WHAT WENT WRONG - Southland Tales

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

The Rock stars as a Republican action star with amnesia at the center of a sex tape scandal that threatens to derail a presidential election in Richard Kelly’s eerily prophetic 2007 film, Southland Tales. This week, Chris & Lizzie set out to determine why this follow-up to cult classic Donnie Darko tanked at Cannes, derailed Kelly’s career, and perhaps came out 10 years too soon.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Follow Us on Instagram! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, about what went wrong with some of Hollywood's biggest hits and biggest misfires. Today we are talking about the 2007 science fiction comedy satire film Southland Tales, which I am guessing basically none of you have ever even heard of. I am guessing you have heard of this director's first film, Donnie Darko. That director is Richard Kelly. he created, wrote and directed Donnie Darko, one of the most cultishly acclaimed and revered movies of the last 30 years. And today we are going to dive into try to figure out why his second film, Southland Tales, is completely unknown in relation to Donnie Darko.

Lizzie, you just saw this movie for the first time. How would you describe it to somebody who has never seen Southland Tales? Well, the rock's in it. Yeah, that's a good start of noise. It's set in Los Angeles. That's also true. It's, um, there's some sort of police state that has taken over at least Southern California, if not the rest of the country as well. Miranda Richardson lives in a room full of TVs and watches people.

Sherry O'Terry is some kind of neo-Marxist. Neo-Marxist, extremely violent activist. And the rock somehow travels through a rift in the space-time continuum and through that is able to write a screenplay

predicting the end of the world. And then at the very end he blows up in a blimp in his Jesus and also Wallace-Shahn is there. Yep. That's about as coherent as you'll get on a first watch of this movie. So let's rewind. The way that it was described by the financier was a pop satire

exploring the intertwining lives of an amnesiac action star, a psychic porn star, and a racist cop in Los Angeles during the last three days on Earth. Two out of three of those, I missed. Yeah, so we'll get into that. But let's rewind. and go back to May 21st, 2006. Richard Kelly, he's the critically acclaimed and cultishly revered director of Donnie Darko,

and he's standing outside the Grand Theater Lumiere at the Cannes Film Festival, waiting nervously for the premiere of his second film, Southland Tales, to wrap up. The movie featured an unconventional cast that's a little bit forward-thinking, in my opinion. It's Dwayne the Rock Johnson in one of his first non-wrestling roles, Justin Timberlake, Mandy Moore, Sarah Michelle Geller, Amy Poehler, Kevin Smith, did you recognize him? I did. It took me a little while, but when he yelled, I recognized his voice. Yep. And a nearly incomprehensible plot line, which we can recap again as an action star with amnesia, may or may not be responsible for ushering in the apocalypse, set against a dystopian United States

morphed horribly by the war on terror. So I do think we have to take a second and acknowledge that There is a reason that we're covering this one this week, which is that the police state that is shown in this movie, which I'm sure looked insane when it premiered however many years ago, does not look so crazy now. They show tanks and military vehicles in Venice and downtown Los Angeles. I live in downtown L.A., and right now I'm able to see National Guard and military vehicles outside my window. So, right. Part of the reason we wanted to record this right now is that we're at the end of the first week of the George Floyd protests living in Los Angeles. And this movie in 2007 was roundly panned, but had some oddly prophetic predictions that came to pass over the last few years, the elites of which are after the George Floyd protests, we have Hummers all over Los Angeles and National Guardsmen. with rifles, as shown in this movie. But back to Cannes of 2006, so 14 years ago, almost to the day, only three American films are competing in the festival that year.

It's Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation, both of which were booed before Kelly's film premiered and Richard Kelly's Southland Tales. The festival opened with Ron Howard's Da Vinci Code. What? What? The critic's cat called and whistled that out of the theater. So, like, American films are getting brutalized at the festival. There are a few audiences more merciless than those that can.

