The Big Picture - 3: ‘Anchorman’ and ‘Zodiac’ | Mission Accomplished

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

As Americans pine for a kinder, gentler nation, two wildly entertaining (and wildly different) films about life in 1970s California poke holes in our country’s past. 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

By 2004, a lot of Americans were feeling, well, pretty lousy, and you can't blame them. Within a few years of George W. Bush taking office, the excitement and promise that people were feeling when the new millennium began, three, two, one, had given way to a depressing new day-to-day existence. There were constant terrorist threats, multiple wars, and a general feeling that nothing was going is planned. The present had become a bummer. And so movie makers and moviegoers began racing back to the past. That's not entirely surprising. After all, nostalgia is one of our oldest industries. I mean, it's literally nothing new. Yet the pop culture revivalism of the 2000s was more than just a diversion. It was part of a full-on retreat. Audiences were so eager to forget their current

reality that they happily tried to relive any decade, even the ones they'd missed the first time around. They traveled to the 1950s and 1960s through music biopics like Ray, walk the line, I'm not there, and walk hard, the Dewey Cox story. That was freaking transcendental Paul McCartney. Don't you read John Lennon? Yes, Dewey Cox. With meditation, there's no limit to what we can imagine. And the 1970s came back too, just like they always do. I had totally forgotten this. But somehow, in the early 2000s, we got not one, but two primetime Brady Bunch TV specials. Those were followed by a bunch of Hollywood remakes of films from the Nixon Ford Carter era. The Longest Yard, The Bad News Bears, Freaky Friday, the Amityville Horror.

There was even a movie version of the 70s TV show Starsky and Hutch. I like you, Lincoln. It's the 76. It won't be out to next year. But I know some people that know some people that rob some people. By the way, did I ever mention that I was on the set of Starsky and Hutch? and then I spent most of my time there in a corner watching Snoop Dog, calmly stroken iguana, and staying out of Owen Wilson's eyeline?

Anyway, that's my Starskeane Hutch story. It's not that memorable. Kind of like the movie. And as for the 1980s, they really blew up in the early 2000s. You could hear it in the next wave of synth pop bands, or see it in the fashion of the time. GQ did a whole fashion shoot dedicated to the Reagan era.

And even E.T. came back, making tens of millions of dollars in theaters. Some of these blasts from the past offered a vision of America that was idyllic and idealized. An America where everyone felt safe, where bad guys went to prison, and where everyone mostly got along.

You know, the good old days. But these good old days that people were nostalgic for in the early 2000s were a myth. And two major films from the Bush years made that point clear, albeit in very different ways. The first movie is the story,

of an obnoxious local news anchorman named, well, you know his name. And I'm Ron Burgundy. Go fuck yourself, San Diego. The second movie is the real-life account of a serial killer, one who haunted Northern California on and off for years. I think you know his name, too. This is the Zodiac speaking.

The movie's Anchorman and Zodiac are both set in 1970s, California. And both are workplace stories, with a lot of the action taking place in big city newsrooms. One's a fast-paced spoof of the TV industry. The other is a slow-burning thriller about police work and journalism. And while these are wildly different films and take place way in the past, both movies reflect the rapid onset instability of the Bush years. I mean, Anchorman could have been set in the Bush White House.

It's about a bunch of powerful dudes who are cocky, careless, and eager to rush into combat. This is going to end right here, right now. Let's dance, Dickweed. And the main character in Zodiac is an amateur investigator, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who finds himself going deeper and deeper into an information abyss, the kind that millions of conspiracy-obsessed Americans were falling into after 9-11.

Just because you can't prove, it doesn't mean it's not true. Look, I'm not trying to say that these movies were a direct response to what was going on in the early 2000s. But I don't think it's an accident that they arrived during the Bush year. years. Comedy is always about the subconscious, same with the horror movies. That's Anchorman, director and co-writer Adam McKay. I think what was going on was we were participating in this culture that was taking a dark turn. Anchorman and Zodiac would bring that darkness to light in surprising ways.

They were reminders that the violence, paranoia, and general uneasiness that people were experiencing in the 2000s was nothing new. They were just coming together at a pace none of us could have expected, or controlled. Ron Burgundy summed it up in one of Anchorman's most quotable lines. You know the one. Boy, that escalated quickly.

From Spotify and the Ringer podcast now, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is Mission Accomplished. Episode 3, Anchorman and Zodiac. By the mid-2000s, a lot of Americans were starting to feel disillusioned about the state of the country. Adam McKay wasn't one of them. He'd been disillusioned for years. I'm old enough to remember when Reagan got elected how the culture started to change. Conspicuous consumption kind of became the goal.

