The Big Picture - 2. ‘25th Hour’ and ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ | Mission Accomplished

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

In the wake of 9/11 and America’s new war on terror, two films capture the chaos of a country caught between open rage and simmering paranoia. Host: Brian Raftery Producers: Devon Baroldi, Brian Raftery, and Vikram Patel Sound Design: Devon Baroldi Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It didn't take long for the American government to respond to the attacks of September 11th. Good afternoon. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes. That's President George W. Bush, addressing the nation on October 7, 2001. The day U.S. and British troops began airstrikes in Afghanistan. Their targets? Training camps belonging to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. who'd orchestrated the 9-11 attacks. The U.S. also set its sights on the local Taliban government,

which was believed to have harbored al-Qaeda. The Taliban will pay a price. In his address, Bush sent a message to the rest of the world. You were either with us or you were against us. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocence, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril. Bush made it clear that the U.S. was going to respond with force.

During a visit to Ground Zero, he'd stood on the rubble with a bullhorn, surrounded by firefighters and first responders. America today is on bended knee in prayer for the people who's lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn. At one point, somebody in the crowd yelled, We can't hear you. I can hear you. I can hear you.

The rest of the world hears you. By now, you can probably guess my feelings about Bush. But this really was a remarkable moment. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. The roar you're hearing? That was being echoed across the country. Bush knew that millions of Americans wanted to hit back at the terrorists. And when he launched those strikes on the Taliban, he got a lot of public support.

One poll, by CBS and the New York Times, found that nearly 90% of respondents approved of the fighting in Afghanistan. Still, for a country that was already on edge, the strikes were another shock to the system. First came the 9-11 attacks, and then, before we'd even had time to process what had just happened, the country was suddenly in the middle of a war. A war with no clear endgame. And the years ahead would be full of battles, both the literal kind and the emotional kind, as Americans dealt with their feelings of rage and fear.

In this episode, we're going to look at two films that plug you directly into that time. The first is 25th hour, directed by Spike Lee. It stars Edward Norton as Monty, a drug dealer who's about to go to prison, and who's spending his last night of freedom in Manhattan. It's a city where everyone is confused, pissed off, or both. No one quite knows how to feel about anything anymore.

But they agree on one thing, that they don't feel good. In 25th Hour's most famous scene, Monty stands in front of a mirror and lets loose at everybody in New York City. This whole city, it's five minutes long. Let the fires rage. Let it burn to fucking ash and then let the waters rise and submerge this whole rat-infested place. While 25th hour deals with the emotional fallout of 9-11, John Denny's 2004 drama The Manchurian candidate deals with the political fallout.

It stars Denzel Washington as a veteran who becomes unraveled after he discovers a vast conspiracy, one that involves a war-obsessed U.S. senator, played by a truly fierce Merrill Street. I will, and I will do whatever is necessary to protect America. from anyone who opposes her. One thing I've learned while talking to people for this show is that everybody has a movie that brings to mind the months and years after 9-11, even if it's not about 9-11.

Maybe that movie is children of men. Maybe it's signs. Or maybe it's Donnie Darko, like we talked about in our last episode. Manchurian candidate in 25th hour are two of my 9-11 movies. I know that's a weird term, but those two movies bring me back

to what it was like to be an American and the New Yorker in the early 2000. These movies aren't allegories for the attacks or anything like that. Instead, they're dealing with the here and now of a strange time that even decades later is impossible to describe. There was definitely a palpable disassociation that everybody was going through. That's Daniel Pine, one of the screenwriters of the Manchurian candidate. Like, what is happening, what is going on in the world, and what are we building to, you know, what is this war that we, we're getting enmeshed in.

What are we building toward? That's a question a lot of people were asking in the early 2000s. And none of the answers seem promising. Make no mistake. The American people are terrified. They know something's coming. They can feel it. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Rafter.

And this is Mission Accomplished. Episode 2, 25th Hour and the Manchurian candidate. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, cinematographer Rodrigo Preeto was in Detroit, working on the movie Eight Mile. Prieto, who was born in Mexico City, had recently shot the 2000 drama Amore's Peros, a film that made a lot of people in Hollywood want to work with him.

An Eight Mile would be his first movie shot in the United States. And I remember in the production office when we got the news, and it was the assistant director. I was sharing an office with the A.Ds, and he's the one who said, whoa, and airplane just flew into the World Trade Center. Wow. And we all thought, you know, an accident. What an unfortunate accident.

