The Press Box - Pitchfork’s Greatest Hits, Joe Biden Does Late Night, Richard Lewis Obits, and Revisiting 'The War Room' With Sean Fennessey

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

On the final edition, Sean Fennessey, The Ringer’s head of content, joins Bryan. They discuss President Joe Biden’s appearance on 'Late Night With Seth Meyers' and how he addressed the concerns of his age (1:27). Then, they discuss Sean’s history with Pitchfork and its era of internet writing (13:32). Later, they discuss a couple of journalists who made headlines this week: Peter King with his departure (32:02) and Jon Stewart with his return (40:02). They also talk about the different Richard Lewis obits online and what they learned about him (43:02). Bryan also has a couple of surprise questions for Sean regarding his career (47:25). And after a listener’s request, they review the movie 'The War Room' (52:43). Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Sean Fennessey Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Galaxy lights, Coachella, Lightning Bolt necklaces. Did you catch all the Scandival clues? Last March, one cheating scandal launched a reality TV investigation that generated hundreds of conspiracy theories, thousands of podcast episodes, and millions of dollars in revenue. I'm Jody Walker, host of an American Scandival. Ahead of the Vanderpump Rules premiere, relive the pop culture phenomenon that rocked a reality nation,

starting January 23rd on Ringer Dish. Hello media consumers. Welcome to the press box. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Brian Waters. Coming up on today's pod, can Joe Biden find his voice and speak his truth on late night TV? We've got Pitchfork's greatest hits. We say farewell to Peter King and check in on week three of John Stewart. Plus, we revisit the great campaign documentary The War Room.

All this with today's guest. host Sean Fennacy. He is the ringer's head of content. He hosts the Big Picture and Rewatchables podcast. I like to call him the king of all physical media. Sean, welcome to just my opinion. I mean, the press box. I'm so honored.

I promise to keep the takes as hot as we typically keep them on JMO. Thanks for having you, Ryan. Yes, yes. That's what I want. All right. Lots to talk about, but let us begin with a little moment from the campaign, a media moment, if you will, on Monday. Joe Biden went on late night with Seth Myers.

What did that sound like? Well, here's Joey. Welcome back, Mr. President. It's good to be back. Why haven't you invited me earlier? Well, you know, you were a busy guy. Did you think when you were here in 2014, this show would make it 10 years? No.

Yeah. How did you think Biden did on late night? If we're using an out of 10 scale, I'm going to go with a five and a half. Which is to say, the man did not fall down. The man did not trip over his words too many times. He seemed to stick to the script that was clearly delineated for him. But you'd be hard-pressed to walk away from that segment and not think to yourself, boy, he's moving at a slow pace.

The way he speaks, the way he stood and walked towards the stage, the way he constantly did the thing that I recall my grandmother doing as a young boy, which is she would reach for my hand. And he did this on more than one occasion with Amy Poehler. Whenever he had a moment where he was either going to make a joke or needed to feel a sense of connection, he turned and reached for her hand. Now, obviously, Joe Biden has an interesting history

with making physical connection. And also, he is doing things that old people do. So I couldn't get that out of my mind as I watched him do what is now becoming an increasingly rare media appearance. What do you think? Did you like how both Amy Poehler and Seth Meyer, maybe subconsciously adopted the mannerisms you adopt when you're with grandpa on the couch? Yes, that like fear that they're going to say something that they shouldn't say,

that concern that everything is going to go smoothly in this interaction, that's softness that you have to have. Yeah. You know, the quietude that comes with every conversation with a grandparent. It was a different kind of late night talk show conversation, which is weird when you're talking to arguably the most powerful person in the universe right now. Totally. And the way you pull memories out of them.

Remember that time we were on Parks and Rec together? Remember that? It was strange. Wasn't it strange? It was really strange. And I think it is a preview of Biden's 2024 media strategy. This is it. Very controlled appearances.

Very contrived appearances. Here we got the contrivances of politics combining with the contrivances of late-night TV and a very interesting mix. And also I think Seth Myers is exactly the concept. kind of person Joe Biden wants to interview. It's not a journalist, but it's a journalist-like object. And also codes as a friendly, successful, liberal Democrat in an uncomplicated way. You know, Seth Myers, most people just think he seems like a pretty good guy.

And I think that Joe Biden would like it if everyone said, he just seems like a pretty good guy. That's kind of Biden's brand in some ways. So they were really a good match. And a person that will ask him about the war in God. But in such an open-ended way, hey, things are awful. What's going on with the war in Gaza? And then Biden answers it and then we move on. Yeah.

One of your favorite isms is the talk about. And there was a feeling of talk about to that interview. Not a lot of pressing directives, not a lot of hard lines in the sand through each question. It was just a lot of people are thinking about this, Mr. President. What is it that you think about this? Totally. And then open field to say whatever he felt. I thought, you know, I was pretty nervous, honestly, watching the first 10 minutes of this interview

concerned that he wasn't going to be able to make it through at times. And then as soon as he flipped to rehearsed policy position, I thought he actually did all right. Certainly well enough for, you know, a late-night TV appearance. This was not a controversial appearance by any means. But we're now in this critical moment of his presidency where any misstep will become 10xed instantaneously. So in that respect, like, it was fine. It was, it was most, it was legible. It was clear.

It was kind of boring in the good way for them. But you can't imagine that he's going to be willing to go toe to toe to with anybody who's going to push him any harder in the next six months, right? I wouldn't think so. I mean, it didn't want any of Margaret Brennan or Noro Donald or Tony DeCopal or whoever CBS would have put up there before the Super Bowl. Right. Which is traditionally not a super hard hitting interview. I mean, certainly within the bounds of a normal political interview. So I think they will seek this stuff out.

He's been on Conan. That was in December. He's been on the SmartLess podcast. He's been on Jay Shetty's podcast. If you're a podcaster and you kind of code as Seth Myers does, you should probably answer your phone if it's a 202 number. No question. In the next few months,

because Joe Biden's White House may be calling you. Well, I think one thing that's important to note about all of those appearances, too, is that they are all pre-taped and all manageable ex post facto, which is that in case anything goes wrong, in case there is a radical mistake, in case someone trips and falls, those things can be edited out. and the live appearance, the live experience of a president is kind of the essence of a president.

You know, I'm speaking directly to the nation. He's not putting himself in those situations for obvious reasons because they're concerned about a misstep. Whether or not that posture is the right posture headed into the most boringly distressing election of our lifetimes, I'm not sure if that's going to work out well. I'm curious if you think that this like can hold. If he just keeps doing podcasts and late night talk shows, if that's going to work. It's a great question. I think they're not trying to win the age question at this point.

They are not sending him out there and saying, this is going to be Bill Clinton playing the sacks on Arsenio. Right. This is not what we're going for right now. We just need to put him out there so that a bunch of nervous Democrats and nervous never-Trump Republicans say, okay, good enough. Right. I'm worried about Biden's age, but I watch that and good enough,

I'm going to vote for Joe Biden. I think that's what they have to do. And I don't know the way out of that other than they just continue to send him out. And by the way, I'm not just advocating for podcasts and comedy shows. I would say he should also do interviews. I don't know the way out of this at this point. There's not, no one's just going to forget and say, oh, well, you know, 75% of Americans are worried that he may be too old to be president. Six months from now, we're just not going to remember that anymore.

No, you are. I don't know. And I do think sometimes the opposition and maybe even the media talking about this over and over again does create this enormous. most low bar for Joe Biden, do step open. Yeah. So if you watch that, that was not an impressive,

you know, that was not going to make us remember Robin Williams on the Tonight Show by any means. But maybe that is enough just because the expectations are so low. Yeah, I think it was ultimately innocuous. And if they're trying to have innocuous experiences for the next nine months,

so be it. I think it's in fascinating contrast to the way that Trump, when he was president, would pursue direct confrontational interviews with the press. I mean, the Jonathan Swan moment is legendary in that respect. But in some ways, you know, Jonathan Swan certainly got a cue rating boost out of that

experience, but did Donald Trump really take a hit by just going toe to toe with someone and fighting back? I don't really think so. I think his demeanor, his posture is that of a fighter, of a defiant person. Joe Biden for years was known as a fighter.

