Check Book: Say No to Holland Bond

Please, lord.

, and

Jun 30, 2025

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IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

THE BARDI PARTY REPORT

A conversation between Marie and JJ, the two main authors of Check Book

Amazon/MGM made a splash last week with the announcement that the Dune Daddy himself, Denis Villeneuve, would be taking the helm of the new Bezos Bond series (well, at least the first installment). I’m not going to log on to substack dot com and complain about one of the great contemporary blockbuster filmmakers signing on to do a Bond. He’s a very solid, expected pick.

HOWEVER - what really got my goat was the report in the trades that Amazon had three lads at the top of their wishlist to play Bond, and one of them happened to be Mighty Mouse. I’m sorry, but Tom Holland cannot be James Bond.

I know people complained about Daniel Craig. “Bond can’t be blonde!” He proved us wrong. But here’s the thing - Blonde Bond was still BEEFY. The man could fill out a set of very tiny swimming trunks and he also could hold a gun without looking like a school shooter. His face was always kind of craggy, like I believed Craig Bond had seen some shit. What has Tom Holland seen? The Minecraft movie, probably!

“But the whole point of this New Bond is we want a young Bond!” Do you know how old Sean Connery was in Dr. No? 32. Tom Holland is currently 29. He’s not gonna grow a bunch of chest hair in three years, or become a credible threat to my husband. Amy Pascal, David Heyman - I know you’re subscribed to Check Book. Please listen to my pleas. We cannot have a James Bond who I could probably beat up.

As for the other two lads on the leaked wishlist - Harris Dickinson and Jacob Elordi are both more “man-coded” to me. Harris Dickinson picked up Nicole Kidman and flung her around a hotel suite in Babygirl, which feels like an important prerequisite for playing Bond. However, he apparently revealed himself to be quite the budding auteur at Cannes this year with his well-received directorial debut Urchin, and I don’t want his schedule to be completely consumed by Bond AND Beatles. If we are going for a “hot, young Bond,” Elordi seems like the best pick of the three. He’s 7 feet tall and has a deep voice and is definitely capable of ordering a martini at a bar. I also fear that him playing Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a disastrous idea and he’ll need to bounce back from that with a splashy swerve. Like playing James Bond.

Watch this all become a moot point when they end up casting Aaron Taylor Johnson like we always thought they would. Anyway. Stay tuned for more reactions as this story develops.

KING RALPH LIVE ON VOD!

Tickets and exclusive merch on sale now!

Thank you to everyone who joined our streaming premiere last week - the chat was a blast! We might do another live chat later in the summer if there’s interest!

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

In an interview with the author Michael Singer for his 1998 book A Cut Above, writer/director Amy Heckerling professed her love for the novelist Franz Kafka: “He’s my hero. If I really knew how to express what I feel I would have been him. Every word he’s written makes so much sense to me, I can’t tell you. That’s why I do National Lampoon’s European Vacation.”1 And when Heckerling first stumbled upon the idea that would led to her blockbuster 1989 comedy Look Who’s Talking, she initially lamented that her movie would be so different than her favorite Martin Scorsese film: “I kind of didn’t want to do it. If someone had offered it to me, I would have said no because I thought, ‘I can see how this could be a hit. But I would rather do ‘Mean Streets’ than do something cute.’ I felt like it was not going to be edgy.”2 Though Heckerling never made her own Mean Streets or her own The Metamorphosis or her own A Clockwork Orange (another longtime Heckerling favorite), she did—a decade apart—twice attempt to adapt the work of a pair of international cinema’s most acclaimed auteurs. In 1992, The Washington Post revealed that Heckerling would begin directing an English-language remake of French New Wave icon Alain Resnais’ 1980 film Mon Oncle d'Amerique in January of 1993. Heckerling’s adaptation was tentatively titled “Rat Race,” as The Post claims that she planned to “use rats in business suits as a running motif throughout the film,” an image Resnais deployed only near the end of the original’s run time.3 But the project, Heckerling claimed, was too high-brow for its crass American studio: “It was developed at Disney and they kept giving me notes that weren’t related to the story and I was miserable. And then, ultimately when they passed on it, they said ‘This is too smart.’”4 Nine years later, Variety linked Heckerling to another festival mainstay, Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose 1998 film After Life she was now adapting for Fox 2000.5 Unfortunately, few details ever emerged about Heckerling’s take on the film, and her name soon returned to being attached to more traditional mainstream comedy projects.
Though 2007/2008’s I Could Never Be Your Woman was unquestionably from the Twisted Mind of Amy Heckerling, it was also, of course, from the Troubled Wallet of Phillipe Martinez. The principal producer of and investor in I Could Never Be Your Woman had what you might describe as a “checkered past”: in the late 1990s, Martinez—a self described “wild cat”—served six months of jail time in France as the result of alleged fraud stemming from one of his early film ventures. His take on the whole situation, in a 2008 Entertainment Weekly article, was that it was all overblown: “Every time an article has been written about me, they feel like they have to mention something that happened 12 years ago. ‘Oh, my God, that guy was convicted for fraud!’”6 By 2005, however, Martinez claimed to have been granted a $200 million line of credit, and he was boasting across Hollywood—while smoking cigars in a chauffeured Bentley—that the newly formed Bauer Martinez Entertainment would become a Major Independent Studio, if not THE Major Independent Studio. Early signs, however, were not good. In 2005, Bauer Martinez released Harsh Times, the directorial debut of Training Day writer David Ayer. Though Ayer initially thought that he and the upstart Martinez would “be neophytes together and reinvent the system,” their relationship quickly soured as the film languished in release purgatory, payments didn’t come on time, and debates were had over whether Martinez or distributor MGM was responsible for the film’s marketing budget. By the time of Harsh Times’ release in fall of 2006, Ayer told The New York Times that he desired “the warm, loving embrace of the studios. Studios are the way they are for a very good reason.” Martinez’s response: “[Ayer] should kiss me every morning for what I do for his movie.”7 In the case of I Could Never Be Your Woman, Heckerling claims that the money seemed shady from the start: “When I would say to people where is this money coming from, they would say, you don’t want to know. I asked Is it being used to kill Jews in Israel? Is it guns? They would reply you don’t want to know.”8 What followed, mostly, was turbulence: the film bounced between distributors, Martinez fumbled the film’s foreign and home video distribution rights, footage that Heckerling wanted to use went missing, and a massive argument ensued over how involved star Michelle Pfeiffer should be in promoting a movie that she filmed many years prior. On that last issue, Martinez had this to say: “Money is more important for some people. Maybe movie stars should just make movies with studios.”9 And Heckerling—like Ayer before her—was happy—or, rather, resigned—to join that chorus in support of the real studios: “If this is independence, I'd rather go back to what they call ‘the devil you know.’ When I did Clueless, there was a big studio system that had marketing and distribution people who knew what they were doing, and had an idea of what TV shows movies should be advertised on, and did research into who liked which movie, and what they watch and what they read, and how much it costs to reach them. These people who knew how to make posters and advertisements. You know, I liked that machine. It worked.”10
One final quote to conclude this section: in a 2008 interview, the AV Club’s Noel Murray asked Heckerling whether she wished the “Amy Heckerling shelf had a few more items on it.” Heckerling’s response: “It's not really my place to think about it. Who cares? There were missed opportunities, and there are things I wish I'd never gotten up to do. I can't think about it, because I'm stuck inside of me. Nobody can tell the future, or how things would've happened. There's no point to that. As far as, like, wishing I did a shitload more—I mean, do you wish you fucked more beautiful women? What are you gonna do?”11 In the published interview, Murray has no response for that question. After all, what are you gonna do?

WHERE ELSE CAN YOU FIND TEAM BC THIS WEEK?

David made an appearance on the Brit expat podcast “What’s All This Then?” and he got to nerd out about the TUBE:

Plus, if you are in the NY area, Alex Ross Perry’s cinematic essay on the legacy of video rental stores - Videoheaven - premieres this week at IFC Center. Griffin will be moderating the Q&A on Wednesday night. Tickets are still available.

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

Ben Hosley, Producer: “Check out Apartamento! It’s a magazine that showcases interesting people and what their homes look like! It’s great peeping! I find it so fascinating and inspires me to make improvements in my own home. Apartamento also publishes incredible books in a range of subjects (art, cooking, photo, design).”

David Sims, Host: “I recommend The Electric State. Just kidding! Mostly I watched Coen brothers movies last week because we’re doing them on the podcast. Did you know that? I DID finally get to my Tucker: The Man and His Dreams blu-ray that I bought a zillion years ago. It’s like bright-and-sunny Megalopolis, and it’ll be right on top of my “art deco nostalgia” rep screening series whenever I get around to programming it.”

Marie Bardi, Social Media: “I watched a really strange/trippy Czech movie from the 1970s over the weekend - Juraj Herz’s Morgiana. It’s got everything I love - an actress playing dual sister roles (and one is evil!), goths on the beach, POV cinematography from the perspective of a siamese cat, a visual aesthetic that is somewhere between a Gustav Klimt painting and The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant…good shit! You can watch it via the Internet Archive. Remember to turn on subtitles!

AJ McKeon, Editor: “I’ll recommend Dramamine! Currently on a boat from Copenhagen to Vik, Norway, and the seas be choppy.”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “Every moment I have spent writing this newsletter—no, every moment of the last five days—I have been thinking about Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.”

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I’m going to keep my Book Recommendation Summer™ rolling and jump off the discussion on this weeks episode to recommend Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club, which is worth reading ahead of Chris Columbus’s Netflix movie dropping in August. It’s about a group of residents of a retirement community in England who solve murders. While you would definitely class it as a cozy mystery, it’s a good deal funnier and more heartfelt, and includes a good deal more kicking ass (literally and figuratively), than other cozy mysteries I’ve read. Generally, a real romp that’s a pleasure to spend time with. I’ve read all the TMC books now, and I’d recommend the whole series. Pairs well with tea.”

THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST

The inimitable Karen Chee, daughter of Kenny Chee (distant saxophone sound), joins us to discuss the Blockbuster exclusive I Could Never Be Your Woman.