The Press Box - Election Talk, More Woj, and the Top 5 Campaign Movies With Sean Fennessey

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Hello, media consumers! Bryan welcomes The Ringer’s head of content, Sean Fennessey, this week. First they discuss Woj’s shocking announcement and the value of the sports insider (1:39). Then they discuss the latest with the election and what they expect in the remaining months (16:3 0). And to stay on theme with election season, they close the show with their top 5 campaign movies (30:54). Plus, David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis Guest: Sean Fennessey Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the summer of 1999, thousands attended what would be the final iteration of the Woodstock Music Festivals. But unlike its namesake, Woodstock 99 was not about peace and love. Joining me as I dive deep into this story about music, mud, violence, and tragedy. From Spotify and the Ringar Podcast Network, I'm Stephen Hayden. And this is Breakstuff, the story of Woodstock 99. Available Tuesday, August 27th. Hello, media consumers, welcome to press box. Brian Curtis of The Ringer here, along with producer Brian Waters.

Let us bring in our guest host. He is the Ringer's head of content. He talks movies on the big picture where, like the quarterback of his favorite NFL team, he always does his own research. He is my friend. Sean Fennessee, welcome back to the press box. I'm so excited to talk back scenes. Let's go!

Let's go! We've got an hour or more. Yes, we do. we do. Let's do this, Brian. So we're going to unveil our top five campaign movies in just one second. But first, you and Chris Ryan have a little segment called Just My Opinion, at least a theoretical segment. That's true. I thought we could do more than have a theoretical segment. We could do it just my opinion here on the press box. Yeah, let's show a tease to the plat, what the platinum tier subscribers are getting, the listeners of JMO, those who are willing to touch the gods

and to hear the truth, the way that we share it on the show. A backdoor pilot. That's right. Chris might say. Yeah, sure. All right, so JMO topic number one. Okay. The retirement of Adrian Wojnarowski from ESPN. Shoemaker and I had our say on this yesterday. What do you make of the post-WOGE era of sports writing? Well, I thought you guys sort of said it all about who Woj was and what he did.

And if he wants to go spend more time with his family and also support his alma mater, I think that's amazing. I too would one day like to spend more time with my family. So I really admire that decision. I am really interested in two things about this story and I'm really interested to know what you think about them. The first is a very simple what's next, which is who is the person or people who move into position for the role that Woj occupied,

not just at ESPN, but in the greater sports media diaspora. And then secondarily, and this is much more interesting to me, is what hath Woj wrought? What was this? and is it irrevocable? Is it irreparable? Is this era of sports journalism and frankly news media,

but sports news media particularly, that he dragged into modernity. And if it wasn't him, it would have been somebody else, but he did do this. He was the person who went from columnist to newsbreaker and making newsbreaker. I believe you called it,

was it the absolute unit, the measuring unit? The basic unit? The basic unit. I love that. And the fact that he did it and then walked away, you know, burning building behind him, what happens now is the thing that I'm most interested in discussing? And you guys got into it a little bit, you and David,

but I want your expanded Brian Curtis uncurral thoughts here. Well, I think the second question is, you're right, by far the most interesting one. Because the first one, it's going to be Shams. There were Jake Fisher rumors on the internet. Somebody will jump in. Yep. And power might be shared in a slightly different way than it was between Woj and Shams, but it will be, I think, relatively similar to what we've seen, just as they were like,

okay, we need baseball Woj. So Jeff Passon, you're the guy, you're willing to devote yourself to this. You're the, here you go, you're it. What's going to happen? So much has happened in this era that is so fascinating to me. I think one is we have all become conditioned as podcasters. And this has to do with us going, from writers to podcasters

to be very reactive to things that happen in the world. We need fodder. We need constant fodder. We need segments. We need bits. So instead of being writers going out into the world

and being reactive, certainly, but also saying, what story can we tell to people? We say, what happened? And what clever response can we give to it?

And I think the world that he helped build is one in which there were constant nuggets being fed to us. So he's programming all of ESPN chat shows. He's programming

ringer podcast. Like crazy because there was always something to talk about it. Maybe it's me being kind of off to the side from sports world, but I would always be like, but what if this particular Wojbom isn't particularly interesting? You have said that in the past. You have said, do we really care

about Marcus Morris' senior's four-year deal with the Detroit Pistons in 2017? We had those conversations in the past, which is not to denigrate the work of any reporter acquiring that information. But the fact that we elevated it to this point of meaning, and we are complicit. I'm not trying to...

One thousand percent. We participated in this. We helped build the business of the ringer around a lot of this reactive material you're talking about. But there's an interesting delineation I find between what Woj and Shams and Passon and everybody who is part of the Schefter, obviously a major contributor to this evolution in sports media. I would argue between 80 and 90 percent of the information that is the information that

is delivered by those reporters is information that was going to come out one way or another. It's information that the team was going to deliver to us or the league was going to deliver to us or a network and a sports center anchor would have otherwise delivered to us. It is essential information if you care about the inner workings of sports, the league, athletes, contracts, the CBA, all of those things that we follow closely. But it's just, it's one to one with the world of movie insiders, you know, where it's like, who got the casting scoop? That's something I follow closely.

you know, who's got the next deal to make the next Star Wars movie. If Reporter X didn't say it and say it a little bit faster, then Disney would have just told you. You know, they would have just put out a press release. Often within 24 hours. Yes. Not weeks later or months later, but within 24 hours. Now, there is still between 10 and 20 percent of information that is reported that is revelation, that is an uncovering, that is delivering what we would term vital information to the public at large about the area of interest. and that still matters

and I don't think that has really specifically changed so much but we've come to prize the other things so much more and the battle between Shams and Woge and the Woge bomb and the deification of the race between newsbreakers you know I've just been sitting at ESPN and now at the ringer through the entire evolution of this state and Woge walking away when he has where like a lot of sports writers are out of work right now

it's kind of a desperate moment candidly. It feels like it feels like Schwarzenegger like walking off into the sunset at the end of a movie and he's okay

but like New York City is destroyed you know and I'm not blaming woge for that but I am so fascinated by this kind of aftermath moment and whether or not we can kind of reconcile like what the last 10 years of this has represented and whether or not like I don't want to say was it worth it

because people want it like we wanted it I wanted it. I loved it absolutely. But now here we are. And I'll be tuning into every Jeff Passon tweet come free agency period for the New York Mets. I'm so fired up for them to lose $100 million off their payroll so that they can sign Juan Soto. You know, like I'm complicit. But there's a real now what feeling that I had almost three minutes after I read the news yesterday.

What do you think of that? Yeah, I think you're right. And it's interesting to me how this style of reporting, this focus of sports writing has jumped from Yahoo, just kicking ESPN's ass. to ESPN. And now I think we can officially say we've seen it jump from ESPN to the athletic. Yes. The athletic has a chance to say, we want to invent a sports website. We're now in the loving arms of the New York Times. We have a lot more backup than almost any journalist on the planet because we got wordle. So screw you. We're going to do whatever we want. Well, what do they want to do? Kenny Rosenthal, Diana Rossini, Shams, Andrew Marchand, they want insiders who are breaking news.

And when there is breaking news, you see there's these like crazy four or five byline stories. A moment happened. We got to own the moment. No matter what the moment is, right? Like it's the same formula. But what is the inherent value of that? Because that's the thing, even at the ringer that we have discussed over the years, is what is the value of an insider? Obviously, information is paramount.

