Check Book: It's Pretty Blood Simple

Plus, a postcard from Amsterdam

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:

THE BARDI PARTY REPORT

Hello from Amsterdam - consider this an abbreviated BPR as I’m doing my own National Lampoon’s European Vacation this week (Netherlands > Germany > France). Dutch is the best language. I just learned that a movie theater is called a “bioscoop” here. And movie showtimes? BIOSCOOPAGENDA. There are pancake restaurants everywhere and I can’t stop thinking of Goldmember.

I just Googled “Where does Paul Verhoeven live?” and the answer was “Los Angeles” - very disappointing. However, if I see any Verhoeven-related oddities here, I will be sure to update the Blankies. The Dutch Resistance museum mentioned Soldier of Orange, so that’s at least something.

KING RALPH LIVE ON VOD!

Tickets and exclusive merch on sale now!

It’ll be available for viewing through the end of August. Don’t miss out!

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

• Holy shit, I’m going to be writing about the Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan) for the next five months—as long as I can avoid getting fired. Wow! Thanks, March Madness voters.

• The Coens were born and raised in the great state of Minnesota; more specifically, the Coens spent their formative years in St. Louis Park, a first-ring middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, a wonderful city I’ve recommended in a past newsletter. As the legend goes, it was in the Midwest that the young Coens first caught the filmmaking bug, using a Super 8 camera to make movies with their friends, like the future endocrinologist Mark Zimering. Many of these films were remakes, as Joel revealed to Film Comment in 1985, of “bad Hollywood movies that we’d seen on television,” like Cornel Wilde’s 1965 safari survival thriller The Naked Prey. The Coens titled their remake Zeimers in Zambezi. It starred Zimering—nicknamed Zeimers—and featured, according to Joel, “very weird special effects”: “We actually had a parachute drop—a shot of an airplane going overhead, then a miniature, then cut to a close-up of the guy against a white sheet hitting the ground. … They were just hacked together.” Other Coens’ remakes—like their take on Otto Preminger’s 1962 film Advise & Consent—were much more loosely tied to their sources, presaging the Coens’ notorious resistance to doing serious research. Per Joel, “[A]t the time we made it we hadn’t seen the original film or read the book. We just heard the story from a friend of ours and it sounded good, so we remade it without going back to any of the source material.”¹ In their own invented stories, the Coens utilized the harsh natural landscape of their hometown, as Joel told The Washington Post in 1985: “You use the milieu that you have. We found ourselves trapped in this subarctic environment, where we went out and all we saw was a lot of, like, snow, so we'd go into the woods and say, 'Snow and woods -- let's make a lumberjack movie.’”² The resulting film was titled Lumberjacks at Play, and Zimering says that it told the story of “a lumberjack in a plaid shirt going to work with a briefcase full of pancakes and a hacksaw. They liked pancakes a lot, and so the lumberjacks would eat the pancakes, and then vomit.” Vomiting, Zimering told Vulture in 2011, was an important motif in the early films of Joel Coen: “Even when Joel was in film school, his teachers noted his movies all contained big, physical actions, like vomiting, or beatings. I think it was because we spent a lot of time in the refrigerator, experimenting with stuff like cranberry juice and ketchup, trying to trick the other person into drinking it. Vomiting was a recurring motif — probably because it showed up well against the snow.”³ While the Coens are famously hesitant to draw any direct lines between their lives and their films, I’m going to draw one for them: there seems to be a straight path from the Coens mixing ketchup and cranberry juice to Dan Hedaya barfing in Blood Simple.

• While the Coens might not hold the same stature in the world of pranks that their frequent star George Clooney holds, they’re certainly close. These are, after all, the guys who invented a fictional backstory for their editing alias Roderick Jaynes—one that some in the press, including a “television station in Sussex,” initially took at face value.⁴ One of the Coens’ most infamous pranks came during Ethan’s time at—or rather away from—Princeton University. Before finishing his degree in philosophy, Ethan took a year off from attending college. But when he returned for school the next year, he neglected to adequately inform the registrar that he was coming back. To explain his absence and his lack of communication, Ethan came up with a (very obvious) lie: “It's supposed to be a pro forma thing. But I was late and I didn't really have any excuse for being late, so I said in my letter that I had been involved in a hunting accident in my brother-in-law's living room and had lost my left arm.” In a follow-up letter, the dean of students replied, “We're sorry to hear about your arm, and send a letter from your doctor saying whether or not you're going to be able to attend your classes.” Ethan doubled down, inventing a fictional doctor—Reverend Doctor Samson Gaziorwitz of the Our Lady of the Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital—who composed a message to the university in which it was disclosed that Ethan “had also lost his legs, and so his classes should be scheduled close together.” Reverend Doctor Gaziorwitz further recommended that the junior Coen “should be kept away from the taunts of classmates because 'Young Ethan has become quite adept at wielding his hooks.’” Once school officials finally caught on to Ethan’s deception, he was sent to the school psychiatrist, who found a quick fan in Ethan: “So I go down there, and the psychiatrist was nuts. He was too good to be true. He had this laundry list of mental illnesses. He said, 'Are you aggressive/sadistic?' I said, 'No.' 'Are you manic/depressive?' 'No.' I just answered no to all the questions, so he gave me a clean bill of health.”⁵ And thus, Ethan was granted permission to finish his thesis on Wittgenstein.⁶