And it was alarming. McKay had voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, hoping that a Democrat in office would turn things around. I'm like, all right, we're going to get back on track. And that didn't work out very well. Though a lot of people tend to glamorize what life was like in the 1990s, something I'm very much guilty of. at times, McKay was frustrated by what he saw happening that decade. And he's right,

there were plenty of problems during those years. The country underwent drastic shifts. Jobs went overseas. Courts began sending a shockingly high number of black Americans to prison, and there were multiple billion-dollar media mergers, giving corporate America more control than ever over the news. McKay channeled some of his disappointment into his comedy, including his work on Saturday Night Live, where he was made head writer in 1996. That's where McKay met Will Farrell, who'd go on to become one of S&L's biggest stars, and who spent the early 2000s doing a spot-on impression of George W. Bush.

Farrell's version of Bush was an amiable dingling, one whose speeches were littered with all kinds of weird malapropisms. I believe it was the great poet, Leonard Skinnerd, who wrote, ooh, that smell. Can't you smell that smell? Well, I can smell that smell. And it's the smell of George W. Triumph. For tonight, I am Victorian.

McKay left SNL in 2001, not long after Bush took office. Over the next few years, McKay became desponded about the government's response to the terrorist attacks of 9-11. The first time I was legitimately hair on fire,

I don't want to say traumatized, but, like, actively upset every day. That was during the Bush years and the invasion of Iraq. It was the first time I genuinely was afraid for the United States and started to really feel uncomfortable with being a part of what was going on. McKay was also upset by. by how the Iraq War, and the response to the Iraq War, was playing out in the media. Several media outlets had consolidated in the 1990s, and new laws had made it easier for big

companies to team up. Disney bought ABC, Viacom merged with CBS, and Clear Channel gobbled up hundreds of radio stations. These companies didn't want to upset their audiences, or their advertisers, especially after 9-11. When things were so heated, one stray comment could get you silenced, which is what happened with Bill Maher. Look, I get it. None of you want to hear from Bill Maher. Even circa early 2000's Bill Maher. Back then, he was pretty much the same leaky smugboat that he is now. But Marr played a crucial role in the post-9-11 crackdown on media. On the September 17th, 2001 episode of his ABC show Politically Incorrect, Marr got into a debate with conservative commentator Dinesh DeSuzza. Again, I know, Bill Maher and Dinesh DeSuzza. This is the

ultimate, no matter who wins, we all lose kind of scenario. Anyway, they were discussing a recent speech by President Bush, one in which he described the 9-11 hijackings as a cowardly act. Here's Bill Maher's response. We have been the cowards, lobbying cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it, not coward.

That comment set off a firestorm. Advertisers dropped out of the show, and at least a dozen ABC affiliates announced they'd stopped carrying politically incorrect altogether. A few days later, Mar's comments were brought up at a White House press briefing. Surely, his commander, he was enraged. I'm getting there, less. Okay, sure. That's Ari Fleischer, who was the White House press secretary at the time.

I'm aware of the press reports about what he said. I have not seen the actual transcript of the show itself, but assuming the press reports are right, it's a terrible thing to say. As if Fleischer hadn't made his point already, he added, The reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that. There never is. While we're pretty used to the White House attacking specific TV personalities nowadays, this was unheard of back in 2001.

And while Fleischer would later say his quote was taken out of context, it wasn't hard to hear this as a warning, one that TV executives took seriously. Bill Maher's show was ended by ABC in 2002, and in the years it followed, the corporations that owned some of the country's biggest news networks became skittish about any program that questioned America's military role in the Middle East. Case in point. In February 2003, just a few weeks before the start of the Iraq War,

MSNBC canceled a talk show starring longtime TV host Phil Donahue. The network blamed the decision, in part, on low ratings, and Donahue's numbers were pretty disappointing. But he'd also just aired an episode in which several panelists, including actors Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, debated whether Americans should be protesting the war. At one point in the episode, at many points, in fact, a commentator accuses Sarandon of being un-American. I love this country. I'm raising my children here, and they are terrified that we will be kicked out of this country because I'm asking questions. This episode is wild. If you have an extra 45 minutes to kill, and need proof that Americans have been polarized forever,

Look it up on YouTube. It gets really heated. And there are some pretty amazing call-in guests, like Wanda from Indiana. Some joke about it. And actresses think that their opinion is worth so much more than anybody else. As far as I know, Susan Sarandon and that Tim whatever is her voice for him, they're not even married. Donahue's show was canceled not long after this episode aired. Here he is in 2011.

