1. ‘Bring It On’ and ‘Donnie Darko’ | Mission Accomplished

0:00Just a reminder, tickets for our live show in New York City go on sale today, August 12th at 2pm Eastern Time at 92ny.org. Again, the show is Saturday, October 4th. Tickets go on sale when? Today. Today. It's today. Today. See you there, we hope. Today.

0:21Hello, Big Picture listeners. For the next few weeks, Sean and I are handing over the feed to a narrative podcast called Mission Accomplished, which chronicles how the movies of the 2000s tell the story of that tumultuous decade in Hollywood and in America. It's hosted by longtime Ringer contributor and friend of the pod, Brian Raftery, who you might remember from a few other narrative podcasts we've done, A Hollywood Hack, Do We Get to Win This Time, and Gene and Roger. Sean and I will be back in a few weeks.

0:52In early 2000, I was given the chance to interview a guy who had no shot of becoming the next president of the United States, George W. Bush. At the time, Bush hadn't yet secured the Republican ticket, but he did have a famous last name, And he spent the last few years as the governor of Texas. On the campaign trail, though, Bush always sounded like he was trying to hide how confused he was. His speeches were full of garbled statements, like, I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully. I thought Bush was a goof. And so, as a young journalist, when I got the chance to interview him, and by interview I mean email some questions to his press team, I didn't ask Bush about his foreign policy plans, or about what he'd do with Social Security, or even about his spotty record as an oil man.

1:44Instead, I asked, what are your favorite movies? I know, it was a very unserious question. And I got a pretty unserious answer. Turns out one of Bush's choices was Austin Powers' International Man of Mystery, a movie about a guy who, like Bush, had high self-confidence and iffy communication skills. Allow myself to introduce myself. The fact that a well-intentioned but very green reporter could get away with asking a U.S. presidential candidate such a softball question and receive such a ridiculous answer might give you a sense of just how low-stakes things felt in America throughout most of 2000.

2:26I'm not saying bad things didn't happen that year, but looking back now, 2000 may have been the last relatively relaxed period in American history. The economy was in good shape, and the country wasn't stuck in a major war. For most of 2000, it felt like nothing could hurt us. It was a time when Americans could take on the impossible, when the human being and fish could coexist peacefully. You could sense that resilient spirit at movie theaters throughout 2000. The big screen heroes of that year were everyday Americans unwilling to back down from a challenge. Like Denzel Washington, leading his players through tough times as a high school football coach in Remember the Titans.

3:05Or Tom Hanks, making his one-man escape from an island in Castaway. Or Julia Roberts, playing a single mom trying to turn her life around in Erin Brockovich, which is probably the most 2000 movie to actually come out in the year 2000. I'm smart, I'm hardworking, and I'll do anything, and I'm not leaving here without a job. Spoiler, she gets the job. And she helps a law firm take on a major chemical company. And she falls in love. and Aaron Brockovich, everyone wins. To be clear, not every 2000 movie was bursting with that kind of optimism, but a whole bunch of films that year embraced a sort of kick-ass, can-do American spirit.

3:42And many of those movies were huge hits. I mean, Aaron Brockovich made more money than Nutty Professor 2, The Klumps. And I think that says a lot about the kinds of movie heroes Americans wanted to see that year. Characters who were tough, driven, and optimistic. Characters who were just like them, or at least the best versions of them. But by the end of 2000, that optimism started to get a little wobbly.

4:10I am honored and humbled to stand here where so many of America's leaders have come before me. That's George W. Bush in January 2001. He'd just been sworn in as president, but only after a too-close-to-call election, a tense recount in Florida, and a controversial Supreme Court decision. That election, which seemed to drag on forever, was the first of several events that, over the next few years, would slowly erode the country's morale. Not long after came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, followed by the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there.

4:52That's Bush in July 2003, talking about the U.S. forces in Iraq. My answer is bring them on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation. Over the course of Bush's two terms, America would endure one outrage after another. Enron. Katrina. The housing crisis. Whatever high hopes had existed in 2000 began to curdle, replaced by fear and disillusionment.

5:21Look, I'm not trying to bum you out here. But you can't talk about the Bush years without talking about the monumental transformation America went through during the early 2000s. I mean, things were so dire that the government was using a color-coded chart to keep us aware of imminent terrorism. Here's a local news broadcast from that time. Each color reflects the probability of a terrorist attack and the potential gravity, with green being the lowest threat and red being most severe. Still, you didn't need to watch the news every night to witness the impact this had on the American psyche. All you had to do was head to your local movie theater.

