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THE HUDSUCKER PROXY — The Coen Brothers fall from a great height · MUBI Podcast

• 0:00
  This episode contains adult language and spoilers.
• 0:07
  Okay, so if there's one person I'd expect to love the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, it's this guy.
• 0:13
  My name is Jackson O'Brien, and I am a freelance culture writer and a movie obsessive who lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
• 0:20
  'Cause if you don't know, the Coens are movie obsessed Minnesotans too, okay?
• 0:24
  And Jackson's entry point to their films couldn't have been more perfect.
• 0:29
  When I was in high school, it was the mid-90s, and I had just seen the movie Fargo.
• 0:36
  That's, of course, the Coens deadpan noir masterpiece about a murder for hire that goes totally wrong, set in the flat, bleak winter of the Gopher State.
• 0:45
  I currently live in Minnesota.
• 0:47
  I didn't at the time, but my mother's family is from Minnesota, and so we'd constantly visit, and that movie just really spoke to me.
• 0:54
  And because it was like, you're putting my family on screen in this really weird way.
• 0:58
  Except there's murders involved.
• 0:58
  It's really funny and really interesting.
• 1:01
  Then Mrs Mohra, she heard about the homicides down hereand thought I should call it in.So I called it in.End of story.- Well, what this guy look like anyways?
• 1:12
  - Oh, he's a little guy.Kind of funny looking. And a friend of mine said,"Hey, if you liked that movie, you should watch"their, earlier film,The Hudsucker Proxy." Makes sense.
• 1:27
  The Coen's The Hudsucker Proxy had come out just a couple of years before, but it was hardly the same kind of movie.
• 1:34
  Inspired by the comedies of Hollywood's Golden Age, it told the story of a nerdy bumpkin who ends up CEO of a massive corporation.
• 1:41
  Instead of desolate, snowy flatlands, it was set in a world of soaring Deco skyscrapers, out of which folks occasionally dangled precariously.
• 1:50
  Don't worry, Mr Mussburger, I got you.
• 1:50
  I got you by your pants. Instead of dry black comedy, it was full of slapstick and wisecracks.
• 1:58
  The guy's a real moron.As in a five-letter word for imbecile. And Jackson O'Brien loved it even more.
• 2:05
  I mean, it's just a hilarious, hilarious film.
• 2:09
  And at the time, you know, there was very little internet.
• 2:13
  I couldn't go back and read reviews of it very easily.
• 2:15
  I'd need to, like, go to a library to read what Roger Ebert thought about it.
• 2:19
  All I knew was that this is a movie that I loved, and that clearly was one of the hugest movies on the face of the planet, because Fargo was huge, and therefore this clearly had to have been huge.
• 2:29
  I just kind of missed it.
• 2:31
  And it slowly dawned on me over the course of the next, like, lifetime, that this is somehow the dark horse, the like, kind of shameful,'Oh yeah, there's alsoThe Hudsucker Proxy.
• 2:43
  'We don't really talk about that.' Yeah, in 1994, The Hudsucker Proxy became the Coen brothers biggest bomb, changed their career path, and probably made Fargo inevitable.
• 3:06
  I am Rico Gagliano.
• 3:06
  Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast.
• 3:09
  MUBI is the streaming service that champions great cinema.
• 3:12
  On this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema.
• 3:15
  This is season seven.
• 3:16
  We're calling it Box Office Poison and it is inspired by the new book
• 3:21
  of the same name by this guy: Tim Robey, film critic for The Telegraph, and suddenly expert on flops.
• 3:23
  of the same name by this guy: For some reason.
• 3:27
  of the same name by this guy: Every episode, with help from Tim and many more, we are diving into a different story from his book about a good film that did bad box office.
• 3:35
  of the same name by this guy: And this time we're looking at The Hudsucker Proxy, a film so overloaded with stuff that Jackson O'Brien wrote an essay about it every week for a whole freaking year in his newsletter.
• 3:47
  of the same name by this guy: The movie packs 10 pounds of movie, in a 5 pound bag.
• 3:51
  of the same name by this guy: And a film that paired indie darlings the Coen Brothers with the biggest producer in Hollywood.
• 3:55
  of the same name by this guy: For better and worse.
• 3:57
  of the same name by this guy: He turned to me and said on her first days watching the dailies, he said, "Roger, what the fuck is this?" That is legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins.
• 4:07
  of the same name by this guy: He shot films like, oh, The Shawshank Redemption, No Country for Old Men, and this flick, and I talked to him and many more about this high flying movie that fell from a great height.
• 4:17
  of the same name by this guy: So loosen your hips and prepare to hula.
• 4:20
  of the same name by this guy: Here comes the story of The Hudsucker Proxy. To understand how this movie came to be, first, I think you got to understand what went down with the movie the Coens made before it.
• 4:34
  of the same name by this guy: So I'm going to take you back to 1990, when the brothers were in London to ask Mr Roger Deakins to shoot their psycho-dramedy Barton Fink.