Discussing his firing in an interview with the program, Democracy Now. anti-war voices were not popular. And if you're General Electric, you certainly don't want an anti-war voice on a cable channel that you own. For Adam McKay, the clampdown on dissent was maddening. So is the fact that, as he saw it, the media wasn't asking enough questions

about why the U.S. was going into Iraq. Some news outlets even seem to be cheering on the war. Like Fox News, which experienced record high ratings after 9-11. Many of the network's anchors pushed the pro-war narrative night after night. Here's a typically chest-thumping Fox broadcast about the invasion of Iraq from April 2003.

You'll probably recognize the host's voice. My question of you is those people that have not supported the effort and raised questions about the president and his diplomacy efforts. Yep, that's Sean Hannity. Will they be embarrassed when we find all these weapons of mass destruction? It wasn't just the big TV networks that had disgusted McKay. He was also enraged by the way some major newspapers handled the war in Iraq.

In 2004, the New York Times published an editorial about its own coverage of the lead-up to the war, saying that some of it was, quote, not as rigorous as it should have been. The Times also acknowledged that they'd unknowingly printed misinformation. So, you've got pro-war propaganda, sloppy reporting. It was all just a mess. So the media, the news media escape was getting really ugly and started for the first time in my life at that point to look like they were really focusing on manufacturing

a level of consent for that invasion. Things that felt different when McKay was growing up, when he trusted the people he saw on the nightly news. It was a time he'd revisit in his first film with Will Farrell, Anchorman, The Legend of Ron Burgundy. There was a time, a time before cable. When the local anchorman reigned supreme, when people believed everything they heard on TV.

Said in 1974, Anchorman is the story of Ron Burgundy, a San Diego News Anchor with a giant mustache and an ego to match. I'm very important. I have many leather-bound books, and my apartment smells of rich mahogany. Anchorman wasn't an easy movie to get off the ground in the early 2000s. McKay had never directed a feature before, and Farrell had never been the lead in a hit film.

No studio wanted to make it. We had, I think, ten rejections in one day. That's Farrell in 2017, talking about the movie's origins with Bill Simmons. At one point, Farrell and several other actors even did an Anchorman Table Read for a financier who was interested in funding it. And the guy was like, oh, that was the funniest read-through I have ever sat through. But we can't make the movie. That was it.

They had already determined that for whatever reasons, they just weren't going to make any money off that subject matter. The movie's fortunes changed after the 2003 release of Old School, the college comedy that proved Farrell could find an audience outside SNL. He and McKay would get a pretty decent budget, about $26 million. They'd also get to fill out their cast with a bunch of comedy performers, including Steve Carell, who plays Brick Tamland, a dim bulb weatherman. I ate a whole bunch of fiberglass insulation.

It wasn't cotton candy like that guy said. Ron Burgundy and his crew are impulsive, dim, and surprisingly aggressive. At one point in Anchorman, they get into a violent brawl with news teams from competing networks. Public news team is taking a break from its pledge drive to kick some ass. Hey, it's Susan Sarandon's former partner, Tim Whatever. No commercials? No mercy! Though set in the 70s, the character is an Anchorman embody the kind of high-y-year-old. testosterone, low IQ behavior that would define the 2000s, especially when it comes to Iran.

He's supposedly a journalist, yet he often has no idea what he's talking about. Sometimes he just straight up invents facts and sticks with them no matter how foolish they might be. Discovered by the Germans in 1904, they named it San Diego, which of course in German means a whale's vagina. And other times, he just repeats with. whatever he's told to say. You stay classy, San Diego. I'm Ron Burgundy? Damn it, who typed a question mark on the teleprompter?

Watching Anchorman now, decades later, you can see how McKay was incorporating all of his disillusionment with America into his movie. As if to say, yeah, all these dudes telling you they know what's going on, they're full of shit. Farrell and I were pretty conscious of the fact that there were a lot of, like, mediocre are white guys steering us into these disasters.

And that mediocrity wasn't limited to the media or to the White House. The early 2000s was a boom period for middle-aged dudes with lots of power and no scruples. I'll get into this a little more in our next episode, but corporations like Enron and WorldCom wound up getting caught in big scandals that took their entire companies down. And it was all happening around the time McKay and Farrell were working on their Anchorman script. that makes Anchorman, in a weird way, one of the few happy byproducts of the Bush era.