5:55As the 2000s went on, a series of films addressed the country's newfound anxieties, sometimes indirectly and sometimes very explicitly. Movies like 25th Hour, which captured the rage and uncertainty New Yorkers felt in the wake of 9-11. Fuck me, fuck you. Fuck you and this whole city and everyone in it. Or Michael Clayton, starring George Clooney as a lawyer who, like so many other Americans, has arrived at the end of the Bush years feeling near broke, beaten down, and highly compromised. I'm not the guy that you kill. I'm the guy that you buy. Are you so fucking blind you don't even see what I am?

6:33Even a comedy like Anchorman managed to evoke the out-of-control feeling of the early 2000s, despite taking place in the 1970s. Boy, that escalated quickly. I mean, that really got out of hand fast. Things really did get out of hand fast in America during the Bush years. So how did Hollywood, and America, go from green to red in just a few years? And what do the movies of the Bush years tell us about one of the most tumultuous periods in American history? Over the next six episodes, we'll look at some of the most popular and powerful movies of the Bush era. We'll trace how the country changed during that time, and how the movies reflected those changes.

7:15And to do that, we're going to start at the beginning, with a pair of films that show how quickly things shifted. The first movie, Bring It On, came out in the summer of 2000. It's a triumphant underdog story about a group of super-confident high school cheerleaders. And while Bring It On tackles big questions about class and racial divisions in America, the movie mostly presents a sunny, trouble-free version of American life. The second movie, Donnie Darko, came out in the fall of 2001. right after the destruction of the World Trade Center. Like Bring It On, its main characters are suburban teens.

7:51But Donnie Darko presents a very different take on American adolescence. It's a movie full of apocalyptic warnings and ennui. And when it arrived, Donnie Darko felt uncomfortably of the moment. Though they came out just over a year apart, Bring It On and Donnie Darko each define very different points in American history. One takes place during that brief peak of post-Y2K euphoria. The other came to symbolize a new age of dread and confusion. It's the difference between feeling like this

8:24and feeling like this. I hope that when the world comes to an end, I can breathe a sigh of relief because there will be so much to look forward to.

8:40You can think of Bring It On and Donnie Darko as the how it started, how it's going of the early 21st century. Together, they capture a drastic shift in the kinds of movies Americans wanted to see and a shift in the ways they saw themselves. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is Mission Accomplished. Episode 1 Bring it on and Donnie Darko

9:15Refresh your good vibes with Tic Tac With the right vibes it's Oh man to

9:45Growing up, Jessica Benninger was raised on the classics. And by classics, I mean the noisy, funny, and often very horny high school films of the 70s and 80s. Access to movies was different growing up for the Gen Xers, right? So I do remember seeing Rock and Roll High School. Meet Rip, the wildest girl in Rock and Roll High School. I've done more attention than anyone in the school's history. And I was like, what is this? You know, just like, oh my God. But before that, it was Greece was probably the biggest, you know, cultural phenomenon. Then Risky Business and Fast Times, of course. and then you have the John Hughes canon.

10:27If there's one thing nearly all of these carefree teen movies have in common, aside from some awesome soundtracks, it's that they've all got some pretty grown-up ideas on their mind. Ideas about class, capitalism, and sexism. In the mid-1990s, while working as a journalist, Bendinger set out to write her own high school film, one that was inspired by the world of cheerleading competitions. She'd done lots of research on the subject and knew that cheerleading was a big business. If you had watched ESPN back in 1996, you would see, like, the 1991 championships, the 1993. Like, it didn't matter what year.

11:06It was just, like, they were going constantly. College, high school, peewee. I knew it was something. But that wasn't the only reason Bendinger was interested in the topic. One of her first jobs had been covering hip-hop for Spin magazine. She wrote about Salt-N-Pepa and Def Jam. and visited the set of Public Enemy's video for Fight the Power. And she knew there was resentment about white hip-hop stars stealing from Black artists. You know, Vanilla Ice got a lot of shit, as did Snow later on, and as did the Beasties a little bit up front. Years later, when she got into the world of cheerleading, she saw that pattern repeating itself.

11:42You'd watch ESPN and these cheerleading competitions, and you see these little white kids imitating the moves. And now I'm watching this where these kids have no idea where this came from, really. They're just having fun. And I think that bothered me.