• 4:43
  of the same name by this guy: We met in a cafe in Notting Hill, but it was kind of funny'cause my agent at the time thought the script was very weird, and I asked who had written it and who was directing it, and they said the Coen brothers, so I immediately wanted to read it.
• 5:00
  of the same name by this guy: Yeah, by then, the Coens had made three indie flicks.
• 5:02
  of the same name by this guy: Only one was a hit, Raising Arizona.
• 5:05
  of the same name by this guy: But critics and movie heads, including me by the way, pretty much love them all.
• 5:10
  of the same name by this guy: Over tea, Deakins took the job.
• 5:12
  of the same name by this guy: And it kind of changed my life, actually meeting them and working on Barton Fink.
• 5:16
  of the same name by this guy: How so?
• 5:17
  of the same name by this guy: Well, I'd come off a project I was not happy on at all and thought I wasn't really suitable for the film industry, quite honestly.
• 5:25
  of the same name by this guy: Oh, really?
• 5:25
  of the same name by this guy: You were, like, considering giving it up?
• 5:27
  of the same name by this guy: Yeah. I had a house in London.
• 5:29
  of the same name by this guy: I'm selling up and I was moving back to Devon to actually where I am now, in a flat in Devon.
• 5:35
  of the same name by this guy: What about that experience kept you in the biz?
• 5:38
  of the same name by this guy: It was just a great experience.
• 5:38
  of the same name by this guy: I mean, working with them, it's like...
• 5:43
  of the same name by this guy: It's proper filmmaking, you know, it's like so much care and the craft and so much collaboration, and it felt like being part of a family and, you know, not being somebody that was just being used.
• 5:56
  of the same name by this guy: - You weren't a tool.
• 5:56
  of the same name by this guy: - Yeah, it was, working on Barton Fink, that's like real filmmaking, you know.
• 6:02
  of the same name by this guy: And Tim Robey says at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, the jury agreed.
• 6:08
  of the same name by this guy: They went crazy for it and not only gave it the Palme d'Or, but also best director and best actor for John Turturro.
• 6:15
  of the same name by this guy: Which is in fact something that the Cannes juries would not be allowed to do anymore.
• 6:19
  of the same name by this guy: You can't give the same film that many major prizes in Cannes anymore, but they went crazy for it.
• 6:30
  of the same name by this guy: Look upon me! Audiences didn't go as crazy for it.
• 6:34
  of the same name by this guy: In fact, it was the third Coens flick out of four to earn major critical respect but lose money.
• 6:40
  of the same name by this guy: Not much, though, especially given how totally not mainstream it was.
• 6:45
  of the same name by this guy: I'll show you the life of the mind.
• 6:45
  of the same name by this guy: I will show you the life of the mind. And it also got three Oscar nominations.
• 6:51
  of the same name by this guy: The first ones that the Coens had got.
• 6:55
  of the same name by this guy: So the fact that Barton Fink won the Palme d'Or immediately made everyone think, well, we're going to kind of give the Coens not exactly a blank check next time, but we're certainly going to extend them some latitude.
• 7:05
  of the same name by this guy: You know, these are major filmmakers, and maybe it's time for them to step up their budget and aim for something a little bit more crowd pleasing and kind of all embracing.
• 7:15
  of the same name by this guy: The Coens fet it too, for their next film, they should aim big and broad, and the first project they thought of was one they'd dreamed up years before, along with a guy who definitely liked to go for broke.
• 7:30
  of the same name by this guy: I'll let Jackson O'Brien do the flashback to the early 1980s,- at which point...
• 7:34
  of the same name by this guy: - Joel Coen is an NYU film student, and through that he ends up meeting Sam Raimi.
• 7:41
  of the same name by this guy: He helps edit the, Sam Raimi's first movie, The Evil Dead.
• 7:45
  of the same name by this guy: They become fast friends, I think, because they're fellow nice Jewish boys from the frozen parts of the Midwest, and they end up as roommates in Los Angeles.
• 7:56
  of the same name by this guy: I think it's like four of them in a two bedroom house.
• 8:00
  of the same name by this guy: Frances McDormand, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, and Sam Raimi.
• 8:03
  of the same name by this guy: And they wrote this movie together, Sam and the two Coen brothers.
• 8:08
  of the same name by this guy: It was called yes, The Hudsucker Proxy. And you can imagine this house full of genius film nerds writing the film nerdiest movie imaginable.
• 8:16
  of the same name by this guy: Say, what do you do when the envelope is too big for the slot. With Hudsucker Proxy, we followed the very quick rise and very, very quick fall of a mailroom boy called Norville Barnes, who is working at a manufacturing corporation in, we assume the 1950s, called Hudsucker Industries.
• 8:36
  of the same name by this guy: Just got hired today.- Terrific.
• 8:38
  of the same name by this guy: - You know, entry level.Tell me about it.But I got big ideas. This guy is a bit of a dolt.
