Pod Insights The Big Picture 3: ‘Anchorman’ and ‘Zodiac’ | Mission Accomplished About this episode As Americans pine for a kinder, gentler nation, two wildly entertaining (and wildly different) films about life in 1970s California poke holes in our country’s past.
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
Transcript 8,488 words · 35 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Speaker 00 By 2004, a lot of Americans were feeling, well, pretty lousy. And you can't blame them. Within a few years of George W. Bush taking office, the excitement and promise that people were feeling when the new millennium began
0:21 Speaker 00 had given way to a depressing new day-to-day existence. There were constant terrorist threats, multiple wars, and a general feeling that nothing was going as planned. The present had become a bummer. And so movie makers and moviegoers began racing back to the past. That's not entirely surprising. After all, nostalgia is one of our oldest industries. I mean, it's literally nothing new. Yet the pop culture revivalism of the 2000s was more than just a diversion. It was part of a full-on retreat.
0:54 Speaker 00 Audiences were so eager to forget their current reality that they happily tried to relive any decade, even the ones they'd missed the first time around. They traveled to the 1950s and 1960s through music biopics like Ray, Walk the Line, I'm Not There, and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
1:11 Speaker 01 That was freaking transcendental, Paul McCartney. Don't you agree, John Lennon? Yes, Dewey Cox. With meditation, there's no limit to what we can imagine.
1:21 Speaker 00 And the 1970s came back, too, just like they always do. I had totally forgotten this. But somehow, in the early 2000s, we got not one, but two primetime Brady Bunch TV specials. Those were followed by a bunch of Hollywood remakes of films from the Nixon-Ford-Carter era: The Longest Yard, The Bad News Bears, Freaky Friday, The Amityville Horror. There was even a movie version of the 70s TV show Starsky and Hutch.
1:46 Speaker 02 I like your Lincoln. It's the 76s. It won't be out till next year. But I know some people that know some people that rob some people.
1:53 Speaker 00 By the way, did I ever mention that I was on the set of Starsky and Hutch? And that I spent most of my time there in a corner watching Snoop Dogg calmly stroking Iguana and staying out of Owen Wilson's eye line? Anyway, that's my Starsky and Hutch story. It's not that memorable, kind of like the movie. And as for the 1980s, they really blew up in the early 2000s. You could hear it in the next wave of synth-pop bands, or see it in the fashion of the time. GQ did a whole fashion shoot dedicated to the Reagan era. And even ET came back, making tens of millions of dollars in theaters. Some of these blasts from the past offered a vision of America that was idyllic and idealized. An America where everyone felt safe, where bad guys went to prison, and where everyone mostly got along.
2:37 Speaker 00 You know, the good old days.
2:42 Speaker 00 But these good old days that people were nostalgic for in the early 2000s were a myth. And two major films from the Bush years made that point clear, albeit in very different ways. The first movie is the story of an obnoxious local news anchorman named, well, you know his name.
2:58 Speaker 03 And I'm Ron Burgundy. Go fuck yourselves, San Diego.
3:03 Speaker 00 The second movie is the real-life account of a serial killer, one who haunted Northern California on and off for years. I think you know his name, too. This is the Zodiac speaking.
3:17 Speaker 00 The movies Anchorman and Zodiac are both set in 1970s California. And both are workplace stories, with a lot of the action taking place in big-city newsrooms. One's a fast-paced spoof of the TV industry. The other's a slow-burning thriller about police work and journalism. And while these are wildly different films and take place way in the past, both movies reflect the rapid onset instability of the Bush years. I mean, Anchorman could have been set in the Bush White House. It's about a bunch of powerful dudes who are cocky, careless, and eager to rush into combat.
3:49 Speaker 03 This is gonna end right here, right now. Let's dance, dickweed.
3:55 Speaker 00 And the main character in Zodiac is an amateur investigator, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who finds himself going deeper and deeper into an information abyss, the kind that millions of conspiracy-obsessed Americans were falling into after 9/11. Just 'cause you can't prove it doesn't mean it's not true.
4:14 Speaker 00 Look, I'm not trying to say that these movies were a direct response to what was going on in the early 2000s, but I don't think it's an accident that they arrived during the Bush years.
4:23 Speaker 04 Comedy is always about the subconscious, same with horror movies.
4:31 Speaker 00 That's Anchorman director and co-writer Adam McKay.
4:34 Speaker 04 I think what was going on was we were participating in this culture that was taking a dark turn.
4:43 Speaker 00 Anchorman and Zodiac would bring that darkness to light in surprising ways.
4:51 Speaker 00 They were reminders that the violence, paranoia, and general uneasiness that people were experiencing in the 2000s was nothing new. They were just coming together at a pace none of us could have expected or controlled. Ron Burgundy summed it up in one of Anchorman's most quotable lines. You know the one.
5:09 Speaker 05 Boy, that escalated quickly.
5:16 Speaker 00 From Spotify and The Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is Mission Accomplished, Episode Three, Anchorman and Zodiac.
5:34 Sean Fennessey? 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? LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn Ads. You can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So cut the bullspend, advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just
6:13 Sean Fennessey? go to LinkedIn.com/thebigpicture. That's LinkedIn.com/thebigpicture. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. There's nothing better than having friends who support whatever you're into, like re-watching 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.
6:51 Speaker 00 By the mid 2000s, a lot of Americans were starting to feel disillusioned about the state of the country. Adam McKay wasn't one of them. He'd been disillusioned for years.