And the movie was evidence that America's past, as alluring as it might have seemed back in 2004, wasn't as great as people remembered. The only competent character in Anchorman is Veronica Corningstone, a smart, ambitious journalist played by Christina Applegate. The joke with Anckerman was that it is a Veronica Corningstone story. Veronica is surrounded by mediocre guys And no matter how hard she works

She's never taken seriously by her male colleagues Including Ron You're just a woman with a small brain With a brain a third the size of us It's science I will have you know that I have more talent And more intelligence in my little finger Than you do in your entire body, sir

The sexism that Veronica faced in 1974 Would still be a problem in 2004 As Anchorman makes clear, the quote-unquote good old days that Americans were pining for during the bush years weren't good for everyone. And while Anchorman had a lot of fun with its 70s setting, the garish suits, the AM Gold soundtrack, it's definitely not a nostalgic movie. In fact, when it comes to the past, Anchorman is actually kind of antagonistic. I realize it's a little ridiculous to give Anchorman so much weight. I mean, this is a movie where Will Ferrell plays the jazz flute and where a dog negotiator, a peace treaty with a bear.

But according to McKay, Anchorman, in some ways, was a reflection of the outrage he felt during those years. So were the other films he and Farrell co-wrote during the Bush era, Talladega Knights and Step Brothers.

They were all part of what McKay and Farrell called the mediocre white men trilogy. It was very conscious. I remember when we turned in our first draft of Talladega Knights, Judd Appetal was a producer on it.

And he said this reads like two guys that are really angry at the Bush administration. And Farrell and I both were like, yeah, that's accurate. The movies that McKay and Farrell made during the Bush years were huge hits, and not just in theaters. The home video market had exploded in the early 2000s, thanks to a technology that had become a cash cow for Hollywood. A technology promoted via some very excitable advertisements. It's a movie on a disc, the size of a CD. The picture.

DVDs had been around since the 1990s, but by the time Anchorman was released in 2004, movie fans were spending $15 billion on DVDs every year. And if they weren't buying discs, they were renting them from one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley, a company that advertised a unique new business plan that seemed like it was never going to work. Go to Netflix.com, make a list of the movies you want to see,

and in about one business day, you'll get three DVDs. Keep them as long as you want, without late fees. Netflix had launched in 1997, and within a few years, the company had more than 2 million customers. Netflix got so big that Blockbuster Video tried to launch its own mail-order DVD plan. In the early 2000s, DVDs helped ensure that movie making remained a thriving industry. I realize I'm using a lot of terms that young listeners might not recognize. DVD, Blockbuster Video, Thriving Industry.

All you really need to know is that for movie studios, that DVD revenue was like found money. And that impacted what kind of movies got made back then. That's one of the reasons why, during the Bush years, comedy was king. A movie like Anchorman wasn't just relatively cheap to make. It also sold millions of DVDs. And it would be followed by more comedies. Wedding Crashers, the 40-year-old Virgin, Tropic Thunder.

I mean, even this movie made more than $100 million at the box office. Welcome to Daddy Daycare. Don't panic because they're like animals. They can smell fear. Of course, there were other reasons why comedies were so big in the early 2000s. When you consider what was going on in the country and in the world, it's not surprising that people were desperate for anything that would make them laugh. For a lot of people, Anchorman was the best of the Bush-era comedies. And while some fans just loved the movie for its way,

Mel Vagina references and Brick Tamlin quotes. I love carpet. I love lamp. I don't think it's just the comedy of Anchorman that made the movie so popular. What really gave the film its kick back in 2004 and even now, decades later,

is the movie's inner rage. I know it sounds crazy, but really, in the early 2000s, as the country was marching to war and the media was cheering it along, McKay felt the same way millions of other their Americans did. Deeply pissed off and in need of a release. It was almost as if he was, what's the term I'm looking for here?

I'm in a glass case of emotion. Exactly. An anchorman gave McKay a chance to address the madness of the Bush years. His cynicism even comes through in the film's hilarious yet ominous ending, in which we learn what happens to the characters 20 years later. Brick Tamland, the guy who can't even form a coherent sentence? Well, he did okay for himself. Rick Tamland is married with 11 children and is one of the top political advisors to the Bush White House. And you can probably guess how the unquestioning, uninformed Ron Burgundy felt about George W. Bush.

In July 2004, just a few days before Anchorman hit theaters, Burgundy made a quote-unquote appearance at the Paley Center for Media. He was asked for his opinion on Bush. George W. Bush, who, I got to say, he looks like a fine chap. He really does. It had been a tough summer for Bush, who was running for re-election. His approval ratings, which had been dropping all year, had just hit an all-time low. Voters were especially frustrated by Bush's handling of Iraq.