And after two hour, after running a almost three-hour cut of the movie, the lights come up. And in the words of the late Roger Evert, quote, I was dazed, confused, bewildered, bored, affronted, and deafened by the booze all around me. The lead of the film, the young and untested Dwayne the Rock Johnson, remembers the moment distinctly. quote, when the screening ended, we were all on our Blackberries, and our publicists were like sweating. He said, we had to walk from there directly to our press conferences. We sit down in the press conference and someone was like, hey, they fucking hated the movie. So just be prepared. I've never seen so many people walking out of a movie.

Southland Tales eventually limped its way to a domestic release in 50 theaters, making a few hundred thousand dollars at the box office against a $17.5 million budget. Richard Kelly went on to direct one more movie, The Box, starring Cameron Diaz and James Marsden. Hey, filmed in Boston when I was in school there, and my roommates were all extras. Yeah, and that's the last thing he's done in for basically 10 years. And the question kind of remains, what went wrong with Southland Tales? So to kind of dive into this, I think it behooos us to jump back to Richard Kelly's first festival premiere, which is Donnie Darko. Donnie Darko was his first movie. He made it when he was 24 years old. He'd only made two short films in undergrad at USC. And I think a lot of people, because that movie has such a good critical reaction now, it's like 90% on Rotten Tomatoes.

People like to think that there was a warm reaction to the movie when it came out. But very similar to Southland Tales in Cannes, Donnie Darko premiered at Sundance to a lot of booze and a disinterested audience. and the movie didn't sell at Sundance. And basically, to those who don't know, Donny Dark is the story of a troubled high school boy who's informed by a six-foot-tall man in a creepy bunny suit that the world is ending in 28 days and encourages him to engage in violent behavior.

And this came out within a year of the Columbine shootings. And so people didn't really know what to make of the lead and the movie's tone and its genre blending. And the movie couldn't find a buyer. Kelly himself deemed the movie a failure. They nearly released it direct to video through stars until Christopher Nolan, of all people, saw a screening of it. He convinced New Market Films, which had released Memento, to give it a chance, and they set it for a late October 2001 release. So there's a plane jet engine falls through the main characters.

Yes, I do remember this. They're setting for an October 2001 release, what could be the problem with showing a plane crash? in an October movie of 2001. I mean, September 11th. Yeah, 9-11 happens. So they have a whole marketing campaign that's highlighting the plane crash in the movie. All of a sudden, 9-11 happens.

Two commercial airliners are piloted into the World Trade Center towers. They pull the trailers. They strip down the number of theaters that Donnie Darko is going to be released. I just want to pause and say that that was the right thing to do versus Mariah Carey's star vehicle glitter, which she went on to push and then blamed the failure of, on 9-11. Exactly.

Yeah. Better to accept it and move on and push forward and then say after the fact, that's why. Oh my God. Donnie Darko definitely was affected, though. It made $500,000 at the box office. But fortunately, DVDs had just started to become popular and all of the sudden, mostly millennials discovered it.

And it made over $10 million in DVD sales alone. So it became this cult hit. the thing is even though Donny Darko later seems to have been this big success at the time Kelly kind of considered himself a failure. So he is apparently offered an X-Men movie, but he turns it down. I couldn't find anything that backed that up, but it would be consistent with some of the other directors, you know, that we've talked about who have had similar paths. Because the problem is he falls in love with this idea for a movie called Southland Tales.

and it is a wild concept that initially involved blackmail, two cops, a psychic porn star, and that was it. And then Lizzie, you made the comment that it felt like 18 movies in one. Yeah, like if that's all it had been, it would have been a lot easier to follow, but I couldn't, I was, like, my eyes were crossing just trying to figure out what the name of the character I was looking at was or what their relation to The Rock was. Yeah, exactly. You know, Lizzie said it felt like so many movies. And I think that the tough thing was that he was trying to make a satire of basically everything. The Patriot Act, 9-11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, climate change, reality TV revolution, mainstream news going 24-7, pop culture, colliding with everything. Leaked sex tapes competing for airtime with foreign wars, civil unrest, and time travel just to add that on top of everything else.