And if you're a reporter and you acquire information and you're able to share with your audience, bully for you. what really did Woge give ESPN when he tweeted on his own account? I think it's a great question because the value was for Elon Musk now and Jack Dorsey and others before. Yes. For ESPN, I mean, there's a certain pride of ownership of scoops. It's weird to be the dominant sports brand or to try to be the dominant sports brand and have other people constantly breaking news. And clearly that irritated ESPN at some level. Yes. They could have kept the old cast of Mark Stein and all those guys, let Woj break all those scoops at Yahoo and just, you know, confirm them 20 seconds later.

They could have done that, but I think it was weird. It was weird on the bottom line. So there's just a certain pride of ownership, even if you own it for all of 10 seconds. Again, I like pride of ownership is a elusive and vague and kind of flimsy thing. I agree. But what is the thought? What do you think it is? I don't know.

I don't know. And that's so when I'm when I'm reconciling what happened, which is that, and you, I thought you said it so well, which is that the old job was the job that I grew up being interested in, not me doing it, but just liking it, which was like reading the columnist, reading the person who had the bully pulpit to say, like, here's what's really going on in New York with the Rangers. Here's what's really going on behind the scenes with the giants. And I came to value that. And then radio talk show host had a somewhat similar status in, in some cities, at least the city I grew up in. And now that this is the thing, so ESPN gets to say that they employ Woge, and that he goes on their network and talks about the information that he's already shared elsewhere, how do you, one, have you turn that into money? And then two, how do you turn that into value for the network? I've never understood it. I've just never understood it.

You can plant them on a set during a pregame show and have that scoop be on the pregame show if it holds, but maybe they want to tweet it out first. That's the thing. The race has gotten even more intensified because of this change. Right. Pre-game shows are pretty useless for actual sports fans. So that just gives it a little edge, right? Gives it something that you like, if you and I are sitting there and it's on and we're playing with our kids, maybe we look up when that person comes on.

I think a lot of people, if you're sitting in a barbershop or you're sitting at a bar and you're watching TV and you're not looking at Twitter all day, you might be hearing for the first time that a player has been traded by hearing Woj's said on TV. It's not as though he isn't delivering firsthand information to people at first glance. but most of the time, the way that information like this and this world travels, it's on Twitter, it's on social media, it's on the internet.

And I, you know, because we have talked about should the ringer be having insiders? Is that an important thing? Is that level of information? And what is the value is the thing that we always would circle back to when we would talk about it?

So it dawned on me here. I don't have the answer. I don't know. I don't know where things are going next. I don't know what the value is. There are people who are smarter than me that pay millions of dollars to insiders to help them create content.

for their platforms. But it got me thinking pretty hard about what it is we've been doing here for the last decade. Totally. I mean, and if you're an insider, or if you hire an insider,

you're putting them on the Peloton machine and you're saying, so here's the deal. You never get to get off. Oh, God. I mean, that's where my empathy for Woj lives, where I'm like,

your life must have been horrible. I think my life is hard, just trying to keep up with whatever is happening in Hollywood, which is total nonsense. He literally the shower comments that people were making

about needing to, like, have your phone against the glass. That's that's cuckoo behavior. Every day. That's crazy. Forever, Sean. You never get to get off because that was the thing about insiders I was thought was so fascinating is you can never say, I don't know. And there have been a few times in my life where I've known something that insiders don't know, usually about the media. And I watch them try to talk their way through, I don't know. They can't say it. They don't know,

but they can't say it. Because then all of a sudden, it's like the Wizard of Oz. all the power goes away. Yeah, no, that's such a good observation. You have to know everything. And that's why when you're wrong, you don't ever, I wasn't wrong. I don't know. Something changed. Whatever it was, you never say it.

You think Woj will go through withdrawal? It's got to be. Yeah. It's got to be. And just knowing him a little bit, and I wouldn't say I know him well at all, but he and I talked a few times over the years. He's just an incredibly in the game dude. Yep.

He's an incredibly competitive in the game dude. And the fact that he came from the old world of journalism and was very competitive in that sphere as well, wanted to be this thing. And that swerve you mentioned from columnist to insiders, fascinating to me. To go from, I get to have the opinion that you read or wish you could give to, I know something you don't. Yeah. Yeah. That's the change. That's, you know, job number one of the old world to job number one of our new world. Do you think it's too bold a claim to say that his transition represents a broader

disinterest in reading across 10 years of sports journalism. I don't think he caused it because I think it was happening anyway. Not blaming him, but do you think it's a metaphorical? The information we saw it was in a tweet rather than an article that we were picking

our way through, even an 800-word column from the Daily News of the Post. Yes. Yes. Is he the signal figure for that change? It's hard to say with Schefter because in a way, Schaefter does not have the mythology of Woj. I think it's just because Sheffter has just owned that freaking beat for so long and has really not had another competitor

who's on the same screen. There's no Shams of the NFL. He was kind of grandfathered in by Mort, right? And they teamed up and then they never had to Yeah, but Sean's in Woh did. Darth Vader just teamed up forever. That's right. But it would be as though Woj never left Shams when they were at Yahoo

together, right? Because didn't he bring him into Yahoo and he sort of like groomed him and then departed to go to ESPN? And there was also that backstory, which made that much more interesting. But I think Shefter is the similar kind of figure. Yeah, no, it's a good point. And we care about the NFL more than we do the NBA. I mean, America, not the ringer.

But we care about the NFL more. So I think he in a way is, is that guy as well. But I'm always amazed. And again, I see on media tweets all the time with just something that happened, some transaction. I'm like, I don't even, I'm looking at this. Like, why do I care about this? And this is my part of the world.

Am I supposed to be interested in this? One, this will be the last thing I bother you about with this. but this is such a fascinating story to me. What about the crediting the agencies thing? I just don't. I mean, it was such a strange flourish of sports writing. In a way, I think you could probably, if you were so inclined to be a devil's advocate,

argue that it was more transparent. Oh, interesting. Than the previous world, because then at least we could look at it and be like, well, that's where that came from. And we could also read it because sometimes there is stuff from teams. So if it doesn't have the business card, the agency on it, then maybe

it came from the dude. So I think there's this level of perhaps, again, I'm playing devil's advocate here. But I found that to be, and it was weird that everybody else started doing it. Well, that's the thing is, the criminology gets deeper because this started happening, you know, that you can cite the sourcing openly.

I mean, you know, that's also relatively unprecedented, I feel like, you know, and everyone knows that a shadow network is what drives all subcultures, but especially sports. Sure. And I think him putting that on Front Street so much so that it was an inherent part of the first delivery of the information. Just fascinated me.

Made me laugh. I love JMO so far. This is going quite well. That was a hot one. Thanks for indulging me. Let's bring the temperature down with topic to the election. There's an election? There's an election.

It's 46 days from now. 46 days until the election. What are your feelings about what's in front of us as we see here and talk? Boy, it sure feels like there's going to be. be an October surprise. That's kind of where my head's at. Things seem to be going a little too swimmingly on the democratic side of things. Okay, so we're shoving aside eating pets and other things like that as October, September

surprise. If J.D. Vance reveals the family that has been eating the pets as his October surprise, I suppose that would qualify. No, I just, I think I was thinking about it in relationship to the debate, which I'm sure we'll talk about and whether Harris is going to get a huge bump in the debate. And it seems like she is. And so far they've run with the occasional quibble about a lack of sit-down interviews, somewhat flawless campaigns.