In one survey, 60% of Americans said they thought Bush hadn't been truthful about why America had gone to war in the first place. Still, not everyone saw Bush as a mediocre guy with lots of credibility issues. Despite the lack of WMDs in Iraq or the revelations of abuse at Abu Grebe, tens of millions of Americans still looked at Bush and thought, yep, that's my president. He dresses well. He's got a good head on his shoulders. I like him.

I think he like it. He wasn't alone. That November, Bush won a second term, getting just over 50% of the popular vote. One major reason for his victory, according to polls, was that a large number of voters felt Bush symbolized to return to, quote, traditional values. What those values were remains debatable, even today, but people saw that things in the country were escalating quickly, and some began wondering why we couldn't go backward to a time when America was peaceful and worry-free. That version of America never existed,

a point that would be reinforced by another movie from the Bush years. Like Anchorman, it takes place in the world of media, and it's set in large part in 1970s, California. But you wouldn't want to go back in time after being in the world of David Fincher's Zodiac. Summer is Tim's ice latte season. It's also hike season. Pool season. Picnic season. And yeah, I'm down season. So drink it up with Tim's ice lattes, now whipped for a smooth taste. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Brad Fisher was one of those people who spent the Bush years thinking about the 1960s and 1970s.

But he wasn't doing it for nostalgia's sake. He was doing it for research. In the early 2000s, Fisher was a young movie producer who just landed his first film, Basic, a military drama starring John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. At some point during production, he began talking to the movie's screenwriter, James Vanderbner, about future projects.

One thing I made a practice of asking writers who I started to work with and get to know is like, what's the one thing that you always wanted to do? Vanderbilt had a quick answer. He'd always been fascinated by Robert Graysmith, a political cartoonist who'd spent years trying to find one of the most feared criminals of the late 20th century, the Zodiac Killer. Starting in the late 1960s, the Zodiac Killer terrorized Northern California, where he was believed to have committed at least five murders.

Early last Saturday evening, Celia Shepard and Brian Hartnell, both in their early 20s, were sitting on this knoll of land overlooking part of Lake Beriasa. This is a 1969 news report on one of the Zodiac's deadly attacks. They thought they were alone, but there was a third man on this knoll, a man who wore a medieval-style executioner's hood, carried a knife and gun and intended to use them. The Zodiac communicated by sending a series of encrypted letters to newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle. That's where Greysmith worked when he became interested in the case.

Soon, he began his own investigation, which Greysmith chronicled in his 1986 book, Zodiac. It had a famous cover, one I remember seeing in the library as a kid. It was bright yellow, with the word Zodiac in big red letters running down the spine. Vanderbilt had read the book. and he thought Gray Smith's search for the Zodiac Killer could be a great movie. And he wasn't alone. Here's producer Brad Fisher again.

The book was under option by Disney of all places. It just sort of, I think, had died on the vine in studio development. Fisher knew Disney was never going to make a film about the Zodiac Killer, but he had to wait until the rights expired. Once they did, Fisher got in touch with Graysmith, who was about to hold an unusual bidding war for anybody hoping to adapt his book. I was like, is there an agent or who should we send the offer to? And he said, well, there's a kinko's downstairs. And so if you can fax your offer to the kinkos and make sure it's

in by five o'clock, you know, on this date, it was bizarre. But it was the first in a series of bizarre moments throughout the journey of this film. They got the rights. And soon, Vanderbilt was at work on the Zodiac script. He wouldn't be the first to bring the killer's story to the screen. In the early 1970s, an aspiring filmmaker named Tom Hansen released a low-budget drama called The Zodiac Killer. The Zodiac, that's me. I'm the Zodiac. Decades later, Hansen claimed that the movie's release

was partly an attempt to catch the Zodiac, just in case the killer happened to show up in the theaters. Spoiler, that didn't quite work. The Zodiac Killer even inspired one of the biggest action films of the 1970s, Dirty Harry, in which Clint Eastwood plays Harry Callahan. a hard-ass inspector hunting a San Francisco serial killer who calls himself Scorpio. You know, you're crazy if you think you've heard the last of this guy. He's going to kill again.

How do you know? As he likes it. Audiences love Dirty Harry, which ends with Scorpio being shot dead. But the real-world story of the Zodiac killer didn't have a satisfying conclusion, or any conclusion, really. He was never apprehended, and there are still debates today as to his identity. all of which presented a big challenge to the filmmakers. So many people would say to me,

like, how are you going to do a film about the Zodiac killer? There's no ending. But that wasn't a problem for the director who'd wind up making Zodiac, David Fincher, the guy behind inventive, twisting dramas like Fight Club and Panic Room. Not to mention seven, one of the most influential serial killer thrillers of all time.