• 8:48
  of the same name by this guy: I guess you would call him a rube and he's being manipulated without realizing it by the big boss, who wants to lower the company's stock for nefarious reasons, and thinks that if he promotes Norville to the top job, it's going to cause Wall Street to lose all faith in the company.
• 9:06
  of the same name by this guy: What we need now is a new president who will inspire panic in the stockholder.- A puppet.
• 9:10
  of the same name by this guy: - A proxy!A pawn. So that's probably already enough plot.
• 9:15
  of the same name by this guy: A naive who's put in charge because the bad guys want him to fail.
• 9:19
  of the same name by this guy: But wait. There's more.
• 9:20
  of the same name by this guy: Norville is then rescued from this stock manipulation swindle by an intrepid, fast talking gal reporter named Amy Archer.
• 9:28
  of the same name by this guy: I tell you, the guy's a phony.- Phony, huh?
• 9:30
  of the same name by this guy: - As a $3 bill. - Says who?Says me, Amy Archer.
• 9:32
  of the same name by this guy: Why is he an idea, man?Because Hudsucker says he is. And then there's the subplot involving Norville's big product idea, which he tells everyone is going to make millions.
• 9:42
  of the same name by this guy: Take a look at this sweet baby. A simple diagram of a circle.
• 9:45
  of the same name by this guy: You know, for kids. But what it turns out he has actually invented is the Hula Hoop.
• 9:50
  of the same name by this guy: The movie is set in 1958, which is when the Hula Hoop is actually invented, and of course becomes a massive success, much to everyone's surprise.
• 10:00
  of the same name by this guy: Norville Barnes,Young president of Hudsucker Industries,a boy bred in the heartland but now the toast of New York. Meanwhile, there's romance between Norville and Amy.
• 10:09
  of the same name by this guy: There's a wise sage who lives in a clock tower.
• 10:12
  of the same name by this guy: Also, slapstick set pieces with people crashing out of windows.
• 10:15
  of the same name by this guy: A giant industrial mailroom full of workers who explode in a frenzy when an emergency letter needs delivery.
• 10:24
  of the same name by this guy: The letter! It's a blue letter! He's got a blue letter! Basically, the script was a caffeinated mash up of all its writers' movie obsessions,
• 10:37
  like the cartoonish comedy: very likely Sam Raimi's doing.
• 10:39
  like the cartoonish comedy: Lot of the silliness and zaniness I think probably comes from him.
• 10:42
  like the cartoonish comedy: If you read his interviews and like his press and things, he talks very openly about how, like The Evil Dead and The Evil Dead 2, that was his version of a Three Stooges movie.
• 10:52
  like the cartoonish comedy: It was just big slapstick humor, just with zombies rather than three idiots.
• 10:57
  like the cartoonish comedy: But then from the Coens came an homage to a totally different kind of movie classic.
• 11:01
  like the cartoonish comedy: Aesthetically, and in terms of the script, and even in terms of some specific scenes, the movie is is referencing Frank Capra movies from the 1930s.
• 11:10
  like the cartoonish comedy: That's Karina Longworth, the voice and mind behind the world's other great movie podcast,You Must Remember This. Her next season is actually all about Capra.
• 11:18
  like the cartoonish comedy: So there are elements of the plot that hew pretty closely toMr Deeds Goes to Town and also Meet John Doe.
• 11:26
  like the cartoonish comedy: They both have these sort of loudmouth career women, these journalists who are deceiving the male lead of the film, and then they end up falling in love.
• 11:38
  like the cartoonish comedy: And then Raimi and the Coens threw in the cherry on top, a loving send up of Howard Hawks' newsroom comedies of the 30s, as embodied by the Amy Archer character eventually played by Jennifer Jason Leigh.
• 11:49
  like the cartoonish comedy: She seems to be playing Rosalind Russell, in terms of her voice.
• 11:53
  like the cartoonish comedy: She seems to be doing Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday.Are you repeating yourself, Walter?That's the speech you made the night you proposed.- I notice you still remember it.
• 12:00
  like the cartoonish comedy: - Of course I remember it.I didn't remember it.
• 12:02
  like the cartoonish comedy: I wouldn't have divorced you. And I think it's great.
• 12:04
  like the cartoonish comedy: I mean, I think she really pulls it off.
• 12:06
  like the cartoonish comedy: She's definitely doing an exaggerated version.
• 12:08
  like the cartoonish comedy: And is this guy from Chumpsville High?I even pulled the old mother routine.- Adenoids.
• 12:11
  like the cartoonish comedy: - Lumbago. Which I, but, you know, the whole movie is like, in order to kind of hit home the joke it's making about the past, it has to do an exaggerated version of the past.
• 12:22
  like the cartoonish comedy: Yeah, it does do that.
• 12:23
  like the cartoonish comedy: But I've always wondered, do we know where that whole ra-ta-tat fast talking thing came from in those Hawks' comedies?
• 12:29
  like the cartoonish comedy: Like, I know exactly what it is, and it's at the scripts were too long, and so they told them just talk faster.
• 12:35
  like the cartoonish comedy: - Really?
• 12:35
  like the cartoonish comedy: - Yeah.
• 12:38
  like the cartoonish comedy: True to form, the script to The Hudsucker Proxy was also epic and demanded period sets, and costumes, and a huge cast, and special effects, and just a lot.
• 12:48
  like the cartoonish comedy: Yeah, they wrote it in 1984, but they knew while they were writing it, this is so beyond the kind of budgets we're getting, there's no possibility that we can make this where we're begging and borrowing and stealing a few million dollars from our uncle's friend's dentist.
• 13:05
  like the cartoonish comedy: And so they kind of put it on the back burner.
• 13:07
  like the cartoonish comedy: And after increasing levels of success and Barton Fink being this real critical darling, they decide to say,"Okay, this is the time we can actually secure some funding for this." And the person who enables them to do it is, of all people, Joel Silver.
• 13:29
  like the cartoonish comedy: Okay, so tell folks who don't know that name who Joel Silver was at that time.
• 13:34
  like the cartoonish comedy: Joel Silver is probably the least likely person you might have plucked to help the Coen brothers make their commercial breakthrough.
• 13:42
  like the cartoonish comedy: He was a big name action producer at this time because he had three huge franchises on the booksPredator, Die Hard, and Lethal Weapon. All of those were in their prime.
• 13:51
  like the cartoonish comedy: You know, he just made Die Hard 2.
• 13:56
  like the cartoonish comedy: He just made Lethal Weapon 3.- Riggs, you crazy son of a bitch!- Yeah! Essentially, Warner Brothers who were looking after those franchises were just absolutely falling over themselves to keep Joel Silver happy.
• 14:10
  like the cartoonish comedy: So when he decides I want to help these Coen brothers, I want to produce their next movie.
• 14:15
  like the cartoonish comedy: I want to help them get a good budget for it.
• 14:17
  like the cartoonish comedy: I want to help them get really good big name actors for it.
• 14:20
  like the cartoonish comedy: Warner Brother were like, "Okay".
• 14:21
  like the cartoonish comedy: By the way, like what would attract Joel Silver?
• 14:24
  like the cartoonish comedy: What would make him want to work with these kind of semi-inscrutable arthouse filmmakers?
• 14:29
  like the cartoonish comedy: I think Joel Silver had the yearning that probably a lot of producers in his position do, to be taken seriously, not just to make a fortune with Mel Gibson running around with guns.
• 14:40
  like the cartoonish comedy: I think there's also there's certain aspects of their style that he found personally appealing.
• 14:46
  like the cartoonish comedy: Bizarrely, Joel Silver is obsessed with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and he bought one of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses in the Hollywood Hills in 1984 and had it completely restored.
• 14:58
  like the cartoonish comedy: And now Frank Lloyd Wright is all over The Hudsucker Proxy.
• 15:01
  like the cartoonish comedy: A lot of the architecture is very much borrowed from his style, so you can sort of see Joel Silver, perhaps while reading the script, kind of saw a certain kinship there, and he thought, this is the one for me to do.
• 15:12
  like the cartoonish comedy: And that's how in 1993, the Coens, whose last film, remember, was an arthouse money loser made for 9 million bucks, found themselves finally makingThe Hudsucker Proxy, with nearly three times the budget.
• 15:28
  like the cartoonish comedy: And both they and Joel Silver's hopes were high.
• 15:31
  like the cartoonish comedy: I think, in all honesty, they thought this was going to be a big success.
• 15:35
  like the cartoonish comedy: This would be just a real straight down the middle, easily accessible movie.
• 15:39
  like the cartoonish comedy: And I think that because of the fact that they're like, oh, it's just going to be a bunch of jokes and everybody likes jokes and we're good at telling jokes, you know?
• 15:47
  like the cartoonish comedy: Like this is going to be...
• 15:47
  like the cartoonish comedy: this is going to print money.
• 15:50
  like the cartoonish comedy: But what their idea of a broad comedy is, and what the actual moviegoing public's idea of a broad comedy is, are so different in 1994, that it didn't quite work out that way.
• 16:01
  like the cartoonish comedy: Hudsucker's stock plummets.
• 16:01
  like the cartoonish comedy: That's coming up in just a minute.
• 16:05
  like the cartoonish comedy: Stay with us.
• 16:13
  like the cartoonish comedy: All right everybody.
• 16:14
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• 17:27
  like the cartoonish comedy: You can also find links and info in the show notes of this episode.
• 17:31
  like the cartoonish comedy: Speaking of which, let's get back to this episode.
• 17:39
  like the cartoonish comedy: So it's November 1992.
• 17:41
  like the cartoonish comedy: The Coens have started shootingThe Hudsucker Proxy with the biggest budget they've ever had.
