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

The Big Picture Live Show in NYC: Tickets go on sale today, August 12, at 2 p.m. ET at 92ny.org! As a new millennium gets underway, two beloved high school films—one full of pep, the other drenched in dread—reflect America’s sudden shift from post-Y2K cheer to post-9/11 confusion. Host: Brian Raftery Producers: Devon Baroldi, Brian Raftery, and Vikram Patel Sound Design: Devon Baroldi Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Just a reminder, tickets for our live show in New York City go on sale today, August 12th.

• 0:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Today!

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Today, August 12th, at 2 PM Eastern Time, at 92NY.org. Again, the show is Saturday, October 4th. Tickets go on sale when?

• 0:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Today.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  Today.

• 0:15Amanda Dobbins?

  It's today.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  Today.

• 0:16Amanda Dobbins?

  See you there, we hope.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Today.

• 0:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Hello, 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 Rager 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.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  In 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.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  At the time, Bush hadn't yet secured the Republican ticket, but he did have a famous last name, and he'd 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,

• 1:20Speaker 02

  I know that a human being and fish can coexist peacefully.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  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. Instead, I asked, "What are your favorite movies?"

• 1:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  Allow myself to introduce...

• 2:10Speaker 02

  ...myself.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  The fact that a well-intentioned but very green reporter could get away with asking a US 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. I'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.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  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. Or 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 Aaron Brockovich. Which is probably the most 2000 movie to actually come out in the year 2000.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  I'm smart, I'm hardworking, and I'll do anything, and I'm not leaving here without a job.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  Spoiler: she gets the job, and she helps a law firm take on a major chemical company, and she falls in love. In 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. And many of those movies were huge hits. I mean, Aaron Brockovich made more money than Nutty Professor 2: The Clumps. 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.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  I am honored and humbled to stand here where so many of America's leaders have come before me.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  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 11th, 2001, followed by the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  That's Bush in July 2003, talking about the US forces in Iraq.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  My answer is bring them on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  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.

• 5:22Speaker 00

  Look, 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.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  Each color reflects the probability of a terrorist attack and the potential gravity, with green being the lowest threat and red being most severe.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  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. As 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.

• 6:13Speaker 05

  Fuck you and this whole city and everyone in it.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  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.

• 6:26Speaker 06

  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?

• 6:34Speaker 00

  Even a comedy like Anchorman managed to evoke the out of control feeling of the early 2000s, despite taking place in the 1970s.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Boy, that escalated quickly. I mean, that really got out of hand fast.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Things really did get out of hand fast in America during the Bush years.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  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?

• 7:05Speaker 00

  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. And to do that, we're going to start at the beginning with a pair of films that show how quickly things shifted.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  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. But 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

• 8:07Speaker 00

  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

• 8:24Speaker 00

  and feeling like this.

• 8:26Speaker 07

  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.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  You 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.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  From Spotify and The Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is Mission Accomplished. Episode One, Bring It On and Donnie Darko.

• 9:14Sean Fennessey?

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. There's nothing better than having friends who support whatever you're into, like rewatching a director's entire catalog in the lead up to their latest release. And like those friends, State Farm is there to help you feel supported by helping you choose the coverage you need. With so many coverage options, it's nice knowing you have help finding what fits for you. So you can check coverage off the list and spend more time debating movie rankings. Go online at statefarm.com or use the easily accessible app to get help from one of their local agents. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 9:44Speaker 09

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• 10:44Speaker 00

  Growing 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.

• 10:54Speaker 10

  Access to movies was different growing up for the Gen Xers, right? So I do remember seeing Rock and Roll High School.

• 11:02Speaker 05

  Meet Rip, the wildest girl in Rock and Roll High School. I've done more detentions than anyone in the school's history.

• 11:08Speaker 10

  And I was like, what is thi-- you know, just like, oh my god. But before that, it was Grease was probably the biggest, you know, cultural phenomenon. Then Risky Business and Fast Times, of course. And then you have the John Hughes canon.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  If 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.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  In the mid-1990s, while working as a journalist, Benninger 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.

• 11:56Speaker 10

  If you had watched ESPN back in 1996, you would see like, the 1991 championships, the 1993-- like, it didn't matter what year. It was just like, they were going constantly. College, high school, Pee-wee. I knew it was something.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  But that wasn't the only reason Benninger was interested in the topic. One of her first jobs had been covering hip-hop for Spin Magazine. She wrote about Salt and Pepper 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.