Fincher had a personal connection to the Zodiac story. He'd come of age in Northern California during the 1960s and 1970s. His memories of that time were fleeting, but intense. When Fincher was seven years old, the Zodiac threatened to attack school buses, claiming that he would, quote, pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.

For the next few days, police cars escorted Fincher's bus to school. And for years, he and his friends had to come home early on Halloween. But Fincher's ties to that era weren't the only reason he was interested in making Zodiac. He said, obviously, I've done a serial killer movie before, but I don't really see this as a serial killer movie.

I see this as, I don't see it as a detective story. I see it as a newspaper story. You know, it's to me the closest bedfellow is all the president's men. Now, I don't know who needs to hear this, especially on a ringer podcast. But All the President's Men is the 1976 drama about Bob Woodward and Carl Burns' the journalists whose investigations into Watergate helped bring down Richard Nixon. It's more than two hours long,

with no action, no sex, and no murder. It's mostly just a bunch of excitable or nervous people talking to one another. And it's maybe the most perfect movie ever made. All the President's Men was about the hunt for information, how it drives you and consumes you in equal measure. That's what Fincher wanted for Zodiac. As he explained to producer Brad Fisher,

It's really more about the journey and the nature of obsession. and how, you know, we can kind of be sucked down the rabbit hole and to the point where, you know, we've totally lost our bearings and can't remember which way it was up. Gray Smith's pursuit of the Zodiac Killer may have begun in the late 1960s, but to modern movie-going audiences, the film's depiction of obsession would feel very familiar.

During the George W. Bush years, a new kind of rabbit hole had emerged online, though rabbit hole doesn't really seem like the right term. This was more like a massive black hole. one that could easily suck you in for hours and hours on end. So Amber's here to show us one of her favorite sites online that lets you upload, tag, and share your video with the rest of the world, or just family and friends, if you prefer.

Yes, the site's called YouTube.com, and that's Y-O-U. This is an episode of the Tech News TV series Call for Help, which aired in September 2005, just a few months after the launch of YouTube. Back then, video sharing was still a novelty, and user-generated content was barely even a thing. YouTube would change that. All of a sudden, people could easily put all kinds of homemade clips online. At first, the videos were short and silly.

Goofy stunt clips, cute animal footage, TV bloopers, stuff like that. But people quickly started uploading homemade rants, explainers, and even DIY documentaries. It all grew insanely quickly. When Google bought the site in 2006, YouTube had more than 100 million clips. By then, you could watch hours of videos in one sitting, all from your own home. It didn't seem exactly healthy. In fact, one of the first genres to emerge on YouTube was videos about spending too much time on YouTube. Like the clip for this catchy little tune, which came out in 2006.

YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, they'd all blow up during the Bush years. Information and opinions became almost like a utility. You switched them on the second you woke up and you let them run all day. It was easy to get lost in it all. The filmmaking team behind Zodiac would also become inundated with information,

though in their case, it was a bit more analog. Fincher wanted them to actually re-report the case as much as they could. He asked producer Brad Fisher to create a massive timeline of all the Zodiac-related events, a document that spanned years, and wound up taking over Fincher's headquarters in Los Angeles. Here's how Fisher remembers it.

We started to have these kind of regular meetings at Fincher's office, and we taped up the timeline on the walls. So it started in his office, and then eventually as it got bigger, it sort of snaked out his office door, down the hallway, toward the conference room, The Zodiac team also took trips to actual murder sites, like Lake Beriasa, the spot where Cecilia Anne Shepard and Brian Hartnell were attacked in 1969, and the filmmakers interviewed survivors

and witnesses from that era. That included police officers from various cities in California, some of whom hadn't even talked to one another during the heyday of the Zodiac investigations. At one point in my conversation with Fisher, he held up a small stack of audio tapes. So here's one. This is, well, this is just Gray Smith. They were recordings of the interviews he'd been a part of in the years leading up to making Zodiac. He read off some of the labels to me.

January 13,04. Gray Smith, Vanderbilt Fisher, this day three. Oh, this was Toskey. He's talking about Dave Toskey, a San Francisco police detective who spent years pursuing the Zodiac, and who influenced not. not only Clint Eastwood's role in Dirty Harry,

but also Steve McQueen's ultra-cool cop in the movie Bullitt. In Zodiac, Toskey would be played by Mark Ruffalo, part of an equally ultra-cool cast that included Jake Gyllenhauls Robert Graysmith, and Robert Downey Jr. as the ball-busting crime reporter Paul Avery. Those three characters are rarely on screen at the same time, and when they are, they don't quite get along. Hey, Bullet.

