Blank Check with Griffin & David - Rosewood with Jamelle Bouie

Episode Date: May 30, 2021

Blankie favorite Jamelle Bouie returns to the pod to discuss “Rosewood” - an ambitious historical epic whose failure at the box office (against not one, but TWO Star Wars re-releases) may have necessitated a shift for Singleton towards more commercial fare. The careers of Ving Rhames, Jon Voight, and Michael Rooker are spotlighted, as well as the surprising filmography of Rosewood’s screenwriter Greg Poirier. Join our Patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram! Buy some real nerdy merch at shopblankcheckpod.myshopify.com

there ain't enough bullets in the world for all them podcasts. Now, the alt for that is there ain't enough podcasts in the world for all them crackers. Both kind of are true. Which, that is, by the way, that is an accurate assessment of the podcast industry. Absolutely. I am as someone who thinks people should say crackers more often. Yeah, I'm going to I'm going to go. I'm going to cast my vote for that one. OK, acknowledging that it may be controversial.

Sure. That's why I put it second, because I wanted to actually frame it so that people had to accept it. You know what I'm saying? Let me give them the underwhelming one first and then let's all get on board with saying cracker. Bring back cracker. Now, can I say, I was looking because the quotes page for this movie is not, you know,

ripe with options. Many of them are things I cannot say on microphone. So I looked at the tagline. This movie has an incredible tagline, but not one that I can easily turn into a podcast opening. Do you know what the tagline is for this movie? No. I don't know if there are multiple posters for this movie,

but this one... No, not really. Okay, because this one has no actors on it, no faces on it, no names above the title. It is just, it's like a photo, very dark, hard to even make out anything, with the sign that says, Welcome to Rosewood, and then far off in the distance, Rosewood on fire, right? And smoke rising from it. And it says,

That's quite a tagline it is but i will say it's not like i don't know it's not making the casual that's what i was gonna you know multiplex visitor be like oh that sounds like a barrel laughs i mean you know what are you gonna do i guess it's interesting that the tagline doesn't end with this is their story. It ends with this is for them. Right. That's the interesting thing for me. That difference of like a couple of words might have been the difference of like $15 million at the domestic box office. Right. Because if you say this is for this is their story, it's almost like, oh, shit, fuck.

I want to hear the story. What's the story? And then the second you say this is for them, it's like, is this homework? You know? But it is true. It's true. It's true that that's the movie's energy.

Right, right. And it's like, you know, we're unearthing a story that's been, you know, really preserved only in people's memories, not in like records and all that, you know, so like blah, blah, blah. But look, there was one other poster griff that i can find that is very like doesn't seem like was used much where they've superimposed ving rames and john voight onto that because that i think is like the dvd cover and stuff right um but it's not a it's i don't know it doesn't really

tell you much it's like ving Rhames with a shotgun. And then John Voice just kind of standing behind him going like, like that. Well, I want to get. It's not the sexiest poster. Ving Rhames is very sexy. Sure. We all know as pre-established on this podcast, in my opinion, the sexiest poster of all time is the individual character poster from Good Luck Chuck centered around Jessica Alba's character. Where she is holding an ice cream cone and the ice cream, which is vanilla,

is dripping onto her hand. And the tagline is, there's something about Jessica. Poster that was... You had it on your wall or something? In my dorm room, yeah. That's embarrassing. Look, I'm throwing myself under the bus.

I need to atoneone if it makes you feel better all the posters i had in my dorm were very sort of like dorm room pretentious guy posters like okay what did you have list them oh boy i think i had a pink floyd poster i had definitely had a like kill bill poster cool i had did i have a hendrix poster probably wow um yeah sort of like your state your standard issue 18 year old boy thinks he thinks he has good taste yeah uh a set of posters i had a memento poster in my dorm room i remember that really showing out my christopher nolan fandom at the time. Trying to remember what else.

I had a Coltrane poster because I had a whole jazz face. That was my pretentious poster. You had a jazz face? I don't think I know about Ben's jazz face. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got really deep into jazz. Oh, and glow-in-the-dark posters, though, too. Come on, guys.

You took a black light or glow in the dark or bull that's what i mean black light okay okay no i i had to get a distinction here yeah okay uh i think it was like it was like a i don't know it was like a slug or something or no it was like jabberwocky but it was smoking like a hookah i had one of those sure got it absolutely i i had the jessica alba one and then i had a a giant french toy story poster that was uh woody with his arms crossed like one of the promo shots where he's like looking give him buzz the side eye and then the the tagline in big french letters was woody he will touch your heart man remember when when you were a teenager and it was just like if you got a poster you were like that's going on my wall probably like just any

poster you could get your hands on yeah um i want to i want to uh interest the show because we were we were burning up some takes on the marketing of this film and how it didn't work and what could have saved this movie, which I want to get into now that we're talking about posters and everything. Because this is, of course, Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David. And this is. Yeah. Yes, you were fast.

Congratulations. It's a podcast about filmography. podcast about filmography. Directors who are given, who experienced massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want and sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce, baby.

And this is a mini-series on the films of John Singleton. We're calling it Pods in the Cast and today we're talking about what is arguably his last big blank check movie, right? right like from this point on he sort of goes to a one for me one for them system that becomes overwhelmingly ones for them i would say he really mostly just does like he he shifts into i want to do more commercial

movies like the only movie right baby boy's the only one after this, and that's not a huge scale movie. That's like a relatively, yeah. That's what I'm saying. Don't you think he's thinking in his mind, cool, here's what I'll do. One for me, one for them, and then it becomes, he makes one more for himself

and like five more for them. Yeah. But he's also talked, I mean, he wanted to prove, we'll get into all of this. Yeah, he wanted to sort of like, he wanted to prove himself as a commercial, you know, a successful commercial director. Right, which I think. In that sphere.

I think a lot of guys get trapped in that. They get frustrated with the perception of like, oh, I'm not a commercial filmmaker. I can't make things that connect with audience. I want to prove them wrong. And then they spend the rest of their career still trying to grind that axe you know yeah um but look we'll get to that in future weeks because today we're talking about rosewood his 1997 uh historical epic that was inexplicably released in february not you know a wide release in february after a qualifying run for the oscars no just straight released in february uh yeah it was given yeah a

1000 screen theater release in the middle of february um we're gonna do the box office game but it was up against bizarre competition we're you know in the middle of an oscar season that it's not a part of and it didn't you know it played at the berlin film festival which was you know probably was happening around the same time that's a february film festival but i feel you know it got good reviews but i feel like you know kind of golf clap type reviews like oh this is good you know like yeah but not overwhelming and it was kind of forgotten and the next movie john singleton makes is chap like and it just feels like him being like okay i'm gonna you know i made four

movies in a row that are worthy and interesting and sort of more positioned as awards players and mostly ignored after boys in the hood so i'm gonna do something else did i mean did they even did each one go down at the box office like am i correct in thinking it's like higher learning grosses more less than poetic justice even less yeah uh let me see let's i mean it makes perfect sense for him to do shaft but i want to talk about the framing you're sort of correct okay higher learning made a little more than poetic justice but then rosewood is down okay so i don't know um want to talk about the framing this movie want to talk about the movie itself and boy do we have a guest. One of our favorite people here on the show and one of the most inexplicably overqualified guests we have ever on this show from The New York Times and from, of course, the infamous fund the police story campaign for Jackie Chan in the 2021 March Madness competition.

Please welcome back to the show, Jamel Bowie. Hello, guys. Glad to be here. Jamel, you and I were DMing a long time ago because this Singleton mini has been on the books for a while, and I must have mentioned it and you just i just remember you being like david i have to be on the rosewood episode there's no that you know this was not a thing where you know you were like oh singleton interesting like oh there's a bunch you were you were very focused that you wanted this movie yeah um i was on for last episode was almost forrest gump i don't i really have a history of that movie

I feel like I have the same history that everyone has with that movie everyone our age has with that movie but Rosewood is a movie that I have a history with I saw it

just to clarify quickly sorry would you say that your history with Forrest Gump is that Forrest Gump sort of like wandered into your life briefly touched you

changed the way you saw the world forever and then went on to his next adventure yeah pretty much you know Forrest he had a newspaper with him or i had a newspaper with me and he was like might be fun to write in that one day and i was like you know what force it would be old york times they should try doing a new york times uh no i saw so i saw rosewood comes out in 97 i would have been like 10 or 11 when this movie

came out i didn't see it in theaters but once it hit sort of the hbo rotation um is when i saw it as a kid and this wasn't the case of me like stumbling you know browsing uh television staying up too late and like watching a movie this was very much a case of my parents and my dad in particular watching the movie and wanting me to watch it with him. And the reason for that is that Rosewood takes place in Sumner County, Florida, which is in the Florida Panhandle. If you've only ever been to Miami or to Tampa, those places are like not, the Panhandle is nothing like those places. The Panhandle is Southern Georgia. It's Southern Alabama. It's like very rural. It's very much,

when you imagine kind of like the rural backwards South, that is the Florida Panhandle. And it's where my dad's family's from. Sort of a large part of my family is all in the Florida panhandle, not in Sumner County, but in sort of the next county over. And so the story of Rosewood is a story that my dad was familiar with just from having spent his childhood in, like, rural northern Florida. And it's one of those things and i think last year or was it two years ago when hbo's watchmen debuted and people were like learned about the tulsa massacre it's one of those things for which prior to you know relatively recent memory the only people who really kind of knew about it were black people from the area so right like the tulsa massacre was well known among black families in tulsa and oklahoma city and that surrounding area because it's very much part of the history of the black community there um there's a whole i'm sorry to laugh but there's there's sort of a whole bunch of these

incidents that take place in like the 1910s and 20s and so i was about to say something like oh you can you know if you're from nicodemus kansas or you're from i mean you can kind of go down the list of horrible things like this that happened in the united states uh to black communities and so rosewood is in some sense sort of like a like almost a paradigmatic example of it and also the ways in which it happens uh it's more or less immediately lost to mainstream historical memory and pretty much exists as like an oral tradition and recollections amongst local blacks until you know interested people dig it back up again um long after the events that that's all to say that like my connection to this movie it's not i don't i'm not like

you know descended from anyone but i know this area of florida like i've spent a large part of my childhood during the summers like you know two hours away more or less in this part of florida and the history of this part of florida is very much like entwined in the history of my family my lack of an accent betrays the fed there belies the fact that i i i my whole family's from the rural south yeah and this region in particular um i'm familiar i'm very familiar with but i mean i think you like you hit the nail on the head on the main thing that singleton is trying to do in this movie which is genuinely earnestly educate people unlike a lot of other historical dramas it's like he's making a movie about a

thing that he knows most of the audience will have literally zero baseline knowledge about, right? I mean, it's like, and the poster and that, you know, very, very kind of po-face tagline speak to that as well it's like i i think i kept thinking back to like um when uh vice came out which i'm seeing here was uh one of the best movies yeah it was named one of the five best pictures of the year by the academy of motion by everyone sciences everyone was screaming they have to see vice they have to see vice vice vice people were all about it but but like look adam mckay who i generally like a lot right i don't like that movie but i'm a fan of the man i saw i remember someone was clowning on the movie on Twitter and like McKay went like full bodied after them and sort of said, like, I don't understand why you're clowning on me. This movie was made with very good

intentions. It an incredibly bad series of things happened because of this regime. And I really want people to know about it. I'm earnestly trying to educate people. And there was this, I remember, you know, just having this feeling of like, this happened in recent history. It's been talked about obsessively. It was talked about at the time and has been talked about even more with a little bit of distance. You know, there's no one who's seeing Vice who is going to be blindsided by this, you know? And like, I'm a moron. And even I watching Vice was like, I don't think there's anything in here that I didn't already know. And I could very easily be taught

a lot more about the Bush administration than I know. Whereas Rosewood is literally Singleton being like, can I let you know that this existed in the first place and then get into the details of it? But he's also sort of putting, you know, he's fictionalizing a story within the center of this very real event that people don't know about outside of an oral tradition, as you said.

quick just to say that i think you know an audience orientation and a white audience specifically approaching this isn't just going to be i don't know anything about this but they may be incredulous that something like this could even happen and i think this is sort of one of the key things about these episodes of uh racial violence in the country especially these like mass ones like if this were if this were a movie about an individual lynching right if this were a dramatization of the killing of emmett till no problem and i think that movie probably would have done much better yeah but like this kind of collective racial violence is something that is more or less been like obliterated from like public memory right like no one up until recently really i mean up until quite recently this was

just not a thing that existed in in most americans's headspace and so i i have to imagine we'll get into this because i have a whole theory here but i have to imagine that this was specifically a problem in the middle of the 1990s which has a lot of things going on in terms of historical moralization that i think would affect how this movie was received. I also feel like the 90s were this time of pushback on how Hollywood took liberties with real life stories and historical events. Whereas that used to be de rigueur. I feel like in the 90s, I've been watching a ton of fucking Siskel and Ebert on YouTube when I can't sleep. I've been watching a ton of fucking Siskel and Ebert on YouTube when I can't sleep.