7:01 Speaker 04 I'm old enough to remember when Reagan got elected, how the culture started to change. Conspicuous consumption kind of became the goal. And it was alarming.
7:15 Speaker 00 McKay had voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, hoping that a Democrat in office would turn things around.
7:21 Speaker 04 I'm like, all right, we're gonna get back on track. And that didn't work out very well.
7:30 Speaker 00 Though a lot of people tend to glamorize what life was like in the 1990s, something I'm very much guilty of at times, McKay was frustrated by what he saw happening that decade. And he's right. There were plenty of problems during those years. The country underwent drastic shifts. Jobs went overseas. Courts began sending a shockingly high number of black Americans to prison. And there were multiple billion-dollar media mergers, giving corporate America more control than ever over the news. McKay channeled some of his disappointment into his comedy, including his work on Saturday Night Live, where he was made head writer in 1996.
8:06 Speaker 00 That's where McKay met Will Ferrell, who'd go on to become one of SNL's biggest stars and who spent the early 2000s doing a spot-on impression of George W. Bush. Ferrell's version of Bush was an amiable dingaling, one whose speeches were littered with all kinds of weird malapropisms.
8:22 Speaker 03 I believe it was the great poet Leonard Skinnerd.
8:27 Speaker 03 Who wrote, "Ooh, that smell.
8:31 Speaker 03 Can't you smell that smell? Well, I can smell that smell. And it's the smell of George W. Triumph. For tonight, I am Victorian.
8:43 Speaker 00 McKay left SNL in 2001, not long after Bush took office. Over the next few years, McKay became despondent about the government's response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
8:54 Speaker 04 The first time I was legitimately hair on fire, I don't want to say traumatized, but like actively upset every day, that was during the Bush years and the invasion of Iraq. It was the first time I genuinely was afraid for the United States and started to really feel uncomfortable with being a part of what was going on.
9:31 Speaker 00 McKay was also upset by how the Iraq War and the response to the Iraq War was playing out in the media. Several media outlets had consolidated in the 1990s, and new laws had made it easier for big companies to team up. Disney bought ABC, Viacom merged with CBS, and Clear Channel gobbled up hundreds of radio stations. These companies didn't want to upset their audiences, or their advertisers, especially after 9/11, when things were so heated, one stray comment could get you silenced, which is what happened with Bill Maher. Look, I get it. None of you want to hear from Bill Maher, even circa early 2000s Bill Maher. Back then, he was pretty much the same leaky smugboat that he is now.
10:14 Speaker 00 But Maher played a crucial role in the post-9/11 crackdown on media. On the September 17th, 2001 episode of his ABC show Politically Incorrect, Maher got into a debate with conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza. Again, I know, Bill Maher and Dinesh D'Souza? This is the ultimate, no matter who wins, we all lose kind of scenario. Anyway, they were discussing a recent speech by President Bush, one in which he described the 9/11 hijackings as a cowardly act. Here's Bill Maher's response.
10:44 Speaker 07 We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it, not cowardly.
10:57 Speaker 00 That comment set off a firestorm. Advertisers dropped out of the show, and at least a dozen ABC affiliates announced they'd stopped carrying Politically Incorrect altogether. A few days later, Maher's comments were brought up at a White House press briefing.
11:12 Speaker 03 Surely, Commander, he was enraged.
11:14 Speaker 08 I'm getting there, Les.
11:15 Speaker 03 OK, sure.
11:16 Speaker 00 That's Ari Fleischer, who was the White House Press Secretary at the time.
11:20 Speaker 08 I'm aware of the press reports about what he said. I have not seen the actual transcript of the show itself. But assuming the press reports are right, it's a terrible thing to say.
11:30 Speaker 00 As if Fleischer hadn't made his point already, he added:
11:33 Speaker 08 They're reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that. There never is.
11:42 Speaker 00 While we're pretty used to the White House attacking specific TV personalities nowadays, this was unheard of back in 2001. And while Fleischer would later say his quote was taken out of context, it wasn't hard to hear this as a warning, one that TV executives took seriously. Bill Maher's show was ended by ABC in 2002. And in the years that followed, the corporations that owned some of the country's biggest news networks became skittish about any program that questioned America's military role in the Middle East. Case in point, in February 2003, just a few weeks before the start of the Iraq War, MSNBC canceled a talk show starring longtime TV host Phil Donahue. The network blamed the decision, in part, on low ratings. And Donahue's numbers were pretty disappointing.
12:27 Speaker 00 But he'd also just aired an episode in which several panelists, including actors Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, debated whether Americans should be protesting the war. At one point in the episode, at many points in fact, a commentator accuses Sarandon of being un-American.
12:42 Speaker 09 I love this country. I'm raising my children here, and they are terrified that we will be kicked out of this country because I'm asking questions. I don't want my children...
12:50 Speaker 00 This episode is wild. If you have an extra 45 minutes to kill and need proof that Americans have been polarized forever, look it up on YouTube. It gets really heated. And there are some pretty amazing call-in guests, like Wanda from Indiana.
13:04 Speaker 10 I should talk about it.
13:05 Speaker 11 Actors and actresses think that their opinion is worth so much more than anybody else. I don't know they... As far as I know, Susan Sarandon and that Tim whatever her wife is, they're not even married.
13:17 Speaker 00 Donahue's show was canceled not long after this episode aired. Here he is in 2011, discussing his firing in an interview with the program Democracy Now!
