “Those four years, you’re just seeing prices on that stuff really go up incrementally by the hundreds,” Moe says. </p>
<p id="tXPV10">With ’90s nostalgia’s crest in the 2020s, the demand for vintage band merch has continued to go up. The “Heart-Shaped Box” tee, now in some cases worth $2,000 or $3,000, is an extreme example of that. Because no two pre-owned tees are <em>exactly </em>alike, the Tannis Root design doesn’t have a single, universally accepted price. Before pricing or buying one, T-shirt nerds consider the condition (holes and other flaws), the wear (softness), the fade (print distressing), the size (an extra large is the most desirable), and the variant (the Canadian- and Australian-made versions are particularly coveted). But no matter what, <em>any </em>version of the Heart-Shaped Box is valuable.</p>
<p id="msVpx6">So valuable that the shirt has become an object vintage shop owners show off to draw in discerning collectors. “It’s like a cornerstone piece,” says Ryan Haas, one of the co-owners of Faded. “I don’t really see many people who actually wear them.” </p>
<p id="UY0NuK">Adds Moe: “Nirvana fans or vintage dealers that wear Nirvana shirts, a lot of those people don’t like that shirt, or they would never wear it. It’s just too loud, and it’s a really heavy print. So a lot of times, unless it’s really worn out, it’s a heavy shirt to wear.” </p>
<p id="v8sMn1">There’s some irony in the fact that the ultimate Nirvana signifier has become something that’s kept behind glass like a museum artifact. The band came up in an alt-rock scene that rejected slick designs in favor of homegrown merch that kids actually liked to wear. And when he was alive, Cobain railed against the corporatization of rock. Now, his group’s T-shirts are part of a luxury industry. </p>
<p id="3JaBrH">Thirty years after designing the Heart-Shaped Box, Mooney isn’t terribly shocked that it’s now a collector’s item. What is surprising to him is how many different kinds of people he sees wearing modern, <em>inexpensive</em> Nirvana tees. In a way, it’s a fitting tribute to Cobain, a man who seemed to genuinely <a href="https://www.livenirvana.com/digitalnirvana/discography/nirvana/incesticide_note.html">care about inclusivity</a>. One specific T-shirt Mooney has noticed features a version of the band’s blissed-out smiley face that’s been <a href="https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=566617571&q=nirvana+rainbow+smiley&tbm=shop&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiM9Yaf-raBAxVRJUQIHS-XCIkQ0pQJegQICxAB&biw=1454&bih=724&dpr=1">rainbow colored</a>. “I don’t know that<em> that </em>design would’ve ever been approved by Nirvana back in the day,” Mooney says, “but I’m sure that they appreciate more that the shirt is being worn, and not just by macho bros.” </p>
<p id="4j8QYP">By the time it worked with Nirvana, Tannis Root was no longer an underground shop. In 1995, it was making tees for almost half of the bands on Lollapalooza’s main stage. Today, the design firm is still known for its cool T-shirts through the work it’s done for bands like Pavement, the Avett Brothers, and Tame Impala.</p>
<p id="RfG05l">Over Labor Day weekend, Faded featured an exhibit highlighting the work of Tannis Root. The company’s tees were displayed on the walls of the WaterFire Arts Center in Providence, Rhode Island, and, more meaningfully, on the backs of many of the thousands of vintage collectors flooding the event. “We’re really concerned with art and giving context to these things,” LaMonica says. “Because without that, they’re just pieces of clothing.” </p>
<p id="LCnVVL">That day, there were only a few “Heart-Shaped Box” T-shirts in the building. Mooney got rid of his long ago. “When it was all over, I got paid for it, and I probably had 10 or 12 of those shirts,” he says. “And I really did sell those at a yard sale.” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="YdD1Mn">Mooney has no recollection of who bought them, but he knows it wasn’t any of his friends. “A lot of them were Nirvana fans who’d seen Nirvana play to 100 to 200 people in Chapel Hill,” he says. “And they probably weren’t that interested in them either.” </p>
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https://www.theringer.com/music/2023/9/21/23882927/nirvana-vintage-t-shirts-heart-shaped-box-in-uteroAlan Siegel2023-08-08T06:20:00-04:002023-08-08T06:20:00-04:00The Jerk Aficionados
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<p>Playing a sleazy, blustering buffoon the audience loves takes skill—just ask Adam Scott, Ben Stiller, or Julia Louis-Dreyfus</p> <p id="jrpPt2">When Adam Scott landed an audition to play the biggest jerk in <em>Step Brothers</em>, his mind immediately went to the supermarket checkout lane. “It was so long ago that I thought of a magazine,” he said in an interview for my 2018 <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/7/10/17540704/step-brothers-oral-history-will-ferrell-john-c-reilly-adam-mckay">oral history of the movie</a>. The glossy mag was called <em>The Robb Report</em>. Aimed at filthy-rich men and wannabe filthy-rich men, it featured photos of luxury vehicles, fancy clothes, big mansions, and super-yachts. Before going to meet with director Adam McKay, Scott bought himself an issue. </p>