And she stepped up and people seem enthused about her. And she did very well in the debate. But, you know, once upon a time Hillary Clinton kicked Donald Trump's ass in a debate, too. Three times. And that didn't really seem to matter all that much, ultimately. And there were some reasons for that. And I think in October surprise was one of the reasons for that. So I think everybody's...

trying to not count their chickens because they're a little haunted by 16 and their memories of 16. And when I say people, I mean, people who are left leaning and talking about these issues, I think the other thing that is really interesting that has transpired, last time I was on the show, we talked a lot about Biden and his age and his appearance on Seth Myers and this sort of pantomime that he was doing, that he's cool and he's got it under control and he's not in his 80s. And now as I look at Donald Trump, I'm like, well, there's the old guy. He now seems old. He seems really old and he seemed less old in comparison to the sitting president. But as more and more daily expressions of age, I'm not going to say like senility,

but just like when you talk to an older person and you're like, they don't have the neurons firing the way that you want, you know, it's just not working the way that it did even for him six, eight years ago. That I think people are seeing that. I think they are seeing it and they are subconsciously letting it slide into their bloodstream. And that's part of the reason why Harris has had this kind of unimpeded, modest progress towards success. I cannot wait for the books after this campaign where people talk about the age thing, where Donald Trump sets up the election. And the single number one issue is you don't want to vote for the old guy.

And then all of a sudden it becomes the old guy. In the debate, there's been some debate. I'm curious what your perspective is on this about sort of like Kamala Harris's posture towards him and the sort of the eye roll. and the side-eyeing and the kind of chuckling at this, you know, crazy old guy. And maybe that was a misstep. I don't think so because I think she effectively communicated what I just described, which I think is impactful, which is like, can you freaking, can you guys believe this? And actually, Joe Biden did a fairly good job of that in 2020.

He did it by saying shut up to him on stage. But it was a version of like, guys, come on. Like, really this? And I think that it is now probably hurting Trump more than it was, certainly in 16. And in 2020, it's debatable. That being said, I don't know anything. This is probably going to be an incredibly close election. I don't really know how to trust polling data at all anymore.

So I don't know how to get bent out of shape about anything I read because I don't know what's true and not true. Like, how do you evaluate it at this stage? Well, I do want to talk to you about those gestures during the debate because I thought they were fascinating. And somebody had a point on CNN that night that was so right on, which is that if you're a prosecutor, when you walk into the courtroom, you don't just prosecute the case. You also know that every gesture you make will be observed by the jury. every, every expression on your face, every move of your hand. And so watching them in that split screen was fascinating, right?

You had her shaking her head at times. You had her laughing at times as an outrageous stuff. You had her putting her hand under her chin at one point. I once had a boss that said, if you ever take an author of photo, don't put your hand under your chin because you'll look like a total dick. Yeah, that's a good one. But it sort of worked as a split screen.

And she's trying to do a few things there. One is be not afraid of the bully. I can stand up to the bully. And we hit some numbers this morning from the AP National Opinion Resource Center, a poll. It says tough enough to be president. Kamala Harris, 59%, Donald Trump, 57%. You are Kamala Harris. And again, fallibility of polls aside, you are absolutely going to take that number.

That's a good poll. Yeah. It's a good poll. And I think a lot of it came out of that debate, right? And this is, by the way, also intersects directly with the media strategy you're talking about. We're going to not do interviews, but we're going to put a lot of chips into the table for that debate, that the things we would have demonstrated in interviews we're going to demonstrate on stage, and I think that worked to her to a great extent.

I think she also has a certain level of credibility because she's been in rooms and in circumstances like that opposite hardened criminals. And so honestly, if that's on the resume. Transnational gangs, transnational organizations, to use a phrase I've heard a few dozen times. Yes, that's right. Yeah. Her international relations record is extraordinary. I mean, you know, that's the other thing. She's not, she's not a foolproof candidate. This is a, this is a tremendously flawed circumstance. I think the lack of information, about her in the general public is benefiting her at the moment, but I think a

savier and more old school Republican machine would have taken apart a lot of those flaws. And it doesn't seem like Donald Trump is quite in a position to do say what, you know, the George W. Bush era machine might have been able to do. I think if a different campaign were running against someone like Kamala, you would just see different level of attack. Or with a different candidate that was doing what the campaign said. Yes. I mean, if he loses and it's still a huge if. It'll be interesting to see what Florida was telling him to do at all these stages because all

that stuff will leak out like crazy. And what Trump was actually doing. How much was he defying the advice? Yeah, because it was pretty clear his playbook in that debate was she's the incumbent. Don't you call me the incumbent. You're the incumbent, ma'am. And he doesn't get to it until literally his

final statement of the debate. It's like you've been in office three and a half years. Why haven't you done all this stuff? Even in saying that, I noted that moment. Even in him saying that, I think that that failed a fundamental test, which is that most people who pay attention to politics don't think the

vice president does anything. They don't think the vice president has any role in the government. They think that they are largely a figure head person who was part of being, who was added to a ticket to drive a certain amount of voting and then representational in many ways. And so that being like his big Trump card,

I thought it was weak, like shockingly weak for that moment after having months to prepare for fire. back against whatever her campaign was going to be. So, and people are smart enough to know that, I think, at least those of us who are watching debates and talking about politics in August instead of, you know, spending time with their families.

Yeah, it may be a larger thing about who's the change candidate here. So people are dissatisfied about certain aspects of the country. Are you the change candidate? I mean, we've seen Harris rush to that, right? Turn the page. We're not going back. We're not going back over and over again. It's a part of that tapestry.

I did want to ask you this question, as somebody who's in charge of, things here at the ringer. Should Kamala Harris do Bill's podcast? Well, I saw Bakari Sellers said that she should. I mean, what would that accomplish? Like, let's actually talk through it. Uh-oh. Here we go. What would it accomplish? Honestly, it would accomplish the listeners of the Bill Simmons podcast would get to hear more from Kamala about what Bill wants to know. That's it. That's the, that's the gambit. Or she makes a gaffe in that environment by,

I don't know. She says the cubs when she means the white socks. You know what I mean? Like, what's something that could happen that would be like a whoops moment for her? That wouldn't really mean anything, but would get attention because of the level of notoriety the bill show brings along to it. Is that worth it? Did it help Joe Biden to go on Seth Myers? Like, I don't, I'm not sure that these things matter in the way that they used to. Part of what Baccar is saying, right, is it, what she's trying to do is get more men to vote for her, right? That campaign is chasing men, right? We know the gender divide will be what it is, but they're trying to, of course,

close the gap in various things. So his ideas were Bill's Pod, Paul Feinbaum. I think we'll probably see a podcast rollout here pretty soon, and you and I can now do the list, right? It's smart list. It's the hot ones. You just go down the list of things politicians do

that are relatively safe environments or fun environments where people see a different side of them. I guess I haven't quite seen her correlated to sports yet. And so I'm sure that's what Bacari was thinking, that there is this huge audience of people that, like, don't even really pay attention to political media, but they watch a lot of college football. And that if you put it on with Findbound, then you could capture that audience in some way. But I just think things are way more stratified than they used to be. And I don't think that this kind of political media strategy works in the same way. I think when Barack Obama was engaging with Bill Simmons, it was a very different proposition.