• 17:46
  like the cartoonish comedy: And if you've been following this season so far, now is usually the part of the story where the directors get obsessive or overconfident or egomaniacal and drive the budget sky higher.
• 17:58
  like the cartoonish comedy: But Roger Deakins will tell you that is not the Coens' style.
• 18:03
  like the cartoonish comedy: I'll give you one anecdote.
• 18:05
  like the cartoonish comedy: I was in a lunch queue with Joel one time onO Brother, down in Mississippi.
• 18:10
  like the cartoonish comedy: That would be their year 2000 movieO Brother, Where Are Thou? And there was, I think, a prop person in the queue with us talking about the film.
• 18:19
  like the cartoonish comedy: And she said to Joel, she said,"And what do you do?" And Joel said, "Oh, I direct" with no sense of irony or anything.
• 18:28
  like the cartoonish comedy: They're very, very unpretentious.
• 18:31
  like the cartoonish comedy: Just amazed that Joel says, you know,"How the hell do we actually get to play movies?" You know, they just can't believe it.
• 18:40
  like the cartoonish comedy: And Deakins says they ran theHudsucker set with that kind of modesty.
• 18:44
  like the cartoonish comedy: Didn't do a ton of takes.
• 18:45
  like the cartoonish comedy: Kept the shooting crew as small as the one on Barton Fink.
• 18:49
  like the cartoonish comedy: Instead, the budget got spent on making the movie feel as big and beautiful as the classics it was inspired by.
• 18:58
  First order of business: casting a big, beautiful old school star as the villainous boss.
• 19:04
  First order of business: I just love Paul Newman in this film.
• 19:06
  First order of business: You know, like you look at him on screen and you're like, no man has ever looked better, and he's like 65.
• 19:10
  First order of business: That to me, I mean, talk about it like a link back to the classic Hollywood.
• 19:17
  First order of business: I mean, you have it in living, breathing form through him, and he's just like, he's so delicious as this awful guy who's having so much fun being an awful guy.
• 19:27
  First order of business: And your friends, they called you jerk, didn't they?- Uh...
• 19:30
  First order of business: - Dope.- Dipstick.
• 19:31
  First order of business: - Oh.Lamebrain, schmo...Not even behind your back.No, as a matter of fact, they voted me most likely to succeed.You're fired. And, you know, there's, like, absolutely no possibility of redemption for him.
• 19:43
  First order of business: I love it whenever he's on screen.
• 19:45
  First order of business: Another over the top thing, the scale of the film's totally fabricated mid-century world, built entirely on a studio backlot in North Carolina.
• 19:54
  First order of business: You'd think I'd probably remember most about it as being awed by the size of the set.
• 20:00
  First order of business: Dennis Gassner's sets, that kind of monumental feel larger than life.
• 20:05
  First order of business: I mean, I'd shot 1984, which is quite big sets, but, it was nothing like Hudsucker.
• 20:11
  First order of business: There's an element of, like, fascist design in the film's architecture, which I think is quite interesting.
• 20:16
  First order of business: Paul Newman was astonished by the size of the sets.
• 20:19
  First order of business: He said he hadn't seen sets this big and impressive since the very beginning of his career, when he made this Roman epic called The Silver Chalice.
• 20:27
  First order of business: And just like the script, a lot of time those sets were crammed with gags and details like take the moment early on, when Norville Barnes arrives in New York and pauses to look at a job board filled with gigs he is utterly unqualified for, and the camera shows this board and it just is the silliest jobs you could possibly imagine.
• 20:48
  First order of business: Here, I'll pull up the list real fast.
• 20:51
  First order of business: The jobs are milliner, cantor (Reform), vice president, shoe salesman, dye setter, estimator, chief, pin boy, house painter, tool and die maker.
• 20:59
  First order of business: Security guard, printer feeder, roundhouse switcher, tailor, plumber, porter, director of internal medicine, tobacconist, pastry chef, foundry worker, glassblower, cabbie, diaper delivery manager, illustrator, administrator - executive position, vacuum cleaner, salesman, glassblower, third base coach, furniture mover, jackhammer, chiropodist...
• 21:16
  First order of business: All right, I think you're probably getting the picture.
• 21:18
  First order of business: ...wet nurse, beadle I'm only, like, halfway through the list, and each of them only takes up, like, half a second of screen time.
• 21:25
  First order of business: Trombonist is on screen for two frames.
• 21:28
  First order of business: In other words, with their maximal budget, the Coens made a maximalist film.
• 21:34
  First order of business: The movie packs 10 pounds of movie in a 5 pound bag.
• 21:39
  First order of business: Now for Coen's fans like Jackson, and frankly, me, that's the movie's appeal and maybe its whole point.
• 21:45
  First order of business: But for others, like, for instance, Joel Silver, sounds like it was all just perplexing.
• 21:50
  First order of business: I would sit next to him in dailies.
• 21:50
  First order of business: I think it's okay me saying it.