<p id="mAz0Qj">“It was guys with suits on, on tarmacs in front of private jets, in their sports cars, in their sunglasses, with their slicked back hair,” he said. “They were super serious. That’s sort of where my mind went. It was really funny. All you had to do was put a little spin on it.” </p>
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<p id="0mgWtL">That was <em>exactly</em> how Scott pictured the character he was reading for. Derek Huff, overachieving younger brother to Will Ferrell’s Brennan, is the vice president of the biggest executive helicopter-leasing company on the western seaboard. He claims he hasn’t eaten a carb since 2004. He’s arrogant, condescending, and homophobic. He goes bonito fishing with Bobby Flay, Chris Daughtry, Jeff Probst, and Mark Cuban and <em>can’t stop talking about it</em>. </p>
<p id="dDNltc">Scott recalled referring to the Mavericks owner as “the Cubes” in his audition for Derek—one of the many small, toolish touches that got him the part. “God, he is so good at playing an A-hole,” McKay told me in 2018. “He had all these little, subtle moves that he was doing. In the room they’re not bowling you over, but they really played well on camera. Thank God we ended up casting him.” </p>
<p id="bmlnDP">Scott does the impossible in the hit 2008 comedy: He steals scenes from Ferrell and John C. Reilly. And though Scott hasn’t reached that height of cinematic dickishness since, Derek will always be one of the roles he’s best known for. That’s the power of being able to play a great jerk: People will remember you. </p>
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<p id="AAcbre"><br>Being likably unlikable can sustain and jump-start careers in Hollywood. Ben Affleck worked his way up to stardom by embodying aggressive creeps in <em>School Ties </em>and <em>Dazed and Confused</em>. He later had a renaissance as a middle-aged shady dude, playing one in <em>Gone Girl </em>and <em>State of Play</em>. Julia Louis-Dreyfus gifted the world two of the most self-centered, most insensitive, and <em>funniest</em> characters in television history in Elaine Benes on <em>Seinfeld </em>and Selina Meyer on <em>Veep</em>. (At least Elaine didn’t have the power to influence federal policy.) Ben Stiller has been good at playing strange jerks for a long time, from odious fitness guru Tony Perkis in <em>Heavyweights </em>to sadistic orderly Hal in <em>Happy Gilmore</em> to the titular male model in <em>Zoolander</em> to gym owner White Goodman in <em>Dodgeball</em> to fading action star Tugg Speedman in <em>Tropic Thunder</em>. </p>
<p id="BCB5BS">Unsurprisingly, though, not all A-listers are comfortable making even the occasional foray into sleaze. That’s usually left to character actors who spend years skillfully pretending to be slimy. It’s not an easy job. Because once you get that reputation, it can be hard to shake—whether you like it or not. Seann William Scott played the (ultimately) good-hearted meathead lax bro Steve Stifler in four <em>American Pie </em>movies. He lost count of the times he met fratty young men who thought he <em>was </em>his character in real life. “They would realize that I was nothing like that and it was kind of fucking up their universe,” Scott told me for <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/9/24/20879910/american-pie-90s-comedy-home-alone-mighty-ducks-clueless">a 2019 interview</a>. “I’d always see confusion. Their circuits firing off and then there was always a little bit of sadness. It was kind of breaking their heart because they had this idea of how I’d be. Sometimes I was like, ‘I don’t want to break their heart.’ So I would say something outlandish. And they were like, ‘Oh yeah, OK.’ And then I’d just walk away. These guys have given me a career. I can’t crush their spirit.” </p>
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<p id="1XVI0q">Being a jerk is fun. James Spader gets it. He’s played <em>a lot </em>of them: rich kid Steff McKee in <em>Pretty in Pink</em>, drug dealer Rip in <em>Less Than Zero</em>, voyeur Graham in <em>Sex, Lies, and Videotape</em>, violent fetishist James Ballard in <em>Crash</em>, Michael Scott’s intense replacement Robert California in <em>The Office</em>, and most recently, Raymond Reddington in procedural<em> The Blacklist</em>. “I’m most drawn to characters who are compelling and repellant at the same time, very often right at the same moment, and who are frightening and funny all at once,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/theater/29spader.html">he told <em>The New York Times</em></a><em> </em>in 2009. </p>
<p id="1pmkyt">Performances like these take a special kind of self-assured vulnerability. If you want to pull off on-screen loathsomeness like Spader does, you can’t be afraid to look overanxious or mean or ridiculous or evil. The best jerks are deeply committed jerks. </p>