And I mean, if Bill wants to put Conno Harris and she wants to do the show, great. I don't, you know, that's their call. You're not against it. I'm not against it. Not against having the vice president of the United States on the Ringer podcast. No, but from her campaign's perspective, is it more valuable to go on hot ones? I don't know. That puts her in league with Ariana Grande and Conan O'Brien.

I guess that's cool. You know, I like both of them. Just fine. It's a relatively unsurious pursuit is the thing. And how many unsirious pursuits do you want to put on your docket in the final 46 days before you're maybe or maybe not elected president? I don't know. Last thing on the campaign. Wait a minute.

What do you think? Should she go on Bill's show? Am I saying this as a ringer employee? You're saying it as the man, Brian Curtis? As the junior senator from the ringer. I think I would like to hear the interview because often with Bill, it's just a different interview. And that is one thing that people say about doing the podcast thing. You know, it is not, you know,

force ghost Tim Russert. It is something different that they get. But often when you get asked different questions in different ways, you do wind up saying something revealing or we learn something about you. And I think like just like Bill with movie stars, like he's just going to ask different stuff. You know, he's going to glance down at his notes and just ask something different. Or Howard Stern or not going to living doing this forever.

So I would just like to know, hypothetically what those two or three nuggets that we would get from her in that environment that we might not get somewhere else. What's the core premise of their conversation? What's the thing? Because when Bill's talking to Barack Obama, I know what it is. It's the Bulls. It's the NBA. It starts with sports and then it probably goes other places. With Kamala, I don't know. I honestly don't. Is she like a huge Warriors fan? Like what? So Tim Walls, you're saying we should book. Well, that would be a lot easier because he has expressed a real meaningful admiration for the Vikings and for the T-Wolves.

You know, and there's easy ins there. Did you know he was a football coach? I've heard he was a coordinator. That was one of the most amazing. I'm like, have you seen all the football nerds? They're not fetishizing the head coach. He's the Vic Fangioan of this ticket. Come on.

He's basically wearing a visor for crying out loud. Our last note about the campaign. I think of you every time I see the movies get pulled into the vortex of 2024, particularly Hannibal Lecter and the Silence of the Lambs. Trump might in fact be talking about the sequels to Silence of the Lambs,

I think. Why not the Mads-Micholson TV series on NBC? Perhaps that as well. What do you make of the movies becoming part of the campaign? I think that's something that always happens. I think we're like a culture of phraseology

and confusion about histories of culture. And I don't fully understand the Hannibal Lecter aspect of it, But I do understand, as somebody who appears frequently on their rewatchables, that quoting lines is a great way to ingratiate yourself to people. People just want to hear other people say lines from movies. And so it has an oddly humanizing quality. And also, politics is theater.

Politics is made up. Politics is performance. And they are closely correlated. You know, it is Hollywood for ugly people. That's what they say about Washington, D.C. and so showbiz for ugly people. And so of course they have something in common with each other. It's interesting though, because like, if you talk about movies that are about politics,

there are a lot but not very many good ones. And the same way that I don't really want to hear my presidents talk about movies. I wonder if politicians are like, why does Hollywood keep trying to make movies about politicians? They don't know what they're doing. This is kind of closely correlated, I think, with the sort of like quiet fall of Aaron Sorkin over the last 10 years as a reliable. source of smart punditry about where America stands in the world. It's just a scant six weeks ago that that man said that Mitt Romney should run on the Democratic

tickets. Absolutely wild. It was a sorkidast fantasy of another time being transported to 2020. Of another planet, you know, it's just such a strange thing. So I think obviously, you know, movies and movie culture and movie phrases are always a part of these things, just like music is too. You know, we talked about this over the years and the way that someone like Trump will adopt a song that an artist is like, I think Jack White and Meg White reunited for three hours to issue a joint

statement about not wanting a, I was a Seven Nation Army being used at Trump rallies. So politics makes strange bedfellows and it also makes strange enemies in this case. I'd tell you my theory is that he actually watched Scarface first and that movie propounds the idea that Castro is emptying the jails in the mental asylums. And then he jumped from that to Hannibal Lecter is in one such institution. then he confused asylum with asylum as in political asylum

so it's actually like kind of a letterbox deed leap between Brian De Palma and Jonathan Demi and then we somehow got here if that's true if your theory is correct we're so fucked

like this country is so fucked that this is like a recurring theme of public speeches from a presidential candidate that's Hollywood could not write that that level of mass confusion. You brought us right to our next topic.

Hollywood could write this because I gave you an assignment the other day. After you giving me assignments for eight plus years, I gave you one. I didn't even send an email saying, just checking in, Sean, see how you're doing. We are going to do top five campaign movies.

Which, by the way, is incredibly fun to watch all these movies. Some of these I'd never seen. Some of them had seen forever. I enjoyed all of them. No rules here, by the way. It could be about any kind of campaign. Campaign could be the subject of the movie or the secondary subject of the movie. Before we get to our list, I have two rules of campaign movies I'd like to propose to you.

Fire away. Rule number one, in a campaign movie, the schlubby character actor will play the campaign manager and the handsome movie star will play the candidate. Okay. Peter Boyle to Robert Redford, Paul Jumati and Philip Seymour Hoffman and George Clooney. There's a schlobby Robert De Niro and wag the dog. no, he's not a particularly schlobby person. Rule number one. Rule number two, the more boring the real life election, the better the campaign movie. Interesting. Okay.

So there's a big cluster of these around 96, which is an all-time boring presidential election. Another around 72, which is Richard Nixon winning 49 states against George McGovern. Great theory. I love this. And I think it's because like when real life is exciting, it's hard to capture. It's a great point. But also, as we'll talk about with these, the, artifice of politics is the subject of these movies. And where do we want to talk about the artifice of politics more when an election is a total blowout? And it's not addressing what we think is actually happening in the country. So those are two working theories as we go. All right. Let's start with you. Number five on your list of best campaign movies. Is it okay if we have crossover here? I'm happy to throw a ton of honorable mentions out if we in fact we do. We do. Tons. Please. Okay. Number five, I'm not sure how much I thought how hard I thought about the actual rankings, but the movies themselves

are very important. Number five is the candidate. 1972, film directed by Michael Ritchie. This is high on your list, I assume. Very high. This is one of the signature films of the New Hollywood, even if it doesn't always feel that way. You cited Robert Redford and Peter Boyle. Robert Redford plays

a Senate candidate from California who sort of stumbles into a race that he has no intention of winning, and lo and behold, things start to unfold, and he begins to accrue success. This is a movie that, without spoiling anything, has one of the single, greatest endings in movie history. And I think is largely representative of the politics that I

just described, which is that this is like a fake playing field full of fake people who are just like making things up as they go and hoping that it works out. And oftentimes it does. And when you look at like, God, who is the phony representative from Long Island who had to step down? George Santos. George Santos. Thank you. That man was elected to office, you know, much in the same fashion as this movie. I think this movie has like, extraordinary script, character, energy. It has a kind of like Verite style where it feels almost documentary at times where it's sort of like closely on the shoulder of Redford's character peeking through crowds.

Michael Ritchie, the director, truly fascinating career. One of my guys, as we say at the Ringer, these are the films that he has directed. They bear no resemblance to the candidate whatsoever. Fletch, the Bad News Bears, the Golden Child, Downhill Racer, Smile, Wildcats, Diggs Town, the Scout sports movie Hall of Fame director. This is one of his vanishingly few political films, but it's an absolute gem. The over-the-shoulder part of it was something I really latched on to watching.

