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Oct. 25, 2024 - I Don't Speak German
01:22:04
UNLOCKED! Bonus Ep34 'Dave' (1993)

We continue our election year series on movies about the US President, with a chat about Ivan Reitman's Capraesque 1993 political-romantic-comedy-drama-satire(???) Dave, starring Kevin Kline as a lovable goofball Presidential lookalike who ends up actually pretending to be the President, kindasorta accidentally pulling off a (well-meaning) one-man coup d'état, enmeshed in the plots of the evil White House Chief of Staff (Frank Langella), and falling in love with the First Lady (Sigourney Weaver).  This bonus episode was originally exclusive for Patreon subscribers. Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent.  Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1

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Time Text
Wanted.
Ambitious individual for leadership position.
Be prepared for difficult application process and stressful work environment.
Challenges?
Many.
Rewards?
Numerous.
Failure?
Possible.
Your employer?
The American people.
The few chosen have been the presidents.
And welcome, folks, to bonus episode, whatever number it is, the second in our series about movies about the American presidency.
And our last one, about Air Force One, was rapturously received, I suppose.
I don't know, really.
Nobody said anything to me, but I assume it was.
So, of course, we're going to be continuing.
And we, by the way, is me and Daniel Harper, who's here also, I hope, anyway.
Yes, I am here.
You are not speaking into the void.
Or if you are, I am also here in the void, so it's fine.
I was going to say, we're both in the void, in the dark, echoing void.
No, no, it's always good to know that I'm not talking to myself, because I often do that.
Anyway, yeah, so this episode is going to be about the movie Dave.
When was this released?
There's some context clues, but...
1993.
May 7th, 1993.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's very 1993, isn't it?
I think we might discuss that, so yes.
I think we might discuss that, yeah.
So Dave is an Ivan Reitman movie, starring Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Frank Langella, and a billion other people.
Who you will recognize, but whose names you might possibly not know, but you'll go.
It stars hundreds of, oh yeah, it's him, or hundreds of, oh yeah, her, yeah, faces from the 90s.
And it's a movie about, let me see if I've got this right, it's a movie about a guy who is hired by the Secret Service to be a body double for the president.
So that he can be seen to be leaving a hotel where he's actually staying so that he can have sex with one of his secretaries.
And this is all apparently like official White House stuff, like the staff of the White House organized this.
It's not just...
I want to highlight a moment here.
It's not just the Secret Service, although I believe this is done through the Secret Service.
It's literally the White House chief of staff and the chief communications person.
Those are the two people who are running this operation.
And apparently, they're the only two who know.
Anyway, we can get into that.
This is run not just by White House officials, but the top people.
The chief of staff is personally running this thing.
Like, you know, the president needs to get him some strange from the secretary who works right outside his office.
And therefore, we're just going to do that now.
You know, it's just it's just a it's just presented, you know, without without without commentary, really.
It's just well, this is just clearly what's happening.
You know, like it.
It seems like an over-complicated way of going about things.
Let me put it this way.
Yeah, he needs to be seen to be leaving, but he's not actually leaving.
He's staying in the hotel so that he can have a nice night with his secretary, who's played by Laura Linney in a very early role.
Very young Laura Linney in a role that's frankly beneath her.
But yeah, And this is, as I say, this is apparently like the entire White House knows this is going on, or the Chief of Staff and the Secret Service, they're all in on this.
And there's no easier way of achieving this, clearly.
But while he's with Laura Linney, I should say the president is being played by Kevin Kline, who was about the hottest shit in Hollywood in 1993, I suppose.
And so, of course, is the guy who is his double, Dave, the titular Dave.
And while he's having a very nice time with his secretary in the hotel room, he has a stroke and goes into a coma, literally while they're engaged in a coma.
And so the evil White House chief of staff decides to keep the hapless body double on as a pretend president.
For...
reasons?
I shouldn't...
It seems to me they don't trust the vice president, because the vice president is actually a good man, a moral man, who's not going to do all the shit that they want to do.
Right, he's an honest man.
This is going to come up later.
This is a significant plot point, but...
They see the vice president as unable to rise to the occasion for their nefarious plans.
And this really is like the chief of staff is the guy who's like, no, no, I run things.
This is my White House.
This is what I do.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
The chief of staff, Bob Alexander, who's played by Frank Langella, or Langella, I'm not quite sure how you pronounce that, in total, just complete open villain mode.
Like, he just goes around just glowering at everybody all the time with these cold, dead, murderous, sociopathic eyes.
He never speaks.
He's practically playing Dracula here.
He is, basically, yeah.
Yeah, except he's more sinister here than he was when he played Dracula.
Because when he plays Dracula on Broadway in the movie version, he's like a sexy, young, romantic Dracula.
This guy is just...
You know, he never speaks except in a low, dead, quiet villain voice like this.
He might as well be called Bob Evil, basically.
And it's great.
I love it.
I think it's great.
But as it goes on, it becomes clear that he's got a Richard III sort of thing going on, which I love that.
I love that he's actually...
Because it's like him and the president...
Who's got the most generic...
We talked last time about generic president names.
This is even more generic.
Last time it was President James Marshall.
This is President Bill Mitchell, which is just, like, complete...
You know, it's not there.
It's basically not there, that name.
There's going to be a quiz at the end of this series as to which president is which in which movie.
LAUGHTER So as it goes along, and this is really well written, actually.
This is one of the things I wanted to say.
Watching this, it was a real...
Window back into a long-vanished era where stuff like this...
This is completely inconsequential fluff.
There's nothing to this whatsoever.
But nevertheless, everybody involved in crafting this gave 110% and put in a great job.
And every part of it is beautifully done.
It's written, the plot is perfect, it's timed perfectly, everything.
They literally, I mean, I know what I sound like, but they literally do not make films like this anymore.
Just entertainment crap, but to a really high basic standard.
You just don't get stuff like this anymore.
Well, they spend too much money on movies now.
Like, this movie cost, I was looking at Wikipedia, you know, this movie cost $28 million.
And made $92 million.
And even adjusting for inflation, they don't make movies for $50 million anymore.
Everything has to be $100 million.
It's either made for $400,000 or it's a $100 million movie.
And you don't get like big name actors to come into your movie without, you know, paying what they're worth, you know, like, and so everything has to be this giant production.
It has to do certain things and they're just pushed through this development pipeline.
Like this would have been developed to death if it had been like done by a major studio in 2020.
Like, it's just, you know, it's just a different world.
It's a different world.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, a movie is a huge investment of time and money.
It takes like, I don't know, like a big Hollywood movie, it can take a year, two years plus to make.
So there's a huge number of people on the payroll being paid to do it, you know, a huge amount of work for a year Plus, they can't afford to do that now unless they're expecting to make just hyper-profits.
Right.
You know, so as you say, movies like this just don't get made.
And you can't sell toys on this either.
Like, you can't sell Dave the action hero.
You can't sell Dave the happy meal.
You know, and that's the other thing that goes on is, like, everything that's made has to be, like, connected into some, like, ancillary marketing, you know?
That's going to give you even more money.
I saw this comment that all the Marvel movies, you can like them or hate them or whatever, but these are not movies.
These are commercials for action figures.
That's what these movies are meant to be.
Some of them are more effective at it than others, but that's just what it is.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, big movies now, they exist for the same political economic reason that back in my childhood, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe used to exist.
It was made in order to flog plastic toys.
Right.
Yeah.
This is just a drama.
This is just a comedy drama or a dramedy, I suppose.
A romantic comedy at that.
Cause there's a, there's a strong romantic element to this.
Yeah, no, definitely a romantic comedy, drama satire.
I don't think.
Maybe.
I mean, I'll give it that.
It's fine.
I don't know.