<aside id="1QSm1r"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Best Pop Culture Jerks Bracket: Round 2","url":"https://www.theringer.com/pop-culture/2023/8/8/23823836/best-pop-culture-jerks-bracket-round-2"},{"title":"The Forgotten Former Meaning of “Jerk”","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2023/8/8/23824204/jerk-word-evolution-steve-martin-goodfellas-jerry-maguire"}]}'></div></aside><p id="76wFoH">In 1988, Alan Rickman splashed onto the scene as the erudite East German terrorist mastermind Hans Gruber in <em>Die Hard</em>. “He was so soft-spoken and so sweet,” director John McTiernan <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/die-hard-director-john-mctiernan-857256/">told <em>The Hollywood Reporter</em></a><em> </em>after Rickman’s death in 2016. “But he had such a gift for playing such terrifying people.” <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/alan-rickman-die-hard-role-789252/">It was the actor’s idea</a> to dress John McClane’s foil in a suit, not tactical gear. A smart, non-stereotypically dressed bad guy is, after all, a scarier, more interesting bad guy. </p>
<p id="eVGZNg">Rickman went on to play a string of morally questionable and/or sarcastic men, from the sheriff of Nottingham in <em>Robin Hood </em>to Severus Snape in the <em>Harry Potter </em>series to Alexander Dane in <em>Galaxy Quest</em>. “It must have all been a reversal,” McTiernan added. “In his imagination, he must have been somewhere so vulnerable to cruel and evil people and felt so frightened of them that it gave him this amazing gift for constructing them. It was just astonishing.” </p>
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<p id="7jbFbW"><br>Of course, not all movie and TV jerks are as malevolent as Hans Gruber. Some, like the smarmy huckster Mayor Vaughn in <em>Jaws</em>, are more … foolish. Director Steven Spielberg found the perfect person for the insecure politician in Murray Hamilton, who played his character with hurricane-level bluster. “Murray could be sleazy and a villain, but he was also a sympathetic human being,” <em>Jaws </em>screenwriter <a href="https://uproxx.com/movies/carl-gottlieb-interview-jaws-writer/">Carl Gottlieb told <em>Uproxx</em></a><em> </em>in 2020. “He had humanity. He was trying to quit smoking. He really was concerned for the welfare of the town.”</p>
<p id="Gp510N">Some jerks are just pathetic. For an actor, that can be a difficult assignment. In <em>True Lies</em>, there’s a mustached used-car salesman named Simon. He cons suburban housewives into sleeping with him by pretending to be a spy. When director James Cameron was casting the movie, he was worried that he couldn’t find someone who could get serious enough to sell Jamie Lee Curtis’s character on a fake undercover alias without undermining his true greaseball identity. Then Bill Paxton auditioned for the role. </p>
<p id="FvO02J">“I had to be very earnest in the part where I have to convince her that I’m a secret agent and all that, and if that didn’t come across, then it would make her character look foolish,” the late <a href="https://www.avclub.com/bill-paxton-1798231628">Paxton told <em>The A.V. Club</em></a><em> </em>in 2012. “That was a big concern of Jim’s, and I prevailed.” </p>
<p id="clS3bv">Paxton got the part—and the action-comedy’s biggest laughs. When actual agents, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Arnold, finally bust Simon, he crumbles, and Paxton <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOaRmOLu21w">delivers the perfect confession</a>: “I’m not a spy. I’m nothing. I’m navel lint! I have to lie to women to get laid, and I don’t score much. I got a little dick, it’s pathetic!” </p>
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<p id="7bzSU6">Thankfully, most people who play movie jerks aren’t real-life jerks. But some of the actors who are best at it have sprinkled bits of themselves and their past experiences into their characters. Remember Elaine’s famous shove in <em>Seinfeld</em>? You know, the one she often incredulously hits her friends with? </p>
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<p id="lRJdcg">According to Ariel Levy’s <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/17/julia-louis-dreyfus-acts-out">2018 <em>New Yorker </em>profile of Louis-Dreyfus</a>, she would do the same thing in college. “The way that she would shove guys—that’s the way she had to treat us,” Paul Barrosse, who was in an improv comedy group with her at Northwestern, told the magazine. “That kind of physicality was on display very early. … There’d be, like, seven male cast members and two female. I and some of the other senior guys in that show were like the 800-pound gorillas in the room, with huge egos, and she really stood up to that.” </p>
<p id="j21blO">It turns out Louis-Dreyfus developed her confrontational energy long before that. As a kid in the early ’70s, she watched Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker and Bea Arthur’s Maude spar on <em>All in the Family</em>. The debate—unapologetic feminist vs. unabashed bigot—hooked her on the sitcom. “<em>All in the Family </em>informed my life without my knowing it,” <a href="https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/julia-louis-dreyfus-tony-hale-veep-all-in-the-family-my-favorite-episode-podcast-1203314610/">Louis-Dreyfus told <em>Variety</em></a><em> </em>in 2019. “I was devoted to it as a kid, and I watched it religiously. I adored it. But without realizing it, it informed me as a performer. Carroll O’Connor played the most horrific person that you adored. And I think I’ve made a career of playing lovable assholes.”</p>