He was a very aggressive fight back kind of politician. So to be like removing that essential, part of his identity as a politician in the face of a fight, a real race is a curious stroke. Like he can't help it in press conferences. You still see that guy come out at times

when he takes issue with a question from someone. But in general, the demeanor of like grandpa's here to tell us about when he was on a sitcom is an odd one. Honestly, at a time when a lot of Americans are kind of freaked out about the future. The Trump strategy is fighter,

but it's also just completely drown you in words. So that if there is a mistake, you will just forget it at some point or it will be consumed by nine other mistakes and eventually everybody will just be confused and give up. Yeah, that's true. I wonder, do you think it's possible that Trump has an old guy moment that somehow like obviates all this Biden angst in the next nine months?

Like, is there a world in which he trips and falls or he has a gaff that is unrecoverable? He's walked right up to it. But again, it just seems to get swallowed in so much other stuff. Yeah. And whatever he has projected to the world doesn't depend on policy accuracy in the same way a Biden. speech does. Seth Myers did ask Biden about the age thing, and Biden had an answer. Obviously,

pretty workshopped, ready for that. All jokes aside, according to recent polling, this is a real concern for American voters. How do you address that concern going forward as you come up to the 2024 election? Well, a couple things. Number one, you got to take a look at the other guy. He's about his old as I'm, but he can't remember his wife's name. Yeah. Number one. Number two, it's about how old your ideas are. Look, I mean, I mean, I mean, this is a guy who wants to take us back. He wants to take us back on Roe v. Wade. He wants to take us back on a whole range of issues that are 50, 60 years.

They've been solid American physicians. And I really mean this sincerely. I think it's about the future. So we'll workshop the delivery a little more, maybe. Yeah, it's got to tighten it up. But that's perhaps the right idea. I mean, he's right. It's accurate.

It's not inaccurate. Donald Trump is also old. A lot of pundits have gone out of their way to point this out in the last few weeks. I think that, you know, we'll talk about John Stewart, but he made a big point at drawing some equivalencies between these two old guys. And even though one guy seems is a little bit younger and seems maybe a little bit more hail and hearty right now, they're both old men. That's not weird to say, I don't think. They're both old men. Did you see that Donald Trump recorded a video response to Biden's late night appearance?

I did not. Perfectly dovetails to what you said because he had this whole explanation of how he did. didn't forget his wife's name. And that how when he looked like he was uncertainly getting on a stage, he was merely imitating Biden uncertainly mounting a stage. If you have to explain the jokes,

maybe the jokes aren't quite landing, but somebody said this on Twitter, you know, part of what Biden's strategy made be is to goad Trump into talking more, right? Go Trump into strange places. And when Donald Trump's like, I need to get in front of a camera

and record a response to Joe Biden on Seth Myers, I don't know, maybe you've won some kind of political victory there. I think it stands, I think it benefits Trump. I think the whole spectacle of this benefits Trump because Trump is actually facing real legitimate, scary, financial and legal issues every day. There were like big, big changes in both of those topics in the last 24 hours.

And the fact that you and I are talking about this, I think is a win for Trump. The spectacle of what happened on, you know, late night with Seth Myers is a sign that people are going to overlook meaningful aspects of the campaign, which is what happens every year, right? Like, whatever is the most meaningful thing isn't necessarily the most predominant thing

in the conversation. Is their age the most important thing? I think it speaks more to the exasperation that voters have generationally than it does to these two individuals personally. Yeah, and my take on the media has always been we can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Like, you know, if you look at the top of the New York Times homepage, it's Donald Trump's financial and legal scanties. The problem with Joe Biden is he's not doing interviews, right? He's done a third as many interviews as Donald Trump, a fourth as many interviews as Obama to this point in his campaign. So this is what you put out there.

You put out a tiny amount of stuff, and this is what we have to judge you on. All right, topic number two for you. We've been talking about media sadness a lot on this podcast. And in the list, WAMU and Gadget, the messenger and on and on was a site near and did your heart. Pitchfork. The music site, which was absorbed,

to use the very weird verb of this time, into GQ. Tell us about your history with Pitchfork. Sure. I genuinely don't think I would have a career without the site. And I think it speaks to my experience with, it speaks to a very particular era in internet writing, I would describe it as.

So if you don't mind, I'll tell like a little personal aspect of this. So I had a David Shoemaker. I had a close friend in high school who, you know, we bonded over the movie Fight Club. We bonded over Oasis. We bonded over, you know, we were both on the video yearbook and the school newspaper. We were editors together.

His name is Ryan Dommel. He's a great guy. And Ryan introduced me to a former Rolling Stone editor named Michael Goldberg who ran a site called Newmew.net when I was in college. And Ryan had been writing for this site. And I started writing for this site essentially for free. Maybe reviews would be for 10 or 15 bucks. And just writing about new music.

I was a huge hip-hop fan. I was writing about basically underground hip-hop independent record labels putting out rap records. And because I was writing those records in a very nascent time in internet writing, this is roughly 2000, 2001, 2002, I amassed what was then an important thing, which was clips. I had published material. And because I had that published material and I had this relationship with Ryan, who was always very encouraging, and we were the same age, but he just always seemed wiser about all of this stuff than I was. I was able to send an email, basically a cold email, to the editors of Pitchfork and say, hey, I'm a music writer. I know a lot about rap.

I'm really interested in basically deepening the coverage of hip hop at your site. I was a big fan of what Pitchfork's mission was. I was always a little bit hot and cold on their approach to things, you know, especially in the late 90s, early 2000s, pitchfork was very snarky and, you know, very attitudinal in its writing in a way that sometimes. times I thought was really compelling and profound, and in other times I thought it was kind of churlish or immature. But there was a real dearth of hip hop coverage. Now, far be it for me, white kid from Long Island, to be the authority on that, but I wanted to pitch in and contribute.

I felt like I had a lot to say. So I had a tryout circa 2002, 2003, and I basically failed it. Like I wrote a couple of reviews on spec and was more or less ignored by Ryan Schreiber, who was the founder of the site. But I give him credit for responding to that first email I sent. And then roughly like a year or a year and a half later, I started getting in touch with a couple of other editors, Scott Pledgeinhoff, Mark Richardson, people who were kind of critical to that site at that time. And Ryan had started writing for the site at that time as well.

And I just said, hey, like, I'm a huge fan. There's a Public Enemy Greatest Hits album. I can do it. I can write about this. I know everything about Public Enemy. They're from Long Island. They're a band I followed religiously. Like, I really understand how much they mean to the history of music, really, at this point.

They let me write about them. Let me write about Twista's album Kamikaze in 2004. At that time, Kanye West was a huge figure for me personally, and he was an artist who I thought was basically about to be a generational bullhorn, which he did turn out to be. And I think following him closely led to a lot of success. But so I started writing about this kind of music on this site where there were not a lot of writers.

There'd been a handful. There'd been Sam Chinald, I remember, Raleigh Pemberton, a handful of guys who were covering hip-hop back then, but a very small number. So I joined and started. writing about big artists. And then a few other guys started joining my friend Nick Sylvester, my friend Zach Barron, my friend Tom Bryan, my friend Pete LaFishal.

And we all started hanging out in New York and we were all writing for Pitchfork and we were all very aspirational and we had this little like clubhouse mentality about how even inside the pitchfork machine, which was just a website with album reviews and news and the occasional feature interview, we were helping evolve the character of the site. So I look back on my time there. And I wrote for roughly six to seven years on and off, writing record reviews, single album reviews, the occasional feature. I covered a whole swath of genres of music. I wrote about Queens of the Stone Age.

I wrote about R. Kelly. I wrote about a lot of different artists over that time. I've got the whole list here, Gorillas, JZ, on and on and on. Yeah, I wrote about a lot of artists. I interviewed artists for the site. I mean, there's also a lot of work that I published on the site that has been deleted. that is no longer represented there as so much of our digital work has been over the years.