Been a year and a half, you're gonna catch this fucking guy or not. Go fuck yourself. Happily. But all three men get pulled into the search for Zodiac. And as a result, they're slowly pushed away from their regular lives. At one point, Jalenhall's character is taken the task by his wife, played by Chloe Seveney, for his Zodiac obsession. When is it going to be finished?

When you catch him, when you arrest him? Be serious. I am serious. I... I... need to know who he is. I need to stand there. I need to look him in the eye. And I need to know that it's him. A-list actors, a tightly researched script, a $70 million budget. By the time Fincher and his team began shooting in late 2005, they were ready to bring the Zodiac era back to

life. Not that everyone was thrilled by their efforts to recreate the past. One late night, while trying to shoot on a street corner in San Francisco, the filmmakers were blocked by scaffolding that had been left up by some locals on purpose. Were they against it because you were filming late at night, or was the kind of thing where they were like, we don't want the Zodiac movie being made here? We're done with this story. It was the subject matter.

They didn't want, you know, look, I get it. I mean, you know, they're worried about that, you know, they don't want a tourist destination to be that late. I get it too. I mean, this is the director of seven taking on a real-life serial killer. But Fincher wasn't setting to glorify the Zodiac killer.

Here's Fincher in a behind-the-scenes video, talking about why he initially didn't even want to make a Zodiac movie. Get ready for some very 2007-ish background music. To make a movie about Zodiac and who he might have been, as he once wrote in his letters, I wonder when there's going to be a movie about me. I wonder who will play me. To feed that narcissism, I think, would be morally unconscionally.

But that didn't mean Fincher would shy away from depicting the killer at work. Zodiac opens on the night of July 4th, 1969, in the suburbs of Vallejo, California. Kids are playing with sparklers and dads are cleaning up after holiday get-togethers. It's the kind of all-American scene that some people were no doubt thinking fondly of in the 2000s. Later in that scene, a young couple parks their car on a deserted street. Suddenly, a figure approaches, and a few shots ring out, leaving the young woman dead. In just a few seconds, that idyllic 1960s American suburb depicted in the film's opening has been destroyed, and demystified. Fincher's movie has a few other scenes of the killer in action, all of them harrowing.

But the Zodiac doesn't even show up in what might be the film's most unsettling sequence. It takes place toward the end, and features Jill and Hall and Ruffalo sitting at a diner. By this point in the film, their characters, cartoonist Robert Graysmith and Detective Dave Toskey, have spent nearly a decade trying to solve the case. Graysmith is convinced that he's finally identified the killer and has laid out all of his clues, but Toskey is still skeptical.

The prince, I am writing. I'm not asking you as a cop, but I am a cop. I can't prove this. Just because he can't prove, it doesn't mean it's not. True. It was pretty easy to relate to that last line back in 2007, in multiple ways. For one thing, it brought to mind all the brazen bullshit of the Bush administration, like when Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,

or when Bush gave a speech on an aircraft carrier in May 2003, declaring the war in Iraq over. He made a dramatic entrance that day, arriving in a Navy jet before addressing the crowd. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. While giving his speech, Bush stood in front of a banner that read, Mission Accomplished. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country. In reality, thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis were yet to be killed, in a war that would keep going for years.

years. There's another reason why that one line from Zodiac, just because you can't prove it, doesn't mean it's not true, hit so hard back in the bush years. The internet had made it easier than ever for people to lose themselves in rabbit holes of information and to bring others along for the never-ending ride. One of the most popular videos from YouTube's early days was an hour-long documentary called Loose Change. It used archival news footage, on-screen graphics, and some straightforward narration to attempt to make a controversial point, namely that the U.S. government had been responsible for the September 11th attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. America has been hijacked, not by al-Qaeda, not by Osama bin Laden, but by a group of tyrants

ready and willing to do whatever it takes to keep their stranglehold on this country. Loose change was made by three friends from upstate New York, none of them professional journalists. The film's budget was in the four-figure range, and it was put together on a laptop. Yet Loose Change became one of the most watched movies of 2005, the Blair Witch Project of Conspiracy Docs. According to one report, it was viewed online more than 10 million times within a little more than a year of its release. At that point, a huge number. A Vanity Fair article said Loose Change might even be, quote, the first internet blockbuster. At the time, the idea of streaming an entire movie on your computer seemed ridiculous. Yet these guys had somehow

gotten millions of people to check out a movie released without a studio or without a big promotional campaign. Watching Loose Change now, it feels pretty rinky dink in terms of production values, and especially in terms of research. Many of the movie's claims have been refuted, but you can see why people got so drawn to it. The movie treats each viewer like a friend being led in on a big secret. Loose change is confident, but kind of casual, and it's never too polished. The following footage is taken from a documentary