Yeah, that shows up in the last like 10 minutes of this movie. And I was so confused. And so we wrote this script that was this like enormous, like incredible script that is super long and quote unmakable. It's unmacable in the same way that quote Donnie Darko was unmakable. Nope, a little different. This one's actually unmacable. I can say that having watched it. Kevin Smith, here's Kevin Smith's review of the script when you read it.

He said my first impression of the script was it was a political pulp fiction. It was brilliant. And I thought it would win a screenplay Oscar. I was astounded that it was as deep as it was as relevant at the time. And he attracted a lot of talented people to the project. So I will say this. When I was watching it in that scene where that killer song is playing, Justin Timberlake is like drinking a Budweiser amongst all these sort of like

latex clad hot blonde ladies in like an arcade. And it's very, it actually, when I was watching it, I was like, this does feel a little pulp fictiony. Like, there are moments in the movie that feel very much like he's trying to do a Quentin Tarantino. Right, with the fractured storylines and all that. Yeah. And the music and everything. 100%.

And the sort of like almost music video-esque moments, which happened a couple times. Yeah, that sequence that you're talking about is the most famous sequence of the movie. Justin Timberlake is lip syncing to, uh, the killers, all these things that I've done in an arcade. And famously, Richard Kelly shot that scene without having the rights to that song. That's insane because it's the whole scene hinges on that song. Yeah. And they only had Justin Timberlake for one shooting day.

So the producers were like, why are you wasting four hours shooting this scene with this one guy that we can only have for one day? So on the scene that we don't even know if we're going to be able to keep in the film. And Kelly ended up sending a rough cut of the scene to the scene to the scene to the the killers, and they agreed to license it to them for basically nothing. But he's created the script that people seem to like, but it's unmakeable. Like, no studio is going to back this, you know, 180-page sprawling projects. No.

who came on as a producer first, agreed to play a role in the movie. And that's what ended up getting it financing. So when she agreed to be the teacher, that's when they started getting traction. And then that attracted Jason Schwartzman to play the lead. And then he dropped out, and that's how Jake Gyllenhaal came in. So they set Richard Kelly up to meet with Sean William Scott, who is big off of the American Pie series at that point in time, but wants to tackle a different type of role than just the frat guy that he's always played.

And so he meets with Sean William Scott, and Sean William Scott's the first guy that he just jumps on board with this project. He wants to play Roland slash Ronald Tavernor, the like dual role racist cop who may or may not end the world after shaking his own hand at the end of the movie. I just, I don't. That's the plot line that I cannot untangle. It was a harder to, we'll get into that. It was hard to understand. But Sean William Scott said something in the project and he jumps in. and then that gives it some legitimacy.

So then Richard Kelly goes to Dwayne the Rock Johnson. He had starred across Sean William Scott in The Rundown. And with Dwayne Johnson on board, they have enough firepower that they can start putting together a financial plan. And so one of the producers, Matthew Rhodes, he strings together this $17.5 million budget for the movie. He calls it the most complicated financial plan he's ever put together in his entire career. It involves financing from France, Germany, and the United States. and Kelly then builds out this cast with this kind of like insane mix of 80s and 90s icons. I mean, like, Lizzie, how many S&L actors, like, did you recognize in this movie?

I mean, at least four. There's John Lovitz, Amy Poehler, Sherry O'Terry, and I'm missing one more. Who was the other one? Nora Dunn. She plays Cindy Pisitsky. Oh, she's in Drop Dead Gorgeous. In my head, that's the bucket she lives in with Will Sassau, who's also in this movie. Yeah, along with Sarah, Michelle Geller of all the 90s, Buffy fame, Mandy Moore,

Wallace Sean, Eli Roth, who gets shot on a toilet after being the movie for 10 seconds. There's actually two different people that get shot on toilets in this movie. Eli Roth was one of them, yeah. There's also Bailing, and I would watch a two-and-a-half-hour-long movie of just Biling and Wallace-Shahn dancing. That was the highlight of this whole thing. Yeah. The cast now is a little bit indifferent about the movie. Justin Timberlake said in 2011, he still doesn't know what Southland Tales is about.