<p id="ELrqjR">On the other hand, Thomas F. Wilson became famous for playing a jerk who isn’t very lovable. Biff Tannen is more the kind of jerk you love to hate. The comedic actor played several different versions of the iconic lunkhead (and his kin) across the <em>Back to the Future </em>trilogy. Wilson is nothing like Biff, but growing up, he knew plenty of Biffs. So becoming Biff on-screen wasn’t all that daunting. “A thin and sickly kid, I was pushed around and beaten up by bullies throughout my childhood, until I grew bigger than everybody and it stopped,” Wilson told <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/back-future-thomas-wilson-biff-833035/"><em>The Hollywood Reporter </em>in 2015</a>. “I knew very well how they operate, and specifically the joy they take in scaring people. I’d stared them in the face so often that it wasn’t particularly challenging to do an impression.”</p>
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<p id="U0qsX9"><br>Sometimes an impression isn’t needed. When Vince Vaughn first flipped through Jon Favreau’s <em>Swingers </em>script, the main character’s slick best friend Trent sounded familiar. “The phraseology, the way that he talked, was all characters I would slip into at times,” <a href="https://www.gq.com/video/watch/iconic-characters-vince-vaughn-breaks-down-his-most-iconic-characters">Vaughn told <em>GQ</em></a><em> </em>in 2020. “That stuff was all stuff that I had actually said. So it was kind of odd reading it originally.” Even though “not everything that happens in the movie was what happened in real life,” Vaughn added, the role was perfect for him. He’s gone on to play several more Trent descendants, from Jeremy Grey in <em>Wedding Crashers </em>to Gary Grobowski in <em>The Break-Up</em>. </p>
<p id="zTGfQa">But even if you’re not already a jerk, jerkishness can be learned, honed, and perfected. In the ’90s, Ben Stiller started playing jerks and turned it into a decade-long hobby. His shtick was usually funny, even if it wasn’t always evolving. Take, for example, his role in <em>Dodgeball</em>:<em> </em>“It all kind of comes from the Tony Robbins impression that I tried to do on <em>The Ben Stiller Show</em>, and then it became Tony Perkis from <em>Heavyweights</em> and then it morphed into White Goodman,” <a href="https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2017/06/14/ben-stiller-vince-vaughn-dodgeball-reunion">he told <em>Entertainment Weekly</em></a><em> </em>in 2020. “I don’t have that many moves, really. It’s funny because once you do the makeup and get the wig on, then you’re suddenly like, ‘Oh yeah, I got this.’”</p>
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<p id="Mmr9RR">Soon after <em>American Pie </em>hit theaters in the summer of 1999, Seann William Scott became famous. But many of his teenage fans, of which there were probably millions, didn’t know his real name. To them, he was just “Stifler.” Being mononymous didn’t bother Scott. “It never occurred to me that I would be in a movie people would remember,” he told me. “Or know my name, or know <em>the character’s name</em>, or start saying dialogue that maybe I made up on set. It was amazing.” </p>
<p id="WctFP5">Naturally, the first movie Scott was offered after <em>American Pie</em> was another sex comedy: <em>Road Trip</em>. The role he was up for—I challenge you to remember his name—sounded just like Stifler, only he was in college. Scott happily took the part. “I was like, ‘Who gives a shit? These characters are so much fuckin’ fun,’” he said. “I’d rather be the guy who says outlandish shit than the boring guy.” (The character’s name was E.L. Faldt.)</p>
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<p id="IPrvTZ">Playing a jerk can pay your bills. It can make you a household name. But being typecast as one can be exhausting. Wilson has said that <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/back-future-thomas-wilson-biff-833035/">he’s proud of his performance</a> as Biff, but at one point he felt the need to type up <a href="https://www.gawker.com/5909535/biff-tannen-has-a-business-card-that-answers-all-your-annoying-questions-about-back-to-the-future">a <em>Back to the Future </em>primer</a><em> </em>to hand out to fans. They always had the same questions. Here’s a sampling from the fact sheet: “Michael J. Fox is nice.” “The hoverboards didn’t really fly, we were hanging by wires from a crane.” “The manure was made of peat moss, cork, dirt, and a food agent that made it sticky.” “I coined the term, ‘butthead,’ as well as ‘Make like a tree, and get out of here.’” </p>
<p id="U17BTm">Also, for his stand-up act, Wilson wrote a tune about fan queries. “They shake my hand and never ask my name,” he sings. “And they start asking questions that are always the same.” A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwY5o2fsG7Y&t=11s">YouTube video</a> of him performing the song has 4.6 million views.</p>
<p id="X0yS7y">Paxton seemed to be at peace with the fact that some moviegoers will always know him as Chet, the doltish, flat-topped older brother from <em>Weird Science</em>. “People like to bust actors like me and take us down by saying, ‘Oh, yeah, Chet in <em>Weird Science</em>,’” said Paxton, <a href="https://www.avclub.com/bill-paxton-1798231628">who claimed</a> that director John Hughes modeled Buzz from <em>Home Alone </em>on Chet. “It’s a passive-aggressive thing. But I’m very proud of Chet. One thing about Chet was, he might’ve been an A-hole, but he was an A-hole you respected.” And then he laughed. </p>