• 12:28Speaker 10

  You know, Vanilla Ice got a lot of shit, as did Snow later on, and as did the Beasties a little bit up front.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  Years later, when she got into the world of cheerleading, she saw that pattern repeating itself.

• 12:42Speaker 10

  You'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 or... And I think that bothered me.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Bendinger 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.

• 13:37Speaker 10

  I 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."

• 13:59Speaker 00

  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. Yet 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?

• 14:32Speaker 10

  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, you don't necessarily want to announce it.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  Bendinger 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's 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...

• 15:17Speaker 10

  Gladiator!

• 15:20Speaker 00

  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.

• 15:45Speaker 11

  The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  That movie sucked, but in 2000, Universal and the rest of the big studios weren't just constantly pumping out sequels and reboots. They 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: Cast Away, What Lies Beneath, Unbreakable. It was an extremely good year to be a movie fan and to be a movie executive.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  Don't get me wrong, Hollywood did have some bumpy moments in 2000. That year, the big movie studios came under attack from Washington DC. 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 Outsize Icehook. 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. Hollywood would spend the next several years running anti-piracy ads, some of which featured music that sounded like it came from the Wachowskis' car stereo.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  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 like this time you were pitching the movie, there was kind of an open-mindedness to new ideas.

• 17:35Speaker 10

  Very different time. You couldn't do 28 pitches. Now, there aren't that many shingles still up and studios in business. It just wouldn't even, you couldn't even do a couch and water bottle tour if you wanted to.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  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.

• 18:02Speaker 10

  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.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  After that sometimes painful audition process, Kirsten Dunst was cast as Torrance, the leader of the San Diego team. She'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.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  The Clovers are led by a cheerleader named Isis, who's played by Gabrielle Union, and who issues a fierce challenge to the competition.

• 18:44Speaker 12

  Then when you go to Nationals, bring it. Don't slack off because you feel sorry for us.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  To prepare for Nationals, the Toros hire a famous cheer choreographer named Sparky Pallastri, played by comedian Ian Roberts. In one of the movie's most famous scenes, Sparky teaches the Toros a crucial move. These are spirit fingers. And these...

• 19:07Speaker 05

  Our gold.

• 19:09Speaker 10

  That is a thing in cheer where they would, when they're going to camp, they teach you that. Yeah, it's just absurd. Like, right? Cheerleaders who are supposed to cheer for teams cheering for themselves is kind of how American and ridiculous and fun at the same time.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  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. First, 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."

• 19:55Speaker 00

  "Bring 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.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  People were feeling bullish about the future and ready to take on whatever challenges awaited them in the 21st century. Napster shutdown, 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.

• 20:22Speaker 13

  Today, after seven and a half years of hard effort, we're in the midst of the longest economic expansion in history.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  That's President Bill Clinton at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 2000. He's giving a sort of unofficial farewell address and doing some bragging along the way.

• 20:39Speaker 13

  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 homeownership in history.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  It wasn't just the economy that had people cheering that year. In 2000, the US 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. And 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.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  The truth is that while 2000 wasn't a perfect year, it was pretty relaxed. People were living in the chelenium. 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.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  Anyway, 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, Bendiger met a Universal executive who made it clear he wanted none of the blame if the movie failed.

• 22:26Speaker 10

  He was like, "No." Like, he practically stepped backwards, which I think I've given him shit about subsequently.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  But Bring It On opened at number one and stayed there for three weeks.

• 22:38Speaker 10

  Yeah, people were shocked.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  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, 10 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. That 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,

• 23:24Speaker 00

  "Bring it on."

• 23:26Speaker 05

  What was his name? Donnie. Donnie Darko.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  After the break, Donnie Darko.

• 23:38Sean Fennessey?

  This episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Amazon Prime. What pairs with a good comedy? The cozy blanket arriving with Prime. What pairs with a nail biting thriller? Snacks arriving with Prime. What pairs with big game on Prime Video? That new couch arriving with Prime. Whatever feeling you're after, Prime helps bring it to life with great entertainment and fast shipping that delivers what the moment calls for. From streaming to fast shipping, it's on Prime. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions, reach and reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not so great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that: bullspend. Instead, why not invest in what looks good to your CFO?