And so I you know, it's just interesting to always watch the context of them talking about movies in the week that they came out and addressing whatever the sort of public response seems to be. And in the 90s, there's a lot more pushback, I feel like of Ebert saying like audiences are complaining, critics are complaining that this was changed from real life. I don't care if it makes the movie interesting. Right. If the point if the larger points being made. It did feel like there was that going on. And when you have a story that most people don't know, and especially, you know, the vast majority of white America don't know, and then you're adding in elements like the Ving Rhames character, who is like this kind of classical movie superhero placed into this tragedy i do think people are just like i can't believe that most of this is real like how much of this is then you know fictionalized yeah okay yes i think that's part i mean i it's interesting we we were talking jamal you mentioned i think on twitter like

amistad came out this year yeah and that's a movie that i think is tremendously flawed and uh we talked about it on this podcast and one of our shortest episodes ever a long time ago um and is i feel like hollywood sort of like rolling up its sleeves steven spielberg at the height of his you know dreamworks powers post-oscar being like i'm going to make a definitive movie about the horrors of slavery and you know the middle passage and like you know i'm going to dig into all this and he mostly makes a courtroom drama about john quincy adams you know convincing the supreme court that like you know slaves these these people should be free like you don't like you know it's and and that's a movie that takes historical liberties and so on as well like you know slaves these these people should be free like you don't like you know it's and and that's a movie that takes historical liberties and so on as well like you know much

like you know like that that movie also burnishes things we talked about it at the time we should also say like the first 45 minutes or so of amistad that are actually about the amistad ship are far and away the best part of the movie. And then after that, everything he's trying to do in the rest of the movie, he just improves upon 15, 20 years later with Lincoln. It's like a dry run for what he ultimately kind of gets right with Lincoln. It feels like Hollywood's like, well, that's the only way we can approach this, right?

Like just this, we gotta do the heavyweight thing. We gotta do the sort of like uh oscar movie and this rosewood is not a small movie and it's not a and it's a studio movie i do like you know warner brothers made this movie uh it's from a major director who's oscar nominated or whatever but i feel like the approach he's taking is quietly kind of radical yeah yeah i mean this to to to pick up on what i had said earlier you know and it almost came out this year but i actually think that the more relevant kind of point of contrast with this movie is all the world war ii memorialization that was going on in this part of the decade right yeah like the uh you know the 50th anniversary of the end of the wars in 95 um you know stephen frederick ryan isn't for the year

after this i think yeah but you kind of you're big you have like a really serious ramp up of lots of pop culture material around world war ii earlier in the decade and i think this is relevant to you have movies like schindler's list you have a greater awareness of the Holocaust and sort of like mainstream popular discussion. And I think that, you know, watching this for the first time since I was like 12 or whatever, 11 or 12, the thing that stuck out to me is how much of the movie is pointed at sort of critiquing white masculinity. And I don't think that critique makes any sense outside of the context of a period where there is a big public valorization of sort of a traditional white masculinity, right? Sort of like the greatest generation that many fought in the second world war and there's also this sort of pop you know with the with the popularization of holocaust

remembrance amongst sort of americans at large you have uh you know like basically people cosplaying in their heads what they would do in that kind of situation. And so here you have a movie that does kind of two things very explicitly. One is it's constantly showing the relationship of the ability to inflict racialized violence, showing that relationship to ideas of white masculinity and white manhood. And then it's also showing even decent white people basically being flummoxed about what to do in the midst of all of this. And that to me, both those things together seem like a very pointed response to the World War II discourse happening at the time. Yeah, I also think, you know know all these other movies we're comparing this to

have a common thread which is they're choosing to focus on a sliver of the story that is about a small win right that proves the essential goodness of humanity yes but look schindler had this list he got some people out matthew mcconaughey was the one good white lawyer he fought to make this man free you know they're like stories that have this sort of centering of like, well, this thing was incalculable, but we're going to focus on this one good thing that happened in the middle of it. And even something like Save It Private Ryan is like they got this one guy out. They got him out. You know, it's like you can save the one. And this movie. Well, let's put it this way. This story does not have that. Right. And there he's choosing to put the Ving Rhames character in as this sort of like almost folk hero. Right. I mean, this like sort of cowboy archetype man with no name who can ride up, save the people and then like go on to whatever his next adventure is. save the people and then like go on to whatever his next adventure is um but as this movie is presented to the public it just seems like oh this is just a story about unrelenting awfulness

there's no conceivable win here you know they wiped a place off the map and you know it was forgotten almost instantly except by the people who were there. Right. But there's a difference in frame there of Singleton saying, like, this is my attention must be paid movie rather than my here's the story about the human spirit in the face of unbearable darkness, you know, and how one man can make a difference. And Jamel, right before recording, you were saying that you well, you should I'll let you say this yourself. Talk about tweeting about the movie last night oh yeah just that there wasn't very much i mean usually when i tweet about movies like there's a lot of engagement and i just noticed that there is very little engagement on this so that tweets about this movie i think part of that's just because it is a basically forgotten movie um yeah like you know we've been it's we're like you know two or three years in now to sort of like

broad public awareness of racial justice i don't mean to say that in a flip way although i do have complicated feelings about it um but through all of that i mean after the after watchmen after the watchmen hbo show came out you would think that this movie would sort of rear its head in kind of the discourse. But, like, no. There's, like, there's nothing there. And I wonder if it is because it is a pretty bleak movie. I mean, I was saying to my wife when we were watching it and we were finishing it last night that if not for Ving Rhames' character character this might actually be unbearable to watch like yeah ving rames's character acts as basically a release for the audience so that you can have

not just someone to root for but like you can be like oh someone's doing something right that the movie can feel like it has any sort of win yeah because yeah uh uh john voight's character i mean him and his wife end up hiding people but like it's very fraught for them they like they're like we don't we don't we almost don't want to do this right they're basically bullied into it and you know that john voight's character is you know like fundamentally he's very flawed we've known that from the start honestly but like you know he's he's not taking up arms or whatever with the rest of the mob. But still, push comes to shove.

He doesn't want to do it. He basically has to be forced. He's driven by money pretty much every time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he's the sort of benevolent guy who's like, oh like oh i'm happy in the community i'm a friend to all and then the second someone's bidding against him in the auction who's not white he's like well what the you know this isn't right we'll talk about his character he's an interesting conflicted

character but it's also he's not a white savior almost right almost any other filmmaker at this time which is to say any white filmmaker who would have had the ability to get this movie greenlit right at this scale would have centered the story around him. Right. Would have made it that this guy's conflicted and then he learns the fundamental lesson and steps up right to the plate. He cannot stay silent anymore. And he's very much a character in a larger tapestry. The thing I kept thinking watching this is just like, you know, I mean, Jamel, you're talking about how the movie feels so sort of would be unbearable if not for the Ving Rhames thing, right? Which is sort of the one kind of like, the character almost feels fantastical. Like he almost feels supernatural.

Like he's like Pecos Bill or something, right? Right, right, right. Like he's like rolling into town and he has no backstory that you really... His name is Man, right? Right. He's just, he's like just, he's archetypal man. Right. And that kind of keeps you afloat.

But also the fact that it's like a historical movie that is assuming that you don't know any of this other than how badly this is going to end because of the expectations the movie is setting itself. But the thing that this is most structured like in my eyes is a disaster movie more than your traditional historical drama because it is pretty ensembley it is pretty spread out it's got this opening like 45 minutes to an hour that is just sort of like let's set up all the little satellite narratives right here are the groupings here are the this and that and then it's about like and then the fucking dam breaks and everything goes to hell and some of the people you love get killed off immediately and you're watching as the pieces rearrange themselves who's going to be the skeleton crew and how do they get out of this some way right like how do they somehow survive the wreckage and right it's like ving rames ends up you know

is is the other interesting thing is it feels like this is halfway to the thing that now tarantino has become obsessed with doing for the last decade which is like can i present a horrible tragedy or within a horrible setting add in these fantastical elements of how i wish things could have gone right what if you had had a classic movie hero that could come in and fucking take shit into their own hands i think it's right and i think there's something you know what one critique of django unchained right is sort of like the jamie foxx character is despite being a former slave is sort of like weirdly magically outside the context of the antebellum south like he the social forces of that of the of

the of the era don't really impact him that's part of what makes him magical that he can talk any way he wants he can carry himself any way he wants and he's sort of like a fully realized individual in a way that is very modern and that like could probably couldn't have happened for you know for for a free a free or freed black person in the period and being rames's character man what's interesting is that at this as much as he is a kind of wish fulfillment and there's a moment i think a very pointed moment of wish fulfillment when two kids are about to get shot and then like he shows up to save them in a very like dramatic uh dramatic scene but he's still very much bound by the social conventions he's he is both he is both a heroic archetype sort of wish fulfillment but

also sort of wish fulfillment very much grounded in the world that all the other characters live in like he he wants to escape at first because he's like listen i'm just some guy like i just i just showed up i showed up in here with a horse and i have a lot of money they're just gonna they're gonna like fucking kill me there's no question about this the thing is though as he says when he's saying i want to get out of here he is also this like nightmare figure to uh a lot of the white people in the movie because he's sort of confident he's a veteran he knows how to you know he he has guns he has money and he's like mysterious so he becomes the they're like well he it must be him he must be the villain he must be the sort of like

imaginary thing we're chasing because he's so right like he he gets to operate on both sides both as sort of you know fantasy hero and fantasy villain right all right right and well and he he functions as sort of like a human trigger to the white people of this town i mean obviously there's the inciting incident that that is historically accurate but i also feel like he's representational he's sort of a human embodiment of of you know the white citizens of rosewoods fear like wait a second what if they realize they could be equal right like what what what if they start walking around with this sense of confidence? That's sort of like, you know, it's I mean, it's all this fucking shit that we've been dealing with forever. But that has certainly been like feeling amped up for the last couple of years of just like, wait a second, why do we need to change anything?