Yeah. But everybody that's working on it seems excited to be doing something different and working on this project that's just going to be unique. Everyone works for scale. Nobody's getting some big paycheck off of it. And they can just make the budget work, or at least it seems like they can just make the budget work. And in my mind, this is kind of the first major thing. to go wrong. They didn't actually have nearly enough money to make the movie that Richard Kelly

wanted to make. No, I was going to say, $17.5 million for the movie that I just watched is insane. I mean, all of the, like, CGI and sort of animated sections do look absolutely terrible, so that that adds up. But, like, even that said, it's amazing that they made that movie for $17.5 million. Yeah. It features a, quote, mega Zeppelin flying over Los Angeles. Gunfights, downtown, a perpetual motion machine in the ocean, and ultimately the end of the world. And Kelly's plan was, well, as long as we can make it through production, we can get another source of financing to come on board once they see the edited movie, and they can take care of the animation, the visual effects, et cetera.

And so it was kind of like, you know, a let's take it one step at a time process. but as a result, the movie doesn't feel cohesive in the way that, like, Donny Darko felt cohesive. It feels cobbled together. Yeah, it's all over the place. And there's certain sequences, like one that is now burned into my retinas of two cars having sex, I guess. Yeah, an advertisement for Hummer, I think, or something like that. It was extremely unclear what it was an advertisement for. And I kept thinking, like, that can't be what it's.

happening and then it just keeps going and it's very clearly what's happening. But my point being that the animation also looks really bad. So on top of the fact they're watching two SUVs bone each other, it's just very poorly done. I like the concept for the commercial. I agree that they could have used some more money for the animation. The exhaust pipe turns into what's clearly a vagina and and the other exhaust pipe gets extremely long and enters the first one. And it, yeah, anyhow. But they were really scrappy with the project to make it work. All of the news and CCTV footage that plays on the monitors in front of Miranda Richardson

at, quote, US-Eident throughout the movie. They were shot by Richard Kelly and his cousin for like a year. They just ran around Los Angeles and shot those things themselves. The opening barbecue scene was staged at a relative's house of his in Abilene, Texas. They just used friends and family and they had some digital camcorders running and they shot that whole sequence for basically nothing with just friends and family. And one of the reasons I want to talk about this project is that production actually went well. They only had 29 days to shoot the movie, which is crazy. They were probably shooting five or six pages a day at least.

People were freaking out when they were like firing these huge guns on the boardwalk in Venice. Wealthy homeowners were like screaming at them. Yeah, they literally have Justin Timberlake with like a Gatling gun. sitting atop the Mexican restaurant at the end of San Monica Pier and aiming the gun at the beach. It's an amazing image. And a lot of people didn't know what was going on because they weren't this huge production that was locking down the beach. They just had permits to be there.

Wow. That's an actual nightmare. Maybe don't do that. Also, that's a real gun that they got from Israel that, like, the Israelis have mounted on walls. So they put the laptop on it and the giant bullet in it. So they were doing kind of like this guerrilla indie-style filmmaking trying to make this, like, sci-fi multi-layer epic movie. But they apparently make it through production.

The cast and crew have a great time. It doesn't seem like there's any drama on set to uncover. Unlike a lot of the other movies that we talk about, Richard Kelly seems like he's a good director to work with, especially as a performer. But the problem is that the story that he wants to tell has continued to grow as he's gone through production. So while in production, he realizes

wait, there's information that the audience is going to need to understand this that I'm not going to be able to film because of our budget. So he starts writing a series of graphic novels that he's going to release as prequels to the movie that are going to go along with the film's release. And so there's going to be three graphic novels that aren't supplemental. You actually kind of need to read them to really understand what's happening. They basically cover all of that Justin Timberlake VO at the beginning in way more detail and way more sophistication

than what he did do as being. And so not only is the movie going to be incredibly long, he's now realizing the story's even longer than that movie and he has these three comic books that need to be read to go with it. And as a result, the cut is not making sense. So in editorial, it seems like people around him are starting to get nervous because Richard Kelly's not happy with the cut and it's around three hours long.