It has that looseness of 70s movies where you can't predict what the next shot is going to be. And the camera almost seems to be on a skateboard, just looking around. And I love the feel of it. The movies from this is great period of American filmmaking, but it's also just a very loose and free period of American filmmaking. I love this movie, too. And after watching all these movies, I put a number one on my list.

Wow. Because I just enjoyed every moment of it so much. And I think what I liked about it was it's very, very believable. Yes. You know, it's funny. Like, so Adam McKay is a political filmmaker, even though he began as a comic filmmaker. I think I saw something on climate change recently from his studio. The thing that I like about this era of movie is in particular this movie is that it's basically a comedy crew.

Like Victor Kemper shot this movie. He shot National Impunes Vacation. He shot The Jerk. He shot Tommy Boy. He shot Beethoven. But he also shot Dog Day Afternoon. And he also shot Elaine Mays, Mikey, and Nikki. Like the blending of story styles, genre,

the idea that a movie like the candidate could be both funny and a little scary and very dramatic at the same time is something that I think really elevates this kind of thing. Because the movies that play this stuff too seriously, sometimes they work, but not often. You really need it to be more in either a satirical. mode or a comic drama mode. You need to care about the characters. And sometimes it gets way too satirical for me and I sort of tune out and I'm like, I don't care about this anymore because I don't believe that this is happening.

Like the Republican in this movie, the Orange County Republican is played by Don Porter, utterly believable. Yes. Utterly believable. Robert Redford is that sort of, you know, sort of vision of idealism drops away and he becomes, you know, drawn into the cynical process. Utterly believable. He looks the part.

He absolutely looks the part of this guy that comes out of nowhere to win. Is he Jerry Brown or is he Ronald Reagan? Or is he both? Like there's a really like a reasonable accumulation there of ticks that he's hitting on. Number five on my list is Bob Roberts, mockumentary from 1992, written and directed by and also starring Tim Robbins. He plays a populist Senate candidate from Pennsylvania. Populist candidates are a big theme from campaign movies. In this case, the populist is also a folk singer who performs his own right-wing songs.

at events. His hit is, these times they are a change in back. Which is so, so good. This movie came out in 1992 when George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were running for president against each other. But man, watching it here in 2024, it bumps up against so many themes from our last three presidential election. A movie that at the time, I think, was considered a little broad that now seems a little mild in terms of its satire. You know, that like as things have gotten weirder and in some cases worse, this looks much smarter. Tim Robbins only directed three movies. I wish he directed more movies. I did too.

He's got a good handle on tone. Like he did Dead Man Walking, Cradle Will Rock, which is a fascinating movie that isn't totally successful, but I like. And this movie, and that's it. It's funny. This has got a great cast. You can tell Tim Robbins just went around and asked everybody he knew. So it's got a lot of people that were in the player, which came out the very same year. It's also got a very, very young Jack Black in the movie.

Helen Hunt is in the movie. Gore Vidal plays the very, very believable senator that Tim Robbins' character is running against. Also, they got Alan Rickman, who is not a schlubby person, but he puts on dark kind of photochromatic glasses in the movie to become the schlubby campaign operative. I haven't seen this movie in a long time. I'd forgotten about that. That's really funny. Extremely hard to find. I had to go to a video store here in Los Angeles to actually get a copy of it.

Why do you think that is? That it's hard to find. Yeah. It got rediscovered a little bit during the Trump era. there is an assassination plot in this movie. Again, I will not spoil very much. And it was so sort of evocative that Tim Robbins had to get on Twitter the summer and be like, by the way, Bob Roberts is not real life to tell you.

And Tim, Tim Robbins, not a righty. I had to get on and say, folks, just take a breath here. My other favorite piece of trivia about this movie, this comes out in September of 1992. In October of 1992, Tim Robbins is the man. So he's hosting Saturday Night Live. What a cool episode. And it's the episode that Cheneid O'Connor rips apart. Fascinating.

Wow. He managed to avert all scandal then. His hands were clean. You know what it is? He's also, he's a real lefty. He's like an old school lefty. He's like a burn it all down lefty. The kind of, yeah, the kind of Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon wing of Hollywood.

Yeah. And but not like a neoliberal, like a hippie. No, sir. You know, like these structures need to be dismantled immediately. You know, we need to defund the entire military, like one of those lefties. And God bless him for it, he hasn't changed. Like, he hasn't moved an inch on any of that stuff. If you hear him talking interviews, he's the same guy he was when he was doing press for Bob Roberts.

Such a cool actor. What's number four on your list? So number four, I thought, would be a relevant movie to talk about in this moment. I don't know if this is one of the five greatest election movies ever made, but it is a different kind of election. It's the contender. It's a Rod Lurie movie from the 2000. thousands about a woman who is surprisingly elevated to the potential status as vice president. Joan Allen is the potential vice president.

Jeff Bridges is the president. It is one of the singular great representations of the president on screen. The movie's kind of a pot boiler. I was thinking about it even more so when you mentioned the character actors uglifying themselves like Alan Rickman. In this case, it's Gary Oldman, who is the crotchety, you know, sort of like Strom Thurmond

Bob Packer-esque rabble rouser from the South in the Republican Party who's rattling the cage against Joan Allen's potential elevation into the vice presidency. Obviously in the time of Kamala Harris this movie is fascinating

not just because they're both female VPs but because this like road show that has happened where they kind of like have to even while being in the public eye for a period of time They have to explain to the world like who they are and why they're good. And, you know, this movie has some somewhat outdated politics,

but it also has that thing that, you know, Bill Simmons really kind of coined. It's sort of like a TNT movie. It's a movie that like, once you turn it on, you're like, ah, I got to see how this goes. I got to finish this. And it's not going to sear your soul the way that a movie like the candidate might, but it's damn entertaining. I remember trudging to the theater to watch this in 2000.

I just moved to Washington, D.C. So it was in the middle of the actions. My first job. I was so excited. And I just remember it playing at the time like, oh, here is an interesting thought experiment. What if? What if? You know, and there's a whole history.

I think you tweeted one out about James Earl Jones when he died the other day. There was this kind of what if campaign political genre. But yeah, you're right. The T&T thing of like, I just have to sit down and watch this. It may not have been at the top of mind is absolutely descriptive of that movie. I think it would be better if there were more election movies and political movies that were like James Patterson books. I think that there's not enough of this kind of content. We treat this with this sort of halo or this sense of that satirical element that Bob Roberts wants to aspire to, which is like, we're smarter than this.

We're going to tell you why this is a mess. But these are great vehicles for entertainment. TV is known in this for years. Aaron Swarkin has known this for years. But for whatever reason, there's just not a ton of stuff these days set in these corridors. I think it's almost that the people making the movie. forget their talents. They forget why they're good at making movies.

There's this whole little mini genre within here called Liberals Get Together to Make a Movie. Well-meaning liberals get together to make a movie. Adam McKay has had his name on several. John Stewart made one of these movies. Yeah. You're just kind of like, yeah. The aides of March, you know.

Yeah. And it's almost like they write the script and they go, joke, joke, joke, cameo, joke, and you're just like, what is this? What am I watching? But you're right, we need a little more like James Patterson Pop Boiler to it. number four in my list.

