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

As America falls into a recession, two movies about New York hustlers capture the quiet desperation needed to survive in a country running on empty. 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.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Let's go back, real quickly, to the year 2000. Remember Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention that year?

• 0:10Speaker 01

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

• 0:18Speaker 00

  As the decade began, the economy was America's big success story. That's why Al Gore, who was Clinton's vice president, made it such a big part of his own presidential campaign. Here's Gore during a 2000 debate with George W. Bush, promising even more growth ahead.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  22 million new jobs and the greatest prosperity ever, but it's not good enough. And my attitude is, you ain't seen nothing yet.

• 0:44Speaker 00

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

• 0:53Speaker 00

  In early 2000, the Nasdaq had taken a nosedive. And on Wall Street, investors were trying not to panic, though some of them couldn't hide their frustration from reporters.

• 1:03Speaker 03

  Ah, dead day. Dead day for you? Another one, yeah. Yeah, I know. Too many in a row.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  The freefall was especially bad for tech startups, including Pets.com. The company had become famous for its talking dog sock puppet mascot.

• 1:17Speaker 04

  Did you know that Pets.com delivers food, treats, and toys?

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Now, Pets.com had a wild ride. It was launched in 1998 and soon raised more than $80 million. The company was so successful, at least on paper, that in 2000, Pets.com could afford to buy its own Super Bowl ad. But as 2000 went on and the dot-com bubble burst, the company ran out of cash. By the fall, Pets.com had shut down altogether.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  There were more signs of financial trouble to come in the early 2000s, like when Enron, a billion-dollar energy company, filed the largest bankruptcy in history. The news was deeply upsetting for President Bush.

• 2:02Speaker 05

  My concern, of course, is for the shareholders of Enron.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  That's Bush in late 2001. And don't worry, Enron employees. He talks about how much he cares about you, too. In a very human, very convincing way.

• 2:14Speaker 05

  I have great concern for the stories, for those I read about in the stories who put their life savings aside.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Thousands of Enron employees lost their jobs. And the company's chief executives would later be convicted on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy. The scandal was so big, Enron even gets a shout out in Edward Norton's rant in 25th Hour.

• 2:34Speaker 06

  Send those Enron assholes to jail for fucking life. You think Bush and Cheney didn't know about that shit? Give me a fucking break.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  That line had some people cheering in the theaters. A few months after Enron collapsed, a second billion dollar company, WorldCom, also filed for bankruptcy over bad accounting. Those meltdowns were proof that the economy wasn't as stable as it had seemed a few years earlier. But nothing could prepare the country for what would happen down the road. Americans had long suspected that there was something wrong on Wall Street. And during Bush's last full year in office, those suspicions were confirmed.

• 3:12Speaker 07

  The signs were everywhere, but now it's official, we are in a recession.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  That's Katie Couric in late 2008. You can tell by her tone that she wasn't too surprised. Everyone had been feeling the squeeze of a recession, but no one wanted to admit it out loud.

• 3:27Speaker 07

  The recession actually started a year ago. But the question now, when will it end?

• 3:34Speaker 00

  The Great Recession, which started in 2007, was the strongest sign yet that something had gone terribly wrong in America. Greed had always been one of the country's biggest vices. But when you combine rampant greed, rampant corporate crime, and rampant shitty leadership, clearly, things had gone awry. And nobody would escape unscathed. According to one report, more than 2.6 million jobs were lost in 2008. The biggest decline since 1945. By the end of Bush's second term, people were feeling defeated. And exhausted. It didn't seem like you could actually thrive in America anymore. The best you could do was just survive. And even that required the kinds of compromises that would have seemed impossible a few years earlier. How far were you willing to go?

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Just to keep going?

• 4:24Speaker 00

  That question will be raised by two of the best dramas of that decade. Both took place in New York City, and both gave viewers a behind the scenes glimpse at worlds people usually never get to see. One was an Oscar-winning, big studio film starring George Clooney. He plays a mid-level Manhattan attorney who helps keep the rich and powerful out of trouble, even if they deserve to be in trouble.

• 4:46Speaker 08

  I'm not a miracle worker, I'm a janitor.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  I know I don't have to tell you this, but that's Michael Clayton.

• 4:52Speaker 08

  The math on this is simple. The smaller the mess, the easier it is for me to clean up.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  The other movie was a low-budget indie drama about a kid hustling and scheming to make it on the streets of Queens.