13:26 Speaker 10 Anti-war voices were not popular. And if you're a general electorate, you certainly don't want an anti-war voice on a cable channel that you own.
13:41 Speaker 00 For Adam McKay, the clampdown on dissent was maddening. So was the fact that, as he saw it, the media wasn't asking enough questions about why the US was going into Iraq. Some news outlets even seemed to be cheering on the war, like Fox News, which experienced record-high ratings after 9/11. Many of the network's anchors pushed the pro-war narrative night after night. Here's a typically chest-thumping Fox broadcast about the invasion of Iraq from April 2003. You'll probably recognize the host's voice.
14:12 Speaker 01 My question to you is those people that have not supported the effort and raised questions about the president and his diplomacy efforts.
14:19 Speaker 00 Yep, that's Sean Hannity.
14:21 Speaker 01 Will they be embarrassed when we find all these weapons of mass destruction?
14:25 Speaker 00 It wasn't just the big TV networks that had disgusted McKay. He was also enraged by the way some major newspapers handled the war in Iraq. In 2004, The New York Times published an editorial about its own coverage of the lead up to the war, saying that some of it was, quote, "not as rigorous as it should have been." The Times also acknowledged that they'd unknowingly printed misinformation. So you've got pro-war propaganda, sloppy reporting, it was all just a mess.
14:52 Speaker 04 So the media, the news media scape was getting really ugly and started, for the first time in my life at that point, to look like they were really focusing on manufacturing a level of consent for that invasion.
15:19 Speaker 00 Things had felt different when McKay was growing up, when he trusted the people he saw on the nightly news. It was a time he'd revisit in his first film with Will Ferrell, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.
15:31 Speaker 12 There was a time, a time before cable, when the local anchorman reigned supreme, when people believed everything they heard on TV.
15:46 Speaker 00 Said in 1974, Anchorman is the story of Ron Burgundy, a San Diego news anchor with a giant mustache and an ego to match.
15:55 Speaker 13 I'm very important. I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.
16:05 Speaker 00 Anchorman wasn't an easy movie to get off the ground in the early 2000s. McKay had never directed a feature before, and Ferrell had never been the lead in a hit film. No studio wanted to make it.
16:16 Speaker 03 We had, I think, 10 rejections in one day.
16:20 Speaker 00 That's Ferrell in 2017, talking about the movie's origins with Bill Simmons. At one point, Ferrell and several other actors even did an Anchorman table read for a financier who was interested in funding it. And the guy was like, "Oh."
16:35 Speaker 03 That was the funniest read-through I have ever sat through. But we can't make the movie.
16:41 Speaker 14 That was it?
16:42 Speaker 03 They'd already determined that, for whatever reasons, the... they just weren't gonna make any money off that subject matter.
16:50 Speaker 00 The movie's fortunes changed after the 2003 release of Old School, the college comedy that proved Pharaoh could find an audience outside SNL. He and McKay would get a pretty decent budget, about $26 million. They'd also get to fill out their cast with a bunch of comedy performers, including Steve Carell, who plays Brick Tamland, a dim, bulb weatherman.
17:10 Speaker 15 I ate a whole bunch of fiberglass insulation. It wasn't cotton candy, like that guy said.
17:17 Speaker 00 Ron Burgundy and his crew are impulsive, dim, and surprisingly aggressive. At one point in Anchorman, they get into a violent brawl with news teams from competing networks.
17:28 Speaker 16 Public news team is taking a break from its fudge drive to kick some ass.
17:33 Speaker 00 Hey, it's Susan Sarandon's former partner, Tim whatever.
17:37 Speaker 17 No commercials? No mercy!
17:41 Speaker 00 Though set in the 70s, the characters in Anchorman embody the kind of high testosterone, low IQ behavior that would define the 2000s, especially when it comes to Ron. He's supposedly a journalist, yet he often has no idea what he's talking about. Sometimes, he just straight-up invents facts and sticks with them, no matter how foolish they might be.
18:02 Speaker 03 Discovered by the Germans in 1904, they named it San Diego, which of course in German means "a whale's vagina."
18:13 Speaker 00 And other times, he just repeats whatever he's told to say. You stay classy, San Diego. I'm Ron Burgundy?
18:22 Speaker 03 Dammit, who typed a question mark on the teleprompter?
18:26 Speaker 00 Watching Anchorman now, decades later, you can see how McKay was incorporating all of his disillusionment with America into his movie. As if to say, yeah, all these dudes telling you they know what's going on, they're full of shit.
18:39 Speaker 04 Farrell and I were pretty conscious of the fact that there were a lot of mediocre white guys steering us into these disasters.
18:50 Speaker 00 And that mediocrity wasn't limited to the media or to the White House. The early 2000s was a boom period for middle-aged dudes with lots of power and no scruples. I'll get into this a little more in our next episode, but corporations like Enron and WorldCom wound up getting caught in big scandals that took their entire companies down. And it was all happening around the time McKay and Farrell were working on their Anchorman script. That makes Anchorman, in a weird way, one of the few happy byproducts of the Bush era. And the movie was evidence that America's past, as alluring as it might have seemed back in 2004, wasn't as great as people remembered. The only competent character in Anchorman is Veronica Corningstone, a smart, ambitious journalist played by Christina Applegate.
19:34 Speaker 04 The joke with Anchorman was that it is Veronica Corningstone's story.