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• 24:50Speaker 14

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• 25:33Speaker 00

  In the late 1990s, movie producer Adam Fields got his hand on a screenplay that had clearly been making the rounds in Hollywood.

• 25:40Speaker 15

  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.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  So it was pretty, it was pretty well traveled at that point?

• 25:48Speaker 15

  Yeah, I was like, you know, we're not even gonna waste Xerox money on this script.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  By that point, Fields had worked on several big films, including 16 Candles and The Breakfast Club, both iconic teen movies written and directed by John Hughes. Fields had read plenty of scripts in his career, but nothing quite like the one that had all those stains on it. It was called Donnie Darko, and it followed a high schooler who learns the world is coming to an end and who embarks on a metaphysical journey to change his destiny. When Fields read the Donnie Darko script for the first time, he was struck by how realistic the film's young characters were.

• 26:24Speaker 15

  It reminded me, again, when John Hughes sent me the play for Breakfast Club, that was like really incredible dialogue that I thought really captured the zeitgeist of kids that age.

• 26:35Speaker 00

  The Donnie Darko script also reminded Fields of one of his favorite TV shows, The Twilight Zone. The idea of making a high school movie full of surreal twists and turns, and there were a lot of twists and turns in Donnie Darko, struck Fields as pretty cool.

• 26:49Speaker 15

  As a producer, I said, you know what? I think I can get this made.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  There was only one problem. The guy who'd written the screenplay, Richard Kelly, was a 20-something film grad who'd never made a feature before, and he wanted to direct Donnie Darko. The film's story was a personal one for Kelly. He'd grown up in Richmond, Virginia, and as a kid, he'd heard a story about a chunk of ice falling off a plane and landing on a boy's empty bedroom. Here's Kelly at the 2014 Austin Film Festival, talking about how that incident not only helped inspire the plot of Donnie Darko, but also let him tell a complex coming-of-age story.

• 27:26Speaker 16

  The death of the Reagan era and adolescent confrontation with authority figures and religion and sexuality and politics and the whole kitchen sink.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  As passionate as Kelly was about the film, Fields wasn't sold on having a rookie filmmaker direct his own script, especially one like Donnie Darko. It's a movie featuring wormholes, midair explosions, and a weird guy in a bunny suit. In the wrong hands, it was a movie that could easily go off the rails. But Fields met with Kelly anyway.

• 27:57Speaker 15

  And he talked it with such confidence about the material in a way that I said, you know what? This is what you need to put him in a room with actors. He can make them feel like he understands that there's someone in control. I said, so let me run with this and put it together.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  That meant raising money, something independent producers like Fields did frequently back then.

• 28:18Speaker 00

  The indie movement had exploded in the 1990s. Thanks to a series of low-budget hits like Sex, Lies & Videotape and El Mariachi, audiences approved they'd show up for movies without A-list stars or major budgets. All you needed was a well-executed idea and maybe a Blair Witch or two. I'm scared to close my eyes. I'm scared to open them. By 2000, there were numerous companies willing to take risks on smaller, weirder films. Some big studios, like Universal, had even set up their own divisions for movies that had no shot at being blockbusters but could turn a profit and maybe even win some awards. Still, Fields would have to hustle to get the town excited for Donnie Darko.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  The producer planted a story in The Hollywood Trades announcing they were going to start filming that summer. It was total bullshit, but it worked.

• 29:08Speaker 15

  Suddenly, agents were calling me going, "Dude, I just got dressed down in the casting meeting because I'm not covering this. Why didn't you call me?" I go, "I did. You didn't return my calls."

• 29:23Speaker 00

  Eventually, the Donnie Darko team got financing from Drew Barrymore, who agreed to co-produce the movie and to play a small supporting role. With just months to go before shooting, the Donnie Darko script got to Jake Gyllenhaal, a former child actor who was just starting to move into leading roles. He was interested in making what he called "an anti-teen movie." Here's Gyllenhaal in 2016, talking about Donnie Darko to Entertainment Tonight.