• Though American independent filmmaking obviously predates the emergence of the Coens, their first feature Blood Simple—along with precursors like Sam Raimi’s 1981 film The Evil Dead and contemporaries like Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 film Stranger Than Paradise and Spike Lee’s 1986 film She’s Gotta Have It—brought a new level of mainstream awareness to films made outside of Hollywood, helping to kick off what journalists and academics would later declare America’s indie boom. But amongst its indie siblings, Blood Simple always felt like something of an outlier. Sure, on the one hand, Blood Simple’s independent bonafides were obvious: as Joel told Film Comment in 1985, “You can’t get any more independent than Blood Simple. We did it entirely outside of Hollywood. To take it a step further, we did it outside of any established movie company anywhere. … It was done by people who have had no experience with feature films, Hollywood or others.”⁷ In lieu of the West Coast bigwigs, Blood Simple was funded by Midwestern dentists, New York businessmen, and an inventor friend “who came up with the pump used in Windex bottles.”⁸ On the other hand, however, independent cinema—like its cousin art cinema—is often considered the terrain of “personal expression,” something the Coens typically downplay any presence of in their films. Instead, the Coens (at least claim to have) wanted to be entertainers. As Joel declared in 1985, “If somebody goes out to make a movie that isn’t designed primarily to entertain people, then I don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. I can’t understand it. It doesn’t make sense to me. What’s the Raymond Chandler line? ‘All good art is entertainment and anyone who says differently is a stuffed shirt and juvenile at the art of living.’” And thus, per Ethan, Blood Simple was “a no-bones-about-it entertainment. If you want something other than that, then you probably have a legitimate complaint.”⁹ The resulting independently made entertainment flummoxed—or downright disgusted—many a distributor and critic, including such esteemed figures as The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman, who characterized Blood Simple as having “the heart of a Bloomingdale’s window and the soul of a résumé,”¹⁰ and The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who wrote, “Blood Simple comes on as self-mocking, but it has no self to mock. Nobody in the moviemaking team or in the audience is committed to anything; nothing is being risked except the million and a half.”¹¹ Surely this is the last we will be hearing this line of critique about the Coens.

• The Coens proudly wear their influences on their sleeves—or in their frames—and there was no bigger influence on Blood Simple than the hardboiled crime novelist James M. Cain, whose novels The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce—along with the lesser-known comic novella “Career in C-Major”—deeply inspired the Coens when they were reissued in the late 1970s. In the 1985 interview with Film Comment that I’ve cited frequently throughout this newsletter, the Coens’ praise for Cain was immense. After Ethan noted that “Cain usually dealt in his work with three great themes: opera, the Greek diner business, and the insurance business,” Joel added, “which we felt were the three great themes of twentieth century literature.” Moreover, Joel felt that Cain could and should stand toe to toe with some of contemporary literature’s most securely canonized forefathers: “We’ve always thought that up at Low Library at Columbia University, where the names are chiseled up there above the columns in stone—Aristotle, Herodotus, Virgil—that the fourth one should be Cain.”¹² Look, I’m just going to say it: the Coens kind of have a way with words!

• Hired to shoot Blood Simple was the Coens’ friend Barry Sonnenfeld. Despite prior work on industrial films, pornographic films, and one feature-length Oscar-nominated documentary (1982’s In Our Water), Sonnenfeld had never worked on a feature narrative film before. He was, as a result, very nervous on the set of Blood Simple, per Joel: “Barry threw up a lot. He never betrayed any nervousness, except he threw up about 18 times. It got to the point where we'd ignore him, and people thought we were being callous. We'd just seen it so much. We'd laugh, as a matter of fact.”¹³ Sonnenfeld was aided by at least one experienced crew member: the key grip Tom Prophet, Jr., who had worked on films like Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie and James Bridges’s The China Syndrome. One technique the Coens and Sonnenfeld utilized to help the film bely its low-budget provenance was “cool transitions,” which Sonnenfeld says helped make “the movie seem more expensive than it is.” But there was one transition he and the Coens couldn’t quite figure out: “We described one shot in which Frances McDormand transitioned from discovering the murder in the office to thinking about it at home. We had no idea how to pull it off.” Enter Tom Prophet, who Sonnenfeld says “ended up designing a special rig” to which the “camera and Fran were both mounted”—“one moment you see her looking at the office, then we drop the rig 90 degrees and she falls through space on to her bed, which we’d put on the floor of the same set.” And according to Sonnenfeld, Blood Simple wasn’t the last time Prophet deployed his invention: “Tom later used it for some sexual thing with his wife – we didn’t want to know.”¹⁴ But now I know—and you all know, too.

