Unclear and Present Danger - The Pelican Brief (feat. Jay Willis)

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

In this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle, John and special guest Jay Willis of Balls and Strikes discuss the 1993 adaptation of John Grisham’s “The Pelican Brief,” and ask whether anything about the movie’s plot actually makes any sense. They also discuss the early days of the conservative legal movement, the political hegemony of capital, and Stanley Tucci.Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieJay WillisUnclearPodAnd join the Unclear and Present Patreon! For just $5 a month, patrons get access to a bonus show on the films of the Cold War, and much, much more. Last week, we covered the 1979 BBC adaptation of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”Links from the episode!New York Times front-page for December 17, 1993Kirkus book review of “The Pelican Brief.”The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle or Control of the Law

The Supreme Court of the United States are ultimate symbol of law and order, but in a single night, two of its justices will be brutally assassinated. A thousand miles away in New Orleans, a lone law student has pieced together who did the killings, and why, and created a document that has become known in the corridors of power as the Pelican Brief. Now, she has become a target,

and the only person she can trust is an investigative journalist. Everyone I've told about to brief is dead. If this thing reaches as deep and goes as high as we think it does, these men will do anything not to be exposed. Denzel Washington, the Pelican Brief. about the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and what they say about the politics of

that decade. I'm Jamel Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section. And I'm John Gans. I'm a freelance writer. I have a substack newsletter called On Popular Front and I'm working on a book about American politics in the early 1990s. Today we are back to the world of the legal thriller with the 1993 film The Pelican Brief, directed by Alan J. Pacula. I've never actually said. his name out loud. And starring Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, Sam Shepard, John Hurd, Tony Goldwyn, William Atherton, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, lots of people that we like, people that should be familiar to you if you've watched the movie in the 80s or 90s.

So here is a short plot synopsis after an assassin kills two Supreme Court justices. Tulane University law student Darby Shaw writes a legal brief detailing her theory on why they were killed and then a bunch of stuff unfolds and that's the movie before we get started you should watch the Pelican Brief if you have not

seen it. It is available to buy or rent on iTunes and Amazon. It's also available for streaming for free on Tooby but that has commercials. So if you want to watch it commercial free you're going to have to either buy it or rent it. We have a guest for this episode. Welcome to the show.

Jay Willis, Jay, is the editor-in-chief of Balls and Strikes, a legal law and politics publication, I guess that works as well. Fellow Supreme Court skeptics, so we're always a fan of that. Jay, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Happy to talk about our favorite institution together. Before we get started with our usual stuff, J. I'll ask you real quick, what is your, what's your

experience with this movie? Have you seen it before? Have you read the book? Are you a John Grisham head or not? I had not seen the movie before this. I'd read like a decent number of John Grisham books back in the day before I realized they are all very much the same, very much kind of like airport novel comfort food. I honestly am not sure. I'm not sure. sure whether or not I have read this one, which again sort of speaks to his, his particular output. So this was, this movie was the first time through for me. The novel was a very popular Grisham novel, and the movie was a big hit, and we'll talk about that in just a few minutes before we do. Let's go to the New York Times front page for the day this was released,

which was December 17th, 1993. Okay, dokey. So let's see what's really. relevant for our podcast here. Well, big story is Inman, ex-admiral, is defense nominee, an operator for the Pentagon, Bobby Ray Inman. More than a decade ago, Bobby Ray Inman left Washington a Huff, vowing never to return. This was two meeting, the bureaucratic interviewer too innervading, and backed by two intense, he told him to minutes after serving 16 uncomfortable months as deputy to William J. Casey, who was then director of Central Intelligence. Shucking along, government career, Amman went home to set up business in Austin, Texas,

using the tools he acquired a four-star admiral and a spy master, self-indiscipline, he managed to keep his finger on the pulse of power. I'm an operator, the 62-year-old inman, bluntly told reporters today after President Clinton announced his nomination to succeed less Aspen as Secretary of Dispence, hopefully with a strategic view. So this is a shake-up early in the Clinton,

fairly earlier in the Clinton presidency of the Defense Department, who people thought was being mismanaged by Clinton, immediate Republican attack on Clinton was that he was weak on defense. And I think this was less to do with that and more with actual mishandling of stuff going on inside the Pentagon, which is a very complicated bureaucracy, as we know. But it says here, a few paragraphs down,

by selecting Mr. Inman, Mr. Clinton sought to show up his credentials with the military, which began grumbling during the 1990 President of the campaign when he was disclosed. He had avoided the draft in the Vietnam War. And also, the president also sought to insulate his administration from attacks by conservatives who have criticized his handling of events in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, North Korea. So, yeah, this was a political move to shore up his soft defense credentials. What else do we have here? I'm going to look at the front page, but I noticed some very, very interesting things in the opinion section, which I'm going to jump to in a second.

Secret nuclear research on people comes to light for three decades after World War II. to top medical scientists in the nation's nuclear weapons industry undertook an extensive program of experiments in which civilians are exposed to radiation and concentrations far above what is considered safe today. And let's say no more about that. The experiments at a government laboratories and prominent medical research centers involved injecting patients with dangerous radioactive substances like plutonium are exposing them to powerful beans of radiation. What I find funny or funny about horrible stories like this is like this is the stuff. of conspiracy theories and then it just comes out that it's true like every it's like oh yeah no we did

that we we we injected people with plutonium we tested you know faulty medications on people all that kind of stuff during the cold war they did a lot of wild and crazy things including this it's real i'm just i'm just i'm sorry i'm just stuck on injecting people with plutonium what the fuck did they think was going to happen well they were probably expecting it to you know, help them maybe get a super super power, something like that. I think that they were just trying to see what happened when you gave a burst in plutonium. And who knows? It could have gone the other way. We could have created, you know, Dr. Manhattan or Spider-Man or something like that. But instead probably made a lot of people deathly ill. All right. So a lot of New York

news. Spest dose is a big thing. Oh, this is interesting and maybe fits with the theme of this podcast. Big grocery chain reaches landmark sex bias accord. A sex discrimination settlement that could alter personal practices throughout the grocery industry, Lucky Stores, Inc. has agreed to pay nearly $75 million damages to women in Northern California, who are denied promotion opportunities and to invest $20 million in a firm of action programs for female employees. So the early 90s is when a lot of just gender discrimination, sexual harassment,

law suits start to get, you know, to be successful, to be a big part of the national consciousness. And here's an example of that. And especially not, and this is among, you know, people who had kind of working class jobs, not just in, you know, among professionals and corporate jobs. So that's an interesting piece of historical detail. But I want to look at the very interesting opinion section, because there's two articles. A broad at home, Anthony Lewis's column, when you appease fascism, a specter is haunting Europe, the specter of extreme nationalism.

