ReportWire

Tag: Oral history

  • Presidents’ Days: From Obama to Trump

    [ad_1]

    Obama had started out, like so many, thinking that Trump was little more than a comical, if malevolent, real-estate hawker. Trump’s early and bellowing deployment of the racist “birther” theory gave Obama every reason to hate him; he chose, instead, to laugh at him. In January, 2016, Matt Lauer, then at NBC, asked Obama, “So, when you stand and deliver that State of the Union address, in no part of your mind and brain can you imagine Donald Trump standing up one day and delivering the State of the Union address?”

    Obama laughed. “Well,” he said, “I can imagine it in a ‘Saturday Night’ skit.”

    Even in the last days before the election, as the Clinton team faltered, Obama’s campaign guru David Plouffe still insisted that Clinton was a “one-hundred-per-cent” lock and instructed worrywarts to stop “wetting the bed.”

    Like Plouffe, Obama proved to be a poor prognosticator. Not only did he (along with, in fairness, nearly everyone) fail to anticipate Trump’s victory, he failed to comprehend the degree to which Trump would, particularly in his second term, set out to demolish the principles and the institutions that Obama had defended in Athens. Obama met with Trump at the White House following the election, on November 10th. Not long afterward, Obama told me, in an interview in the Oval Office, “I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.” In fact, he had told his staffers, who were stunned by Clinton’s loss, many of them weeping, that sometimes losing was the nature of democracy, that history does not move in straight lines.

    “People were mired in despondency, and he thought part of his goal was to keep people pointed in the right direction,” David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser and political consultant, told me recently. “Our norms and institutions have proven more vulnerable to Trump’s assaults than President Obama imagined then.”

    Obama told me at the time that he had accomplished “seventy or seventy-five per cent” of what he had set out to do, and that only fifteen or twenty per cent of what he had achieved would probably get “rolled back” by Trump. “But there’s still a lot of stuff that sticks.” This badly underestimated what was to come. Not only has Trump undermined government institutions and basic norms, he has, through his example, through his daily insults and his late-night social-media rants, normalized a level of racism, misogyny, and gratuitous division that cannot be calculated by percentages.

    Here and there in the oral-history archive, people in the Obama circle refer to Trump’s racism, particularly the birther rhetoric that propelled his first campaign. Nearly a decade later, as I was watching and reading these interviews, the background noise was, as usual, incessant: there was Trump showering contempt on female reporters and sharing a racist video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. This is such routine behavior from Trump that, as news stories, they pass quickly and, of course, with no apology.

    Out of office, the Obamas have handled these grotesque insults differently. Michelle Obama harbors deep anger at Trump, according to knowledgeable sources, and has made it plain that she wants nothing to do with him. She believed that the birther rhetoric endangered her family, and things only got worse from there. As a matter of obligation, Obama is still capable of sitting next to Trump, as he did at Jimmy Carter’s funeral, last year, and exchanging pleasant banalities. When I raised this with two of Obama’s closest aides, Axelrod and Ben Rhodes, they both referred to the analogous predicament of Jackie Robinson, who was the first Black player in modern major-league baseball, and who made it a matter of principle to endure and absorb every slur with an almost superhuman dignity. The pathfinder’s predicament. In private, Obama usually does not lash out angrily about the Trumpism of the day—that is not his temperament—but he will routinely ask people to imagine the response if he had been the one to, say, rage-post hateful videos at 2 A.M. or use his office to enrich his family by billions of dollars.

    [ad_2]

    David Remnick

    Source link

  • That’s the Way Life Is

    That’s the Way Life Is

    [ad_1]

    Will Arnett used to leave BoJack Horseman recording sessions feeling disoriented. He’d step outside a dark Hollywoo(d) studio blinded by late-morning sunlight. As he walked to his car, he’d start to sweat. The caffeine from the coffee he’d just drunk would buck in his empty stomach. All the while, he’d be struggling to shake his character’s pathologically antisocial behavior. “This guy’s just been really shitty to someone in some fucked-up scenario,” Arnett says. “And I’m like, ‘What? How am I going to go on with the rest of my day?’”

    Hey, that’s life as the voice of a depressed, self-loathing, alcoholic, anthropomorphic horse: Occasionally, you sink into the depths with him. “There were days where I’d come home really bummed out, and I’d be like, ‘What is life, man?’” says Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the show’s creator. “And I’d go to work the next day like, ‘Oh, right. I’m watching this really depressing episode all day.’ It’s seeping into my brain.”

    On first look, BoJack Horseman was a satirical story of a washed-up sitcom star desperate to be famous again. But it was more than the tale of one unhappy equine. It was an existential comedy about people, some of whom happen to be animals, figuring out how to live without letting their piled-up baggage weigh them down. “That’s just such a unique point of view: to realize that each day, we get out of bed and we have a certain amount of damage that we are all either trying to protect our friends and colleagues from or protect ourselves from,” says executive producer Steven A. Cohen. From the beginning, it was clear that in the show’s world, like in the real world, damage can’t be reversed. When the ottoman in BoJack’s living room catches fire, it stays burned out in every subsequent episode. “Things like that, which were such small pitches at the time, were showstoppers,” Cohen adds. “Because you’re like, ‘That’s the way life is.’”

    There were dozens of smart and funny animated series in the decades before it, but BoJack Horseman was different: It was built for prestige TV. It had a hard-to-pull-for antihero as toxic as Tony Soprano or Don Draper, an anti-feel-good sensibility, a unique visual style, and the ear of critics. But even while exploring serious topics—the Wikipedia page lists 12 hot-button issues it covered, and that’s a low estimate—the adult cartoon didn’t veer into self-seriousness. And it could’ve come about only during the brief time in the early 2010s when media conglomerates, in pursuit of building big streaming platforms, were willing to take chances on quirky ideas. Today, the show about a horse would be considered, well, a unicorn.

    Over six seasons, BoJack got really real, really often. Yet as heavy as it was, it had a unique knack for finding room for jokes. “That’s one of the things I’m proud of with the show, is that 77 episodes deep, it was still really silly and goofy and cartoony while also being very dramatic and melancholy and intense the whole way through,” Bob-Waksberg says. “I never felt like we could choose one tone. It was always kind of both things.” BoJack tapped into an eternal truth: When you’re drowning, sometimes the only thing you can do to stay afloat is laugh at your predicament.

    Late in the first season of the show, there’s a flashback to a fresh-faced BoJack and his friend and creative partner Herb Kazzaz—whom BoJack later screws over—sharing a moment at the Griffith Observatory. They look out at Los Angeles, and Herb says, “I see a city that you and I will run someday. And when we’re both famous and have everything we’ve ever wanted, we’ll come back here together and high-five.”

    The scene, more or less, was ripped from Bob-Waksberg’s life. When he was new to L.A., he’d hike Griffith with friends, look out at the city, and snarkily wonder about the future. “We used to say, tongue planted firmly in cheek, ‘Someday we’re going to own this town,’” he says. “That was the thing we would do. We were like characters on Entourage.” Or The Lion King. “One day,” he adds with faux gravitas, “everything the light touches will be yours, Simba.”

