Check Book: May in June

Griffin and Marie Spend an Evening with Elaine May

Jun 16, 2025

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IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

THE BARDI PARTY REPORT

This past weekend, a select group of New Yorkers in-the-know enough to purchase tickets early were treated to a very rare and delightful screening of a little-seen 1990 film titled In The Spirit. Written by Jeanne Berlin and Laurie Jones, directed by famed “dream-work” acting teacher Sandra Seacat, and starring real life best friends Elaine May and Marlo Thomas, In The Spirit is like Home Alone meets Married to the Mob meets A New Leaf meets a 10mg THC gummy chased down with an Erehwon smoothie. Berlin, May, and Thomas play three very different New York women connected by karmic destiny and a series of screwball circumstances - Berlin a deadpan sex worker, May a wealthy socialite married to a deeply depressed Peter Falk, and Thomas a woo-woo proprietress of a health food store. An apartment renovation gone wrong, a series of murders, and some spectral occurrences all culminate in Elaine and Marlo hunkered down in a boobytrapped upstate house designed to catch a killer. Hilarity ensues.

Not only did the Roxy screen the film this weekend, they had Elaine, Jeanne, Marlo, and producer Julian Schlossberg in attendance for two very enjoyable Q&As. Griffin and I attended the Saturday evening screening, and had the incredible fortune of being seated directly behind May et al as they rewatched the film for the first time in years. There is no way to adequately describe the feeling of witnessing Elaine May laugh at her own jokes. That would have been satisfying enough for me. But then to see her field questions from the moderator and absolutely destroy with some withering answers and sharp-as-a-tack comebacks? Transcendent.

I don’t know why the independently-financed movie never saw a real release. But it certainly deserves to. There’s a version on YouTube that is pretty VHS-y in terms of quality (we were able to see a gorgeous 35-mm print), but I think it’s absolutely worth adding to your watchlist. My sides hurt from laughing.

And to all concerned Blankies who remembered the Elaine May wars of 2021 - the offending party was NOT in attendance. She must have been busy.

KING RALPH LIVE ON VOD!

Tickets and exclusive merch on sale now!

We will be livechatting with viewers during the initial premiere on 6/27 at 8:00pm, and then the video will be able for repeat viewing until the end of August.

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

It’s a special All-Musical edition of the dossier section this week, folks! Last month, while waiting for Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory to take the stage on their Madison stop, I found myself talking about the band Wheatus a lot. Finally, after maybe my thirteenth or fourteenth mention of the band Wheatus—a band I’d never really talked about before, and, further, a band I’d never really thought much about before—one of my friends stopped me and asked, uhh, what’s with all this Wheatus talk? To which I (very normally) explained, well, I’ve been researching Amy Heckerling’s 2000 film Loser, of course! And, look, if there is any sort of enduring legacy of Amy Heckerling’s misbegotten comedy, it is likely its association with Wheatus’s debut single “Teenage Dirtbag.” Though the song was released prior to the film—either a month or just a few days before, depending on which source you consult—its placement in Loser was meant to amplify the track and thereby the profile of the fledgling band. (Their first album arrived just a month after Loser premiered.) The Jeff Gordon-directed music video for “Teenage Dirtbag” heavily features Loser stars Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari; it currently has a stunning 341 million views on YouTube—about 22 views for each dollar Loser made at the domestic box office. So when I (somehow) ran out of things to read about Loser, I naturally dedicated some of my research time to reading about “Teenage Dirtbag.” Did you know that Wheatus lead singer Brendan B. Brown first adopted the “Girl Voice” he uses at the end of “Teenage Dirtbag” to ward off high school bullies? Well, that’s what he told Rolling Stone in 2020: “I would get beat up by older kids, and there'd be a lot of homophobic slurs. I found that it'd compress the time that you're actually having the shit kicked out of you if you antagonized them by donning a girl voice.”1 And here’s Brown laying out a pretty upsetting description of the various musical influences he and the rest of the Wheatus boys incorporated into “Teenage Dirtbag”: “I have vivid memories of explaining to the producer, Phil, that I wanted Teenage Dirtbag to sound like Metallica, AC/DC, Paul Simon and James Taylor from the waist up. And then, from the waist down, LL Cool J and Public Enemy. Like, hip-hop feet with rock’n’roll hands. As a production concept, that’s difficult. But every time it comes on the radio, I’m proud. It’s this weaponised piece of pop culture. When we play it, if the room is full, the crowd sing so loud we can’t hear ourselves.”2 Wheatus: the one winner to come out of Loser!