And it's not getting shorter. And at this time, they unexpectedly get an invite to premiere at Cannes. And it seems like the programmers at Cannes had really loved Donnie Darko. And suddenly all of the faith around Richard Kelly comes back. Like, everyone's like, oh, we got an invite to Cannes. I have a question about this, though. So they invited them to premiere at Cannes without having seen any cut of Southland Tales. Is that normal?

No, I think they saw a cut. The programmer saw a cut, like a rough cut. So Richard Kelly's only experience at film festivals up until this point is getting basically panned at Sundance. And now he's like, well, am I going to get fucking panned at can with this unfinished version of the movie? But to his credit, the guy is fearless. He knows the VFX aren't done. They're not even started. The cut's nearly three hours and he's not satisfied with it.

He wants to be able to tell people that it's a work in progress. but all of his publicists are like, you can't say that. It's suicide. And so he lets them screen the movie. And the 9 a.m. screening on the premiere day for critics happens. And then he gets a call from his publicist. And it's that the movie had been booed and that the reviews are all negative and that he's going to be basically eating a lot of shit for the next two days.

After having screened a movie that he knew wasn't ready. And I don't. know how he could have fought against, you know what I mean, getting to premiere at Cannes? No, of course not. Of course you say yes. The biggest gut feeling that he had of like, I got screwed once. I don't want to get screwed twice, but knowing it was probably going to happen comes true. And in 2013, he said in an interview, everybody's your best friend when you get into competition at Cannes. But then when the movie's widely ridiculed, all of a sudden, your phone stops ringing. And what's funny and it's so

true is that nobody was buddying up to him based on whether or not they thought the movie was good. All of these Hollywood people were only doing it based on what they perceived the reaction to the movie to be. I also do want to say like, I wasn't bored. I mean, it's extremely confusing. I don't know what I was looking at, but I actually didn't mind looking at it. It wasn't like Fantastic Four, you're saying. I liked it quite a bit more than Fantastic Four.

I did too. I think so the issue was also that the cut that they screened at Cannes was about 25 minutes longer than the one that you watched. That's impossible because the one that I watched was 500 years long. It was 501 years long. They got out a full year. So at this point, unlike at Sundance, the movie finds a buyer at Cannes somehow. Scott Schumann at San. Sony, he sees something in this, and he swoops in and they buy the movie for $5 million,

the rights to distribute it domestically. The movie costs $17.5 million to make, I don't know the structure of the financing deal, but that's a pretty low price tag for a movie that expensive. Now, here's the problem. Kelly now owes them a version of the movie that they feel they can release in theaters. And the only way that they'll give him any money to finish his VFX is if he cuts the movie down. And so the movie is in an impossible position now where it's three hours long, but it's not actually long enough to make sense. It actually doesn't have the plot details that you need to fully

understand it. So if anything, it should be expanded, but he actually has to cut it down. They try to remove a storyline, a character, a scene. You'd watch it and realize, oh my God, now this makes even less sense. Eventually, he had to cut it down to get any VFX money. So in exchange for cutting it down. They get some money from Sony, which is, as you said, not enough money for the VFX. By his own admission, Richard Kelly admits that the last part of Lou Taylor-Poochee on a floating ice cream truck firing a rocket launcher at a Zapplin. That's who that was. It didn't look great, but by the way, that's such a cool image. Like that... Actually, I thought that did look good. I thought the only parts to me that really didn't look okay

were the parts that were the sort of weird, like, like the things that were. were clearly computer generated. Yeah, completely CGI. Yeah. That didn't look great. The ice cream truck floating, you know, hundreds of feet above downtown Los Angeles as it's shooting an RPG at a Zeppelin.