<p id="vnLFb1">In the end, it’s better to be remembered for playing a jerk than it is to be forgotten. They’ll always be fun roles for actors to play. And movies and TV shows wouldn’t be nearly as interesting without them. Or as realistic. The year after <em>Step Brothers </em>came out, ABC’s <em>Shark Tank </em>premiered. Adam Scott was watching an episode one night when a fratty contestant called panelist Mark Cuban “the Cubes.” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="vChzGQ">“By Mark Cuban’s expression, I think he was a little sick of it,” Scott said. “I’m pretty proud of that.” </p>
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https://www.theringer.com/tv/2023/8/8/23823242/how-to-play-jerks-ben-stiller-adam-scott-julia-louis-dreyfusAlan Siegel2023-06-14T06:20:00-04:002023-06-14T06:20:00-04:00‘Righteous Gemstones’ Has Its Own Succession Story to Tell
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<p>HBO may have lost one trio of failchildren vying for their claim to one empire, but another persists. Ahead of the Season 3 premiere of ‘Righteous Gemstones,’ Danny McBride, Edi Patterson, and Adam Devine talk about the series, NASCAR, and the challenges of working around so many funny people. </p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="QL7jz9">Early in Season 3 of <em>The Righteous Gemstones</em>, something unexpected emerges from deep beneath Jesse’s bushy sideburns and hollow machismo: self-awareness. The eldest of three spoiled heirs to a Southern megachurch pastor, he understands what he and his siblings are up against. </p>
<p id="fOnV4w">“Nobody’s rooting for born-wealthy people to become more wealthy,” Jesse says, correctly. </p>
<p id="tjjNSL">The large adult Gemstone children—wannabe mogul Jesse (Danny McBride), budding Christian rock star Judy (Edi Patterson), and youth minister Kelvin (Adam Devine)—know that they’re not powerful or beloved like their father is. But Eli Gemstone (John Goodman) is retired now, and his offspring have no choice but to try to keep the family’s massive collection plate overflowing. </p>
<p id="itnuyF">“It’s so easy to talk shit on the bench when everybody else is doing the work,” says McBride, who created the HBO series. “And now they have to step up and do it.” </p>
<p id="ZJwr2z">If last season was the story of how Eli built and maintained his empire, this one is about whether his progeny have what it takes to lead his kingdom into the future. Sunday’s premiere picks up where the <em>Succession </em>finale left off: with a bunch of rich kids desperately attempting to prove that they’re not actually a failson or faildaughter.</p>
<p id="jBYH9g">“They have none of the life experience or anything to earn this spot, and it affects each of them differently,” McBride says. “And I think it’s weirdly a tragic element, because they didn’t choose this. This is just what they were given, and, for better or worse, they’re left to flounder in front of everyone.” </p>
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<p id="AGPZ8J">Praise be for that. It is hilarious to watch the trio attempt to run the church without their daddy helping them. This season of <em>The Righteous Gemstones </em>is, unsurprisingly, full of ultra-specific, zeitgeisty humor and ridiculously committed performances. There are monster trucks, militias, moral panics, and … pickleball. Shea Whigham pops up as a chain-smoking, grizzled NASCAR driver sponsored by Winston cigarettes. Stephen Dorff plays a Falwellian preacher. And a bewigged Steve Zahn even emerges as the comedy’s latest agent of chaos, the leader of a faction of fundamentalist doomsday preppers.</p>
<p id="Val6lQ">Yet as joyfully absurd as the series can be, the absurdity never <em>fully</em> hijacks the narrative. After all, McBride says, “What this show is really about is family, and it’s about power and wealth and the passage of that to the next generation.” </p>
<p id="qwUdkI">And who better to expound on that transition than the Gemstone children themselves?</p>
<p id="bjKLCC"><strong>One thing I wanted to bring up first, because it just made me laugh: I think you’re the rare show set in modern times that has cigarette smoking. Danny, was that an ordeal to try to figure out?</strong></p>
<p id="0iv38c"><strong>Danny McBride: </strong>I think we fly just under the radar, where you do this shit and you’re like, “Oh, no one’s allowed to do that.” I know that Warner Bros. <a href="https://www.adweek.com/lostremote/hbo-max-removes-cigarettes-select-movie-posters/66441/">scrubbed cigarettes out of the poster for <em>McCabe & Mrs. Miller</em></a>, and we just have people starting the show fucking smoking.</p>
<p id="1w63vz"><strong>And then the Winston ads. </strong></p>
<p id="2qZ7Zc"><strong>McBride: </strong>Yeah, the Winston ad right there too. We’re turning the clock back.</p>
<p id="UwNp28"><strong>For the three of you, what was your experience with NASCAR growing up? </strong></p>
<p id="IA2UUB"><strong>Edi Patterson: </strong>I grew up in Texas, which you would think, “Oh yeah, this bitch has seen some NASCAR.” I never went anywhere close to it. So going to that track was wild for me. I had no idea the scope of it. I had no idea how loud they are. </p>
<p id="QFKHrJ"><strong>Adam Devine: </strong>I didn’t grow up in a NASCAR home, but I’ve gotten to do a few things with NASCAR over the years. I’m going to be the grand marshal next weekend for a NASCAR event.</p>