You know, this sort of white pushback to like, hold on, hold on. Let's all just like, what about the way things were like five years ago? Can everyone just like reset back to that? I don't understand why anyone feels like they need more than they currently have right now. It's just the example of Rosewood, this little town, there's nothing fancy about this town at all. It's just, I think town at all it's just i think the i was reading i think an la time times article something like the the only thing people would say about it when they're remembering is like all the houses were painted so like you know it's like it's it's small it doesn't have much infrastructure but it's nice it's sort of you know kept up and

everyone there is you know carving out a life for themselves and that example alone is just like frightening to people like that's you know enough to essentially make this place like teetering on the edge of risk just by existing right there's that tension at the very beginning of the movie before ostensibly anything goes wrong that's just like you know like whenever you're cutting to the michael rooker character or whatever you can you can feel them just sort of saying like, OK, but this is like the most we're going to allow. Two things related to the general conversation, but first to Michael Rooker, I feel kind of bad that Michael Rooker both looks and sounds like an old Southern racist. I know we're gonna we're gonna have to get into this more yes he's like daniel brule if you cast daniel brule in a

hollywood movie about world war ii where you're like well i know who michael rooker's playing like and the thing the fact of the matter is he's actually playing a slightly slightly more complicated character than some of the people in this movie but but yes i mean like remember when michael rooker like dropped into like the walking dead or whatever you're like well i don't think this guy is going to be the most like you know have the most broad perspective on life i i'm gonna pull like rule southern identity real quick and just say that like he just he he sounds like a redneck he just that's just right just just how he sounds and he's got the face too and like he's had that face his entire life you know like even when he was young it's funny that it was like okay his breakthrough

performance is henry portrait of a serial killer and it's like okay this guy's got to escape typecasting and he's like yeah yeah cool cool i'll just hide out in a virulent racist for the next couple of decades so people don't think of me as that sociopath anymore um even when he even when he isn't playing virulent racist like in in uh what days of thunder that that tom cruise nascar movie it's like yeah michael rooker seems like a good guy probably says the n-word well and also like let's say of course even in freaking guardians of the galaxy i was gonna say he's got an alabama accent his role is yondu the only true male feminist you you do watch that movie and part of sort of like the juice of that

casting is what if an alien sounded like a racist like Like the character isn't, but that's part of the incongruity of just like, oh, this is interesting energy. This isn't what I usually get out of aliens in these kinds of movies. His first lines are him bragging that he didn't eat Peter Quill. Like he's basically like, I am a hill person. It's sort of his take on the aliens.

His whole thing is like, i'll make it clear i don't like humans right right um the other thing i was just gonna say real quick is that uh for for all for as much as the story is embellished and you know the thing rames character is uh is from you know it's a fabrication it's made up for the story things like the fact that it was a place like rosewood that was so vulnerable to this kind of collective violence does actually ring and very true and does reflect the actual circumstances of these sorts of events it was it was never it was rarely the case that you saw this kind of like collective racial violence inflicted on places that were dramatically worse off than the nearby white community and especially in the south you know

that the um in terms like segregation like really kind of overstate the amount of separateness right that like it was like segregated social spheres but in terms of everyday life it was like segregated social spheres. But in terms of everyday life, it was actually very intimate for like a variety of reasons. But it was not the poorest places. It was always the places where there was like that they were roughly the same economically. Right. Where a black farmer might have enough money to buy some land and really settle and have some prosperity. And when you look at sort of the history of lynching, and this was an observation made in the 1890s by Ida B. Wells, the Southern journalist, the targets of lynchings often were landowners, business owners, relatively prosperous people who weren't just it wasn't just sort of like, oh, we hate these black people.

It was like, no, this is economic competition. Right. And the prospect of economic advancement kind of implies potential social advancement and it's that kind of that's where the tension comes from you have that in the in the movie you have the one guy who's like you know speaking of um uh sylvester why did i just uh forget the actor's name that's don cheadle's character he says that the one of the members of the mob says, well, he has a piano. I don't have a piano. And he says, the guy who owns everything, he has a piano.

And that, to me, is such a smart and subtle way of getting to what the dynamic is here. you know uh the the the very famous famed sociologist writer dubois speaks of like a psychological wage of racism and it's a sense of sort of like they aren't getting paid the psychological wage that they expected that that creates the tension their their their race isn't according to the kind of privileges that they thought material privileges is kind of the the the thing that makes people mad and on edge and you and that's like that's like a that's a real thing that's like a real dynamic yeah i mean that uh yeah go sorry go ahead no no it just you said like you know that sort of like um uh know, material advancement implies a social advancement. But we live in a fucking gross capitalist country where essentially it's one in the same.

You know, it's like the second, you know, things are evened out financially, the worst is already done in these people's eyes. I think about I've shared this before. Cause I just think about it a lot, but, uh, Greta Gerwig in some interview, I think what she was promoting little women and people asked her about like how much better it's gotten out there for women in the film industry.

Right. And she pushed back on that and was just like, it's not, I mean, it's like, you know, if I get a nomination, then people write about, look, it's so much better,, it's not, I mean, it's like, you know, if I get a nomination, then people write

about, look, it's so much better, but it's not. And I was talking about this on set with Meryl Streep. And I asked her, like, why do people feel like it's this way? Because, you know, like in, in the thirties and forties, you had like people like Catherine Hepburn who were major movie stars and they were the leads of their films in which they told men what to do. Right. They ran the fucking table. Barbara Stanwyck as well. Like all these incredibly smart, high status, fast talking women, comedies and dramas who just fucking ruled the place. And now we don't have shit like that anymore.

And people act like things are better. And if there's a little bit of agency for a female character, people push back really, really hard. And Meryl Streep said, yeah, but the difference is when audiences were watching Katharine Hepburn movies or Barbara Stanwyck movies, they were fantasy. This in their actual life. They did not exist. And now a woman doing 10 percent of that in the movie feels like a threat because it's like watchmen i feel like there was that bell curve of like you know people are just assuming that show's gonna suck right why would they do this they're playing with fire the show comes out everyone's really impressed with the first episode but then like four days later there's that sort of second wave of press that's like do you know that this is real? The Tulsa massacre is real. Like there were just so many headlines and tweets that were like, that's not a fucking thing that they made up.

And something about the framing of Watchmen, where you're already dealing with alternative histories, I think made that opening more palatable to white audiences. Cause they were just like, what is this weird sci-fi alternate history we're dealing with that the show is building itself upon before then it started like the education started coming out of like no this is like the real thing and then the fantasy is spun out of that whereas this movie is just asking people to like acknowledge a thing that isn't often acknowledged,

which means there's already a sort of guilt and complicity for white audience members in just like, I'm watching a movie by a thing that I don't know about. That feels like I've already fucked up in some way. It's all true. I'm trying to make sense of why this movie was sort of just like totally shrugged off in 97 i think yeah look i mean i think there's a bunch of reasons and one of the main ones is just that the warner brothers probably did not have a lot of belief in it like they probably watched it and they were like this is a two hour 22 minute movie that's very very um

sad and very upsetting and doesn't have a huge star and we're going to dump it like i i they they put it in berlin but they dumped it like and i think they're that it was just sort of a commercial calculation i just have to assume right and john singleton's career which i wanted to ask you about, Jamel, is kind of fascinating in that because he comes out of the gate with his big guarantor, this sort of surprise hit that refocuses the industry a little bit for a while. of him being like okay i want a bigger budget i want to tackle something really meaty and i want to make a movie that like like you say and the poster is going to say like this is for real people who suffered and hollywood's like yeah yeah sure but by the time it's coming out they're like okay yeah i don't know put it out in february who cares like you know dump it and like it feels like the end of the 90s, like post Spike Lee's post John Singleton boom of giving black filmmakers studio budgets for a while, which I feel like kind of narrowed again in the 2000s and is only sort of widening out again recently. Is that crazy? And let's also say just briefly, and I very much want to hear Jamel's sort of history with Singleton at large, but the model for black filmmakers breaking into Hollywood for about 10 years after this becomes the model Singleton kind of sets by his next wave of movies.

Right. singleton kind of sets by his next wave of movies right like you have people like tim story and f gary gray who continue to work within the industry but they have to do sort of the crossover blockbusters right right yeah right or or like you you make a small budget comedy but but the sort of like earnest emotional black drama does not really exist in the studio system in a major way for a while for a while and i wanted to ask you jamal about your thoughts on singleton outside of rosewood like do you have like you know are there a lot have you seen all of his films like are there others in his filmography that you watch a lot? I feel like a lot of his movies were in the cable rotation. You were sort of talking about Rosewood being in the cable rotation.

I've seen Boys in the Hood a bunch. And as like a parenthetical, the Hood movies of that period have a lot of issues. But they're all, I think, a lot of really compelling watches. I've seen a bunch of them, a ton, like Juice and Menace to Society and all those. Right. And then sort of their successors like Paid in Full and what's the one with Queen Latifah, the all-female cast.

Set It Off. Yeah, Set It Off. I've seen Too Fast, Too Furious, Rosewood. I don't think – I have notwood. I actually have not sat down and gone through his entire filmography. So these are like those three in shaft. So these four are the ones that I've seen in scene. Rosewood, this is my second time watching. The others I've seen a couple times.

a couple times just thinking about how singleton debuted in sort of his trajectory it seems to me that part of the challenge for him and like his peers is that they that these their their first movies these hood movies so to so to speak they were huge hits and i think there was an expectation that they would just make more of them or sort of like make more of this kind of movie. And I think part of the trouble with Rosewood in terms of its, how the studio reacted and how the public reacted is that it very, as far outside of that kind of, that kind of,

that kind of, that kind of frame. The other thing I'll say is that just from three movies, Boys in the Hood, Rosewood, and Shaft, Singleton seems to be very interested

in and you might even say preoccupied with sort of Black domesticity, right? Sort of like the Black family. And one of my other take about this, about Rosewood, is that I think it's worth considering it in the context of sort of the political and cultural discourse about the Black family in the 90s, which was, you know, this is the era of welfare reform. This is the era of the welfare queen of this, of this is sort of the tail end of the crack era um it's pretty much a time when

for as much as there is greater representation on screen of black people a lot of the political discourse was very much of like black pathology but there's something wrong with black people with black families that renders them unable to really operate or compete in society. And so a movie like Boys in the Hood is interesting in part because it's offering, at first glance, a stereotypical view of what Black life is like. But as soon as you sit down for the movie, what you see is this is a movie of tight communities and tight familial bonds, for the movie, which you see is this is a movie of like tight communities and tight familial bonds that even though this is the ghetto, it is there are intact families. There are families that care about education, care about the kind of mainstream values that in political life, it said that black

people don't really care about. And I think Rosewood is doing something interesting, too, in that it's its primary point of contrast within the movie is of Black stable domesticity against sort of like white disorder, right? dinners churches and you're introduced to um you know the the the character who incites all of this in i mean not only are is she in her home with her husband sort of like about to you don't know if they're married about to engage about to have sex maybe but they're coded as maybe low class and the character sarah sees them and is like passing judgment on them in this sort of very moralized way and i think that i think that that dynamic you got to consider in the context of what discourse about the black family was like in the middle of the 1990s right like this it is very much a to me at least it reads as a attempt to say you're wrong about

black families and black communities in a way that I think Boys in the Hood is saying and in a way that even a movie like Shaft which is has family as a part of it I think is also trying to bring up but I have not seen

if you guys for the two movies prior to this I kind of wonder if you guys uh for the the two movies prior to this i kind of wonder if you know no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no absolutely i mean it's singleton feels like you know uh to make a weird analogy in the way that all of

nancy meyer's movies are about her not being able to get over her divorce it feels like every singleton movie is in some way him expressing his thankfulness for his parents right for the upbringing he had and the guidance and the perspective that they gave him that is sort of like this is what gave me the stability to become a filmmaker and to have the confidence in my voice and i'm sort of arguing for the necessity of that. And, you know, poetic justice is in the end ultimately about the the the domestication of Tupac, like the character, not Tupac, the person. Right. But it's like it's about him learning how to step up to the responsibility of being a father and how to be an emotionally intent to partner uh exactly right and to end and romantic partner yes right right and higher learning is about a lot of things but the the

predominant black storyline in the movie is a young man begging his professor to be a father figure to him, looking for that sort of guidance in his life, wanting that sort of support. Omar Epps, Lawrence Fishburne. Lawrence Fishburne, right, right. The other thing is he talks about, when he makes Boys in the Hood and when he makes all these,

and it's crucial to consider, Rosewood is a total pivot for him. His first three movies are these Californian movies. Like they are very contemporary. They're very much like set in a place where he's from. But he talks about like, you know, he was raised by his dad was a real estate agent. His mom was a pharma sales executive. Like he said, like, I grew up in a black neighborhood.

