Check Book: Tariffs???

No one knows what's going on.

May 05, 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

The film industry was shaken to its core over the weekend with (redacted) announcing a “100% tariff on films produced outside of the United States.”

Readers, I must admit that while my production background means that I am well versed in location incentives and tax breaks, I am not SUPER knowledgeable about trade agreements. I truly don’t know what a “100% film tariff” actually means. Turns out, no one does. I spent all morning reading up on this and my confusion has only grown. Will our tickets to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey come with a surcharge? Sometimes you’ve gotta film outside of the US for creative reasons! What is Mission Impossible without Ethan Hunt jetsetting? I need Tom Cruise to go to the White House and fix this. I trust him to do the right thing here. The movies need to be saved now more than ever.

In other news:
Thunderbolts* topped the box office this weekend with a $76M domestic opening. I haven’t seen it, but I keep seeing folks in my orbit say that it was “fine” / “pretty good” / “enjoyable enough.” Red Hulk gets mentioned, apparently.

Joseph Kosinski announced plans to make a new Miami Vice movie, which I’m sure people are going to be normal about. It probably won’t have Gong Li on a speedboat scored to Moby so I will probably be underwhelmed.

Major Burger Report incoming - okay, maybe not a Burger Report but a Wine Report. Amy Irving’s record release show yesterday at City Winery was THEE event of the weekend. Who did Griffin and I spot enjoying the lovely musical stylings of Amy Irving? None other than Steven Spielberg, Kate Capshaw, Rosemary Harris, Jennifer Ehle, Tony Shalhoub, and Brooke Adams. Griffin and I were the most famous podcasters there, that’s for sure.

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

Amy Heckerling first “went crazy” for the movies of actor James Cagney while watching old Hollywood classics with her grandparents as a little girl. Though the young Heckerling “didn’t know what the stories were or anything,” she loved that Cagney “ran around smacking people like Bugs Bunny.”1 Soon, however, Cagney would provide Heckerling with a defining early childhood lesson. Some time before Heckerling even began attending kindergarten, she watched Michael Curtiz’s 1938 film Angels with Dirty Faces. Towards the end of the film—SPOILER ALERT FOR AN EIGHTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD MOVIE—as Cagney’s gangster character began his march towards the electric chair, Heckerling started “freaking out.” Though she “didn’t know what was going on,” she “knew it was something bad.” Heckerling responded how any pre-schooler might respond to their first on-screen execution: she “started running around the house screaming.” When the wailing stopped, Heckerling’s mother told her that, yes, something bad had happened: Cagney’s character had died. But, she also explained, “‘In movies, you don’t really die.’” Heckerling’s response: “I thought, movies, fuck, that sounds good. I thought, he’ll magically always be alive.”2 (Really funny to imagine that a four-year-old Heckerling actually thought, “movies, fuck, that sounds good.”) As she aged, Heckerling found that her love for Cagney was not short lived: in fact, it continued to grow, per the director: “[E]very step along the way, it still works for me. If you see young people who never saw those movies and show them, they go wow. It’s not something they’ll say is creepy or cornball. No; he holds up.”3
Cagney wasn’t the only classical Hollywood figure to make an impact on a young Heckerling: she also loved Mickey Rooney, Fred Astaire, and anything Warner Bros.4 She was also drawn to the Speedy, the mascot for the dissolvable antacid Alka-Seltzer. She, of course, loved MAD magazine, and when she was old enough to watch it, she loved Blazing Saddles, too, because it felt to her like “a MAD magazine article come alive.”5 In her teenage years, she migrated to the New Hollywood and movies like Carnal Knowledge, Bonnie and Clyde, Mean Streets, and A Clockwork Orange. As she told friend of the show Dana Stevens, Heckerling’s primary influences, thus, were “like this great clump of the 1930s and then amazing stuff in the ’70s.”6 But one of her biggest creative inspirations was a literary titan that Heckerling felt she was unable to usher into her own work: Franz Kafka. As she told the author Michael Singer, “[Kafka]’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.”7 No way I can write a better stinger for this paragraph than that.
Though Johnny Dangerously may not have fared very well with general audiences or the critics—TIME magazine said that “[t]he wit in this spoof of the old-fashioned gangster melodrama never rises above that mildly agreeable level and is often below it,” while The Washington Post’s Paul Attanasio declared the movie a “a one-note bore”—the movie did at least catch favor with a few prominent fans.8 Heckerling claims that “somebody” once told her that “during a screening they were sitting next to Brian De Palma, who had just done Scarface—and he was in hysterics.”9 When Metrograph programmer Jake Perlin—who counts Dangerously as his favorite in Heckerling’s filmography—scheduled the film at the theater, he was, according to a great 2017 Lindsay Zoladz article, saddened by the “modest” attendance. But there was one audience member who laughed “uproariously” throughout the screening: Heckerling’s longtime friend/A Master Builder’s Wallace Shawn.10 And, most notably, star Micheal Keaton told GQ that the film curried the favor of some very big figures in the world’s smallest sovereign state: “There was some priest from Pittsburgh who had a position in the Vatican, and he was gathering people from different spheres who were Catholic. He called someone in my office and said he'd like me to come to South Carolina to be part of the entertainment contingent. And I went, ‘Whoa. With all due respect…I'm not a practicing Catholic. It'd be disrespectful of me.’ But then, one of the things the guy said—and hand to God I'm not making this up—he says, ‘We're big Johnny Dangerously fans.’ Like, people in the Vatican had seen it and dug it. So I hang up and think, That was crazy…”11 Outside shot that the conclave ultimately goes with our boy Johnny D? I think he’d be the first pope with an adverb for a last name.

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

Everyone: We’ve still got art from Blank Canvas on sale via Mutant! Don’t you want to own a custom figure of the fucked up baby from Trainspotting???: https://www.madebymutant.com/blank-canvas-exhibition

David Sims, Host: “I must recommend Andor and consequently Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast which served as a major inspiration for Tony Gilroy and is what I listen to as I swim laps!!! Learn about revolutions, it’s fun! I recommend starting right at the beginning because he’s going chronological with how each revolution affects the next, but his Haiti season is very special.”

Marie Bardi, Social Media: “I rewatched Far From Heaven this weekend in preparation for my upcoming appearance on Podcast Like It’s The 2000s, and I recommend that everyone who did not vote for Todd Haynes both times he was in March Madness should shoot themselves in the foot. You deserve to know pain.”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “My recommendation for this week will be embracing change. And this one I know is tough. One of the founding principles of Blank Check, all the way back to the Phantom Podcast days is that we are adamantly PRO SMITS. However, as we traverse the Decade of Dreams we must embrace our Bratt ERA, and with that, I ask the Blankies community especially the “Presentheads” to embrace the recasting of Bail Organa and prepare ourselves for Bratt Summer.”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “I’ve been loving Ben Ratliff’s new book, Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening, which is decidedly not a how-to guide explaining how the ideal BPM can propel you to record speeds but rather an extraordinary work of phenomenological music criticism. Ratliff’s ability to place the reader inside of the worlds of his songs—and of his runs—is astonishing: his close readings of his music, his body, and his environments are rich and invigorating. Despite being a book about running, this is the kind of detailed, descriptive criticism that simply makes you want to slow down and pay attention. So, the best kind.”

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I recommend baseball. America’s Pastime. Go to a game. Grab a hot dog, kick up your feet. Fall in love with a team, get your heart broken. Count your team out and watch them rally late in the season. Fall asleep on the couch with the game on. Read a book if the game gets boring (nobody cares). Thrill of victory, agony of defeat. Stats for days. It’s the best.”