Why the Towers fell. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Bring it back. Loose change came out after the one-two punch of 9-11 in the Iraq War had caused people to lose trust in the government and to seek out their own narratives about what was going on in the world.

Even Bush had expressed concern that 9-11 would inspire a way of conspiratorial thinking. Here he is in November 2001, speaking to the United Nations. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th. Malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame

away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty. Such warnings didn't take hold. Throughout the Bush years, conspiracies would circulate far and wide via the internet, and by 2006, the so-called 9-11 truther movement was in full swing. That year, a weekend-long conference was held in Chicago,

in which more than 500 attendees from around the world shared their theories about how 9-11 had really happened. Those arguments could spill over into the real world, like on this 2007 episode of the radio show Opie and Anthony, featuring on-the-street debates with conspiracy theorists. I don't know what the answer is, but it doesn't make sense? Well, don't you know what the answer isn't? I'm sorry to subject you to Opey and Anthony,

but this video is a good glimpse of what online debate would look like in the years ahead. The internet would make it possible to debate total strangers with full confidence, but little actual information. All that matter was that you just kept asking questions. The louder, the better. And these sort of debates didn't stop at 9-11. There were online conspiracy theories about Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 election, and the Indian Ocean tsunami.

They were evidence that Fincher's instincts were right about Zodiac. This wasn't a movie about a killer. It was about a man torn apart by uncertainty, overwhelmed by information, and looking for order in a world that didn't feel orderly. Nothing makes sense anymore. Do it ever? I want to be really clear about something, which is that I'm not saying Robert Graysmith's research,

or Detective Dave Toskey's investigations, were anything like the conspiracies that sprung up online during the Bush years. And I'm not sure anyone involved with the Zodiac movie saw it as an allegory for what was happening in the 2000s. What, you think David Fincher was farting around on YouTube back in the day? I mean, this is a guy who hung out with Madonna and Brad Pitt. He's always had better things to do than us. But all movies are products of their time. And Zodiac, whether intentionally or not, feels like a story that could only be told during the Bush years.

And not just because of the rabbit holes it goes down. It's also a film about living with the daily threat of terrorism, about what happens when law enforcement agencies don't communicate, and about our insatiable appetite for information. There was a lot for audiences to connect to. Not that moviegoers showed up for Zodiac, at least not at first. In fact, in its opening weekend, Zodiac got clobbered by Wildhawgs. If you don't remember Wildhogs, that was the Midlife Crisis Motorcycle movie

starring John Travolta and Tim Allen. I remember the variety headline was Hoggs Zap Zodiac, I believe. That's Brad Fisher again. He was definitely disappointed that Zodiac wasn't a big hit in theaters. But he also understood why audiences may have been a little skittish about seeing it. Listen, it's part of it may be those people who said, hey, how can you make a serial killer movie where the guy doesn't get caught at the end? Still, audiences eventually did catch up with Zodiac.

Much like Anchorman, it was one of those 2000s movies that, back in the cable era, you kind of had to stop and watch whenever it popped up on TV. And Zodiac and Anchorman actually make for a pretty fascinating Bush Year's double feature. Granted, the movies are totally different. I mean, one's about an eccentric loner who's responsible for multiple murders. Brick killed a guy. Did you throw a trident? Yeah, there were horses and a man on fire, and I killed a guy with a trident. And the other movies about a bunch of news addicts busting each other's chop.

What do you do for fun? I love to read. I enjoy books. Those are the same things. But in a lot of ways, Anchorman and Zodiac are saying the same thing. Namely, that the kinder, gentler America that many were nostalgic for during the George W. Bush years,

and that some people are still nostalgic for now, never really existed. The movies are reminders that the people in charge are just as clueless as the rest of us, that you can absorb endless information without ever finding the truth and that America is a place where things always escalate quickly.

This podcast is reported, written, and hosted by me, Brian Raftery. The executive producers of this podcast are Juliet Litman and Sean Feniston. Story editing by Amanda Dobbins. The show was produced by me, Devin Boraldy, 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