• 5:03Speaker 09

  Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, sorry for the interruption.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  It was called Chop Shop.

• 5:08Speaker 09

  We are not gonna lie to you, we are not here selling candy for no school basketball team. In fact, I don't even go to school and everyone...

• 5:15Speaker 00

  Though the characters in Michael Clayton and Chop Shop live in the same city, in many ways, they're worlds apart from one another. But both films are about strivers who've given up too much for too little, a feeling a lot of people could relate to in the 2000s, and you know, also today. And the movies arrived when a lot of Americans were unsure how they felt about the country and about themselves.

• 5:37Speaker 08

  I'm not the enemy, then who are you?

• 5:43Speaker 00

  From Spotify and The Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is Mission Accomplished, episode four, Michael Clayton and Chop Shop.

• 6:00Sean Fennessey?

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• 6:42Sean Fennessey?

  That's LinkedIn.com/thepickpicture. 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.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  If there's one thing we've learned in this series, it's that movies don't just show up overnight. They take years to conceive, shoot, and release. During that time, they evolve in ways that even their creators couldn't predict.

• 7:31Speaker 11

  And every film has a different gestation period.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  That's Tony Gilroy, the writer-director of Michael Clayton.

• 7:37Speaker 11

  There is a delay. So you have to look, when did the first sound wave start across the lake before I heard it?

• 7:43Speaker 00

  For Gilroy, the process of making Michael Clayton began in the mid-1990s. Back then, he was a screenwriter best known for hits like "The Cutting Edge" and "Dolores Claiborne." And he'd just written a movie about New York City's most well-connected power broker: the devil.

• 7:59Speaker 12

  I'm here on the ground with my nose in it since the whole thing began. God likes to watch. He's an absentee landlord.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  That's "Devil's Advocate," the 1997 thriller directed by Taylor Hackford. It stars Al Pacino, obviously, as the head of a Manhattan law firm, who's also the devil. Great movie. Lots of big Al speeches in this one. Anyway, before production on "Devil's Advocate" began, Gilroy and the rest of the filmmaking team did some research.

• 8:32Speaker 11

  We went all over the place and saw a whole bunch of New York law firms.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Sometimes, Gilroy would wander off from the rest of the tour group. That's when he noticed that the firms had these fancy, wood-paneled conference rooms, and that they were usually empty.

• 8:45Speaker 11

  You realize that law firms are, you know, two-thirds of the businesses behind the wall is in the kitchen.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  He realized, this is where the real work happens. The kind of work that people in the firm usually don't brag about.

• 8:57Speaker 11

  Over time, I thought, no one's done a movie about the back of the house. And I thought, that's really kind of fascinating. And I'm always, you know, you're like a truffle pig. You're trying to look for truffles all the time. And that's like, that seemed really cool.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  Gilroy began kicking around a new idea for a movie. It was a thriller, set in the back of the house at a prestigious law firm. To gather intel, Gilroy took high-powered attorneys to lunch to talk about their work. During one of those meetings, a lawyer used a term that Gilroy had never heard before.

• 9:26Speaker 11

  She used the word "bad document" twice. And I go, "What's a bad document?"

• 9:30Speaker 00

  The lawyer gave an example. It was about a billion-dollar case that a firm had been working on for years. Late one night, while going through some paperwork, a young associate found a document that had been misplaced. A document that threatened the firm's entire case.

• 9:44Speaker 11

  So I said, "Okay, so what happens?" She said, "Well, two things happened. One, that associate was the youngest associate that ever made partner in our firm. And that document didn't make it to sunrise. Gone." I go, "Okay, that's pretty fascinating."

• 9:59Speaker 00

  While meeting with these lawyers, Gilroy would sometimes pitch them the character he was thinking about. He was a fixer. A guy who works behind the scenes in a big law firm, dealing with everyone else's secrets and making things go away.

• 10:12Speaker 11

  One attorney said to me, "Well, we don't have anybody at our firm like that, but boy, I wish we did."

• 10:21Speaker 00

  Gilroy's idea was partly inspired by the tough, dark, very grown-up films that the big studios made in the 1970s. Like The Parallax View, with Warren Beatty as a reporter who investigates a series of political assassinations.

• 10:34Speaker 11

  Whoever's behind this is in the business of recruiting assassins. I think I got some of their entrance exams.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Or Save the Tiger, with Jack Lemmon as a middle-aged business owner who's $300,000 in debt and rethinking his life.