But it really did change my life because even though what I wanted to do was work in magazines, the work that I was doing a pitchfork was by far the most read. It was the thing that I clearly had made my reputation on writing about late registration and giving it a 9.5 on pitchfork

in a weird way certified me to a generation of people that cared about reading music reviews. And I'm forever grateful for the fact that I got to do anything where anybody was reading or paying attention, it's the same attitude I have now about everything that we're doing

where I'm just like, it's remarkable to me that people listen to our shows, read our website. Like, it's just so exciting every day. I don't mean that like in a sense of false modesty. Like I'm really, like sincerely passionate about that. But it clearly helped because I would be able to get my foot in the door

at other places by saying, I'm the guy who reviewed late registration. I'm the guy who reviewed. We got it for cheap, the clips mix tape, which was very popular at that time in the mid-2000s. So it was, it was a critical place for me

developmentally. Everything I wrote there is pretty much terrible. Like the pieces are so bad, Brian. I feel like I can't believe that that stuff is still there. I hope people don't go back and read it. This may be false modesty because the ones I read this morning were not terrible. That's nice of you to say, but I know that they're not good. Like I've edited thousands of pieces now. I know what makes for good criticism. And that wasn't it. But they were letting me basically

learn on the fly and take chances on me. And they were encouraging me to take on bigger and bigger assignments. And so you know, it became a safe haven for people like me. There were a lot of young writers and editors who really made their bones at a site like that. Now, the site did not pay well. I was a staff writer there, but I was making 50 bucks a review as a staff writer. It's not like now where if you're a staff writer at most places, you're a full-time employee. In theory, maybe you even have benefits.

Maybe you even have a 401k. Who knows? This was ad hoc internet criticism in its earliest stage and its larval stage. And so because of that, you basically had to have another job. if you wanted to be a staff writer, a Pitchfork, because it would be impossible to pay your bills, just writing those reviews. So I was lucky that I was able to do that.

I was lucky that some of my employers at magazines at the time were willing to let me continue to do that. It wasn't until I took sort of a slightly bigger editing job at Vib that I stopped writing for Pitchfork because it felt in competition. But it was a completely different era. The site obviously went on to get bigger and bigger and bigger over time. It developed this incredible reputation for its king-making abilities for artists. You know, it kind of crowned.

you know, arcade fire, for example, and they went on to become one of the signature acts of the 21st century. They, I think, evolved their reputation really smartly, post-acquisition from Condon asked. I think they widely diversified their staff. They widely diversified the kinds of music they covered, which is to say not just genres, but realms of popularity.

Like, I think Pitchfork's identity is as an indie site, a site that covers modest mouse, you know, and they eventually became a place that could cover African jazz and Beyonce and a Christmas album and ambient noise music. And there are very few places that were doing that at scale as recently as this absorption that you're talking about. So I think they were just like a critical voice in the cultural writing landscape. I mourn what happened with them. I think it's very, very challenging to make money on criticism is something that I'll say. And there are a variety of reasons for that.

But I think that when they were an independent company, the systems that they put in place were clearly sustainable. But once they were sold, it seems like it made things much more challenging. But I have a lot of love and respect for all the, pretty much everybody who walked through there and tried to contribute in some way. They get sold to Condé Nest in 2015. Let's talk a little bit about that undoing. because I think that is interesting.

The one culprit I hear mentioned again and again is the Spotify algorithm. Yeah, yeah. Which can recommend music to you and you don't need to go seek out reviews on places like pitchfork or pitchfork itself. Does that track with you? Absolutely. I mean, I think it's a factor at a minimum. I think there were probably weight. The thing is that it's a question of scale is does music criticism feel as vital today as it did in 2005?

I do not think it does for that exact reason that you cited. In addition to that, music, to me, is the most highly subjective of the arts that we closely track. And so we think about this when we think about podcasts at The Ringer. Music podcasts for a long time were very difficult to crack. Eventually, we identified that you have to be kind of categorical and structural to make them successful. So if you look at the shows that we do at the Ringer, every single album, dissect, bandsplain, 60 songs that explained in the 90s, those shows, all of which are great and all of which work as shows, have these clear, tight structures in many ways they're often nostalgic.

They're looking back on things that have happened. Covering the contemporary landscape of popular music is really, really hard. And it's hard because people don't want to read about something new. They just want to listen to it as soon as possible and decide whether they like it or not. So I think that's clearly a factor. But how big did pitchfork need to be? I think that's the question that you have to ask when a company like that gets acquired. You know, when an organization gets acquired and hoovered up, whether it's by, you know, equity capital or by a technology company or just by some shadowy investor, there's just a question of growth.

Every day people say, how big does something have to get? It just seems like the expectations for a site like Pitchfork, which was always meant to be a niche culture site, probably got too big. And then it made it harder to justify its evolution. So I think that's a shame. I don't know enough about what was going on behind the scenes, but that's my impression of it. There's a good Max Taney piece about that in Semaphore. And so essentially Condi Nass's interest in pitchfork and in a couple of things. One is they want digital brands to pair alongside their old media brands.

They want events, branded events, which they've done some of. And it sounds like from Tanny's piece have been somewhat successful at least. And then they want to appeal to the kids. We could argue, do the kids read pitchfork? Who are the quote unquote kids? maybe their kids when compared to New Yorker readers. Yes. But those, that's what they want.

And Pitchfork's founders say in the piece, look, we turned down the VC money over and over again because we didn't want to have to scale up. We did not want to try to do that because that seemed dangerous to us. And we only sold when we thought, okay, there's this guardian of media and journalism and magazines. Right. Well, I had a short stint at Condonast. I worked for a couple of years at GQ in the early 2010. before you and I started working together at Grantland. And I would say that back then,

the digital strategy was not evolved. I would say that there was a complete lack of emphasis on anything digital, that the magazines were driving the business almost singularly. And they were really late to the party. There were people that were trying to make change. It's not like everybody had their heads in the sand. Even the people at the highest levers of power that I would talk to

knew that it wasn't right, but there was a feeling of holding on to a golden age that they had lived through in the late 90s and 2000s that they just couldn't give up on. And so because they failed to evolve in those eras, basically everybody is paying the tax on that now. The fact that the company was not built to be a modernized digital media company,

circa 2007, which is when they really should have gotten their shit together, I think that when you make an acquisition like pitchwork, but you're not built to support and grow pitchfork because they weren't. You know, when you look at Max's piece and you look at some of the things that they were suggesting to get people to do, it was like, how do we, you know, get U2 to perform at a concert so that we can then sell more ad revenue against U2's performance? It's like, you two performing at a concert

has nothing to do with pitchfork's identity. That's not what they do. That's what Rolling Stone did. Pitchfork came along to subvert what Rolling Stone was doing. That was the whole point of the enterprise. So when you lose sight of that or when you try to say like this is a place that can reunite the white stripes. It's like, the white stripes are not getting reunited. That's not, that's not something that publications do. That was by far the best detail in this piece, by the way. It's ridiculous. So I think it shows like a real lack of insight into the editorial identity of the thing that they own. And that is common. I think that's common in media acquisition culture. And we've been watching it basically transpire pretty much since newspapers started getting hoovered up in the 2000s,

where you just don't really know what the character of a site or a magazine or a newspaper. is and so the people that are steering the ship misdirect. But I find the pitchfork want to be quite curious because it always just seemed like it was meant to be a certain size. You know, the idea of trying to get to like 75 million Uniques by publishing reviews of William Bazinski's disintegration loops is just psychotic. Like, that's just never going to happen. So I find it really tragic in that very modest respect.

You've watched the last six weeks of media apocalypse along with us. Does anything stick out to you from the news you've been reading about all these publications slimming down, disappearing entirely? I think they're all for individual reasons that are probably ultimately correlated. And for the most part, my guess is that it's just about it's not that these places couldn't generate revenue or couldn't even potentially make profit. It's that those profits were not enough profit for the expectation against the portfolio, which is just a really callous way of saying that like people just want to make more money, companies want to make more money. And the other thing is that, honestly, it's really hard to run a media business. It's a frantic and chaotic kind of work.