• 29:46Speaker 17

  There was a time in all these movies about coming into adulthood or whatever that period of time in your life might be. We're about like, you know, parties and sticking things into pies.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Donnie Darko, though, was different.

• 30:02Speaker 17

  That was a movie that was sort of more about the psychological journey of adolescence and the confusion of all of it.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  Speaking of confusion, Donnie Darko is a ridiculously tough movie to explain. There have been multiple versions of the film released over the years and countless theories as to what the movie means. But I'll try to give you the most bare-bones outline possible. In the fall of 1988, just weeks before George H.W. Bush is elected president, a depressed teen named Donnie walks onto a suburban golf course and finds a man in a rabbit suit. The man starts a countdown clock.

• 30:40Speaker 05

  Six hours, forty-two minutes, twelve seconds.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  And tells Donnie what will happen when time runs out.

• 30:51Speaker 05

  That is when the world will end.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  That is when the world will end. Not long after the man in the bunny suit delivers that warning, a jet engine falls from the sky without explanation, destroying Donnie's bedroom. Donnie returns to school, unsure of what to make of all these bleak visions he's now having. And the audience is just as confused as Donnie. Is he schizophrenic? Suicidal? How much of what he's seeing is even real? Donnie starts studying time travel and begins dating a new student named Gretchen, played by Jenna Malone. She puts an idea in Donnie's head.

• 31:30Speaker 18

  And what if you could go back in time and take all those hours of pain and darkness and replace them with something better?

• 31:38Speaker 00

  Now, I'm skipping a lot of plot points here, like those wormholes I mentioned earlier, a couple of scenes of vandalism, and a whole subplot about a youth dance team named Sparkle Motion. All of it collides in a movie that could be pretty bleak at times. How bleak? Well, for comparison, here's the most popular song from Bring It On.

• 31:57Speaker 05

  I'm wanted, I'm hot, I'm everything you're not.

• 32:01Speaker 00

  And here's the best-known tune from Donnie Darko.

• 32:04Speaker 19

  The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  But you get the point. Donnie Darko lived up to its name.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  The movie ends with Donnie saving Gretchen's life by changing the future. Or maybe changing the past. And in the process, Donnie dies. Or maybe he lives on in another timeline.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  Donnie Darko cost just $4.5 million and wound up being filmed in just 28 days. A total coincidence, by the way. Some weird stuff happened during the shoot. According to one newspaper account, a Boeing 747 hit a bird and began raining down engine parts on a beach not far from where the movie was filming. But what's really weird, looking back now, is that Kelly's film was a movie about the start of one Bush era in the late 80s, but it would arrive just as another Bush era was getting underway in the early 2000s.

• 33:04Speaker 20

  In one hour, Al Gore and George W. Bush will face off against each other for the first time. Two men going-

• 33:10Speaker 00

  That's from the first debate of the 2000 presidential race, held on October 3rd. And trust me, those 90 minutes, they felt very long. At the time, Gore and Bush were close in the polls. You'd think that would have made them a little feisty. Instead, they spent the debate dryly discussing...policy. Honestly, even they seemed a little bored by the whole thing. At times, you could actually hear Al Gore sighing right into his microphone.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  I've had a record of appointing judges in the state of Texas. That's what a governor gets to do.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  Just listen to that sigh. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but Gore's got a certain defeated dad energy in his voice. And trust me, I know that sound. And as for Bush, well, at least he tried to get in the occasional zinger, but he did so with zero energy.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  The man's running on Mediscare.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  Now, to be clear, Bush and Gore did discuss important topics that night, like the fate of Roe v. Wade and the future of Social Security. But to a lot of Americans, their showdown felt kinda unimportant. More than 46 million people tuned in to watch, but that was actually low for a live presidential debate, and some of the major networks didn't carry it at all. To be fair, the candidates weren't that inspiring. Gore was seen as stiff and condescending. Plus, he'd served under Clinton, who'd just survived impeachment and who a lot of people were pretty sick of. As for Bush, well, he was kind of a proto-Nepo baby. Thanks in part to his family name, he'd run an oil company, owned a baseball team, and

• 34:44Speaker 00

  served as governor of Texas. But a lot of people had a hard time taking George W. Bush seriously, in part because of campaign statements like this.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  And you're working hard to put food on your family.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  When it came to the 2000 race, many voters were either bummed out or checked out, especially younger voters. A few weeks before the election, a 20-something voter told the press he couldn't decide between, quote, "stupidity" or "soulless evil." He didn't specify who was who. Finally, the big night arrived.