In 2017, Heckerling’s agent Ken Stovitz told Lindsay Zoladz of The Ringer that Loser “was ruined in post. Loser was really good until the studio said, ‘No, you’ve got to make it PG-13 rather than R,’ and it ruined the movie. Just ruined the movie.”3 As discussed on this week’s episode, the most notable change between Loser’s first cut and the version that played in theaters was the removal of a controversial scene in which Dora awakens from a Rohypnol-induced slumber to discover that Paul’s roommates have placed her on an operating table, where they use “veterinary equipment” to undress her.4 But there were other—less potentially offensive—elements left on the cutting room floor, too. One of them, for instance, came at the expense of Ben Folds, who revealed to The AV Club in 2011 that he originally composed “The Luckiest”—his most streamed solo song on Spotify, and his second-most streamed song overall—to score the ending of Loser. As Folds explained to Nathan Rabin, the final shot of the movie was initially “a real ambitious scene,” with the camera “going around and around” while Biggs and Suvari have “this long embrace/kiss.” When Folds discussed the sequence with Heckerling, he suggested that the song would be about how “these people are together” and that “you assume they're going to be together for the rest of their lives at the end of it”, so he “put a subliminal wedding vow inside of it.” However, once Folds “got the song recorded properly and sent it to the movie people, the scene had been cut altogether.” Though the producers told Folds they would find a different place in the movie to insert the song, the singer/songwriter had pretty tightly composed “The Luckiest” to the film’s original ending, and he chose instead to save it for his debut solo album, 2001’s Rockin’ the Suburbs. Per Folds, “I had done the dynamics and the tempo change—the swells—all around the movement of the camera. I had locked it to that and I was really married to that. And so I said, nah, don't use it, that's cool."5 If any of you know of any other artist-defining songs that were either in or meant to be in Amy Heckerling’s totally forgotten 2000 film Loser, please sound off in the comments below. It feels like there should be a third.

As part of her promotional tour for Loser, Amy Heckerling sat down with The Los Angeles Times in May 2000 to answer some of the “commonly asked questions about ‘The Kids Today,’” the first question being, “What’s with all the crappy music?” Heckerling’s response: “Of course, I don’t mean Blink-182, the Offspring or Everclear. You know who we’re talking about: ‘N Sync, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and all the other overly choreographed, pre-fab wunderkinder. A normal grown-up might say, ‘Oh my God! I don’t get it! I must be getting old!’ Relax, this too shall pass. In 1969, what was on top of the Billboard chart? The Beatles? The Who? Led Zeppelin? Nope, it was ‘Sugar, Sugar’ by the Archies. So, not to worry. They will either go away, get reinvented or, possibly, evolve.”6 Two-and-a-half months later, Heckerling came back to the LA Times with more music takes: “I like to hear live alternative music, anything on Power 106 or KROQ. This year I saw the Goo Goo Dolls and Smash Mouth and Fatboy Slim and Method Man. Like the Palladium, I’ve seen a lot of groups there. I’ve seen some at little clubs, the Roxy and all, but that’s more industry-like. But if my brother comes--because I don’t drive on freeways--he’ll take me out to an arena or something.”7 And with that fun list of names we conclude this week’s mega-musical dossier section.

WHERE ELSE CAN YOU FIND TEAM BC THIS WEEK?

Griffin and Marie will be participating in the Wit’s End Trivia Showdown this Wednesday 6/18 at Littlefield in Brooklyn, going up against Connor Ratliff:

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

Ben Hosley, Producer: “In honor of Father’s Day, I would like to spotlight the malt liquor beverage Natty Daddy. It’s a variant of Natural Light beer. It’s basically just a higher ABV (8%) but remains American made hog swill. Now, first thing I gotta say is I never drank Nat Dad. Nor will I. But fuck if I don’t respect them for the bit. Adding ‘daddy’ is so stupid I’m impressed.”

Griffin Newman, Host: “Sadly last Saturday my beloved Muppet*Vision 3D (the last thing Jim Henson ever directed!) permanently closed its final standing location at Disney World in Orlando. I couldn’t make it there for the closing date because of its proximity to our own live show, but this video is the best approximation of the full experience I’ve been able to find! Highly recommended for anyone who never got to see it themselves IRL or wants to relive it one last time!”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “I'll recommend the UT Austin Radio-Television-Film Media Camps. Hayes went to their Stop-Motion Animation: The Wonderful World of Paper this past week and made some really fun animated shorts. We got to go to a screening of them on Friday, he was very nervous, but one of his shorts got the biggest laugh so it was all good! If you have kids, look up whatever college in your area has the best film school and I'm sure they have camps. It's fun!!”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “It's time to talk about the game console everybody's been talking about: that's right, Panic's crankable niche black-and-white handheld the Playdate. I've owned my Playdate for a couple of years, and—despite a number of really cool games, like Lucas Pope's Mars After Midnight or Keita Takahashi's Crankin Presents Time Travel Adventures—it's always felt like more of an odd curiosity I was happy to show off rather than a console I would recommend other people go out and purchase. But that's changed with the Playdate's recently launched second season of games: currently at the halfway point, each of the six titles released thus far has held my attention in a way that even the best non-Root Bear Playdate titles have not. The best of them is Fulcrum Defender, a high-score-chasing arcade-style shooter from the makers of FTL and Into the Breach—it absolutely rules, and its crank controls make it the kind of game that couldn’t be found on any other system. Other highlights include Otto’s Galactic Groove (a rhythm game in the style of Trombone Champ, but with crank controls), Dig Dig Dino (a simple but addictive treasure-hunting game from the makers of Arco), and Long Puppy (a puzzle-platformer in which you use the crank to make a puppy, well, really long). And then there’s Blippo+, a frequently-updated cable TV simulator that feels like it was made for the kind of people who not only listen to this podcast but also read its newsletter offshoot (and maybe no one else). Perhaps the biggest compliment I can give the second season of the Playdate is that my anticipation for each week’s new games hasn’t decreased at all since acquiring a Nintendo Switch 2; it’s become a must-play part of my daily gaming routine.”

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I’ll recommend Stephen Graham Jones’s book My Heart Is a Chainsaw. A great read for any fans of horror cinema.”