It's a people kind of work. And there's a lot of people management that goes into that work. It's also high stakes. And if you make a mistake, it can be existence threatening. And so I think that there's a cost-benefit analysis at the highest level in boardrooms that goes into some of those decisions where people just say, like, is this worth it to us to potentially torpedo our business by continuing to, let people publish things. So I think all of those things together. And then also, like,

candidly, some of these businesses are failing businesses. Like some of these sites, no matter what good work is being done at them, will never be profitable because the expectation that in an advertising generated environment, like giving people what they want, if you're not willing to acknowledge that there's a certain kind of thing that people want in this space, it is harder to succeed. So I think it's very easy to romantic. and valorize, you know, a strong editorial identity and an independence. And I think the way that you talk about this is very wise and I really respect it. But I've also been able to like see the other side in the last five or 10 years of my career. And sometimes things don't work. And so what do

you do when something doesn't work? Like how long can people agree to throw good money after bad? So, you know, that's not a judgment on any individual circumstance because I don't know what's going on at every single company. I think in some cases, there are horrendous actors. And in other cases, it's just the business that didn't work out. It does feel, this does feel finally now, to me, though, like 2008 felt when things were really, really bad. And I got laid off in 2000, the beginning of 2009. Most of my friends lost their jobs at that time. I don't, you know, it felt very scary. That was a horrible year for media. Yeah. It felt like this was a mistake. A lot of people thought about and did change direction and take different kinds of

kinds of jobs. I almost moved away from media because I was scared. I was about to get married. So I, you know, I don't know, you and I both get the like, what should I do? Like, how do I break into the industry or what should I do? Like, I'm done giving advice. I don't even know what to say. Like I, what could you say to say, well, here's how clearly how you'll make it. Yeah. Yeah. And even the more elemental questions, I do should I be a journalist? You know, not even, not even, not even the how to, but but the should I do this at all? It's a harder and harder question to answer with the whole segment about this because I just don't I don't know what to say yeah I used to have good lines of very practice lines but like hey you know the the economics of

it make no sense but and now it's hard for me to even get to that but but I do think there's a core of people out there that just want to do this job that want to be journalists that have that mind there's nowhere else that's going to go and be happy other than journalism or media broadly defined and so I don't know where I would steer them if I don't steer them here I think the other thing to consider is that there is a much blurrier space between journalism and writer and content creator and that that has created a kind of anxiety in our work where are we here to entertain? Are we here to inform? Are we here to educate? Are we here to report?

Are we here to self-actualize feelings and ideas that we understand better than someone else? Like, yes. Like in our mission at the ringer, yes. but if you want to be a newspaper reporter, it's harder. If you want to be a magazine editor, you're insane. Like, that's not a good idea right now because those expectations and those dreams

that I had in 1997 don't make sense anymore. So I think that these things do evolve and I feel like we're in the middle of a big transitional moment where some people are just looking at the landscape and saying it probably would be more financially beneficial for me

to become a YouTube influencer than somebody who is going to report on Gaza right now. And it certainly seems easier. It seems more profitable. And there will be like a brain drain, ultimately, generationally, if that's something that happens. Because if you are even, if you're in college right now and you're in J-school and you're tracking what's going on, are, like, unless your parents are independently wealthy,

like, how do you take the leap? I don't know. I really don't know how you do it. Let's talk about one traveler in this fraught media landscape or somebody who recently departed it. Peter King still weird to say Peter King of NBC. I never really

got around to that. Yeah, when we were doing the segment about the other day, I was like, what's the name of his column now? Because I still call it Monday morning quarterback. He left with a big goodbye on Monday. What did you make of the way Peter King figured out the internet?

I think he's clearly in a very strange way connected to pitchfork, right? I mean, these kind of like Gen X, elder millennial icons of mega reading, you know, these like overlong pitchfork reviews and essays are sort of connected to our desire to read the 4,000 word Monday morning quarterback column, which I read religiously as well in the 2000s. And just like Bill Simmons's column was like my connective tissue to a sport that I loved that could pop culturally make me understand it. And Bill was the absolute best of writing about the NBA, among other things.

And Peter, I was just, it was crack. Like, I read Len Pascarelli on ESPN.com as well. But it was just like a completely different experience, you know, reading Peter's columns. And he figured something out. He figured out that at that time, like, we wanted to read long. We wanted to read. I mean, he reinvented the dot dash column, right? To like the dot paragraph column.

And that bite-sized approach was really, really smart. 15 years later, I was like kind of done with his coffee order. but at the time it felt novel. It's only so many times. Yeah, yeah. But coffee nerdness can really hit home on a Monday morning. Yeah, it was just also not that sophisticated a coffee take. So I'm not sure what we were going for there.

But, I mean, look, he also just had something that to this day, I think matters in the media landscape, which is like he was an info guy. He was connected to people who were feeding him information that he was filtering through his column that had great value. He wasn't doing it the way that Woj does it or the way that Schefter does it. He was doing it. in like a slightly like a folksier, more analytical, more storytelling kind of way about the narratives of the sport at the time. And I always found it appealing. I think sometimes he was just like hairbrained and weird,

but I also just, I liked reading what he was doing and he clearly inspired a generation of people. It is weird. I heard you talking with Shoemaker about this, that not as many people as you would think were able to replicate his approach, both at SI and beyond. You know, I think what Zach Lowe does is clearly influenced in some way,

even if Zach was not a religious Peter King writer, reader, by what Peter did. Sure. Ten things I think I think, the Zach Lowe column, which I was editing at Grantlin 10 years ago, that's a Peter King riff. You know what I mean? That's like a, it's a modified Peter Vessy column. It's a modified Peter Gammons column. Bob Ryan.

Bob Ryan. Sunday, Sports Pages all the way back to the 70s. All those guys who figured out that we want to move a little bit more quickly. through things, like not everything should be Gary Smith. And so that alone is like a mega contribution to at least the contemporary media. It is, I'm always fascinated by these moments in sports writing when there's two arrows pointing different directions. One is Woge, where it's like, I'm going to go try to be the next Mike Lupico for the next

30 years, or I'm going to go do basketball schools and become Woj. And he goes that way. And the business, I think, changes as a result of that. I think Peter King, you could argue, it's the same thing. talks about in his farewell comp going to SI and feeling completely outgunned in literary terms by Gary Smith, Rick Riley, Frank DeFort,

named the whole list. So he's going to give you tonnage. And then you see this separation, especially in the early 2000s. There's your magazine writer who is going to give you 3,200 extremely polished and reported words

and then disappear in a puff of smoke and come back six weeks later with another piece. Versus Peter King, who every, every Monday morning is going to be your pal with 10,000 words on the NFL. Here you go, pal. Boom.

And guess which one of those won out in the end? And I'm not saying Peter did that. We could argue the forces of journalism and technology. We're going to push us in that direction anyway. But the world of substack and the world of sports writing now sure looks a lot more like Peter King to me than the other. It does. It's an interesting question of how fungible you are as a potential writer.

because I'm sure that many people, I'm sure that Peter King looked at Frank DeFord and said to himself, I could never do what he does. And I'm sure if Frank DeFord cared enough, he would look at Peter King and be like, I don't think I could do that, even though Frank DeFord could do a lot.

So it really depends on who you are and what you can accomplish. Peter King has something that is pretty rare that I have a lot of admiration for as somebody who basically came up through the internet, which is he has a motor. You know what I mean? To use the NFL Combine word.

Like, he really could just go every week. He never let you down on delivering that tonnage that you're talking about. That is a skill, man. It's hard. This is really hard work. I know people think it's like, oh, people just sit in front of their keyboards and they don't do anything. It's like, that guy was clearly on the phone nonstop. He's watching games all the time.

And when he delivers, he delivers at weight. So I think that there's something to that. I don't know if that's a good lesson. That's the other thing. That might not be the best lesson that what you need to do is just like pour as much into the ether as you possibly can and hope somebody takes a bite. that's also a little dicey for what the expectation should be

for a writer. I do think it's interesting though that that we lived through a long form era that it feels like has also disappeared into the ether in some ways. The Peter King thing though, is that gone? Who are the signature long columnist? Like Bill Barnwell

is still doing what he does. There's some writers that, I guess Mike Sando is somebody who's still writing that column. Obviously our own Ben Solac is amazing. But like, it doesn't feel like there's the same hierarchy or sort of like this is the king of the jungle thing that we had 10 years ago when it comes to sports writing. Yeah, they might not be possible in the same way now

just because the world's so different. But I do think there is that particular type of sports writer and I would not recommend this as a lifestyle choice unless this is you, but there's a particular kind of sports writer that it just cannot be contained. They have so much. If you hear about Peter Gammon's in the 70s of the globe,

that's what happened. I've just got so much. Here's a whole page. baby on Sunday, fill her up. And you do it every Sunday. And there are types like that. Peter King started doing this in 1997 at the suggestion of an editor because he had all this stuff in his notebook that he couldn't use.