But it soon became clear that this was something much bigger. It was pretty traumatizing because I had moved shortly before that to the U.S. So it really felt weird to be there at that time, you know, and be away from my fans. family and my daughters, my wife, they were all in L.A., and I was all paranoid. Not long after finishing 8 Mile, Prieto started working on his next American film, one that would take him to New York City, where the aftermath of 9-11 was visible everywhere you went. That movie was 25th Hour. It was based on a novel by David Benioff, who'd also written the screenplay, and who'd later go on to be one of the showrunners of Game of Thrones.

25th Hour is the story of Monty, a convicted dealer who's about to go to federal prison for seven years. Monty plans on spending his final moments of freedom with his two best friends and his girlfriend. But everyone is uneasy and unhappy,

and their relationships have all become strained. Benioff's novel came out in early 2001, and he worked on his script before the September 11th attacks. But after the towers fell, director Spike Lee decided

to make 9-11 a part of 25th hour. This was a New York movie, made by a New York filmmaker. As Lee notes in this interview with Hollywood.com, the city had changed. How could he not address it? New York, I'm dealing with my film,

which I deal with all my films that take place here. In 25th hour, it's the crippled, somewhat crippled, somewhat wounded, recovering city. At that point, mentioning 9-11 on screen in any way was a risky move. For the most part, Hollywood responded to the September 11th attacks the way the rest of the country did, with a mix of confusion and panic. In the weeks after 9-11, some big movies were delayed, like Collateral Damage, starring Arnold

Schwarzenegger as a widower out for revenge against a terrorist bomber. Warner Brothers pushed collateral damage back a few months, and even pulled the trailer from theaters for a bit. And you can see why. The trailer promises lots of explosions and violence. Things that likely would have made some moviegoers uncomfortable in the fall of 2001. What's the difference between you and I? The difference is, I'm just going to kill you. Other movies would have entire sequences reshot, like Men in Black 2,

which originally featured an action scene set at the World Trade Center, and a few other films, including Zoolander and Serendipity, had the towers erased from the city skyline entirely. The worry was that seeing the World Trade Center on screen would upset moviegoers, or at the very least, take them out of the movie. It was a jittery time. But Lee wasn't nervous. In fact, he was disappointed that other filmmakers

had cut the World Trade Center from their movies. In Lee's words, those directors had decided to, quote, punk out. And if there's one thing Spike Lee has never been accused of, it's punking out. He obviously didn't want to offend viewers, but he knew they could handle 9-11 being part of 25th hour. The movie was originally supposed to star Toby McGuire as Monty. After he dropped out, Lee turned to an actor who'd wanted to work with the director for years,

Edward Norton. The two had recently hung out after attending the concert for New York City, a post-9-11 fundraiser in October 2001. If you'll let me take a very quick diversion here, that concert, which was held at Madison Square Garden, was a massive undertaking. The show ran nearly five hours long, and featured some of the biggest stars in the world, Paul McCartney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jay-Z.

But the concert for New York City also highlights the unpredictable mood of the city at the time. It took place barely a month after the towers had fallen, and the garden was full of firefighters and police officers and their families. Everyone was on edge, and everybody needed a release. So the crowd went wild when Saturday Night Live star Will Ferrell showed up as George W. Bush

and talked about the airstrikes in Afghanistan. And why are we going to do this? I can do anything I want. My approval rating is like 106% right now. Richard Gear got some big cheers, too, at least for a while. The crowd turned against the actor when he suggested that the national mood, scared, angry, bent on revenge, could be used for something different than more. We could take that energy and turn it into something else.

We could turn it into compassion and to love, into understanding. That's apparently unpopular right now. My point is, emotions were running high in the city. And they were just as strong a few months later when Spike Lee and Edward Norton decided to make 25th hour. They'd be joined by a great ensemble cast, including some longtime New Yorkers. That includes Philip Seymour Hoffman as Jacob,

a private school teacher who's one of Monty's buddies, and Rosario Dawson is natural. Chorrell, his girlfriend, who Monty suspects of turning him into the feds. In the film, these characters all hang with Monty during his final moments of freedom. 25th Hour plays with time, cutting between Monty's present and his past. Before filming began, Lee told Prieto he wanted each section of 25th Hour to look and feel unique, and the cinematographer was more than up to the challenge. So I wanted to come up with a look for each one of those things, which would be.