Which makes you feel better?
Is that it has a tiny bit of satire that's well-executed, or it's just not really aiming for a satire?
Whichever one you think makes the movie sound better, it's that one.
That's how I feel about it.
Yeah, absolutely.
But the point is that it's just a story.
It's a one-off story.
It's just characters, plot, plot.
Beginning, middle, end.
That's it.
You bought your ticket into the cinema.
Maybe you bought a Coke and some popcorn and a hot dog.
Maybe you didn't.
But that's it.
You went for an evening at the cinema.
You paid for your ticket.
You watched a story.
Well told, within a certain given value of these terms.
And that's it.
And as you say, you know, maybe you bought the VHS. God, this is 93.
Maybe you bought the novelization.
But that's the most we're talking about here, isn't it?
Really.
Yeah.
Pay-per-view was a thing around this time.
And this may have been one I saw first on pay-per-view.
Because that era, like around 93, 94 was when we got pay-per-view in my area.
But that's basically just a movie rental at that point.
It was just like one of the...
One of those now be gone to time sort of options.
You gave me the numbers a little while ago.
Is that total gross or is that theatrical?
Do you know?
Because I bet this did well on home rental.
Yeah, yeah.
The box office notation on Wikipedia, like if you just look at the...
It's always just the domestic box office total.
So that wouldn't include any kind of international numbers.
or it definitely wouldn't include like VHS DVD you know later on it would be on DVD Blu-ray etc but no that doesn't include those so this made money this made bank for what it is this was a popular movie in 1993 this made real money yeah Yeah.
So anyway, all that byway being said, I was sort of going through the plot.
The evil White House chief of staff, Bob Evil, played by Frank Langella, he decides...
Because as it comes out, as the movie progresses, it becomes clear that...
Bob and the other guy, the guy with the beard and the bowtie, and the president.
Alan, who is the communications director, by the way.
Okay.
Alan Beard and the president are like...
They're kind of a little gang of criminals, it seems to be implied.
Oh, yes.
As the film goes on, that becomes even more obvious.
Yes.
No, absolutely.
And...
Again, it's strongly implied that Bob has kind of...
It's kind of Frank Underwood.
It's kind of House of Cards, isn't it?
Except it doesn't take itself ridiculously seriously and be incredibly pompous and pretentious about it.
And also, I think this is another thing that's going to be a theme of these.
Which party?
I think it's strongly implied, particularly in that sort of Vox Pops section where you get loads of cameos from actual politicians.
I think it's strongly implied that the president, Bill Mitchell, is supposed to be a Republican.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
I think that's right.
And I think there's a...
There's another angle at this, when you know a little bit about the history.
So this film was written by Gary Ross, who's going to go on to do a whole bunch of...
He's going to go on to write and direct Pleasantville.
He's going to write and direct Seabiscuit.
He's going to write and direct one of the Hunger Games movies.
I forget which one, but he does that.
He also did the Ocean's 8, the all-female version of the Ocean's 11 franchise, which I quite like.
Oh, yeah, I remember that.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I remember seeing the adverts for that.
It's quite good.
I saw it theatrically.
That's one of those films that I was excited for, and I thought it was very well made.
If you like that Ocean's franchise, then that's one of the better ones in that franchise, I think.
I've never seen any of them.
All right.
Well, I can tell you that Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Eight are both quite good.
I would recommend them.
They are very fun, like...
Feel good entertainment.
There's nothing else going on.
There's no really interesting thing there.
But if you want to spend two hours of your life and have just a nice time watching a heist, they're very effective at that.
And so unlike where we were talking...
So it's written by Gary Ross, who also co-wrote Big.
And so the first two big things that he did is the Tom Hanks vehicle, Big.
And then this.
And then he goes on to write and direct Pleasantville.
And so these are all like big, high-concept movies, you know?
know like the guy who looks like the president like that just sounds like the worst idea for a movie ever but what he does is he executes at the highest level imaginable at doing the goofy comedy that's also got some dramatic elements and a romance in it about the guy who happens to look like the president and he's trying to trying to get at something um but it is very i mean the word that i would use is i mean it's just it's just copper-esque it's it's explicitly copper-esque you know
but absolutely absolutely yeah and so so so ross what i was getting at here ross was a he actually worked on the dukakis campaign in 1988 and was inspired at that time to write a movie like this basically around his own personal anger around the SNL scandal Pardon me, not the SNL scandal, but the Iran-Contra affair.
And so I think there is a very real sense in which This is like an alternate universe Reagan that we're kind of seeing.
Because he would have had intimate familiarity with what presidential politics was in that very moment, in that very era.
And watching Dukakis get crushed by H.W. And just seeing it.
And once you see...
I mean, look, the plot of this is you've got this kind of sinister president who nonetheless is a great communicator.
people eat out of the palm of his hands then suddenly he has an annual he has a stroke and he's replaced by the guy like the actor who just sort of looks like the president and suddenly like things are better now because he actually is just a decent guy and really the problem was that reagan was just personally obnoxious and toxic right um and so i kind of came into this i mean i always thought of this
as like you know i mean it's it's a guy who's typically secretary and it's to the president of the United States in his 1983.
I mean, this is a Bill Clinton thing, right?
I was going to say, Bill Mitchell is kind of simultaneously Happy Bush and Bill Clinton, isn't he?
He is.
He is.
Yeah, no, definitely.
And so – but no, no, I think Reagan is a better way to understand what this movie is trying to say.
So yeah, I think in this one, I think it's pretty clear that Ross would not have written this as a Democratic president.
Even though it's not stated, I don't think that Ross would have seen – Certainly now we can see a lot more Clinton-esque or even Obama-esque kind of patterns of what the real Bill Mitchell is doing.
But I don't think that was in the head at the time.
I think this is clearly a Republican president.
So that's where I land on it.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
So yeah, as I say...
Evil White House Chief of Staff is kind of planning a Frank Underwood, Richard III, I will eventually be president thing.
And it's like the president's aneurysm speeds up his plans, and he's obviously planning like...
Well, he actually says it.
He has a conversation with the other guy, the bow tie guy.
He says, you know, we keep this guy on for a little while, and then he appoints me vice president.
We get rid of the current vice president.
We dump this first national thing.
We dump not white water on vice president.
It's explicitly an SNL scandal, so it's a savings and loan thing that's going on.
It's SNL, yeah.
It is absolutely like the 80s all over again.
This is so a 1985 scandal, you know, that it hurts.
It hurts out in 1985.
Yeah, there is a great bit later on where he's addressing a full meeting of Congress and he lists the crimes that he's been charged with and it's like, oh, influencing federal regulators to let big money donors Get away with stuff and interfering with the justice department investigation and listening to all this stuff.
It's obviously supposed to be terribly shocking.
And it's like, well, obviously, you know, his, his career, you know, his presidency is over.
He's just, it's so, it's so depressing.
It's like, that's a Tuesday now, like Democrat or Republican.
That's kind of a Tuesday now.
Yeah.
But yeah, no.
So yeah, continue with the recounting of the plot as far as you want to go.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
So, yeah, his plan is to dump the scandal on the vice president, and then he resigns.
And the fake president that he's installed, who he's obviously delighted that he has the same president, but now he has a version of that president who's completely under his control.
He can just tell him what to do.
So he says, you appoint me vice president, and then we get rid of this guy, this nobody, and I become president.
So that's obviously the culmination of his entire career in politics, really, is leading up to this.
Get to be president, you know.
But Dave, who is the ordinary guy who has sort of fallen bass-ackwards into kind of being the president, he, of course, initially he treats the whole thing as just a great big lark, you know.
But then he starts to think...
I can actually do good with the power that I have.
And he starts doing...
