Check Book: Our Coens, Our Selves

Plus, we close our chapter on Amy Heckerling

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

Hi Blankies. I have a confession to make. Please don’t get mad at me. Don’t make fun of me. I’m being VULNERABLE right now with you all because we’ve built such a strong relationship these past four and a half years. Don’t make me regret it.

Okay here it goes — The Coens? Kind of a blind spot for me!!!

Don’t get me wrong - I just did the math. I’ve technically seen 11 of their 18 co-directorial efforts. That’s not nothing. I’ve also seen The Tragedy of Macbeth, and I’ve even seen a film INSPIRED by Fargo, 2014’s Kumiko the Treasure Hunter. I watched the pilot of the Fargo TV show. I even have my own Coen Brothers Burger Report to relay!!! I’ll save that one for later.

Anyway, I bet you’re wondering, why all this handwringing? I think I am insecure that I lack a deep pre-existing emotional connection to our March Madness champions. And here’s the confession - they were never really “my guys.” I think I can trace this back to two things. The first being that they were in a bit of a career slump at the peak of my teen years, post-O Brother and pre No Country. The second aspect of this is the 2007 Oscar season, which pitted No Country For Old Men against There Will Be Blood and it felt imperative to pick a side. I was 18 years old in 2007, and I regret to inform everyone that I was a little dumb. Outside of the “How much have you ever lost on a coin toss” thrills, I don’t think I really grasped what the film was doing. And I’ve yet to rewatch it. There Will Be Blood, on the other hand - pretty easy to disgest.

I think the Coens filmography rewards rewatching. I remember not feeling like I really appreciated the complexities in Fargo or A Serious Man until later viewings. It’s easy to take the folksy Midwestern plainspokenness at face value. The Mike Yanagita scene is just a scene until you realize that it’s sticking with you for some reason you don’t quite understand, and it’s scratching an itch in your brain that you didn’t even know was there to begin with.

As of this newsletter, Fargo and A Serious Man are the only Coen films I’ve seen more than once. I’ve never seen Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, or The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. This is going to be six months of continuous discovery for your pal Marie. Watch this space for updates.

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

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

• While writing her 2012 film Vamps, Amy Heckerling considered, of course, the many bloodsuckers of cinema past. There was, most obviously, F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized 1927 Dracula adaptation Nosferatu—whose star, Max Schreck, Heckerling still considered the “scariest” cinematic vampire—as well as 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, a heavily fictionalized behind-the-scenes accounting of the production of Murnau’s film in which an Oscar-nominated Willem Dafoe portrays Shreck as an actual vampire, which Heckerling thought was “very fun.” There were a few legitimate Draculas, too: Francis Ford Coppola’s lavish take on Bram Stoker’s story in 1992, Bela Lugosi’s iconic turn in 1931, and, most interestingly, Gerard Butler’s much less iconic turn in Dracula 2000 in, well, the year 2000. Though Heckerling conceded that Patrick Lussier’s film was “uneven,” she thought that Butler was “awesome” and “hot,” and she was fascinated by the film’s unique characterization of its well-known protagonist: “It had a funny, interesting take on it. It was as though Dracula was doomed or cursed because he was Judas, and that's why he doesn't like seeing crosses, and the curse is that he will never see the day again, because he double-crossed Jesus.”¹ But Heckerling claims that two of the biggest cinematic inspirations for her off-beat take on vampiric life were actually extra-terrestrial; she wanted to make the kind of genre-defying storytelling modeled by our old pal Steven Spielberg in 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1982’s E.T. As she told The Mary Sue, “In Close Encounters, after tons of outer space guys coming down and destroying the Earth, suddenly an outer space guy comes, they come down and you go, ‘oh, they’re nice, let’s go over and see what’s going on with them.’ And then taking it further to E.T., it’s like, what if the outer space guys were nice. I need to play around with the parameters of being a vampire and have fun with it the way I see it.”² Sometimes it feels like all of our previous subjects are connected; other times it feels like we just covered the most famous filmmaker of all time.