I didn't know a lot of white people i had a great buffer against you know any drama or you know sort of bad things like you know i i loved movies that was part of this sort of uh you know that was part of what kept me sort of on the straight and narrow blah blah blah and then in this there's this good article in the times uh written during the production of Rosewood. Is this the LA Times article? Yeah, in the LA Times, where he says, like, I have a deep, I wouldn't call it fear, but a deep contempt for the South because I feel like all the horror and evil that black people faced in the country is rooted here. So I was like, fuck the South.

I don't want to make a movie in the South. This is him trying to like overcome that, like him trying to be like, OK, I should, you know, step generations back. It's like an exorcism for him in a way. It really feels like it. And like, you know, when they're making this movie, they have survivors of the massacre on set who people who are obviously children at the time and now are old people. people who are obviously children uh at the time and now are old people and like i think making this movie you know they built this big set like you know they're they're out in the middle of florida with the palmettos and you know it must have been sort of like weird and ghostly and spine tingly and all that like i think making this movie was this sort of weighty, sort of intense experience for all of them. It sounds very interesting.

Just to have the people there being like, that sounds right, or that makes sense, or that looks... To recreate something like this is... Greg Poirier, who is the screenwriter, and... Let's talk about this quickly. When you look him up... who is the screenwriter and let's talk about this quickly we have to talk about this filmography quickly because I can't fucking figure it out this is my best guess

go ahead for some reason at some point someone else had tried to write a movie about this when he went to Warner Brothers they had this script Singleton took it wrong? that was my guess okay wow so so the reason griffin is freaking out is that the guy who wrote this movie

is like his the rest of his um hollywood screenplays are mostly like trash like he wrote and directed tomcats that's his only directorial effort but let me just truly just burn through these okay the the series of things that he does before rosewood the titles are the adventures of dynamo duck danger zone 3 steel horse war death riders sounds good the strangers wild malibu weekend exclamation point yes yes okay uh yes i agree all of those titles sound good but they sound like good trash okay then rosewood his credit and and look there are many cases of this where someone is like a serious minded screenwriter they write some amazing spec script they get thrown into the system they write a bunch of trash for years. I mean, it's like when you interviewed the Arrival writer and you were like, this is an interesting pivot for you because you only wrote horror before this. And he's like, no, only my horror screenplays got produced before this. Those are the only things I had the credit for. So you're like, maybe this is serious about a guy who got caught up in genre junk for a while no his next credit is additional written material for the lion king

to simba's pride then he writes gossip c-spot run the david arquette dog two-hander he writes and directs tomcats a sound of thunder which is like a notorious sci-fi flop he has a story credit on national treasure book of secrets which is admittedly an American masterpiece. Of course, a great film. But that's a movie with like 14 story credits or whatever. He writes The Spy Next Door, the sort of arguably the nadir of the American

Jackie Chan movies. I don't know if you disagree with this, Jamal. It's not a good movie. I've not seen it. I mean, when Billy Ray Cyrus' second build in your movie. Yes. And then, what is. I mean, when Billy Ray Cyrus' second build in your movie. Yes. Ooh. And then, what is,

I mean, his most recent credit is like a Ukrainian animated film called A Warrior's Tale. Yeah, he also worked on the Ashley Judd TV show Missing. Look, I don't know how it is that this converged, but when he's writing this movie,

the LA times interviews him he he is it mentioned as a theater guy and in brackets it says this is his first major screenplay so i'm assuming you know wild malibu weekend and danger zone three or whatever like that that's that's money uh you know those are our jobs for money i I guess. And he is someone who interviewed like Rosewood survivors and found a 200-page report commissioned by the Florida legislature. He is whatever.

He is the guy that John Singleton is working with to excavate all the history, and he's on set and stuff. It's also odd. That's just a weird thing. Right. And look uh there are many cases in which a director is very hands-on and doesn't get a co-writing credit but it's also

just interesting because singleton was the sole writer on his first three films uh yeah i mean he certainly wrote all those movies i'm trying to remember if he had a co-writer on any of them no yeah no he's the sole right yeah look i mean i i assume rosewood he's also not a producer on which he had been on his other movies yeah this movie is produced by jormel please uh john peters yes uh the famous uh psychopath who ran uh which studio was it uh for a sony so he ran you know columbia for a couple years he was barbara Streisand's hairdresser. He famously demanded to put metal spiders into

Superman movies for many years. And then finally got it. He's crazy. What's his recent thing? I feel like he has a recent thing. Oh, he was like going to make a Sandman movie, right? And he was like, but my Sandman fucks or whatever. You know, he was going to mess up the Sandman at one point. I don't know. He also announced that he was like but my sandman fucks or whatever you know he was gonna mess up the sandman at one point i don't know so announced that he was gonna release a book he had written

it and like hollywood just fucking shook him down was like do not fucking publish this you will burn down the entire town with you um but but but but yes interesting things to talk about i mean jamel you mentioned this and it's very much in all the interviews we're reading for each of these movies, each of these episodes we do. Singleton was so aware and sort of defensive about getting pigeonholed as a director, right? Especially because he's so fucking young. He comes out of nowhere so hard and hits so big with Boys in the Hood. And it does spawn this kind of subgenre for years. Higher Learning and Poetic Justice are both pivots. I mean, it's like Poetic Justice is a fascinating follow up movie to me because it feels like him pushing

off his blank check cash in for a movie or two. Right. He's like, I'm going to make something pretty small and modest in its ambition. I'm going to scale down from Boys in the Hood. And it's very much like, let me make the counterpart film. Let me do the female perspective. Let me try to get more romantic, you know, but it's not him cashing in all the chips. And it does. OK.

And then he does higher learning learning which is like his big sort of messy ambitious primal scream altman movie kind of thing right and then he does this and rosewood and higher learning both feel more like the film you make after you become the youngest person ever to be nominated for best director. But he sort of like extended his blank check aura by not cashing it in immediately. But those first three movies are Columbia. Stephanie Allen was the person who really shepherded him. And you wonder if it's just like, OK, well, you made two more films and neither of them totally hit. Right. They just you you've now had three bites at the apple. Only one of your films really grabbed hold of the culture.

Are you sort of like was that a one off fluke? You know, are you in a sort of Altman way where they like gave him a longer run because he was a white man of like the 70s where them being like, you've got to be able to make mash again. Right. And then by the like popeye they were like fuck it he can't he can't do it i don't understand why that one movie he was able to make something that the audience is liked but the guy can't fucking do it but he's still obviously a respected enough person and enough of nom that someone like warner brothers if columbia sort of goes cold on him other studios are gonna going to be fighting to see, like, can he recapture it? Can we give him a shot?

What if we get him a writer? What if we put someone like John Peters on him, you know? And especially on paper, you're like, yeah, this should be his fucking Schindler's List, I guess, you know? If he's coming in and saying, I want to make – I'm going to get a John Williams score. I'm going to make my big historical drama. I'm going to get a John Williams score. I'm going to make my big historical drama. But he had thornier ambitions with this movie.

Yeah, I mean, it's you think about the kind of movie that I imagine the studio thought it was going to get. Maybe something more and more in line with like a Lee Daniels picture. Right. Sort of something that's very maybe like very melodramatic, very maudlin at points. And this isn't that. This is like a thriller. This is more a thriller than it is anything else, in my mind. And the historical story here, all that's not uplifting. It's sort of it's like cautionary. It's it does not hit the kind of notes that a movie with a john williams score um you might have you might imagine hitting wild that williams did the

score oh yeah i saw that when that came up on the on the credits at the beginning i was like oh not not anticipating a john williams score for this. Thinking about why this movie did not connect with audiences. Or, I mean, the critical response was positive. But there does seem to have been sort of like, as you mentioned at the start of the conversation, David, kind of like, oh, yeah, this is sort of like, yeah, this is the, yeah. But I just, and I said this to you over text like i think this may have been received as like a a standard issue race movie but it really isn't at all and i think to to um to go to something i said at the beginning as well i think maybe one reason that this movie was not was received so lukewarmly is that its message if it has one is like a it's like a dissection of

white american masculinity and really connecting it to the country's history of racism one of the one of the subplots of the film is bruce mcgill and his son and from the start that subplot is bruce mcgill trying to impress on his son that the way to be a man is to be able to inflict this kind of violence on others when when they're introduced he's sort of goosing his son to shoot an animal when they're out hunting he's like anointed his son for not pulling the trigger yes and and that is that's like repeat that that's repeated throughout the film but also you see in so many other ways the way that the way in which uh sort of camaraderie connection a sense of worth all of these things end up being connected to like the ability to get gathered together and like inflict violence on other people and i have to imagine that even if an audience member

uh wasn't unaware of this like i sort of think that the way in which this movie takes a very jaundiced view of americans of white americans a very sort of like, your shit stinks kind of view, had to have had an impact on how it was received. Especially, again, given this context of kind of like end of history self-congratulations. 50 years ago, we beat the Nazis.congratulations right like we beat you know 50 years ago we beat the nazis five years ago we beat the soviets you know it's sort of that's i don't know this

this movie seems to me seems to me to be so much in dialogue with the kind of general vibe of how mainstream america thought of itself in the 90s. In the same way, you know, I was on the Forrest Gump episode, in the same way that Forrest Gump was also vibing on that as well. This is another movie that is taking that and sort of trying to critique it and push back on it. In a way that, yeah, it's just not going to appeal to people. I'd even go as

much to say that if this movie came out today you'd have like a whole there'd have to be like a whole mini culture war cycle about it yes with um with a lot of outrage about its depiction of white americans i'm looking at the the la times article which people can find which was uh The LA Times article, which people can find, which was written, it was published in June of 96 when they were filming the movie. And in that they say that the movie is going to come out in the fall. And John Peters is talking about how he believes the movie will stir up controversy. And he was trying to organize a 60 minutes episode that was a town hall on the real story to sort of like get that you just have to imagine when they deliver the cut warner brothers goes like this is not uplifting this does not have the sense of triumph you know this does not

have the sense of um you know what it still comes up when fucking race movies enter the Oscar sphere in a major way. They tend to be films that deal with race relations in a way that keep the audience's hands clean. Right. The white viewers hands clean of. Well, look at how bad those people are. I'm not as bad as them. Or this was so far away. Clearly, we've come so far since then.

And this is a movie that does not allow you to sort of absolve yourself of complicity in as clean of a way. But that's clearly – the other interesting thing in this article is that Peters is the one who kickstarted this project. the one who kickstarted this project. Peter saw a story about a survivor on the news and then investigated, got their life rights, which makes me wonder if he then hired Poirier and... Yeah, that might be true, right. Right, and then... And Singleton eventually, right, yeah.

Right, I mean, they might have courted Singleton or Singleton might have independently come to the idea that he wanted to do a Rosewood movie and Peter's already had one sort of percolating at Warner Brothers. But yeah, you can understand how a producer like John Peters, who to put it nicely, is pretty crass and base. Yes.