He gets his friend, because he runs a temp agency, and he's friends with a local business guy where he is, who's played by Charles Grodin.
I love Charles Grodin.
I want you to do this, but I think there's a really important bit that there's a sea change here, because at first, you're right.
He is absolutely doing the...
Little kid gets to be president for a week, kind of, like, you know, the fun stuff.
This is big, isn't it?
This is big.
This is a kid gets to be an adult.
Because, like, I mean, Kevin Kline is obviously, I mean, Kevin Kline is delightful here.
Like, he's great, you know.
But, like, again, there's that whole thing of, like, we really don't get a sense of, like, who Dave is, like, as a human being.
We know that he owns, like, an unemployment agency.
He's just, yeah, he's kind of a compassionate goof-off.
That's the impression, isn't it?
Exactly, exactly.
Like, he rides a bike, you know.
Not that riding a bike is cool.
That's absolutely.
Semiotically, it's clear to his personality.
He's just carefree goofball.
He's got an apartment.
We learned that he used to be married, but now he's divorced.
And it didn't take was all he has to say about that.
But that's really all you ever learn about the guy.
He's got a big heart.
He wants to do the best by people.
And he's got a wide social network, including Charles Grodin, who runs an accounting firm.
And who has taken apparently at least six or seven of the people that just need a job right now off of Dave's employment agency.
He's just got the Alka-Seltzer commercial face for the entire time.
You see him in that moment as like, I can't take another one.
I don't have the payroll for this.
And it's like, dude, it's just for a week.
It's fine.
Everybody works.
And I feel for Dave here.
He's doing the right thing.
He's doing the best he can to get people a job today.
To make sure that is...
You're doing a great job there, Dave.
We appreciate you.
And so he goes into this and he's doing the kid for a day president thing.
He's having a great time.
He's absolutely – apparently the approval ratings are through the roof on this because he's doing all the man of the people stuff because he's actually a man of the people and it actually comes across – He's a great communicator.
He's a great communicator.
One of my favorite bits, it's even in the trailers, where he's got the big mechanical arms in the auto factory, and he starts dancing with them and stuff.
It's so silly, but it's just so effectively done.
This would be a great little campaign stop for the President of the United States.
And he's got real compassion.
What he learns is that the First Lady absolutely despises the President of the United States.
She is played by Sigourney Weaver.
She is someone who actually believes in things, who actually believes in doing right for the people.
And her big thing is homelessness.
Her big pet issue because...
The most uncontroversial social issue you can possibly...
Well, then you find out...
It used to be.
Sorry, I keep forgetting what world I live in now.
Sorry about that.
I mean, but the cutting of homeless shelters was always a thing.
This was always an issue.
But there's a moment where they go and do one of these meet and greets.
They do one of these photo ops at a homeless shelter.
And Dave has a fun little moment with one of the kids who's just sitting out by himself.
I think he's implied to be autistic or something.
Sad, lonely one in the corner.
Sad, lonely one in the corner.
And Dave is like, and even, I mean, he does this thing that's like, you know, because obviously the press corps is coming up and they don't want to watch the canned speech.
They want to watch the president like play with his kid, this newly telegenic president.
And he like waves the cameras away and they go.
They're like, you know.
Yeah, they just go, yeah.
He goes like, give us a minute, give us a minute.
And they just go, okay, I guess we're just not filming.
It's like, you know, that's not how this works, guys, you know?
But, you know, I guess in Frank Capra world, this is how it works.
And then he finds out that the chief of staff has forged Mitchell's signature on a bill.
He's going to veto a bill that would cut the funding for that very homeless shelter.
Well, that's how I felt initially.
That specific homeless shelter?
But no, it's like he's cutting federal funding for the program.
He's cutting the funding for the program, which will mean that that homeless shelter is on the chopping block.
So it's more complicated.
I mean, he both is and is not cutting that.
It's not like the greedy land developer in the teenage car movie or something.
It's like, we've got to save the rec house.
It's not quite that.
But it's like the presidential politics version of that.
This breakdancing club is going to be the site of my new factory.
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
And so the First Lady confronts Dave on this in the shower in another very funny sequence that made the trailer.
And then...
You know, Kevin Kline, Dave, is like, okay, I'm going to do something about this.
And then he calls Charles Grodin.
And so now continue with where you're going.
I felt like we need that little bit of narrative chew.
We need that gristle in order to make this make sense because we've seen him before and now we're seeing him again.
And now we know kind of what the process is of like, the movie's getting serious now, right?
It was like the fun and good times, you know, like, let's do, let's be the kid president.
And now we're doing like, now there's actually something at stake, right?
And so that's where we, that's, and that's the scene you're about to describe, I think.
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
And it does emphasize the thing I was talking about before about how well written this is, because as ludicrous as it is, and that's fine because it's a fantasy story, everything that happens Is motivated.
Everything that happens is a result of something that happened before.
And, you know, characters aren't introduced for no reason.
If they're introduced, it's because they're going to play a role, etc.
You know, this is basic stuff.
But, you know, these days you can appreciate it because it's not a given in cultural production in 2024.
So, yeah, what he decides to do is he decides to balance the budget.
He decides to completely rebalance the American federal budget.
And he calls his friend who runs a local typing business.
He calls, he calls, he calls.
Once he finds out about the big, you know, the big veto, he calls for the two, the chief of staff and the communications director.
He calls for these two guys at like 10 at night.
And then he says, like, we went there.
We were supposed to We can't.
This is terrible.
We can't.
We look those people in the eyes.
And Dracula, chief of staff, says, if you can find $650 million, you can keep your goddamn shelters.
And so Dave says, well, I'm going to find $650 million.
Let me call my accountant buddy to come to the White House.
All right.
Again, I'm just clarifying some of the narrative here.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
So his friend comes to the White House, and the two of them sit down with the American federal budget.
And there's this great bit where the friend, the Charles Grodin character, looks at him and says, this doesn't make sense.
If I ran my business like this, I'd be shut down.
Which, you know, on one level, I kind of love that.
On another level, this thing about, oh...
We had it in this country recently.
We had Angela Rayner, who's a British politician in the Labour Party, who's probably going to be our next Chancellor of the Exchequer after the election that we're going to have this year.
She was saying about, oh, I can run the British economy because my mum taught me how to balance the household budget at the kitchen table when I was a kid.
And I'm like...
Fuck you.
A national economy is not like a household budget, nor is it like the budget of a small business.
It's not like doing the accounts of a business or a household.
Charles Grodin, believe it or not, cannot issue his own sovereign currency by which he can pay all his bills.
This may surprise you as much as you love Charles Grodin, but it is not actually true.
I think if anybody should be allowed to, it should be Charles Grodin.
Yeah, that's fair.
But anyway, they come up with a load of spending cuts.
Right.
And the Dave president, pseudo-president Dave, he calls...
Because this is something else I want to get to.
This guy is making gargantuan decisions about...
The United States.
And he's doing it without a second thought.
And he is completely unelected.
He has no mandate.
He's an imposter.
He has essentially, with a smile and a sparkle and good intentions, he's committed a one-man coup d'etat and taken over the American government.
Because he looks a whole lot like the president, right?
I think given the approval numbers that this guy had, there is at least a little bit of a mandate there that maybe this is a guy that the American people are trusting.
I mean, that's certainly the implication that we're given.
It's not treated as like he's committed a coup d'etat.
I mean, the people who are committing the coup d'etat are the ones who put him in place in the first place, right?
Yeah.
Yes, but the thing is, he's supposed to just smile and wave and do as he's told.
And they are, of course, they're evil, so it's, you know, but they are government officials who were put in their jobs by the elected president.
So they have much more right to make any of these decisions than he does.
And he just decides, basically, because he's got these guys over a barrel, he can just fess up any time and completely screw them.