    That was a decade and a half ago. Back then, Bob-Waksberg would’ve laughed in the face of anyone who told him that his success was preordained. The dream of BoJack Horseman was alive, but in the way a zombie is alive. “BoJack was the development that wouldn’t die,” he says. “It was like two years I was bouncing around this thing, and there were points where I was like, ‘Why am I still spending time on this?’”

    Bob-Waksberg was working on the project with Tornante, the studio founded by former Walt Disney chairman Michael Eisner. His spec script had initially impressed two development executives at the company, Cohen and Noel Bright. “In this town, everything starts with somebody sending us something to read,” Cohen says. “And the very first thing we read of his … it’s from the same writer today. You can see the hallmarks. He’s just a gifted storyteller.”

    Cohen and Bright quickly set up a meeting with Bob-Waksberg. “When you sit with Raphael, he’s just as gifted in person, and you can see his brain working and when he’s excited, because his body starts moving and his hands start moving,” Cohen says. That day, Bob-Waksberg, hands in motion, told them a story about the time he went to a beautiful home in Laurel Canyon for a party that, to him, was anything but festive. “He was feeling completely alone and divorced from the magic reality that is Hollywood,” Cohen says, “and realizing like, ‘What does this all mean? And who are these people?’ … It’s 10 years later, and I don’t have those answers. And that’s uniquely Raphael, to just basically provoke you into thinking about something for 10 years.”

    Eisner didn’t go to the meeting. “It was not Steven Spielberg,” he says with a smile. Afterward, though, he briefly met Bob-Waksberg and asked what show he was pitching. “Just tell me in one or two sentences the best idea,” Eisner recalls saying. “He said, ‘Well, it’s a comedy about a character who has the head of a horse and the body of a man.’” Eisner, who used to get a kick out of Mister Ed back in the ’60s, loved it. “I said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it,’” Eisner says. “That’s how long it took.”

    The show that Bob-Waksberg wanted to make was constantly asking, “What does this all mean?” The full premise wasn’t all that complicated: “BoJack the Depressed Talking Horse.” In fact, that’s exactly how he described it in an email to a friend in Brooklyn, cartoonist and illustrator Lisa Hanawalt. They both grew up in Palo Alto, California. “I knew who he was in middle school because he was in school plays and because he was loud and weird,” Hanawalt says. “Which is my favorite kind of person.” Bob-Waksberg wrote Hanawalt because he needed an artist to help bring BoJack to life. Luckily for him, Hanawalt had always loved horses. In early 2010, a few months before he reached out about his show idea, she’d made a comic about a horse person.

    “I looked at his pitch, and I was like, ‘This looks really depressing. I don’t know about this. I’m into things that are less depressing,’” Hanawalt says. “And he was like, ‘OK, cool.’ But now I actually like the depressing aspects of it a lot. I take it back.”

    With Hanawalt’s blessing, Bob-Waksberg downloaded a bunch of animal drawings from her website and showed them to Cohen and Bright. “I kind of put them in a little envelope, and I brought it with me and said, ‘This is the show I want to make, with these guys,’” he says. The execs loved the concept and asked for an outline. “I was frantically Googling, ‘What does an outline of a TV episode look like?’” Bob-Waksberg says. “I sent in this thing, and Steve was like, ‘This is not an outline, but sure, go write your draft now.’”

    Bob-Waksberg eventually came back with something more fleshed out. “Everything that came in was so true to form,” Bright says.

    “All of a sudden, we realized that Raphael was different from everybody else,” Eisner says. “Somebody like Raphael comes along once a decade, if that.”

    That original script treatment included what became the pilot’s opening scene: Charlie Rose interviewing a drunk, defensive BoJack about his long-ago-canceled sitcom, Horsin’ Around. “For a lot of people, life is just one hard kick in the urethra,” BoJack says. “Sometimes when you get home from a long day of getting kicked in the urethra, you just want to watch a show about good, likable people who love each other, where you know, no matter what happens, at the end of 30 minutes, everything’s gonna turn out OK. Because in real life … did I already say the thing about the urethra?”

    Finding someone to personify a sad horse turned out to be fairly easy: Bob-Waksberg and Arnett had the same manager. “My manager said, ‘Hey, this guy we represent wrote this really cool thing for this animated series,’” Arnett says. “And it’s always a crapshoot. You never know what you’re going to get. I read it and it was like, ‘Wow.’” The actor, who has a uniquely gravelly voice, loved that the series sounded both grounded and ridiculous. “OK, so this guy is kind of a has-been, and he lives in this fucking cliché house in the Hollywood Hills with what’s left of his entourage, which is one moron,” Arnett says. “And then on top of it all, he’s not a guy, he’s a horse.’”

    “The first thing I said to Will—I mean, I was nervous, I guess, to meet a star—was just like, ‘It’s great that you’re cast because you sound like a horse,’” Hanawalt says. “And he’s like, ‘Never heard that one before.’”

    The one guy left in BoJack’s entourage was Todd Chavez, who ended up being less of a moron and more of a sweet and sneakily wise slacker with a million crazy ideas. Kind of like Jesse Pinkman if he’d never met Walter White. Coincidentally, Breaking Bad was almost over, and Aaron Paul was about to be available. “He got this really goofy, silly comedy script, and he did not know this would also go to a dark place,” Bob-Waksberg says. “And so I think he felt like, ‘Oh, this is a ray of sunshine. What a fun break from being in a pit, the slave of neo-Nazis making meth all day.’” Not long after he learned about BoJack, Paul committed to it. “I love that you can laugh and also really have an emotional experience in a single scene of that show,” he says.

    The rest of the main BoJack characters were a mix of humans and animal people. Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris) is BoJack’s feline agent who struggles with work-life balance. Like most Labrador retrievers, actor Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins) is an outwardly cheerful people pleaser. And Diane Nguyen (Alison Brie) is BoJack’s Vietnamese American ghostwriter who deals with depression. (When we spoke, Bob-Waksberg complimented Brie’s performance but reiterated a point that he’s made in other interviews: “I think I was not fully cognizant when I cast her, the limitations I was putting on myself by casting a white actress to play a Vietnamese character. I wasn’t up to the responsibility of writing a Vietnamese character fully. And so part of that is it’s not just the casting, it’s the writing. It’s that I wasn’t thinking about all the dimensions of what this would mean. And I think that, combined with the casting of Alison, was a disservice to the character.”)

    Yet even with all BoJack had going for it, networks weren’t interested. Bob-Waksberg felt like he was rowing a boat with one arm, just going in a circle. “No one’s going to buy this show,” he remembers thinking. “Maybe I’ve outgrown it.” Arnett and Paul, who’d also come on as executive producers, did their best to sell the project, but it seemed futile. “I was part of the pitching process, just kind of calling people that I had relationships with or had a past with and really pushing this thing to get across the line,” Paul says. “And everyone was passing on it.”

    Everyone except one. In the early 2010s, Netflix was no longer just a DVD subscription service. It was gunning to become a real Hollywood studio. To make a big splash—with consumers and creators—it needed to take creative risks, particularly the kind that other networks had long been afraid to take. It had found early success with House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, and a reboot of Arrested Development but still hadn’t green-lit an animated show. Cohen and Bright happened to know Blair Fetter, a new creative executive at the company. They asked him whether he’d take a look at an animation test put together by Mike Hollingsworth, who became the show’s supervising director.