19:41 Speaker 00 Veronica is surrounded by mediocre guys. And no matter how hard she works, she's never taken seriously by her male colleagues, including Ron.
19:50 Speaker 13 You're just a woman with a small brain, with a brain a third the size of us. It's science.
19:56 Speaker 18 I will have you know that I have more talent and more intelligence in my little finger than you do in your entire body, sir.
20:05 Speaker 00 The sexism that Veronica faced in 1974 would still be a problem in 2004. As Anchorman makes clear, the "good old days" that Americans were pining for during the Bush years weren't good for everyone. And while Anchorman had a lot of fun with its 70s setting, the garish suits, the AM Gold soundtrack, it's definitely not a nostalgic movie. In fact, when it comes to the past, Anchorman is actually kind of antagonistic. I realize it's a little ridiculous to give Anchorman so much weight. I mean, this is a movie where Will Ferrell plays a jazz flute and where a dog negotiates a peace treaty with a bear. But according to McKay, Anchorman, in some ways, was a reflection of the outrage he felt during those years.
20:48 Speaker 00 So were the other films he and Ferrell co-wrote during the Bush era, Talladega Nights and Step Brothers. They were all part of what McKay and Ferrell called "The Mediocre White Men Trilogy."
20:59 Speaker 04 It was very conscious. I remember when we turned in our first draft of Talladega Nights, Judd Apatow was a producer on it. And he said, "This reads like two guys that are really angry at the Bush administration." And Ferrell and I both were like, "Yeah, that's, that's accurate."
21:23 Speaker 00 The movies that McKay and Ferrell made during the Bush years were huge hits, and not just in theaters. The home video market had exploded in the early 2000s, thanks to a technology that had become a cash cow for Hollywood, a technology promoted via some very excitable advertisements.
21:39 Speaker 19 DVD. It's a movie on a disc the size of a CD. The picture.
21:44 Speaker 00 DVDs had been around since the 1990s, but by the time Anchorman was released in 2004, movie fans were spending $15 billion on DVDs every year. And if they weren't buying discs, they were renting them from one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley, a company that advertised a unique new business plan that seemed like it was never going to work.
22:04 Speaker 01 Go to Netflix.com, make a list of the movies you want to see, and in about one business day, you'll get three DVDs. Keep them as long as you want, without late fees.
22:15 Speaker 00 Netflix had launched in 1997, and within a few years, the company had more than 2 million customers. Netflix got so big that Blockbuster Video tried to launch its own mail-order DVD plan. In the early 2000s, DVDs helped ensure that movie making remained a thriving industry.
22:34 Speaker 00 I realize I'm using a lot of terms that young listeners might not recognize. DVD, blockbuster video, thriving industry. All you really need to know is that for movie studios, that DVD revenue was like found money. And that impacted what kind of movies got made back then. That's one of the reasons why during the Bush years, comedy was king. A movie like Anchorman wasn't just relatively cheap to make. It also sold millions of DVDs. And it would be followed by more comedies. Wedding Crashers, The Forty Year Old Virgin, Tropic Thunder. I mean, even this movie made more than $100 million at the box office.
23:11 Speaker 20 Welcome to Daddy Daycare. Don't panic, because they're like animals, they can smell fear.
23:16 Speaker 00 Of course, there were other reasons why comedies were so big in the early 2000s. When you consider what was going on in the country and in the world, it's not surprising that people were desperate for anything that would make them laugh. For a lot of people, Anchorman was the best of the Bush-era comedies. And while some fans just loved the movie for its whale vagina references and Brick Tamland quotes. I love carpet. I love lamp. I don't think it's just the comedy of Anchorman that made the movie so popular. What really gave the film its kick back in 2004, and even now, decades later, is the movie's inner rage.
23:57 Speaker 00 I know it sounds crazy, but really, in the early 2000s, as the country was marching to war and the media was cheering it along, McKay felt the same way millions of other Americans did. Deeply pissed off and in need of a release. It was almost as if he was... What's the term I'm looking for here?
24:14 Speaker 03 I'm in a glass case of emotion!
24:18 Speaker 00 Exactly. And Anchorman gave McKay a chance to address the madness of the Bush years. His cynicism even comes through in the film's hilarious yet ominous ending, in which we learn what happens to the characters 20 years later. Brick Tamland, the guy who can't even form a coherent sentence? Well, he did okay for himself.
24:36 Speaker 12 Brick Tamland is married with 11 children and is one of the top political advisers to the Bush White House.
24:43 Speaker 00 And you can probably guess how the unquestioning, uninformed Ron Burgundy felt about George W. Bush. In July 2004, just a few days before Anchorman hit theaters, Burgundy made a "appearance" at the Paley Center for Media. He was asked for his opinion on Bush.
24:59 Speaker 03 George W. Bush, who, I gotta say, he looks like a fine chap. He really does.
25:05 Speaker 00 It had been a tough summer for Bush, who was running for reelection. His approval ratings, which had been dropping all year, had just hit an all-time low. Voters were especially frustrated by Bush's handling of Iraq. In one survey, 60% of Americans said they thought Bush hadn't been truthful about why America had gone to war in the first place. Still, not everyone saw Bush as a mediocre guy with lots of credibility issues. Despite the lack of WMDs in Iraq, or the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib, tens of millions of Americans still looked at Bush and thought, "Yep, that's my president."
25:41 Speaker 03 He dresses well. He's got a good head on his shoulders. I like him. I think he likes it.