He just decides, yeah, I'm going to start running the country.
country yes absolutely completely unelected absolutely so he he becomes the he becomes the smiling charming goofy fascist dictator of america and what he does with
it is a dictator for a day and what he does with it is he he rebalances the american budget by saying oh we can cut this like pr program about how great american cars are and we can cut this thing here and we can cut this thing there and he does it at a full cabinet meeting which is it's the hundredth cabinet meeting of his presidency, so there's Completely unelected.
It just happened to be highly publicized.
It just happened to be.
The only reason why Dracula, Chief of Staff, cannot nip this in the bud immediately.
You can see in Frank Langella's face, he's literally thinking, I need a 9mm right now.
There's no way this is happening.
He is so great.
With the fishes tonight in any realistic universe.
The funniest bit of the film is when he's furious.
I can't remember exactly what it is he's furious about, but he's marching through the White House.
He's walking, but he's walking incredibly quickly, and it's hilarious.
It's so funny.
But even funnier than that is he bursts through this sort of tour group that's in the White House, and there's this woman who's leading the tour group, and she stood at the front of this group of ordinary people who were touring the White House, and she's doing this, like...
Air traffic controller thing with her hands, you know, pulling them forward.
And she's saying, we're walking, we're walking, and this area is this, and we're stopping.
And I'm going to talk to you for a bit, and then we're going to go to the...
We're walking, we're walking.
And he bursts through this, and she sort of clocks him and says, oh, oh, oh, and that's the White House Chief of Staff, Bob Alexander.
What an honour for you all.
We're walking, and she steals the entire film.
I was pissing myself laughing.
That was actually Bonnie Hunt.
This is an early film role for her.
She was also the mom in the first two Beethoven movies.
And you probably have no idea what these are.
You know what they are?
I haven't seen them.
Okay, this is the big fluffy dog movie, which Charles Grodin is the lead in that.
He's the father.
I was going to say, Charles Grodin's in those, yeah.
Right, yeah.
So you can imagine that I believe Ivan Reitman produced some of those or something.
And so I think that's where a lot of this casting, these are friends of Ivan Reitman, effectively, who are in these little roles.
No, Bonnie Hunt ends up being, she does a ton of sitcom stuff in the 90s and 2000s.
And so I've always had a, I've always just known her name.
But yeah, no, it was, that's a great little, that's a great little moment for sure.
Yeah.
So yeah, he rebalances.
He does it by basically embarrassing the members of the cabinet in front of these cameras into saying, well, we've got this stupid program here.
Do you want to keep this program and put small children onto the street, Mike?
Is that what you want to do in front of the cameras?
And, you know, one by one, these politicians have to go...
No, of course I don't.
So he gets his $650 million for the homelessness program.
I suppose the existence of homelessness is just a given.
Obviously, there's always going to be homelessness, but we can have shelters if we cut bullshit government programs.
Right.
I do think, interestingly, the first thing he does on that list is, like, we have a bunch of military contractors who have not provided the stuff that they were supposed to provide, and we've already paid them, so we're just going to not pay them until they provide.
And that's, like, literally half of that $650 million is just that by itself.
And it's like, oh yeah, you have now pissed off the entire defense industry.
That is really going to bode well, you Don't go to Dallas.
Yeah, exactly.
Whatever you do, whatever you do, don't pass by the Texas School Book Depository.
It's going to end badly for you, my friend.
But yeah, no.
Yeah, it's kind of, again, it's double-sided because this thing about, oh, crazy government waste...
It's a classic right-wing narrative.
I don't know if it's such a big right-wing narrative in the States.
I suppose it probably is.
But in Britain, it's long been a huge right-wing narrative about, oh, crazy government waste.
Look what they're spending our money on, etc.
Taxpayers Alliance, all that kind of stuff.
And that was a huge thing, especially in the 90s.
In this era, that was a huge Republican talking point.
They still do that, but it's more like it's just part of the wallpaper now.
It's just like, well, tax and spend Democrats.
Because now they have trans people to beat up on, and so they need those kinds of narratives less.
But yeah, no, it's very old-fashioned in that way.
But yeah, so...
Yeah.
But at the same time, you know, there is a lot of a germ of truth in, you know, like the government does funnel gigantic...
I mean, the government subsidizes things like the military and the arms industry anyway, you know, but governments do funnel huge amounts of kind of semi-official dark money in the way of these private interests via things like constantly paying for contracts that never get fulfilled.
I mean, that's a thing.
Yeah.
So yeah, but the thing that gets me about that scene is like as they're leaving the cabinet chamber after they've done this, they're all delighted about it.
They're all shaking his hand and they're all beaming and it's like they've rediscovered their humanity, these soulless politicians.
He's taught them how to be human again and he's reminded them of their better selves and all this sort of stuff.
Now we're all celebrated because we saved the homeless shelters.
We couldn't have done this without Dave, without our buddy Dave, who we don't even know is our buddy Dave.
We think it's just the Bill Mitchell who has come back to life after looking death in the face.
That's kind of the narrative there.
And it ties in, I think, with a running theme in the film, which is the idea that...
And it's quite an interesting one, really.
It's not...
I don't necessarily subscribe to it, but it's interesting in the sense that it's not a narrative that you see in a lot of...
Narrative representations of stuff like this, which is the idea that it's not power that corrupts, it's the process of getting there that corrupts.
That seems like what this film thinks, because it's It does exactly the same thing that Air Force One does.
There's a scene in Air Force One where the President and the First Lady reminisce about how he started in politics, and they're all like, oh, you know, we had no money, and we had to borrow a car, and we put our...
Our message on homemade placards and stuff like that.
Because in these sorts of films, these fantasy presidents, they're not the scion of a political dynasty.
They're not Harvard and Yale alumni.
They're not from money or privilege or stuff like that.
They're guys who started out by being a city councilman.
Right.
Exactly the same thing in this.
You know, there's the conversation between President Dave and the Vice President, who, again, this is 93.
You know that this man is supposed to be basically a living saint because he's played by Ben Kingsley.
Yeah.
And they have this little conversation where they talk about how they got started in politics.
And, you know, the vice president, he wasn't a federal prosecutor or anything like that.
He was a shoe salesman, and he got onto local government.
And Dave, of course, he's pretending to be Bill Mitchell, but he's become the president, and he started as running a temp agency and stuff like that.
So it's always that.
But it's like, in the film, there's a lot of emphasis paid.
Just to be clear, I think it...
We would be living in a better country if our president of the United States had run a temp agency rather than what he's actually done for the last 50 years.
I think power corrupts.
The system itself is screwed.
There's the elites and powerful, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But given the choice, I'd much rather have the son of a cobbler than the son of a senator as the president of the United States.
That's just...
Sure, yeah.
The problem is that that doesn't happen very often, except in movies like this.
I mean, just look at Bernie.
That's all I got to say about that.
Just look at Bernie.
It's like at a certain moment, it looks like, oh, there might be actually some momentum here.
Crush it immediately.
Barack Obama himself got on speed dial and just crushed that shit.
That's what happened.
That's what happens to any halfway decent person who even attempts this.
Sorry, please continue.
I just wanted to get that little dig in there.
Yeah, sure.
Digs always allowed.
There is a repeated emphasis on The history that people have in this film.
There's a very...
Almost the first time you see President Mitchell, the actual President Mitchell, he's at this big gala due for high-flying lawyers.
I think the guy that he singles out in the audience, it's implied that he's on the Supreme Court now because Mitchell put him there or something like that.
And he talks about how they start...
It's explicitly stated that Mitchell put him on the Supreme Court, yes.
So he's his old buddy from Yale.
Yeah, exactly.
And Mitchell has been like this political animal forever.