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<img alt="NASCAR Cup Series Toyota / Save Mart 350" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0NP1qiw2Jt8KZc6qVod8l5DVRWE=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24725769/1497713632.jpg">
<cite>Photo by Sean Gardner/Getty Images</cite>
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<p id="XrmMX1"><strong>McBride: </strong>Yeah, you are. </p>
<p id="WDcZZE"><strong>Devine: </strong>And I get to say, “Drivers, start your engines!” Yeah, it’s just huge how many people go to those events, and it’s such a party. Even though I do not care about NASCAR, it makes me want to care, because I’m like, “I want to just go to that party.” </p>
<p id="iCHQ2M"><strong>McBride: </strong>I had seen NASCAR races when I was a kid. I had been to a race in Richmond. I grew up in Virginia. I went to the Coca-Cola 600 this past weekend. And you saw how big Darlington was. That is a drop in the bucket [compared] to how big the Charlotte Motor Speedway is. It was so fucking cool. Honestly, I lost my mind when I was [filming] there. It’s 95,000 people. I was supposed to drive the pace car, so all week, I had been researching it, and I read stuff that the drivers will fuck with you, that they’ll rev behind you. And you gotta do four laps around.</p>
<p id="P6BIAH">And the day that we were going to do the race, it got rained out, so they couldn’t certify me to drive it, so then I just rode in the passenger seat. And God, when I got there to do it, I was so fucking glad I was not driving. It was so intimidating. You got there and you saw that whole lineup, all those cars, all that noise, everyone in the fucking stadium looking at you. I just looked over at the [driver], and he’s like, “Your seat’s the best. You can take it in. If you were driving, you’d just be pissing your pants and white-knuckling it the whole time.” And he was right.</p>
<p id="7bKaIt"><strong>Patterson: </strong>Oh God, I’d be so scared. That’s so much more pressure than even a pitch at a baseball game.</p>
<p id="MVdn8z"><strong>Every time I watch the post-church scenes at the restaurant, I just wonder how you don’t all crack up every take. </strong></p>
<p id="lH1atP"><strong>McBride: </strong>You have every character present there. By design, we don’t have lines for everyone, because the scene would be 12 pages long if everybody in it had one line. So, you get there, you feel what the rhythm of the scene is, then everybody’s so good that they know when it would make sense to interject or to add something. And it’s fun. They’re the only scenes that have all the characters of the show there, but it’s also just fun to see how everybody basically plays basketball. And those days are also very long. The amount of people on the scene and the amount of coverage you need, we’ll always be there late. And inevitably, everyone gets punchy at some point, where you start laughing at the dumbest shit that there’s no reason why it’s even funny, and you suddenly can’t get through takes, and it’s just pure joy.</p>
<p id="HwdkrG"><strong>Patterson: </strong>It’s fun to see who’s game if your character’s just going to ask somebody something. For instance, if Adam had a line and if I, as Judy, go, “Oh, why do you think that?” I know that’s just a soft pitch to Adam to say something. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s a fun place to lob pitches to people. </p>
<p id="CNNd4x"><strong>Devine: </strong>It’s fun too, just because you do have to march around that whole table to get everyone’s coverage to remember three takes ago if Edi did something funny on <em>her </em>coverage. Then, you can reverse engineer it for your coverage and go, “Oh, I’ll set her up this way so it’ll all make sense.” </p>
<p id="XUARlk"><strong>Do you have any favorite moments like that that came out of improv? </strong></p>
<p id="FIZ1TG"><strong>Patterson: </strong>That first season when the three of us are on the couch, I thought I was going to die. I was laughing so hard.</p>
<p id="aQd2mD"><strong>McBride: </strong>When Adam started doing the voice of the devil.</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="67UH8w"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"A Song of Vice and Friars ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2019/8/16/20807799/righteous-gemstones-review-danny-mcbride"},{"title":"The Righteous Bros: In Praise of the Danny McBride Multiverse ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2019/8/15/20806561/danny-mcbride-the-righteous-gemstones-hbo-eastbound-down-vice-principals"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="q2fGm0"><strong>Patterson: </strong>I think we had all been working all day, and then we were meeting together for a night shoot, and we were punchy AF.</p>
<p id="5DnCLr"><strong>Devine: </strong>That was probably the hardest one to get through. </p>
<p id="FcUuur"><strong>Do you all have siblings? And I’m curious, what do you take from your real-life sibling relationships into this show? </strong></p>
<p id="l36m8z"><strong>Devine: </strong>I go the opposite route. I take things from our show and interject it into my relationship with my sister. I was like, “I should be cruel to her more often.” </p>