• 10:48Speaker 13

  Harry Stoner, American. First, the buffalo went, then the Indian went. Now, Harry Stoner is the last of an endangered species.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  Those dramas were released at a time of political and economic upheaval. And they capture a sense of disorientation, that something wrong is going on. When Gilroy watched those films in the 1970s, he saw them as mirrors.

• 11:11Speaker 11

  But it's also an intensifying mirror. It confirms what you're already starting to think, and then you think more about it. And they were, sad to say, they were accurate.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  And that's not the only thing that made those 70s films so exciting.

• 11:28Speaker 11

  You had this really weird mix of new ideas, young filmmakers, and drugs, and paranoia, and really activated imaginations. But then you had all the muscularity of this really well-established filmmaking community. So it's old Hollywood at its best that meets this new insane application.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  That anything-goes attitude was gone from Hollywood by the late 1990s, the time Gilroy was pitching his Fixer idea. Still, the major studios and production companies were looking for new ideas and for new filmmakers. The indie movement had exploded, proving that audiences were willing to take a chance when they headed to the theater. Gilroy eventually landed a deal for his Fixer movie. He'd even get to direct it, so long as he kept a few promises.

• 12:20Speaker 11

  I'll keep the budget down, I'll write a movie star part, someone will die. And they gave me carte blanche to go off and do that.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  Over the next few years, Gilroy got interrupted with work on movies like Proof of Life and The Bourne Identity. He was just about to get back to his legal thriller when the September 11th attacks happened.

• 12:41Speaker 11

  There was just no way to incorporate something that huge into the behavioral fabric of your characters. It just was impossible.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  By the time Gilroy returned to the idea, George W. Bush was a few years into his first term. At that point, things had changed. The country was heading toward war in Iraq.

• 13:00Speaker 11

  I think there's few things that made me angrier. In my life than the invasion of Iraq, I just was so, I was really bereft and really, really angry. And I was also extremely angry that, that it was going down as if there was no, and being perceived as if there was no pushback on it.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  Gilroy did push back. He attended one of the massive anti-war protests I told you about a few episodes ago. They were held around the world and in cities around the country, drawing huge swarms of people. And they were impossible to ignore.

• 13:35Speaker 14

  Loud and large protests against the attack on Iraq. Thousands swarm the streets of Boston, calling for an end to military action.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  It was during this period of frustration and protest that Gilroy doubled down on the movie that would become Michael Clayton.

• 13:48Speaker 11

  I just was so apoplectic about it. And I really, I stopped reading the newspapers for a year and a half and just really opted out. And that's when I wrote the script. That's when I pushed on it. And it's so, there's a lot of anger in it, um, quiet anger in it.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  There was also a lot of Gilroy's research in the script for Michael Clayton.

• 14:13Speaker 00

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

• 14:42Speaker 11

  I cannot even tell you the many versions of this film that there were and the many places that it went.

• 14:48Speaker 00

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

• 15:22Speaker 00

  That had always been the case, of course. But the number of stars who could actually make executives and audiences happy was getting smaller. One of those stars was an actor that Gilroy had long wanted for the part, George Clooney. He'd become famous playing guys who may have been down on their luck, but who never gave up.

• 15:40Speaker 08

  Play long enough, you never change the stakes. The house takes you. Unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet big and then you take the house.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Look, I realize that playing a scene from Ocean's Eleven will just make you want to turn off this podcast and watch Ocean's Eleven, which is a totally logical response. But just stay with me if you can. As the 2000s went on, Clooney's film choices started getting more downbeat and more reflective of the times. Siriana, Good Night and Good Luck, Solaris, and he was in his late 40s, a great age to play a lawyer having a midlife crisis of conscience. But Clooney wasn't interested in Michael Clayton, at least not at first.

• 16:18Speaker 11

  He'd passed on it two years earlier because he didn't want anything to do with me, a first-time director. And then he was really reluctant later on. But I switched agencies and the agency put the arm on him and said, "You gotta read this and really think about it seriously." And he said, "Okay, have him come up."

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Gilroy met Clooney at the Actors House. They talked about some of those 1970s movies, movies they'd loved when they were younger.

• 16:45Speaker 11

  You know, we're about the same age. We watched all the same shit.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  They also talked about the thing that all guys talk about when they're hanging out: corporate malfeasance.

