Check Book: Remember When I Said We Weren't Going to Talk About Emilia Pérez?

Like, last week? Okay, well some stuff happened!

, and

Feb 03, 2025

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

“From penis to vaginaaaa” - more like “Frontrunner to pariaaaah,” am I right, folks??

A major escándalo hit the Academy this week, with the reveal that Karla Sofía Gascón (thee titular Emilia Pérez) has a history of tweeting the most racist, awful shit about everything from entire ethnic groups to the Oscars telecast itself. And when I say “history,” I mean RECENT history. Like, post-pandemic history. It is BAD.

People have had “bad tweets” before. Nick Vallelonga had some gross post-9/11, anti-Arab tweets exposed during the Green Book Oscar season, and uh, we all know what happened with Green Book. The Academy didn’t care. But this time, it feels different. The sheer volume and scope of the Gascón tweets is unprecedented. Scott Feinberg reports in the Hollywood Reporter that Academy members he spoke to anonymously feel less inclined to vote for Emilia Perez in ANY category now, not just for Karla in Best Actress.

What does this mean for the rest of the race? Does Zoe Saldana lose in Best Supporting Actress, and does Ariana Grande take her place? Does Brazil’s I’m Still Here end up winning the Best Foreign Language category? WHO IS GOING TO END UP WINNING BEST PICTURE? Will it be my beloved Cardinal Benitez, the archbishop of Kabul???? The fact that the drama of this awards season is mirroring the plot of Conclave may only help his chances.

IN OTHER NEWS…

JAKE GYLLENHAAL TO STAR IN A NEW FILM FROM THE TWISTED MINDS OF M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN AND NICHOLAS SPARKS. I cannot imagine a better headline. I’m foaming at the mouth. All three of these bozo-mode freaks working together means that we’re going to get an all-timer episode of this podcast.

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey adaptation continues to add really fun names to the supporting cast. John Leguizamo! Elliott Page! Benny Safdie! Himash Patel! Samantha Morton! The voice of TARS himself, Bill Irwin! Do we think there is a Griffin Newman type still uncast and up for grabs?

And last, but certainly not least - we listened to everyone on the Reddit and started an ad-free tier on Patreon. You can continue listening to every main feed episode and every unpaywalled Patreon episode for free with ads. You can continue to pay $5 a month to still get Patreon special features episodes as they were before. But if you want to pay $10 a month to listen to every single episode of this podcast ad free, you can now. Happy Decade of Dreams.