He's a crass person. Right. Right. Just said like, this is important. There has to be an important Holocaust style movie you can make about this story. You know, just going like, well, this is I hear I see big hit movies that get Oscar nominations about tragedies and the strength of the human spirit in the face of them. But I mean, Jamal, you said before we recorded that one of the only responses you got to your tweets about the movie was from someone saying, I never saw that because I always assumed it was a white savior movie. And yeah, John Voight is first build in this. Right.

Right. But it's also not like the movie was seemingly sold on Voight. Like, it does feel like Ving Rhames was the face they were trying to put forward yeah because Ving Rhames is kind of at the height of his stardom sort of let's do a little thing here pretty yeah we can do a little thing I mean we've obviously talked about him I guess in Mission Impossible and stuff but like um yeah like obviously Pulp Fiction is is 93 94 sorry yeah um and post that okay he's in mission impossible he's in of course david caruso nicholas cage two-hander kiss of death he's in uh strip tease i feel like all of that i mean is is stuff where it's like he's hollywood is like we've got you pegged you're a supporting

character you're a character actor like out of sight right it's like that becomes his default thing that's like right post rosewood it's right con air obviously he wins the golden globe for only in you know blank don king yeah on tv but yeah out of sight entrapment bringing out the dead he's he's so good in bringing out the dead that is a hysterical performance yeah so cool he would maybe be my supporting actor winner that year certainly on the ballot he's so fucking great in that movie but but all supporting yes he's in baby boy he's in you know singleton works with him this is kind of the only movie that even let's say this the only major studio film that even attempts to sort of center him.

I'm genuinely trying to think of others. There have to be some, right? I guess Dawn of the Dead, he's kind of a lead, right? Co-lead with Sarah Pauly. He's second lead. Pauly is very much the audience surrogate character in that and i think part of ving rames power as a movie star at this point in time is there's some kind of unknowability about him right there's something kind of elusive and distant about him yeah yes that's true yes he's the he's the mystery man

who wanders in often or yeah there's some right Right. And there's the conflict in Ving Rhames between his sort of like innate steeliness and a vulnerability, a sensitivity that he cannot entirely hide. Right. And something like Pulp Fiction is like the guy's just high status, intimidating until you get to the Zed scene. Right. status intimidating until you get to the zed scene right but then even just like on a comedy wavelength it's like the dave performance is kind of hollywood's perception of ving reigns in a nutshell which is you spend a whole movie with this guy being like the funny straight man because he's so serious and humorless about everything and at the end he has his heartwarming moment where he shows that he cares right and it's like a lot of him being the best friend

character who comes through at the end in these big hollywood movies like luther strickland which becomes his like his stock and you know but but this is a very different use of him in a movie especially because of how centered he is and how the movie is really framing him as like this is if anyone's gonna save the day it's gonna be this guy there's no one else you could turn to he's not playing assist voight i will say is almost more interesting because this is when he's coming back right you know he kind of has a weird in the years before that yeah right he has a sort of a weird sabbatical

then he's back he's in heat he's in mission impossible of course with ving rames he's in this and anaconda and u-turn and the rainmaker all in 97 you know like he's suddenly kind of everywhere and you know we don't have to talk about it too much but like obviously now john voy is this sort of weird red pill trumpy you know like he's one of those guys well he has that quote you know i'm not saying he originated but he he drops it all the time of like when you're young if you're not a liberal you don't have a heart and when you're old if you're not a conservative you don't have a brain he says that all the fucking time because he was such a fucking lefty, you know, like radical for so much of his career, not just in who he was as a public figure, but like especially in the roles he played and shit, you know?

I mean, even just him taking on a project like this, it's kind of unfathomable with who Voight is today. He would probably be in the exact opposite of this movie. He would probably be in the exact opposite of this movie. But like him winning the Oscar for coming home and making a sort of politically radical speech, you know, while wearing a scarf and just being like, you know, America is fucked. And then now he's just like, why is anyone insulting America? Right. It's weird. In this LA Times article, he says, he has these quotes where, I want to find the exact quote, but I feel like we're witnesses, that we can't stand in these shoes, but we've chosen to immerse ourselves in this story. He's very serious. That's what I'm saying. When he used to go on TV, he speak that way you know and now he does the same thing but just with lunacy i don't know it's just weird yeah uh john void just weird he's he's good in

this movie but his character as you're kind of saying jimelle like he's not being introduced as like the kind shop he's being introduced having sex at the back of the store you know like he there's this sort of a nastiness not like extreme just kind of like a you know this is we're not like entering his store as viewers being like oh this is sort of like a part of the community that's crucial like we're kind of entering with this sort of uncomfortable feeling right i mean to go back to something you guys said earlier any a non i'm not even going to say like a a non-black filmmaker because i can i can imagine a black filmmaker making this movie this a different way as well but any any of the major you know historical drama filmmakers of the 90s if this were Spielberg, if this were Zemeckis, the Voight character would be, they'd sand off all the edges and have him be much more of an audience surrogate.

But Singleton presents him as scummy, as venal, as sort of not really any less racist than anyone else in the town. My, you know, my broken brain that reads too much academic stuff, you know, I see this kind of character. And it's just it's such an interesting it's interesting to have him as a shopkeeper, which is to say like an owner of capital and property. And he just occupies this place in this town where he is both reliant on the present hierarchy, right? Sort of like that kind of keeps him in his status, but also just it's kind of in the nature of like market life that there is this tension with the hierarchy as well. It's like he sells bullets to Don Cheadle's character and also gives them to the mob. He kind of is his fingers in both pots. And one thing that struck me watching this movie is how much... I need to actually just like read some reviews from when this came out, because I have to imagine that at least some of them are just sort of like the white characters are so cartoonish.

But I see this movie is actually having like a lot more tension and ambiguity about the nature of like white society within the context of the movie so to go back to michael rooker's character not a great guy no he's he's the playing the sheriff right he's playing the sort of right he's the sheriff yeah but he's like somewhat resistant to the mob not because he has any sympathy for for the denizens of rosewood but because he has an interest in maintaining kind of like a monopoly on state violence and sort of like the mob letting the mob go go wild both undermines that it also sort of undermines the social relations of the area that like they actually do need the the black rosewoodians to like do labor right they need them there yeah um uh the husband of fanny you know says you shot the woman who cleans my home like there's this there's this there there are labor relations

here that have to be preserved that are threatened by the mob violence and creates this tension within even all the within the racist mob um which is like an interesting it's like a the thing about this movie that so stands out to me is how how like legitimately nuanced it is about all of these things despite kind of portraying a not particularly nuanced story like in the broad strokes of it and that you could have made this movie in a way that completely flattens out all these internal tensions and contradictions uh and i kind of think it would have done better i kind of think this movie is like flaw in terms of its like popular appeal

is precisely that it's like operating on a lot of interesting levels that um that are challenging. And aren't the kind of thing you see in this kind of movie. To contrast it with Amistad again, Amistad is very straightforward. There's not really that much to say about Amistad as a movie besides all the tropes, all the white savior tropes. The talk about Amistad, the talk about all the ways in which it's flawed, but actually the movie itself is pretty straightforward and offers either a portrait of like black suffering or like white heroism and that's kind of that's kind of how it

how it goes and rosewood um rosewood just takes a much more nuanced view of sort of all everyone involved in all of this, which is something I got to say, I wasn't expecting when I turned this on Sunday night is when we started it. And so I just like was expecting something more like a 90s historical drama versus something that feels like it was written by an academic in part. Right. I think a lot of these types of movies are trying to frame these stories in a way where it's like, and here's how we fixed it, or at least here's how we took the first step towards fixing it. The first step towards fixing it and you as the audience get to feel the like and now things are good. That sort of like remove the disconnect, the arm's length that helps make these movies become Oscar favorites and commercial breakthroughs and what have you. And this movie is so much more interested in why these things happen in the first place, which is, you know, a thing that is very uncomfortable to watch um he's interested in the sort of like domino effect of all this stuff and and the breaking points of these tensions you know which it's like a big part of this movie is these guys the white people in this town, were clearly just waiting for an excuse. You know? The quickness with which it escalates,

the degree to which it does. There's that scene I love when Lauren Dean goes back to his wife and mentions that Esther Raleigh's character has been shot. And she just sort of starts losing it and going like, what do you mean? But she didn't do anything. Why would they shoot her? And it's like, well, this is the woman who started the whole thing. And she was, and this is the other major theme I think he's

really interested with in, which is a very raw nerve for people to deal with, which is the incredibly short walk between sexual guilt and shame and most forms of bigotry. You know, and it's things we see even just, you know, it happened fairly recently at the time we're recording this, but the series of the massage parlor shootings, you know, but even just I will sometimes play that fucking game on Twitter of seeing a person who openly just uses slurs in their main feed, goes into people's fucking at replies

and just starts throwing slurs around. And then you click on that account and you click on their likes or their at tweets and it is almost always predominantly cam girls of the group that they are using the slurs against right there's just this incredible sort of shame and this movie is all about the inciting incident is the notion of a sexual encounter uh you know uh not to mention that the the void character that's sort of his main framing in his introduction. And what makes him so conflicted as a character is you sort of get the sense that it's like he probably would be a great a greater ally.

Did he not feel the need to overcompensate for his shame about the fact that he is having this affair with a black woman. And when the people are coming to him for some sanctuary in the town, he wants to push them away. And it is his wife who's like, what the fuck? Bring them in, you know? But he's sort of overcorrecting for, I feel shame by the fact that I'm cheating on my wife, that this is not the person I'm really attracted to. I need to go harder in denying the outreach to them. Along those lines, I mean, so the inciting incident to Fanny is, I guess she has like, she sleeps with other men when her husband's working.

I guess she just like cucks her husband routinely. And Robertbert was it robert patrick is that who that was robert patrick robert patrick credited as fanny's lover he's just in and out as as this sort of like mystery villain yes yeah my wife was like is that is that is that a terminator it's again i'm 15000. He melts in and melts away. The framing of that scene is interesting because they hold off for so long on letting you see who the guy is. Not just throughout the entire actual act. You're not seeing him.

You're not seeing anything identifiable. But even post-coitus when he's dressing, redressing, they really hold off on giving you a look at the guy. So you don't know who it is. Right. You get the sense because you're introduced with the photo on the mantle of her and her husband. This probably isn't her husband. But but you also kind of don't know, like, is this a white guy? Is this a character we already know? Who is this that she's having such energetic sex with? But I'm sorry, Jamal, you were about to say it. Just building off your point about sexual shame, so that's he,

they have sex, he beats her afterwards, and then she goes out into the street and she screams that it was a black guy who assaulted her, didn't rape her, but assaulted her. Although, in the word word of mouth this becomes like she was raped yeah she actually makes it clear i wasn't raped but right it means nothing right uh and later michael roker says to her husband character, we all know what happens in your home when you're not home. It's not a big secret here. And there's this way in which

violence inflicted on Rosewood is itself a manifestation of the shame. Everyone knows that this woman who is a white woman who is supposed to be sort of like more innocent or pure in whatever way is not and so rather than deal with that we're just going to kill a bunch of other people to the ground right and blame them for our own dysfunction i mean i I could not stop thinking during this movie about the Capitol riots in January because it was the same kind of thing

where it's like there is this blatant fallacy that is being perpetuated as this is your excuse, the reason why you need to storm the Capitol, you know? I mean, what people call the big lie, and it's just like, it doesn't hold up under any scrutiny, but people were looking for an excuse to be told it is not only okay,

but you have a moral obligation to fucking get violent and stomp your way in there, you know? And it's the same kind of thing where it's like, no one actually really seems to believe this. It's maybe my favorite moment in the movie.

I mean, Esther Raleigh's so fucking good in this thing overall, but there are so many witnesses to the violence, right? To Robert Patrick leaving. It is seen. And she doesn't say anything for a while as this game of telephone heightens. And not only is this myth perpetuated and spread, but it's also now amped up to, oh, it was rape. It wasn't just a beating. Right. And she is doing anything she can to not have to deal with the consequences of I'm cheating on my husband.