It was perfect for me. It was how do I represent time is short? You know, how do I make it feel like there's a final day for the main character before going to jail, right? So time is short and time is precious. For scenes set in the present, Prieto decided to use a camera shutter technique that would make Monty's world look all the more urgent. So it makes each frame a little bit more sharp in a way or less motion blur for each frame. So it gives a little bit of a staccato feel to that, all that section. And because he was shooting on film, Prieto was able to develop those scenes

that they came back looking slightly grainy. For me, that was a 9-11 element of it, which was sort of the dirtiness or the ashes in the air. Before shooting got underway, Prieto and Lee traveled around New York. Despite everything the city had been through, the people they saw were in a pretty upbeat mood, though that's at least partly because of Lee.

He's so loved in Brooklyn and New York that wherever we went, it was, hey, man, Spike, what about them Knicks? You know, it was always, there was excitement. Still, Brito knew that, in some ways, he was very much an outsider. I didn't have that sense of loss that so many people from there had. For me, it was a sense of maybe a wonder, of, wow, I can't believe that these buildings were here and these lives were lost. That sense of absence would be conveyed

by 25th hours' dramatic opening credit sequence, one that would bring Prieto right next to ground zero. In early 2002, nearly 100 spotlights have been placed in downtown Manhattan. When the lights were projected into the sky, they created two giant blue beams that stood where the towers once were. The light stayed on for just a few hours each night.

and Prieto only had one evening to film them. So it really felt like we were in the middle of this historical moment and that was to me very powerful and moving, very moving. Then we had to really rush to get to all the different places before they shut the lights off. He and the rest of the crew would have to do a lot of rushing around

to make 25th hour. The film will be shot in less than 40 days in the summer of 2002. And though the movie was being made by Disney's Touchstone Pictures, proof that in the early 2000s, big studios were still willing to take big risks, 25th Hour had a modest budget of just $15 million. That meant the cast had to be willing to take pay cuts,

including Barry Pepper, who plays Monty's friend Francis, an obnoxious Wall Street hustler who lives in a swank downtown apartment. That's the setting for 25th Hour's most pointed scene about 9-11. It starts with Pepper and Hoffman's characters shooting the shit and opening some beers. Then they walk over to a giant glass window, where it's revealed that Ground Zero,

now a vast, flat construction site, is right below them. Yeah, New York Times says the air's bad down here. Oh, yeah? Well, fuck the Times. I read the post. EPA says it's fine. Hoffman's character then asks,

Are you going to move? Fuck that, man. As much good money as I pay for this place? Hell no. I'll tell you what, Bin Laden could drop another one right next door. I ain't moving. That moment sums up how a lot of New Yorkers felt at that time. Stubborn, angry, and kind of stupidly cocky.

And by the way, I'm allowed to say that because I was born in New York City. But what really hit me when I saw this scene back in 2002 was the site of Ground Zero itself. A lot of New Yorkers, including me, had tried to keep a respectful distance from downtown Manhattan. If you didn't have to be there, you just kind of quietly walked around it. But in 25th hour, Lee forces you to confront the reality of 9-11, whether you wanted to or not. When I saw the film in a Manhattan theater full of New Yorkers on opening weekend, nobody moved or made a noise for a long while after seeing Ground Zero on the screen. I was so immersed in the technical challenge of it

that I wasn't so aware of the magnitude of the shot, of the emotional impact, you know, of the shot. It was only until I was actually rolling the camera and seeing, oh, shit, is the camera going to be reflected? Oh, no, I think it's okay, no reflection, okay, good, okay, I think we got it. I think we got it. I think we got. And then after that, I realized, wow, look at what we're filming. As memorable as that Ground Zero scene was,

the moment that most people remember from 25th hour takes place a little bit earlier in the film. It's that long rant from Edward Norton's character, Monty. He's just a few hours away from going to prison. He's angry at the world, at himself, and even at his own friends and family. So Monty stands in front of a bathroom mirror, stares bitterly at his reflection,

and rips into the entire city. Everyone gets taken down, from the rich Fuck the Wall Street brokers, self-styled masters of the universe To the poor Fuck the panhandlers grubbing for money Smiling at me behind my back Fuck the squeegey man dirty enough The clean windshield of my car

Get a fucking job Nobody is spared Monty's wrath He attacks Italians, Jews, and Puerto Ricans The Police and the Church Monty even goes after Jesus Christ I mean, it's just pure rage. But it's also kind of weirdly affectionate. After all, part of loving New York is also hating New York.

And it's not even clear if Monty means everything he's saying. He just needs a target for his anger. A lot of targets. Including, finally, himself. No, fuck you, Montgomery Brogan. You had it all and you threw it away, you dumb fuck! Monty's rant was a key part of Benny. off's novel, and Lee had to push hard with Disney to get it in the film. It's a good thing he did,

because it's hard to imagine 25th hour without that moment. If the Ground Zero scene represents the somberness and sadness that it gripped the city after 9-11, Monty's rant shows all the volatility that was right under the surface. But the movie ends with another long speech. This one way more hopeful. As Monty's driven to prison by his father, played by Brian Cox, his dad tells him that he can still escape, that he can flee to a different city, change his identity, and even raise a family. And when he's old, Monty's dad says, Monty can tell his kids how lucky they are to be alive. He can remind them, this life came so close to never happening. This life came so close to never happening. That's the way a lot of us felt in the early 2000s. Everybody across the city

and across the country had been reminded that their fates were out of their hands that their lives were a gift the question now not just for Monty but for the audience was

what do you do with that gift going forward the fact that 25th hour was willing to ask that kind of question is why even now people keep rediscovering this movie it wasn't a huge hit at the time but it's a film that shows

that anything can be rebuilt no matter how damaged whether they happen to be buildings cities, or even our own lives. We need, you know, the tools to help us deal with these traumas. And I think art, hopefully, is one of those tools. And I hope that 25th hour has been that for New Yorkers. That's Rodrigo Preeto again.

I should probably point out that he and I were talking just a few months after the Los Angeles wildfires of early 2025. I must add that now I'm going through something in a way similar in my personal life because I lived in the Pacific Palisades. My house didn't burn down, but my neighborhood did. When you were mentioning that notion of seeing ground zero, and remember what that was and at that moment where it's just basically, you know,

they're still cleaning up the debris and starting to, you know, prepare for a construction of something. Who knows what that was going to be? That's where the palaces are had now. Reminders of the fires are everywhere. in the form of empty lots and burnt structures. So it's poignant for me that we're discussing this where I'm personally going through something similar,

that trauma, right, of the destruction of a place that you've been at, you know, for years, you know. So anyway, it's interesting that right now this has come back, you know, and talk about 25th hour, so I thank you. We'll be right back. By the time 25th hour came out in the fall of 2002, it was clear America was heading toward another foreign war, this time in Iraq. The two countries had a fraught history, to say the least.

America was one of several nations to take part in a bombing campaign over Iraq in 1991, back when George H.W. Bush was president. That endeavor, which was a huge victory for the U.S., was known as Operation Desert Storm. Now, more than a decade later, some in the new Bush administration believed Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, had ties to al-Qaeda, and that Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs. Here's George W. Bush in September 2002, making his case against Hussein to the American public. For 11 long years, Saddam Hussein, has sidestepped, crawfished, wheedled out of any agreement he had made,

not to harbor, not to develop weapons of mass destruction. Okay, so there were a couple of problems with all of this. First off, a lot of intelligence experts questioned the link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. And the government wasn't providing a lot of evidence that Iraq was manufacturing WMDs. That didn't stop members of the Bush administration, especially Vice President Dick Cheney, from trying to scare Americans into backing the so-called war on the war on the government. on terror. Here's Cheney on Face the Nation in March 2003, going to extremes to justify America invading Iraq. And we now are faced with a prospect of a terrorist using perhaps

a nuclear weapon against us. And we know as a result of 9-11 that we are multiple. Now, if you happen to be a history professor, and by the way, I am not, you're probably ready to drive off the road right now in frustration, because I am really simplifying the whole geopolitical climate of the early 2000s. But I got to get through this section, There's an underrated Denzel Washington movie to talk about. Anyway, by early 2003, it was clear Bush had set his sights on Iraq. That February, he sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to address the United Nations Security Council so he could lay out the case for war.

