Check Book: Hey Dwayne

The Golden Globes and the start of our Spielberg Series

Surprise! Blank Check has started a newsletter! Your favorite connoisseurs of context are gonna go on even more tangents, commit to even more bits, and share opinions on even more pieces of entertainment industry news because - hey, why not. Thanks for joining us!

IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

Sign up for Regal Unlimited to maximize your moviegoing! Use code BLANKCHECK to get 10% off your 3-month subscription.

THE BARDI PARTY REPORT

We’ve got a pretty strange awards season on our hands, folks. Per tonight’s Golden Globes ceremony, the two presumed frontrunners are an earwormless “musical” about a Mexican cartel leader whose gender-affirming surgery magically turns her into a good person and a 3.5-hour long exploration of brutalist architecture, Zionism, and horizontally-projected film stock. Kind of cool? Remember when Oppenheimer came out last year? That was awesome.

Some takeaways from the 2025 Golden Globes:

• Jeremy Strong - far and away the best dressed of the evening. A turquoise velvet ensemble by Loro Piana complete with matching bucket hat and sunglasses. He looks like a Despicable Me villain, which makes sense, as he was nominated for playing Roy Cohn. I’m obsessed.

  

• Best speech of the night goes to Demi Moore. She solidified her narrative for the season as the “comeback” gal we all want to root for, who has long been underestimated by audiences and industry folks alike. I think she’s taking the Oscar. I’m happy for her.

• Most WTF speech - hate to be uncharitable but Brady Corbet talking about “final cut tiebreakers” in his Best Picture (Drama) acceptance speech was a big HUH? Directors, some of the most oppressed people on the planet. His daughter is very cute, though.

• Biggest Blankie Moment of the Night obviously goes to Vin Diesel A) addressing the Rock with a “Hey Dwayne,” B) reminding everyone that he made a movie with Sidney Lumet, and C) extolling the values of BLOCKBUSTER TENTPOLES. This is why we turn into these telecasts. History-making moments.

• I thought Nikki Glaser did a fine job, I liked all her sparkly dresses. “Wicked, Nightbitch, and Queer” being things Ben Affleck shouts after sex was a good line.

• Colin Farrell thanking the craft services team on the set of The Penguin??!?!?! What a mensch. We love him so much.

I feel like a real entertainment journalist filing this Golden Globes dispatch late on Sunday night. “Dispatch” - psh, like I was actually there instead of sitting on a couch stuffing my face with prosciutto-wrapped mozzarella sticks. I *will* be at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards dinner this week along with the rest of the BC crew, so expect actual on-the-ground gossip in next week’s newsletter. Our very own David Sims is HOSTING!! He’s going to be wearing a really nice suit (but no bucket hat).

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

• Though a young Steven Spielberg was a self-professed “TV junkie,” his parents were wary of giving him consistent access to any programs aside from stuff like Jackie Gleason or The Mickey Mouse Club.¹ The reason, Spielberg wrote in a 1985 TIME magazine essay, was that, “when [he] was four or five years old, when [he] did see things on TV [he] got scared.” The biggest culprit was a documentary about snakes, which caused Spielberg to cry “for hours.” (I wonder if that fear ever worked its way into his movies…) Trips to the cinema were frequently frightening, too: when Spielberg saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the age of six, he was so freaked out by the Evil Queen’s transformation into the Old Hag that he “burst into tears and started shaking” and had to spend the next three to four nights crawling “into bed with [his] mom and dad.” (Spielberg would attempt revenge on Snow White in 1969, when he tried to adapt Donald Barthelme’s R-rated 1967 post-modernist novella Snow White as a feature film.) As Spielberg aged, he found various outlets for his fright, the first being his siblings Anne, Nancy, and Sue: “I had no way to sublimate or channel these fears until I began telling stories to my younger sisters. This removed the fear from my soul and transferred it right into theirs.”² As his mother Leah told biographer Joseph McBride, Spielberg’s horror stories—which ranged from hiding outside of his sister Anne’s room and using a scary voice to personify the moon to, uh, cutting off the head of one of Nancy’s dolls and serving it to her on a silver platter—became notorious: “Baby-sitters would not come into the house. They’d say, ‘We’ll take care of the girls if you take him with you.’”³ Eventually, Spielberg moved on to scaring other captive audiences, like the Boy Scouts (“I was a great storyteller in Boy Scouts. I used to sit around the campfire and scare forty Scouts to death with ghost stories.”) and, of course, the audiences for his movies.⁴