That was actually kind of cool. It was cool. But apparently, Richard Kelly is, like, recruiting undergrads out of USC to, like, intern for free to, like, finish the VFX for the movie at this point. Like, that's how strapped they are for cash. And so after 18 months of work, they get the movie to 144 minutes what you watched. They get the VFX to a watchable place.

Apparently, the Cars Having Sex Scene was a literal commercial idea that Richard Kelly had pitched to Tony Scott's production company as like a real commercial. And they were just like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Now I like him. Yeah. And he was like, no, this will play great in Europe. And actually he was supposed to be the green version of the car, the like energy efficient version, fucking the gas-cusling version. So Wallace Sean's character is some kind of weird, like Elon Musk-esque, like, environmental

billionaire. He's the one who makes this commercial with the two cars banging each other. And after he airs it, he's like, ha? And everybody loves it. Yeah. Which honestly, I could see Elon Musk making a commercial where a Tesla is like banging a Prius or something. That's coming.

That's what we'll get to. So finally, Samuel Goldman Pictures releases it into 63 theaters, which I think is like five more than Donnie Darko got. The stars of the film actually still are really eager to promote the movie. Dwayne Johnson, like, wants to promote it. Sarah Michelle Geller wants to promote it. And then boom, the WGA strikes that year and all of the talk shows get canceled. Oh, no. And so there's no junket for them to promote the movie because they're not doing film festivals.

So they got to do talk shows and the talk shows are canceled. So the movie gets kind of widely panned. it ends up making less at the box office than Darnie Darko, $375,000 at the box office. And people move on. Dwayne Johnson goes on to become the biggest action star slash maybe the biggest actor of his generation. Yeah, he's awesome. Yeah, he's great. Could he be our political messiah as he is in this movie?

Is that what happened? And Richard Kelly, to date, has made one more movie, the box, which all of Lizzie's friends start in, but he's basically been dormant for a decade now. And so in looking at what went wrong, I mean, I think we'd all admit at its basic, at its most basic, Richard Kelly made this largely incomprehensible story. And I think he'd even admit he bit off more than he could chew. Like, you said it's more movies than one in one. He took this huge swing and he got eviscerated for it.

But what I would argue is that 13 years later, and the reason I wanted to watch it this week, is that even though I don't think I convince anybody that Southland Tales is a good movie, like I wouldn't try to argue that necessarily. It is a completely utterly unique movie that predicted our current situation in ways that are hard to shake. And I think that that actually should count for a lot. Yeah, I do want to specify it, when we're saying it predicted the situation. It reflects something that looks very much to a certain degree sometimes. like what we're seeing right now. It didn't predict it in terms of like the actual movement that we're

seeing or the change that we're seeing. But but on a more specific level like let's go through the details because they're interesting. So in 2006 that's when they shot this. Richard Kelly made a movie about the United States pulling itself apart both literally and figuratively over an election. True. In the movie endless conflicts with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. Yeah. And North Korea. Syria and North Korea hadn't happened yet. A 25 and a 24-hour news cycle had driven the populist numb and an ideological gridlock. Video recordings of police shootings are being weaponized against racist, classist institutions by grassroots movements. Yeah. Politics has become a game of celebrity power. The entire election hinged on the endorsements of a right-wing leaning

action star. Climate change is quickly rendering the world uninhabitable. This is at a time when most people can't even agree on climate change in 2006. And the one solution offered has the unfortunate side effect of ripping apart the fabric of spacetime. An eccentric billionaire inventor promises salvation in exchange for power, remaining politically agnostic through it all. Sound like Elon Musk at all? You sort of.

Minus the political agnosticism, but yes. A former pop porn star finds herself in a position of extreme influence following her relationship with the pop culture icon, Kim Brahe. I don't know if she's a porn star. She got famous for releasing a sex tape. Well, she didn't release it. She was in it.