When it appeared two years ago in Serbia and the United States and Western Virginia-Sydena to treat it as a serious threat, they followed a policy of appeasement, a wheedling democracy that rewarded Serbian aggression. Now that Spector before us is not so easy to ignore, the strong-shoulders. in the Russian legislative elections by the party headed by Vladimir Zerunovsky. He campaigned as an extreme nationalist and anti-Semite, calling for restoration of the Russian empire and the use of nuclear weapons if needed. Menacing as Zerunovsky is the instinctive reaction in the West to dismiss the threat. President Clinton said the support for him was primarily a protest vote by people who did not know what they were voting for.

Some commentators said that he should not dignify it by taking him seriously. Well, as you may know, Gironovsky was a presence in Russian politics, kind of became sort of the controlled opposition of Putin later on and died not long after the war in Ukraine started, which is sort of the culmination of the kind of politics that he had hoped for. Yeah, so he was his far-right figure in Russian politics, a far-right nationalist figure whose party was called the Liberal Democratic Party

nothing liberal or democratic about them. He was very crude. He promised to reinstitute a police state, highly misogynistic, anti-Semitic, racist, you name it. Outrageous figure and demagogue. And on A.M. Rosenthal's column, on my mind, Russia, who's to blame? For days, phone calls have been coming in from Russian friends, explains to me to me and themselves, how in their homeland a fascist,

nationalists could have become a strong contender for power. In their explanation, much of the American intellectual and political reaction ran a theme of Western failure or guilt. President Clinton was guilty for sticking so strongly to Boris Yeltsin. The NATO powers failed to suit the fears of the Russian military. The West should have provided more money to stabilize the Russian economy. Western guilt, I think not. Russian did this to Russia.

Russians, not Westerners, checked the ballots and a quarter of them, and the choice of national party selected the leadership of the man who promised another dictatorship and resurgent armed forces on the march. The memory of German voters helping Hitler leap to power is inevitable and valid. The other editorial mentions Mussolini. This editorial mentions Hitler. So a strange and unsettling foreshadowing of the present in way back here in 1993. And another interesting note, there is a thing in the middle of the section about the CIA support of death squads in El Salvador.

Also, a column here about gun violence. So much of the things that we are concerned with today is foreshadowing, not just of the rise of extreme nationalism in Russian Eastern Europe, but in the United States, it is interesting to think about how in the wake of Trump's election, there was lots of excuse-making. There was actually a very little appetite among the American commentary for saying basically, no, people should be responsible for their own actions, and we should take seriously what they chose to do. I don't know. It's an interesting contrast there. I wanted real quick back on the front page to look the asbestos story because like the Pelican Brief, you know,

it doesn't really deal with geopolitics at all. It's very much about kind of domestic political corruption. And so this asbestos cover up, this asbestos blast cover up is is very much, I think, of the kind of thing that would have been in the mind of a viewer while watching this movie, sort of how corporate interests, corporate corporations, moneyed interest, have kind of a total disregard for the public and will do whatever it takes to maintain their profit. So I just wanted to bring that up as kind of something relevant to the film. Jay, is there anything you see on the front page

or anywhere else in the paper that you think it's interesting? Yeah, the big one that jumped out to me was this sex discrimination settlement. This is sort of taking place at a period in the court's history when the scope and extent of civil rights law and affirmative action was very much still sort of up for grabs, still being shaped. So in 1989, there was a big Supreme Court case that made it easier for employers to defend against certain types of employment discrimination claims. And it's kind of unique because just two years later, like Congress reacted, at least in Congress adjusted terms, swiftly and explicitly to overrule the Supreme Court's interpretation of civil rights law and make it easier for plaintiffs to bring these kinds of claims. So I just bring this up because like concepts like sex discrimination especially and sexual harassment, which you mentioned earlier, are kind of in their infancy in terms of how the public understands them.

But it's definitely a theme that reappears several times in the movie and definitely the kind of thing that like an informed viewer of this movie. at the time, ideas that would jump out to them. All right. So let's do a little background on the film just to situate ourselves a bit. I mentioned at this top, Pelican Brief came out in 1993, and it was directed by Alan Jay. I'll say Pakula. You probably, and this is the general you, you probably know Pakula's movies.

his first big hit was 1971's Clute starring Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda and Roy Snyder. Roy Snyder being a frequent something who frequently appears in the films in this podcast. He has a film I have not seen called Love and Pain in the Whole Damn Thing

which is like a comedy drama but then he kind of is on a run of films that again you're going to recognize the parallax view which is 1974, starts more Beatty. It's a great paranoia thriller where we will likely talk about it at some point on the Patreon. All the President's Men is his follow-up, which is one of the, you know, I think iconic films of the 1970s based off of the Woodward and Bernstein book of the same title about the Watergate and the Nixon administration. A bunch of other movies I'm again

not too familiar with. Comes a Horseman as a Western starting over. It's another comedy, but they make it Sophie's Choice in 1982, which stars Merrill Streep, a very famous movie, very famous Merrill Street performance. And then there's some more stuff, but then as far as we're concerned, there's presumed innocent, which is a Harrison Ford vehicle. I think we talked about this a little bit on the Fugitive podcast, Fugitive episode. One of the many Harrison Ford, I didn't kill my wife movies. Um, and we have a, and when we get to the, uh, the feedback of any of the episode, they actually have an interesting letter about all that. Um, and then there's consenting

adults, which is a crime thriller starring Kevin Klein, Kevin Klein, Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio, who we saw in White Sands, uh, Kevin Spacey and Rebecca Miller, um, which is another, you know, one of those bad husband dramas. And here we are at the Pelican brief. His last film as a director was The Devil's Own, starring Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt since 1997. And it is a, we will cover this for the podcast. The plot revolves around a member of the provisional Irish Republican Army that comes to the U.S. to obtain black market anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down the Brits and Northern Ireland. So that's right on theme for the podcast. But the Pelican Brief is Bakula's last big hit before he passes away in 1998

and is based off of a John Grisham novel, as you know, of the same name, which came out the year earlier, and was also a big hit. Kirkus Reviews called it a gripping legal suspenser. And in this review, they write, it is a tale that baits its own hooks with the lures of all the president's men. kind of see why Pacula was attracted to this material. As for the stars, we'll just focus on two right now, Julia Roberts and Denta Washington. There's been a conversation happening recently and sort of like film Twitter, you know, film conversation stuff about the absence of the sort of 30 to 40 year old female star. I guess Julie Roberts at the time would have been

in her early 20s. But kind of the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the female star that can helm a big budget movie. And Julie Roberts was kind of maybe one of the last of the breed in the 1990s. A movie that had Julia Roberts at the top was a movie that was going to be an absolute massive hit. And just going through some of her movies from the 90s into the 2000s, you can see that Pretty Woman, obviously, which grossed $464 million. worldwide. My best friend's wedding, Notting Hill, Runaway Bride, Aaron Brockovich, which is in 2000, and then she's still putting on hits throughout the 2000. So Julie Roberts, kind of not yet at the peak of her career, but definitely on the rapid ascent. Pretty Woman was the kind of smash

hit that immediately made her one of the most bankable people in Hollywood. And then we have Denzo Washington, who is not yet. I mean, I mean, so the funny thing about Denzel is that he, by the early 90s, by this movie, he had already done Malcolm X. He had already done Mo Better Blues. He's already in glory. So he's already kind of in that world. But he mostly, and he's starred in a lot of stuff, in a couple years earlier, he was in heart condition, which is, I don't know if you guys have seen this movie. It's very stupid.