25:50 Speaker 00 He wasn't alone. That November, Bush won a second term, getting just over 50% of the popular vote. One major reason for his victory, according to polls, was that a large number of voters felt Bush symbolized a return to "traditional values." What those values were remains debatable, even today. But people saw that things in the country were escalating quickly, and some began wondering why we couldn't go backward, to a time when America was peaceful and worry-free. That version of America never existed, a point that would be reinforced by another movie from the Bush years. Like Anchorman, it takes place in the world of media, and it's set in large part in 1970s California.
26:32 Speaker 00 But you wouldn't want to go back in time after being in the world of David Fincher's Zodiac.
26:43 Speaker 21 Ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease symptoms don't pause for the moments that matter. That's why understanding your treatment options matters. Discover what's possible with Tremfya. Guselkumap. Tremfya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections, or lower ability to fight them and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Talk to your doctor and explore what's possible. Or call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more about Tremfya and visit tremfyaradio.com.
27:28 Sean 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 the 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.
27:52 Speaker 14 This episode is brought to you by The Home Depot. The Home Depot has everything you need to launch your holiday season in style. Upgrade your yard with this year's hottest holiday decor, including the show-stopping towering Santa. Oh, I like that one. And his impressive reindeer, both 8.5 feet and both designed with incredible detail that stands out day or night. When you want decor that delivers impact, The Home Depot has it. Make your home Santa's favorite stop with the holiday decor you want, all waiting for you at The Home Depot.
28:21 Speaker 00 Brad Fisher was one of those people who spent the bush years thinking about the 1960s and 1970s. But he wasn't doing it for nostalgia's sake. He was doing it for research.
28:34 Speaker 00 In the early 2000s, Fisher was a young movie producer who'd just landed his first film, Basic, a military drama starring John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. At some point during production, he began talking to the movie's screenwriter, James Vanderbilt, about future projects.
28:49 Speaker 22 One thing I made a practice of asking writers who I started to work with and get to know is like, what's the one thing that you always wanted to do?
29:01 Speaker 00 Vanderbilt had a quick answer. He'd always been fascinated by Robert Graysmith, a political cartoonist who'd spent years trying to find one of the most feared criminals of the late 20th century, the Zodiac Killer. Starting in the late 1960s, the Zodiac Killer terrorized Northern California, where he was believed to have committed at least five murders.
29:21 Speaker 23 Early last Saturday evening, Celia Shepherd and Brian Hartnell, both in their early 20s, were sitting on this knoll of land overlooking part of Lake Barriessa.
29:32 Speaker 00 This is a 1969 news report on one of the Zodiac's deadly attacks.
29:36 Speaker 23 They thought they were alone, but there was a third man on this knoll, a man who wore a medieval-style executioner's hood, carried a knife and gun, and intended to use them.
29:52 Speaker 00 The Zodiac communicated by sending a series of encrypted letters to newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle. That's where Graysmith worked when he became interested in the case. Soon, he began his own investigation, which Graysmith chronicled in his 1986 book Zodiac. It had a famous cover, one I remember seeing in the library as a kid. It was bright yellow, with the words Zodiac in big red letters running down the spine. Vanderbilt had read the book, and he thought Graysmith's search for the Zodiac Killer could be a great movie. And he wasn't alone. Here's producer Brad Fisher again.
30:26 Speaker 22 The book was under option by Disney of all places. It just sort of, I think, had died on the vine in studio development.
30:35 Speaker 00 Fisher knew Disney was never going to make a film about The Zodiac Killer, but he had to wait until the rights expired. Once they did, Fisher got in touch with Gray Smith, who was about to hold an unusual bidding war for anybody hoping to adapt his book.
30:49 Speaker 22 I was like, is there an agent? Or who should we send the offer to? And he said, well, there's a Kinko's downstairs. And so if you can fax your offer to the Kinko's and make sure it's in by 5 o'clock, you know, on this date. It was bizarre, but it was the first in a series of bizarre moments throughout the journey of this film.
31:10 Speaker 00 They got the rights, and soon Vanderbilt was at work on the Zodiac script. He wouldn't be the first to bring the killer's story to the screen. In the early 1970s, an aspiring filmmaker named Tom Hanson released a low-budget drama called The Zodiac Killer.
31:25 Speaker 01 The Zodiac, that's me! I'm the Zodiac!
31:29 Speaker 00 Decades later, Hanson claimed that the movie's release was partly an attempt to catch the Zodiac, just in case the killer happened to show up in the theaters. Spoiler: That didn't quite work. The Zodiac Killer even inspired one of the biggest action films of the 1970s, Dirty Harry, in which Clint Eastwood plays Harry Callahan, a hard-ass inspector hunting a San Francisco serial killer who calls himself Scorpio.
31:54 Speaker 24 You know, you're crazy if you think you've heard the last of this guy. He's gonna kill again. How do you know? Because he likes it.
32:03 Speaker 00 Audiences loved Dirty Harry, which ends with Scorpio being shot dead. But the real-world story of The Zodiac Killer didn't have a satisfying conclusion, or any conclusion, really. He was never apprehended, and there are still debates today as to his identity, all of which presented a big challenge to the filmmakers.
32:21 Speaker 22 So many people would say to me, like, how are you gonna do a film about The Zodiac Killer? There's no ending.
32:26 Speaker 00 But that wasn't a problem for the director who'd wind up making Zodiac: David Fincher, the guy behind inventive, twisting dramas like Fight Club and Panic Room, not to mention Seven, one of the most influential serial killer thrillers of all time. Fincher had a personal connection to the Zodiac story.