    “That five-minute test had me hooked,” Fetter says in an email.

    “The questions he asked were ‘Is this going to have Will Arnett in it? Is it going to have Aaron Paul?’” Bright remembers. “I was like, ‘Yes. Yes.’ Those are the easy answers.” Then Fetter asked two more questions: “Does the creator have a vision?” and “Could we hear it?”

    About a month later, Bob-Waksberg had a meeting with Netflix. During his presentation, which lasted more than an hour, he sketched out the entire first season of the show without a single note in front of him. The pitch was years in the making. “That long development process gave me the room to grow as a writer and figure out what kind of stories I wanted to tell in this world so that when the opportunity came,” Bob-Waksberg says, “I would be ready for it.”

    “It felt exactly like the Netflix version of an animated series,” Fetter says. “We were all in.”

    The first season of BoJack Horseman had to be made at a full gallop. After selling the show to Netflix, Bob-Waksberg and his team had about seven months to finish 12 episodes. “Which was wild,” he says. “We had some materials because we’d been developing it for so long, but it was still a mad dash to get that first season done.”

    The process of learning how to create a digitally animated show on the fly was particularly difficult for Hanawalt, the production designer. “I was using watercolor on paper,” she says. “I didn’t know how to draw on the computer at all.” What she did already know how to do was create distinct characters. That helped give the show its unique look.

    “What first drew us in was her attention to attire and wardrobe,” Cohen says. “Drawings of some of the characters that were these anthropomorphic animals but were wearing a tweed jacket with patches and a vest or a tie. And all these different looks that were exciting and different than the traditional animation characters that were wearing one outfit for 30 years.”

    Hanawalt liked playing around with patterns, whether it was the designs on BoJack’s sweaters, the little fish on Princess Carolyn’s dress, or the red arrows on Diane’s jacket. “A lot of the details didn’t come from anywhere in particular,” she says. “It was just me wanting to make them look specific rather than generic.”

    The anthropomorphic cast eventually could’ve filled Noah’s ark, giving the animators the opportunity to conjure up characters like Sextina Aquafina, a dolphin pop star; Amanda Hannity, the editor of Manatee Fair; and Cuddlywhiskers, a hamster and TV producer. Naturally, the show was full of animal references, animal jokes, and animal puns. Yellow lab Mr. Peanutbutter gets anxious when there’s a stranger in his yard. There’s a spear-nosed bartender/marlin at a ’50s diner named Brando who announces the delivery of three beers: “Stella!,” “Stella!,” and “Corona Light.” And Princess Carolyn has dinner with an albino rhino gyno.

    And aside from The Simpsons, no animated series had better—or more numerous—sight gags. Some were broad, like Vincent Adultman, who’s really three kids stacked under a trench coat. Others were of the blink-or-you’ll-miss-it variety, like a party banner that says, “Happy Birthday Diane and use a pretty font.” There were also plenty of running jokes, like when Hollywood became “Hollywoo” in the show after BoJack drunkenly stole the “D” in the famous sign. The way Bob-Waksberg sees it, some of the series’ silliest bits popped because of what Arnett did with them. The showrunner recalls working on the scene where BoJack wakes up hungover and sees the missing “D” in his pool. “The line we wrote for him was ‘D-d-d-damn,’” Bob-Waksberg says. “And I remember being like, ‘OK, we’ll replace this later. This is not a joke,’” he says. “And then Will did it at the table read, and it was so funny and stupid. And so we thought, ‘OK, let’s not touch that.’”

    Like Arnett, BoJack was a veteran sitcom actor with impeccable comic timing. But the character was also, frankly, despicable. Arnett realized that early in the show’s run. He points to a story line in the first season when BoJack is so afraid of losing his lackey Todd that he sabotages his rock opera. “BoJack is so fucking hateful about it,” Arnett says. “That for some reason always sticks out at me because Todd’s so sweet and kind and BoJack is just so unrelentingly BoJack in that moment.”

    While voicing someone with so many ups and downs, Arnett admits that he couldn’t help but think of his own. “It made me think about my own mental health a little bit, for sure,” he says. “A lot of it felt like it’s a cautionary tale.”

    Over the years, Arnett has spoken candidly about his own sobriety. “I’ve often thought about how prescient it was of Raphael to write this,” Arnett says. “And I went through my own struggles, which I talked about with Raphael. I was like, ‘God, it’s so odd to do this thing, to play this guy.’”

    Still, Arnett is not BoJack. Despite what some misguided fans might think. Several years ago, the actor had a house built in Beverly Hills. It had a pool. “People were like, ‘I saw photos of Will Arnett’s house, it’s just like BoJack!’” Arnett says. “And I’m like, ‘Motherfucker, shut up.’ By the way, we need to take the internet apart.”

    At midnight on August 22, 2014, Netflix released the entire first season of BoJack Horseman. “We all waited up and watched the first couple of episodes,” Bright says. The next morning, the producers started hearing that some viewers had seen all 12. That shocked them. After all, binge-watching TV was still a relatively new phenomenon. “That was something that we all looked at each other like, ‘This is unbelievable,’” Bright adds. “We just spent four and a half or five years working on this show. It premiered. And the next day, people were like, ‘I love the season.’” Most critics agreed: Writer Alan Sepinwall called the show “something that simultaneously functions as both lunatic farce and melancholy character study.” Four days after the first season dropped, Netflix announced that it was renewing the animated series for a second season.

    These days, studios cancel promising shows with ruthless efficiency. But back then, streaming companies gave new series more time to build an audience. Even though BoJack didn’t have as many viewers as Game of Thrones, Netflix got behind it. That faith was a gift to its fans, a group that grew as time went on. “People that stayed with it and watched the show and got the show came to love it,” Bright says. “And it was really fun to see that happen.”

    Viewers stuck with a series that stayed funny, but became less fun. BoJack’s depression worsens. He mistreats the people closest to him, repeatedly crosses the line with young women, and pathetically clings to the hope that he’ll once again become an A-lister. He reminded Eisner of an older American comedian he once ran into at a hotel in England. When Eisner asked what the comic was doing there, he replied that it was the only place he still got recognized. “BoJack was a big star,” Eisner says. “All he wants to do is be in the movie Secretariat, which he can’t get because he’s no longer a star. He spent all his money. He’s living a life of memories. He’s gotten himself involved with bad things, drugs and alcohol. He still has an agent. And it is a metaphor for anybody who’s had success and is now forgotten.”

    To Bob-Waksberg, BoJack was, in some ways, like an exorcism: “I could get out some of my darker feelings into this show,” he says. But as sad as the series could be, he wasn’t trying to fetishize bleakness. He recalls a note a fan sent him after Season 4. “Which has one of our more hopeful endings,” Bob-Waksberg says. “But he had just seen Episode 11, and he emailed me saying, ‘I understand what your show is trying to tell me: Life is bitter and hopeless and it’s never going to get better, and I should stop hoping that it’ll get better or try to make it better. It’s just one slow slog down the drain.’” Bob-Waksberg responded by telling him to please watch Episode 12. “And then he did. He’s like, ‘I feel much better now.’ I was like, ‘OK, good.’”

