PREVIEW: Backer Bonus Episode on 'The Fugitive' (1993)
Become a backer of Daniel or Jack to get exclusive access to a new bonus episode. Becoming a patron also brings access to all other bonus episodes. At least one new Patreon exclusive bonus episode every month. This time we talk about The Fugitive (1993). The Fugitive (1993 film) - Wikipedia Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
IDSG bonus episodes are a regular extra just for Patreon backers of myself or Daniel.
Here's a preview of the new one.
Another thing I noticed on this rewatch is how incredibly brisk and efficient it is.
You meet Richard Kimball, You find out who he is, in terms of his job, his wife, his friends, his personality, his career situation.
You see his wife.
You see his colleagues, who are important to the plot.
The wife gets murdered.
He gets arrested, interrogated, tried, convicted, and sent off to prison.
And that's like 20 minutes!
That's the first 20 minutes!
Yeah.
It's just bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
That's it.
And then, as you say, the last 20 minutes is the resolution.
He's worked it out.
He's having a fight.
The cops are there.
Helicopter.
Gun.
Bad guy gets knocked out.
Sam Girard and Richard Kimball are friends in the car.
That's the last 20 minutes.
And the entire hour 10 in the middle is just Richard Kimball investigating and evading capture.
That's obviously the point of the film.
The film knows what the point of itself is.
The point is Harrison Ford is on the run and he's investigating and evading capture.
And that's the entire middle section.
But in order to get you there, the film has to do this incredible backstory and it just says, oh, we could do that in 20 minutes.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Whereas again today, it would trudge along for an hour before it got you there.
Like, Eternals again, an hour in when I gave up.
Basically nothing had happened!
And this movie, it's already spent its load in the first hour, or at least it has done the thing that another movie could have done for four hours.
Again, it is possible to look at the first 25 minutes of this and go, well, that's an episode of a TV series.
That's an hour-long pilot.
And then the next 20 minutes.
That's two or three episodes of a modern TV series, the first 20 minutes.
I don't know.
I'm not disagreeing with you.
I'm not, you know, like, like, I mean, this is a criticism of, like, modern TV.
And, you know, I will definitely, you know, like, plot blocking is a thing in which, like, you know, creatives are told, like, all right, look, we need to do 10 episodes.
And so your plot has to, like, go out of run along 10 episodes.
And here are the story beats.
Here's the stride.
And so, like, if you're watching a show like Game of Thrones happened.
That's why Game of Thrones happened.
That's why Game of Thrones was a TV show, because in George R. R. Martin's books, they found the perfect source material for modern serialized high prestige television, because that's what George R. R. Martin does.
He sets plots in motion in the first little bit, and then he spends the entire rest of the 700 pages of the book blocking the plot, or the 17 different plots that are all happening simultaneously, blocking them from progressing.
That's a George R. R. Martin book.
So obviously somebody looked at that and thought, now that's television.
I think of the original Jessica Jones season, the season one of Jessica Jones, which I quite like, but that's.
Oh, I like that.
Yeah.
I think that's 10 episodes, which really could have been six.
Yeah.
Like, you know, it only needed six.
There's a lot of, and then we're introducing this other character who's going to be like a main thing in another series or whatever, you know?
And yeah, we don't, we don't need all of that, you know?
And, you know, it's very clear that they were given, you know, sort of a guideline of only so much can happen in an episode because you want people to watch this one and then want to watch the next one.
You know, and that's, again, the medium is the message, you know, the mature conditions by which it's made affect the artistic integrity of it.
Yeah, and it's an interesting thing with texts now that there's a kind of, you can sense somehow, sometimes, that there's a tension between those essentially commercial imperatives and the intentions and the desires artistically of the people.
When the people behind the texts, the various authors, are very engaged in what they're doing.
And I think Jessica Jones Season 1 is kind of like Exhibit A at this.
It's a really good example.
Like, you have an entire episode of Jessica Jones season one, which is a plot by way.
It's just the plot is completely stalled.
It's an episode where she's with Kilgrave and he takes her back to her family home or something.
And it's a complete, plot-wise, it's almost a complete waste of an episode.
Nothing happens, basically.
But you can feel the artistic imperatives of the various authors of the show pulling against that, because they say, right, okay, we're stalled here for a bit.
But they managed to actually do something quite interesting with that episode, thematically and in terms of characterization.
I do want to just reference the, you know, if they can dye the river green one day of the year, why can't they dye it blue the other 364 days?
It's such a great little moment.
It's just, it's such a great, like, it's a great little moment.
I mean, you know, it's so stupid, but like, I love it.
Um, you know, and, uh, I've never been, I live not that far from Chicago.
One day, I will go to Chicago on St.
Patrick's Day, and I will witness the Green River, and I will wear the green hat and the trench coat that Harrison Ford is running from Girardin, and that will be the apotheosis of my existence, so.
Yeah, yeah, and as you march through the streets, you'll sort of look furtively behind you and pretend you're running from Tommy Lee Jones.
Yeah, that's how it goes.
Yeah, I'm going to be doing, I'm going to do cosplay.