11:58Bendinger incorporated that idea into her screenplay, which was originally titled Cheer Fever. It followed two talented cheerleading teams. The Toros, a wealthy, all-white group from San Diego, and the Clovers, a black squad from Los Angeles struggling to get funding. After the Toros are called out for stealing the Clovers' moves, a showdown ensues. Bendinger began shopping her script around Hollywood in the mid-1990s. She'd even show up at meetings with financial data about the cheerleading industry to show how lucrative it was. But nobody bit. She got turned down again and again. Bendinger still remembers one particular meeting with an executive from that time.

12:37I do my pitch, and he says to me, Listen, I gotta just tell you something, kid. Girls don't go to movies. And at that moment, all of my training from working in New York, working at Spin, working in the business, knowing I love movies, I was just like, these people are idiots. Like, put on your poker face, girl, because this is just, this is some dumbass shit. It was some dumbass shit. In fact, by the late 1990s, young women would become one of the most powerful demographics in popular culture. The success of Romeo and Juliet and Titanic, the rise of the CW and TRL. they'd all be driven, in large part, by young women.

13:16Yet Bendinger still couldn't find a home for her script. So when you were getting all these rejections, was there sort of a through line to all of them? Were people saying, we don't want to do a movie about teenage girls? Or were they saying, we don't understand cheerleading? I'm just kind of curious, you know, was the cultural appropriation aspect of it, was that too hot for people to handle? No, I mean, look, I wasn't telling them that's what I was doing when I was pitching it. Like, if you're doing a social satire about the hypocrisy of, you know, certain things, You don't necessarily want to announce it.

13:43Bendinger pitched her cheerleading idea around Hollywood nearly 30 times. But even after all those rejections, she didn't give up. She kept retooling her pitch. And eventually, Cheer Fever found a home at one of the biggest studios in the world, Universal Pictures. If you want an idea of how the big studios worked back in 2000, what kind of movies they made, and what kinds of audiences they chased, Universal is a pretty good example. At the time, it was mostly producing original films with A-list stars, like Meet the Parents, or Aaron Brockovich, or Elizabeth Taylor's favorite award-winning epic...

14:18Gladiator! I'm not kidding when I say that I hear Liz Taylor saying Gladiator in my head at least once a week. I think about that more than I think about the actual movie. Anyway, in addition to those award-winning blockbusters, Universal also released lots of franchise stuff in 2000. Its biggest movie that year was How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Universal even managed to make a film that was a prequel, a sequel, and a TV adaptation all in one. The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas. That movie sucked. But in 2000, Universal and the rest of the big studios weren't just constantly pumping out sequels and reboots.

14:59They could afford to take risks, because business was booming. In 2000, more than 500 films were released in theaters, and moviegoers spent almost$8 billion on tickets. And audiences weren't just lining up for franchise movies. Some of the biggest hits of 2000 were original stories. Castaway, What Lies Beneath, Unbreakable. It was an extremely good year to be a movie fan, and to be a movie executive.

15:27Don't get me wrong. Hollywood did have some bumpy moments in 2000. That year, the big movie studios came under attack from Washington, D.C. Some politicians wanted the studios to stop marketing violent, R-rated movies to kids. They even held multiple hearings on Capitol Hill, meaning the whole country got to watch John McCain explain the plot of a Jennifer Love Hewitt movie. I know what you did last summer, a tale of a serial slasher equipped with an outsized ice hook. Studios were also dealing with the growing threat of piracy. Movies were being illegally uploaded to the internet or sold via bootleg DVDs while they were still in theaters.

16:06Hollywood would spend the next several years running anti-piracy ads, some of which featured music that sounded like it came from the Wachowski's car stereo. Real DVDs are the right way to watch movies. But for the most part, in 2000, things in Hollywood felt unbreakable. And major studios like Universal could afford to take a risk by bankrolling a movie like Bring It On. Even though there were all these rejections, I do think that this time you were pitching the movie, there was kind of an open-mindedness to new ideas. Very different time. You couldn't do 28 pitches. Now, there aren't that many shingles still up.

16:40And studios and business, you couldn't even do a couch and water bottle tour if you wanted to. Universal bought Bendinger's script and hired future Ant-Man guy Peyton Reed to direct. The film's budget was pretty low, just$11 million. If it turned out to be a hit, great. If not, well, at the very least, Universal would make its money back on DVD. I was really lucky in that nobody was paying attention to this movie, so I was in some of the castings. I saw a girl do a toe-touch jump and split her pants up the center. After that sometimes painful audition process, Kirsten Dunst was cast as Torrance, the leader of the San Diego team.

17:19She's the one who discovers her squad has been stealing moves from the Clovers and have even been using one of their trademark cheers, which, like every cheer in this movie, you've probably performed in the mirror at some point. I said burn! It's cold in here! There must be some clovers in the atmosphere. The clovers are led by a cheerleader named Isis, who's played by Gabrielle Union, and who issues a fierce challenge to the competition. Then when you go to nationals, bring it. Don't slack off because you feel sorry for us. To prepare for nationals, the Toros hire a famous cheer choreographer named Sparky Palastri, played by comedian Ian Roberts.

17:57In one of the movie's most famous scenes, Sparky teaches the Toros a crucial move. These are spirit fingers. And these are gold. That is a thing in cheer where when they're going to camp, they teach you that. Yeah, it's just absurd. Cheerleaders who are supposed to cheer for teams cheering for themselves is kind of how American and ridiculous and fun at the same time. After filming on Cheer Fever ended in the fall of 1999, Universal realized it had a problem on its hands. According to a study commissioned by the studio, 59 % of teenagers considered cheerleading, quote, uncool. So the movie's title went through some changes.

18:38First, it was called Made You Look. When that didn't work, the marketing team suggested another name, Bring It On. And the studio made a lively, colorful trailer, set to the Aqua song, Happy Boys and Girls.

18:55Bring It On turned out to be a perfect title for Bendinger's movie. And a perfect way to describe the mood of the country back then. People were feeling bullish about the future. And ready to take on whatever challenges awaited them in the 21st century. Napster shut down? Another Star Wars prequel? 98 degrees going on indefinite hiatus? Bring It On. And there was a good reason why Americans felt so certain things were going to go their way back in 2000. Today, after seven and a half years of hard effort, we're in the midst of the longest economic expansion in history. That's President Bill Clinton at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 2000.

19:34He's giving a sort of unofficial farewell address and doing some bragging along the way. More than 22 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in 30 years, the lowest female unemployment in 40 years, the lowest Hispanic and African-American unemployment rate ever recorded, and the highest home ownership in history. It wasn't just the economy that had people cheering that year. In 2000, the U.S. wasn't involved in any major conflicts, and none were on the horizon. It was a rare moment of peace and prosperity. According to one poll, nearly 80 % of Americans were feeling optimistic about their lives as the 2000s began.

20:13And when pollsters asked these people what did scare them about the future, the number one response was earthquakes, which is a valid fear but not exactly a pressing one.

20:26The truth is that while 2000 wasn't a perfect year it was pretty relaxed. People were living in the chilenium. To give you an idea here's the most stressful thing that happened to me the entire year of 2000. One night I had to go to a screening of Requiem for a Dream and see a Weezer reunion concert and get home to see the season one finale of Survivor before anybody ruined it for me. That's it. that was the biggest headache of the entire year for me.

20:55Anyway, things were chugging along in 2000 just fine. Americans were feeling confident about their future, maybe even a little cocky, and the very cheery Bring It On was in sync with the national mood. Still, in the weeks before its release, expectations for the movie were low. Bring It On was scheduled to open that August, a month when studios usually dump movies they don't know what to do with, and nobody thought Bring It On would be a hit. At the premiere, Bendinger met a Universal executive who made it clear he wanted none of the blame if the movie failed. He was like, no! He practically stepped backwards, which I think I've given him shit about subsequently.

21:34But Bring It On opened at number one and stayed there for three weeks. Yeah, people were shocked. Bring It On wound up earning nearly$70 million in theaters, making it one of the most successful high school films of all time. It arrived not long after hits like American Pie, Ten Things I Hate About You, and She's All That, movies that had plenty of teen angst, but that were ultimately pretty hopeful about life in general. Those high school movies from 1999 and 2000 are still popular today, even with people who weren't around to enjoy them when they came out. I think it's because films like Bring It On, aside from being really entertaining, depict a mostly happy-go-lucky way of life, one that was soon going to disappear.

22:16That total shift will be reflected in a film that opened in the fall of 2001. It was about a high schooler who looks at all the darkness ahead of him and says, bring it on. What was his name? Donnie. Donnie Darko. After the break, Donnie Darko. In the late 1990s, movie producer Adam Fields got his hand on a screenplay that had clearly been making the rounds in Hollywood. So they literally sent me a script that had food stains on a bunch of the pages. They didn't even bother to make a clean copy. So it was pretty well-traveled at that point. Yeah, I was like, you know, we're not going to waste Xerox money on this script.