    As the series moved along, everyone in BoJack’s orbit tried to pull themselves up from the depths, even if it seemed impossible. As they grew, so did the show—both thematically and narratively. The audience got an inside look at every major character’s psyche, including Todd’s. Paul was touched when the kind goofball became TV’s most prominent asexual character. “I love that they decided to just tackle his identity and [him] trying to understand, wrap his own hands around like, ‘Wait, who am I truly? Who am I?’” Paul says. “And then obviously he realized, ‘Oh, I’m asexual.’ He didn’t even know that was a thing. And so many people come up to me, and I can tell right away that they want to talk to me about BoJack and specifically about asexual identity. And a lot of people said, ‘Look, I didn’t even know that was a thing. I just knew that I was different and I was just trying to find my place, and you really shined a light on something that I didn’t even really know existed, even though I’m living in that skin.’ It’s pretty amazing.”

    Bob-Waksberg and the writers weren’t afraid to try new things. “At the beginning of just about every season, Raphael would pitch us a bold idea for one episode somewhere in the upcoming season,” says Fetter, now vice president of scripted series at Netflix. “He would pitch it off the cuff, and it always felt like it was going to be a terrible episode, leaving us skeptical. But inevitably, he would execute that big idea in such a mind-blowing way.”

    One of those episodes barely had any dialogue. And it was set underwater. “I said, ‘Really?’” Eisner recalls. Bob-Waksberg told him yes. That idea became Season 3’s hypnotic “Fish out of Water.”

    Then there was Season 5’s showstopper. Bob-Waksberg had always liked monologues. He wondered whether he could pull off an episode that was one long speech. “Just Will talking for 25 minutes,” he says. In the Emmy-nominated “Free Churro,” which Bob-Waksberg wrote, BoJack gives a wrenching eulogy at his abusive mother Beatrice’s funeral.

    At most table reads, Arnett goofed around with Tompkins and Sedaris. This was different. He was the only actor there. “I thought, ‘I wonder how this is going to go. I guess we’re about to find out,’” he recalls. “And it was just very strange. And then reading it out loud, it worked. Which is just such a testament to how strong the material was.”

    That day, the room was completely silent. “You could hear a pin drop,” Bob-Waksberg says. “It was just like everyone was on the edge of their seats. It was such this beautiful, intimate thing. It was incredible.”

    In 2019, Netflix announced that the sixth season of BoJack Horseman would be its last. “It was such a dream job, and we were hoping to do it forever,” Paul says. “And so it was a bit of a hard pill to swallow when Netflix said, ‘Look, we love you, but we’re going to do one more season, and that’ll be it.’”

    While making the final BoJack episodes, Bob-Waksberg didn’t allow himself to be wistful. He still had an ending to write. “It’s hard to internalize this idea of appreciating what you have while you have it,” he says. “There are moments where I enjoyed it, where I was having fun, where I thought, ‘This is cool. We’re doing something great. Look at me. I’m at TV fantasy camp.’ But I felt so much pressure all the time. Every season I thought, ‘This season has to top the last season, or people are going to hate us. People are going to hate me. This is the time where I let everybody down.’”

    But that time never came. In the last scene of the series finale, BoJack and Diane have an intimate conversation on a roof. “Because we’d set up that imagery earlier, and that felt like something we kept coming back to,” Bob-Waksberg says. The question he had was “How do we get to that roof?”

    Well, first BoJack hits bottom. After breaking into his old house, he nearly drowns in the pool. Then he’s sent to prison. He sees the sentence as comeuppance for a lifetime of shitty behavior. When he gets out of jail, he’s relieved to find that all the important people in his life have freed themselves from his grip. And BoJack, it seems, has freed himself from his own desperate need for validation. “I liked the idea of this final line, which Diane says, ‘It’s a nice night.’ And BoJack says, ‘Yeah, this is nice,’” Bob-Waksberg says. “Because it felt like so much of BoJack the character is him regurgitating the past or having anxiety about the future. And one of his difficulties is just being present in the moment. And so in a small way, giving him that, right at the end of the series, felt pathetic and rewarding and appropriate.”

    “I think Raphael is right,” Arnett says. “BoJack spent so much time and the show spent so much time looking back at what made him so flawed and so worried about how he was going to be perceived and how he could manipulate people in situations. I think at the end of the day, all of that was sort of futile.” Arnett knew that BoJack was never going to be redeemed. “He wasn’t given the tools to mature and grow up, and we sort of see why. So how could we expect him to be this great guy?” he says. “I always thought it was kind of a miracle that he ended up being a functioning person at all.”

    If there’s one thing that Arnett took from playing BoJack, it’s this: “Be honest with yourself about where you’re at. That’s what it taught me. I don’t always get it right, but I think I’m getting better at it.”

    As the discussion of mental health issues has become less stigmatized in America in the 10 years since the show premiered, dozens of TV series and movies have depicted people dealing with past trauma and depression. But few, if any, have resonated quite like BoJack Horseman. “That’s one of the best shows that I’ve been in any way involved with in, I don’t know, 50 years,” says Eisner, who had a hand in Happy Days, Cheers, and Family Ties.

    There’s a reason why Netflix’s Hollywood office has a big conference room named after the show. “I do think that BoJack Horseman showcased our ability to push boundaries in different mediums and certainly jump-started more animation and comedy in general,” Fetter says. “It’s probably the series most writers tell me they love all these years later.”

    In the middle of working on BoJack, Hanawalt bought her first horse. “I found her on Facebook,” she says. “It was an impulsive purchase.” She also got her own anthropomorphic, animal-centric show, Tuca & Bertie, which ran for three seasons between Netflix and Adult Swim. Hanawalt hopes that there’s still a place for the kind of series like hers, the kind of series that BoJack helped usher in. “I want there to be room for more experimentation and a little weirder stuff,” she says. “I like that. Keep it weird.”

    Right now, Bob-Waksberg is working on his next project. This time, he plans to put a little less pressure on himself this time around. He’s come a long way in the past five years.

    Before the last half season of BoJack Horseman was released, there was a premiere at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Bob-Waksberg took the stage to start the screening, with a note written down to himself at the top of his speech. Take a breath and take in this moment.

    “Because I felt like I hadn’t done that for the entire run of the show,” Bob-Waksberg says. “That’s something that I’ve tried to take with me since then, to not get so—like BoJack—hung up on the future or the past that I forget to be in the present.”