• It’s difficult to notice while watching the finished film, but Heckerling claims that the biggest challenge facing the production of Vamps was “[d]oing it on [a] tight budget.”³ While Heckerling noted that making the film independently had its advantages, like “the freedom of using all the people that I love instead of being dictated by the studio to use the hot person of the moment,” the lack of financial muscle behind the picture also forced her to make concessions.⁴ In an interview with Vulture, Heckerling revealed some of the things she most regretted having to cut, including an opening “dream on the beach” sequence where “Krysten Ritter’s character is seeing all these bloated, big-tits, big-lips, big-pecs people that are beach people, super tan — like a beach movie gone scary.” Heckerling described the scene as a “reverse Carnival of Souls,” in which “the beach-y people [chase] and [horrify] the pasty, white person.” In a later sequence, Heckerling “wanted Alicia [Silverstone]’s character to be more incorporated into the history of New York.” In the finished film, Heckerling notes that there is “one time when you see her remember the history of a building on St. Marks Place,” but she intended for this sequence to be more extensive, with Goody venturing further out into the “Lower East Side, where there’s now a Whole Foods, and hav[ing] her be like, ‘This is where the flophouse was. This is where the cholera epidemic was.’”⁵ Instead, Vamps was shot in Detroit, where producer Molly Hassell claims the architecture was “old enough that it matche[d] the architecture of the New York buildings.”⁶ Fooled me!

• Amy Heckerling has not directed a feature film since Vamps was unceremoniously dumped on VOD in the fall of 2012. In 2018, she told The New York Times that, in some ways, she feels like it’s her own fault for not knowing how to schmooze with the executives: “I’m not a wheeler-dealer. I’m, like, a middle of the night scratching on paper person.” But she also worried that any effort might not help much anyway: “I mean, I don’t know, maybe they just don’t like me.”⁷ In the past 13 years, Heckerling has found her most consistent work on television, stepping in to direct episodes of series like Gossip Girl, The Carrie Diaries, and Red Oaks. Though Heckerling told IndieWire that it was always nice to “get to hang and talk and do stuff together and joke around” with a crew, she was blunt about how that work compared to her more personal film projects of the past: “I’m not thrilled. It’s interesting. It’s more of a puzzle than the thing that will make your heart burst if you don’t get to do.”⁸ Additionally, Heckerling has branched out into the web: in 2019, Heckerling directed two episodes of the Jordan Peele/Charlie Sanders-created YouTube Premium anthology series Weird City. Her two episodes feature an impressive roster of famous faces, including Gillian Jacobs, Steven Yeun, Hannah Simone, and Awkwafina. In 2020, Heckerling directed all 10 episodes of Darren Criss’s musical comedy series Royalties for David Sims’s Quibi with what sounds like an extremely stressful production schedule, per Criss: “We had to make the whole thing in a very small window of time between the writing of the songs, producing. I did 10 songs, 10 days. Pre-production was so short, [director] Amy Heckerling said yes very close to when we started shooting. She had a less-than-pleasant amount of days to do pre-production, and when she got to L.A., she was told that she also had to prep 10 music videos.”⁹ Her most personal work has likely been the Clueless musical, the difficult production of which I detailed in a previous issue of Check Book. But still, the movies: there have been no movies. Yet in 2016, Heckerling teased that a secretive—potentially disastrous—film project had captured her imagination: “I finally have found something that’s so insane. It’s like, you could see how it could be the worst thing ever made, or something that nobody’s ever seen. I can only work on it really, really, late at night, when there’s absolutely no other voices in the universe, because they’ll just say bad stuff.” When first pressed for details, Heckerling intimated that the project was historical: “It’s something that takes a lot, a lot, a lot, of research. I’ve been reading, and reading, and reading, and every day, I’m like, ‘Oh, my fucking God, that happened, and they did that and that?’ You almost think like, while you’re writing it, you want to have a thing flashing on the screen going, ‘This is true.’” But Heckerling’s sole cryptic clue as to what the film was actually, you know, about was this: “[Shoah] relates to what I’m writing. I’ll just say that.”¹⁰ And with that, my time as an Amy Heckerling historian has come to an end.