• 16:56Speaker 11

  The actual memo that our film is based on is based on a case, a GM case, where they blew up, these cars were blowing up, and eight, nine people had been killed. And this engineer says, "Oh, well, we could fix it, but it's gonna, you have to retool the whole line and change everything. It's gonna cost this huge amount of thing, and I can't, this is way above my pay grade to figure out what this costs to fix." And they determined that it was cheaper to pay off the death benefits than to repair the problem.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  That memo had been written in 1973, and GM had spent decades trying to keep it out of court. A class action suit against the automaker wound up dragging on throughout the early 2000s.

• 17:38Speaker 11

  That document was literally the bad document, right?

• 17:43Speaker 00

  At their meeting, Gilroy and Clooney talked all day, and by the time they were through, the actor had committed to Michael Clayton. The film would be released by Warner Brothers. This would be a low-budget movie with a big star. So the math on this was simple.

• 17:57Speaker 11

  The movie cost what George was getting for his huge commercial films. That was the budget of the movie, and he waives his fee, and I'm not making any money. And so, wow, it's a good bet.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Instead of getting a big check, Clooney opted to bet on the movie. If Michael Clayton succeeded at the box office, he'd do OK. What was most important was that it got made at all. The cast and crew of Michael Clayton headed to Manhattan to begin filming in the winter of 2006. A lot had happened in the years since Gilroy originally wrote his script. A lot to get very angry about.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  At the time, the country was reeling from the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. The storm had overwhelmed the levees of New Orleans, leaving nearly four-fifths of the city underwater. Here's a Fox News report from the early days of the storm.

• 18:47Speaker 15

  They're seeing block by block suddenly become submerged in some degree of water, whether it's one inch or three inches or more than a foot at this point. And everyone's starting to wonder, how high is it going to get? And nobody...

• 19:01Speaker 00

  The government's response to Katrina was seen by many as incompetent, even callous. And the fallout sent Bush's approval ratings to new lows. His second term was going terribly. The war in Iraq looked like it was never going to end. Gas prices were crushing consumers, and there'd been a series of high-profile political blowups. In late 2005, Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was forced to resign after being indicted on charges of money laundering.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Around the same time, a well-connected GOP lobbyist named Jack Abramoff, who had close ties to the Bush White House, was charged with fraud. Abramoff had been a movie producer at one point. In the 1980s, he made a Dolph Lundgren action flick titled Red Scorpion. That's a pretty kick-ass name for what was actually a pretty lame-ass movie.

• 19:51Speaker 16

  They think they control him. Let's kick some. Think again.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  No one remembers the Jack Abramoff thing now, but it caused a huge outrage at the time. In fact, Clooney, who was very outspoken during the Bush years, annoyed some people when he joked about the scandal at the Golden Globes.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  I want to thank, uh, Jack Abramoff. You know, just because.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  During the Bush years, the news had become so reliably scandalous that, at a certain point, all you could do was laugh. It seemed like everybody was breaking the rules just to make a buck and not caring who got hurt along the way.

• 20:29Speaker 11

  When people know they're doing something wrong and they do it anyway, as sophisticated and cynical and old and wise as I am, I'm like a golden retriever. I'm like staring at a moving car. Every time I see that, I'm like, how can people do that?

• 20:45Speaker 00

  He wasn't the only filmmaker asking questions about where America was going.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  Not long after Michael Clayton came together in Manhattan, a very different Bush years drama began shooting in Queens. This film had a much lower budget and took place in a much smaller world, but it had a lot to say about the trickle-down effects of the 2000s.

• 21:12Speaker 17

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• 21:57Sean 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.

• 22:21Speaker 18

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• 23:06Speaker 00

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

• 23:20Speaker 19

  I had never visited as a child. I went as an adult, as a 23, 24-year-old, and I had lived there for three, four years.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  Being in Iran during 9/11, Barani says, was, quote, "a unique experience."

• 23:34Speaker 19

  There was a decent wave of support. There were candlelight vigils, mainly by young people. I mean, the same way that Americans don't necessarily want to be associated with certain government policies, most Iranians that I know don't want to be associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran and its leaders.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  He also sensed a lot of underlying anxiety.

• 23:57Speaker 19

  Then if you're Iranian, there's just an immediate terror of, I hope the people who... this are not going to come back as being from Iran.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Afterward, things got tense, and Barani decided to leave Iran.

• 24:09Speaker 19

  So without really any plan and no income, I went to France. And, um... At that time, still, the world was in total shock about what had happened.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  That sense of shock would continue in the weeks and months ahead. Barani was living in Paris when the US began bombing Afghanistan.