Sodom Hussein and his regime will stop at nothing until something stops him. A lot of Americans weren't buying that argument. There was huge pushback against the invasion of Iraq, which some people believed was just a way for the U.S. to gain control of the country's oil supply. There were protests around the world, like this one in New York City, which attracted hundreds of thousands of attendees. George Bush, what do you say? Machine change in the USA. War on Enron, not Iraq. But those rallying cries weren't going to stop Bush.

In March, a global coalition began bombing Baghdad. Millions of Americans watched as Iraq was subjected to what was called a shock and awe military campaign. Here's Dan Rather, explaining the massive amount of weaponry involved in those initial attacks. The attack came in waves, cruise missiles, followed by the F-117 stealth bombers with so-called bunker-busting bombs. Everything about the lead-up to the Iraq war felt wrong. The fear-mongering, the lack of transparency, the way Americans were basically told, hey, this is happening and it's going to go great. So stop complaining.

It was a truly terrible time. And this was before we all realized that Bush and Cheney's claims about WMDs were total bullshit. It really felt like we were being played. Like there were these bigger forces controlling our lives. Forces we couldn't see or understand or push back against. The feeling at the time was

our system was slowly, almost like invasion of the body snatchers. The political forces were kind of being co-opted and none of us knew. And it was happening right in front of us. That screenwriter Dean Giorgeris, who told me about that sneaking suspicion that we were all being misled about Iraq. He worked on a movie that I think

really depicts the emotional turbulence of the early 2000s, the Manchurian candidate. Something happened out there in the desert that night during that mission, and it's not what we thought it was, and it happened on my... The Manchurian candidate stars Denzel Washington

as Ben Marco, an Operation Desert Storm Vet who's experiencing strange nightmares about his time overseas. Ben slowly begins to realize that he's been brainwashed and implanted with false memories, and he suspects that one of his fellow vets has also been manipulated. His name is Raymond Shaw, and he's a very handsome but very bland candidate

for Vice President of the United States. Ben tries to convince Raymond, who's played by Leib Schreiber, that somebody's messed with their minds and is now in control of their lives, which was kind of a relatable feeling back when this movie came out in 2004. Somebody got into our heads

with big steel-toed boots, cable cutters and a chain saw, and they went to town. Neurons got exposed, and circuits got rewired. It turns out both men are part of a deadly political conspiracy involving Raymond Shaw's mother,

Eleanor Shaw. She's a powerful U.S. senator, played by Merrill Streep, who sees terrorism everywhere she looks. I will do whatever is necessary to protect America. from anyone who opposes her. Eleanor uses some scare tactics

that you could describe as Cheney-esque. You know we are on the brink of another cataclysm, probably nuclear, on our own soil. The Manchurian candidate had a long history, one that went back decades.

It began as a novel by Richard Condon and was first made into a movie in 1962. That version stars Frank Sinatra as an ex-Korean war soldier who discovers one of his fellow vets has been unknowingly brainwashed by communists and has been ordered to kill the U.S. president. The original Manchurian candidate is a fantastic thriller.

And the fact that the original was so good is why Giorgeris was skeptical when he was asked about writing a remake back in the late 1990s. My first thought was absolutely not. The original film is a classic that I love, and I don't want to be a part of doing that. But Remembourger,

Thanks for becoming more and more popular in the early 2000s, as studios try to compete with video games, the internet, the rise of cable TV, and a bunch of other forms of entertainment. And besides, while the original version of the Manchurian candidate was a classic, Georgeris knew that the country had changed since the movie came out in the early 1960s. Paranoia was very much in the air back then, but it was based on the government's efforts to root out suspected communists in the U.S. That search led to an atmosphere of mistrust, pitting friend against friend. And, you know, the original film, obviously, an examination of the Red Scare,

examination of communism, what the fear of communism could do to our government. So I started thinking, well, you know, what does it feel like is happening to our relationship with government? He thought about politicians like Dan Quayle, a smiling, blank suit who'd come out of nowhere in the late 1980s and been elected vice president. He also thought of John F. Kennedy Jr., a young, good-looking, go-getter, many assumed was going to be a political superstar, despite his lack of experience. We're moving into this era of political apathy when it comes to how well we know and we research

the people who are empowered. Georgieris had also seen the rise of terrorism in the 1990s, like the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which had killed six people. Terrorism obviously hadn't become a war on yet, but it was building, and it was becoming evident that appealing to America's sense of security was something that's coming. New dangers from overseas, a wave of voter apathy, and a young generation of unknowable politicians. By the late 1990s, Georgieris had a lot to work with. It felt like an exciting set of ingredients to tell a modern story.