• In 1967, Spielberg attempted to make his first major independent production since 1964’s Firelight: a bicycle racing sports drama called Slipstream. The project marked the first pairing of Spielberg and the cinematographer Allen Daviau—who would go on to shoot E.T., The Color Purple, and Empire of the Sun—but the production eventually ran out of money—thanks largely to logistical issues—and the film went unfinished. But while the project was still building buzz, a 20-year-old Spielberg sat down for an interview with fellow California State College at Long Beach student Jo Marie Bagala in which he offered the following summation of who he wanted to be as a director: “I don’t want to make films like Antonioni or Fellini. I don’t want just the elite. I want everybody to enjoy my films. For instance, if an Antonioni film played in Sioux City, Iowa, the people would flock to see [Disney’s 1967 fantasy] The Gnome-Mobile. But I do want my films to have a purpose! I just want to make pictures in which I say something, something I am close to and can convey to the audience. If, in doing so, I create a style, then that’s my style. I’m trying to be original, but at times, even originality tends to become stylized. I feel that right now the worst thing for me to do at twenty is to develop a style.”⁵ But just six years later—while Spielberg traveled Europe on a promotional tour for the theatrical release of Duel—the young director would come face-to-face with one of the auteurs he claimed he didn’t want to become, as he ran into Federico Fellini at the Hassler Hotel in Rome. Per Spielberg, “[There] was a man speaking Italian very quickly to me; I didn’t understand what he was saying, and I kept saying, ‘Speak English! Speak English!’ and he couldn’t, obviously, he kept speaking Italian. Finally he gave the phone to somebody who spoke English. It was a woman came on the phone and said, ‘Meester Speelberg, Meester Fellini is in the lobby. He wants to meet you. Can you come down now?’ And I was so groggy, I said, ‘Fellini? Federico Fellini?’ And she said, ‘Sí!’... I probably got dressed faster than I’ve ever put clothes on before! I got dressed, came downstairs, and it was Fellini. It was nine o’ clock at night, and we went into the bar and had a drink. He had just seen Duel at a press screening the night before, and loved it, and just was picking my brain about how the movie was made, and had an interpreter with him, and I was picking his brain about everything that he had ever done.”⁶

• In recent years, Steven Spielberg has circled a Bullitt project that would star fellow BC miniseries subject Bradley Cooper and feature an original screenplay—not a redo of the 1968 film—penned by Josh Singer. But the iconic Steve McQueen-starring version of Bullitt also played a major role in another of Spielberg’s films: Duel (which is why I’m writing about it this week, duh). Because Spielberg was making a car (or truck) chase movie, he naturally turned to the people behind the current gold standard in vehicular action, hiring Bullitt stunt driver Carey Loftin to drive Duel’s killer truck and camera rig designer Pat Eustis to, well, break out the camera rig from Bullitt for another chase. Author Steven Awalt describes the Bullit rig as “literally a camera car, only low-slung like a robust go-kart so that it could race alongside screen vehicles, capturing footage from a road-level vantage.” Spielberg claims that “Most of the best shots on Duel were shot on the Bullitt car from the front mount, which was only six inches off the ground and the back mount, which was also six inches from the ground.” In the end, Spielberg says, “The Bullitt car really made the film twice as exciting.”⁷

• Oh, and I should probably note that the dossier for this week’s episode was (regrettably) the longest I’ve ever produced for the show: at 14,695 words, the Duel dossier was 1,733 words longer than previous record holder Barry Lyndon’s. (And to think, all I really had to type was probably “Watch The Fabelmans lol.”) May Duel please keep that record for a long time (like, forever).