I went back and forth between election and Napoleon Dynamite. I went with election in 1999 and what put me over the top was like, has there ever been a candidate in a movie that has become shorthand the way Tracy Flick has become shorth. The only nominee I could come up with was Bullworth. Have we ever had a Bullworth? We had a Tracy Flick. We had a Tracy Flick.

We've had a lot of people wanting to go Bullworth. not in the way Bullworth was actually Warren Beatty rapping a lot in that movie What a weird But that like Fearless truth telling

You know that Patty Chayefsky in Like here's how it really is thing I'm gonna say what I'm really thinking Yes I We can talk about Bullworth in a minute But election is fantastic

Oh my gosh I mean you guys always talk about Apex Mountains And who does their best work I mean this is arguably right The best work The three actors ever did Certainly Chris Klein

us on the mountaintop we could argue the other two but I just love rewatching it. Great, great movie. Amanda Dobbins and I did a rewatchables about this I think for the 99 feet. I'm not sure if that has ever been made widely available. Yeah, I mean, like works incredibly well as a standard high school dromedy

and also works incredibly well as a big bold statement about electoral politics. I think Tracy Flick is not just one of the signature characters of the 1990s, like a character that men can't get out of their head. And the movie is about that. And it's about that in such an interesting way.

And it's such a, it's a way more sour and cynical movie than I think we remember because it was MTV Films. Yep. Remember? And it was like, it was marketed to us when we were basically kids as, you know,

the logical conclusion to like clueless. But it's not that at all. Like it is a much more bitter pill and so clever and so funny. And we were talking recently, I think it was on the big picture about whether or not that crew should try to reunite because Tom Perrata did in fact write a sequel to election and I think

it's called Tracy Flick can't lose. That's right. And would Reese Sutherpoon come back for that? Would Matthew Broderick come back for that? I haven't read the book so I don't know but it that's the rare case where I want to know where Tracy Flick is in 2024. Yes. We are

in a diminished era when we're like, what if they made election too? There's just no new material. Could be worse. I bet it better. that than Star Wars 14. It could be worse. I hadn't seen this since the theater in 1999. Oh, really? And holy mackerel, the sourness of it.

I was struck by the prickly nature of the movie. I mean, this is a strange, wonderful, gloomy movie about politics. And absurd. You know, like what Broderick's character is imagining in his head and his vision of like marriage and love and romance. And it's fucking cracked, man. It's a really, really great movie. I love that pick. Okay.

So number three for me? Yes, sir. Number three, I'm going with Dave. this is sort of in the Bullworth zone. God, I love Dave. Dave is so fun. Dave, an Ivan Reitman film,

also a pure fantasy about a president who falls gravely ill and there are so many important things on the docket in America that they need to find a stand in to fill his shoes because if he's seen as weak, the country could come apart

and the party that he represents could come apart as well. So they find a lookalike and where is he? He's working as a lookalike at a car dealership. opening. And Kevin Klein plays both the president and this stand-in, Dave, who, because of the severity of the president's illness, needs to essentially assume the reins of president of the United States.

And in fact, he starts doing stuff. He starts being the president. At a critical moment, this like the contender is a kind of unusual sort of election, but it is a kind of election. They have elected to allow Dave to do stuff. And he kind of grabs the reins. This also has a kind of crotchety character actor as his wingman. Charles Groden, my favorite actor of all time. And it's a movie also in the Bullworth Mold where normal people get the chance to look at what politicians do

and try to apply pragmatic solutions to big problems. The movie is an outright fantasy, and it oversimplifies things like balancing the budget, for example, in the United States of America. I'm not suggesting this is a realistic movie in any way. But the sensation that you get when you watch, because we all villainize politicians in both parties,

when you let yourself sit in the seat of if a regular person, a person who is not completely indebted to their donors, their party, their own history as a politician, if we let them make decisions, could something good come out of this? And for me, that's like a worthwhile liberal fantasy.

It's maybe not quite the same as Aaron Sorkin's vision for America, but it is the one that I like. It butts up against Aaron Sorkin's Vision for America. I love this movie too. My mom took me to see this movie in 1993. This was a Brian and Mom movie for me. And I rewatched it the other day. And it's fun when Kevin Klein first gets the job that he's into the,

what if I could put my hands up and everybody starts cheering? I could walk down a red carpet and people would just want to see me and be near me. And then he gets to the second fantasy that you mentioned, which is what if I come in here and I don't have ideas about what's possible and what's not possible? And what it is I'm supposed to do because I'm always trying to win my next election. Right. What if I just wanted to do good things for the. the country. What if? What if? Really good Sigourney Weaver performance. Excellent.

You realize her 90s was often a lot of kind of strange supporting roles and she's really good at it. Frank Langela is the schlubby campaign White House operative here who has his eyes on the big job. It's a really great fantasy, fun, silly movie about politics. It's a good comedy. Also very, very funny Ben Kingsley performance as the vice president. Let me swerve entirely from my number three, which is the Manchurian candidate from 162. do. Last time I watched this movie was in high school. David Shoemaker and I saw it in the same class. We watched it this week. I forgot how bad shit this movie

is. It is unbelievably from the opening moments. Oh, my God. Starting with the brainwashing from the Marvel superheroes of communism for Lawrence Harvey and Frank Sinatra. The plot is incredibly hard to follow. Someday you can sit me down, sit down

and explain to me how Angela Lansbury was actually wanting her son or someone, but It turns out to be her son to be a brainwashed assassin who's going to come into the United States and then help her political fortunes. Let me tell you, just moment to moment, scene to scene, could not take my eyes off the Manchurian candidate. Beautiful film. John Frankenheimer, one of the more underrated stylists of the 60s and 70s, somebody who made, you know, an equal measure of exciting and thoughtful and deep movies. I would also recommend his movie Seconds, starring Rock Hudson.

which is roughly contemporaneous to this movie, but also made a lot of junky stuff in the 70s and 80s and 90s. And is a little bit overlooked now when we talk about the great heroes of Hollywood in the 1960s, and he was somebody who started in television and is more in the realm of Lumet and Pollock and not in the Scorsese-Ault-N era of filmmakers, but he made some damn good movies.

This movie is weird. It's really, really, really fun. It is a good movie to watch if you're 19 starting to get open-minded about conspirators. in our culture. That's certainly when I saw it. And Angela Lansberry, I think, is my wife's favorite actress. She is a certified murder. She wrote addict. And I remember showing this movie her being very upset.

She is the mom. She's conspiring. She has a sexual attraction to her son in the movie. This movie kind of hates moms. It's a little suspicious. It's obviously deeply Freudian. But it's really good. And I also want to give a shout out to the remake, which was a Bush era Jonathan Demi directed film, which was fairly maligned at the time of release, and I think

is undergoing a very modest reclamation right now. I am one of the reclaimers. And that I think is an extraordinary movie about post-9-11 America, what we expect from public officials, mental health, addiction,

PTSD. It's this absolute stew of ideas. And when we look back at the 2000s, like what a broken time that was in this country and a mainstream thriller starring Denzel Washington trying to get its arms around all of these ideas and represent them in a thoughtful way while also entertaining you. To me, that is the absolute pinnacle of what Hollywood can try to do. It's like make something mainstream that is smart and makes you think. And I love that movie. I hope more people give it another chance and maybe like remove some of their expectations they had of it at

time. I remember liking it at the time when I first saw it. Remind me the sequence here, three kings and then the Manchurian candidate when we're making like a rock war era movies and trying to speak to the moment. You know what the Manchurian candidate reminded me of a lot is it's kind of the OG JFK except it knows it's a satire, whereas JFK doesn't know that and doesn't want to be that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the Manchurian candidate is more almost like pop science fiction, you know, There is an absurd quality to, as you said, that like roundtable of communist leaders at the beginning. From all the country. It just feels like a Twilight Zone episode.