• 24:28Speaker 19

  And I remember watching Afghans sitting around television, watching the news, and they were watching their country being bombed, you know? People being pulled out of rubble, dead, alive. And I imagine they must be searching in these images to see if their family members are being balled out of the rubble.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  9/11, the war on terror. These were some of the most seismic moments of the early 21st century. And they got Barani thinking about his home country.

• 25:00Speaker 19

  Without those experiences, I would, I never would have been able to see America the way that I've revealed them in my films.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  Barani would see that reaction up close when he returned to New York City, where he began making a series of low-budget, highly entertaining dramas about life in the city. The first was called Man Push Cart, about a Pakistani immigrant who lugs his coffee cart around the city, making whatever dollar he can find. During production of Man Push Cart, there were two separate instances in which someone approached Barani and the film's lead actor, accusing them of being terrorists.

• 25:38Speaker 19

  One of them, in fact, absurdly said, "Are you funding a bin Laden training camp?"

• 25:44Speaker 00

  Barani took the man aside.

• 25:46Speaker 19

  And we ended up talking for a while. I never forget this guy. He was second-generation Italian. And I said, "What do you think your parents and grandparents must have suffered through when they came here with the Irish immigrants and were treated just as you're treating me and my friend?"

• 26:01Speaker 00

  The guy was so taken aback, he actually apologized.

• 26:05Speaker 19

  And so there's an undercurrent in that entire film of the war on terror and what it meant to be in New York at that time and to be of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent at that time.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  Man Push Cart got ridiculously good reviews when it hit theaters in 2006. Roger Ebert even put it on his top 10 of the year list. The indie film ecosystem that had exploded in the 1990s was still thriving. Even a movie like Man Push Cart, which was made with non-professional actors and cost less than $80,000, could get lots of attention.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  By that point, Barani was already working on his follow-up, a film called Chop Shop. It would also deal with underseen, overworked New Yorkers, this time in the industrial neighborhood of Willetts Point, Queens. It was an area full of auto shops, junkyards, and factories.

• 26:57Speaker 19

  There were many people, typically migrants, who lived in the garages or lived in the abandoned cars on the side of the gravelly road there. So if you went there at 6:00 a.m., you would see men, you know, yawning as they stumbled out of an abandoned car.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  Nearby was a massive billboard for a bank. It read, "Make Dreams Happen."

• 27:23Speaker 19

  And I thought to myself, "How ironic that a bank is going to tell us how to have a dream when I felt it's the banks that are going to be destroying us all."

• 27:33Speaker 00

  When Barani began work on his new movie, the economic crash hadn't happened yet. Yet, when he looked around Willetts Point, it was clear many people were having a hard time getting by in the 2000s and that they'd do anything they could to survive.

• 27:46Speaker 19

  Their houses were the auto body shops or the cars, trying to just piece together a living while the public perception was all gears are roaring and hypercapitalism and everybody is successful.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  These are the people who become the stars of Chop Shop.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  The movie's about a 12-year-old orphan named Ale. He lives in a cramped room above an industrial garage with his teenage sister, Izzy. They want to make their dreams happen, so they hustle to save up $4,500 to buy their own food van, with the goal of one day working for themselves. Ale sells bootleg DVDs and helps out at a garage, while Izzy gets a job selling food for a demanding boss. In Chop Shop, Ale and Izzy nag each other, tease each other, encourage each other, and drive each other nuts.

• 28:42Speaker 09

  It's only the first day. Things are gonna start getting better. Ale, oh, she does it for paying that bitch on you all the time. Come on now, she ain't know that bad. I'mma work this shit out. Don't worry about it.

• 28:51Speaker 19

  They're young, so they're full of hope, dreams, right? We talked about that billboard that I was so taken with. They have dreams still. They have hopes. And I found that energy could be really powerful because their life is so difficult. Yet they don't seem to even understand how difficult their life is. And I found that inspiring, and I found the contrast really compelling.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  And Barani would need lots of inspiration to get Chop Shop going.

• 29:19Speaker 19

  There was no money to make the film. In fact, I didn't even have a place to live. I was sleeping on a friend's sofa. I had no money. I would go to Europe, collect the prize for Man Push Cart, land at JFK, and call two or three friends to see where I could crash for the week to keep trying to cast Chop Shop.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  After Barani got to New York, he set out to find two young actors to play the leads of Chop Shop. The search would take months.

• 29:42Speaker 19

  Well, the first thing I did was try to get the kids that were working and living in the location, and that didn't work out. I could tell there was a resistance because they were undocumented. And if their parents or whoever their guardian was, uncle, aunt, grandma, they were like, no way.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  He began visiting schools in New York City, almost 100 of them. Barani eventually found two Lower East Side kids who'd never acted before, Alejandro Polanco and Isamar Gonzalez. They'd star as the film's hard-working young characters, who would ultimately be named after the actors themselves, Ale and Izzy. Despite having no on-screen experience, their performances felt remarkably real.

• 30:24Speaker 09

  My name was on the van, and you picked the color. And I hold the money because you don't know how to count. What are you talking about? You never even finished school. At least I finished 7th grade. You didn't go to school.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  To get ready for filming, Alejandro, or Ale, spent six months learning how to work in a real auto shop. He even got to drive.

• 30:44Speaker 19

  It was like adventure in camp for him.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  Chop Shop was about as DIY as you could get. No professional actors, no sound stages, and no giant crew. During rehearsals, the kid actors didn't even get a script.

• 30:58Speaker 19

  They would never read lines. I would just tell them what the scene was about and I would give them the hints of what the dialogues were, and then they would forget, so they would start to improvise in their own language. And I would have to guide these improvisations when they went haywire.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  As a result, sometimes when you're watching Chop Shop, it feels like you're watching a documentary. Which is what makes it so heartbreaking when things start to go wrong for the kids. Ale discovers his sister has taken on sex work to make more money. Then, after the siblings have finally saved up enough cash to buy the food van, a friend tells them they've been ripped off, and that the van isn't even usable. Still, the kids remain defiant. They believe that somehow, they can still make this work. You know, look, there's no vents here. There's holes everywhere. It's rusted everywhere.

• 31:48Speaker 09

  Come on, stop exaggerating. We could clean that off.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Come on, Ale, man. It's devastating to watch. Now, Izzy and Ale will need even more money. Ale gets angry, and then he gets desperate, stealing a woman's handbag and trying to sell her phone. But even that doesn't work. He'll just have to keep on hustling. If that all makes Chop Shop sound like a bummer, well, it's really not. It's a beautiful movie that just kind of flies by. And it ends in a way that's not totally feel-good, but that definitely feels real. You get the sense that, no matter what, these kids are gonna find a way to survive. I mean, what other choice do they have? Chop Shop didn't hit theaters until early 2008. By then, the so-called Great Recession was already underway.

• 32:39Speaker 05

  The past seven years, the system has absorbed shocks. Recession, corporate scandals, terrorist attacks, global war.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  That's President Bush in early 2008, a few weeks before Chop Shop's release. Congress had just passed a $168 billion stimulus plan to help get America's economic system back on track.

• 33:00Speaker 05

  Yet the genius of our system is that it can absorb such shocks and emerge even stronger.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, that didn't happen. Instead, over the next few months, things only got worse. Brokerage firms like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapsed. The government started bailing out huge corporations like General Motors. And the Dow took a nosedive. That made the economic desperation in Chop Shop feel especially well-timed. In 2008, a phrase like "make dreams happen" seemed less like a promise and more like a taunt. Still, Chop Shop wasn't intended as a rip-from-the-headlines kind of film, and neither was "Man, Push Cart." Instead, they were addressing issues that had been going on in the US for years.

• 33:45Speaker 19

  Those films didn't come out of the economic crisis. I think they were germinating because of what was happening, America's response to 9/11. So you have one strike of tragedy in America, but then there was just that brutal, brutal reaction.

• 34:07Speaker 00

  Chop Shop was a low-budget, largely improvised production, made in a way that let Barani change things on the fly. That approach wouldn't work for Michael Clayton. Gilroy's script was very talky, which makes sense. I mean, it's a movie about lawyers. The film starts with a two-and-a-half-minute voiceover from one of Michael's coworkers, a brilliant older attorney named Arthur, played by Tom Wilkinson. Arthur has spent years defending an agricultural company accused of killing hundreds of people, and he's discovered a bad document, one that shows that company executives knew what they were doing all along. As a result, Arthur has a manic episode, though he calls it, quote, "a stunning moment of clarity." He says that he's realized something, that when he walked out of his office,

• 34:52Speaker 00

  he wasn't walking out of, quote, "a vast and powerful law firm," but from...

• 34:57Speaker 20

  "The asshole of an organism whose sole function is to excrete the poison, the ammo, the defoaming necessary for other, larger, more powerful organisms to destroy the miracle of humanity, and that I had been coated in this patina of shit for the best part of my life."

• 35:17Speaker 00

  A few of you, maybe too many of you, can fill in the rest. This is one of the most quotable film monologues of all time. That's partly due to the fact that Wilkinson's just so good. You can really hear Arthur's excitement as he catalogs the big truths about his life. But what really powers the moment is Arthur's realization that he's deluded himself, that he's been coated in that patina of shit, and that, in his struggle for success, he'd gotten lost in a bigger, greedier machine. Again, very relatable stuff back then, especially for Michael Clayton.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  His job is to keep Arthur stable, so the firm doesn't lose its billion-dollar case. But Michael, who's always done what the firm asks him to do, knows something's off, and he's also started questioning his life's work. He takes his concerns to his boss, played by Sidney Pollack, who doesn't want to hear about Michael's sudden epiphany about right versus wrong. You can hear the disbelief in Pollack's voice. He can't grasp that Michael's only now realizing how compromised they all are. "This case reeked from day one. Fifteen years in, I gotta tell you how we pay the rent." Michael can't afford to just leave the firm. He's $80,000 in debt, thanks to a bad restaurant investment. So Michael's boss is off for a deal.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  If he keeps Arthur in line so that the case can be won, they'll bail him out and keep his career going. But then, an agricultural company executive, played by Tilda Swinton, has Arthur killed, and Michael barely survives an attempt on his own life. He realizes that he's been coated in shit, too. So at the film's climax, he confronts Swinton's character and threatens to go public. They work out a deal where she'll pay him millions to keep quiet. Michael points out that all they had to do was throw money at him to make him go away.

• 37:05Speaker 21

  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? I'm the easiest part of your whole goddamn problem and you're gonna kill me?

• 37:16Speaker 00

  I'm not the guy that you kill. I'm the guy you buy. I know a lot of Big Picture listeners are very young, but trust me, you're gonna reach a time in your life or career where you realize you've traded away some of your integrity just to make a buck. You didn't wanna cave in, but you had no choice. By the way, if you'd like to hear more of my thoughts about selling out, my Venmo is patinaofshit2025. But Michael doesn't sell out. He refuses to take the bribe. Instead, he secretly records her confession, sinking the firm's big lawsuit and probably his own career along the way. The movie's ending is somber. Michael gets in a taxi and gives the cabbie some cash.

• 37:57Speaker 21

  Give me $50 worth. Just drive.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  Then the camera just stays on Michael for two minutes, in silence. It's a remarkable conclusion. You don't know where Michael's going, and neither does he. It just feels like an escape. Nowadays, it's hard to imagine Michael Clayton finishing any other way, but that final scene came together at the last minute.

• 38:23Speaker 11

  I did not have an ending. I did not have that. I didn't, I didn't know what to do when he came out of the hotel.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  Gilroy thought of movies like The Graduate, The Piano Teacher, and The Long Good Friday, films that ended with a close-up of the characters' faces as they quietly accepted or questioned their own fate.

• 38:43Speaker 11

  And I'm like, you know what? What's more fascinating than George?

• 38:47Speaker 00

  Still, taking over the streets of midtown Manhattan would require a little bit of star power.

• 38:52Speaker 11

  We have no permits. We have no permits. What we do have is we have George Clooney. And George Clooney, on several occasions, several important occasions, you know, could get cops to do things, get air traffic control people to do things, could get people to do things for us that you normally would never get.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  They worked out a deal allowing them to try a few takes. At one point, after Clooney had just shot another take of him sitting quietly in the cab, Gilroy asked, "What are you thinking as we shoot this?"

• 39:27Speaker 11

  And he goes, "I'm replaying the movie in my head."

• 39:36Speaker 00

  Michael Clayton finished shooting in the spring of 2006. The film would take a long time to hit theaters. There were already a couple of big Clooney movies on the runway.

• 39:44Speaker 11

  We were like, "Oh, my God, we have to sit on it for a year." It was, it was, I was bereft.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  In the meantime, Gilroy had to get support from executives at Warner Brothers. Early test screenings of Michael Clayton hadn't gone well.

• 39:57Speaker 11

  There were some people there that were really unhappy with it, really unhappy. "Can we change the ending? Can we do some things? Can we put a happy ending?" And some things that they suggested as happy endings were like the most depressing thing ever.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  One of those suggestions was that Michael should get together at the end with a woman he was dating in the office. Gilroy fought back, and the long, quiet ending remained.

• 40:19Speaker 11

  But that's the kind of monkey business that happens. And, you know, it depends on how hard you fight for things. And, you know, that's your job. You know, they pay you to be passionate about it.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  But Michael Clayton did have fans of Warner Brothers. At one screening, the lights came up and Gilroy saw an executive crying.

• 40:35Speaker 11

  He goes, "I know how we sell the movie." He goes, "I know what the audience is." And he goes, "I said, 'Who's the audience?'" He goes, "Men who know they're going to die."

• 40:45Speaker 11

  And I'm like, "Oh, my God."

• 40:47Speaker 00

  "Oh, I mean, I'm in that audience."

• 40:48Speaker 11

  "Yeah, no, yeah, no." And I was like, "That's a pretty big audience, I think."

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Michael Clayton opened wide in October 2007, not long before Chop Shop hit theaters.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  Neither film was capital P political, but Michael Clayton and Chop Shop both illustrated the toll the Bush years had taken on so many Americans, no matter where they lived, or how they lived. But the movies had very different releases. Chop Shop played on just a handful of screens. Pretty much everyone who saw it loved it, even though it took some viewers a while to catch up to it. Michael Clayton, though, was unavoidable that year. It was a big studio movie with a major star, and a fantastic tagline: "The truth can be adjusted." That motto could have been the tagline for the entire Bush years. The movie's release is kind of remarkable now, for a couple of reasons. The first is that Michael Clayton was a hit. It made $50 million,

• 41:45Speaker 00

  and won Tilda Swinton an Oscar. Sometimes you bet big, and you take the house. We snuck our way through.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  But what's really amazing about Michael Clayton is the competition it had that year. 2007 was a pretty remarkable year for a certain kind of studio film, a kind of movie that's all but disappeared. These were movies with big stars, and big ideas about the state of America. They were entertaining, provocative, and they gave a shit. We already talked about Zodiac from that year, but 2007 also gave us There Will Be Blood, with Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview. He's a greedy and murderous oil man. And by the film's end, he's living alone in this massive mansion, lording over his longtime foe, who's played by Paul Dano.

• 42:36Speaker 22

  Stop trying, you sniveling ass. Stop your nonsense. You're just afterbirth Eli. No. Slithered out on your mother's filth.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  I think you know how this scene ends.

• 42:51Speaker 22

  I drink your milkshake.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  2007 was also the year of the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford. It starred Brad Pitt as the famous American outlaw, who's now finally taking stock of a lifetime of violence.

• 43:09Speaker 23

  I go on journeys out of my body and look at my red hands and my mean face. And I wonder about that man that's gone so wrong.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  There were lots of 2007 movies about Americans feeling rootless, lost, or just let down. And after all that had happened in the decade, those films felt like a collective scream.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  But those kinds of movies would soon get harder to make, if not impossible. The Great Recession would have a huge impact on Hollywood. Entire movie studios would be wiped out. Paramount Vantage, the studio that helped release There Will Be Blood, shut down in 2008. More studios and divisions would find themselves in trouble around that time. Warner Independent, Picture House, and even Miramax, they'd all release crucial films in the 2000s. And by the decade's end, they were either gone or greatly diminished. Hollywood was feeling the pinch. But it wasn't alone. As the Bush years crawled to an end, it seemed like everyone was hurting. A lousy economy, multiple wars,

• 44:18Speaker 00

  and no sign that anything was going to get fixed anytime soon.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  In the final months of the Bush era, a group of films would look at what America had become in the 2000s and how we'd gotten there in the first place.

• 44:33Speaker 23

  What you got ain't nothing new.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  These movies were reminders. This was no country for old men.

• 44:41Speaker 23

  This country's hard on people.

• 44:47Speaker 23

  You can't stop what's coming.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  This podcast is reported, written, and hosted by me, Brian Raftery. The executive producers of this podcast are Juliette Littman and Sean Fenestry. Story editing by Amanda Dobbins. The show was produced by me, Devon Baroldi, and Vikram Patel. Fact checking by Casey Gallagher. Copy editing by Craig Gaines. Talent booking by Kat Spohling. Sound design by Devon Baroldi. 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.

• 45:38Speaker 24

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• 46:08Speaker 25

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