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

Griffin Newman, Host: “My recommendation this week is LA BOULANGERIE’S SUPER FLAKY™ CROISSANT TOAST. As my slow-ass recovery from dental surgery extends into week three, it is not an understatement to say that having a slice or two of this incredibly soft miracle food every morning (alongside a handful of pills) has been keeping me afloat across a very achy holiday season. Strongly recommended to anyone else currently stuck with half a tooth and a gaping gum hole of exposed nerves!!!”

David Sims, Host: “I have watched the Emile Ardolino film version of The Nutcracker starring a fairly stressed out looking Macaulay Culkin about six times since my daughter discovered it this week; highly recommend if you want to watch staid but impressive 35mm filming of classical ballet that your kid can zone out to. I also inexplicably watched every episode of season two of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power or whatever it’s called, which takes zoning out to another level. Gandalf’s entire arc over eight episodes is whether he’ll figure out his name and get a staff! That is all he does for the whole season!!! Looks for a stick!!!!!”

Ben Hosley, Producer: “My recommendation is chicken cutlet: literally breaded food is always good. I was in Jersey visiting my dad this weekend and had a bangin ass chicken parm sub from the local pizza place Anthony Franco’s. Now don’t get me wrong, I live for sauce. And I pray at the alter of melted mozz. But the star of the show is the cutlet. So go munch on some and tell em Ben sent ya.”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “Reading a book to fall asleep. For the past week I’ve gotten back into reading after getting into bed and it’s helped me fall right to sleep. Also highly recommend the Manta sleep mask sound if you like to listen to things to sleep and don’t want to disrupt your partner. (Ie you listen to things at 2x speed and they think you’re fucking crazy)”

Marie Bardi, Social Media: “Embarrassed to admit that I've spent like 20 hours this past week playing Infinity Nikki on PS5, which is basically like Breath of the Wild but free and all about styling cute outfits. Right now, I’m engaged in a fashion duel with a sentient rag and the overarching direction for said fashion duel is ‘SEXY’. I go back to work this week and will never play this game again.”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “In between awards season catch-up viewings (woof), I’ve been trying to sneak in some Criterion Channel first watches. My favorite recent discovery has been Desire, a 1936 film that reteamed Morocco stars Gary Cooper—who plays a lovesick American yokel puppy dog—and Marlene Dietrich—who plays a glamorous jewel thief who develops eyes for a lovesick American yokel puppy dog. The movie features a fascinating mishmash of tones: elegant funny man Ernst Lubitsch applied his touch to the film in the early stages of production before the old-school romantic Frank Borzage helmed the bulk of the shoot. But it works: the jokes land, the passion swells.”

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I was listening to the best of the year episode of My Perfect Console (v. good video game podcast, like Desert Island Discs, but for games), which was how I learned that The Rise of the Golden Idol, the sequel to The Case of the Golden Idol, had come out. I played Rise in like three days, I love it as much as the original. The art rules, the game mechanics rule, it’s an engaging and innovative way to tell a story. If you like a detective game where you have actually have to solve a mystery yourself, it’s the game for you. And if you have Netflix, you can play it for free on iOS (or pay like 20 extremely-worth-it dollars to play it on any other platform).”

THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST

We kick off PODRASSIC CAST with Steven Spielberg’s debut feature DUEL. Great episode but needed more discussion about how it’s basically a movie about being cucked:

And we’ve started THE JELLY TRILOGY over on Patreon with Analyze This! In the immortal words of Joe Viterelli, “Das fuckin weird.”

COMING SOON:

1. Joseph McBride, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, 66.

2. TIME, July 15, 1985.

3. McBride, Steven Spielberg, 98.

4. McBride, Steven Spielberg, 88.

5. McBride, Steven Spielberg, 176.

6. Steven Awalt, Steven Spielberg and Duel: The Making of a Film Career, 187.

7. Awalt, Steven Spielberg and Duel, 93.