<p id="RkJ5sX"><strong>McBride: </strong>I have two sisters, and we definitely didn’t go at each other as hard as this. My wife doesn’t have any siblings, and so me and my sisters, we’ll get into fights sometimes, and my wife is like, “Oh my God, are we never going to see them again?” I’m like, “Nah, this is the shit we do all the time. You can say the worst shit to them and they still have to fucking show up at Christmas. It’s fine.” </p>
<p id="Fvnqe2"><strong>Patterson: </strong>With your siblings, you know where every button is, and even if you’ve made it your goal to never fucking push those buttons, it just happens sometimes because the second they nail one of yours, you’re going to come back with something you know, and you know such weird stuff about each other. </p>
<p id="L2IAbm"><strong>Devine: </strong>It can be a super, super deep cut. You could be just like, “Oh yeah, ham sandwich.” And they’re like, “Why would you say that to me?” </p>
<p id="oGXDD4"><strong>McBride: </strong>Even in the show, I fuck with my siblings. In the first season, in that fifth episode, Judy says, “It makes my bird twitch.” That’s something that my sisters used to say when we were kids. And so even just putting that in the show was for them to be like, “Fuck you. Now everybody knows that.” </p>
<p id="YxQqsp"><strong>It’s a joke for three people, but that’s the best kind.</strong></p>
<p id="iK9f2i"><strong>McBride: </strong>Exactly. </p>
<p id="8hfCxf"><strong>My brother, he was 6 years old and was not using soap in the shower, and we called him a “scrub.” And we called him that until he was 35 years old. So it just never goes away.</strong></p>
<p id="9oNc7r"><strong>Patterson: </strong>Also known <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrLequ6dUdM">as a buster</a>.</p>
<p id="yGtMv1"><strong>Exactly. I was going to ask about John Goodman. He just </strong><em><strong>really</strong></em><strong> does feel like your dad. Does it feel like that on set? What has it been like working with him for the last couple of years?</strong></p>
<p id="zxxOAx"><strong>McBride: </strong>He pulls pranks all the time. You know what? The evolution of Goodman on the show has been incredible, because I personally was shocked that he was going to <em>be in</em> the show. I am such a fan of his and have always been and just admire the hell out of him. The idea that he was going to come play with us, I was just so excited by but also intimidated by as well. <em>What is this going to be like? </em>Despite everything that he’s done, he still approaches it all the same way we do, where he gets nervous and he wants to be good and he wants to try his best. It instantly levels the playing field, and you instantly are able to look at it as just another actor in this show. It was awesome to feel that with him.</p>
<p id="Qm2WNL"><strong>Patterson: </strong>I think he’s got a really, really weird and awesome and smart sense of humor, and that was the thing that cut through my kid brain of just like, “Oh, holy shit, it’s John Goodman as our dad.” I noticed that very weird and specific things in the script would really tickle him. And yeah, that’s something where I knew, “Oh, we can get down with this dude. It can get wild. And he’s not going to be offended or mad or not know what’s happening.” </p>
<p id="PguDs2"><strong>Devine: </strong>He’s like my dad in a way where I know he truly loves me, but I’m also not sure he even likes me. You know what I mean? That’s how I feel. I still feel like I’m like, “Huh? Right, John?” But he’s so damn good. I feel like [having] him as the anchor for the whole family lets us go be as wild as our characters allow, and then you’ll cut back to a scene with John and it feels super grounded and real. </p>
<p id="xAdiWb"><strong>You mentioned pranks. Do you have a favorite of his that illustrates that weird sense of humor? </strong></p>
<p id="Z6BL9n"><strong>McBride: </strong>I feel like everyone always asks about pranks.</p>
<p id="6ENUhf"><strong>Patterson (deadpan): </strong>Would this count? If his call time is before all of ours, he shits in our trailers. Is that weird? Is that what you mean?</p>
<p id="RZCLdX"><strong>Devine: </strong>But what’s funny is it’s not in the toilet. It’s not where you would expect the shit to be.</p>
<p id="Ayz5Sd"><strong>Patterson: </strong>No way. </p>
<p id="0xk8MG"><strong>An upper-decker? </strong></p>
<p id="6p31ku"><strong>McBride: </strong>On a toothbrush.</p>
<p id="Lve1ro"><strong>Anyway, one thing I like about the show is that every year, there’s been this funny agent of chaos that has come in. Walton Goggins you could say was the first season, and then Eric Roberts, and now Steve Zahn. Is that a fun thing to do, to introduce some crazy shit to mix things up?</strong></p>
<p id="qWHMa4"><strong>McBride: </strong>After doing so many seasons of TV, inevitably what ends up happening after the first season is you’re creating sequels. And so to avoid it being just the same shit over and over again, I think it’s important that each one feels completely distinct and completely unique. And I think to do that, you rely on these new characters that can expose something different about our characters. Ultimately, all these characters are also filling in the blanks on the backstory of the Gemstones and where they came from. </p>
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<p id="HNRybd"><br><strong>What is it like for you guys acting with Walton? Is it as fun as it looks?</strong></p>