Georgieris began working on a new version of the Manchurian candidate. The biggest question was, who would be the bad guys this time around? After all, the original story had been set during the Cold War, which was long over. So it was time to find a new villain, and Georgieris went to Washington, D.C. to talk to some insiders. Almost every time the subject of this film came around, and I would say, who do you think would be involved today? How do you think it would unfold? It kept coming back to these... corporations that people didn't know really existed yet. One giant corporation that people were about to become very familiar with was Halliburton.

It was ostensibly a massive oil services company, but Halliburton was much more complex than that. The company seemed to have its fingers in everything. And in the 1990s, one of Haliburton's divisions was handling U.S. military contracts overseas. By the way, Halliburton's CEO during the second half of the 90s, that would be Dick Cheney. Keep that in mind for later. The point is, when Giorgeris began working on the Manchurian candidate script, it was becoming clear that the country was entering a corporate era. All of this was happening behind the scenes.

You know, it was a very slow-moving, obviously, Ku, it's way too dramatic a word, but it was a very slow-moving revolution of our political system that moved power really away from the voters and even from the parties into this small group of people with incredible amounts of wealth. Big corporations, vague politicos, secret power moves, they'd all wind up in the Manchurian candidate remake, which, by the way, a lot of people in Hollywood

thought was a terrible idea. Studios may have been looking for remakes back then, but this one was a very tough sell. So it was really more a project that I think no one believed what happened until we were able to come up with this version of it and even then it languished for a little while until after 2001. The Manchurian candidate got stalled out

during the development process. Then, in the early 2000s, it came to the attention of superproducer and incredibly nice guy, Scott Ruden. One thing he was great at doing was getting movies like this made and he called Sherry Lansing up and said, why is this film sitting on the shelf?

I can cast this and make this right away. And then, I mean, he did that in the span of about 48 hours. Sherry Lansing, by the way, was the chairwoman of Paramount Pictures. By the time she greenlit the Manchurian candidate in the fall of 2002, it was clear the country was heading to war with Iraq. For a big studio to commit to a dark political drama back then was honestly pretty ballsy. I mean, I love the Manchurian candidate remake,

but even I would have been like, yeah, let's just make another Crocodile Dundee's sequel. But Paramount had gotten Denzel Washington to agree to star, and the studio had landed on a major director, Jonathan Deming, the guy who did The Silence of the Lambs, stopped making sense, and three or four of your other favorite movies. By then, Georgierrez had to move on to another project he'd committed to, so screenwriter Daniel Pine took over. I talked to Pine about what it was like to write a movie about such a chaotic era while

it was still underway. As I was writing it, as I was working on it, At the time, I was constantly chasing, I would come up with something and it would happen. We were constantly trying to stay ahead of, so that it didn't feel dated when it came out. A lot had happened, obviously, since the late 1990s. For one thing, Halliburton, through one of its divisions, had become an even bigger player in the world of military security. The company now had a foothold in both Afghanistan and Iraq. And while Cheney was no longer Hal Burton's CEO, he's still at a financial stake in the company.

And dozens of other corporations would be pulled into America's new wars. The invasion of Iraq was going to make a lot of people a lot of money. As Pine points out, a new philosophy was taking hold during the Bush years. For some people, there was a sense that the country had undergone a fundamental evolution. They felt that America no longer needed presidents, they needed CEOs. We needed, you know, we needed a businessman to run the country. The Iraq War was kind of a corporate war. And in the new version of the Manchurian candidate,

the village wouldn't be some far-off communist country. It would be a corporation, one called Manchurian Global. Think Halliburton, but much more powerful. Manchurian Global has its fingers in everything. As Marco finds out when he visits a scientist, played by the late great Bruno Gans. Imagine not just a corporation, Marco, but a goddamn geopolitical extension of policy

for every president since Nixon. Cash is king, Marco. Cash is king. I don't want to give away too much of the movie's plot here, but the whole Manchurian conspiracy involves Streep's character, the powerful U.S. senator named Eleanor Shaw. We wanted to be the smartest person in the movie.