• 21:55
  First order of business: He turned to me and said on the first days watching the dailies,
• 21:59
  he said: "Roger, what the fuck is this?"
• 22:04
  And I said: "Joel, didn't you read the script?" Seriously?
• 22:08
  And I said: No, no, I remember it, because I was quite shocked.
• 22:11
  He said: "What the hell is this?" This is surprising to me because I watched an old clip of him talking about this movie on Charlie Ros e, and he really seems to just be genuinely jazzed to be working with the Coens.
• 22:22
  He said: And he also seems to genuinely believe that it's going to be a hit.
• 22:25
  He said: This is right before it came out.
• 22:25
  He said: You're saying that that was--- No. I think both are true.
• 22:28
  He said: - It was a put on?
• 22:31
  He said: I think both are true.
• 22:32
  He said: But I don't think what he was seeing was what he expected.
• 22:36
  He said: And it's not, it wasn't obviously the sort of film he usually produced.
• 22:40
  He said: Or the sort of films Warner Brothers produced.
• 22:43
  He said: So as the movie gets set to debut in 1994.
• 22:46
  He said: I think they're not quite sure what they've got.
• 22:49
  He said: And I think Warner Brothers are even less sure.
• 22:51
  He said: Warner Brothers start to sort of whisper about maybe let's do some reshoots, let's get this film to land a little bit more securely.
• 23:00
  He said: Let's do more test screenings.
• 23:02
  He said: They did do some, and they were pretty mixed.
• 23:05
  He said: Worryingly so for a movie they were hoping to market, you know, quite widely.
• 23:10
  He said: And to be fair, even the movie's admirers will tell you that story wise,Hudsucker isn't the tightest flick.
• 23:16
  He said: You know, I think that it's like a movie that has incredible momentum up to a point, and then it kind of gets a little, like, lost in its own quicksand- for about 20 minutes.
• 23:25
  He said: - Towards the end?
• 23:28
  He said: Yeah, basically like, once the Hula Hoop is a hit, there's about 20 minutes where it feels like the movie is not sure how to get to the ending.
• 23:35
  He said: It's true.
• 23:35
  He said: And this movie is like surprisingly long.
• 23:38
  He said: It's it's aiming to be this kind of Capra-esque rom-com, but it's this, like, epic thing.
• 23:43
  He said: Oh my God, all of Frank Capra's movies are so long.
• 23:47
  He said: They're so long.
• 23:48
  He said: And they, like most of them, feel so long, at least to me.
• 23:51
  He said: But for some, that kind of thing was exactly the problem.
• 23:54
  He said: The feeling that the Coens were having a ball aping classic movie conventions at the expense of their own movies, story and characters.
• 24:01
  He said: So the premiere was Sundance in January 1994.
• 24:06
  He said: It didn't go down particularly well.
• 24:08
  He said: The reviews confirmed a lot of people's worries that people found it a bit of a cold film, like even critics who'd admired the Coens before were like, yeah, it's very impressive.
• 24:18
  He said: And yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure.
• 24:18
  He said: But where's the heart?
• 24:20
  He said: It exists to remind us of wiseacre movies of a half century ago,and as great as it looks, and it looks great,and as funny as its setup is, there's no payoffin The Hudsucker Proxy.
• 24:31
  He said: A close call.
• 24:31
  He said: Thumbs down from me. So suddenly, instead of opening big, Warner Bros. decided to open the movie tiny.
• 24:43
  He said: I feel they bungled it.
• 24:43
  He said: I feel like there was panic set in.
• 24:47
  He said: They were like, we've got to get it out there quickly.
• 24:49
  He said: Otherwise people might think there's something wrong with it.
• 24:51
  He said: It opened just very small.
• 24:53
  He said: Boutique release strategy, five cinemas March 11th, and it really didn't do well.
• 24:58
  He said: There was just this lack of hype around it.
• 25:00
  He said: And then there was the competition coming from a movie ironically financed by one of the companies that had shipped in for Hudsucker's Budget.
• 25:08
  He said: PolyGram, who was still one of the co-producers of it, had another movie that they put out the very same week, and that was Four Weddings and a Funeral.
• 25:15
  He said: Now, Four Weddings and a Funeral is not what I would call direct competition to The Hudsucker Proxy in any tonal way, but it was still a kind of boutique movie that people started to hear about and went,"Wow, the film you've got to see right now is Four Weddings and a Funeral."Four Weddings and a Funeral cost an eighth of what Hudsucker Proxy cost, and it did 20 times the business.
• 25:38
  He said: Yeah, Hudsucker took in a measly 2.8 million bucks in the States.
• 25:42
  He said: In Europe, where the Cannes Film Festival had made the Coens a brand and where critics loved hat tips to old movies, it fared better.
• 25:50
  He said: 12 million.
• 25:51
  He said: For a film that cost between $25 and $40 million.
• 25:54
  He said: The film was still still a flop everywhere, but it was especially a big, big flop in the USA.