    [ad_2]

    Alan Siegel

    Source link

  • Indie rock and hubris: An oral history of three long-gone Phoenix music venues

    Indie rock and hubris: An oral history of three long-gone Phoenix music venues

    [ad_1]

    The history of music in the Valley of the Sun includes the ghosts of countless closed venues. Over the years, a slew of great clubs and dive bars have all gone under, either the victims of gentrification or the result of a mostly fickle population…

    [ad_2]

    Chris Coplan

    Source link

  • “There Is No Limit”: The Oral History of the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ Minions

    “There Is No Limit”: The Oral History of the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ Minions

    [ad_1]

    P.J. Byrne never liked making cold calls. While majoring in finance at Boston College in the early 1990s, he took a summer internship selling AAA-rated municipal bonds over the phone. At the time, he’d planned to be an investment banker on Wall Street, but after two weeks on the job, he realized dialing numbers wasn’t the path for him. “I was like, this just feels car salesman–y to me,” he says. “I wanted nothing to do with that.”

    About 15 years later, after pivoting to drama school and pursuing an acting career, Byrne gave cold-calling a second chance. In a taped audition for The Wolf of Wall Street, the actor leaned into his brief boiler room experience, took a gamble, and improvised an outrageous sales call monologue in which he pretended to scam a former client’s widow out of $100,000. In a devastated voice, he built a sob story around her husband’s financial intentions. “I started pilfering information from this woman,” Byrne says. “But on the other side of the phone, she can’t see that I’m humping the desk and having a blast.” Without realizing it, Byrne had channeled Jordan Belfort—the movie’s craven, money-hungry, criminal protagonist—to a T.

    It wasn’t long before he got a callback to go to New York—along with several other green actors, including Brian Sacca, Henry Zebrowski, and Kenneth Choi—to convene inside a suite at Le Meridien Hotel, where they would perform the same monologues in front of Martin Scorsese and casting director Ellen Lewis. The group was, understandably, nervous as hell. “I thought it was going to be a serious audition,” Byrne says. After a few minutes, however, everyone quickly realized the director wanted them to channel the absurdity of their original auditions, use prop desks and phones, and take advantage of the unusual group setting. “And then,” Byrne adds, “you heard him cackling.”

    “We were doing it almost like a scene,” Sacca says. “At one point, I said something on the phone: ‘If you buy these stocks, I will let you snort coke off of my tits.’ That got a big laugh from Marty and the other guys.”

    Though The Wolf of Wall Street mostly chronicles Jordan Belfort’s real-life rise and fall as a corrupt CEO (dynamically portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio), the movie’s hedonistic heart belongs to his unquestioning, cultlike worshippers, tracing their evolution from blue-collar schemers to suit-and-tie heathens eager to debase themselves in the name of money and power. The “merry band of brokers,” as Forbes nicknamed them—Nicky, Robbie, Chester, Alden, and Toby (Ethan Suplee)—might not be in charge, but they double down on their penny-stock-peddling debauchery. “Those are the types of people you’re looking to recruit,” Wolf writer Terence Winter says. “A guy who is morally malleable and hungry and has half a brain.”

    The three-hour comedy, released 10 years ago this week, ultimately becomes an American tragedy of unchecked testosterone, spiraling greed, and blind idolization. To pull off the corporate circus, everyone in the group—much like the characters they played—embraced excess and chased their id. Guided by Scorsese’s kinetic camera and Winter’s loyal adaptation of Belfort’s autobiography, the cast practiced slimy sales techniques, improvised office high jinks, snorted fake cocaine, simulated orgies, and lost their voices screaming at clients over the phone. Making it was a marathon of endurance, frat-like behavior, and pinch-me moments.

    “I was astutely aware,” Sacca says, “that the things that were happening were the stories I was going to be telling forever.”

    In 2007, when Winter first pored through Belfort’s The Wolf of Wall Street, he couldn’t wait to turn it into a Hollywood script. Belfort’s first-person account had plenty of cinematic moments—office sex parties, a quaalude trip, a sunken yacht—and followed a classic rise-and-fall narrative, but Winter mostly related to its ambitious protagonist. The pair were around the same age, had grown up in New York’s outer boroughs, and both dreamed of moving to Manhattan and becoming rich. In 1987, around the same time Belfort began his financial career at L.F. Rothschild, Winter had started as a legal assistant at Merrill Lynch. “I was literally working a quarter of a mile away from where Jordan was working on Wall Street,” Winter says.

    In other words, he knew this guy. He knew what drove him. But perhaps more importantly, he knew exactly how Belfort built and scammed his way to the top with a bunch of low-level nobodies. “They reminded me of my own friends,” Winter laughs. “These are guys who don’t have the strongest moral compass. They’re not necessarily college educated. These aren’t guys who would go the more traditional route to work for a legitimate Wall Street firm.” Effectively, they were door-to-door salesmen ready to make a quick buck who would pledge loyalty to anyone who could make them money. “As long as Jordan looked like the pillar of success, that’s all he really needed,” Winter says. “If you’re rich, they don’t care how you got there.”

    After securing an initial option deal and commitments from Scorsese and DiCaprio, Winter began investigating more about Belfort’s life. He met with Belfort’s parents, his ex-wife, and his financial victims. He drove to Long Island, toured Belfort’s home, and visited his country club. Most shrewdly, Winter convinced Belfort to reenact one of his daily pump-up speeches at CAA’s headquarters, where Winter taped his old sales presentation for reference. Soon after, Winter structured his screenplay with voiceover narration, changing key names and crafting composite characters—like Jonah Hill’s Donnie Azoff, Stratton’s second-in-command—for legal reasons. But he never strayed from the real-life insanity of Belfort’s cult creation. “I wrote the whole script in 17 days,” Winter says. “It was maybe the most fun I’ve ever had writing a script.”

    About five years later, the movie went into production, and the recently cast Belfort boys began their preparation with a sales crash course from the wolf himself, which clarified and informed the entire shoot. “It gave you a little glimpse,” Choi says. “When you have that killer shark energy, everybody else around you has to become a killer shark, or you get swallowed up and eaten.”

    Henry Zebrowski (Alden “Sea Otter” Kupferberg): When we first came together, we went to Leo’s apartment. He had Jordan come in and give an example of his ramp-up training speech.

    Kenneth Choi (Chester Ming): Sort of a mini sales pitch tutorial.

    Zebrowski: We were talking with [Belfort], and he said, “Have you guys ever seen $25,000?” And he pulled out a bunch of money and threw it on the table, which he probably had to scoop up and put back into his pockets. Then they popped a bunch of bottles.

    Terence Winter (writer): It’s really fascinating when you see somebody who understands the psychology behind how to set you up. It’s a whole series of questions and answers to the customer. It’s like a good cross-examination. I am going to move you into a corner where your only response can be the one I want.

    Choi: He would say, “If you ever get lost, follow the script. The script is your bible. The script is gold. Memorize the script.” Even in that little training session, you could kind of see him step back in time. He got swept up in it.

    Zebrowski: Jordan would say, “I just had this piece of paper come across my desk.” He was like, “You wave your hand across. I know it’s dumb, but this is how I talked to the dumb shits I worked with back in the day.”

    P.J. Byrne (Nicky “Rugrat” Koskoff): I was like, this guy is a fucking con artist. Holy shit. This scared the fuck out of me.

    Choi: I think it was valuable not just to hear how he would do it, but to see his energy and really feel it right in front of you. He was constantly teaching you how to divide and conquer.

