Check Book: Keep Your Eye on the Donut

And not on the hole.

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!

DAVID LYNCH: 1946-2025

We lost a good one this week. I’ve written a bunch here and deleted it, because nothing feels sufficient as a eulogy. We didn’t know the man. We spent six plus months in close conversation with his work, some of the greatest creative work in the history of American popular culture. I grew attached to him. The distinctive timbre of his voice, the Woody Woodpeckers, the Bob’s Big Boys, “Crazy Clown Time,” that picture of him sitting on the floor with Laura Dern, and they’re both wearing similar suits, and Laura is barefoot and her feet are filthy, but they both look so happy. I will never look like a strip of yellow paint on a dark road illuminated by headlights without thinking of him. As far as I’m concerned, he can claim ownership over blue roses and orange Cheetos and red velvet curtains. I wouldn’t be the person I am today, with the life I have today (a really good one!) if I hadn’t rented Mulholland Dr. from the video store in middle school. I’m sure a lot of you feel the same way.

Reading your comments this past week - whether they be on social media, or reddit, or private messages - has been such a balm. I’m so glad we all got to love him together.

You can read David Sims on David Lynch in The Atlantic here, which is far better written than all of this. And you can read Kyle MacLachlan in the New York Times here, which might make you cry all over again. Or, you can take some time to look out at the clear blue skies and golden sunshine while listening to Ben Hosley’s 100 song Lynch playlist - which is probably what David would have wanted you to do:

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

• When Steven Spielberg read the galleys for Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel Jaws, he felt it comprised two stories: one good, one bad. The good, per Spielberg, was in “the last 120 pages, when they go on a hunt, a sea hunt for the great white shark, and that extended drama.” The bad was everything that came before it: “I hated the first two acts, the first 200 and some pages of the novel.”¹ (Even less of a fan was Robert Shaw, who said to TIME magazine in 1974 that “Jaws was not a novel. It was a story written by a committee, a piece of shit.”)² Spielberg’s issue with the bulk of the book was Benchley’s characterization: “Peter didn’t like any of his characters, so none of them were very likable. He put them in a situation where you were rooting for the shark to eat the people—in alphabetical order.”³ So when Spielberg signed onto the project, as he boldly shared with Take One in 1974, he claims he “told Zanuck that I—because I volunteered to do the picture—I said I’d like to do the picture if I could change the first two acts and base the first two acts on original screenplay material and then be very true to the book for the last third.”⁴ And yet, first brought in to write a draft of the film’s screenplay was Benchley himself, who was soon told to cut much of his book’s material, per the film’s director: “I guess I’m personally responsible for removing [the novel’s affair subplot], but I felt that it had absolutely nothing to do with the crisis. It was almost an ingredient in an already well-publicized formula of the making of a best seller. The Mafia, the sex, it’s just one more ingredient that I felt should be removed.”⁵ (An additional Spielberg quote about the axed affair: “That was like a Peyton Place scandal that I didn’t feel had any place in the kind of movie I wanted to make.”)⁶ After Benchley completed three drafts of the script—devising, according to Spielberg, at least five wholly original scenes for the movie—Spielberg turned to his old Columbo pals Richard Levinson and William Link for the next draft. But they passed on the job, urging Spielberg to do the same, per Link: “We were doing important television like The Execution of Private Slovik and That Certain Summer—we were the social-issue boys. We, idiots that we were, tried to talk him out of it. We said, ‘Why do you want to do a dumb horror film? It’s like a Hammer film. You’re so talented, what do you want to do a dumb thing about a shark for?’”⁷ Instead, The Great White Hope playwright Howard Sackler came aboard to complete five weeks of uncredited work on the screenplay. (It was actually Sackler who introduced the USS Indianapolis to Quint’s backstory, though his speech was later—quite famously—rewritten by John Millius and Robert Shaw.) But when the film entered casting and then quickly proceeded to filming, Spielberg—and the studio—were still yet to find a satisfactory script. So Spielberg looked to embody the ideals of a fellow trailblazing American auteur: “I knew what I needed to do was cast the movie and do something that is very frightening to me—which I understand Bob Altman does quite a lot—you subjugate absolute control to meaningful collaboration; everybody gets into a room to determine jointly what kind of movie we are going to make here.”⁸ Hired to facilitate that process was Carl Gottlieb, whose job, as described by Spielberg, was “essentially to polish the script as the actors sat with me every night—often only twenty-four hours before the shot—and improvise.”⁹ But Spielberg notes that there was one obvious advantage to not finding the right screenplay before the production inaugurated: “For some strange reason I got away with murder on Jaws. They just left me alone. I changed the script every day, but I never received a telephone call from any of the powerful executives on the West Coast. I don’t think anybody was ever in love with any of the screenplays, and felt that the story and script could only be improved.”¹⁰

  