I'm saying she got famous for that sex tape. Sure. Sex tapes threatened to upend a presidential election. A law has been passed that requires visas to move from state to state. We now need real ID compliant licenses to fly across state lines. Really? Yeah. And a government system of oversight, U.S. Ident is monitoring every citizen at all time,

which predicted NSA's prison program that, Edward Snowden rat it out. 2008, Democrats are running Clinton for the presidential ticket. She did run in 2008. Sponsored content in native advertising dominate every possible square inch of screen space. Hustlers tattooed on the side of a tank. And this came up before Facebook was available to people outside of Harvard. And, of course, The Rock will lead us to salvation ultimately.

Yeah, boy, I hope that one's right. A message of the movie. I think he'll run for president within 12 years. fingerprint scanners are all over the place. They're on our cell phones now. And we have a PTSD-ridden veteran population hooked on a drug called fluid karma in this movie, but largely, I think, reflects the opioid epidemic right now. And so I want to go and read you like my favorite synopsis of the movie.

This is from Thomas Wishlaw in the Seats. It's a website just found today. Quote, the impending electoral victory of a Republican Party that has made a xenophobic and heavily illiberal rendition of extreme national security its top priority could be derailed by a sex tape involving a prominent Republican celebrity that may or may not exist and may or may not be in the hands of a porn star, all while a climate-related apocalypse is all but a certainty. You could say that that is 2016 to today or that is Southland Tales and it fits perfectly in both situations. He went on to write, as the world around us makes less.

sense Southland Tales makes more. It doesn't, it's not that it predicted everything perfectly in all of its events, but all the themes are weirdly exactly right. A hundred percent and also just sort of the chaos involved in it, like while it is extremely hard to digest and it is really hard to like figure out what you're watching, one of the things about it that made it both interesting to watch and also kind of uncomfortable to watch is that that kind of feels like what's going on now to a certain degree. Right. We're trying to figure out what the broader conspiracies and mechanics of everything that is happening are. And I think this movie, you're grasping at the same straws as you're watching it. And at the time, when it came out, it didn't get entirely negative reviews. Manola Dargis of the New York

Times, she wrote of Southland Tales, I would rather watch a young filmmaker like Mr. Kelly, reach beyond the obvious, push past his and the audience's comfort zones, then follow the example of the Coens and elegantly art direct, yet one more murder for your viewing pleasure in mind. She was talking about no country for old men came out the same year. Certainly Southland Tales has more ideas, visual and intellectual, in a single scene than most independent films have in their entirety, though that perhaps goes without saying. And I think she's absolutely right. This movie might be short on some things, but it's not short on ideas that he's trying

to get across. My kind of final analysis of what went wrong with this movie, I don't know. I am convinced Richard Kelly just has terrible timing. And if you think about it, his first movie that he tried to get made was about a violent, troubled young white man. And he was trying to shop that script right after Columbine. And nobody wanted it. Nobody wanted to see that. Then just before that movie's release, involving a plane crashing, planes crash into the World Trade Center and change American culture forever.

And they can't market that movie because the jet engine crash in it, is a crucial plot point. Then inspired by 9-11, the thing that derailed his first film, and glitter, of course. Obviously. He makes a movie about the government security state, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He makes this movie Southend Tales that ultimately should never have been a movie. It should have been a miniseries at the least. And this is something where you watch it now, and you're like, oh, great, Handmaid's Tale. I get it. I see what this could be. Right.

But it's five years too early for that. streaming doesn't exist at that point in time. Yep. And so he's premature once again in what he's trying to make. And not only that, the world that he's trying to show us with this fun house mirror that he's holding up is too extreme in 2007. We couldn't believe it then. We couldn't believe then what we could believe now.

Until the night of the election in 2016, we couldn't really believe that Donald Trump was going to be president. But now we can. And so now the movie almost seems tame in a lot of ways compared to what we're dealing with now. But at the time, it was too extreme. Police violence, the U.S. government spying on its people, extreme border control, sex tape, scandals, climate change apocalypse. That's all normal now. Like, we talk about the P-Tape.