    Winter: He basically applied high-level skills to a low-level sales force, taking the skills of a Jedi and bringing them into a shitty boxing gym. The idea that this is a legitimate, Wall Street–trained broker and using the spiel you would get from L.F. Rothschild or Goldman Sachs on a mailman. … It was like taking candy from a baby.

    Ethan Suplee (Toby Welch): We are playing blue-collar guys who couldn’t cut it as blue-collar guys. We suck at this. You’re not going to find a whole lot of legitimate guys who are willing to do that because there’s risk. You’re doing something completely immoral and unethical, but also illegal.

    Zebrowski: The direction for my character was like, this is kind of a revenge against society. Because everybody always told me I was fat and dumb and I was never going to be a millionaire and I was never going to make it. Now, here I am. Jordan believes in me. He saw something in me. I’m just like him.

    Suplee: Jordan was like the pied piper. He is the messiah of this industry of ripping people off.

    Zebrowski: Intelligent, self-conscious people get pulled into cults all the time. It’s because there’s extreme comfort in letting someone else take the wheel.

    Byrne: You’ve got to remember, these guys are all narcissists. And they all ruin the people closest to them. No one has a long-term relationship. If you get sucked into their orbit, you’re going to get chewed on and shit out. But while you’re there, it’s a fucking insane ride.

    In an early, seminal montage, DiCaprio mimics Belfort’s presentation, teaching his friends how to reel in customers and shake them down with nefarious tactics. Throughout the scene—which functions as a shared monologue—they follow their scripts and reap the rewards, helping turn Stratton Oakmont from a garage facility into a full-blown office. Using variations of their monologue auditions, the group of actors leaned into their comedic roots to make every office call sizzle.

    Zebrowski: It was like two weeks of rehearsal. Scorsese loved improv, but you better be very, very good. He doesn’t want time wasted.

    Brian Sacca (Robbie “Pinhead” Feinberg): They hired us because we were guys who could improvise, who could be in the moment and come up with some shit. Some of my favorite moments were: “We need you to do something.”

    Choi: We sit around a table, we have the script, and you would just throw everything against the wall. You’d react off someone’s bit, and then Leo and Jonah would react off it. I’d improvise one thing and you’d get the script back a couple days later and your stuff would be in there word for word.

    Winter: Anything beyond the dialogue is great. And sometimes, that’s where the gold is, especially when you get an actor who’s really good at it.

    Sacca: There were like six of us, including Ted Griffin, the on-set writer, finding how the Tetris of this sales monologue through that long montage is going to work up until an hour before we shot that.

    Byrne: Marty knew it would get boring. And he’s like, “How do we keep it interesting?”

    Sacca: There was one day of rehearsal where we’re all in a room around a table reading that monologue. And a debate happened between Scorsese and Leo: “Do we let the guys go free-form and improvise, or do we keep it contained and to the script? Finally, I just raised my hand: “Guys, you’re going to shoot this on a circle track, right?” And immediately, I’m like, “What the fuck am I saying? Am I going to get fired off this movie?”

    Byrne: [Scorcese’s] like, “I was thinking you’re next to Kenny, and I was going to put a [circle] track around both of you, let’s just say this little part of the monologue.” We were only supposed to do a paragraph, and the monologue is like three pages. We kept passing it and passing it. The room’s quiet now and filled with hundreds of extras, but everyone’s now listening. You can feel the energy. I’m in the zone of zones. Kenny’s in the zone. We’re just making this magic.

    Zebrowski: Everybody kind of got to just throw in on their character. And it allowed me to feel comfortable with these people. As we became masters of the universe, it was really important to kind of go from our dumb Queens clothes to the suits. You kind of see how that changes everything.

    Choi: I specifically was asked to gain 20 pounds. This guy is about excess. He eats everything, he consumes as much cocaine and women and booze as he can. And that’s where some of my little moments like the doughnut scene came from. He’s just a slovenly pig.

    Sacca: We all had our specific traits that we liked to play with. But we all had different levels of aggression. That kind of yes-men, doofus quality was a through line between a bunch of us.

    Once Stratton Oakmont grew into a Wall Street middleweight, the office became littered with shocking and vulgar HR violations. As chronicled by Belfort, almost anything related to sex, drugs, and alcohol happened within the walls of the brokerage firm, which more often looked like a bacchanalian madhouse. But Winter wasn’t too surprised by the colorful revelations. During his own brief stint in Merrill Lynch’s law department, he’d seen firsthand the kinds of unholy shenanigans taking place at Stratton. “Somebody had a marching band and brought a monkey onto the trading floor,” Winter says. “When the market closed at 4 p.m., everybody went out and just partied all night. And you’d get guys coming in the next morning hungover and just coked out of their minds.”

    Of course, the bigger firms couldn’t compete with Stratton’s no-holds-bar approach, something Scorsese and Winter became devoted to portraying and sometimes embellishing. Spitting in the face of discretion, the filmmaking team leaned into the company’s voracious and lustful appetite, depicting everything from stampeding strippers, to thrown-around little people, to impromptu animal stunts. Not to mention Belfort’s motivational speeches, which turned the office into a pep rally every afternoon. “The whole thing is about excess, and when is too much too much?” Winter says. “It just got crazier and bigger and out of control.”

    In some ways, showing it all became a sort of PSA, especially when things come crashing down in the third hour. “That’s the power of comedy,” Byrne says. “You’re able to turn the mirror on yourself with society and go, this is wrong.” In order to capture the chaos, the production moved from Manhattan into a massive office stage in Westchester, where, for nearly two months, the Belfort boys—alongside hundreds of extras—lived inside an unethical bubble catering to their leader’s absurdist ideas.

    Sacca: My voice was gone for a good six weeks because we were screaming so much.

    Choi: I wasn’t very talkative because I had to gain so much weight that I always felt like taking a nap.

    Sacca: I’ll shout out the AD and second AD, who had to wrangle 500 extras to get all of us to be screaming and then shut the fuck up in between takes. That was hard.

    Choi: There’s so much importance put on AI in our SAG contract. There’s a reason for that. When you’re in a real space with 300 human beings who are in the background, the energy just swells and you can feel it. Everybody is going apeshit trying to “sell, sell, sell,” and that informs your performance because you feel that surge of energy come through you as an actor.

    Suplee: There’s a lot of shit happening in the background of that movie that’s just as crazy as what’s happening in the foreground.

    Zebrowski: It was just us bullshitting for 12 hours being animals. Scorsese used to come by and go, “Yeah, you pigs, you ready to get going, you pigs?” We’re like, “Yeah!”

    Choi: There’s a scene where Leo walks through with a chimpanzee for no reason, which scared the shit out of me. The whole time I’m thinking, “This ape is going to fucking pounce on me.” I think I just bent down and did some fake lines of cocaine.

    Sacca: We had to snort a lot of cocaine in this movie. At the beginning, it was very finely powdered vitamin B12. And man, did it fucking feel good. It was so nice.

    Zebrowski: We could snort B12 forever. And we did. And we took every single opportunity we could because we were in a Scorsese movie, and we were animals.

    Sacca: About three months into production, they switched it up—they put some dog shit in there. And we were like, “No, no, no, no. Where’s our B12? Bring back the good shit!” We had to sit down with the props master and be like, “Come on, man, we have to snort this shit all day long.”