• 35:14Speaker 11

  Good evening, everybody, and welcome to our election coverage 2000, ABC 2000. We're back in Times Square.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  That's ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, live on November 7, 2000.

• 35:26Speaker 11

  This being billed as the polls closed before the election as the closest election in a generation.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  Within a few hours, it became clear just how close the election had been. Now, explaining all the up-and-down weirdness of the 2000 election would take me days. Honestly, I'd have an easier time describing the plot of Donnie Darko. But here's a quick breakdown. Even after millions of votes had been counted, there was no clear winner by the end of the night. It remains tick-tight. It has been for virtually the whole night and now into the wee hours of the morning, and we go into the dawn. That's CBS anchor Dan Rather, telling voters who'd just woken up that the election was still too close to call. It had all come down to Florida and its 25 electoral votes. He who wins Florida wins the presidency. What followed was more than a month of recounts, court arguments, and ballot inspections, all of it covered nonstop by the media.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Finally, in December, the battle went all the way to the US Supreme Court. By a vote of 5-4, the justices forced an end to the recount efforts, making Bush the winner. That night, Gore called Bush and conceded the race. In his acceptance speech, Bush recalled their conversation.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  And we agreed to do our best to heal our country after this hard-fought contest.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  The second Bush era was about to begin. On January 20, 2001, George W. Bush was sworn in as the 43rd President of the United States. It was a cloudy, rainy, freezing cold day, a little on the nose weather-wise. Anyway, in his speech, Bush pledged to work with other countries to, quote, "shape a balance of power." And he swore to keep his administration's collective ego in check.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  We will show purpose without arrogance.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  It was a promise that would be hard to keep in the months and years ahead.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  On the same day that Bush was sworn in as president in Washington DC, thousands of movie fans gathered in another chilly and weirdly powerful town, Park City, Utah, the home of the annual Sundance Film Festival. Sundance had given birth to several hit indie films, crucial 90s movies like Pie, Clerks, and Welcome to the Dollhouse. And at the 2000 Festival, Donnie Darko was one of the most anticipated films. Its first major screening took place right as the festival began.

• 37:46Speaker 15

  You never want to open Sundance.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  That's Adam Fields again.

• 37:49Speaker 15

  Unless you have the greatest movie of all time, you want to wait till people have spent three days seeing really bad movies, and then your movie starts looking really good.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  Because Donnie Darko had so much buzz, a bunch of studio heads had shown up for its premiere.

• 38:01Speaker 15

  Everyone was there, and it was like, great, they're all here to see my movie. And no one came by after the screening and got, hey, congratulations. They just like, kind of looked the other way.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  No one knew what to make of Donnie Darko, and no one wanted to buy it. The movie left Sundance without a distributor. For the next few months, Donnie Darko was in purgatory. Finally, the producers were able to get a deal with a small distributor, and Donnie Darko was scheduled to open in a few dozen theaters on October 26, 2001.

• 38:34Speaker 00

  For a movie full of unsettling moments, the most eerie scene in Donnie Darko has nothing to do with a guy in a bunny suit, or with wormholes, or even a jet engine falling out of the sky. The scene that always gets me is one in which Donnie and a bunch of schoolkids are standing outside. Suddenly, they hear a plane loudly passing overhead. And for a few seconds, nobody says anything. They just look to the sky and wait.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  That feeling, that sort of unspoken dread, that was something a lot of people were experiencing in the fall of 2001. On September 11, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Another plane hit the Pentagon outside Washington DC. And a fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 Americans died.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  President Bush was in a Florida elementary school when he got word of the attacks. And that night, he addressed the nation from the Oval Office.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  In his speech, Bush vowed to punish those responsible. He was no longer interested in, quote, "shaping a balance of power with other countries." According to Bush, America was going to do whatever it needed to do.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  If you're too young to remember what the mood was like after 9/11, or if you weren't alive when it happened, I'm not sure I can really describe how things felt back then. Anger, disorientation, grief, terror, even the guilty relief of realizing you were okay. It was all of those emotions, all at the same time, and for months on end. Everything felt so uncertain back then. And when Donnie Darko came out the next month, the film's anxiety felt very timely. Here's Jake Gyllenhaal being interviewed by journalist Eric Blair at a Donnie Darko event that fall. He's describing the movie's bigger meaning.