THE OFFICIAL HECKERLING SOUNDTRACK PLAYLIST

Listen to our Heckerling Companion playlist compiled by Nate Patterson:

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

David Sims, Host: “I recommend the novel Sleep by my friend and colleague Honor Jones!! Came out in May but I finally read it in full this weekend! It’s an absolutely enthralling family drama about which I’ll reveal very little cause it’s v cool to see it unfold!!”

Marie Bardi, Social Media: “After seeing it excerpted in Alex Ross Perry’s Video Heaven, I watched Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts this week. An incredible film about loneliness and mediated connection. Egoyan is such a fascinating guy - Speaking Parts, Exotica, and The Sweet Hereafter are three of the most staggering films of the 90s (Speaking Parts is technically 1989, but whatever), and then like Austin Powers in The Spy Who Shagged Me, he just…completely lost his mojo. What happened!?!”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “I’ll recommend Bingo. Find a group and play a big game of bingo, it’s a fun time!”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “Some food and drinks I’ve enjoyed lately: Poppi’s limited edition summer time flavor Punch Pop; vegan smash burgers and raspberry churros from Madison’s very best food truck Cinn City Smash; Golden Road Brewing’s non-alcoholic Mango Cart wheat beer; a vanilla Coke-flavored donut named after One Piece’s General Franky from Madison’s Level 5 Donuts (the cookie dough and Hawaiian Punch donuts on the July menu are also great, as are long-time favs like blueberry lemon and churro, of course); and the vegana pizza, the insalata di cavolo, and the non-alcoholic negroni from Madison’s Bar Corallini. Shout out to our estimated 170 subscribers from the state of Wisconsin. If you are not in or near Madison you could consider getting a burger, churro, donut, or pizza from wherever you are I guess. Also I recommend the video game Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.”

Wisconsin rocks.

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I’m taking a break from Book Recommendation Summer™ because on last week’s episode, Richard Curtis’s About Time was mentioned, and I want to encourage everyone to watch that movie. It is a sentimental Curtis rom-com, and it rewired the way I see the world. I was very charmed by it, and then walked around in a daze for like two weeks. A movie that’s a little bit about using time traveling powers to fix a bad date, and a lot about what it means to find contentment, to come to terms with the decisions and the events that make your life what it is, and to experience the world as you’re living in it. It wraps a lot of meaning into what is essentially a sweet little movie. ”

THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST

We wrap up our Amy Heckerling series as Caroline Framke joins us to discuss 2012’s Vamps, as well as The B in Apartment 23 and the RULK in the White House.

And over on Patreon, we’re entering the post-Reeves era of Superman as we discuss Superman Returns —a film directed by nobody and starring Brandon Routh and nobody… as Lex Luthor.

COMING SOON:

OFFICIAL ARTWORK STILL IN PROGRESS BUT OUR COENS SCHEDULE IS:

Jul 13 Blood Simple
Jul 20 Raising Arizona
Jul 27 Miller's Crossing
Aug 3 Barton Fink
Aug 10 The Hudsucker Proxy
Aug 17 Fargo
Aug 24 The Big Lebowski
Aug 31 O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Sep 7 The Man Who Wasn't There
Sep 14 Intolerable Cruelty
Sep 21 The Ladykillers
Sep 28 No Country for Old Men
Oct 5 Burn After Reading
Oct 12 A Serious Man
Oct 19 True Grit
Oct 26 A House of Dynamite**** - Kathryn Bigelow new release
Nov 2 Inside Llewyn Davis
Nov 9 Hail, Caesar!
Nov 16 The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Nov 23 The Tragedy of Macbeth
Nov 30 Drive Away Dolls
Dec 7 Honey Don't!

As of this writing, we are planning to close out the year with James L. Brooks’ Ella McKay on December 14, and Avatar: Fire & Ash on December 21. We will be dark for the last week of 2025.

1. The Advocate, November 13, 2012.

2. The Mary Sue, November 13, 2012.

3. Women and Hollywood, November 3, 2012.

4. The Advocate, November 13, 2012.

5. Vulture, April 9, 2012.

6. Screen Daily, August 19, 2010.

7. The New York Times, December 5, 2018.

8. IndieWire, May 12, 2016.

9. Variety, July 1, 2020.

10. IndieWire, May 12, 2016.