Eleanor is smart and shrewd. She's absolutely unapologetic about her desire for power and about America's use of force. Streep gets off some A-plus-plus speeches in this movie. I mean, they're like really wild out there, Merrill Streep speeches. At one point, she makes a fierce case as to why her son should be the party's vice presidential candidate instead of the current guy who believes... Human beings are essentially good and that our powers somehow, I don't know,

shameful or evil or never to be used. She then issues a not-too-veiled threat. And we now are faced with a prospect of a terrorist using perhaps a nuclear weapon against us. Sorry, that was actually Dick Cheney again. Not sure how I got my war mongers all mixed up. Anyway, here's Eleanor Shaw. Make no mistake. The American people are terrified.

They know something's coming. They can feel it. And we can either shovel them the same old shit and call it sugar. Or we can arm them. In the original version of the Manchurian candidate, Eleanor was an enemy spy masquerading as a concerned mom. But times had changed. In the early 2000s, there were a number of powerful women in Congress,

Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Diane Feinstein. So the Eleanor Shaw character had to evolve with the times. This is a powerful person who, nevertheless, there was a glass ceiling that she couldn't get past, that she was not going to be able to be elected president. Streep took inspiration from some of those real politicians, at least in terms of appearance. I know that Merrill leaned hard into wanting to look like Nancy Pelosi, and her hair was kind of a combo of Hillary. And, you know, we really did want to make it feel as real as possible. There are other similarities between the politics of the Manchurian candidate and the politics of the early

2000s. Right before the movie began filming in the fall of 2003, a handsome, big smiling young politician named John Edwards announced he was joining the presidential race. He'd eventually become the Democrats' vice presidential candidate. Edwards was boyish and chipper. Here he is at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, trying to get people amped up for his running mate, John Kerry, which was not an easy task. You can embrace the politics of hope, the politics of what's possible, this is America, where everything is possible. Before he joined the race, most people in the country had no idea who Edwards was. But like Raymond Shaw and the Manchurian candidate, he'd seemingly been born to be a politician.

At his best, John Edwards was just such a lot, sort of charismatic, camera loved him, people loved him. You know, easy smile, glib answers, that kind of character seemed believable as someone, that could be quickly inserted into a political process the way that Eleanor does at the convention. I should point out here that in the new version of the Mancharian candidate, it's never made clear which party Raymond and Eleanor Shaw are part of, even though it's pretty obvious they're Republicans. Jonathan really was interested in not making it partisan in that way

and not making it about liberal versus conservative, but more about a more fundamental right and wrong. But while the movie didn't get too specific about the country's politics, the Manchurian candidate was very plugged into the era. Again, I don't want to give away all of its twists and turns, but this is a film about the many unpleasant side effects of living in the 21st century. Conspiracy theories, PTSD, multinational conglomerates in cahoots, deep cahoots, with politicians.

If 25th hour chronicles the anxieties of being a New Yorker in the early 2000s, Manchurian candidate shows what that time was like for the rest of the country. It's a story about not knowing what the facts are, not knowing what the truth is. But none of that would make the Manchurian candidate an easy movie to sell. Paramount decided to release a film in the summer of 2004. They thought it would play well in the summer and there was a popcorn thriller. That was optimistic, considering that test audiences had been. been kind of mixed on the movie.

There was concern that the ending was too downbeat. It was too inconclusive. It didn't feel like there was a big win. Looking back now, it's kind of amazing that Paramount thought the Manchurian

candidate would do well in theaters. Granted, it was a smart, psychological thriller with some major stars. But by 2004, it was clear that many Americans weren't too interested in mixing their entertainment with their politics. In the months after 9-11, actors, filmmakers, and musicians who question the country's direction, whether they were talking about the Iraq War or Bush and Cheney or Halliburton,

were being criticized in the press and in person. And the Oscar goes to... Bowling for Columbine. Michael Moore and Michael Donovan! In March 2003, Michael Moore won an Academy Award for his documentary, Boeing for Columbine. the bombing in Iraq had started less than a week before and outside the Oscar ceremony that night a dozen people were arrested for protesting the war

so when Moore was called to the stage to accept his award he used his time to address the topic that was on everyone's minds and we live in fictitious times we live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president as Moore spoke out against the president some people in the audience began to boo We are against this war, Mr. Bush.