• 40:55Speaker 21

  Well, it's sort of like, anything is possible. So it sort of takes everything into perspective.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  Well, I think we've learned that in the last couple of months, haven't we?

• 41:02Speaker 21

  I would say so.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  Donnie may have been a confused, depressed teenager, but by the fall of 2001, his on-wei was relatable to any viewer, regardless of age. Donnie Darko was the first movie to really embody the post-9/11 mood, even though it had been made more than a year before the attacks. It wasn't just the falling jet parts that made the movie so painfully of the moment. Donnie Darko was also kind of a downer film with a real apocalyptic vibe. All of that made the movie a tough sell in October 2001. Not that Donnie Darko was ever going to be a big hit. The movie was really out there, and Gyllenhaal wasn't a big star yet. And besides, moviegoers mostly wanted breezy comedies and romances, like Zoolander and Serendipity.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  If they were going to watch a movie about a troubled young man, it was gonna be this guy.

• 41:54Speaker 22

  Sorry.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  Donnie Darko wound up grossing barely half a million dollars in the US. But not long after it left theaters, the film got a second life.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Movie theaters in New York City, Boston, Dallas, and Washington DC started holding late-night screenings of the film. So did a few college campuses. Young people were coming together to watch a movie about alienation. As a result, Donnie Darko had become the first midnight movie of the 2000s. One that people bought on DVD so they could watch it again, and again, and again. Some of those fans were drawn to the movie's elliptical, unresolved plot. Donnie Darko would become a prime example of subreddit cinema. A film people would spend hours trying to decipher online. But there's another reason why Donnie Darko found its audience in the early 2000s. One that has a lot to do with a scene you heard earlier in the episode. That scene where Gretchen asks Donnie,

• 42:53Speaker 18

  "What if you could go back in time and take all those hours of pain and darkness and replace them with something better?"

• 43:01Speaker 00

  To a lot of people in the early 2000s, that sounded like a pretty good plan. Donnie Darko was a movie in which it was possible for an average American to change the course of history, to save somebody from dying. You can really see the appeal of a movie like that, and not just back then.

• 43:17Speaker 16

  I think we confront the apocalypse every day.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  This is writer-director Richard Kelly talking to the upcoming in 2016. He's explaining what drew him to Donnie Darko, and what still draws viewers to the movie years later.

• 43:32Speaker 16

  We can undo tragedy in cinema, but sadly, in life, we don't have those tools. We don't have a time machine in real life.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  But movies can be their own time machines. And Bring It On and Donnie Darko both transport viewers back to very specific moments in history. Bring It On documents that carefree blip between Y2K and 9/11, the country's last moment of relative calm. And Donnie Darko captures the fear and confusion that engulfed America in the fall of 2001. And that's what's so wild about those two moments and those two movies. They're separated by barely a year. That's how quickly things change in the early 21st century. Anything is possible. Do you think of those pre-Bush, pre-9/11 years, did those feel like a separated before and after?

• 44:18Speaker 10

  Yes, 100%. Yeah, 100%.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  Jessica Bendinger.

• 44:23Speaker 10

  I think the naivete that we had, or innocence, whatever you want to call it, it was like a collective modern loss of innocence, 9/11.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  And in the early 2000s, Americans would confront that loss of innocence at the movies. Hollywood would soon unveil a wave of films that addressed the country's confusion, determination, and anger.

• 44:46Speaker 23

  Make no mistake, the American people are terrified. They know something's coming. They can feel it.

• 44:55Speaker 00

  This podcast is reported, written, and hosted by me, Brian Raftery. The executive producers of this podcast are Juliet Littman and Sean Fenestry. Story editing by Amanda Dobbins. The show was produced by me, Devin Beraldi, and Vikram Patel. Fact checking by Casey Gallagher. Copy editing by Craig Gaines. Talent booking by Katz Blaine. Sound design by Devin Beraldi. Mixing and mastering by Scott Somerville. The music you hear in this series is from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Art direction and illustration by David Shoemaker.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening.

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