Yes, very much so. It doesn't really feel like something that is attempting to explain why America is rotten to its core the way JFK is. But I love that movie too, not quite an election movie, but it's something I really care about. Okay, are we on number two? We're on number two. Okay, number two is a cheat. Number two is my two films. I'm sorry if either of them are on your list, but it's Nashville and Shampoo.

Excellent. So neither of these movies are really about an election, but they're both set against critical elections. And they use the sort of proscenium of an election to tell the story of complicated people in a broken country. In the case of Shampoo, Hale Ashby movie starring Warren Beatty, who's already come up here with Bullworth. Somebody who's very interested in the history of American politics, all politics, actually, if you've ever seen Reds. Shampoo is about a hairdresser who keeps getting himself involved with various women. He's a stick man, as Michael Rappaport once said. and he somehow finds himself

entrenched in an affair with a politician's wife and a number of other people and it's set over a very short period of time in the run up to election day and it's a great movie about the... I think it takes place in the 70s, but it's set in the late 60s, is that right? And it's a great movie about how

these things that seem important have to take a back seat to our carnal pleasure but also how our carnal pleasure is represented in our politics. Really, really smart movie written by Robert Town. And then Nashville is directed by Robert Altman, written by Joan Tewkesbury, which is this sprawling, massive character piece about sort of a concert taking place in town

where there's also an election that is about to take place. And it's a presidential election, I believe, in Nashville. And we see that sort of representation of the election in the form of a candidate's car that has a bullhorn attached to it up top and is constantly talking through the candidates' messaging. That's just kind of interwoven with this soap operatic story of all of these people in the way that their lives are intermingled in this town.

And it's a snapshot of like a failing America, you know, like I'm an America that desperately wants to be entertained as it is taken away from its individual citizens. Very sensitive, very beautiful, very strange movie. It's probably the signature representation of Altman's portrayal of cross talk. You know, his movies where people are sort of have overlapping dialogue and you can't quite follow every conversation.

His movies feel more like being in a room at a party than they do. You talk, then I talk, then you talk, then you have a monologue, and I have a monologue. He doesn't make movies like that. And I've always just been kind of entranced by that thing that he does with movies. And this movie is very, very big and very, it's at times hard for me to kind of get my arms around what it is that it's trying to be.

But I love to watch it and try to pick apart what each character represents to the character of the country or just to the character of this story. And it is a very, very deep movie. So I recommend Nashville. 100%. And whenever I watch it, I'm always struck by how many things are in it and what a narrative challenge it is to make that movie.

And I think in a way, the campaign, which is the candidate's name is Hal Philip Walker. Here is another populist reappearing once again. He has this campaign van going around saying these kind of semi-absurd things. He's a member of the replacement part here. He's filling himself as a replacement. party. Lots of echoes there too. That is kind of in a way the through line of Nashville

that gets us sort of back on track kind of reminds us where we are and what's going on. Right. These two movies were both released in 1975. I believe they were both released by Paramount. What a time. They

they're in the run-up to the Jimmy Carter election, but I'm not sure that they represent specifically that period of time. in American politics. I think they more accurately represent this feeling that I think a lot of people had in 2016 too

which would or rather like in the lead up to 2016 which is sort of like do I have to care about this? Like is this important for me to care about? And then before like getting cold water splashed in their face. So I think both of these movies are very important. I love Robert Altman. You know, go as deep as

thieves like us or wherever you want to go with him. And I'm happy to talk about all that stuff. but I couldn't get into 10 or 88. Oh, interesting. I like that show a lot. Yeah, that was an HBO series. There was sort of a mockumentary about,

was he a presidential candidate or? He's a presidential candidate. And Bob Dole's in it and Pat Robertson. There's all these walk-ons. It's fun. It's kind of interesting. How do you feel about Dunesbury? Never my thing.

Yeah, well, it's written by Gary Trudeau, who's the creator of Dunsbury. Yeah. And if you don't like his thing. Yeah. And maybe it's TV, so it's very flat. It's not film, which seems very weird for an Altman.

I think it's shot on video, as I recall. So it just feels very flat for him. It's one of those things where it's going through these things about campaigns. There's plenty of humor there, but it's just kind of like okay for me. I really tried to get into it for this. I love Michael Murphy, who's a recurring figure in a lot of these 70s movies. I'm talking about, he plays Tanner in that show. I haven't seen that show in a long time, but I remember liking it.

I remember thinking, I think a lot of times when you look at a Dunesbury strip, you're like, that's clever. You know, that's kind of how I feel about Tanner 88. That's clever. All right, number two on my list is a movie that Andres Chavez, one of our press box listeners in Peru pointed out to me. I'd never seen him before. It's called No. It's from Chile. It came out in 2012, got nominated for an Oscar, stars Gail Garcia Bernal.

It is about Augusto Pinochet. I think I said Pinochet before, but I looked up an explainer for this. So let's go with Pinochet. He's a dictator in Chile. He's in power for 15 years. And then there's this 1988 referendum where voters get two choices. Yes, he stays. No.

he goes. And this is about the no campaign. This could have been number one on my list. It's almost in a lot of ways the best pure campaign movie I watch for this exercise because it is, I feel you understand the campaign, you understand the people behind the campaign, you care about it, but also do terms of speaking to today. Here we have a literal dictator of this country. Okay. So Garcia Bernal comes in and, oh, you were thinking about talking about the torture and

disappearances, that's not the way to actually win over the public. The way to win over the public is a jingle. It's joy, to use a word we've heard a lot here in 2024. We need to attack this in a completely different way, not talk about the very real moral problems here. We need to capture people's attention and get them to the polls by appealing to something else, the language of advertising. It's a fascinating movie. So I don't know how many of Lorraine's other films that you've seen. I would recommend many of them. It's an interesting year to be recommending a Pablo Lorraine movie. He has a movie in kind of Oscar contention this year. It's called Maria. It's a biography of Maria Callas, the famed opera singer. It's the third in his trilogy of

Sad Ladies of the 20th Century films. His first one was Jackie about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. And his second one was Spencer, which was about Princess Diana. I like all three of those movies a lot. I think I like this period of Lorraine Moore and he made a kind of spiritual prequel to know last year called El Conde, which is a movie about what if Pinocchette

was a vampire. It's like literally Dracula, but it's Pinocet and his family fighting for his fortune in the aftermath of his ousting. And it's a dark and weird black comedy, but super interesting. Lorraine is a very, very talented filmmaker and is one of those

guys who's like, I feel like like slipped through the cracks where like Netflix keeps giving him money to make these crazy movies. And I'm like, why has Netflix paying for El Conde? And yet they are. And it looks beautiful and it's wonderful to watch. No, is a great movie. That's when that's when he first hit at my radar was this film. I kept thinking about, you know, the savvy take about Biden. You know, Biden was just focusing a little too much on the whole end of democracy thing. Really, it was kind of misplaced. He should have been talking about other things. And you're thinking, well, we're not talking about the end of democracy. This isn't a thing. And this is literally what these people are confronting and

know. Do you talk about the thing or do you then use again this other language, this language of advertising? You should really see it in the faces of them at the end because spoiler alert, they win. And what happens is like, oh my gosh, now we're going back to making ads about soft drinks and other things. We're using the exact same vocabulary. Don't scare, inspire. It's representative of this campaign right now. All right. What's number one on your list? Number one is the best man. this is a movie that I find endlessly fascinating. It's 1964 film I'm not referring to the 1999 black friendship drama. It's directed by Franklin J. Schaffner.