Yes. Lauren Dean is her husband. Right, right. I can villainize an anonymous black man, and that way I will be absolved of any wrongdoing in this situation. This is a common enemy that the white citizens of this town will all be able to get behind, which unfortunately lines up with a mysterious Ving Rhames cowboy character coming into town, which gives them an easy scapegoat, right? But the scene where they're in the church and Voight is there and she asks him to leave before she can spread the information that I saw the guy, he was white. The guy's white. And A, she's not saying it as look here's our play we have to spread the word that he's white she's saying it as look it doesn't fucking matter because it's not like you

know whether or not they believe this is is the root of the thing but you should all know the guy was white and that she fundamentally doesn't trust Voight to have that information. You know, I think not because it's a secret, but because to some degree it's like I don't want to give him the power to deny it or give him the power to act like i'm gonna be the hero go back to everyone say do you know it was a white guy and have them ignore it you know it's it's just sort of a temperature setting thing for her of like we should just know that this is bullshit anyway we're fucked we're not really doing the plot of this movie because it's actually a simple plot in a way because the first chunk of it is really just sort of like community feeling and you know you're

it's a disaster movie right right things are building up storms are brewing bing rames bing rames and john foy you know um and then yes there's this this incident with robert patrick where you're like wait who are these you barely know who these people are you barely know who lauren dean is it's really as you say jamel it's just like yeah well his wife just sleeps with other men and like his her her lover beats her she blames it on a sort of you know phantom black person and that's it that's the that's the sort of torch to the kindling and everything just disintegrates from there but as you say aunt sarah ester rolly like the the sort of a pretty beloved figure in both the towns of rosewood and sumner like you know this she said she delivered a lot

of the people who end up burning her town to the ground right like she's certainly yeah no one bears ill will towards her and and strategic casting a beloved figure in american homes right i mean you have like right this like quintessential sitcom matriarch right the the sort of the um classic mom character exactly from good times and just a great actress. And as you say, like the character of Fanny is very upset to learn that she's dead, but she is also,

she's a, she's upset. Like, it's like, ah, that, you know, like,

like, like someone knocked, you know, something over, you know, like, like it's just this sort of like well how could that have happened like what the fuck you know she's not i don't know like you

know she makes no effort to then correct i mean that's the other thing she continues to go like i i am hurt upset angered by her death but also if i own up i'm gonna be in trouble like i continue to be willing to put black bodies in front of my uh consequence and not to bring up amistad again but amistad is a movie in which uh people of power debate the moral weight and consequence of slavery in like the supreme court that is the that is the essence of that movie whereas this movie is just this movie set a hundred years later basically and is about like it literally takes some bullshit like it just takes like one thing right it's as you've been talking about jamel this sort of simmering egotism and uh you know uh self-consciousness what's the word i'm looking for you know that

just just this um what did you jamel the thing you were saying about basically like the discrepancy between what i think i'm owed and how my life actually is is like a poor person in the florida poor white person in the Florida panhandle just exploding. And it's like, and the town was wiped off the map. And the consequence was nothing. The consequence was those who survived got out alive maybe. And that was it. And, you know, maybe there was a newspaper article written and that was it.

And also white, these white people were willing to burn their own town down not just the homes of the black people but just wipe out their entire town just to make sure that things didn't even up more you know they're they're sort of cutting their nose to spite their face i want to throw out a a theory okay what's your theory if this movie has a major failing i think it's cheetle i think it's both his performance and this character not working necessarily in the way they need to for the movie to become completely overpowering in a good way. And I love Cheadle. Obviously, I love Don Cheadle. Yeah.

Jamel, I'm assuming you're probably a Don Cheadle fan. I don't want to paint you into a corner here, but, you know, he's a good actor. You're an American, right? Right. This movie is two years after Devil in a Blue Dress, which was his breakout. And I feel like it's, you know, he's you know right you know this this movie is two years after devil in a blue dress which was his breakout and i feel like it's you know he's in boogie nights this year he's an out of sight the next year right this is when don cheadle is starting to pop up in lots of stuff and he's playing sylvester he's kind of a co what you know in the beginning of the movie

you're like oh this is sort of the third lead that's what i was gonna say because that's the other disaster movie thing is very often you start with three key pillars right like in disaster movies you're cutting between a couple different storylines but you got three central kind of protagonists and then the movie is the things start to converge as disaster strikes and he's very much set up as the third and then sort of taken off the board for a while so they can fake out his death and have him come back at the end yeah you think he's dead because they say he's dead and because the his house gets burned down and his uh you know uh aunt sarah gets killed and like he's like like you say jamal he's sort of like one of the more prosperous people in rosewood right he has a piano right like he's got this sort of nice household he's got a great mustache he's got a great mustache and he's dead and you're

like oh i guess he's dead and i guess this is just the senselessness of this movie is that he's gone we don't even see him go like that was don cheadle that was one of the bigger stars in the movie and he's gone and then he's back at the end and i feel i do agree that i don't think the movie really lands that he's back you're like oh okay uh and yeah maybe there's just 10 minutes there that we kind of need like to sort of invest us in him more or i don't know i mean this is my thought okay i was right before he re-emerged thinking to myself oh i guess don sheetal died right i guess as you said that's the point the movie made the senselessness he's taken I was right before he reemerged thinking to myself, oh, I guess Don Cheadle died, right? I guess, as you said, that's the point the movie made, the senselessness.

He's taken off the board so quickly, so ceremoniously, right? And then he comes back in, and I immediately, as much as it's like, I'm very happy Don Cheadle is revealed to be alive in any movie. I'm very happy any movie reveals to me that they have more Cheadle to give. I did then feel the sense of like, oh, if the character was gonna make it through the movie though, I wish he had just been on screen for that time. I don't think the movie gains anything really

from withholding Cheadle from us. And I also feel like just in its construction, he should kind of ostensibly be the person who's guiding us through the story as much as anyone because the ving rhames character as we said is a mystery is kind of unknowable right and the character is not you know in in a good way a white savior character as someone who's going through the arc of realizing his wrongs the cheetle character is kind of the man on the ground. You know, he is the person who is, you know, most victim to this, or at least representationally. It does feel like he's the guy we should be seeing this through. Taking him off the board for that long a chunk of the movie, I don't think does it any favors. I also want to throw out, I think Cheadle

is good in the movie, but he is not great, and he is most often great. He doesn't have a lot of meat. He doesn't have a lot of meat. It's also an underwritten character. I think it's an underwritten character. I also want to throw out, are accents Don Cheadle's Achilles heel?

I mean, you're talking about Ocean's Eleven. Right right which is just notoriously one of the worst accents ever and you kind of have to love how bad the accent is and it fits into uh you know the fun of that movie and obviously he's great in hotel rwanda it's not like he has never pulled off an accent but this accent is similarly kind of dodgy. I think every moment he speaks on screen, I go, oh, it's Cheadle playing Southern rather than actually buying him as a Southern man. Jamel, as as a Southerner, I want you to weigh in as well. I honestly, Don Cheadle is the kind of movie star where I actually don't really buy him not being just Don Cheadle.

So it doesn't really distract for me. It's sort of like, Oh yeah, this is Don Cheadle in this movie. So he doesn't really sound like someone from the area, but who cares? Whatever. It's,

it's Don Cheadle. I wanted to agree with you, Griffin, about how he, he probably should have been the audience surrogate character, not just because he seemed to represent it, but because he's the one character who seems to have a connection to everyone else in the story,

right? Like he has a connection to Boyd's character through his cousin. He has a connection to, and we should talk about her, the woman who's the female leader, I suppose. Yeah. Scrappy,

Scrapple. Sc scrappy uh elise neal is the actress who i i mean she i i guess she's in mission to mars she's in scream 2 she was sort of around she's in hustle and flow i don't know her that well yeah she was on the hugelies for yes she was on the hugelies that's right. Yes. She's the female lead, right? She's the white. Yeah. But in Cheetle, Sylvester seems to be known among the white residents of Sumner, you know, as they don't like him, but like they know who he is.

And so that kind of that that level of connection to everyone renders him um a good choice for audience area i kind of wonder if the scene of him coming back was sort of added late because it does come out of nowhere and it the purpose it seems to serve is basically to give you the audience a little bit or a little bit of triumph like the movie ends on a note of relief like oh god they got out right but not so much like a note of like anything is good happening here um and so having having sylvester return at least gives the audience a little more to grab onto in terms of like coming out of the movie and not feeling like trash. Yeah.

I mean, I also, I keep on going back to my, my fucking disaster movie thing here, but, um, I, I,

I kept thinking about, uh, a day after tomorrow, which has that kind of inexplicable set piece. That is Jake Gyllenhaal and his friends fight the wolves. Oh yeah. I forgot about that. Right.

Everyone forgets about that. And except for sequence, my friend, Alex Pearl and I, who never stopped talking about the wolf sequence and day after tomorrow, we're obsessed with it. And I always say like, well,

cause I think they just realized they had backed themselves into a screenwriting corner where they have a, an antagonist that cannot be defeated right like the movie is about fucking global warming there's no way for them to stop it and ultimately the movie lands at a point of like things seem to have settled down for now because there's nothing they can do to reverse the the threat So it's like Roland Emmerich was just like, let's just have 10 minutes where there's a thing they can actually stop. They can beat wolves. They can run away from wolves. Wolves can be defeated.

And then there'll be more rain and snow and shit, right? And eventually we'll just go like, it's been four days. Things are calming down now. The weather's subsiding. And the movie gets itself to this point where like the train becomes the thing, right? It's like, OK, if we can get a couple people out on this train, it will feel like there is some kind of win in this movie. And then tied to that is Ving Rhames is going to get a shotgun and he's going to be able to take some names,

right? Like this this small win of he's going to get some survivors out of here and he's also going to get some revenge at the same time. And the Cheadle re-entrance feels part of that, of just like, well, now the movie is giving you

some fucking Hollywood hoorah victory. There's a little bit of triumph. But it does feel, I don't know. It almost feels a little bit like Tom Cruise's son surviving a war of the worlds. The most irritating creative decision of all of that movie. Yes. Possibly of all time. Right. And then there's the moment I actually really like when Ving rames is like how did you make it out and don sheetal says like in my mother's coffin they carried me out yeah right or his father's coffin whatever it was but like there's a moment of of true uh solemn

terror there and it's like he survived by the most absolutely traumatic escape hatch possible. Can I can I throw out a couple of quotes from this L.A. Times piece that I find very interesting? Yes. So they don't fill in all the gaps here, but it does seem like perhaps Peters courted Singleton. Right. He had had gotten the life rights, had started looking into this story. Singleton goes to Florida to meet with, as they put it, a dozen or so elderly survivors, right, who kind of start to guide him through this. And one of them tells him, son, you were

chosen to do this movie by God. So don't try to take anything from it or add a whole lot to it. Just do the movie. It'll take care of itself. And then this piece, it says Singleton lowers his eyes and exhales at the memory of that moment. I just took a deep breath. He says, I was proud about it. After meeting the survivors, it was a lock. I definitely wanted to make the movie. Makes sense. Yeah, yes. John Peter's main executive, Tracy Barone, says,

I think that cemented something in him that was greater than just the telling of this movie. It was a commitment to these people. And he sort of talks about, where's the last line in this? The volume of his voice doesn't ride, but his intensity does. I think maybe the movie will bear the brunt of a lot of people like the people around here who will say, why are you bringing that up? Why are you talking about this?