<p id="IT9Kx0"><strong>McBride: </strong>Baby Billy’s one of those characters where everyone in the writers room knows his voice. You know what I mean? We all know how to write Baby Billy dialogue. We all know what that sound is, what that cadence is, what that weird turn of phrase is. It’s just a very fun character to fuck around with, and it’s fun to watch Walton not only execute it; it <em>tickles</em> him to execute it. It’s funny to watch Walton become this character and push the boundaries of what he could do and then watch. </p>
<p id="kuxY3j"><strong>Patterson: </strong>He cracks up himself doing Baby Billy as we’re just staying in it, being our characters with him. There’ll be times when he is laughing as Baby Billy and then they yell “cut,” and then he’s dying laughing, and you’re like, “Oh, he was tickled.” </p>
<p id="TRd7CP"><strong>Devine: </strong>Someone asked me that question earlier today: “Who breaks the most out of you guys on set?” And I’m like, “It’s Walton hands down.” But he breaks <em>as</em> Baby Billy. Sometimes they’ll call “cut” and he’s laughing, and it’s the same laugh as Baby Billy. He’s still in it. </p>
<p id="i3DiZ2"><strong>I’m stealing this question from a friend who once asked Anthony Carrigan from </strong><em><strong>Barry</strong></em><strong> what </strong><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2019/4/26/18516704/barry-noho-hank-anthony-carrigan-interview"><strong>his character’s style inspiration</strong></a><strong> was. What are all of your characters’ style inspirations? I’m especially curious about where Kelvin gets his jeans.</strong></p>
<p id="NTwhQc"><strong>Devine: </strong>I’ll send you the link. Well, for Kelvin, I feel like his style has evolved. Maybe he would play acoustic guitar in Mumford & Sons in Season 1, and now, he’s morphed into more of a hypebeast. I feel like he’s decided to drop some coin on his duds this past season.</p>
<p id="ioDyVd"><strong>Patterson: </strong>I feel like that’s the trajectory of Judy as well. I think she’s at the point where she’s like, “Oh, I have a ton of money, and I’m going to show it.” And I think there’s way more attention on designer stuff this year and vintage designer stuff. And I just feel like she’s decided that she’s hot shit now, and whatever’s coming out of Paris, “I’m fucking getting it.” </p>
<p id="Gzezux"><strong>Jesse’s hair is now dyed. I’m curious if that was on purpose too</strong>.</p>
<p id="OCtbGb"><strong>McBride: </strong>Yes. I think Jesse is looking for ways to really show everyone how masculine he is, and I think he’s really taking a [page] from ’70s Elvis Presley. I think he’s just emulating these other men that have come before, and he dyes his hair this year. I think that as he’s looking for ways to be better at the job, I guess he’s identified that maybe having jet-black hair would make him better.</p>
<p id="JSDqPv"><strong>Patterson: </strong>It’s so weird.</p>
<p id="mMXdRi"><strong>Danny, there’s something Jesse says this season that I thought was a great summation of the show: “Nobody’s rooting for born-wealthy people to become more wealthy.” Besides being funny, how do you make these characters sympathetic? And are they sympathetic? </strong></p>
<p id="5U72NU"><strong>Patterson (deadpan): </strong>Yes, they are sympathetic. You should feel for them, and they are all doing their best.</p>
<p id="hIQZ0S"><strong>McBride: </strong>I think it’s one of those things where it’s so easy to just look at them like they’re toxic, and they are, and they’re conniving and shitty. And so the trick really that we hand to all these actors is trying to find the humanity in somebody who has all of these opportunities and can’t muster being a decent human being.</p>
<p id="d7VNGu"><strong>Devine: </strong>What I think Danny and the rest of the writing staff and Edi do so well is infusing these characters with these massive insecurities, especially with my character, where you almost want him to get out of his own way. You’re like, “Ah, buddy, come on.” Even though he can be a total piece of shit, you’re like, “You can do it. You can be a piece of shit.” You’re rooting for him in his shittiness.</p>
<p id="6ua9It"><strong>Patterson: </strong>He’s doing his best, man. He’s like, “This will help kids.” Judy’s really thinking, “I’m not getting enough attention, and I’m a rock star now.” </p>
<p id="xd5ZPt"><strong>I feel like you don’t see depictions of that world much. Is it fun showing people a world that you don’t see on TV a ton? </strong></p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="HvyEFw"><strong>McBride: </strong>It could have been anything. They could have owned a fucking cable news network. They could own a fucking ranch in Yellowstone. But we chose a church because I just felt, ultimately, that more people would relate to that. More people would have a point of reference for that. I don’t know. A lot of people haven’t been to L.A. or New York, and they don’t have a point of reference for that stuff other than what they see on TV. And I think it’s interesting to set stories in places that most people actually can relate to.</p>
<p id="8AVZq2"><em>This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/tv/2023/6/14/23760116/righteous-gemstones-season-3-hbo-premiere-danny-mcbride-adam-devine-edi-patterson-interviewAlan Siegel