32:45 Speaker 00 He'd come of age in Northern California during the 1960s and 1970s. His memories of that time were fleeting, but intense. When Fincher was seven years old, the Zodiac threatened to attack school buses, claiming that he would, quote, "pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out." For the next few days, police cars escorted Fincher's bus to school. And for years, he and his friends had to come home early on Halloween. But Fincher's ties to that era weren't the only reason he was interested in making Zodiac.
33:15 Speaker 22 He said, "Obviously, I've done a serial killer movie before, but I don't really see this as a serial killer movie. I see this as, I don't see it as a detective story. I see it as a newspaper story. You know, it's, to me, the closest bedfellow is All the President's Men."
33:36 Speaker 00 Now, I don't know who needs to hear this, especially on a Ringer podcast, but All the President's Men is the 1976 drama about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the journalists whose investigations into Watergate helped bring down Richard Nixon. It's more than two hours long, with no action, no sex, and no murder. It's mostly just a bunch of excitable or nervous people talking to one another. And it's maybe the most perfect movie ever made. All the President's Men was about the hunt for information, how it drives you and consumes you in equal measure. That's what Fincher wanted for Zodiac. As he explained to producer Brad Fisher...
34:10 Speaker 22 It's really more about the journey and the nature of obsession, and how, you know, we can kind of be sucked down the rabbit hole and to the point where, you know, we've totally lost our bearings and can't remember which way was up.
34:24 Speaker 00 Gray Smith's pursuit of the Zodiac Killer may have begun in the late 1960s, but to modern movie-going audiences, the film's depiction of obsession would feel very familiar. During the George W. Bush years, a new kind of rabbit hole had emerged online, though "rabbit hole" doesn't really seem like the right term. This was more like a massive black hole, one that could easily suck you in for hours and hours on end.
34:50 Speaker 25 So Amber's here to show us one of her favorite sites online that lets you upload, tag, and share your video with the rest of the world, or just family and friends if you prefer.
34:58 Speaker 26 Yes, the site's called youtube.com, and that's Y-O-U.
35:02 Speaker 00 This is an episode of the tech news TV series Call for Help, which aired in September 2005, just a few months after the launch of YouTube. Back then, video sharing was still a novelty, and user-generated content was barely even a thing. YouTube would change that. All of a sudden, people could easily put all kinds of homemade clips online. At first, the videos were short and silly: goofy stunt clips, cute animal footage, TV bloopers, stuff like that. But people quickly started uploading homemade rants, explainers, and even DIY documentaries. It all grew insanely quickly. When Google bought the site in 2006, YouTube had more than 100 million clips.
35:44 Speaker 00 By then, you could watch hours of videos in one sitting, all from your own home. It didn't seem exactly healthy.
35:56 Speaker 00 In fact, one of the first genres to emerge on YouTube was videos about spending too much time on YouTube, like the clip for this catchy little tune, which came out in 2006.
36:16 Speaker 00 YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, they'd all blow up during the bush years. Information and opinions became almost like a utility. You switched them on the second you woke up, and you let them run all day. It was easy to get lost in it all. The filmmaking team behind Zodiac would also become inundated with information, though in their case, it was a bit more analog. Fincher wanted them to actually re-report the case as much as they could. He asked producer Brad Fisher to create a massive timeline of all the Zodiac-related events, a document that spanned years, and wound up taking over Fincher's headquarters in Los Angeles. Here's how Fisher remembers it.
36:55 Speaker 22 We started to have these kind of regular meetings at Fincher's office, and we taped up the timeline, like, on the walls. So it started in his office, and then eventually, as it got bigger, it sort of snaked out his office door, down the hallway, toward the conference room.
37:14 Speaker 00 The Zodiac team also took trips to actual murder sites, like Lake Berriessa, the spot where Cecilia Ann Shepherd and Brian Hartnell were attacked in 1969. And the filmmakers interviewed survivors and witnesses from that era. That included police officers from various cities in California, some of whom hadn't even talked to one another during the heyday of the Zodiac investigations. At one point in my conversation with Fisher, he held up a small stack of audio tapes.
37:44 Speaker 22 So here's one. This is, well, this is just Gray Smith.
37:48 Speaker 00 They were recordings of the interviews he'd been a part of in the years leading up to making Zodiac. He read off some of the labels to me.
37:54 Speaker 22 January 13, 04. Gray Smith, Vanderbilt, Fisher. This, day three. Oh, this was Toski.
38:07 Speaker 00 He's talking about Dave Toski, a San Francisco police detective who spent years pursuing the Zodiac and who influenced not only Clint Eastwood's role in Dirty Harry, but also Steve McQueen's ultra-cool cop in the movie Bullet. In Zodiac, Toski would be played by Mark Ruffalo, part of an equally ultra-cool cast that included Jake Gyllenhaal's Robert Gray Smith and Robert Downey Jr. as the ball-busting crime reporter Paul Avery. Those three characters are rarely on screen at the same time. And when they are, they don't quite get along.
38:38 Speaker 27 Hey, Bullet. Been a year and a half. You gonna catch this fucking guy or not?
38:45 Speaker 27 Go fuck yourself. Happily.
38:48 Speaker 00 But all three men get pulled into the search for Zodiac. And as a result, they're slowly pushed away from their regular lives. At one point, Gyllenhaal's character is taken to task by his wife, played by Chloe Sevigny, for his Zodiac obsession.