But why not? If you don't talk about it, then it could happen again and again and again. It's more than why not. It's like the Holocaust because you can never forget um and that's sort of the root of the whole thing but you're getting back to jamel is just like it's like him making a movie about the holocaust if the holocaust was sort of an urban legend right right that wasn't that wasn't in history books. Right. Only the people who it happened to and their kids like even know about. Right. Right. So it's like, you know, it's not just a movie like Showa that is like this has to be discussed. We have to give voice to these survivors and make sure in detail. It's like he's like, I want people to know just from the start that this happened in any form and that this is not an isolated incident i mean to to make maybe even make it a little more of a more a little more provocative analogy it's like making a movie about the holocaust in uh in a in a germany where the nazis won yeah kind of yeah

right yeah right and that's the other thing he keeps saying in this piece is just like, I'm making this movie because this is America. Like, I'm not, this isn't a triumph of look at how bad things used to be. I'm making a movie about the world that we're still living in. Like, he essentially keeps saying to this reporter, like, same shit, different day. Yeah. The fact that this did not do well because i guess at the start there's the the truly you know disturbing thing about the rosewood massacre so it's not an especially unique episode it's actually it's like one of it's one of many there were there were quite a

few towns or villages that were you know abandoneded to the ground in these spasms of racial violence. Obviously, there's the whole lynching era where something like 3,000 people were killed over the course of 40 years in these often big collective spectacle killings. course of 40 years and these sort of often big collective spectacle killings and so it's not it's not as if it's not as if there aren't more stories here to tell right if you wanted there there are many movies about the holocaust there are many different kind of stories to tell about the holocaust you could tell many kind of stories about this sort of period. But they are emotionally difficult stories to tell. They essentially kind of indict. There's no way to tell them if you're not going to do kind of a triumphant, you know, look how far we've gotten.

But if you're going to tell, even for a movie like Rosewood, which has these basically fantastical elements, a more grounded story, there's sort of no way to do it in a way that makes people feel good. Because every way you do it, it's going to indict the country or it's going to indict the viewer in some way. Because the largest message this film is making is we don't tell these stories. We don't want to think about this the act of watching this film in and of itself is an acknowledgement of the ignorance of the blind spot right of the refusal to um grapple with the past in a way that that's not a fucking thing with holocaust movies like it's just not and i say this as like a jew who has

lived his entire life with an overwhelming fear of like from the scars of the holocaust you know but it's not a thing that has ever gone from the the global psyche as much as you have pushback to it holocaust denial is still a form of acknowledgement you know because it's discussing the thing versus these events which don't get discussed it's not even that they're pushed back against and i mean i feel like so much of like the ending uh is the thesis of the movie is proven in the way he uses the it's and inner which like, you know, the fucking end coda text is is like, I feel one of those things in historical films that are almost immediately an eye roll, right, where you just go like, it almost always feels like it's hammering home a point that was already clear and now makes it feel kind of blunted or is sort of trying to reframe something with some kind of uplift you know if you weren't telling us this in the movie then you know it's a failing that you have to give us fucking five blocks of text at the end but the end text here

is so telling which is the official death toll of the Rosewood massacre, according to the state of Florida, is eight dot dot dot two whites and six blacks. The survivors, a handful of whom are still alive today, place the numbercussed that, like, the accounting of it, as limited as it is, is so blatantly bullshit. You know, and me doing my research for the movie, you know, talking to 10 eyewitnesses completely negates everything about the limited ways in which this is ever discussed. negates everything about the limited ways in which this is ever discussed. I'll say, you know, so much of the, in talking about sort of the audience perception, you've talked about white viewers, but I also think I, I wonder, because this is a dynamic in the present, what, whether there were any tensions with Black viewers, right, between this sort of exhuming history aspect, but also sort of not wanting to see yourself as a victim on screen. And not wanting to be placed in that kind of context.

That's often the context in which Black history stories are told. You see kind of like Black people get the shit kicked out of them. And then hope that there's like a good resolution. And I sort of wonder if that dynamic played against the movie as well and and speaking to that like you know as we've been saying bing rames's characters you can think of as more or less a response to that like an attempt to sort of head that off by giving you a uh self assured um uh forward moving character who is who is not violence is not being inflicted on him he's inflicting it on others uh can i say real quick just about bing ramsey's characters we haven't

talked about the scene the scene where he escapes the noose is like it's a great scene it's very funny when they turn around uh and he's like gone um But also speaks to sort of like the essentially magical nature of his character. That like he is strong enough and smart enough and resourceful enough to even having been lynched can escape that. And not just escape it, but still return as the hero. Can I say a thing that might sound stupid, but I do kind of feel this strongly? Yeah. Knowing that Peters is the one who got the ball rolling on this movie, right?

And that so much of this LA Times piece is him being like, I really think people should know this story. I'm really interested in the history of this thing. And that two years later, makes wild wild west where the will smith jim west character is kind of positioned somewhat similarly to man in this film and there's that incredibly tone deaf disastrous opening sequence in wild wild west that is like Jim West escaping a noose, right? That he is sort of this like magical, liberated, confident, modern black man in a backward south. That much like Peter's trying to get a giant mechanical spider in there somewhere. That he was kind of really into this character and was trying to find another way to make it work.

I would buy that. That sounds totally plausible. Listen, we just 100 percent. We got to have in the movie at least one scene where a black guy almost gets lynched. It's just that scene sticks out so hard i feel like when people talk about that movie and what a disaster it was after so much hype they're always like and then five minutes into the movie that scene happens and it just stops you cold in its tracks right i do feel like maybe peters comes away from this as sort of a dumb guy and goes like we just need to do the movie where it's not the historical shit.

And it's just this guy being a badass vigilante. I also just want to point out, I mean, the other, uh, title card before the one I read is about the fact that they finally, uh, uh,

were able to grant reparations through the Florida house of representatives 70 years after the massacre, 1993. So only four years before this movie is released three years before it's filmed. through the Florida House of Representatives 70 years after the massacre, 1993. So only four years before this movie is released, three years before it's filmed. And that was only done because of the testimony of survivors who were children at the time, presumably mostly the same survivors that Singleton talked to and that Peters got the life rights from. And pointedly, one white citizen who testified on behalf of the victims. And he capitalizes white. And it really feels like

that's like the final hammer drop he's doing at the end of this movie, which is just like, I just want to make it clear. Seventy years later, there was only one white person who came to validate the account. And perhaps, you know, as depressing as it is that there was only one, also perhaps the fact that there was one is the only reason why the reparations even got passed in the first place. So the question and the comment, the question is, so the title card said, or the inner title said it was the Florida House of Representatives. Do we know if this was actually, because to pass a bill, you still need the upper house and then the governor to sign.

And so was it just the Florida House, or was it an actual, did it actually go through the whole process and become a law passed? I can tell you they basically the legislature the first and this is not going to be the most um you're not going to be thrilled to hear this i will say lawton chiles was was governor of florida at the time a democrat um who was a sort of long-time senator and then became the governor of Florida. When this all gets, it was, I believe, one of the first U.S. states to ever consider compensation for racial violence. This whole thing that happened in the 90s. They had testimony, you know, they had hearings. They said there's a moral obligation.

They said there's a moral obligation. There was some kind of wedge thing that happened. Black legislatures refused to support a health care plan until this bill got voted on. There was a political maneuvering to get this thing attention. And they wanted to offer $7 million. They settled on $1.5 million uh which is something obviously it ended up being about 150 000 for every person who could prove that they lived in rosewood during 1923 and 500 000 for ancestors of the people who lived in rosewood um i'm doing a bit of a shrug but you know it was i guess something like i guess there was at least the sort of official government acknowledgement of it.

But when you see that initial seven million number and then the compromise, one point five million, I think there's a bit of a, you know, that sort of tells the story right there. Yeah. So my comment, my additional comment is that in a couple of years after this, Oklahoma had a similar kind of process, a commission. Yes, for Tulsa. Yeah, for Tulsa. And they couldn't get the reparations part of it through. And then North Carolina had a similar kind of commission around the forced sterilization of African Americans in kind of the middle of the 20th century. And that the reparations part didn't happen there as well so it is i mean this does make this sort of unique in terms of um compensation happening and also the fact that i can quickly i thought i had identified two additional such commissions is i think you know just more to emphasize how not especially atypical these kinds of events were.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. With that said, should we play the box office? Yeah. Yeah.

Sounds right. Um, I, I, I feel so bad that this, this, this is a, this is a pretty relatively serious conversation. Uh, when my usual vibe is like – I mean, I know I'm sort of like a serious columnist guy, but my usual vibe is not so serious about movies.

Right. I feel – Jamel, I feel like your next appearance should be – I mean, obviously the Spider-Man 3 episode. I know you're circling that whenever that comes around. I'm America's foremost spider-man but yeah you you should you should get a less sobering movie but also look uh jamal thank you uh uh because uh i mean we would have feel like, had an Amistad episode on our hands if we tried to tackle this alone, you know? Sure. And you just do have one of the best brains on the planet for putting things in perspective with regards to American history, I find. So thank you for wanting to do this episode.

Thank you. And look, Oroz would open number eight at the box office, Griffin, on February 21st, 1997. Okay, it opened to $3 million. It made $13 million. So it opened to less than the reparations that were asked for, but more than what was actually given

true that is true um it was out of theaters i don't know after a couple months yeah you know i mean it was dumped i would say not maybe unceremoniously but ceremoniously dumped and here's the thing what was the number one movie at the box office that week griffin i'm going to tell you it's new this week quote unquote new but it is a re-release i know what it is empire strikes back it's star wars the emperor the empire strikes i wish you hadn't given me the additional clues i knew it immediately i was just thinking about last night january february march new hope, Return of the Jedi. Just still just I mean, I feel like for box office nerds, still kind of an under discussed phenomenon that they were like, we're putting all three Star Wars movies back in theaters.

We're releasing them three weeks apart each. They're each going to get their own healthy play. And that the first one played like a fucking modern blockbuster and the second one played like a solid hit and the third one was a little bit underperforming i think that's why they haven't tried that again just because like it didn't because to me it seems like it'd be a good idea every like 10 years just to be like we're gonna put these back in theaters and make some easy cash i mean here's the thing i think if they did this, if Disney did this pure theatrical with the restored, unspecial editions, right? The theatrical cuts restored perfectly.

And it was like, we're putting them only in theaters. This is the only way you've been able to see these movies legally in decades. And then they'll go up on fucking digital and steelbook later i think they would make adjusted the exact same amounts of money i think they would be equally successful as re-releases i think it would be similarly a kind of phenomenon but um and it would be a true time is a flat circle moment that went back around to anyway uh right we're going as analog as possible but i do think it would work i think it's there was a wave after this of a lot of kind of bigger attempts at re-releases and especially where like oh what if you add back

in shit what if you remaster fix shit whatever and it's like there was an exorcist re-release that did pretty well it was like number one ha Exorcist re-release that did pretty well. It was like number one Halloween weekend. But pretty well seen. Right. Pretty well was as well as Return of the Jedi did, which was, I think, the wildest expectation they had for how these re-releases could do. And what's wild is that A New Hope was still the sixth highest grossing film of 1997, I think. I mean, the re-release was like played about as big as any movie that year it made 120 million dollars it opened to 40 in 1997 like it and can you tell

me what number two at the box office is this week star wars correct yeah right like fucking empire dethroned star wars from the top of the box had been number one for a month and empire strikes back is knocking it off insanity i i mean it's also just like i was going down this rabbit hole of um watching nerdy youtube videos about fucking star wars merchandise but they talked about the fact that like Star Wars had been so big, right? And then continued to have a tale for a handful of years after Jedi and then kind of disappeared. Like, whereas Trek was staying in the spotlight, Star Wars became like a thing, the way we talk about like Beetlejuice now, you know, like, oh, that was a movie from my childhood

that I liked a lot. and then in like 1995 they started making the toys again and it was seen as weird to make toys from a movie that was 15 years old at that point but they sold better than expected and lucas is obviously tinkering with like getting ready to do the prequels at this point then like 96 97 is shadow of the empire yeah i was about to say this this this i didn't know i didn't know that Star Wars had been away. So Shadow of the Empire suddenly makes way more sense what they were trying to do there. Right, and it was like,

well, can we do something to get people a little bit excited about Star Wars? Can we do everything but a new movie? We'll have a video game. We'll have a book. We'll release a soundtrack. We'll have toys. We'll have comics.