• 26:01
  He said: And it makes you wonder what Warner Bros.
• 26:03
  He said: Really thought they were doing with it, or whether they just threw it in the bin.
• 26:07
  He said: Ultimately just decided it was not worth their while to push it, so they just binned it.
• 26:14
  He said: So I'm going to make a confession here.
• 26:16
  He said: In 1994, I was a newbie movie critic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
• 26:21
  He said: Hudsucker was the first film I reviewed.
• 26:21
  He said: Guess what?
• 26:24
  He said: I said it felt cold and that it didn't have heart.
• 26:27
  He said: But watching it today, with all its misfires, it mostly feels like a blast, and actually, on some level, weirdly touching.
• 26:36
  He said: Jackson O'Brien knows where I'm coming from.
• 26:38
  He said: There's a thing in The Muppet Movie, and I'm going somewhere with this.
• 26:42
  He said: In The Muppet Movie, Kermit the Frog wants to get to Hollywood not because he wants material success, but because he sincerely believes he can make people happy.
• 26:54
  He said: And I get that same vibe from Norville Barnes.
• 26:56
  He said: He wants to be a champion of industry, because he genuinely believes he can make people happy and make the world be a better place.
• 27:03
  He said: And that that speaks to me, especially in like, the cynical age of capitalism that was 1994 and is today, where we're not so much interested in making stuff to make people happy, as like reaching our hands in other guy's pocket.
• 27:19
  He said: Which is ironic because Jackson says the Coens, who just wanted to make people happy with this movie, definitely got pilloried for not also making money.
• 27:28
  He said: The movie is a critical flop as well as a box office flop.
• 27:33
  He said: The money spigot gets turned off.
• 27:35
  He said: Joel Silver, like, completely disowns working with them.
• 27:38
  He said: A lot of the things I read about were things that he said after working with them on the movie, and a lot of it has a lot of"Those bastards stole$22 million of my money" energy to it.
• 27:49
  He said: Which probably added insult to injury.
• 27:52
  He said: I really felt for Joel and Ethan.
• 27:52
  He said: Christ's sake, you know?
• 27:55
  He said: And I mean, I think they felt the responsibility also of spending the budget and not getting that money back.
• 28:03
  He said: And they're very, very conscious.
• 28:04
  He said: I mean, they never go over budget, they always work within a budget.
• 28:08
  He said: And they're very conscious of that responsibility.
• 28:13
  He said: And in a way, maybe that was the hardest thing for them, the idea that the film didn't make back the budget.
• 28:19
  He said: So I really felt for them.
• 28:21
  He said: But, what came out of Hudsucker was Fargo.
• 28:26
  He said: I just just keep it still back there, lady,or else we're gonna have to, you know...To shoot you. When they mentioned Fargo to me, they said:"We're kind of going to do a small film, kind of regroup,"and you might not be interested, because it's a very low budget." And I said,"You're kidding. Whatever." Yep, just two years later, the Coens returned with a cheaper, very different kind of movie that got a very different reception.
• 28:55
  He said: Obviously, everyone...
• 28:55
  He said: Who does not love Fargo?
• 28:57
  He said: It's just one of their great films and one of the great films.
• 29:00
  He said: Fargo cost 6.5 million, which is so much lower.
• 29:04
  He said: Like, we're going right back to almost low budget filmmaking again.
• 29:08
  He said: But the thing that really interests me about Fargo is the entire aesthetic.
• 29:11
  He said: The bleakness of it, the kind of reality of it.
• 29:14
  He said: It's so much the opposite of Hudsucker in all those ways.
• 29:17
  He said: Hudsucker is such a vertical film and it's like architecture.
• 29:20
  He said: It's dreamscapes, if you like.
• 29:22
  He said: It's reaching to the spires, into the clouds.
• 29:25
  He said: Fargo is the exact opposite.
• 29:25
  He said: It's a very horizontal.
• 29:29
  He said: Everything is flat and white.
• 29:31
  He said: And also, if you think about the dialogue, all of that rat-a-tat quipping banter in Hudsucker is replaced in Fargo by grunting, just like monosyllables.
• 29:40
  He said: Whoa, Daddy.You'll take care of it. And it's mesmerizing.
• 29:48
  He said: And I think it makes Fargo what it is.
• 29:51
  He said: It makes Fargo great that they went through the Hudsucker disaster, which was a bit of a disaster for them, really.
• 29:57
  He said: That's kind of part of this movie's great legacy, is that it allowed for them to stop trying.
• 30:03
  He said: They realized, oh, we're never going to be the giant blockbuster filmmakers.
• 30:08
  He said: We're not going to be Steven Spielberg.
• 30:08
  He said: And that's okay.
• 30:11
  He said: We can just make our weird little movies and, you know, hopefully we'll make a living off of them.
• 30:15
  He said: And ironically, when they make that decision is when they get their biggest commercial success to that point.