    Suplee: The other brokers and I were in our cast chairs reading books and playing chess, and they came and dragged me to this private set. Leo helped me get sober many years ago, and he was like, “Do you know how to [blow cocaine up someone’s butt]? I was like, “Yeah, I do know how to do this. Unfortunately, I am your technical drug adviser.” But I was happy to help. It was so funny to see them sitting on this closed set discussing amongst themselves, “How do we do this?”

    Choi: The head-shaving scene was a huge fucking deal. I think it was a woman who was somehow friends with Leo, and she offered to do it.

    Byrne: When we started shaving her head, it was shocking. I practiced with a razor on a fake scalp a lot because I was like, “I don’t want to ruin this moment for her.”

    Choi: You have 350 people yelling at P.J. to shave her head. It was so overwhelming.

    Byrne: You’re simultaneously going, “Holy fuck, this is crazy, I can’t believe this.” And then: “There’s the camera. Make sure you’re doing it perfectly for the camera.”

    Choi: [P.J.’s] hairpiece should have got its own credit, that’s for sure.

    Byrne: I still have the hairpiece. It was a thing having that on.

    Sacca: One of the little people we threw was an employee of Stratton Oakmont, and he told stories that were fucked up. These weren’t stories like, “I can’t believe what they did to me.” These were stories of: “Let me tell you what I did.” We were like, “Oh man, don’t share those.”

    Suplee: First of all, we couldn’t actually do it. It’s not like throwing a 50-pound weight. The guy weighed 150 pounds. That’s a lot to pick up and throw.

    Byrne: [Our characters] are not nice people. When you watch that and you know they’re throwing little people, that’s fucking disturbing. And that’s what these fucking guys did.

    Suplee: Terrifically uncomfortable. This is all the behavior of really abhorrent people. But sometimes as actors we have to lean into that discomfort. I also think that it’s important to show that.

    Sacca: I think I would have been more uncomfortable if the two guys who were a part of it weren’t as excited. They were both thrilled to be part of it. And they were really cool dudes.

    Zebrowski: My guesstimation is that 80 percent of it happened. And then the rest of it was mostly just having money and getting hammered with the same five guys and getting rejected at the club and going home to your wife.

    Suplee: If I had gotten rewarded for being at my worst, what would that do to me? It probably wouldn’t have been good for my life. I probably wouldn’t be alive. At my worst, I would be dead for sure, and that was what I was thinking about: Turn the bad behavior up. It’s kind of like frat boy culture. Bad behavior just seems to breed more bad behavior. And I don’t know if it’s that business that attracts and breeds that personality. How much sushi can you stuff down your face? How much can you drink? How much coke can you do? How much money can you make? How many girls can you sleep with? It’s just all part of it.

    Arguably the most obscene imagery of the movie comes from Belfort’s bachelor party, when the camera pans down the aisle of a plane that has been turned into a giant orgy. The scene, filmed on a soundstage in Queens for a day, lasts just a few seconds, but it became an instant memory for everyone involved.

    Sacca: We’re in a metal tube, there’s some hot-ass lights, and there are 60 naked people at 8:30 in the morning.

    Choi: It’s so fucking cramped. Everyone’s sweaty because everyone’s kind of in a rambunctious state. And you’re doing it over and over and over for this poor Steadicam guy who’s trying to get everything.

    Zebrowski: It was a long day.

    Suplee: This was my first experience with an intimacy coordinator. I suspect they invented that job for Wolf of Wall Street.

    Sacca: We had a rehearsal where we met with the choreographer, and we were partnered with people who we were going to be interacting with. It never doesn’t get weird. I couldn’t help but think: My parents are going to see this.

    Zebrowski: I was with a couple of Rockettes and a couple of professional dancers. You have a super awkward moment where you’re having fake sex with someone for an entire take and then you realize the camera wasn’t on you.

    Byrne: The camera’s tracking. We’re going, boom, boom, boom. Where do I want to be? I know I have one second. What can we do in that one “boom” that no one else is doing?

    Choi: In between takes everyone’s real respect, respect, respect. Robes come off. I just kept looking up in the air because you don’t want to be leering. Then you get in the mode of: “This is just about excess.”

    Zebrowski: I remember having to psych myself up. I was sitting there in my chair, saying to myself, “You love strippers! You love cocaine! You love going nuts!” And I was like, “This is your favorite day. So you go in there and have your favorite day you’ve ever had.”

    Byrne: I had a bachelor party, which was G-rated. But I remember my friends made me walk around in a meat bathing suit with a banana hammock. I’m like, if I’m doing that at mine, what are these despicable, wealthy 10-year-olds doing? At the time, I was walking past the Museum of Sex—like, there’s got to be something that’s going to trigger something disgusting for me. Remember those Pez bracelets that you could eat as a kid? They had that in an underwear version. I was like, that’s what I’m going to wear.

    Choi: P.J.’s attitude was, they’re illicit stockbrokers, they do a bunch of drugs, consume all this booze. There is no limit. There is no top. Anything fucking goes.

    Byrne: I went to Sandy Powell, the Oscar award–winning costume designer with jet-red hair. I’m like, “This is candy underwear that just covers my dingle-dangle junk.” She looked at me like I was a despicable, disgusting man. She paused for 10 seconds, but it felt like two days. She looks at me. She looks at that. She just goes, “OK.”

    Suplee: I’ve lost a lot of weight, I’ve got loose skin. I’ve never once felt proud of my body. I have a lot of body issues. I don’t really ever want to do a sex scene. I have four daughters. And then you’ve got Henry Zebrowski, who has got no body shame and is willing to put himself out there.

    Zebrowski: I have done naked improv for a long time. Nudity just becomes the scenery. You’re kind of like, “When’s this going to get over with?”

    Suplee: I wound up pitching stuff that allowed me to keep my clothes on. What if we’re playing cards? What if I’m asleep? What if I’m playing solitaire?

    Sacca: He’s my favorite moment because he’s just sitting there having a conversation with somebody. It made it better.

    Suplee: I have not been to an orgy, but I imagine that’s what an orgy smells like. Like every private part coming into contact with a private part.

    Zebrowski: It got very human in that room.

    Sacca: That day was Scorsese’s 70th birthday. We had cake.

    In the midst of shooting, actor and character began to blur. Every day that DiCaprio arrived to set, he greeted hundreds of screaming women and paparazzi, affirming his A-list stature, before going to work, where he’d receive even more admiration on the fake trading floor. It was an eye-opener for Zebrowski and the other young actors, who couldn’t believe the way their leader had to operate—and how that might affect someone’s identity. “It was weird how many mountains had to move for him to move,” Zebrowski says. “I will never say he’s trapped, but he can’t go anywhere.”

    Leo’s celebrity—and his connections around the city—further accented Zebrowski’s similarities to his own character. “I’m from a working-class family. This is my first time seeing any of this shit,” he says. “I went to the back door of 1 Oak, and you could see the models register. I’m not supposed to be there.” There was a similar vibe once the cameras began rolling. “All these friends and stockbrokers wanted to do was please Jordan,” Choi says. “Everyone on set, all they wanted to do was please Leo and Marty and Jonah. You would have given everything in the scene to make sure that they got what they needed.”