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

Throughout the early years of Steven Spielberg’s career, the soon-to-be-famed director consistently flirted with making raunchy out-and-out comedies. In 1969, Spielberg signed onto Snow White, a Larry Grusin-penned and Universal-produced adaptation of Donald Barthelme’s 1967 post-modern novel of the same name. The story transported the classic Brothers Grimm character to the sex-positive Swinging Sixties, where she now lived in a San Francisco apartment with seven young male roommates.1 Also in 1969, the New Zealand humorist Wallace Reyburn published his fictional biography of the real-life English plumber/businessman Thomas Crapper, Flushed with Pride, which widely circulated the thoroughly debunked legend that Crapper was the inventor of the toilet. Spielberg was tickled by the book, and he asked future American Graffiti/Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz to help him bring it to the silver screen. Huyck envisioned the film as Young Tom Edison (Norman Taurog, 1940) meets Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), but when he and Katz delivered a treatment to Spielberg’s agent Guy McElwaine, Huyck says that McElwaine replied, “Steve, if this is the kind of movie you want to do, I don’t want to be your agent.”2 And then there was Growing Up (alternately titled After School and Clearwater), the 1978 project that many in the press mistakenly assumed was a first crack at The Fabelmans. But if Growing Up was anyone’s The Fabelmens, it was co-writers Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis’s The Fabelmens. Given just one directive from Spielberg—"I want to make a movie about kids”—Gale and Zemeckis decided to draw upon their own juvenile experiences, writing a Chicago-set, curse-heavy comedy, per Gale: “Zemeckis and I being the renegades we are—certainly we were more so then—we thought that to make it really interesting, it should be rated R, and we wrote it that way. We swore like truckdrivers when we were twelve. A lot of kids do that, and we thought that would be the way to go. It was the classic nerds-against-jocks story. The nerds had a dogshit bomb on a radio-controlled car.”3 Spielberg was initially into the Bobs’ vision, saying, at the time, “I don’t want to make a movie about children that’s dimples or cuteness. … It’s my first vendetta film: I’m going to get back at about twenty people I’ve always wanted to get back at.”4 He set up the film at Universal, securing a budget of $1.5 million. Spielberg relocated the story to his own childhood hometown of Phoenix and intended to fill the film with a cast of unknown child actors who would improvise their own childhood stories on set. But Spielberg cooled on the project after he shared the screenplay with the cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who, according to Gale, called the film “disgusting.”5 When Spielberg was asked about the project in 1979, he identified his own (lack of ) maturity as the primary reason he didn’t proceed with the project: “Problem was, I hadn’t grown up enough to make Growing Up. Hopefully, 1941 is the last movie I make that celebrates the boy in me. And then hopefully I can go on from here and do something more adultlike and perhaps more boring.”6 (Instead, he went on to make the greatest action-adventure film of all time, of course.)
With 1941, Steven Spielberg was finally provided with the chance to make the kind of bonkers comedy he had tried and failed to make previously. (Here’s how Spielberg characterized the film’s brand of comedy: “[1941] does cater to the lowest moral character in all of us without licking the sewer. It’s just a tongue’s reach away from good sewer humor. But falls short of classic comedy.”) But it goes without saying that the film’s production was not a joyous experience for the director. And the worst part of making it, in Spielberg’s eyes, was not the escalating costs or the demanding effects work; it was the comedy. As Spielberg told Rolling Stone in a soul-baring contemporary interview, going to the set each morning “was sorta…like going in for x-ray treatments each day and you realize the cure is worse than the disease.” He was crushed under “[t]he utter pressure of having to deliver funny material.” The jokes had to be “come up with … privately, or in a great crazy outcry of ‘Make me laugh, asshole!’” Comedy, for Spielberg, was “an elusive, chameleonlike beast” and “really an era of film that I’m not going to make a habit of.” After all, “[i]t’s too fucking tough, panhandling for your supper. Reaching for laughs. Sometimes stretching the credibility of the story line beyond all recognizable shape for a simple yuk.” And it didn’t help that the film’s two biggest stars were infectious: “[E]verybody watching John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd perform…some of our other characters wanted to be just as crazy. They all wanted to be bigger than the war. Bigger than history. … All the actors seemed to get caught up in that kind of civic madness. No one wanted to be normal—as much as I tried to normalize certain relationships…because realism is the cement floor of comedy. Without it you’re floating in a fantasy netherland.” But ultimately, Spielberg says, the blame for the film’s tone lies with him: “I failed. I failed at toning them down. They don’t teach you that in acting school. It was sort of like trying to stop a herd of kids at your local Toys R Us.”7
In the early part of his career, preview screenings were a very important part of Steven Spielberg’s process. An early showing of The Sugarland Express, for instance, inspired Spielberg—but not the film’s producers—to cut the film’s runtime down by 13 minutes.8 A gangbusters preview of Jaws still had Spielberg convinced the film was missing a scare—so much so, in fact, that he used $3,000 of his own money to shoot additional footage that the studio felt was unnecessary.9 And preview audiences were essential in helping Spielberg see that ending Close Encounters of the Third Kind with “When You Wish Upon a Star” booming over the speakers would have made the film feel too much like a fantasy.10 So when it was time to preview 1941, Steven Spielberg returned to the Medallion Theater in Dallas, which had served as the locale of the most successful of those earlier preview screenings. But the experience with 1941, as you might expect, ended up being quite different, per Spielberg: “I actually looked over the entire audience midway through the film and at least 20 per cent of the audience had their hands over their ears. I knew we were in big trouble at that point. … At the end of the preview, Sid Sheinberg to his credit came over to me and said, ‘There is a movie somewhere in this mess. We should go off and find it.’ The rest of the executives didn't even want to talk to me. It was a very unhappy experience for all of us.”11

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

David Sims, Host: “I recommend Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce, which I saw last week at Nitehawk and had a blast; otherwise I’ve mostly been watching Fantasia 2000 over and over with my feverish daughter. Her fave parts are the whale thing at the start and the water nymph at the end.”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “I’ll recommend Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold & Flu Maximum Strength PowerMax Gels Day & Night. They have the sweet sweet nasal decongestant when you really need it. ”

Marie Bardi, Social Media: “This week, I’d like to recommend the excellent SNL documentaries on Peacock. There’s a four-part series called SNL: Beyond Saturday Night, which is kind of like a 30-for-30 style thing where each installment has a different director and subject. I particularly loved part 2, which was all about the making of and subsequent legacy of ‘More Cowbell,’ and part 3, which is a week-in-the-life of the writers room. There is also a separate documentary that Questlove directed about the history of music on SNL, and it opens with a truly spectacular video mashup sequence that combines Cher with Hanson. All the docs are really creatively inspiring and fun to watch, and made me nostalgic for my treasured Best of SNL DVD collection.”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “I have been sick with the flu for the past week. I do NOT recommend the flu. I have not enjoyed a single movie I have watched while being sick with the flu. I have consumed multiple boxes of JohnnyPops in a failed effort to soothe my throat, which is currently in great duress on account of me having the flu. While having the flu, I have almost finished Donkey Kong Country Returns, a game I have paid Nintendo to play three separate times. The only thing bringing me total joy while I have been sick—with the flu, also known as Influenza A—has been the Peacock reality show The Traitors. I jumped in with the current season but will absolutely be going back to watch the earlier seasons after this one wraps up—and after I no longer have the flu.”

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “You know what’s a stone cold delight? Sam Raimi’s 2002 film Spider-Man! It’s about a man, but not just any man. He’s a kind of a spider/man. Fun fact: the first time I ever got a ticket it was for going 85 in a 55, racing to get from graduation rehearsal to see Spider-Man for the second time.”