Also the interesting lesson here, too, is if you read those old Peter King columns, they were often about Peter King writing about the NFL. That also became a template that was used a lot. Not just the story, as we would read it, maybe in SI, but the story of the person doing the story. There's a certain podcasty self-consciousness in there as I record this podcast looking at you. That sense, I think, creeps into a lot of sports writing. There's something that casting directors look for when they're looking for acting talent,

which is not, are you a good actor or not did you memorize your lines effectively? But essentially, are you interesting? Are you interesting to look at? Are you interesting to listen to? Are you interesting to observe do things? and Peter King was interesting to observe as a persona and I don't know how self-conscious he was about that thing that you're describing but it's something that is increasingly hard to find

and is also increasingly essential to success in media right now you have to kind of personify yourself personaify yourself and he had that and it felt like it came naturally to him the same way I feel like it comes naturally to build the same way like most of these people when you meet them too they're exactly who they sound like on podcasts or in columns. They're not different. They may be amped up a little bit,

but they're genuine. And so it's hard to replicate that too. It's also hard to be 26 and try to replicate it. When you haven't lived, you haven't figured out really what you think about things yet. I only had so much coffee by that stage now at. Exactly, exactly. Have you caught up on John Stewart?

I have. I've been watching. I wasn't watching until you asked me to do the show. But now I'm here I am and I've watched it. And your impression? I had forgotten how much of his routine is just vaudevillian mugging for the camera. And is it over-emphasized now?

I wasn't really consuming the Apple TV stuff. Same. I don't know. And I knew he was doing it in its hey day. And I was a big fan of what he was doing. I thought he really had hit upon something generationally special in terms of how he talked about the news. But I couldn't believe how much reliance there was,

there has been in the first few episodes on, as he bulges his eyes at you. or glowers or does a spit take. I think the writing is still sharp and I think his general exasperation is appropriate for how a lot of people feel right now but it's pretty sticky.

It's pretty sticky and it's always after a clip play a clip of Tucker Carlson, play a clip of Trump or Biden and then come back to the camera and hear's me going, hmm? Doing that look you talk about. Yeah. It is.

Have you liked it? Yes. I find it comforting. I'm trying to separate about how much of that is nostalgia for the salad days of John Stewart when that just felt very cutting edge and different than anything we've seen on TV. Also, I think there's a lot of echoes of podcasting in there. There is. I think all of us, whether we admit it or not or even realize it or not, learned a lot from that.

Yeah. You're right. We talk about things like John Stewart talks about the news. We may not have a camera here to mug for, but we do the audio. one of that. Yeah, I think there's truth to that. I mean, he obviously got some flack, I guess, for the way that he both sidesed his way

through that first monologue about Trump and Biden and their age and the kind of discontent around this being the race that we have. I watched that last night for the first time, and I was like, this seems totally on the money. Like, I don't really, like, whether or not I think, like, I hope Joe Biden is elected. I know, certainly don't mind saying that into a podcast.

but I don't think anything that he said was out of bounds or weird or not part of the good fight. It's like he's hosting a comedy show. Yeah. This is the perfect election to do this. Yes. Both candidates are wildly unpopular. Yes. You're speaking to Democrats who have great fears about their candidate.

Yes. Even if they desperately want Joe Biden to win and think democracy ends if Joe Biden doesn't win. You're still speaking to those fears, right? This is the time for him to come back. Yeah, I think that he's also like a pressure valve for, malaise, you know, the sense, because this is, there's not even like enthusiasm for anything in our political discourse right now. It's like Mitch McConnell announced that he's stepping aside this week, uh, as Senate majority leader. That's a huge story. And I don't think people care.

Basically the person who has presided over political power in a meaningful way for decades and has authored significant change in our country. Is there even like a conversation going on about that right now beyond your typical, like, political hounds? I don't feel like there is. I haven't gotten a phone call for my dad about that, you know? Has it passed that test? No, and I think it's symptomatic of a kind of like, uh, uh, like there's kind of a retreat to the self going on in our culture right now.

And so it's interesting to watch him try to manifest that feeling on TV. And now also doing it about Gaza or doing it about other topics that are going to rise to the surface, which is challenging. That was in episode three. If you're going to try to do both sides, if you're going to try to be that kind of comedian, that was certainly his biggest challenge to try to take on that topic. Did you read any of the Richard Lewis Obitz that were popping up on Twitter?

Just the ones on Twitter, yeah. Just the ones where he seemed to know everyone, didn't he? Did you know that he was sliding into the DMs of all your favorite sports writers? I didn't. I didn't. He's kind of the, is he the Bruce Springsteen of Boomer comedians? We're just like everyone agrees. He's great. Yes.

It surprised me. I think he has multi-generational appeal, right? Because he has a, he has in terms of the love for Richard Lewis, it's like memories of the 90s, memories of a particular time for like HBO and Comedy Central and comedy. Yes. And all the way through with curb,

all the way through now, the Twitter persona. And then there were these interesting, like, Dave McMinnemann is DMing with Richard Lewis. And I'm like, what? Okay.

That's so strange. Dina Rossini is DM friends with Richard Lewis. Okay. Yeah, I would have never clocked that. I mean, I guess you could spot Richard Lewis at the occasional court side in an NBA game from time to time, clearly a sports fan.

Famous NBA fan, sure. Also a famous cinephile, Richard Lewis. He talked a lot about that, and I saw a lot of clips and my version of Twitter now is just people talking about how there are Jean Eustache films that he loved the mother and the whore, which like no one has seen, you know, was out of print for years,

but he would try to take, when he was dating younger women, he talked about how he would try to show, younger women the works of Ingmar Bergman or the mother and the whore. So like he clearly was a person who lived around in complete life. I find it really weird that he passed away

while this season of Curb is airing because there was a joke in two episodes ago about Larry being in his will. And so my heart breaks, you know, I love Larry David. Larry David is a god to me. And so I can only imagine how devastated he is by this, all his friends. It's weird though when you've learned

that someone who is that kind of persona that we're talking about with Peter King, someone who is typified in our mind in a very specific way, was using Twitter the way that one of us might, you know, was living a more common life than you might expect. Yeah, I'm using sports Twitter in that way. For some reason, that's funnier than anything else. A couple of items for a me that perked up my interest. We like to keep track of anybody on this podcast who is breaking their silence out there,

and we had multiple breakings of silence after that failed Willy Wonka immersive experience in Glasgow, both the actor who played Willie broke his silence and the beaten down umpalumpa who was photographed broke her silence. Usually that term is like a famous person who is avoiding the press. When they break it, do you think it's like a hammered a glass? Is it like a, is it like Jean-Claude Van Dam with a board? Like what is, what's breaking here? What's

the physical object? Well, that's what's funny, right? Was the umpa lupa really hiding from the media? Do we just need to get the umpa lupa's name and we just were looking for him? It was really more of a height issue, I think, ultimately. Thanks to Joseph Bean, Khan, and Rattie for pointing that out. Also, we keep a running tally of any athlete mentioning the haters and doubters who have stood in their way, especially athletes who do not, in fact, have many notable haters and doubters.

This week's winner, Anthony Kim, golfer who has not played in 12 years coming back at a live event in Saudi Arabia, also broke his silence, incidentally. But put up a video on Instagram and said, hello haters, I'm back, to which the entire golf media went, no, no, we all want to watch you play. Who are the haters here? Speaking of my time writing about rap, I interviewed a rapper named Mano back in 2008, who had a wonderful song called High Hators, that I highly recommend anybody out there. Anthony Kim really did break his silence.

He didn't talk forever. I mean, we tried to pursue him for stories at Granlin and the Ringer over the last 10 years because his story is an interesting one. Whether or not anybody was hating on him, I don't think that they ultimately were. I don't know. I just like to say hi to my haters. You don't think I can make it back to the press box, but here I am.

Screw you guys. Thanks to our pal, Sean Zach of Golf Magazine for that one. I got two surprise questions for you. This ain't no Seth Myers interview. We keep our guess off balance here at the press box. All right, here we go. Question number one.

You host a movie podcast. Yes. You've been a producer on a number of documentaries in recent years. Would you like to write or direct a movie someday? No. Not at all. No.

Never floats into your head. I'm not interested in that. I do like producing the docs and would be interested in producing other kinds of things for sure. I don't think I have the talent to write a movie. I don't have the ingenuity, the imagination.

It is a very structural job and I've learned a lot about it in the last seven or eight years doing the show and getting to know people who do this really well. Directing, when I was 15, I thought that that was something that I would want to do. And then when you get to know filmmakers, you learn that so much of their job is managerial

and that the vision part is what gets you the opportunity to make the thing. But then the making of the thing is a very mechanical kind of job. And you have to have a taste for it. You have to have patience for it, the ability to do it. And I don't think I would have the skill or the interest, but producing and being able to participate creatively, but without being that manager in that,

that way would be really appealing to me. It's a generous question. I think people think that I'm like some sort of stifled creative when it comes to this, but it's never really something I pursued. I never really have written a screenplay of a movie I want to make. I just, I have a genuine admiration for the people that do it because it is really hard. And if you ever,

if it ever sounds like I'm being a little bit nice to somebody about a movie that everyone thinks stinks, it's because I know how fucking hard it is to get something, not just written and directed, but financed, produced, to get actors to appear in it, to edit it together, to cut sound to it. It's really hard work. And even relative to my experience,

working in media, so I tend to be more, the older I get, the more generous I feel towards anybody who gets anything made. All right. Question number two, the filmmaker I must interview

or I fear my life will never be complete is? I'm dying without Martin Scorsese. I'm dying. I tried really hard on Killis the Flower Moon, I'm not afraid to say it. I really wanted to talk to him for the movie. I really love that movie.

He's available, isn't he? He is available. For some reason, he has eluded my reach. And I've been very fortunate. Like, I've been able to talk to a lot of my heroes. The show is in a place now where people will ask if they can come on the show. You know, their reps will ask if they can come on the show. I don't take that for granted either.

I think that's fucked. That would break my 15-year-old brain if I told them what the people who have been on the show. Quentin Tarantino came on the show to play a game. Like, that's crazy that that happened. But Scorsesee, for whatever reason, he's probably done 30, 40 interviews for the Kills of the Power Moon cycle, but I just couldn't, I couldn't lock it down.

And he's somebody who means a lot to me. And he's somebody who also is clearly at the end and probably isn't going to do that much more. There's only so many David Grandbooks left for him to film. I know. I know. Well, he's next... Well, his next film is about Jesus.

Oh, right. There's a Jesus. Yeah, there's a short film that I think he's co-directing with Kent Jones. also a media to movie writing and directing convert. There's an interesting one. Yes. So I think he's making this Jesus film.

And then in theory, he's making the wager, the grand book, which is also a mega blockbuster. And I don't know. How many more movies can he make? He's in his 80s. And who else is on the list besides Scoress? That's a good question. Never talk to Fincher. And I think this is pure speculation, but I don't mind saying it to you now.

I think Fincher's, at least Fincher's reps, know how. how weirdly obsessed I am with him and don't want to put me in a room with him. You scared him off. Yeah. But most, I've been fortunate, I think,

to basically interview this, like, young cohort of filmmakers that I really love. The Greta, Greta, the Safeties, Damian Chazelle,

Jordan Peel. I've done a couple of events with Ryan Coogler. Like, there's this group of people now that Ari Aster is a part of that, Robert Eggers. Like,

there's this sub-45 group of directors who it's been exciting to be doing the show while they're emerging. and I'm not friends with those people, but they know who I am and they come back to the show basically for every movie, and I feel really fortunate that that's something that happens.

So I'd like to be able to continue to do that. And I'm trying to find more time to interview international filmmakers, shine more of a light on their work, and first-time directors. Like, that's the thing that I'm trying to spend most of my time doing. There's not as much time, you know, I got to interview William Freaking before he passed away. That was big for me.

I was very happy that I got to do that. But my wish list is kind of working in the opposite direction, where I'm trying to now, I'm not checking names off the list, I'm trying to find people I'm excited about going forward. Speaking of movies, we got a wonderful idea a couple of weeks ago from listeners, Zach Brooks.

He said, Curtis and Fantasy should re-watch and review the war room. Yes. I put a bad signal out there weeks ago. If you did not watch, this is a 1993 campaign doc, directed by D.A. Pennebacher

and Chris Hedges, it follows the spin artist who helped Bill Clinton beat George H. W. Bush and Rossboro in the 92 presidential campaign. Where do we start with the war room? Well, it's a movie that could have only happened at that time. It's a movie that's remarkable to me that it even happened.

It's made by world-class documentarians, and it is a complete accident. So the intention of this movie, which was pitched by R.J. Cutler and Linda Ettinger, who went on to become very successful documentaries in their own right, was pitched to Penny Baker and Hedgedy. Penny Baker, one of the five most significant documentaries of the 20th century. He made, you know, the Dylan film Don't Look Back. He shot Ziggy Stardust for David Bowie. He shot Monterey Pop. You know, he made short documentaries about John F. Kennedy at the outset of his presidency.

He was approached by Cutler and Ettinger to make what seemed like a wide-scale documentary about this presidential race. It covered the candidates. They covered the machinery of their campaigns. It covered the feeling of the nation at this time. And basically everyone said no, except for Clinton's, the internal machine of Clinton's campaign. And particularly these two signature figures. And, God, they locked out because they just ran into two absolute stars in George Stephanopoul and James Carville. In print, it's what we call it right around.

Because even getting Carville and Stephanopoulos, they wanted Clinton. And if you watch this stuff on the Criterion disc, by the way, I bought the disc. Aren't you proud of me? Thank you for supporting the movement. To do this segment, I'm going to do one of those fantasy social media posts, but just going to have one disc. I'll put that up. I'll do the full shot of all the Penny Baker films if you want me to. I can do that at home.

But Hedges just says in there, like, she was trying to get Bill Clinton on election night. Like the whole payoff was going to be this guy, this governor of Arkansas, who was so young, realizing, oh, my God, I just became president, like capturing his face in that moment. And it failed. But as often happens in journalism, when you get the right around, he's. you get amazing stuff. It's not a full write-around though, right? Like, it's a write-around for Bill Clinton, but it's a deep portrait of James Carville.

Yes. And in some ways, George Stephanopoulos, in some ways not, I'm curious how you feel about Stephanopoulos looking at this again, you know, and what kind of what his life has been publicly for the last 30 years.

But, I mean, is there a better character in American politics in the last 30 years than James Carville? I don't think so. I mean, he feels like he was invented for a movie. He gives three speeches in this movie that are just jaw dropping. I'm like,

who wrote, did David Mamet write these? Like, what is this? Let's hear a little bit of the famous one. This is James Carval the night before the 92 election. There's a simple doctrine outside of a person's love,

the most sacred thing that they can give is their labor. And somehow, another long away, we tend to forget that. And labor is a very precious thing that you have. And any time that you can combine

labor with love, you've made a merger. And I think we're going to win tomorrow. And I think that the governor is going to fulfill his promise and change America. And I think many of you are going to go on and help him. I'm a political profession. That's what I do for a living. I'm proud of it.

We change the way campaigns are run. Amazing stuff. What's amazing to me about that moment, and it goes on even further. I encourage people to watch this movie if they haven't, is that it is a genuinely moving speech that he gives. I also, I think, I think, I think James Carville is evil.

And so, uh-oh. Like, I think... This took a turn. Well, I think that his entire work is, in theory, premised upon changing the world by getting politicians into office.