• 30:23
  He said: By the way, none of this is to sayHudsucker didn't leave its own marks on the world, even if true to form, was mainly in fun little ways.
• 30:31
  He said: Like to this day, a certain breed of Gen X-er will still cheerily drop the catchphrase,"You know, for kids." It's weird, isn't it? Yeah.
• 30:37
  He said: I think all the all the many, many people who did not queue up to watchThe Hudsucker Proxy in March 1994 because not many people did, somehow heard about,"You know, for kids" by the time it came out on VHS.
• 30:51
  He said: Meanwhile, even if you haven't seenHudsucker, you probably have seen the exquisite miniature skyscrapers that got built for its effects shots.
• 30:59
  He said: There were a bunch of films that brought these skyscrapers back out and used them again and again and again, and saved a lot of money by doing that.
• 31:05
  He said: There was, Batman Forever uses these models.
• 31:08
  He said: You can see them all the way through it.
• 31:10
  He said: Godzilla, the Roland Emmerich Godzilla from 1998 uses them.
• 31:13
  He said: And obviously you've got Godzilla stomping around through New York, so it's quite handy to have these buildings, but they just got more and more tatty.
• 31:20
  He said: Everyone started to think, well, you know, maybe it's time to put these to bed.
• 31:24
  He said: But they still clung on because the guy who was the supremo behind it all, from what I understand, Ian Hunter, spotted them for the very last time, right in the background of the Nicole KidmanBewitched film from 2005.
• 31:38
  He said: And he was like, they're my babies.
• 31:39
  He said: Right at the back there.
• 31:39
  He said: And then that was it.
• 31:41
  He said: - I think that was their swan song.
• 31:41
  He said: - Oh man, I'm sad that it wasn't Godzilla.
• 31:45
  He said: It seems like the most fitting and legendary end to a model city set would be to have it finally put out of its misery, stomped flat by Godzilla.
• 31:54
  He said: Absolutely. Yeah.
• 31:57
  He said: I still think the whole thing's poetic, though.
• 32:00
  He said: Sets from a movie that mashed together pieces of old movies which then got used in other movies.
• 32:07
  He said: I'd like to imagine the Coens sitting in a cinema somewhere, spotting their skyscrapers and happily nodding their heads.
• 32:25
  He said: And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week.
• 32:27
  He said: Follow us this season for more stories about good films with bad box office.
• 32:31
  He said: Next time the great filmmaker Charlie Kaufman gets asked to write a horror movie and ends up feeling like he's in one on his own set.
• 32:38
  He said: They were just in hell.
• 32:40
  He said: Not that people weren't enjoying each other professionally and artistically, but they were just in it, in hell.
• 32:48
  He said: The story of Synecdoche, New York, with guests including one of the movie's stars, Daniel London, and one of its unlikely superfans, comedy star Jamie Demetriou.
• 32:56
  He said: Follow us so you don't miss it.
• 32:57
  He said: Meanwhile, if you love this show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen.
• 33:01
  He said: Won't you let them know we're not your standard movie chat show?
• 33:04
  He said: Also, if you've got questions, comments, or you just want to tell us about a ridiculous detail in Hudsucker that only you noticed.
• 33:11
  He said: Email us at podcast@mubi.com Now let's roll credits.
• 33:15
  He said: This episode of the MUBI Podcast was written, hosted and edited by me, Rico Gagliano.
• 33:19
  He said: Based on the new book
• 33:20
  <i: Box Office Poison>Hollywood's Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey, that's published by Faber and Faber in the UK and Hanover Square in the US.
• 33:27
  <i: Box Office Poison>Go get it.
• 33:29
  <i: Box Office Poison>I also gleaned a ton this week from Jackson O'Brien's Hudsucker Newsletter.
• 33:34
  <i: Box Office Poison>It is called You Know, For Kids. 54 essays all about this movie.
• 33:38
  <i: Box Office Poison>All of them excellent.
• 33:38
  <i: Box Office Poison>Do subscribe.
• 33:41
  <i: Box Office Poison>Ciara McEniff is our producer.
• 33:41
  <i: Box Office Poison>Jackson Musker is our booking producer.
• 33:44
  <i: Box Office Poison>Steven Colon does our sound mastering.
• 33:47
  <i: Box Office Poison>Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick.
• 33:49
  <i: Box Office Poison>Extra thanks this week to James Deakins for taping Roger, David Harper for taping Tim.
• 33:53
  <i: Box Office Poison>And as always, thank you, Carina Lesser.
• 33:57
  <i: Box Office Poison>This show is executive produced by me along with Jon Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel Daniel Kasman and Michael Tarca.
• 34:03
  <i: Box Office Poison>And finally to stream the best in cinema, including some of the films we talk about on this very podcast, just head over to MUBI.com to start watching.
• 34:12
  <i: Box Office Poison>Thanks for listening.
• 34:13
  <i: Box Office Poison>Go watch some movies, and remember failure is okay.