I think this is the last movie he made before directing Planet of the Apes. He also directed Patton. It's written by Gore Vidal, who's just one of my favorite figures and voices of the 20th century. Stars Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson as two guys running for president. Fonda plays a former secretary of state, who's got some skeletons in his closet. Cliff Robertson plays a McCarthy-esque,

gavel-banging senator. And it is about the complexity and favor trading and the psychology of running and what it means to run for office. And what is revealed about you and what do you stand for and where those two things meet? Fascinating movie. True character study,

much more in the mold of a play than a film. It's not staged cinematically, I wouldn't say. But it's shot by Haskell Wexler, who's one of the great cinematographers of this era. And it's one of the first truly political things that he shoots.

And he goes on to shoot a great number of other movies, including Medium Cool, which he directed, which is... Could have been on either one of our list. Very interesting election movie itself. And it's the second time in this year that Henry Fonda portrays a potential president, along with Failsafe, the nuclear annihilation drama.

Right. And he is so representative of decency in our mind's eye. And this movie really challenges that conception. It really challenges our expectation of the man who seems good, but hasn't done something or is a part of something that isn't good. And what does that make you think about them when that's revealed? And that's obviously something that like ripples throughout American history, all of the, you know, JFK, Gary Hart, all these people who come to, you know,

John Edwards, these people who at first glance, you're like, there's a decency, a dignity. or something that I like about that brown-haired white man and I like the way that this movie confronts us with those ideas and then turns them on their head. So good movie.

Why does Schaffner get lost in the wash of the 60s and 70s? Kind of a hired hand, not really an otore. Usually at his, I mean, so the three movies I just mentioned that he made were written by Gore Vidal,

Rod Serling, and Francis Ford Coppola. So he could handle a good script. And frankly, I think Patton is underrated it directorially. It's a very cool looking movie. But he had a really up and down career and he made a lot

of genre stuff that I think was overlooked in its time. But if you talk to say I don't know, Quinn Tarantino, he'd be like, here's why Shaftner's one of the underrated guys of the era. Yeah, it's a real Michael Richie kind of journey here. The boys from Brazil, Capillon, you know, Planet of the Apes, you mentioned. There's just a real, real interesting thing there. A couple notes before we go. First of all, you have a very

fantastic collection of campaign movies on Letterbox D that I will tweet out. If people want a full list of stuff to watch. I'm sure I miss some stuff. So let me know what I missed. Favorite line, by the way, and I got this from your list, Oswald Cobblepot in Batman Returns. I played this stinking city like a harp from hell. Maybe my favorite campaign movie line. Repeated ad nauseum for the public of Gotham.

Yes, on this CD, which is kind of fun in the movie. I thought about putting Batman returns on my list. Would that have been too cute? Maybe, but I think, you know, it's for it. funny. I thought of that completely unprompted when Michael Avanotti was giving all those CNN interviews. Remember when Michael Avanotti was like, that man should run for president?

And I was like, he's playing CNN like a harp from hell. He was on Anderson Cooper every night. Now in jail for extortion. So look how that turned out. I mentioned 10 or 88 movie I wanted to like more. State of the Union, Frank Kapper, Spencer, Tracy, Catherine Hepburn, and once again, the great

Angela Lansberry. Yes, I watched this for the first time as well this week. Oh my God. Sportswriter Ivan Maysell recommended that movie to me. It's about the 1948 election. It was also really, really good. I grouped Wag the Dog, primary colors, and Bullworth altogether in the well-meaning liberals make a movie genre that I mentioned earlier. Bullworth is like one of those fascinating ideas. It does work in certain ways. And then I'm like, God, this is like the fifth time Warren Beatty has started rapping

this movie. To me, there's an incredibly weird side plot where he falls in love with Halle Berry and she falls in love with him. What is happening here? What is happening here? What a strange movie that is? Really good Don Cheadle performance. Unusual movie. But honestly, again, the kind of thing that I wish more powerful people who can get movies made would do. You know, this movie was a huge risk and really strange.

And to this day, people are like, fuck that movie. But I think it's cool that he tried to make it. You know, I actually asked David Shoemaker, co-host of this podcast, to commission to make some art about what I get. would have been the 25th anniversary of the movie would have been 25?

Yeah, I think it's 99, right? It's 98. So now it's at 26. It might have been for 20. When it was turning 20 and 2018, I was going to write a piece and I started writing a piece

about what Bullworth was and what it represents. And I just couldn't finish it. And this never happens to me. I never start writing a column. And I'm like, I don't know what I want to say about this. But it totally flummox me.

And I think David probably still has that art somewhere that we just never applied to a story. I had it like on the Trello board and everything. And I just gave up. And I got to revisit the movie and try again because it's so interesting. Sean, just checking in past the Bullworth column. Well, yeah.

I love this. I could be your editor. Here we go, baby. Sean Fennacy, consider this the launch of just my opinion. We'll listen to him on the big picture. Please subscribe. We'll see you at the polls on November 5th.

Thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks, Brian. All right, it's time for the second weekly edition of David make her guesses, the strained pun headline. Yeah. Monday's headline. Sorry, you had something? No, that's it.

Thanks for having me back. Oh, you're, you know, I thought you were going to jump in there with fantasy. I mean, he is our friend, our boss. Oh, yeah, no, I'm avoiding him. I got a review coming up. Just sitting there silently while we talked about campaign movies. Monday's headline, David, about Dolly Parton's new Prosecco was wine to five.

Wine to five. Today's headline comes to us from alert listeners. Thomas Mooney and Danny Eats World. It's from the New York Post, the old trusted New York Post headline generating factory. And boys, it's strained. I'll read from the post here to you. Thieves swiped a tractor trailer loaded to the gills,

with $305,000 in frozen shrimp bound for Costco, authority said shrimp David has been stolen what was the New York Post strained upon headline it's just shrimp has been stolen shrimp has been stolen

there was a shrimp caper so don't don't be so shellfish that's what we're counseling license to krill whatever you know I'm just trying to think

a shrimp. Life is the grill is amazing. Shrimp a view to a grill. Yeah. Shrimp shrimp. This is really, really strained. What if I recast this as a shrimp-based

swindle? Swindle. Like I'm supposed to use the word? Well, no, no, no. Something that, another word for swindle would be a stolen. A trick. A trick. A swindle. A ruse, if you will. There's also a popular long john or red lobster excuse me maybe also endless

endless shrimp and no a swindle a ruse shrimp scammed pee oh that's good but they went with the p with the p with the p i here so shrimp scammed hyphen p i not just scam like all caps scam no it's scammed scammed p they don't call it the strain pun headline for nothing folks Yeah. All right, that's the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. Prox and Magic by Brian Waters. Coming up next Thursday, a press box doubleheader.

Our friend Jason Gay is going to join us. And then Kate Conger and Ryan Mack of the New York Times. Talk about their fantastic new book about Elon Musk and the destruction of Twitter. On Monday, Shoemaker and I return with more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a great weekend.