Shame on you, Mr. Bush. Shame on you. Moore's comments pissed off a lot of Americans. How dare he speak out against the war? One newspaper even had readers call in to voice their opinions. Here's a sample of how they felt about the ceremony and about the anti-war protests in general. These are all real comments, read by some of your favorite ringer people.

I'm so glad I didn't waste any of my time watching the Academy Awards. Michael Moore made me angry when he said such ugly things about President Bush. The Hollywood folks are not doing their part to keep our country free. I just want to say that I'm appalled by all these anti-war protesters. I think Nicole Kidman should get acquainted with a real passionate man. Well, that's random, but I'm sure that was the only comment about Nicole Kidman, right? Oh, wait. The best thing Nicole Kidman ever did was to get rid of Tom Cruise.

I hope now that we'll see more of her. again, those are all real comments. You get the point. During the early years of the Iraq war, saying anything political was guaranteed to cause a backlash. After the Dixie Chicks criticized Bush during a concert in London in 2003, people smashed their CDs, and some stations even pulled their songs from the air. That same year, at a Pearl Jam concert in Denver, Eddie Vedder impaled a mask of Bush's face on a microphone stand, leading some of their fans to boo and walk out. And the Baseball Hall of Fame canceled a Bull Durham event. Why? Because stars Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon had spoken out against the war. All of which is to say that by 2004, a political drama like

the Manchurian candidate, which cost Paramount $80 million, by the way, was bound to piss some people off. So when it was time to sell the movie, the film's political overtones were kind of smoothed over. And while the studio originally considered screening the Manchurian candidate at the Democratic Convention that year, they quickly realized that was probably a bad idea. And when the actors promoted the movie, they often brushed off questions about the film's bigger implications. I've watched a lot of interviews for the Manchurian candidate. And in almost all of them, the actors are doing all they can to say pretty much nothing

at all. It doesn't say, hey, this is how politics are. That's Denzel Washington, trying his very best to avoid saying anything controversial. If anything, it says, hey, don't believe anything, including us, or make up your own mind. Even with its big name stars and a big summer marketing push, the Manchurian candidate didn't connect with audiences in 2004. As Daniel Pine notes, people came in expecting a movie where Denzel kicks some ass, not one where he's struggling to piece together a conspiracy.

There had to be some audiences who went expecting to have a great time at the movies and then to have this rather sober, thrilling, but very sober and paranoid experience. Now, when it comes to movies, sober and paranoid is exactly my kind of experience. And I've always dug the Mancharian candidate. It's one of Denzel's most understated, underrated performances. And the movie is a real rarity in Hollywood.

It's politically minded and pissed off, but it's also deeply pleasurable. I mean, there's a scene where a guy gets assassinated while Fountains of Wainsong plays in the background. Trust me, this is a very Brian movie. And I'm not the only one who loves the Mancharian candidate. Along with 25th Hour, it's one of those early 2000 films that keeps getting re-evaluated and rediscovered.

If you weren't around back then, those films can give you an idea of what America was going through at the time. And if you were there for the 2000s, 25th Hour and the Manchurian candidate bring up all the heavy emotions of that era. And I'm really glad that these movies, just exist. They're both big studio films that weren't afraid to respond to what was going on in the world, and they were made by A-list filmmakers and actors. We didn't know it then, but those

kinds of movies would become harder and harder to find in the years ahead. Then again, let's face it, everything will get harder in the years ahead. The 2000s were barely at the halfway point, and things were already pretty rough. After all the lies, and through all the confusion, we were in desperate need of a new kind of leader. A real American, one who wasn't afraid to look us straight in the eyes and tell us the truth, no matter the consequences. And I'm Ron Burgundy. Go fuck yourself, San Diego. That's next on Mission Accomplished. This podcast is reported, written, and hosted by me, Brian Raftery.

The executive producers of this podcast are Juliet Lippman and Sean Fennyson. Story editing by Amanda Dobbins. was produced by me, Devin Beraldi, and Vikram Patel. Fact-checking by Casey Gallagher. Copy editing by Craig Gaines. Talent booking by Katz-Belain. Sound design by Devin Beraldi. Mixing and mastering by Scott Somerville.

The music you hear in this series is from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Art direction and illustration by David Shoemaker. Thanks for listening.