It's Denzel Washington and Bob Hoskins. where Washington stars as a lawyer. Bob Hoskins are the police officer. And Hoskins' police officer is a degenerate racist. And it's like Washington's heart, organ transplant helps Hoskins stay alive. And then his ghost haunts him, basically. They have to solve a murder together.

Cool. It's very stupid. It's very stupid. but then that's the kind of stuff he was in right like he's in ricochet the following year which is a movie i really like but is just absolutely bananas it stars john lithgowan and then to washington and then to washington plays like a assistant district attorney who's on the rise and then gets like the attention of an insane person and it ruins his life it's a very crazy movie um so he was like he had this weird place where he's in these this kind of um he was in

a lot of trash but then also like in prestige stuff he played steve biko in cry freedom i mentioned malcolm x which is sort of one of i think a career best performance um but the pelican brief begins basically a run of movies in which he um and i shouldn't forget to mention he was a mississippi masala the a few years earlier which is a phenomenal movie um takes place in the Mississippi Delta about a South Asian woman and a black man in a romantic relationship. Slip that much ado about nothing movie in there too. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, people have seen the still from that where everyone looks great. The movie's fine, but everyone's very hot in it. It's true. But after the Pelican Reef, you got Philadelphia, Crimson Tide, Devil in a Blue

Dress, Kirch Under Fire. I mean, you start getting all the Denzel stuff. So he's also in a roughly similar place as Julie Roberts, although he's a bit older. And that's, I think, I think that those are, those are the key players worth paying attention to for this. This, the Pelican Brief grossed a lot of, a lot of goddamn money. It was very successful at the box office. And let me just double check. Yep, it broke $100 million.

So, very successful movie. wasn't all that expensive either. That's the Pelican Brief. That's the basic. And as for the plot, you know, it is, it is, as I said, Supreme Court Justice,

two Supreme Court justice are assassinated. And a law student, played by Julia Roberts, comes up with a theory about why that happened. It makes its way to the perpetrators. And then she's on the run for her life. There's a Washington place of reporter

who's trying to get the story and their paths across, and they're both trying to solve the mystery of these assassinations and escape alive. A lot of stuff. John, any early thoughts? My question, so, Jay, you read the book? I skimmed the book. I gave the book a gentleman's scroll.

Is there a romantic relationship between the leads and the book? I didn't get that far through, but my understanding is no. Okay, I was wondering if they didn't want to have a romantic relationship between Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts, even at this stage in Hollywood. But that just occurred to me. Honestly, I was thinking that the entire time, I think that every time I watch this movie, because they have such tremendous chemistry. Yeah, and they kind of flirt and then nothing happens. Right, right. I would be willing to bet that if that character can play by anyone of Vindenzel,

they would have had a romantic relationship. Like, if it's not in the book, then that's like your excuse. Well, it's not in the book. But I kind of think that if it weren't Denzel, they would have, they would have, they would have kissed at the very least. Yeah, I'm sure this will come up through our discussion, but I will just footnote. In the book, Denzel Washington's character is not black. It's just a white guy.

Right. Which, like, I don't obviously know the backstory behind that. there's part of me that thinks, as Jamel was saying, if at this point you can get Denzel Washington to star alongside Julia Roberts in your Grisham adaptation, you do it. But it definitely, Denzel Washington's race does provide for like a couple different plot points in vignettes that you would not have gotten if this were like, what, Matt Damon or something. How old is Matt Damon then? I have no idea. Matt Damon is always older than you think he is. Okay.

Okay. My other thought is this. I feel like this movie forms the background of like a baseline conspiracy theory or this, the imagination behind this is the baseline conspiracy theory now that happens every single time a Supreme Court Justice dies. Like I remember like there was like like scaly there was like rumors that Scalia had been like smothered with a pillow or something like that. Right. So. Instead of smothered on those stakes. Right.

So he, he, he, so every time, especially when a conservative one dies, like people, even though the guy, and this is obviously a liberal, you know, people kind of jumped to this conspiracy theory. And I wonder if that really happened before this book and movie came out. And the other thought I had was how completely unconvinced I was by this conspiracy. Why would they bother? I mean, like, I think this is. I think this is. is just because of like the domination of of conservative um legal movement at this point i'm like they could just wait they're going to get their people and eventually like they don't need to kill anybody they know they're going to win you know like so that was like i was like why would they even bother and so i just found the the idea that they would need to make some desperate move to to like unseat liberal domination of the court to me in retrospect seems kind of uh quaint idea like They don't need to assassinate anybody. They're the power bases.

So that was interesting to me when I was watching it. But because I didn't quite, I found that plot point to be a little dated. And also, I guess, I don't know, Jay can speak to this a little bit more. Also just like the idea that there are such strong environmental protections that it would even like hurt an oil company's profits also to me was like they just don't, how much does it really? affect them. So anyway, those are a few of the thoughts I had. I did enjoy it. I thought, you know, it's a pretty good thriller as they go, especially for the way movies are made today. But I thought a few things about it just felt very quaint and dated to me. Yeah, for my for my lawyer sickos out there, I'll go through like a couple of these plot points, which is the case centers around

this like mysterious, mysterious reclusive kind of dark money and politics guy who both helps politicians gets elected, get elected, and also is like trying to invest in big oil and make cajillions of dollars in oil that he's found in Louisiana. So there's a lawsuit over it to like stop the drilling and it's set it around protecting this particular species of pelican, hence the pelican brief. And the idea is that killing these two Supreme Court justices will give this mysterious, reclusive power broker a better chance at winning when it comes to the Supreme Court. But there's like a ton of like very practical logistical hurdles associated with using the Supreme Court to elicit a specific particular outcome at some point in the undetermined future.

So Julie Roberts' character in the movies notes that the lawsuit like the district court level took seven years to go to trial and the jury had ruled for our reclusive billionaire friend but the judge had kept an injunction in place that prevented them from drilling. And she tells Denzel Washington's character that it's on appeal to the Fifth Circuit and she's not sure what they'll do

but then she said then it could go to the Supreme Court and Denzel Washington asks how long and she says probably three to five years. And like that is a long time to decide that icing two justices is like necessary and efficacious. Like what if the Fifth Circuit rules for you or what if the court like decides just not to review your case? It only takes up a small fraction of the appeals it gets.