39:03 Speaker 28 And when is it gonna be finished? When you catch him, when you arrest him?
39:08 Speaker 29 Be serious.
39:09 Speaker 28 I am serious.
39:12 Speaker 29 I, I need to know who he is. I, I need to stand there. I need to look him in the eye. And I need to know that it's him.
39:24 Speaker 00 A-list actors, a tightly researched script, a $70 million budget. By the time Fincher and his team began shooting in late 2005, they were ready to bring the Zodiac era back to life. Not that everyone was thrilled by their efforts to recreate the past. One late night, while trying to shoot on a street corner in San Francisco, the filmmakers were blocked by scaffolding that had been left up by some locals on purpose. Were they against it because you were filming late at night? Or was the kind of thing where they were like, "We don't want the Zodiac movie being made here. We're, we're, we're done with this story."
39:55 Speaker 22 It was the subject matter. They didn't want, I, you know, look, I, I get it. I mean, you know, they're worried about that, you know, they, they don't want a tourist destination to be that late.
40:06 Speaker 00 I get it too. I mean, this is the director of Seven, taking on a real-life serial killer. But Fincher wasn't setting out to glorify the Zodiac killer. Here's Fincher in a behind-the-scenes video, talking about why he initially didn't even want to make a Zodiac movie. Get ready for some very 2007-ish background music.
40:25 Speaker 30 To make a movie about Zodiac and who he might have been, as he once wrote in his letters, "I wonder when there's going to be a movie about me. I wonder who will play me." To feed that narcissism, I think, would be morally unconscionable.
40:42 Speaker 00 But that didn't mean Fincher would shy away from depicting the killer at work.
40:48 Speaker 00 Zodiac opens on the night of July 4th, 1969, in the suburbs of Vallejo, California. Kids are playing with sparklers and dads are cleaning up after holiday get-togethers. It's the kind of all-American scene that some people were no doubt thinking fondly of in the 2000s. Later in that scene, a young couple parks their car on a deserted street. Suddenly, a figure approaches, and a few shots ring out, leaving the young woman dead. In just a few seconds, that idyllic 1960s American suburb depicted in the film's opening has been destroyed and demystified. Fincher's movie has a few other scenes of the killer in action, all of them harrowing.
41:29 Speaker 00 But the Zodiac doesn't even show up in what might be the film's most unsettling sequence. It takes place toward the end and features Jill and Hall and Ruffalo sitting at a diner. By this point in the film, their characters, cartoonist Robert Grace Smith and detective Dave Toski, have spent nearly a decade trying to solve the case. Grace Smith is convinced that he's finally identified the killer and has laid out all of his clues, but Toski is still skeptical.
41:56 Speaker 24 The prints, the handwriting. I'm not asking you as a cop, but I am a cop.
42:04 Speaker 24 I can't prove this. Just because you can't prove it doesn't mean it's not true.
42:10 Speaker 00 It was pretty easy to relate to that last line back in 2007 in multiple ways. For one thing, it brought to mind all the brazen bullshit of the Bush administration, like when Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or when Bush gave a speech on an aircraft carrier in May 2003, declaring the war in Iraq over. He made a dramatic entrance that day, arriving in a Navy jet before addressing the crowd.
42:36 Speaker 05 In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.
42:45 Speaker 00 While giving his speech, Bush stood in front of a banner that read, "Mission Accomplished."
42:50 Speaker 05 And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.
42:57 Speaker 00 In reality, thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis were yet to be killed in a war that would keep going for years. There's another reason why that one line from Zodiac, "Just because you can't prove it doesn't mean it's not true," hit so hard back in the Bush years. The internet had made it easier than ever for people to lose themselves in rabbit holes of information and to bring others along for the never-ending ride.
43:24 Speaker 00 One of the most popular videos from YouTube's early days was an hour-long documentary called Loose Change. It used archival news footage, on-screen graphics, and some straightforward narration to attempt to make a controversial point, namely that the US government had been responsible for the September 11th attacks in New York City and Washington DC.
43:44 Speaker 31 America has been hijacked, not by Al Qaeda, not by Osama bin Laden, but by a group of tyrants, ready and willing to do whatever it takes to keep their stranglehold on this country.
43:57 Speaker 00 Loose Change was made by three friends from upstate New York, none of them professional journalists. The film's budget was in the four-figure range, and it was put together on a laptop. Yet Loose Change became one of the most-watched movies of 2005, the Blair Witch Project of conspiracy docs. According to one report, it was viewed online more than 10 million times within a little more than a year of its release. At that point, a huge number. A Vanity Fair article said Loose Change might even be, quote, "the first internet blockbuster." At the time, the idea of streaming an entire movie on your computer seemed ridiculous. Yet these guys had somehow gotten millions of people to check out a movie released without a studio or without a big promotional campaign.
44:44 Speaker 00 Watching Loose Change now, it feels pretty rinky-dink in terms of production values, and especially in terms of research. Many of the movie's claims have been refuted, but you can see why people got so drawn to it. The movie treats each viewer like a friend being let in on a big secret. Loose Change is confident, but kind of casual, and it's never too polished.
45:05 Speaker 31 The following footage is taken from the documentary Why the Towers Fell.
45:10 Speaker 31 Whoa, whoa, whoa. Bring it back.