• Spielberg’s Jaws was based on a best-selling book, and it soon inspired another: Carl Gottlieb’s 1975 firsthand production history The Jaws Log, which presents the tumultuous production of the film in colorful detail. But the book’s most indelible passage describes the moments just after the film wrapped. As Spielberg finally decamped Martha’s Vineyard for nearby Boston, Gottlieb writes that, “Steven started blinking and twitching, reacting to a whole new set of visual stimuli. Billboards. Traffic. Highways. Lots of cars and people. The closer the car got to Boston, the crazier he felt. It was like coming down off a five-and-a-half-month psychedelic experience, and he wasn’t used to it.” Once Spielberg reached the hotel in Boston, he “and a hyperkinetic Rick Dreyfuss” soon “made a spectacle of themselves” in the hotel’s bar, “mostly by screaming ‘Motherfucker, it’s over! It’s over! Motherfucker!’” though Gottlieb clarifies, “(That’s Rick’s influence. Steven is not so out-spoken.)” While awaiting his flight back to Los Angeles the next morning, Spielberg struggled to sleep, eventually “jolting upright in bed with a sensation of being shocked with electricity. A full anxiety attack overwhelmed him, complete with sweaty palms, tachycardia, difficulty breathing, and vomiting.” The East Coast nightmares then returned with Spielberg to the West Coast: “For the next three months, Steven would be troubled by dreams he kept having, that he was still on the water, still at sea, still on the Whitefoot or the Orca, or in a wet suit on a raft or barge, still rocking to the relentless surge of the endless ocean.” Finally, befitting a man who got his start on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Gottlieb closes the passage with the following punchline: “Then he remembered—Steven Spielberg, at home, sleeps on a waterbed.”¹¹

• And I’ll close this section with one great quote that went unused in this week’s episode, perhaps because it’s been cited so frequently elsewhere. But, like, it’s Jaws, what are you gonna do… So here’s Steven Spielberg, on the kind of movie he wanted to make with Jaws: “I chose to make a movie that would reach audiences really on two levels. The first level was a blow to the solar plexus, and the second was an uppercut, just under the nose; it was really a one-two you’re out combination. I never intended anything deeper than that, because when I read the book I had a lot of fun, and when I began reworking the screenplay I had even more fun. And I really said, I’m going to make a primal screen movie. … When I first got involved in the project, the thing that terrified me most was the idea that there’s something else out there, that has a digestive system with intake; and the whole idea of being on somebody else’s menu was just utterly horrifying. It was a horrifying thought to be part of a food chain. Jaws is a raw nerve movie, it’s just baring your nerves and saying this is about the birth sac, you swim around in yourself.”¹²

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

Griffin Newman, Host: “I’m recommending RAGGEDY ANN & ANDY: A MUSICAL ADVENTURE. A “one-for-them” project that director and master animator Richard Williams took on in the hopes it would help bolster his ability to get passion project THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER made. Unfortunately, it was a humongous bounce and became the only feature film Williams ever completed in his lifetime. (Later adapted by William Gibson for Broadway as RAG DOLL: THE RAGEDY ANN MUSICAL, which somehow was an even bigger bounce.)

This movie deeply frightened me as a child over countless Disney Channel airings in the early 90s, but I hadn’t seen it in decades due to it never available on DVD, Blu-Ray, 4K UHD, or any streaming/rental/purchase platform! This week I finally stumbled across an impeccable YouTube fan restoration done by the same folks who have spent years trying to ‘recobble’ William’s original vision for THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER, and have now fully fallen back in love with this fever dream masterwork that might truly represent the pinnacle of character animation craft in American film.”

David Sims, Host: “Hmm…I haven’t watched much good stuff this week! I recommend HIGH SIERRA which I think is leaving Criterion soon; p solid early Bogie I’d never seen before with Ida Lupino smokin up the screen, maybe we should do our two-year Raoul Walsh miniseries soon. TBH I only really care about Severance!!! I love Severance! S2 premiere just made me want to rewatch s1! I also finally finished The Penguin but I thought that was VERY SILLY.”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “Banana Runts. Find your local candy store with a bulk bag option and load up.”

Marie Bardi, Social Media: “Going to join the chorus of people shouting the praises of Better Man, the Robbie Williams monkey movie musical. Watching a chimp do heroin and have panic attacks and mourn the relationship he never had with his father? WAY more emotionally impactful than watching a human do those things in a by-the-numbers biopic.”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “My favorite song of the year so far is Eiko Ishibashi’s “Coma”, a soft, woozy pop jam that’s served as a warm cup of coffee each morning of this bitterly cold Wisconsin winter.”

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I have a two-fer recommendation. Paolo Iacovelli’s book The King of Video Poker. Very imaginative, very disturbing. It takes a turn about 3/4 of the way through that is so fucked up that it might not be morally defensible. But it really hit me, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. And it made me think of the episode of Love and Radio called “Fuck Your Feelings”, which is one of my favorite podcast episodes. Both are worth thinking about at this moment in history.”

THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST

THERE’S SOMETHING IN THE WATER AND IT’S THE HITMAKER TIMOTHY SIMONS! Our Jaws episode is available:

Coming this week to Patreon is MICKEY BLUE EYES on January 21st. Not a great film, but a good commentary.

COMING SOON:

1. Take One, March/April 1974, in Steven Spielberg Interviews, ed. Lester D. Friedman and Brent Notbohm.

2. TIME, June 23, 1975.

3. Joseph McBride, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, 284.

4. Take One, March/April 1974.

5. Take One, March/April 1974.

6. Vanity Fair, July 27, 2023.

7. McBride, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, 285.

8. McBride, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, 285.

9. McBride, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, 285.

10. Sight & Sound, Spring 1977, in Steven Spielberg Interviews, ed. Lester D. Friedman and Brent Notbohm.

11. Carl Gottlieb, The Jaws Log, 172-173.

12. Sight & Sound, Spring 1977, in Steven Spielberg Interviews, ed. Lester D. Friedman and Brent Notbohm.