Which sort of brings me to like my second big takeaway from this movie, which is that like it's nominally a legal thriller, but there's not a whole lot of like. law going on here. This really is like a political thriller with sort of like a legal adjacent angle. You could easily rewrite this as, you know, two key senators whose votes would pass a past environmental legislation who were assassinated and it could be largely the same thing. And taking a step back, like this movie has released two years after the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, which were not so much about his ideology, so much as his history of being a creepy sex pest.

But the court is, the takeaway from that is the court is like very salient in the public's mind. People who probably couldn't have named a Supreme Court justice even a couple of years earlier, probably can name at least one now, right? And I sort of view this again as less like a legal thriller than Grisham and how do we decide we're going to say the director's name? Pacula. Pacula. I like it. Deciding that this is like a new forum, a new space in which political thrillers can take place.

I think that's right. I think that makes sense. But jumping off of the point about the Thomas confirmation and speaking to John's observation that it all seems. sort of quaint that you'd have to, like, assassinate two justices to get your, your preferred guys on. What's interesting is that in the history of the conservative legal movement, it's not actually where it would be a decade from then, right? Like, it's in 2000, what is it, 2004, 2005, it's when W.

Nominates Harriet Myers to fill the seat left by Sandra Day O'Connor and the conservative legal movement loses its mind because they're just sort of like, we'll be. can't trust that this woman's actually going to be on our side for stuff. It's not there yet, right? And so in the early 90s, the court's decision to uphold Roe in Planned Parenthood v. Casey was a kind of a moment of reckoning for the conservative legal movement, which had had a bunch of momentum coming out of the 80s, but felt that it had basically been, like, betrayed by Reagan, Reagan's nominees, O'Connor, particularly, Kennedy, and was sort of in this place where it basically was like, no, well, the court is still under this, like, liberal hegemony, right?

So being dominated by liberals. And so if you think about the conservative legal movement as being not weak in this moment, but like certainly not nearly as strong or itself hegemonic over Republican politics as it is now or as it would be even a decade later, It does make some sort of sense to think that like a particularly desperate person might be like, well, I got to like off some justices to make sure that I really can get the two guys that I want. But then you do run into the problem of like if you need these permits to go through now, it seems like there are ways to get to that outcome that offer much less exposure to your interests than doing something which has never been done before.

We've talked about this before, but his Supreme Court justice has never been assassinated. Not that we know of. Not that we know of. Not that we know of. I mean, they've died in interesting ways. James Wilson, one of an early justice in one of the first courts, was a degenerate gambler and died in like a cabinet, North Carolina on the run for its debts. So there's that.

There's interesting 19th century deaths, but 18th century deaths in my case. but as far as as far as we know no one has tried to pelican brief for Supreme Court justice and so it just seems like you know from the perspective of the movie and the characters in the movie they probably have other better ways

of getting to these outcomes than doing something that's going to attract a lot of attention I would believe it was an ideological interest group that would try to do assassinations to get their program through but the fact that the guy as a corporate interest seems to me unlikely. Not to say that they're better or they're above it,

but I would think of them pursuing their political goals and ways that would not be so desperate and would follow kind of regular order because they've been so successful at it. It's just like It just seems like the domination of American politics and law by business is so complete that they would never need to use assassination. You know what I mean? Right, right. It seems, yeah. It seems like that's like a misunderstanding of what, like, it's like this movie almost like

overrates the power of liberalism to such a degree. It's like, oh, yeah, like they're so desperate to get rid of. liberals that they have to use assassination. Or environmentalism. Environmentalism is so powerful and so strong that they would have to resort to violence to work around it just seems to me to be a little difficult to buy. We often talk on this podcast about the end of history, the kind of the end of ideology that, you know, the 90s were supposed to be. And there's a way in which the fact that there is no discernible ideological belief. amongst really anyone in this film other than the liberal justice, liberal lion justice

at the start is interesting, right? Like they refer to the president as basically being like unprincipled and ruthless and like a ruthless partisan and like spanning division, but they never really say what that president's politics are. They leave it for you to, I guess, suppose that these are right winger, but he might not be, right? sort of like Clinton was talked about in similar terms as sort of like an amoral politics first everything else second kind of guy so who knows even the other the other justice who is

assassinated we have the liberal justice who's assassinated we have the second justice who was assassinated in a queer porno theater this is a very 90s movie in a lot of ways and one of the ways in which is various 90s is that like there's a real cynicism about Washington and one of the notes of that cynicism is that like oh these people are all actually degenerates of one in one way or another and so this is like I think supposed to be an illustration of that but we don't know what that justice ideology is we're told that he's on the other side of our liberal justice so he could be like a right-wing conservative or who knows he might be a moderate I mean it's sort of it's it's unclear where people stand ideologically in this

film it's very much sort of like in Grishman coolest vision. It's all sort of like, you know, very, very base monetary interest is what's driving people's, or very base political interests, it's driving people's actions, which fits well with, I think, the cynicism of the film. I don't know that the other justices even get names. And the liberal justice, the older one, the liberal lion, he's got some dialogue at the beginning of the movie. I don't think the second justice, has a single line of dialogue. I think he comes on screen

and we watch him get off to the theater and that's it. He comes on the screen and then he gets off on the screen. Nice. Well done. But like, I'm going to play the role

of juvenile in this episode. It's extremely welcomed. But yeah, like legal ideology is not really on this. display here, which I think kind of contrasts with the reality on the court at the time that this movie was happening. As Jamel says, like, the conservative legal movement was not as powerful as perhaps its adherence thought they would be at this point, but Republicans were dominating the court.

So between 1967 when Thurgood Marshall was nominated and 1993, when Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg. There were no other Democratic appointees in that period. There were 10 Republican appointees during that time, twice for Rehnquist, who got appointed as an associate justice and then promoted to chief justice. So the aging and dwindling liberal majority or liberal power on the court that I think is depicted in this movie does, kind of track with the court that was developing at the time. You did see the court kind of flexing early reactionary muscle. There's a quote in the book from Sam Shepard's character who, upon seeing the assassination of these two justices, says, we won't recognize the Constitution

in 10 years. This is sick. He's sort of a disappointed liberal of his own, but he's sort of shown as He's being shown as a drinker, ineffective, has retreated to academia. Embroiled in a sexual harassment lawsuit if this movie were to happen today. Yes. Serial data of students. Serial data of students and has a condescending relationship to his younger student who's still idealistic. The first scene, it shows her in his class with she's defending kind of, I don't know

their legal theory even from my view I was like they're showing this is so stupid this can't be a law school level class the way they're discussing this kind of stuff but like

talking about like privacy rights and what cases be oh it's up Bowers v. Hardwick Bowers v. Hardwick and you know Darby Shaw Julie Robbins' character

is giving this kind of liberal defense of privacy saying the Supreme Court's reading of the law was wrong and so on and so forth. But he's sort of disappointed and burnt out. Denzel Washington's character is not cynical, is a good reporter, is not cynical, but is not clearly, doesn't fully believe the story at first is a little bit grizzled and maybe jaded from his experience as a reporter in Washington. So it's, it's, it's a, um, It takes a little while for people to believe it.