    Unlike Belfort, however, who wanted his employees leveraged and desperate, DiCaprio came to set open-minded and generous, wanting to nail every scene with his collaborators. Ahead of speeches and group scenes, his dedication to preparation became an infectious trait and inspired the cast to deliver unblemished, gonzo performances. “When you have 500 people worshipping this guy, you can feel how energizing and exciting that would be,” Sacca says.

    Suplee: When Leo’s giving those speeches, you almost feel like a fistfight could break out. He’s sending people off to war. He’s the general, and we’re going to go die for him.

    Zebrowski: Chills still go up my spine when I think about it sometimes.

    Sacca: He would come in with these 15-minute monologues, word perfect, accent perfect, still being able to improvise on top of it, coming up with ideas in the moment.

    Zebrowski: He could do it one way, they’d give him a note, he’d do it a completely different way. They’d give him a note, he’d go back to the old way, mixed with the second way.

    Sacca: I was enthralled with it, but it wasn’t necessarily the personality of Leonardo DiCaprio or Jordan Belfort’s words, it was this fucking performance that was like, “Holy shit, I don’t think I can do that.” I can’t crank out these monologues and do a gazillion takes of them and then be like, “All right, let’s do another one.”

    Suplee: I’ve never seen a crack in Leo’s professionalism. They knock on his door to tell him they’re ready on set, and he is exploding from his chair. He is always prepared.

    Zebrowski: For a bunch of green dudes who weren’t movie stars, he was extremely generous. That’s where the Belfort comparison doesn’t work, because that dude would have never shown up and done the dirty work himself.

    Choi: It’s Hurricane Sandy. Everybody got sick over a three-week period. At some point, Leo got so sick that they shut down shooting for a day. We come back, and it’s the “I’m not leaving” scene.

    Winter: I was writing it with Leo in mind. I had taped some of what Jordan said and then added my own embellishment to make it flow a little clearer or better if it needed it. A lot of times, it didn’t. Some of his stuff was just pure gold.

    Byrne: We stayed up all night because the days moved. And I was like, “How the fuck is he going to do this?”

    Choi: I happened to be outside smoking a cigarette, and I watched him in front of his trailer. I was like, “Oh, this guy’s rehearsing.” He would go through his motions. You’d see him kind of shake his head, turn around, go back to his starting mark in the parking lot, and do it again and again and again. He’s a craftsman. He’s pumped up with meds, he comes in, he does one rehearsal, and I’ll never forget, I could see in his head he missed a line. So he took one step back, remembered the line, and carried through with it. After that, he didn’t flub once, and he did it over and over with so much energy.

    Sacca: It’s like a preacher, like Jim Jones speaking into a microphone to his disciples.

    Choi: He was walking down the aisle bashing this microphone on his head. The prop guy came and showed us. It was caved in because he was smashing it on his skull.

    Byrne: He’s a baller, dude. And honestly, that’s the world that I like to work in and live in. All day we’re here to kill. When we’re on set, we’re not coming back here again. Let’s make sure we fucking get it.

    Zebrowski: [In that moment], Jordan’s not a bad guy. He’s not a fucking criminal. He’s helping all of us. You just don’t understand that what he’s doing is including you in his crime.

    Byrne: When you see me get crazy at the end, it’s like, I don’t want my “god” to leave. I don’t want this meal ticket to end.

    Choi: In the wedding scene where we’re all dancing and stuff, [Leo] had this huge case of 5-Hour Energy drinks. He came in right before like, “Everyone take one! Everyone take one!” And then we slammed it, and then we went into the scene.

    Zebrowski: They’re putting us all in a circle, and they just have the music going.

    Choi: We actually were talking about the “kid-and-play” dance. I go out there and do my dance move, and I knew to throw it right to him so he’d come out pop-locking. I was shocked that he was so fucking good with the pop-locking.

    Zebrowski: I guess he’d been doing it for forever on his own.

    Byrne: How fucking insane a dancer is Kenny? And then Leo saw that. He’s like, let’s fucking go. And then everybody had their moment to be who they were.

    Choi: He looked at me and went, “Come here, come here, come here,” so that we could do the kid-and-play dance. That’s why he’s amazing. There’s some actors out there who don’t want you to steal the light.

    When The Wolf of Wall Street premiered on Christmas Day, many critics lauded Scorsese’s return to bombastic filmmaking and comedic storytelling. But a vocal contingent couldn’t get past the movie’s inflated running time and excessive antics, believing they celebrated Belfort’s unethical behavior. As David Edelstein argued in his Vulture review, the movie is “three hours of horrible people doing horrible things and admitting to being horrible,” later calling it “thumpingly insipid.” Later, in an open letter to LA Weekly, a woman connected to Belfort accused the movie’s characters of “exacerbating our national obsession with wealth and status and glorifying greed and psychopathic behavior.”

    The critique resembled the conversations surrounding Goodfellas, despite the fact that both movies highlight their protagonists’ calamitous, unglamorous falls. “When you see Ray Liotta getting chased by helicopters and he’s fucking high out of his mind on cocaine, at no point do you look at that and say, ‘God, being a gangster is pretty cool,’” Suplee says. Wolf’s length and its punishing scenes of depravity, he adds, only helped illustrate the fatiguing and ruinous state that Belfort inspired and embodied. “It was the same experience I had with drugs, which is: You get high, and then you’re just chasing that experience over and over again and you never get it. You always get some muted version of it.”

    Ten years removed, it’s perhaps easier to see the movie as a warning signal, an example of how scammy, magnanimous figures can organize a cultlike following and engender loyal defenders based on flashy facades and mostly empty promises. The examples of the last decade—the fanaticism around Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and so many more—feel akin to Belfort’s own crew hyping up their public con man. “It’s all about selling dreams,” Byrne says. “They are so good at selling you to make you buy in on believing it. And they create this world around them that you’ve now been absorbed into.”

    Byrne, of course, might as well have been referencing the movie’s own world. For each of the Belfort boys, The Wolf of Wall Street remains the most memorable experience of their careers, a testament to the camaraderie they found together and Scorsese’s commitment to capturing everything as it looked. “Not just because it’s Martin, not just because it’s Leo,” Choi says. “It was the scope of it. You have everything there for you. And the more stuff you have that’s real, the more it informs the performance.” It made them itch to go deeper and wilder.

    As Sacca notes, “I couldn’t wait to get off set and call my wife and say, ‘Let me tell you what fucking happened today.’”

    Jake Kring-Schreifels is a sports and entertainment writer based in New York. His work has also appeared in Esquire.com, GQ.com, and The New York Times.

    [ad_2]

    Jake Kring-Schreifels

    Source link

  • ‘The Glowing Ball State’, ‘Big Brighty’, ‘Ol’ Ouchy’: An Oral History Of The Sun

    ‘The Glowing Ball State’, ‘Big Brighty’, ‘Ol’ Ouchy’: An Oral History Of The Sun

    [ad_1]

    Read more…

    [ad_2]

    Source link