We'll do everything. That game fucking whips too. Yeah, and all the shit was good and it was well received but in the way that like you would expect an attempt to revive a nerd property would be received and then the special editions came out and i don't remember the timeline of shadow the empire was slightly before slightly after but that was clearly meant to be their major play and like the special editions were sort of like this is a promotional opportunity for the new remastered vhs that are about to come out and instead it just worked and became as culturally big as it was

when it first came out like it just played like a fucking modern movie and star Wars was the biggest movie for me in grade school in the way it was for my fucking dad like it just it's such a bizarre phenomenon all true it was the you know you took your parents yeah to your parents I saw your parents took their kids like that's what happened with me you know it was like let's pass

it on that was the sort of thing going on but I do think there was partially I just want to say the event status of them saying there's going to be one of these every three That was the sort of thing going on. But I do think there was partially, I just want to say, the event status of them saying there's going to be one of these every three weeks. That was sort of a phenomenon that no one was able to replicate in just a single movie re-release.

It will happen again, but I don't know what, and I don't know why. It'll probably happen with Star Wars. It sounded like a song. Yeah, it'll probably be fucking Star Wars. Number three at the box office is a film from a great american auteur

who's in a bit in his weird 90s post-oscar fallow period not that he made bad movies but i feel like he was not taken seriously post is it all the stone no one oscar he won one oscar uh yeah he might have won two he certainly won best director he. He probably won Best Picture. And it's not Demi or Zemeckis, obviously. No. Is it Barry Levinson? Someone we talk about all the time? No. Someone we talk about all the time, Griff. He's still

making movies. He's got a movie coming out this year. God bless him. Clint Eastwood. It's a Clint. It's a Clint. 97. He had two movies in 1997. Yes. Both based on bestsellers. Is it Bridges? It's not the Bridges of Madison County.

That was his previous film. Right. He had two movies in 1997. This is a thriller. Is it Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil? No. That was his other film in 1997. The one that he's not in. He's in this one.

Is it Bloodwork? Is that what that movie's called? No, I love that movie, Bloodwork. That is 2002. That, I would say, is one of his best movies. This is not a movie I love, but it's absolutely stack cast. It's absolute power. It's the movie in which, of course,

cat burglar clint eastwood witnesses the president getting a blow job uh and then gets drawn into a massive conspiracy and gene hackman plays the president they keep telling the same story over and over i just i just i kind of just imagine clint being like no, I could have stopped Bill Clinton. Yes, exactly, exactly. If I had been peeping on that blowjob, none of this would have happened. Wow, okay. So number one is Empire Strikes Back.

Number two is Star Wars. Number three is a Clint Eastwood beach thriller. Okay, number four? Number four is a disaster moviewood beach thriller. Okay, number four? Number four is a disaster movie, a real disaster movie that famously is coming out the same year as... Volcano?

Dante's Peak? It's Dante's Peak. It's Dante. One of the few Linda Hamilton movies yeah you know that's not a Terminator like post Terminator 2 right I was rereading that great New York Times profile

that came out before Dark Fate because Dark Fate also whips and I have been trying to finally get my friends to watch it and come to the light but she just talked about that she was just like trying to finally get my friends to watch it and come to the light. Um, but, uh,

uh, she, she just talked about that. She was just like, Cameron kept on being like, you should be the next action star. You could run with this. And she's like, I don't really care.

And volcano is the one time she sort of like tried to play the game. It was like, I don't give a shit. I'll retire. Fuck you. Um, Dante's week is fun, right?

Like, I, I, okay. You never seen it. Uh, Jamel, have you seen Dante okay, you've never seen it Jamel, have you seen Dante's Peak? I've not seen it for years I remember seeing it in theaters because my parents were in the military

over the summer maybe the previous summer whenever it would come out I know I was at the military on base child care and they took the older kids to see movies on occasion. And so I know that's when I saw Dante's Peak. I will say I was absolutely terrified of lava as a child.

And the trailers for Dante's Peak and Volcano made me shit myself. I could not handle them. I had nightmares from the trailers. My worst nightmare. I embraced lava, i have to say i was the opposite i love lava i just remember the volcano trailer flipping me out because i was like wait a second the whole reason i live in a city is because i'm far away from volcanoes you're telling me it could reach our streets, but essentially lava is wet fire.

And like, I mean, come on, like what, what, what more do I need to say? But that it is wet fire. That's a very good point.

Good way of putting it. It rules. I also was scared of lava Griffin. And there's a scene in Dante's peak that is probably not that intense, but I remember it really freaking me out. Is this when the grandma gets burned up in the lake? Correct. I'm waving my arms up,

simulating being burned up in a lake. But that's acid, by the way. It's not even, that's not lava. She's in acid water. That's a completely different thing. Jesus Christ. Look, clearly we need to do a Roger Donaldson series just to sort of sort through all this or let's do we could do a patreon lava franchise with dante's peak volcano and lava

um right uh yeah it would be fun lava's the most disturbing and distressing. The most chilling. It's Pierce Brosnan in Dante's Peak, right? It's Pierce and Hamilton. Number five is a film, a late entry in a comedy franchise that is called

Vegas Vacation. And there you go. I was like, what else can I say about it? Is this the final vacation? It's the final theatrical. It's the final theatrical. It's the one where National Lampoon was like, you don't need to put

our name on this one. We want to save our prestige for Van Wilder 2, The Rise of Taj. Don't tarnish our name with Vegas Vacation. But there were TV movies. They did aarnish our name with Vegas Vacation. But they were TV movies. They did a fucking Christmas

2 Cousin Eddie. There's a there's another one I think with the fucking Judge Reinhold and Bryan Cranston weirdly. Anyway, anyway, anyway. So that is a, you know, this is the thing about Rosewood. This is the thing I

want to say about the, you know, sureante's peak is a mini blockbuster but mostly it's being dumped against this competition that is like the star wars re-releases and like you know the fourth vacation movie you know number six is fools rush in which i think is like the second of many matthew perry attempts at stardom uh that's the one where it's like, what if you married Salma Hayek? And I'm like, sounds fine. And the movie's like, no, it's a problem. I'm like, I don't think it's a problem. I'd love to. It sounds like a real champagne problem to me. I'd love to

have that kind of problem. And then, like, you know, it's a bunch, you know, the bottom half is a bunch of Oscar movies that are left over. Jerry Maguire, The English Patient, Scream, Evita, you know, like stuff like that. Right, but to this point, like the Star Wars releases are not supposed to be playing like blockbusters.

They're supposed to be topping out at 30 mil total. The only new movies this week are Rosewood, Blood and Wine, which is opening on 100 screens, and Lost Highway, which hopefully we'll do on this show in a million years from now

whenever we figure out how to cover Twin Peaks. But kind of right. A dumped lynch in many ways. Dumped, dumped. Yes. Anyway. Interesting.

Jamal, thank you so much. Thank you. This is a real pleasure. Happy to talk about this movie. Glad I got to rewatch it. I don't think I would have ever thought to rewatch it. And it's an interesting enough movie that i might even like write about it since i i am allowed to just sort of like write about whatever shit's on my mind so um i yeah i i want you to know uh

i told you right before we started recording but i i made a failed too late hail mary pass attempt to get altman over the the hump the carpenter hump in March Madness last night as of this recording to by getting my father to do a video stump in for Bob. And I sent him your video as an example of what to follow. And he felt very intimidated after watching and said, well, that guy is just too cool. I'm not going to be able to do something that good but but the other thing he said to me but grip grip grip did did jamel actually write about march madness in the in the new york times like he was concerned that you had abused your platform to stump for jackie chan in a twitter

poll listen i know i i don't i don't think there are very many of my colleagues listen to this your platform to stump for Jackie Chan in a Twitter poll. Listen, I know I don't I don't think there are very many of my colleagues listen to this podcast. So I can say this compared to what some of the other columns have done. There is very little I could do to abuse my platform. I agree. Kapow. I agree. Speaking of, you should read Jamal's column.

Do not get scared off by the fact that it is in the op-ed section. But and also your mailing list is always great. Your email. Newsletter. The newsletter. I got my newsletter. Yeah, it comes out every Saturday now. Always a good newsletter. Yeah. It comes out every Saturday now. Um,

always a good read. Yeah. So, uh, people can subscribe to that and I'm on Twitter and you know, I'm around. And you're officially on the books for Spider-Man three, whenever that happens.

And if it doesn't happen soon enough, then we'll, we'll find a very, very stupid episode to have you on between now and then. I mean, I'm sure on the Patreon, you'll guys will get to the, to the spider,

the Spider-Man. No, we, we, we gotta doy griffin knows how i feel about this he's he's very we're very close to dr strange coming up he's making his first movie in a while he's returned to superhero i we i don't want to promise anything because you can't promise you never know variables at play but that is how i am feeling let's just let's just say this. Raimi's on the tarmac right now. I know we're wrapping up. I am fast. I'm so looking forward to what Raimi is going to do with a Doctor Strange movie. Even within the context of the Marvel machine,

I just feel like letting Raimi, especially if they're just going to let him indulge his style with one of these, I'm fascinated. a couple months ago it was like someone was clowning on spider-man 2 on twitter like you you you millennials like this and it's like motherfucker yes this is a great movie this is like the closest thing these movies get to greatness yeah it's still the high watermark as far as I'm concerned. Agreed. And that's one reason we got to cover.

And then we got to talk about three. He's on the tarmac and they're signaling and Rami's going like, do I have permission to fly? And we're like, hold on. We'll get you in there. We're checking the weather.

Yeah, there's some traffic. But yeah, we think so. But it's going gonna happen soon and I mean if that doesn't get people amped up for that miniseries and that episode then what will thank you all for listening please remember to rate review and

subscribe thanks to Marie Barty for our social media AJ McKeon and Alex Barron for editing assistance thank you to lane montgomery and the great american novel for our theme song go to blankies.red.com for some real nerdy shit go to patreon.com slash blank check for blank check special features where we do commentaries on franchises including uh whatever one march madness at this point we'll be doing um uh tune

in next week for shaft a real left turn of a movie from this one very excited though i'm gonna watch all the shafts i think i am going to as well i got the box set or the the the three movies and also the tv movies and my aim is to watch everything before this because I think this is an opportunity to talk about the weirdness of the Shaft franchise. We got a great guest lined up for that one. So tune in and as always. Did you freeze?

Oh, okay, you're thinking. No, it's just a serious episode. I don't really know what to say. I'm trying to think of anything to call back that isn't tasteless. Lava is fire water? Wet fire? Very well done. Oh, hold on. Remember to follow, Griffin. Oh, hold on.

Remember to follow. Ben. I know. I'm sorry, but this is the thing. Subscribe. It's not a word anymore. The language has changed. They've canceled the word.

It's canceled across on all platforms. So you got your spiel. You got to say follow now. I'm sorry. Ben, you explain this to me. And I was making a point of saying subscribe again because I'm trying to be the resistance. But perhaps resistance is futile in this case. You know, do you.

But I just as a reminder, please. Great. Here's what I'll say instead. Thank you all for listening. Please. Just fucking keep listening to this show.