But I think ultimately what he does is he manipulates the feelings of people. That is what his work is. He doesn't inform, he direct. and I'm very suspicious of people who work in those industries. And I wouldn't say that this movie valorizes him. I think it shines a very bright and welcoming light on him,

but I think that you are meant to be a little bit suspicious of the way that this world works. And so there's that interesting moment where he says, I am a political professional. That's what I do for a living. This is for money. This is what he does. It's emotional and it's meaningful to him,

but he does this for money and a lot of money. And obviously at this moment in his career, it is the culmination of something that he has been working towards. And he's kind of a late bloomer and he talks about that in the speech. But the movie is, like all Penny Baker movies, not as admiring of its subject

as you might think based on their identity in the world. You know, he famously captured Norman Mailer debating four women in a documentary called Town Bloody Hall. He captured a rehearsal of company the Stephen Sondheim musical. And these are like really piercing emotional portraits of people who are flawed while doing their work.

Like that's what he's really good at. Norman Miller's work was really like being a blowhard in public and in addition to writing. And James Carville's work is like riling people's feelings and getting them to do things for him. And so I look at this movie as like a mega triumph of documentary. I would have loved to have been a part of something like this. But I, and, you know, I'm glad Bill Clinton got elected and there was not a second term for George H.W. Bush or whatever, but there's something insidious going on at the root of the movie to me.

George Stephanopoulos, you know, cajoling someone from a rival campaign to not publish a story about his candidate and, like, insinuating that he shouldn't do things because it will look bad for him and then he won't be able to work in Democratic politics again. You know, it's the stuff that is right out of advice and consent. You know, it's right out of those Gorvidal novels. It's, it's, that is how it shows you that this is how politics works. It is what you think it is. So it's like a,

a precious text that we see how the world really works. But I, I come away, even though I'm ostensibly a Democrat, I come away feeling a little like, icky watching it like three and four and five times. You know what I mean? As opposed to like stirred by their success. I agree, and I think

part of what it is is you're taking something that we all know is out there and you're putting it on camera. You know, this is probably the best portrait of this since the Joe McGinnis book selling of the president, which is back in the 70s, right? Which goes very deep on that sort of idea of dressing up things and manipulating the public. This is what campaigns are. Yeah. This is what the campaigns are of even the people you root for to win.

You rarely see them on camera in depth, too. Yeah. You know, like this feels, it feels like a chapter from what it takes, but doesn't feel like the book. You know, like it's not quite. It's a piece of the puzzle. There are significant people even who are featured, like Mitch Cantor is featured in this film. You see him talking a few times.

Mickey Canter. Excuse me, Mickey Canner. With the big suspenders on. Yes. Yeah. So Mickey Canter is like a really important person in 20th century politics. I mean, he is basically the author of a free trade movement that ultimately defined Clinton's administration.

Globalization as a as a strategy, as a political strategy, which is now something we look back on about the Clinton administration. We're like, God, that wasn't good. You know, like this, this, this emergence of free trade was pretty tricky. And in the movie, he's the guy in the suspenders who's helping them win. It's not telling us the story of what it is that he did or did not do. It's just this was a team.

And now, most of the people that are featured in that movie went on the long and hallowed careers in the world of politics and had great success. Some of them are good people and some of them are not good people. But the movie very sly doesn't lift them too high or take them too low. Oh, yeah. And why do you need to, right? because you've got this amazing portrait of them backstage. Making those phone calls, as you say, with Stephanopoulos, one of the best scenes in the entire move.

Crazy to catch that. And also the scene of, you know, Stephanopoulos telling Bill Clinton, essentially, that he's winning and he's going to become the next president of the United States. I mean, that stuff is just unbelievable. It's crazy. And what did you think of Stephanopoulos watching it this time? I think the movie may be a reflection of his place in the campaign. You know, this campaign made rock stars out of lots of people.

Probably took, you know, there had been that, That figure in American politics certainly had existed before. This probably took them to another level, considering George Stephanopoulos is on morning television now and has been for many, many years. You know, he comes off as an interesting figure. There was a moment in this campaign where he,

like, called into a Larry King, CNN interview with H.W. To challenge him on the air, which is, just feels like a kind of George Stephanopoulos over your skis kind of moment. It felt like a very contemporary, political move to me. It felt kind of more

like a Trump campaign kind of a move. Sure, a tweet. Yeah, yeah. In a way. But yeah, I mean, he seems to me to be the kind of youngish junior partner to Carville. Yes. Trying to make his name, learning at the foot of the master. I will say one other thing about spin that I think is so interesting. Because when you watch this movie,

the events of which take place in 1992, spin is happening inside the Clinton warring. And there's another great scene where James Carville is talking to a reporter, clearly and saying, you know, why you blame us or everything and you're not asking them those same questions like, which we could just insert as every piece of media complaining everyone. They get away with everything. We say one thing. What's interesting to me about that is the

spin is happening within the war room only. Like if this were today, as soon as anything happens with the Biden Trump campaigns, well, it's on Twitter, right? All of their allies are doing their thing on Twitter. They're doing their things on the partisan cable news channels. The media is the spin room. The media is the war room now in a way that's very, very different from 1992 when essentially they were dealing with the very old idea of a mainstream press. I feel like so much of what we've talked about today is about the way the things used to be and why they can't be that way anymore. You know, the way that pitchfork and Peter King and James Carvel's effectiveness as a political operator, it just doesn't work in the same way that it did, that it has to be kind of

redefined. This movie is a perfect time capsule of someone working at the height of his powers in that time. You know, somebody who really understood the narrativization of a campaign and that, you know, the movie very smartly, you know, Stephanopoulos before Carville's big speech identifies what these key talking points were for the speech. You know, it's the economy, stupid, things like that. And then the film kind of effectively closes on a shot of, like whiteboard where those mantras are written. And it's because Carville is a master of boiling it down. My favorite scene in the film is the one where they effectively write a campaign at in

real time. And you can watch Carville sloganeering in five minutes, three minutes. He comes up with what could be a death blow to George H.W. Bush's campaign just by figuring out the right four words in a certain order. You know, it is, as writers and editors, this is a... skill, you know, like he really did have an innate skill to puncture Pierce and wound

his opponents, and obviously people like Clinton benefited greatly from it. I mean, Cardwell's still doing it. He's still at it. He's still advocating every day for Joe Biden. It's amazing. He's answering every phone call seemingly from the media's on cable news all the time. They were very good slogan years. I think that's also think they're very fast

for the period. That War Room was very nimble in 1992 terms. They had a very, very flawed candidate. Movie starts in New Hampshire with him not only dealing with infidelities or rumors or accusations of infidelities but also draft dodging. Yes. I mean, this, this was, they were trying to sell a very,

very flawed person to the American public who we'd find out in later years was even more flawed than, than we understood at the time. I had this thought when I was watching the movie and was talking to my wife and I revisited it together. And I think if you lived Jerry Brown's life a hundred times, 96 of them, he would have been the president of the United States. And it's fascinating to watch him just have no chance

against Paul Songus and Bill Clinton and Ross Perrault. Because like between the resume and like being a fiery leader of a different kind and representing a movement, being from a big state, he kind of had the mold. Or maybe if he lived in a different era, like across 10 different generations of Americans, someone like him as forceful and clear-minded. And the way he challenges Clinton during one of those debates in the film is like exactly what people want.

to see happen to politicians every day. It's why they tune into debates. They want to see someone get held accountable for the question that they refuse to answer. And he got his clock cleaned by Bill Clinton, in part because Bill Clinton's campaign was so deft and so smart and so effective. Oh, yeah, and he could just, I mean, any question,

I'm just going to turn it on its head and put him right back on here. That's a good Clinton. That's better than your Carville, I've got to say. Also, James Carville, dating Mary Madeline. Can we just talk about how mind-blowing that would be in 2024? the people running the campaigns. I mean,

imagine if the person running the Biden campaign was dating the person running the the Trump campaign. Yeah, it was the Mr. and Mrs. Smith of 1992 for sure. I mean, the movie also very artfully portrays that. You know, we get time with Mary Madeline. We see also what like a whip smart operator she is too. She's really like,

she's basically like a talk show star in front of us, standing outside of convention halls. But the way that they track them and the one moment when they come together. Yes. And then they separate.