But what is kind of also odd to me is how this student comes up with essentially a conspiracy theory. And then the FBI is just like, this sounds very interesting. We're going to go with it. Like that seems also to me. This is also the hope and dream of anybody who's ever come up with a conspiracy theory is that they will put it into the hands of the right people and then they will look at it and say, oh, my God, this makes so much sense.

But the thing is about the logic of the logic of. Obviously, identifying someone with a motive does not a good theory make because that's a problem with conspiracy theories is that they're too logical. Like you say, oh, well, this person has a clear motive. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure of any number of people had a motive, you know, to kill. Pretty much everybody has a motive to kill a Supreme Court justice who has any kind of interest in the law or ideology, which is almost everybody in the United States, right? So like, identifying somebody with a motive to kill a Supreme Court justice is pretty thin gruel. But somehow, this is enough to get the FBI very interested in it to me. And to me, that's just how would that possibly happen?

I mean, she doesn't have any evidence. All she has is a theory, right? That's what the brief is. She doesn't have evidence. She's just like, well, here's a person with a motive. I was trying to think of how this movie would work if it were to take place today. and it's like some you know Eric Garland

Claude Taylor shit right where she logs on to Twitter and it's like got some ideas about justices Rosenberg and Jennings thread 1 247 exactly it's like if somebody if it's like Eric Garland game theory guy

well some might say this is what actually happened but like it convinced you know the Justice Department to look into something right because they were like this theory actually sounds sort of interesting.

It just doesn't, it just, it's just so strange that, like, it would be different if she had a piece of evidence, right? If she had some empirical, she, she, in her research, she, she came across some empirical evidence, but no, she just creates a conspiracy theory, essentially. And the conspiracy theory gets taken up by the FBI, not encouraging. I mean, it happens to be correct, but, but, uh, it's just strange that they would, you know, they would just decide like, oh, yeah, this sounds kind of good. look into it. Yeah, 30 years later, we get Alex Jones. Right. Yeah. What's so interesting to me

about that dynamic, about the fact that there's this very straightforward conspiracy theory, the FBI immediately picks it up, right? Things immediately start unfolding. Her professor, boyfriend is, you know, it seems like within 24 hours of the thing making his point to the FBI. He is blown up in a car bomb in the streets of New Orleans, parenthetical, since I like to point things out. Great car bomb explosion. You know, car explosions are always fun to see on screen. And this one, it was two shots. You see the explosion. And then they, like, do a second shot and you see the dummy on fire. And I thought that was very funny. I wrote double car bomb in all caps in my notes for that. I said to my wife, a crispy critter, look. And then immediately

sort of the people, you know, the people who are trying to cover up their role in the assassination are trying to kill Julie Roberts' character, assassins sent her way. It's a whole thing. And to my mind, having seen Pakula's other films, having seen or his other kind of conspiracy paranoia films, all the president's men and the parallax view, what striking is how much this is, this doesn't actually feel of the 90s. Like it doesn't feel like a 90s kind a conspiracy, right? Like a 90s kind of conspiracy is new world order sort of like trying to reorganize like, you know, the entire political system, you know, geopolitics, shadowy figures interested in changing the entire global order as you know it, like in sneakers, right? Sort of like

that's the kind of conspiracy that seems to be in vogue in the 90s. This is like a very 70s conspiracy, just sort of like very, you know, what's Nixon trying to cover up? A burglary. And the way in which it is like so base and so, you know, it's so logical and involves not sort of like, not sort of like shadowy, almost abstract figures, but like a real estate guy, like an oil guy, basically real estate guy whatever and in all of this um that the assassins aren't in the parallax view warren baby's character is chased basically by sort of like i'm going to use your word shadowy again like these shadowy figures he can barely sort of get a handle on here it's just like it's like it's like a guy right this small bald man who i guess is a psychopath um this feels like a 70s

paranoia movie put into the 1990s, and it just doesn't, like, fit. I mean, I think it's fun to watch, but sort of when you've really been to think about, it isn't quite fit the vibe of the 90s when it comes to conspiracizing when it comes to that kind of, that kind of thing. You mean, I know what you mean. It's not like a lot of those fixate on national security state stuff, not on, like, business interests being corrupt. It was a pretty business-friendly time, as a matter of fact.

So, states were evil. Business was good, you know. Right, right. Whereas in the 70s, business is, you know, it's polluting. It's exploiting in these, like, very sort of like, you know, it's always doing these things. But I feel like in the atmosphere of politics in the 70s, it's like very much in front of mind. The whole movie very much takes place. I thought this was interesting.

in the shadow of Watergate, not just for, like, the viewers at home who understand the references, but, like, for the characters in the movie. And there's a couple of places where they almost, like, break the fourth wall to acknowledge that. There's one sequence where they're talking about, you know, the secrecy of their conversation in the Oval Office. And the president is like, of course it's a secret. This is the Oval Office, which, like, is an immediate laugh line or snicker line, at least, for, like, anyone. familiar with the basic plot points of Watergate. There's also a section or a scene at the end of the film where the sort of Meet the Press political roundtable guy asks like explicitly

draws a parallel between Darby Shaw, Julia Roberts's character and Deep Throat. Sort of a related theme that just kept coming up here is the The surveillance, that surveillance between the like 70s thrillers that you know was referencing earlier, like you can be tracked anywhere by anyone in this movie. Like surveillance is so ubiquitous that it kind of propels the plot along without a whole lot of like the director showing your work because the audience just sort of understands that surveillance is part of, like, reality and especially, you know, how things work in Washington. Like, how does this guy know where Julia Roberts is? How does he have access to their phones?

It doesn't matter because as a viewer, you can just sort of take it for granted. There's a very funny scene where a phone conversation concludes and the camera zooms in on a phone with mysterious music playing. And that's enough to understand that, like, yeah, your phone is, you're Your phone's been tapped, yeah. And then you also had the scene in which this mysterious source calls Denzel Washington's character and with potentially some information. But he's very nervous and he says,

are you recording this call? Denzel says, no, no. Can you trace my call? And Denzel Washington kind of says, man, I'm not recording or tracing the call. Like, just talk to me, what's going on here? The guy hangs up and then Denzel Washington's character like bloops his phone a couple times

and is immediately like I know where the pay phone is and drives there and can like take pictures of this guy with his telephoto camera lens just like which is not something even a reporter would easily do that

that's like very unethical yeah it's not great yeah not great you shouldn't use star six nine that way then so I mean there's the other the other surveillance that I'm thinking of is when a character we have not talked much about Stanley Tucci's assassin

Jacked Stanley Tucci. Jacked as hell. God damn. Yeah, my wife was like, what's his deal in this movie? Who's supposed to be an Arab, right? Yeah, something like that. Yeah.

But Tucci looks great. I'm tempted to make when I tweet about this episode just only pictures of Stanley Tucci from the movie. But when Stanley Tucci Two Jee's character kills John Hurd, who is the friend of Julia Roberts' boyfriend, and he works at the FBI. And so the Pelican Brief gets to the FBI. When he's killed, I believe it's after that that the camera pans over to his phone, and you see the tapped line, which is how the antagonists know what's going on, know how to find Julia Roberts, because she was going to meet with him. so there's a lot of there's a lot of that surveillance is a very important part of this film I wanted so the other 70s thing about this movie is just how it not how it depicts journalism because it I mean it takes a lot of license with how journalists act but um but how it frames journalism still as something that could like create meaningful change in a society right sort of like a single story right with a single story with the right with a single story with the right

scoop, right? Like the journalists can upend the corruption in Washington can upend wrongdoing, can stop bad actors. And so in this movie, Denzel Washington's character was a reporter for basically a Washington Post analog called the Washington Herald, unless the Washington Herald was a real newspaper in which case, I apologize. I don't know my Washington newspaper history all that well. But he's a reporter. Um, he obviously is a very good one. The White House knows him. He hangs out with Supreme Court justice of the top echelons. He's like, he's enough of a household name that, um, that Julie Roberts approaches him because her former boyfriend, uh, was a fan. So he, you know,

he's trying to get this scoop, trying to get this story. And the film is very much of the perspective that like, you know, it's important for him to get this scoop and get this story because if he can get this story published, that will save the day. And at the end, Jay and the scene you mentioned in the very end, when he is on this meet the press kind of TV show, fac-nation kind of TV show, it's very much, you know, the host is like there have been indictments, you know, there's no investigations, Congress is convening a session, sort of like this one story is the thing that's going to set all the stuff into motion.

And that's me very much, that's like a Watergate attitude. It very much comes out of Watergate, comes out of the sense that it was the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein that really cracked this open and brought to light this corruption at the very top. And that, you know, if we just had more people like that now, right? If we just had more people like Woodward and Bernstein, like Denzel's character, then we can get to the bottom of some of this corruption in Washington. It really seems to be kind of the takeaway.

the movie wants to leave you with. Yeah, yeah, and I just think that that's another thing that seems a little bit dated where I don't think we have those idealistic feelings about journalism anymore or its instant effect, you know, on dropping a big story. You know, what would how would this movie look like in reality? Well, they wouldn't bother to kill the justices. They would just gradually over many years, you know, put in, people who were friendly to their interests.

Or if they did kill the justices, you know, her character would be, the FBI wouldn't take up this theory. Her character would be, you know, systematically tarred as a crank by the media consultants of the oil company. They wouldn't bother to try to assassinate anybody. They could just, you know, use the poll that they have in the media and politics to make her look crazy. And then years later, it would be revealed that, oh, actually the theory did have something to it.

And then, you know, it would be something that people said kind of at cocktail parties, which was, oh, you know, actually everyone for years thought that was crazy, but it turned out to be true. And it was only because of heavy oil company lobbying that people thought it was a crazy conspiracy theory. I think that's something that happened during the Trump era is that we kind of, because of all the president's men in movies like this expected, like, oh, one big news story is going to bring it all down, you know? I was just about to say that. I mean, even the journalism industry, the field sort of felt that way. Everyone was trying to get their next, trying to get the next scooper expose on some horrible thing that Trump administration did, thinking that. And liberals, you know, I think we're very much caught up in this.

That if the New York Times can only publish the right kind of story, then Trump will get taken down. He's done. He's finished. This is it. This is the one story that's going to do it. It's definitely movies like this. And, well, and it's spiritual successor or predecessors, all the president's men who primed the public and the profession to believe that sort of thing took place. What's so funny, though, is that even in the moment, I mean, we can, certainly now, right?

Certainly after the Trump years, we can be like, yeah, that's ridiculous. Of course, of course, one story isn't going to do everything. of course these if you want that kind of immediate action that is the task of politics you have to like you have you have to organize politically to make that happen but even in the moment right 93 this movie is filmed in 92 book comes out 92 book written in 91 we're still kind of an iran contra era right like and there are lots of exposés about iran contra right like it's not like it was a big secret no once the journalism for coming out about what the Reagan administration was doing who was responsible for what

But there was like barely the political will to really do anything about it serious. You know, a few people lower on the totem pole went to jail. But it wasn't as if it wasn't as if the journalism around the wrong country, like blew the story open and like completely changed, you know, the way Washington did the business. To the extent that it did, it just made all those people way more careful, right? like Bill Barr who was in the Reagan administration who was an attorney general under George H.W. Bush basically made it his life's mission

to ensure that the next Republican president can do a Watergate or do it around concert without getting caught. And so it's funny in a way that like the movie and probably speaking to its audience which is going to be people in their 40s, right? Like people who have a memory of Watergate. The movie is speaking to attitude

developed in a previous period of American history in a lot of ways, like a very different kind of period. But even in the moment, it's not really clear that in the absence of like serious political pressure that there's going to be the journalism of this sort is going to make that kind of dent. And as we imagine how this might look in real life, right? Like it would, I think even, you know, if we're thinking realistically, even then you'd have to have to have the opposition party really making it a serious issue of the fact that the president was connected to someone who assassinated to his Supreme Court justices. And it's like, I think, I think actually, I mean, one thing to be cynical about it. I think even now we can see

that it takes a lot of work to get the political party to want to at least one of our political parties to do that kind of, you know, demigodgery. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I just think that, also, you know, people just might not believe it. It's so crazy. I can just imagine, like, Hakeem Jeffrey's being, you know, it's terrible what happened to those Supreme Court justices. But the American people want to hear about pocketbook issues, kitchen table issues, how they're going to pay for their insulin. They don't want to hear about a conspiracy to assassinate to Supreme Court justices. Every Democratic politician has heard of, like, the cost of insulin as an issue, and, man, that's in the back pocket all the time. Right, something that they were loved to bring up, but we'll do nothing about.

But again, if my contention, then it's not necessary because we're already run by the interests who would need to assassinate anybody for this. That's the other thing about fucking JFK stupid conspiracy behind that movie. It's like, oh, the military industrial complex had to assassinate the president to stay in control of policy. They had to assassinate the president, not just go to another election. there's no way that they would not have a huge say and yeah so this whole idea that there's like a need I mean maybe I'm being especially cynical today for some reason the whole idea that there's a need to use violence to like for like powerful interests to like shape and control policy in the United States at that level just is is absurd to me like it's just like they don't need to do that

they control it anyway you know like they have a case that may be like a setback for I don't know, 10, 20 years, but they know that they're going to eventually, you know, through litigation, through friendly legislation, eventually roll back the regulations, you know, that bug them. I think we've talked about this before in other episodes dealing with conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing. But I mean, part of what is happening when people refuse to, when people say to themselves, the reason this is happening is because some like singular nefarious force is like pulling the strings or doing something is that it is like think genuinely hard for people who have not trained their minds to think like this to like imagine or think of basically

sort of like abstract forces and incentives shaping how people act and behave right like it it seems in a lot of ways it seems much more straightforward and logical to say well in the case of jfk he wanted to end the war in vietnam so the military industrial complex which sells weapons and needs the money killed them to ensure that it can keep selling the weapons and get the money versus, you know, if that were really an issue, then they would just like donate a bunch of money to an opponent or more than more likely say to themselves, listen, if you draw down forces too much, you know, we won't, we won't donate to you or, you know, they'll rely on the congressmen and the senators and the in the other representatives whose factories are in their

districts to like block whatever you're going to do like there's there are these mechanisms and forces that are that would do that would solve the issue for them versus having to kill someone and like a lot of conspiracies rely like just just feel to me like explanations um that are easier to understand than something just a bit more abstract or people, you know, following their incentives. And also they're willing to compromise. Like, let's say, oh, well, we're going to draw down forces from Vietnam. But if you draw down forces from Vietnam, can you please, please, at least invest, you know,

several billion dollars in a new fighter jet program? Like, if we're not going to have a war, can you at least open some new bases? Like, let's work something out, you know? So there's a lot of, there's a lot of, like, compromise and negotiation. not like, oh, they desperately need, they only one outlet. There's lots of different deals that can be made. So it's not like, oh, they desperately need this one policy to go through or else their entire game is up. No, they're working out all kinds of deals. And it doesn't require like, you know, some dramatic coup against the government usually to make it work. It's just, you know,

it's just, it's just the way business is done. And this is where the innocence of the American public and their desire to believe in these conspiracy theories pisses me off or or i find irritating it's like oh the big corporate interest um it's not a conspiracy because they're like oh the big corporate interest is is trying to line their own pockets yeah but guess who lobbies for them um a congressman and is that congressman getting donations of course but a big part of their constituents work for that company so they're like it's the you're like it's the it's the economic basis of where people live. So it's not only like, oh, the people in charge are lining their pockets from it.

It's the constituents want this too. It's not as simple as like, oh, it's all great big corporate. People work in corporations, you know, like they are having, and they elect politicians who are friendly to those corporations because that's like the political economy of an entire district. Like the obviously, you know, where in, you know, Michigan, the congresspeople are going to be very friendly to GM. Do their constituents resent that?

No, because they say, well, we need those companies here. You know, as long as they kind of, you know, also listen to the UAW sometimes, that's good too. And there's some balance. But no, like, there's a lot of the interests of a whole society are implicated. It's not just like people work at defense plants, right? You know, like no one's innocent in the system is what I'm basically. basically saying, you know. One other thing about this movie that I wanted to flag real quick was its gender politics

and its portrayal of Julia Roberts' character, Darby Shaw, returning to our front page in the New York Times from the day of this movie's release and the headline about the gender discrimination lawsuit settlement. Julia Roberts' character is a law student. in her early 20s in real life and I guess probably in the movie and and she's like at the bottom of the professional totem pole right there's a there's sort of a funny scene where she hasn't yet revealed her identity to Denzel Washington they've just been on the phone and he figures out she's probably a law student because she keeps referring to this thing that she's written as a brief

And he's like, who talks like that? Like, this is, this is probably like a law student whose brain has been too infected by the vocabulary of law school. But man, as soon as these assassins come out of the woodwork, she is an operator overnight, right? She's moving around with wigs. She's moving from city to city, hotel to hotel. There's sort of a suggestion that she has some money from her late father, but like she transforms from Carrie Russell in Felicity to Carrie Russell in the Americans, like overnight. And there's a review of this book I thought was interesting that calls her a, I'm quoting here, politically correct 90s heroin in that she is, and again, I'm quoting here, independent, resourceful and crabby. But like, again, we are talking about a point at which like a traditionally male-dominated

profession like the legal profession is like seeing real meaningful, the real meaningful presence of women within it for the first time. You know, the firm released earlier this year like male lead, right? All the president's men, this director's previous big legal thriller. I haven't seen that. I'm going to hazard a guess that there's not a whole lot of lines of dialogue from women in it. There are no women in that movie. Yeah, okay. Spoiler alert.

And yeah, Julia Roberts' character is operating this whole time in this male-dominated profession with people who are senior to her. And she's besting all of them, right? Like she is using the tools available at her disposal to come out on top. And the movie culminates, right? spoiler alert with her getting like a sit down with the director of the FBI where he's just sort of like begrudgingly respectful of everything that she was able to untangle and pull off and she gets on you know she gets on a plane and off into Witsack and that's this is not the kind

of character arc that you would have seen I think in legal thrillers previously oh no so so maybe we have to revise what we were saying earlier it's not racist. It's actually feminist that she doesn't have to be in a romantic relationship with Denzel Washington. It's fine for them to be friends. It's actually progressive. So, but I think that is interesting. And it is kind of nice in a way that, you know, she, she doesn't, she can have a relationship with Denzel Washington's character where they respect each other and they don't need to see. Two professions. Yeah. Yeah, they're two professionals.

And also especially considering that her prominence previously was predicated on this kind of dodgy relationship with her law professor, you know, it's nice that she's now respected for her actual work rather than, you know, the fact that she was sleeping with her law professor, which in this day and age would not be tolerated. And in a movie, it would not even be tolerated. I can imagine people be, you know, quite, quite outraged that such a relationship was even depicted. as being not something abusive or untoward. Or yeah, at least just kind of weird. Yeah, yeah. I think we need to wrap up. So any final thoughts?

John, Jay? I like this movie okay, but I don't think it was quite as good as the firm adaptation. I thought it dragged a little bit. I was, as I mentioned a few times, not entirely convinced of certain plot aspects. But, you know, again, it's a hell of a lot better than a lot of movies they make today, so I enjoyed it. Yeah, I thought it was funny how most of the contents of the Pelican Brief itself is like a pure MacGuffin.

Like, you don't learn until halfway through the movie what's in the Pelican Brief that has all of these people wanting to, you know, kill Julia Roberts on the streets of New Orleans. but yeah it's just like something that a bunch of people at that point have seen and then they die like they're in a John Grisham's The Ring adaptation or something yeah what's that film noir movie where they open the suit that's got the suit that's like the first MacGuffin it's like there's a suitcase it's like a Mickey Spillane like they open the suitcase and it's radioactive material and you just die immediately as soon as you look at it it's like that yeah I don't know what that movie is I know The suitcase is like the classic McGuffin, yeah.

Yeah. But yeah, mostly it's just used to propel the action along. But the action's cool as hell, so I can live with it. Kiss me deadly is the name of the movie. Yeah, I like this movie. I think

thematically, it was like much more interesting than I was anticipating it to be, especially I've seen this a couple times where I had not watched with that in mind. We didn't really get to it, but there's a whole separate conversation to hold about how one of the, at least the premises, one of the premises of this is that environmentalism

is somehow not kind of like a co-opted, you know, corporate, nothing, but like something but still some sort of radical power to it, which is an interesting way to portray it in the early 90s, no less. The note I'll end on is that, and this will just, I feel like I save these things a little time. I mentioned the car bomb, which was great. This movie is like much more violent than I think I have remembered in my memory. John Hurd's killing is like a bloody mess.

When Stanley Tucci's character gets killed, it's like his head gets blown off. When one of the assassins dies by like driving his car into like another car rigged for a car bomb, it's like there's a fair amount of not just sort of like, you know, death and killing, but like quite gruesome death and killing. I think it's great, obviously. It's too much for me More movies As I've said before More movies should use squibs There should be more real blood in movies

And more dummies being set on fire I think all that is great And I like it Okay That is our show If you're not a subscriber Please subscribe We're available on iTunes

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It does push us up the rankings and it helps this show get out to more people who might be interested in the content. You can reach out to all three of us on Twitter while it's still around. I am at Jay Bowie. John, you are. At Lionel underscore trolling. J. You are. First name, last name.

Jay Willis. And you can also follow the Unclear and Present Danger podcast feed at the Unclear Pod, where I mainly just tweet about stuff that I'm watching, tweet about the movies that we're watching, share info about what's coming next, that kind of thing. It's an easy way to keep up with the podcast and see where things are going. you can reach out to both of us over email at unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com. For this week in feedback, we have an email from Cooper titled Harrison Ford's Creep Factor. I alluded to this email earlier. Hello, I was listening to your fugitive episode and y'all's discussion of Harrison Ford. And I just wanted to chime in because the past year I watched Francis Ford Coppola as the conversation.

and Ford plays a minor villain. I also watched the conversation very recently. This actually reminded me of Ford's other appearance in a Coppola movie as the Army officer who gives Martin Sheen his mission and apocalypse now. Well, these are bit parts. I do find it very funny, interesting that George Lucas looked at Harrison Ford and went, now there's a scoundrel with the heart of gold. And Francis Ford Coppola looked at, seemed to go,

there's a guy who would be up to no good and he shouldn't trust when he smiles. if y'all are taking cold war suggestions for the patreon might as suggest that you do an Algerian war theme double feature of the legendary the Battle of Algiers and the fun the Day of the Jackal keep up the great work I look forward to every episode sincerely Cooper from Louisiana John I mean I have I actually have

the conversation apocalypse now and no yeah the conversation apocalypse now Battle of Algiers and Day of the Jagal all on the list for the Patreon But combining Algiers and Day of the Jackal would be a good, a good, good, good, good double feature for a month. Yeah, that would be cool. That would do that. Yeah.

Yeah. Jay, have you seen either, any of those movies? I have not. I was just thinking about the, um, the prevalence of jackals in like, uh, uh, the assassin genre. Big, uh, big, big, big hits for, um, for jackals. Well, of the, I mean, all, all four are classic. But if you're going to watch one and just to have fun with it, I would go with Day of the Jackal, which is just to me, I love that movie. I think it's a lot of fun.

It's a great sort of like assassin preparing into his thing and like a long man trying to stop him kind of movie. So highly recommend that, but they're all great. Battle of Algeria is, I saw that when I was like in high school and kind of blew my mind. And the conversation and apocalypse now are also wonderful. So, thank you, Cooper, for the email. And you mentioned the Patreon. I, you know, we mentioned the Patreon. I'm going to mention the Patreon.

If you subscribe to this podcast, you probably noticed last week I gave you a Patreon preview to let you know what is happening over the Patreon. We had covered the 1979 BBC adaptation of Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy in that episode. Great episode. You should listen to it. Our next Patreon episode will be on. the 1959 movie, also starring Ale Guinness, called Our Man in

Nirvana. If you want to listen to this material, which is our Cold War show, we're covering the films of the Cold War, subscribe to our Patreon, patreon.com slash unclear pod. For $5 a month, you get this whole separate show

covering these movies, as well as whatever else we can think of to send your way. We'll also do a monthly drawing for a free movie that will send you. So, that's the Patreon. Please consider it. Something like 400 of you have already joined up. So thank you very much. For those who have subscribed to the Patreon, we really appreciate it. Episodes of the main feed podcast come out every other Friday. So we will see you in two weeks after Thanksgiving. You're in

December with, I'm looking, I just looked over to my left to see what's up next on the schedule. And it's a movie that it's going to be a lot of fun. It is a nice. 1994 Stephen Segal directed, Steven Segal starring environmentalist picture on deadly ground. Here's a quick plot synopsis. Forrest Taft is an environmental agent who works for the Aegeus Oil Company in Alaska. Aegeus Oil's corrupt CEO is the kind of person who doesn't care whether or not oil spills into the ocean or onto the land. Just as long as it is making money for him. And Stephen Seagull is here to do something about it.

the poster has him holding a shotgun with an oil refinery burning in the background. I think this is going to be a lot of fun. So that will be in two weeks. It's available for rent on Amazon and iTunes or for purchase. Sorry, did I track there that in a movie in which Stephen Segal stars as like an environmentalist, his character's name is Forrest? Yes. Yeah, cool.

Super cool. Yeah. And he directs this too. This is like his, this is like his, uh, it's going to be so dumb. It's going to be great. Jay, do you have anything you want to plug? Read balls and strikes, balls and strikes.org. We do progressive legal analysis and commentary, but from what we think is a pretty novel angle,

which is that the justices, the Supreme Court justices, are not like these learned law scholars, but are instead, you know, glorified Republican politicians. We think we're right and everyone else is wrong. And if you share our perspective, you should read our work. And as Jamel said, you can find me on Twitter at Jay Willis. And you can also just track my writing podcast appearances like this one if you're so inclined. And whenever I remember to update it, J.willis.Info. Very serious, non-scammy-sounding website.

won't give away your social security number if you go to it thank you jay for joining us we really appreciate it and for sure thanks again for having me guys for john gans and jillis i'm jemel bowie lots of jays this week uh this is unclear and present danger we'll see you next time Thank you.