And Bob Alexander talks about, in one of his moments where he's fuming about Dave sort of arrogating power, he says, you know, I was on the trilateral commission.
I've been a senator, et cetera, et cetera.
And then you get the conversations between Dave and Ellen Mitchell, who's the first lady, because we need to kind of talk about that sort of budding romance between them.
But at one point, they end up outside the White House, just in civvies, in a car, going and getting takeout.
And they have this conversation.
And again and again, the film seems to come back on the idea that spending years in politics, chipping away at getting into power, is the problem.
Just being in power.
And Dave's the ultimate example of that, isn't it?
He's just dropped in.
We talked about how the fact that he's completely unelected.
In a weird way, that's part of how this film is saying that's why he's able to be a good president, because he didn't have to go through the process of climbing the political ladder.
And that's, as I say, I don't necessarily agree with that as an analysis, but it is interesting.
I haven't, I can't bring to mind immediately another drama or story like this about this sort of thing that has quite that take.
Right, well, I mean, you don't, like, see this kind of I mean, I was thinking about an alternate version of this, right?
How would this play if, instead of there being this ordinary run-of-the-mill guy, instead of this good-hearted chump who's in charge, what if the movie was, in the middle of this tryst, President Mitchell has a stroke?
And he does look death in the eyes, and suddenly he becomes a better person.
Suddenly he's like, well, now I can't do this anymore.
I now see that my legacy is going to be ash, and I want to be a better person now.
That's a very...
You could still do a lot of the same bits.
You could still do...
Bill Mitchell is rediscovering his youth.
You could kind of rediscover that.
You could even do the thawing of the marriage.
In a way, that's a more conventional way.
It's even more maudlin, or it's even more mawkish, because then it's like...
The point is...
Now I've rediscovered my humanity, and I was a good person all along.
I just did those terrible things because Washington made me do it, sort of thing.
And so that's an even more mawkish version.
I think I like the version we have better, but I was watching it the second time and thinking, that seems like it could be.
The way they would do it now, I think, is if they wanted to do this, they would ignore the coincidence, the silly coincidence that this guy just happens to look just like the president.
And by that standard, the guy who just happens to look at the president, it's almost like...
He stands in for an everyman in the sense that he really could be anybody.
It doesn't have to be a particular type of human being who just happened to look this much like the president.
You could pick any one of us out of a lineup.
You could just plop one of us, make us look like the president, and suddenly we can do this kind of thing.
At least I think that's a thread that the film is pulling on.
There is this everyman quality to the nth degree.
Yeah, and I think that's the intended message.
It's kind of a democratic populist message.
That's what the film is intending.
You can read this film in quite a sinister way.
If you want to, read it as like...
This thing about, well, what you need is a guy who's, you know, just one man who's got the right personality, who's a natural leader, doesn't matter if he's elected or not, doesn't matter if anybody knows who he really is, or if he's accountable or anything like that.
But as long as he's got the right ideas, and of course the right ideas come from the white middle class.
You could look upon this as an almost fascistic, petty-bourgeois fantasy about, well, if you get the right strong man in there, he could drain the swamp.
He could set it all right with just a pad and paper.
This is legitimately the way that Trump sells his presidency or sells his candidacy.
In this explicit language, I'm the outsider, I'm a rich guy, I'm a nobody, but I'm going to come in and I'm just going to make it work.
It's this very thing of how would you solve such crisis?
Well, I'd get them all in a room and we'd have a conversation and we'd just fix it.
And of course he doesn't need to have an answer better than that.
Actually the world is more complex than that.
Dave is the liberal Hosanna version of what Trump eventually becomes.
Yeah, for sure.
Absolutely.
There is a worrying convergence of ideas there.
The liberal fantasy of the ordinary guy who knows what the real world is like.
And because he's a good and decent, liberal-hearted man, he can cut through all the bullshit, etc.
It does converge to a worrying extent with that very bourgeois fantasy of the right guy Doesn't matter if he's elected properly, doesn't matter if he's really accountable, but he's got the down-home wisdom and he can set it right with a patent paper and by just having the right priorities, knowing what's right.
Yeah, as you say, that's an essential part of the Trumpist myth.
I mean, obviously Trump's not a small business down-home ordinary guy, but they project onto him what they need him to be.
It's still part of the same fantasy.
But if you're doing that, you're reading the film against the grain.
And that's a valid thing to do.
I mean, that's a good and interesting thing to do with texts when you analyze them, read them against the grain.
But it's also important, I think, to remember what the film is trying, so to speak.
To say, which is something much more democratic in a populist sort of way.
Ironically, I mean, you can read the idea that somebody like this can only get into this situation via a kind of quiet coup as an indictment of the system, particularly if you marry it with that idea of the process of rising through politics being the corrupting factor.
Yeah, no, absolutely agreed.
Yeah, no, I think you're spot on with that.
Yeah, what else have I got?
You were talking about the interchangeability of this film with the idea that it could be, you know, him having a, you know, a come to Jesus moment and changing as a person.
And yeah, if they were doing it now, they absolutely would do it like that now because the modern, the present day culture industries are obsessed with like the shitty guy redemption arc, you know, so that's what we get this time.
We'd get the, oh, the selfish, immature asshole learned to be a basically decent human being.
Long, painful struggle he eventually got there.
Let's give him a round of applause.
The Tony Stark sort of thing.
That's what we get now.
But yeah, and you also mentioned that it's Capra-esque.
It's very golden age of Hollywood.
And it's not just bringing...
The interesting thing about Capra is that Capra was in his time...
He's a conservative.
He's very much a conservative in his time.
But if you look at stuff like It's a Wonderful Life...
It does have that...
I mean, Dave in this film is George Bailey, but when he's in his own home context, he's this ordinary guy who's Who spends all his time getting people jobs.
He's just like George Bailey, the ordinary guy in Bedford Falls who spends all his time at the Bailey building and loan, helping people out, et cetera, et cetera.
It's that fantasy again, isn't it?
I was thinking correctly of Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington for the obvious parallels, but it's boring for both.
You're right.
I wasn't thinking about It's a Wonderful Life, but you're spot on there that Bailey and Dave are essentially the same character.
Yeah, no, for sure.
But yeah, Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington, obviously, is a much more direct parallel in terms of the subject matter.
It's a film I'm less familiar with.
But yeah, the thing about Capra is that although he was a conservative in his time and his context...
You know, there's stuff in those films, particularly, I would say, It's a Wonderful Life, that in the context of modern American mainstream politics, it would be looked on as like raving left-wingery.
Yes.
You know?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Like the whole indictment of old man Potter.
And you have like this vision of the alternate Bedford Falls.
Yeah.
In the section where George Bailey gets to see what the world would be like if he was never born, again, it's the hero guy who makes all the difference by himself.
It's still that fantasy.
But you get this window into the other world where the Bailey building and load, which is all about helping common people, working people to...
Get their foot on the first rung of the ladder.
They get their own home and stuff like that because it does something instructive with money, et cetera, et cetera.
And you get the alternate version where Pottersville, instead of Bedford Falls, it's all like cheap clip joints.
And there's a moralistic thing there, dance halls and stuff and gin joints.
But it's also a picture of total commodification.
It's almost like foretelling what neoliberalism will do to the American high street.
These aren't actually socialist ideas or anything that you're getting in something like It's a Wonderful Life, but as I say, in the context of American mainstream politics now, It's raving far-left lunacy.
Right, exactly.
Even making the banker the bad guy is kind of a bit of a ballsy move these days.
That's one of the things that's thrilling about the big short, is that the plucky kids who only have $180,000 in the bank account, right?
The good hedge fund manager.
Sorry, I'm getting a field here, but I absolutely agree with you.
I really need to rewatch It's a Wonderful Life sometime soon.