They're walking out after a debate, I believe. And they have that kind of moment where they're talking to each other. I think Pennybacker said he was holding the camera really low. So you get that kind of almost cinematic feature film kind of tracking shot. I mean, it's really artful. And something that's really hard to accomplish in a story like this, the way that the movie is cut is very smart. Because at times it explains what's happening. And at other times, it just insinuates the circumstances.

So that, I mean, the facts of Madeline and Carville together still blow my mind. the idea of them talking to each other alone privately over breakfast. But on the other hand, they're two genius political animals, right? And so they're probably made for each other. The other thing that blew me away about this movie is it does not have conventional narration or people talking to the camera explaining to you what's going on. It's all sights and sounds and overheard things. And the movie, I was reminded of the most was Nashville, Robert Goldman's Nashville,

just because of the way that the camera would have somebody on stage giving a speech and it would go over here. you know there's that great al gore speech i don't know if i'm going to attempt a third impression he would give on the stump over and over brian yeah this speech is in a lockbox brian

where he would be like you know inflation is up and revenues are down this is up and this is down and instead of showing us that which is actually a very it's like as interesting as al gore has ever been the camera goes to the side and it's a woman translating it into sign language sure and she's trying to keep up with al gore it's an amazing shot

yeah and it really does have that ultmany way of kind of showing you things and letting you hear things. Well, that's, it's a very good point and you're right about it. Penny Baker's style historically is pure verity. It's capturing the events as they're transpiring. It's Jimmy Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire after performing at Monterey Pop. And he was the king of that. This movie demands a certain kind of archival finesse where you're showing news clips.

You're showing. There's a few seams where you have to just show newspaper front pages and a few television things. It's not a pure Pennybaker movie in that way, but that means that the Veritas stuff actually has to be like exceptional. And it is. Like it really is. They have gold on their hands when they show that stuff. It's really incredible and just really stitched together artfully. And it turns out they only get onto this movie at the Democratic Convention in the summer in New York City.

So basically they go back and find this footage that someone else is shot, stitch it together to make it look like they were in New Hampshire. And then they're coming in in New York City when it's a great shot with Carvon, Stephanopoulos and Blue Blazers walking into the hotel. Here come the political consultants. It's really a fascinating thing. I did think a couple of times last night while watching it that, you know, almost all the events that transpire with the exception of the New Hampshire primary are still ahead of us in this race. Yes. Even though this feels all but settled in a way that 1992 did not feel all but settled. and the kind of fascinating mania of Perrault dropping out in this race

and then reinserting himself back into the race. Could you imagine if something like that had happened now? It would be so mind-blowing. But we do have a long nine months in front of us. We have a truly long nine months in front of us. I watched a little bit, by the way, the C-SPAN 1993 premiere, or the premiere in Washington, D.C. was on C-SPAN. It's on YouTube.

Can I read you the names of other films on the marquee of the Washington, D.C. House. Please do. Where the war room was playing. Let's go back in time, Sean. Farewell, my concubine. Absolutely.

Like water for chocolate. Yes, two international masterpieces. Haman, Haman. Three international masterpieces. And Ruby in Paradise. Wow. That is as 1993 as it gets, baby. That's a real art house cinema.

That's got to be, that's a very tasteful space for showing films. There's no longer open. Not a surprise. Tale of movies. That's a sad one. Before we go, can we talk about this year's Oscar Doc nominee? Yes. Oscars coming up on March 10th is 20 days in Marrippole.

The best film I saw last year, full stop and the list, is it going to win? I believe it will win for a variety of reasons. It is absolutely worth seeing Amanda and I actually in the big picture talked about it a little bit this week. It is very hard to watch. I hope I'm not pushing people away from watching it, but there are some sequences, there are some violent sequences early in the film as we see the early days of the siege on Marrippole in Ukraine that are very upsetting

and you need to be prepared for that to watch this movie. You need to be prepared to see human beings and specifically children die on camera. Yes. But that in its way is part of what makes the film so remarkable and so effective and so devastating

is that it is capturing not just warlike circumstances, war circumstances, the devastation of people's lives and done so in a very similar kind Verite way, where his camera is basically moving through the city and observing how people's lives are being torn apart and how the identity of a country and of a city in a nation is basically being destroyed in real time. It's a major achievement, but tough to watch. Have you seen the other

Doc nominees? I have it. That's the only one. So I saw it in film form. I saw it in in, in a movie theater in a theater when I came out last summer and it was it was screening, I guess, last summer. In fact, I went to see Barbie and it was sold out. What am I going to do now? It was in New York City. Are you serious? I went to say 20 days in Maripole based on New York Times Review. And I walked out of it.

Holy God. That's fascinating. Yeah. From the slate, it's a good slate, but it is a slate that I think is representative of a documentary branch that is trying to make a statement about what kinds of work it wants to recognize. It's pretty well known that the Oscars is significantly more international. The Academy is significantly more international than it was 10 years ago.

almost all of these films are international productions, the eternal memory of film about a journalist actually. This is very much worth watching who is engaging, who's in the latter stages of his life and is suffering from, I can't recall if it's early onset, Alzheimer's are defined as dementia, but the movie uses archival footage of his life and career and his life with his partner to talk about how to remember his life.

Very effective and sad movie. Four Daughters is also like an interesting experience. in documentary format where four women are essentially cast and their lives are kind of retold or replayed these four women in Tunisia

and they've lived this kind of traumatic life and it's not totally successful experiment for me but an interesting movie. To Kill Tiger is a movie I haven't seen. It just got acquired by Netflix about a week ago and is a very small production, an Indian production

about essentially the campaign for a young woman who was brutally murdered to seek justice for her and then 20 days in Maripal. And this is not still a Michael J. Fox story. This is not American Symphony, a movie about John Batiste and his wife who is battling cancer.

It's not these kind of celebrity-driven, fame-focused, streamer-funded movies. Like there's a real push right now, I think, within that branch to stand upon. from the machinations of Hollywood. And it's been explained to me in the past that, you know, the doc branch, unlike virtually every other branch in the Oscars, is more really located in New York.

You know, Hollywood and L.A. is over here. And documentary is more of an East Coast proposition. Now, obviously, there are plenty of documentaries who work in the West Coast, Texas, the Midwest, all over the place. But the hive mind for that branch is different. And frankly, is more like the media. And because of that, I think you see a work like 20 Days of Maripole being awarded in this category.

And there's just a long history of this. The films that are more journalistic, you know, give or take my octopus teacher are the films that get recognized. Films like American Factory, films like Navalny. You know, Navalny, which won last year, of course, is like incredibly resonant.

And, you know, obviously Navalny just died in prison in Russia. Or maybe, was he in Poland? I can't recall where he was located at the time. But, you know, those are the kinds of films that that branch looks for. And there often works about urgent issues in the world. 20 days of Maripole, though, I think even by that standard is,

uh, stands apart. Absolutely. It's a fantastic film and I, and I don't know that I would want to see it again. Yeah. Um, or at least all of it again, but I'll never forget seeing it. I mean, even the sites beyond what we're talking about, the sites of the Russian tanks and the big Z painted on the side, uh, coming into the city. It is truly, truly an amazing and horrifying experience. All right, Sean, thank you so much for doing this. Thanks for having me. I had one vision. Always ask your boss for stuff on the there. Sure.

We're getting later in the campaign. It's a couple months, early fall. We're worried about Michigan, particularly, those Michigan voters who are going to turn out for Biden or not. I'm hearing so much about this in the New York Times. It's 35th anniversary of Roger Me this year. You know, maybe in the fall we talk a little bit more, do one of these again. I would love that. That movie is kind of in league with like clerks, pulp fiction, dazed and confused in a way that kind of changed the way that I think about movies and what I want from movies.

I would love to do that. 100%. All right, Sean, big picture, rewatchables, everything else. Thank you once again for coming on the press box. Thanks, Brian. That's the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. Braction Magic by Brian Waters.

We are just about ready to release the March schedule of press box guest hosts. I'm just fiddling with a few things. All new people, including a theme show that you will really, really be interested in. That should come out in the next few days. And then on Monday, Shoemaker and I return with more lukewarm takes about me. Have a great.