A NOTE FROM PAST AND FUTURE GUEST JORDAN FISH

Greetings CHECK BOOK readers! (Do we have an official nickname for you yet? Bookies? Newsies? CPAs? BCCs? Feel free to self-identify in the comments!) This is Jordan Fish, co-host of the To the White Sea podcast, and guest on this week's episode about the Coens' first feature, Blood Simple, along with fellow co-host and co-guest, the great Ray Tintori. We were thrilled to join the gang and help flip the page, Scruggs-style, to Pod Country for Old Cast. Hope you dug it!

In the next paragraph I'll do a shameless plug but before that I also want to encourage you to check out our show. We just dropped a new episode exploring the thesis, developed by Coens storyboard artist J. Todd Anderson, that everything in film can be boiled down to a combination of suspense and surprise. By the way, I believe this is the topic that Griffin alludes to at the very end of the show, which I then say I don't want to get into... in my defense we were running long, and perhaps this new ep will give you some closure after that tantalizing tease of mine.

All right, on to the plug: Griffin and Marie have graciously invited me to tell you about a project I'm working on, and it is Blood Simple related... in a way? I wrote a feature script with my friend Giovanni Saldarriaga called BAD VIBES. It's a sort of 1970s paranoid thriller meets 1990s slacker comedy, except it's thoroughly modern day and the main characters aren't slackers, they're a couple of democratic socialist dirtbags who are trying to protect their social outcast friend from getting made a patsy by shady operators. Right now I'm working on a short-form trailer for the full film to get the vibe across and attract investors. If that sounds like I may have been inspired by what the Coens did for Blood Simple then you'd be 100% right—and fortunately the landscape of independent film financing has not changed much since the early 80s. So what I'm asking, right now, is for every single Blankie who is also an ESTABLISHED DENTIST IN THE MIDWEST to check out the GoFundMe I've set up and consider contributing a coupla bones so I can reach my funding goal for this piece of the puzzle, and take the next steps toward making my dream film for real, forthwith! Thank you kindly for your consideration! Anyways, that's what's going on with me! Hope you had a nice weekend and shout out to all of the movies. I thought that Superman movie was good.

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

David Sims, Host: “Have we recommended On Becoming a Guinea Fowl yet? It’s on HBO Max now! Along with some other A24 movies not worth recommending! Best opening 10 mins of any movie I’ve seen all year.”

Marie Bardi, Social Media: “I’ve been listening to the latest deeply researched and highly entertaining podcast by Leon Neyfakh - Final Thoughts: Jerry Springer. I thought I knew Springer. I did not. Dude was like the Mamdami of Cincinnati before he pioneered the televised shitshow. A fascinating person.”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “Long overdue but finally got around to playing Firewatch, partially created by friend of the show Olly Moss.”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “I’m going to recommend Misericordia (evil movie, very funny, streaming now on the Criterion Channel) and the video game Everdeep Aurora, which has the best retro art I’ve maybe ever seen in a game.”

I’m saying. — JJ

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “Book Recommendation Summer™ continues as I recommend maybe the most distressing book I’ve ever read: Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War. It’s a deeply reported, mind-bogglingly detailed, extremely propulsive portrait of what might happen in, more or less, the first hour after North Korea launches a nuclear missile at the US. Spoiler alert: NOTHING GOOD WOULD HAPPEN. The minutiae with which she describes all the many, many, many not good things that would happen is really ramped up by the fact that she’s an incredible line-by-line writer with a humanist streak that makes this a much richer reading experience than you might expect when I say “it’s a book about how bad a nuclear war would be.” As Jacobsen says in the first line of the acknowledgements, “Nuclear war is insane.” Folks, she ain’t lying.”

THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST

We’re kicking off our Coen’s series with Ray Tintori and Jordan Fish on Blood Simple:

And over on Patreon, we’ve reached the end of the commentary portion of our Supermen series with Zack Snyder’s 2013 film Man of Steel. But fret not—on July 21st, we’ll be releasing an episode discussing 2025’s Superman!

COMING SOON:

1. Film Comment, March/April 1985, in Coen Brothers Interviews, ed. William Rodney Allen.

2. The Washington Post, February 2, 1985.

3. Vulture, February 23, 2011.

4. Premiere, March 1996, in Joel & Ethan Coen: Blood Siblings, ed. Paul A. Woods.

5. The Washington Post, February 2, 1985.

6. Positif, July/August 1987, in Coen Brothers Interviews, ed. William Rodney Allen.

7. Film Comment, March/April 1985, in Coen Brothers Interviews, ed. William Rodney Allen.

8. The Guardian, November 6, 2017.

9. Film Comment, March/April 1985, in Coen Brothers Interviews, ed. William Rodney Allen.

10. The Village Voice, July 4, 2000.

11. The New Yorker, February 25, 1985.

12. Film Comment, March/April 1985, in Coen Brothers Interviews, ed. William Rodney Allen.

13. The Washington Post, February 2, 1985.

14. The Guardian, November 6, 2017.