I haven't seen that in a long time, but I think there's some real parallel there.
Yeah, for sure.
The other thing it reminded me of is there's a film called, I think it's called Waiting for Mr.
Jordan, and it was remade in the 70s with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie as Heaven Can Wait.
And the basic idea is this guy, he's just this football player.
He's just a sweet guy, and he dies in an accident.
And it's, you know, he goes to heaven, and heaven, like this angelic figure, I think it's James Mason in the original, who's just this guy in a suit, but he's obviously an angel.
Very much like there's an angel in It's a Wonderful Life, actually.
And he says, there's been a sort of clerical error.
You were taken too soon.
To compensate you, we're going to put you back on Earth in the body of somebody else.
Who is scheduled to die.
So his soul comes here where it's supposed to be and you get the rest of your life, albeit in somebody else's body.
And it's like he gets put into the body of this evil rich guy.
And he gets to...
Both versions of the film are like, suddenly this evil rich guy is this sweet, open-minded...
He has a complete personality change.
Just like President Mitchell in Dave.
It's essentially the same story.
Yeah, yeah, no.
The other thing I wanted to talk about was the whole idea of the jobs guarantee.
That's a really interesting thing.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
Like his big plan when he decides that he's going to be the president.
He's actually going to be the president.
His team has set up essentially a federal jobs guarantee.
And that's still something that they talk about now.
Like the Jacobin left and people like that.
Yeah.
What do you mean every person in the U.S. is going to have a job?
What kind of fool are you?
Everybody knows you need a certain amount of unemployment, or we're just never going to be able to...
You can't keep people under control and allow them to support themselves.
I mean, it's funny that we don't even think about that as...
That's not even a topic on the table today.
Instead, we talk about things like a UBI is sort of like the only...
It's the only option.
We'll give you a pittance to live on instead of give you an actual working place to decide.
It's more than that, I think.
And the movie is not going there.
But a jobs guarantee means it is the policy of this government to make sure that everyone has a place in society.
It's not just about we need to make sure you can support yourself.
It's about there needs to be a place for everyone.
There needs to be a place in the society where everyone can support themselves and can make a better life for themselves.
That's what the job guarantee is supposed to be in this narrative.
Again, the film does not politically go there, but that's certainly the implication is that we're going to find jobs for people.
We're going to make jobs for people.
The New Deal essentially is like, well, we need a whole bunch of infrastructure.
So we're just going to create a whole bunch of jobs and pour a whole bunch of money into, and suddenly we're out of the Great Depression, or we're moving out of the Great Depression.
I mean, economists will argue about that for the rest of time, but it had a great effect.
I mean, we saw this just a couple of years ago with the COVID, you know, just the stimulus checks, just, like, giving people, like, expanded unemployment, you know?
I mean, this is not a job guarantee, but this is a situation where the jobs just weren't there.
Like, you know, under COVID restrictions, you just could not work.
You could not find, you know...
I know a lot of people in the restaurant industry or who were in the hospitality industry or whatever who just, they furloughed their whole staff.
They were furloughed for a year, for a year and a half, until the vaccines came in and they could open back up again.
And And so this is about what happens when you have people who actually can support themselves, who actually do have the economic means, and then they have the time in their day.
I mean, it's very pie in the sky that the US president actually can't do this by himself.
He's gonna need Literally an act of Congress to get this passed, you know?
And even then, it's an uphill climb, you know?
But the way that people talk of this, and again, it goes back to that, because the whole thing is he does this at a press conference, you know?
And then suddenly, the buzz on the street.
The people are talking about this.
Things are going in motion because Dave made a bold move in this direction.
And suddenly, the wheels of Washington are turning differently than they used to.
And we can suddenly start to get things accomplished.
And all of the messiness of the actual legislative procedure are not...
Suddenly, they're not going to stand in the way in the same way.
Because it actually is, I think it's directly stated at the end of the film that the job guarantee, like, thing actually passed, like, once, like, once Bing Kingsley is president, you know, you know, and, yeah, well, you know, I mean, I think that, I think that's the line of dialogue.
45th, he's the 45th president.
Yep, yep.
And so this simultaneously takes place in 1988, in 1993, and 10 minutes into the future.
It's interesting, it might be the film's darkest moment for me, because he's making that speech to the press corps.
And he gets finally to the point of the speech and he says, from now on, this administration is going to guarantee a job for every American that wants one.
And there's a cut to the press, the journalists, and they all groan and pull a face.
That's quite savage, I think, as a moment of satire.
Their response to that is just, I see.
That's all we're talking about, is it?
Well, that's interesting.
Isn't the implication that they want him to come in and talk about the savings and loan scandal and the, uh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, but it's also like they, they, they inherently and immediately interpret though.
The idea of a jobs guarantee is just flim flam pie in the sky.
Won't happen.
Yeah, no.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, Joe Biden promised to cure cancer.
So, you know, we, we've gotta, gotta keep that in mind.
You know, if you're talking about lofty goals, There's an interesting thing about this whole idea of a jobs guarantee program, because I can think of two texts from more recent years where that is also the president decides on a national federal jobs guarantee program.
That's in these texts.
And in both of them, House of Cards, the American version of House of Cards, And I haven't read it, Ben Shapiro's novel, True Allegiance, but I've listened to the Behind the Bastards reading series where Robert Evans and Cody Johnston and Katie Stoll go through the book.
In both of those texts, the president...
Who's obviously in House of Cards, he's the evil Frank Underwood.
And in the Ben Shapiro novel, he's like a white version of Barack Obama, the evil Barack Obama.
And he's got all the traits that Ben Shapiro believes Barack Obama had.
And in both those texts, it's presented as this evil fascist plot that the president has, the evil Democrat president.
In the Ben Shapiro one, it's explicitly made to sound fascist because he gives it the slogan like work freedom, which is obviously, as Robert Evans points out in those podcasts, it's an echo of work makes you free, which is on the gates of the concentration camps.
So it's just interesting to me, like this one in 93, it just puts this forward as Well, obviously, we have this great conscientious moral plan that's going to turn the country around from this well-meaning.
And nowadays, however much later it is, a president who talks about a jobs guarantee program is the new Hitler.
Right, right.
I mean, I could see, like, if Joe Biden tried this, or God, if a hypothetical president, Bernie Sanders, tried this, this would literally be, that's what they do in communist China.
You know, that would be the next step, yeah.
One of the cameo talking heads actually says that, doesn't he?
Oh, right, right, right, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
They're obviously people that American audiences in 93, like C-SPAN, you know, CNN viewing audiences in 1993 would have recognized.
All of the media figures in this film are actual media figures.
They were filming their cameos on the sets of the actual shows that they were on.
And all of the named politicians are all real.
They were real people who were actually in office at the time.
That tells you something about, you know...
So yeah, so then the evil White House Chief of Staff, he...
Well, President Dave fires him.
There's a great scene where he and Sigourney Weaver, who are now friends, because she's in on it, they sort of They do this scene in front of Bob Alexander when President Dave fires him.
And Langella's face in that scene is just absolutely gorgeous.
The look on his face like, what the fuck is happening to me?
Yeah.
He decides to go public with the idea that the savings and loan thing is President Mitchell as well.
So, again, the plot snaps together beautifully.
President Dave goes to Congress.
He admits the whole thing as President Mitchell, obviously.
He absolves the Vice President and then he stages a Aneurysm or whatever, they wield the actual president who has been stored in his coma under the White House in like a secret medical facility.
How many people know about the real president being underground in this secret medical facility, hooked up to a machine?
Early on, there's a scene where, like, Bob Alexander is saying to the communications director, yeah, we had to pay off all the nurses and doctors.
It was 50 grand each nurse and 100 grand to the doctor, etc., etc.
And so, I mean, this is very, like, Nick said, I mean...
I don't like to be cynical enough to say, yeah, this shit happens all the time.
Shit is just covered up.
They just have a blank check.
They offer them $100,000 and it just goes away.
You sign an NDA, if you ever say anything, a bullet to the back of the head, etc., etc.
It's just a reality of this is how power works.
I don't think that...
I don't think that...
As former President Trump is currently finding out NDAs always work perfectly.
I don't think that's literally what happens, of course, but I think that's kind of figuratively what happens.
I think there is a...
I think that the problem that Trump has is that he's just too obvious about it, and he's too open about doing it under his own name.
He's a fumbling rook instead of an effective one, right?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
He's an idiot.
Yeah.
But yeah, so he stages an aneurysm and they wheel the actual President Mitchell, who's still in a coma, out of his secret under the White House lab, whatever it is.
And Dave just goes back to his life.
And then this is something I want to ask you about.
At the very end, we see Dave and Charles Grodin and all the, like, temp secretaries that Dave was helping out at the start of the film.
And they're now running a campaign for Dave to be, like, in local politics or something.
Like a city councilor or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's obviously implied, you know, this is...
He's now going to be...
He's got a taste for politics, for doing good, etc.
Despite everything the film has said over and over again about the process of having to work your way up, corrupting you, he's now going to try that.
Yeah.
And then at the very end, the First Lady, former First Lady, I should say, turns up at this office in the middle of nowhere.
With no Secret Service protection.
Oh no, no, wait, wait.
She does.
Because Ving Rhames is there at the end.
That's right.
That's right.
The final shot is Ving Rhames.
We haven't even mentioned Ving Rhames as Dwayne, the Secret Service agent.
Yeah, I was hoping we would get to that, but let's finish your thought first.
So yeah, no, she shows up in a baseball cap.
Sigourney Weaver, completely unrecognizable once you put a baseball cap on.
And then one day a Category 10 smoke show walked through, but she was in a baseball cap, so I had no idea.
I didn't even notice.
But yeah, they kiss, and that's the end of the film.
And the implication is, you know, he's going to go into politics, and they're going to get together.
So you're going to have this guy...
Who looks exactly like the former dead president whose girlfriend or possibly wife doesn't look like is the former first lady.
And he's in politics.
How the fuck is this going to work?
These are not questions we're supposed to ask.
This is the happy ending we get at the end of the movie.
Because obviously, they live in D.C. It's pretty explicitly, this is D.C. That's another thing that's weird about it, is that he looks exactly at the president and happens to live four blocks away, sort of thing.
What's her name?
Ellen Mitchell.
I almost said Ellen Ripley.
Ellen Mitchell.
Oh my god, I didn't even think of that!
She's called Ellen!
She is called Ellen, yeah.
Alan Mitchell, she will be followed by cameras every day for the rest of her life.
It's going to look really weird that suddenly she's dating a guy who looks just like her dead ex-husband.
And then maybe somebody besides Oliver Stone is going to work all this out.
That's my favorite cameo in the movie, by the way.
Far and away, my favorite cameo in the movie is Oliver Stone going like, if you look at the photos just before and just after the stroke, there are clear differences in the cheekbones.
And then Larry King is going like, fine, Oliver.
I love that because it's so layered, because there aren't any differences, because both the characters are being played by the same actor.
So, you know, Oliver Stone's evidence is bullshit, but he's right.
The president has been replaced by a different guy.
His conspiracy theory is actually correct.
Right.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Yeah.
So that's Dave.
1993.
It's a lot of fun.
It's a very silly movie.
It's very silly.
We took it more seriously than the movie took itself.
But it's also very well made.
You mentioned this earlier, but there's always a little bit of business happening in the frames.
There's this one moment right when Right when Dave is about to do the walk down the hallway for the first time.
The first time he's posing in for the president.
And he's like...
He's got on his suit and he's stretching out like a kid in his first Easter suit.
He's trying to loosen up and he's doing his...
He's getting into character a little bit.
And the Secret Service agent, Ving Rhames, is just kind of staring at him non-plussedly.
And...
While Loving Reigns is looking the other direction, Dave just quietly pockets an ashtray.
It's his souvenir.
Yes, that's right.
At one point, he's going to split the White House, and he's got this bag with him that's full of towels.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's the Nick souvenirs of White House towels, yeah.
Oh, the other thing we should say before we wrap up is, of course, that the evil White House Chief of Staff, Frank Langella, gets his just desserts.
He is exposed as being a criminal.
Not as having replaced the president with a fake, but he's exposed as being the guy mainly behind the savings alone thing.
And you get a very, one of my favorite little bits in the film is like he's at his DC pad, you know, and he's surrounded by people.
Ben Stein is there.
And they're all, because he's obviously going to run for president and it's all going great for him.
And they're watching the fake president's meeting of Congress on the TV and President Dave says, yeah, these charges are all absolutely true, and evil chief of staff, he thinks, ah, I've got it in the bag.
But then Dave proceeds to just blow the whole thing.
Well, the savings and loan thing, anyway.
And then it just cuts back to Frank Langella, and he's the only person in the room.
He's just sat in his chair, and there's nobody else there.
While the camera was back in Congress, everybody else has just gone.
Yeah, no.
It's a very goofy moment, but it works.
I would have seen this when I was like 14 or something.
I probably saw it on pay-per-view.
I was too young.
I was young enough to be interested in politics, but young enough that that kind of moment, I caught that immediately.
I thought that was hilarious and very, very effective.
Yeah, no, it's great.
Yeah.
So that's it.
I think, yeah.
I mean, we don't usually go through a full plot synopsis, but I think it was worth it for this one.
Like, yeah, I like the format here.
I don't know that, I mean, you know, we could go in, there are certainly, like, moments that we can sort of, you know, highlight.
I mean, I think we didn't talk a lot about Ving Reigns, but he's one of the, you know, he kind of stands in for, like, the public in a way, as, like, because he has to be around Dave all the time, and, like, at first he thinks, like, Dave is just a goofball, and he has no Care for him.
He thinks he's just a loser.
And then, like, over time, he gets, like, softened by, like, how cool Dave is and how, like, nice he is and how he's doing good things.
And there's no political valence to him being the only Black person with a speaking role in the movie.
But I think it is, you know, it's a good performance.
It's Ving Rhimes pre-Pulp Fiction.
And so, like, it is a...
It's pre-Pulp Fiction.
Wow.
Pulp Fiction is the next year, yeah.
So...
Oh, wow.
Yeah, no, he's great.
His facial expression barely changes throughout the entire film.
At the very end, there's the slightest suggestion of an upward twitch on his mouth, and it's very effective.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think.
It reminds me, strangely, of, there was a British television serial in the 80s called A Very British Coup, which was based upon a novel by the Labour, by a journalist and, at one point, Labour MP Chris Mullen, and Alan Plater adapted it into a far superior television drama.
Much better than the book, which is not very good.
But it starred Ray McNally as Harry Perkins, who's like a fantasy Labour Prime Minister.
He's every sort of left Labour person's fantasy of a Labour Prime Minister.
You know, he's an actual sort of working class guy from Sheffield.
He was a steel worker, etc.
And he gets to be the Prime Minister.
And he's very, very left wing.
You know, but he's also an incredibly canny political operator and ruthless and et cetera, et cetera.
And he's followed all the way through the story by an MI5 security guard or bodyguard or something.
And the guy is completely noncommittal all the way through.
Right.
And then at the very end, when Prime Minister Perkins pulls his final maneuver against the forces that are trying to bring him down, this guy, this copper who's been following him around, and has actually said at one point, I don't vote for you, he helps him out.
