4. ‘Michael Clayton’ and ‘Chop Shop’ | Mission Accomplished

0:03Let's go back, real quickly, to the year 2000. Remember Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention that year? Today, after seven and a half years of hard effort, we're in the midst of the longest economic expansion in history. As the decade began, the economy was America's big success story. That's why Al Gore, who was Clinton's vice president, made it such a big part of his own presidential campaign. Here's Gore during a 2000 debate with George W. Bush, promising even more growth ahead. 22 million new jobs and the greatest prosperity ever, but it's not good enough. And my attitude is you ain't seen nothing yet.

0:44But the truth is that, even then, the economy was starting to show some cracks.

0:52In early 2000, the Nasdaq had taken a nosedive. And on Wall Street, investors were trying not to panic, though some of them couldn't hide their frustration from reporters. Ah, bad day. Bad day for you? Another one, yeah. Yeah, I know. Too many in a row. The free fall was especially bad for tech startups, including Pets.com. The company had become famous for its talking dog sock puppet mascot. Did you know that Pets.com delivers food, treats, and toys? Now, Pets.com had a wild ride. It was launched in 1998 and soon raised more than$80 million. The company was so successful, at least on paper, that in 2000, Pets.com could afford to buy its own Super Bowl ad.

1:37But as 2000 went on and the dot-com bubble burst, the company ran out of cash. By the fall, Pets.com had shut down altogether. There were more signs of financial trouble to come in the early 2000s. Like when Enron, a billion-dollar energy company, filed the largest bankruptcy in history. The news was deeply upsetting for President Bush. My concern, of course, is for the shareholders of Enron. That's Bush in late 2001. And don't worry, Enron employees. He talks about how much he cares about you, too, in a very human, very convincing way. I have great concern for the stories, for those I read about in the stories who put their life savings aside.

2:20Thousands of Enron employees lost their jobs. And the company's chief executives would later be convicted on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy. The scandal was so big, Enron even gets a shout-out in Edward Norton's rant in 25th Hour. Send those Enron assholes to jail for fucking life. You think Bush and Cheney didn't know about that shit? Give me a fucking break. That line had some people cheering in the theaters. A few months after Enron collapsed, a second billion-dollar company, WorldCom, also filed for bankruptcy over bad accounting. Those meltdowns were proof that the economy wasn't as stable as it had seemed a few years earlier.

2:59But nothing could prepare the country for what would happen down the road. Americans had long suspected that there was something wrong on Wall Street. And during Bush's last full year in office, those suspicions were confirmed. The signs were everywhere, but now it's official we are in a recession. That's Katie Couric in late 2008. You can tell by her tone that she wasn't too surprised. Everyone had been feeling the squeeze of a recession, but no one wanted to admit it out loud. The recession actually started a year ago. But the question now, when will it end? The Great Recession, which started in 2007, was the strongest sign yet that something had gone terribly wrong in America.

3:41Greed had always been one of the country's biggest vices. But when you combine rampant greed, rampant corporate crime, and rampant shitty leadership, clearly things had gone awry. and nobody would escape unscathed. According to one report, more than 2.6 million jobs were lost in 2008, the biggest decline since 1945. By the end of Bush's second term, people were feeling defeated and exhausted. It didn't seem like you could actually thrive in America anymore. The best you could do was just survive. And even that required the kinds of compromises that would have seemed impossible a few years earlier.

4:18How far were you willing to go? just to keep going?

4:24That question will be raised by two of the best dramas of that decade. Both took place in New York City. And both gave viewers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at worlds people usually never get to see. One was an Oscar-winning big studio film starring George Clooney. He plays a mid-level Manhattan attorney who helps keep the rich and powerful out of trouble, even if they deserve to be in trouble. I'm not a miracle worker. I'm a janitor. I know I don't have to tell you this, but that's Michael Clayton. The math on this is simple. The smaller the mess, the easier it is for me to clean up. The other movie was a low-budget indie drama about a kid hustling and scheming to make it on the streets of Queens.

5:03Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen. Sorry for the interruption. It was called Chop Shop. We are not going to lie to you. We are not here selling candy funnel school basketball team. In fact, I don't even go to school. Though the characters in Michael Clayton and Chop Shop live in the same city, in many ways, they're worlds apart from one another. But both films are about strivers who've given up too much for too little. A feeling a lot of people could relate to in the 2000s. And, you know, also today. And the movies arrived when a lot of Americans were unsure how they felt about the country. And about themselves.

5:37I'm not the enemy. Then who are you? From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is Mission Accomplished, episode four, Michael Clayton and Chop Shop.

6:00If there's one thing we've learned in this series, it's that movies don't just show up overnight. They take years to conceive, shoot, and release. During that time, they evolve in ways that even their creators couldn't predict. And every film has a different gestation period. That's Tony Gilroy, the writer-director of Michael Clayton. There is a delay. So you have to look, when did the first sound wave start across the lake before I heard it? For Gilroy, the process of making Michael Clayton began in the mid-1990s. Back then, he was a screenwriter best known for hits like The Cutting Edge and Dolores Claiborne.

6:36And he'd just written a movie about New York City's most well-connected power broker, the devil. I'm here on the ground with my nose in it since the whole thing began. God likes to watch. He's an absentee landlord. That's Devil's Advocate, the 1997 thriller directed by Taylor Hackford. It stars Al Pacino, obviously, as the head of a Manhattan law firm, who's also the devil. Great movie. Lots of Big Al speeches in this one. Anyway, before production on Devil's Advocate began, Gilroy and the rest of the filmmaking team did some research.

7:14We went all over the place and saw a whole bunch of New York law firms. Sometimes, Gilroy would wander off from the rest of the tour group. That's when he noticed that the firms had these fancy, wood-paneled conference rooms, and that they were usually empty. He realized that law firms are, you know, two-thirds of the businesses behind the wall is in the kitchen. He realized this is where the real work happens, the kind of work that people in the firm usually don't brag about. Over time, I thought, no one's done a movie about the back of the house, and I thought, that's really kind of fascinating, and I'm always, you know, you're like a truffle pig.

7:47You're trying to look for truffles all the time, and that seemed really cool. Gilroy began kicking around a new idea for a movie. It was a thriller, set in the back of the house at a prestigious law firm. To gather intel, Gilroy took high-powered attorneys to lunch to talk about their work. During one of those meetings, a lawyer used a term that Gilroy had never heard before. She used the word bad document twice, and I go, what's a bad document? The lawyer gave an example. It was about a billion-dollar case that a firm had been working on for years. Late one night, while going through some paperwork, a young associate found a document that had been misplaced, a document that threatened the firm's entire case.

8:27So I said, okay, so what happens? She said, well, two things happened. One, that associate was the youngest associate that ever made partner in our firm. And that document didn't make it to Sunrise. Gone. I go, okay, that's pretty fascinating. While meeting with these lawyers, Gilroy would sometimes pitch them the character he was thinking about. He was a fixer. A guy who works behind the scenes in a big law firm, dealing with everyone else's secrets. And making things go away. One attorney said to me, well, we don't have anybody at our firm like that, but boy, I wish we did.

9:04Gilroy's idea was partly inspired by the tough, dark, very grown-up films that the big studios made in the 1970s. Like The Parallax View, with Warren Beatty as a reporter who investigates a series of political assassinations. Whoever's behind this is in the business of recruiting assassins. I think I got some of their entrance exams. Or Save the Tiger, with Jack Lemmon as a middle-aged business owner who's$300 ,000 in debt and rethinking his life. Harry Stoner, American. First the buffalo went, then the Indian went. Now, Harry Stoner is the last of an endangered species. Those dramas were released at a time of political and economic upheaval.

9:45And they capture a sense of disorientation, that something wrong is going on. When Gilroy watched those films in the 1970s, he saw them as mirrors. But it's also an intensifying mirror. It confirms what you're already starting to think, and then you think more about it. And they were, sad to say, they were accurate. And that's not the only thing that made those 70s films so exciting. You had this really weird mix of new ideas, young filmmakers and drugs and paranoia and really activated imaginations. But then you had all the muscularity of this really well-established filmmaking community. So it's old Hollywood at its best that meets this new, insane application.

10:37That anything-goes attitude was gone from Hollywood by the late 1990s, the time Gilroy was pitching his fixer idea. Still, the major studios and production companies were looking for new ideas, and for new filmmakers. The indie movement had exploded, proving that audiences were willing to take a chance when they headed to the theater. Gilroy eventually landed a deal for his Fixer movie. He'd even get to direct it, so long as he kept a few promises. I'll keep the budget down, I'll write a movie star part, someone will die, and they gave me carte blanche to go off and do that. Over the next few years, Gilroy got interrupted with work on movies like Proof of Life and The Bourne Identity.

11:19He was just about to get back to his legal thriller when the September 11th attacks happened. There was just no way to incorporate something that huge into the behavioral fabric of your characters. It just was impossible. By the time Gilroy returned to the idea, George W. Bush was a few years into his first term. At that point, things had changed. The country was heading toward war in Iraq. I think there's few things that made me angrier in my life than the invasion of Iraq. I just was so, I was really bereft and really, really angry. And I was also extremely angry that it was going down as if there was no, and being perceived as if there was no pushback on it.

12:04Gilroy did push back. He attended one of the massive anti-war protests I told you about a few episodes ago. They were held around the world and in cities around the country, drawing huge swarms of people. And they were impossible to ignore. Loud and large protests against the attack on Iraq. Thousands swarmed the streets of Boston calling for an end to military action. It was during this period of frustration and protest that Gilroy doubled down on the movie that would become Michael Clayton. I just was so apoplectic about it. And I really, I stopped reading the newspapers for a year and a half and just really opted out.

12:41And that's when I wrote the script. That's when I pushed on it. And it's so, there's a lot of anger in it. quiet anger in it. There was also a lot of Gilroy's research in the script from Michael Clayton.

12:56It focused on a mid-level attorney at a giant Manhattan law firm. The guy who cleans up everyone else's messes. And when a billion-dollar case is threatened by a damaging memo, it's up to Michael to handle the fallout. That's not the only source of stress in Michael's life. He's got a gambling problem, and he lost most of his money in a bad investment. Plus, he's never made partner at the firm. And he never will. He's stuck. Gilroy got a little stuck, too, while trying to get Michael Clayton made. I cannot even tell you the many versions of this film that there were and the many places that it went.

13:30At one point, Alec Baldwin was going to star in a super low-budget version of Michael Clayton. Denzel Washington was also up for the part. But he was nervous about working with a first-time director. And Michael Clayton was the kind of movie that needed a big star. Throughout the 2000s, the major studios would become even more reliant on franchises. Harry Potter, Spider-Man, The Fockers. To get a tough, original drama like Michael Clayton Greenlit at a major studio, and with a decent budget, required an A-list actor on the poster.

14:05That had always been the case, of course. But the number of stars who could actually make executives and audiences happy was getting smaller. One of those stars was an actor that Gilroy had long wanted for the part, George Clooney. He'd become famous playing guys who may have been down on their luck, but who never gave up. If you play long enough, you never change the stakes. The house takes you. Unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet big, and then you take the house. Look, I realize that playing a scene from Ocean's Eleven will just make you want to turn off this podcast and watch Ocean's Eleven, which is a totally logical response.

14:39But just stay with me if you can. As the 2000s went on, Clooney's film choices started getting more downbeat and more reflective of the times Siriana, Good Night and Good Luck, Solaris, and he was in his late 40s A great age to play a lawyer having a midlife crisis of conscience But Clooney wasn't interested in Michael Clayton, at least not at first He passed on it two years earlier because he didn't want anything to do with me, first time director And then he was really reluctant later on but I switched agencies and the agency put the arm on him and said you gotta read this and really think about it seriously and he said okay have him come up Gilroy met Clooney at the actor's house they talked about some of those 1970s movies movies they'd loved when they were younger you know we're about the same age we watched all the same shit they also talked about the thing that all guys talk about when they're hanging out corporate malfeasance It's the actual memo that our film is based on is based on a case, a GM case, where they blew up.

15:46These cars were blowing up and eight, nine people had been killed. And this engineer says, oh, well, we could fix it, but it's going to you have to retool the whole line and change everything. It's going to cost this huge amount of thing. And I can't. This is way above my pay grade to figure out what this cost to fix. and they determined that it was cheaper to pay off the death benefits than to repair the problem. That memo had been written in 1973, and GM had spent decades trying to keep it out of court. A class action suit against the automaker wound up dragging on throughout the early 2000s.

16:21That document was literally the bad document, right? At their meeting, Gilroy and Clooney talked all day, and by the time they were through, the actor had committed to Michael Clayton. The film would be released by Warner Brothers. This would be a low-budget movie with a big star. So the math on this was simple. The movie cost what George was getting for his huge commercial films. That was the budget of the movie, and he waives his fee, and I'm not making any money, and so, wow, it's a good bet. Instead of getting a big check, Clooney opted to bet on the movie. If Michael Clayton succeeded at the box office, he'd do okay.

16:59What was most important was that it got made at all. The cast and crew of Michael Clayton headed to Manhattan to begin filming in the winter of 2006. A lot had happened in the years since Gilroy originally wrote his script. A lot to get very angry about.

17:16At the time, the country was reeling from the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. The storm had overwhelmed the levees of New Orleans, leaving nearly four-fifths of the city underwater. Here's a Fox News report from the early days of the storm. They're seeing block by block suddenly become submerged in some degree of water, whether it's one inch or three inches or more than a foot at this point. And everyone's starting to wonder, how high is it going to get? The government's response to Katrina was seen by many as incompetent, even callous. And the fallout sent Bush's approval ratings to new lows. His second term was going terribly.

17:55The war in Iraq looked like it was never going to end, gas prices were crushing consumers, and there had been a series of high-profile political blowups. In late 2005, Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was forced to resign after being indicted on charges of money laundering. Around the same time, a well-connected GOP lobbyist named Jack Abramoff, who had close ties to the Bush White House, was charged with fraud. Abramoff had been a movie producer at one point, In the 1980s, he made a Dolph Lundgren action flick titled Red Scorpion. That's a pretty kick-ass name for what was actually a pretty lame-ass movie.

18:33They think they control him. Love kicks up. Think again. No one remembers the Jack Abramoff thing now, but it caused a huge outrage at the time. In fact, Clooney, who was very outspoken during the Bush years, annoyed some people when he joked about the scandal at the Golden Globes. I want to thank Jack Abramoff. You know, just because.

18:59During the Bush years, the news had become so reliably scandalous that, at a certain point, all you could do was laugh. It seemed like everybody was breaking the rules, just to make a buck, and not caring who got hurt along the way. When people know they're doing something wrong and they do it anyway, as sophisticated and cynical and old and wise as I am, I'm like a golden retriever. I like staring at a moving car. Every time I see that, I'm like, how can people do that? He wasn't the only filmmaker asking questions about where America was going. Not long after Michael Clayton came together in Manhattan, a very different Bush years drama began shooting in Queens.

19:39This film had a much lower budget and took place in a much smaller world. But it had a lot to say about the trickle-down effects of the 2000s.

19:56Ramin Barani was born and raised in North Carolina and went to film school in New York City. But when the September 11th attacks happened, he was in his parents' home country of Iran.

20:10I had never visited as a child. I went as an adult, as a 23, 24-year-old, and I had lived there for three, four years. Being in Iran during 9-11, Irani says, was, quote, a unique experience. There was a decent wave of support. There were candlelight vigils, mainly by young people. I mean, the same way that Americans don't necessarily want to be associated with certain government policies, most Iranians that I know don't want to be associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran and its leaders. He also sensed a lot of underlying anxiety. Then if you're Iranian, there's just an immediate terror of, I hope the people who this are not going to come back as being from Iran.

20:55Afterward, things got tense, and Barani decided to leave Iran. So without really any plan and no income, I went to France. And at that time, still, the world was in total shock about what had happened. That sense of shock would continue in the weeks and months ahead. Barani was living in Paris when the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan. And I remember watching Afghans sitting around television, watching the news. And they were watching their country being bombed, you know, people being pulled out of rubble, dead, alive. And I imagine they must be searching in these images to see if their family members are being hauled out of the rubble.

21:409-11, the war on terror. these were some of the most seismic moments of the early 21st century. And they got Barani thinking about his home country. Without those experiences, I never would have been able to see America the way that I've revealed them in my films.

22:02Barani would see that reaction up close when he returned to New York City, where he began making a series of low-budget, highly entertaining dramas about life in the city. The first was called Man Push Cart, about a Pakistani immigrant who lugs his coffee cart around the city, making whatever dollar he can find. During production of Man Push Cart, there were two separate instances in which someone approached Barani and the film's lead actor, accusing them of being terrorists. One of them, in fact, absurdly said, are you funding a bin Laden training camp? Barani took the man aside. And we ended up talking for a while.

22:38I never forget this guy. He was second-generation Italian. And I said, what do you think your parents and grandparents must have suffered through when they came here with the Irish immigrants and were treated just as you're treating me and my friend? The guy was so taken aback, he actually apologized. And so there's an undercurrent in that entire film of the war on terror and what it meant to be in New York at that time and to be of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent at that time. Man Push Cart got ridiculously good reviews when it hit theaters in 2006. Roger Ebert even put it on his top 10 of the year list.