45:14 Speaker 00 Loose change came out after the one-two punch of 9/11 and the Iraq War had caused people to lose trust in the government, and to seek out their own narratives about what was going on in the world. Even Bush had expressed concern that 9/11 would inspire a wave of conspiratorial thinking. Here he is in November 2001, speaking to the United Nations.
45:34 Speaker 05 Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th. Malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty.
45:48 Speaker 00 Such warnings didn't take hold. Throughout the Bush years, conspiracies would circulate far and wide via the internet. And by 2006, the so-called 9/11 truther movement was in full swing. That year, a weekend-long conference was held in Chicago, in which more than 500 attendees from around the world shared their theories about how 9/11 had really happened. Those arguments could spill over into the real world, like on this 2007 episode of the radio show Opie and Anthony, featuring on-the-street debates with conspiracy theorists.
46:20 Speaker 32 I don't know what the answer is, but it doesn't make sense.
46:23 Speaker 00 Well, don't you know what the answer isn't? I'm sorry to subject you to Opie and Anthony, but this video is a good glimpse of what online debate would look like in the years ahead. The internet would make it possible to debate total strangers with full confidence, but little actual information. All that mattered was that you just kept asking questions. The louder, the better. And these sort of debates didn't stop at 9/11. There were online conspiracy theories about Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 election, and the Indian Ocean tsunami. They were evidence that Fincher's instincts were right about Zodiac. This wasn't a movie about a killer. It was about a man torn apart by uncertainty, overwhelmed by information, and looking for order in a world that didn't feel orderly.
47:06 Speaker 29 Nothing makes sense anymore.
47:11 Speaker 29 Didn't ever.
47:15 Speaker 00 I want to be really clear about something, which is that I'm not saying Robert Graysmith's research, or Detective Dave Toski's investigations, were anything like the conspiracies that sprung up online during the Bush years. And I'm not sure anyone involved with the Zodiac movie saw it as an allegory for what was happening in the 2000s. What, you think David Fincher was farting around on YouTube back in the day? I mean, this is a guy who hung out with Madonna and Brad Pitt. He's always had better things to do than us. But all movies are products of their time. And Zodiac, whether intentionally or not, feels like a story that could only be told during the Bush years. And not just because of the rabbit holes it goes down. It's also a film about living with the daily threat of terrorism, about what happens when
47:57 Speaker 00 law enforcement agencies don't communicate, and about our insatiable appetite for information. There was a lot for audiences to connect to. Not that moviegoers showed up for Zodiac, at least not at first. In fact, in its opening weekend, Zodiac got clobbered by Wild Hogs. If you don't remember Wild Hogs, that was the midlife crisis motorcycle movie starring John Travolta and Tim Allen.
48:20 Speaker 22 I remember the variety headline was "Hogs Zap Zodiac," I believe.
48:27 Speaker 00 That's Brad Fisher again. He was definitely disappointed that Zodiac wasn't a big hit in theaters. But he also understood why audiences may have been a little skittish about seeing it.
48:36 Speaker 22 Listen, it's part of it may be those people who said, "Hey, how can you make a serial killer movie where the guy doesn't get caught at the end?"
48:46 Speaker 00 Still, audiences eventually did catch up with Zodiac. Much like Anchorman, it was one of those 2000s movies that, back in the cable era, you kind of had to stop and watch whenever it popped up on TV. And Zodiac and Anchorman actually make for a pretty fascinating Bush years double feature. Granted, the movies are totally different. I mean, one's about an eccentric loner who's responsible for multiple murders.
49:09 Speaker 03 Brick killed a guy. Did you throw a trident? Yeah, there were horses and a man on fire, and I killed a guy with a trident.
49:16 Speaker 00 And the other movie is about a bunch of news addicts busting each other's chops.
49:20 Speaker 29 What do you do for fun?
49:24 Speaker 29 I love to read.
49:27 Speaker 29 I enjoy books.
49:28 Speaker 00 Those are the same things. But in a lot of ways, Anchorman and Zodiac are saying the same thing. Namely, that the kinder, gentler America that many were nostalgic for during the George W. Bush years, and that some people are still nostalgic for now, never really existed. The movies are reminders that the people in charge are just as clueless as the rest of us, that you can absorb endless information without ever finding the truth, and that America is a place where things always escalate quickly.
50:00 Speaker 00 This podcast is reported, written, and hosted by me, Brian Raftery. The executive producers of this podcast are Juliette Littman and Sean Fenestra. 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 Kat Spillane. 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. Thanks for listening.
50:45 Speaker 33 With Truvia Sweeteners, it's simple to make sweetness part of your routine. From sweetening your creamy morning matcha to freshly baked blueberry scones. Truvia Sweeteners make it easy to enjoy the flavors you love with less sugar per serving. From everyday drinks to homemade favorites, they're made to fit right in. Because with Truvia, every moment tastes better. Find Truvia at your favorite local grocery retailer and bring better sweetness home.
51:13 Speaker 34 Does checking your bank statements feel like digging through a dusty attic full of forgotten subscriptions and old free trials?
51:22 Speaker 34 Experian can help take the pain out of canceling by handling it for you. Think of it as Operation Get Your Sanity Back. Over 200 subscriptions are cancelable. So get started in the Experian app and see how much you could save. Results will vary. Not all subscriptions eligible. Savings not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account required. See experian.com for details.
Previous 2. ‘25th Hour’ and ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ | Mission Accomplished Next 4. ‘Michael Clayton’ and ‘Chop Shop’ | Mission Accomplished Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated