Check Book: Sometimes Good Things Happen

Anora and the Philadelphia Eagles win big

, and

Feb 10, 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

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA on an absolutely dominant performance in tonight’s Super Bowl. Sometimes, good things happen.

Speaking of good things happening by way of dominant performances — Anora turned the Oscar race upside down this weekend by taking the Critic’s Choice, DGA, and PGA top prizes. Very rarely has a film swept all three of these precursors and NOT won Best Picture at the Oscars, yet up until this weekend, Oscar prognosticators (including our very own David Sims!) were underestimating the strength of Sean Baker’s sex work screwball fantasia. However, let’s not count out Conclave yet. Sean Baker should delete his social media for the next couple of weeks if he hasn’t already :-)

The Fantastic Four trailer dropped this week, and the Blankies Reddit discovered what we here at Blank Check Productions knew all along - that Griffin was NOT going to be the voice of Herbie. Marvel decided to go full robot and make his dialogue all bleep bloops. Colossal missed opportunity.

Werner Herzog is starting production on a new film called Bucking Fastard, starring actual sisters Rooney and Kate Mara as twins who are psychosexually obsessed with one another. Lena Dunham is securing financing for her next project, a Natalie Portman-led romcom entitled Good Sex about a couples therapist who enters into two different age-gap relationships. Marie Bardi keeps finding new reasons to live.

Michael Bay got arrested for breaking into the Vatican. I have nothing else to add, really:

michaelbay

A post shared by @michaelbay

Oh, and one last thing — I spent this weekend editing this year’s March Madness trailer. It’s really good, I think. I hope.

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

Though Steven Spielberg was only in his early 30s when he cast Raiders of the Lost Ark, he was already a veteran of Hollywood film production, having shot four studio theatrical features and quite a bit of television. He was, in other words, old enough to have seen some shit, and, as a result, Spielberg was ready to make a change: “[After being involved in] many casting sessions all over the country, I realized that actors are really not given a good chance to show you who they really are. When they come into your office you only give them fifteen minutes to open up a portfolio and show you some eight-by-tens. As they talk, you’re usually reading their resume and little eye contact is made. Then, just in the last few minutes of the meeting, an actor is required to make an impression that is everlasting, that will win him the part in your movie. I think that’s crummy, yet that’s been the standard casting method for decades.” So with Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg decided to try something different, turning the casting offices for the film into… a fully operational bakery: “I found the best way to cast was to make people comfortable. I couldn’t think of any better way to make them comfortable than to have a bunch of flour on a table and eggs to be beaten, and dough to be kneaded, and frosting to be laid on. Right away you forget the portfolio. I found in five minutes, as opposed to fifteen minutes, whether I was on the right track. And the actors would all have a chance to let their hair down and be a little looser.” Throughout the fourteen-week casting process, Spielberg and his rotation of potential actors baked “every day, five days a week,” working their way “through Julia Child’s cookbook twice.” And it wasn’t just Spielberg who found the unconventional casting process to be rewarding: “Lucas had a staff of a hundred people. They would smell the cooking from the kitchen in the office complex and suddenly reach in their lunch boxes and have an eleven a.m. lunch because they couldn’t wait any longer.”1
In addition to location shooting in countries like France, Tunisia, and Hawaii, Spielberg and his crew shot Raiders of the Lost Ark at Elstree Studios in London, where producer George Lucas had had such success with—uhhh, *checks notes*—something called the “Star Wars” films. (Spielberg had initially assumed they would shoot the film—his first production in the UK—at Pinewood Studios, the home of his beloved-but-forever-out-of-reach Bond franchise, but Lucas was—as he often is—persuasive.) When Spielberg first arrived at Elstree, the events that would lead to one of his greatest masterpieces—A.I. Artificial Intelligence—were soon put into motion thanks to Raiders’ overlapping schedule with another production using the studio, per the director: “I went ahead and visited the studio but was told that one of the stages that we were going to use for the Well of Souls was currently being used by Stanley Kubrick for the Overlook Hotel from The Shining.”2 Spielberg soon found himself face to face for the first time with one of his heroes: “When I found out that Stanley Kubrick was on the same lot a hundred yards away from my production office some very nice person who has never identified him or herself knew some very nice person who was part of Kubrick’s team and called me up and said, ‘Do you want to come over and meet Stanley’ and I did. I walked over to the soundstage and I was terrified. For me, Kubrick was all four of the Beatles.”3 Later that night, Spielberg was invited to dine at Kubrick’s home, officially inaugurating the 19-years-long friendship of two of cinema’s most titanic figures.
Hired to shoot Raiders of the Lost Ark—as well as the subsequent two Indiana Jones films—was veteran cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, who had (controversially) taken the place of Vilmos Zsigmond during the India shoot of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Despite being nearly twice as old as Spielberg, Slocombe was incredibly spry during the making of Raiders, according to its director: “Everybody worked very quickly. They just ran around. Dougie Slocombe, who is in his mid-sixties, ran faster than everybody. When I said, ‘I’d like the third camera on the hill’ — I'd turn around and Dougie would be on the hill with a third camera two minutes after I had spoken.” He was also cartoonishly daring: “[T]hroughout the shooting of Raiders of the Lost Ark there were dozens of cliffhangers all involving Dougie Slocombe and a sense of balance. Dougie would have his eye screwed into his contrast glass, looking up at the sun and the clouds, walking backwards and, sure enough, there would be a 350-foot drop and, sure enough, [assistant cameraman] Robin Vidgeon or [camera operator] Chic Waterson, who have worked with Dougie for an average of 25 years as a team, would reach a hand out and keep Dougie from falling into Roadrunner and Coyote oblivion.” And Slocombe was additionally, of course, essential in shaping the look of the film/franchise, which ended up in a style quite different than Spielberg had initially envisioned: “I originally wanted a much moodier, almost neo-Brechtian style of light and shadow for this film. I wanted the film to resemble more, say The Informer — the film being more film noir than I eventually accomplished. But I found that the movie was beginning to paint itself out of the corner I put it in, by the kind of sketchy brightness which is Dougie's forte and I began to see what Dougie was doing. He was giving it a fuller look, not a flat look. … I began to say, ‘Hey, this movie is much prettier in color than it is in black-and-white.’ I believe that the photographic style of this movie happened by itself through an interesting compromise between what Dougie loves to do and what I wanted from him. We each came halfway and we found what will now be, hopefully, the continuing style of the Raiders saga.”4
And let’s close this section with a quick shoutout to the original choice to portray Belloq, the (extremely) French musician Jacques Dutronc, whose song “Il est cinq heures, Paris s'éveille” is one of the eternal bangers in the history of French music.5

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

Ben Hosley, Producer: “Ok my recommendation is the new animated show on Max called Common Side Effects. It’s about a conspiracy involving big pharma and the gov’t to suppress the discovery of a rare fungus that heals all! Mike Judge not only is a producer but voices one of the lead characters! Also, the hilarious Martha Kelly from Baskets is a featured voice. And the animation is by the same studio behind the Scavengers Reign. CSE is a must watch!!”

David Sims, Host: “I recommend the goofy Sidney Lumet Sean Connery horny crime caper The Anderson Tapes which is one of the many lovely gems within Criterion’s Surveillance Cinema series, curated by Blankie and generally all around wonderful person Daniel Reis. I also am playing Civ 7 a bit but finding it very overwhelming so far.”

Griffin Newman, Host: “This weekend I made the pilgrimage out to the Santa Barbara International Film Festival for the sudden, surprise “North American Premiere” of Kevin Costner’s HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER II. It is my great pleasure to report that I Get It Now. The Cos’ vision is finally coming into view, and this second installment starts paying out like a slot machine within minutes. Now can we please get this put out in theaters and let Kev finish this damn thing???!”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “The band IDLES, especially their NRP tiny desk concert.”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “I loved Canadian director Kazik Radwanski’s latest film Matt and Mara, which is now streaming on Mubi. Though its log line might read similarly to the log lines of any number of other indie “dramedies”—a creative writing professor’s life is quietly upended by the reappearance of a more successful friend from college—the film breathes fresh life into its trappings via the perfectly-paired performances of its two lead actors, Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson. I also liked that it made me laugh a lot.”

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I’m recommending a Mississippi Roast. You put a chuck roast in a crock pot, add some butter, a packet of ranch dressing mix, a packet of au jus mix, and some pepperoncini. Cook it on low for 8 hours. It’s so easy, and I would eat it every day of my life.”