He just basically puts his finger on a button, basically, and he says, no.
To stop the, you know, the Prime Minister's like giving this address to the nation and the BBC guy is saying he can't say this and he's about to cut him off and this MI5 security guard just puts his hand down and says, no, you can't do that.
It's very similar to that.
Yeah, no, no.
I have not seen that, but I'm sure it is.
I'm sure it is very good.
So, yeah, no, I was thinking about, I think we covered this.
I mean, again, there are, like, little bits and pieces.
Oh, I will, Ben Kingsley, I think.
Because you don't know it's Ben Kingsley until, like, you don't know who it is until, you know, suddenly, oh, I'm the vice president.
And he's been sent on a, like, 12-country tour of Africa, like a Goodwill tour of Africa, during the whole, like, while, you know, Dave is acting president.
And...
He shows up and he's like, I have gifts for you.
This is a horn from such and such.
These are ceremonial beads from here.
He just has to hand it all away.
Dave has been told a bullshit story by evil Frank Langella about the vice president being a maniac.
And the first time he meets him, he's holding a gigantic spear.
Right.
And then, you know, we learned that the Vice President, Ben Kingsley, he's...
The point is, you've been laying all of this crap on me, and I've always been loyal to you.
I've always stood by you.
I've always gone with the party.
I've always gone with the flow.
But this is beyond the pale.
And Dave is like, I didn't do anything.
I'm just Dave.
I'm Dave Kovic.
I just get people jobs.
What are you talking about?
Obviously, he doesn't say that.
I think it would be really interesting if...
He let the Vice President in on it.
I think that would be an interesting...
Because the Vice President does not let it on the secret.
I think he should have cottoned on to it.
But yeah, no.
And that's the thing that makes him kind of go to Dracula.
We've got to work this shit out.
That's the beginning of the end.
That's when he knows we've got to end this.
I can't be president.
Because now there's a decent guy who's willing to step into the role.
There's a decent guy there.
He's going to be a much better president.
Which I think is probably true given everything we know about Bill Mitchell.
But...
But explicitly, he will carry on the jobs guarantee program.
That's the key moment in the conversation, isn't it?
When he says that.
Oh, he says, I think your jobs program is an excellent idea.
I think he even says, you and I have had our differences over the years, but I think your jobs program is an excellent idea.
And that's kind of the moment that leads to the conversation about, like, I ran a ramsackle little campaign and managed to, you know, We managed to get elected and off to the races we were.
That's kind of the thing that leads to that moment.
And they do have a like, even though Dave is pretending to be somebody he isn't, I mean, there is a like real authentic, you know, kind of back and forth there.
I think it's a very, it's, you know, so many scenes.
I mean, there's a lot of comedy.
There's some, you know, dramatic elements.
There's some political valence here, but it's just, it's very well acted.
It's very well made.
It's well shot.
Ivan Reitman is a great director.
I mean, he's at the top of his game here.
Yeah.
So many framing decisions even are made with this, where you get to see this person's face while another person is talking, and so you get to see their response.
And it sounds very basic and very pedestrian, but it is like that kind of pedestrian directing, just those constantly good decisions that really kind of sell.
Particularly in a movie like this, it's really asking you to accept a lot.
You can imagine the...
The Adam Sandler version of this, you know, if this was like Happy Gilmore, like that era, Adam Sandler, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, ironically, Adam Sandler did make a remake of a Catherine.
He made Mr.
Deeds, you know, a decade later, but still like, you know, and so you can imagine like what the goofy version of this is.
And apparently there were a number of actors they went through before Kevin Kline was cast.
I think I have the list.
I imagine Tom Hanks was in the running.
Let me see.
Warner Brothers wanted a box office star, this is from Wikipedia, to portray the lead role, and that one executive even suggested Arnold Schwarzenegger to play the part.
There was very real conversation at that time about Arnold Schwarzenegger.
They're going to change the laws around the presidential...
You have to be a natural-run citizen just to allow Arnie to run, by the way.
That's so funny.
Michael Keaton, Warren Beatty, Kevin Costner was considered.
In fact, apparently Beatty brought Dave to Reitman's attention.
And Klein almost turned it down because he thought he was going to be playing the same character he played in A Fish Called Wanda, which...
Kind of true, but you know.
I think there's similar kind of acting styles.
And I think Klein makes it his own.
I think Klein does make it a different kind of character.
But apparently, again, that's just from the Wikipedia page.
So who knows how accurate that is.
That's weird.
I can't see any similarity between those characters at all.
Otto is a...
He's not a psychopath, but he wants to be a psychopath, doesn't he?
Right, yeah.
He's a horrible person also.
He's just an idiot.
No, I don't see the similarity at all.
Fair enough.
Well, you never know what goes on in actors' minds about how they're perceived when they're shown to tens or hundreds of millions of people.
So, yeah, we'll go there.
So that was Dave.
Enjoyed this one much more than the last one.
So, do we have thoughts about which one we're going to do next?
I mean, you...
I'm kind of...
I've just long-headed in my head we're just going to do Independence Day next to just complete this trifecta of 90s movies.
I think we are going to move away from that after that, but I think, you know...
I thought, like, there's no way we're going to want to do, like, three 90s movies about the president.
But you were very inclined to do Independence Day, and I want to do Independence Day.
Okay, we're going to do Independence Day, which is not really about the presidency, but, you know, we can...
A boy can dream.
A boy can dream.
I don't even really know why I want to do Independence Day, but I just do.
I loved it.
I saw it many times theatrically when it was...
I was 15?
I was 16.
Yeah, I was 16.
Anyway, we'll do that next, and then we'll do something else.
Maybe Dr.
Strangelove.
Sounds good.
Okay, well, that was that, and this is this, and thanks for listening, everybody.
Goodbye.
God bless America.
God motherfucking bless America.
USA! USA! This is CNN. Welcome to Larry King Live!
Tonight, Richard Nixon on the fall of Gorbachev, the Mideast powder keg, the presidential sweepstakes, and the perils of overseas diplomacy.
Now, live, on tape, here's Larry King.
Good evening from Washington, another edition of Larry King Live.
For 45 years, the resilient Richard Nixon has been with us.
Candidate, president, notorious figure, and elder statesman.
Think what you will of his own career, his expertise on both foreign policy and stateside politics remains widely respected.
The man who opened China and won the first tentative period on detente with the much feared Soviet Union He's still talking about how the United States ought to conduct itself.
His new book, Seize the Moment, America's Challenge in a One Superpower World.
It's a great pleasure to welcome a return visit to Larry King Live for President Nixon.
We changed the set for you, Mr.
President.
Oh, thank you very much.
I like little flowers.
Yes, fresh flowers.
They're not artificial.
And happy birthday.
Tomorrow, Richard Nixon is 79 years young.
Don't remind me.
That was fun.
That was fun.
I think this one makes sense to go through with a plot summary.
I think that worked really well.
It just seemed like the right way to do it.
I don't know quite why, but...
No, no, no.
Yeah, I mean, especially this one has probably been less seen than others that we've talked about, you know?
I mean, I guess Air Force One is, but Air Force One is like, it's all premise, right?
You know, so it's not, you know...
Well, this is very plotty.
This one is, you know, as I was saying, it's...
Everything flows, you know, logically from the thing that went before it, and the characters all make sense.
Yeah, I think the last time we get into that nitty-gritty, it was The Dark Knight.
Which is a much different movie.
Which is the opposite.
That's why we had to go through that one because it doesn't do any of those things.
Because it thinks it's full of narrative cohesion and then it's just completely not.
And the only way to describe that is to just shine a light on it.
What Nolan does is he just crams his films full of random gibberish and then he has the characters basically turn to camera and look at you and say, this all makes perfect sense.
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