It's just another thing that might be happening in our political spectrum. And it wasn't normal in 2007. The privatization of energy and technology around like a mythic mogul, which is Wallace Sean, and that's Elon Musk. And you talk about the, you know, one car fucking the other in a commercial, Elon Musk named his car's Model S, then Model 3 and Model X, so it would look like sex when you said the three cars in a row. I hate him. It's the same thing. He's that character.

And Elon Musk wasn't around when he made this movie. I do think that Sarah Michelle Geller is Kristen now, a porn star branching into self-promotion branding Hollywood and politics. I mean, we have the examples of Kim Kardashian-West and reality TV stars parlaying their cachet into other arenas. I think Krista now is a much more interesting character than Kim Kardashian West. I disagree. I actually think Kim Kardashian is very interesting, but that's- She is interesting.

Let me say, like, from an interview perspective, I find Sarah Michelle Keller more compelling, I guess. But it predicted a lot of things, and it was just too early by a decade, basically. And he just has really fucking bad timing, is that that's what I'm convinced. So I'm a big, actually a big fan of this movie. I agree it takes a lot of big swings and I agree it has a lot of big misses, but I think that's much more interesting than most of the stuff that's getting made in the big budget space right now. So Lizzie, I'd like to ask you, if anything, what went right for you in watching this movie? Well, one thing I'll say, which is not directly related to the movie, but is sort of related to the experience of watching it, is that

where we are right now with the protests and with the changes that are just just starting to happen, there does feel sort of like a bit of hope in the air that things really are changing and hopefully for the better. Watching this movie and seeing everything kind of implode, I did have the feeling that that's not where we're headed. So that was nice. You know what? I'll say what went right with this is putting Dwayne Johnson in a lead. Because as we've seen, he can carry literally any movie, regardless of whether it's great or absolute trash at this point. I would love him to do more risky movies like this. I would too.

He's really good. And yeah, hopefully, Dwayne, if you're listening, Mr. Johnson, we'd love if you would consider a smaller project. I think you're great. And I interviewed you once and you were so nice. God. Now he's never going to do it. I agree. I agree. I think the cast went right. And I think his analysis of a lot of what's wrong in America at like a broad level, he's taking big, broad swings, was right. And in light of what's happening in our country today and what will continue to happen, I'm sure, over the next few months and the work that needs to be done over the next few years

and longer. I'd like to end with this last quote from Manola Dargis. Dargis, I apologize for getting her name wrong. She's an amazing critic for the New York Times. Her review of the movie. In 2008, she ended her critique with the following. Neither disaster nor masterpiece. Southland Tales once again confirms that Mr. Kelly, who made a startling feature debut with Donnie Darko, is one of the bright lights of his filmmaking generation. He doesn't make it easy to love his new film, which turns and twists and at times threatens to disappear down the rabbit hole of his obsessions. Happily, it never does, which allows you to share in his unabashed joy in filmmaking, as well as his fury about the times. Only an American who loves his country as much as Mr. Kelly does

could blow it to smithereens and then piece it together with help from the rock, Buffy, Justin Timberlake, and a clutch of professional Weisenheimers. He does want to give peace a chance, seriously. And I love this idea that he loves America so much that he is willing to blow it up and put it back together with its best parts. In Donnie Darko, Donny said of Graham Green's destructors, they say right when they flood the house and they tear it to shreds. The destruction is a form of creation. So the fact that they burn the money is ironic. They want to see what happens when they tear the world apart. They want to change things. I think we're about to face a lot change hopefully. And I think that's going to be scary for a lot of people. But I think that the only

way that you can love something is if you allow it to change and if you take part in that change. So let's tear it down. Yeah. That's it. Thanks for listening, you guys. We'll talk to you next week. To support what went wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, subscribe on Patreon, Apple, or Spotify for $5 a month. Patreon subscriptions also come with an ad-free RSS feed. You can also visit our website What Went Wrong Pod.com for more info. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast

presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman.