When I tell people that I am employed as the researcher for the film podcast Blank Check with Griffin and David—a role I have served since 2021—their first question is often, “What does that mean you actually do?” This type of question has haunted me for a long time, as I have three degrees in film despite never seriously intending to move out to Los Angeles or participate in the production of any movies or television programs. Fortunately, the answer to this question is pretty straightforward. Blank Check is structured around the filmographies of directors: each week, the show chronologically tracks the development of an auteur, film by film. For each episode of the show, I compile a 15-to-20-page document—which we jokingly call a dossier, as if it contains industry secrets unbeknownst to anyone else—that details the development, production, release, and reception of whatever movie the show is covering that week.
Blank Check logo. Illustration by Joe Bowen.
A question with a more extensive answer might be, “What are your goals as the researcher for a show that proudly follows any semi-related detour its very funny hosts might accidentally open up?” To this question, I would say that I have two primary overarching ambitions while writing my research documents. The first, and maybe most important, lies in getting the major facts of the production right, providing hosts Griffin Newman (a comedian and actor who has appeared on shows like The Tick and voiced characters on Masters of the Universe) and David Sims (a film critic at The Atlantic) with a sturdy backbone of rigorously researched details to which they can confidently return when the time comes to dig into the context of the film and its director. My second goal, however, is to actually provide them with some of the obscure facts or outlandish quotes that might lead them on one of their silly or insightful tangents. In 1961’s What Is History? E. H. Carr wrote, “History is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.”1 If the esteemed British historian were to update this quote in light of the emergence of conversational movie podcasts, it might look something like this: ‘History is a continuous process of interaction between the historian, their facts, and the podcast’s hosts, an unending dialogue between the present, the past, and some future recording session.’
Accordingly, in many of the most important ways, the research I conduct for the show is not unlike the research I conducted while completing my master’s and doctorate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.2 My first step always involves grounding myself in the current literature on whatever director the show is covering, with biographies and production histories providing a much better fit for the show than critical interpretations. For directors like Stanley Kubrick, Bob Fosse, and Buster Keaton, who have already been discussed in comprehensive depth in a number of thoroughly researched books by authors such as Vincent Lobrutto, Sam Wasson, and James Curtis, respectively, this style of literature often serves as my bedrock, with my dossiers synthesizing, summarizing, and reconciling these often hefty—and occasionally disparate—texts. And as the show branches out to cover non-Hollywood directors like Park Chan-Wook and Jane Campion, my research must not only provide context for the filmmakers but also the diverse film industries from which they hail, making media industry studies an integral part of my early research.
Books consulted to compile the research for the Buster Keaton miniseries, “Podcast Jr.” Photo provided by the author.
Complementing those books—or, in the case of under discussed films like John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars, Danny Boyle’s Trance, or Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful, serving as the primary wellspring—are a wide array of articles, many of which have been published in entertainment industry trades like Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline. As Eric Hoyt explained in Ink-Stained Hollywood, “Between 1915 and 1950, no American industry had more trade papers devoted to it than the movie business.”3 These trades—both in their historic past and their contemporary present—serve not only as relatively trustworthy sources to confirm the up-and-down trajectories of the show’s directors and films; they are also full of the kinds of odd, obscure, or forgotten stories and industrial discourses that make for some of the most interesting discussions on the show, especially failed projects (like Park Chan-wook’s unrealized S. Craig Zahler-scripted Western The Brigands of Rattlecreek) or recast roles (like Ben Stiller being swapped for Brendan Fraser in Henry Selick’s Monkeybone).
A benefit of having such a narrow subject to research for each episode is that I can cast a fairly wide net while searching for sources, and one of the real pleasures of researching for the show lies in getting to intimately know the personalities and thought processes of each of the miniseries’s respective directors. The majority of this insight is gained from profiles and interviews from newspapers like The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian, magazines like Entertainment Weekly, Fangoria, and Rolling Stone, or websites like Vulture and The A.V. Club. I am also forever in the debt of the University Press of Mississippi, as their Conversations with Filmmakers series, which compiles career-spanning interviews into one tidy collection, has been essential for interrogating the minds of Jane Campion (ed. Virginia Wright Wexman), Stanley Kubrick (ed. Gene D. Phillips), Buster Keaton (ed. Kevin Sweeney), and likely a number of future miniseries subjects. And while the director’s voice is naturally the one which receives the most privileged position in my research, I always make sure to uncover as many interviews with the films’ stars and their below-the-line crew members as I possibly can.4
Table of contents for the dossier on Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful. Photo provided by the author.
Of course, researching is only half of the job, and it is in the writing of the dossier that my work veers away from the style of writing I did as an academic. Any historian knows that it is crucial to write to your audience, and I am, in essence, writing to two audiences: the show’s hosts but also its listeners. The latter group does not greatly influence the form of my research documents, though it certainly influences the content: as a long-time fan of the show before it became my employer, I include the kinds of facts and—more importantly—the sorts of silly stories and quotes that I would be interested in hearing Griffin and David talk about myself. I cannot envision an academic article that could have made space for Kevin Costner talking to writer and podcast host Bill Simmons about the various “green ones” and “blue ones” he took to get through throwing 200-300 pitches a day while shooting Sam Raimi’s For Love of the Game, but the show is the perfect home for that kind of thing.5
Writing for the show’s hosts, however, is a different story. My research documents need to slot easily into the conversational tone of what is typically a two-to-three-hour long podcast episode (and that is after it has been edited). If the dossiers become too awkward or unwieldy, they risk slowing down the momentum of the recording. In form, the dossier—again, I am sorry, that’s just what we call them!—is a hybrid of a research-essay, an oral history, and lecture notes. Aside from a few special exceptions, each dossier is uniformly divided into the same four sections: Development, Cast, Production, and Release/Reception. The prose in each of these sections is organized into outline note-taking form: dashes separate my individual points into quickly digestible chunks, while indentation creates subsections that move from general introductory topics to more specific matters. Each dash usually opens with an explanatory introduction written by me, followed by a quote from someone associated with the film, and I make liberal use of bolding to ensure the document is easily scannable while holding a conversation.6 I want the dossier to be as rigorous as possible without being overwhelming, which can be a tricky balance to maintain, especially with productions as famous as 2001: A Space Odyssey or as infamous as The Shining.
Pre-production notes for the Sam Raimi dossier. Photo provided by the author.
I think what makes my job especially rewarding is that the dossier is not the end-product. My research is merely one of the important starting points for each episode’s discussion—it brings me great joy when I uncover something previously unknown to Griffin, David, or the week’s guest, and it brings me just as much joy when they use my research as a launching point to something I had not previously considered. My work is taken seriously, but it is also reshaped and recontextualized into a smart but deeply silly podcast that reaches untold numbers of listeners. When I was a graduate student, my favorite part of the job was always working in the classroom with undergraduate students, finding a way to take the kinds of research and analytical work I did on my own time and make it appealing and interesting to a large room of people without my same training. The classrooms I led were serious, but they never—not even for a second—forgot the absolute joy that comes from watching and discussing an interesting film and the context in which it was made. With my job at Blank Check, that classroom is larger than ever.
- E. H. Carr, What Is History? (Vintage Books: New York, 1961), 24.
- My dissertation Pack Your Product’s Bags, It’s Going Hollywood: Explaining the Mainstream Emergence of Cinematic Product Placement in the 1980s explored the proliferation of product placement in the movies in the context of both large industrial, cultural, and legal evolutions as well as through close examination of the work done by the practitioners who played an essential hand in actually placing products on the silver screen
- Eric Hoyt, Ink-Stained Hollywood: The Triumph of American Cinema’s Trade Press (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), 2.
- One additional note I should state is that my job requires me to be uniquely nimble on my feet: while I try to stay well ahead of the recording schedule so that I can chronicle each director’s filmography in order of the films’ release dates, there are times where I must quickly piece together the context of a director’s arc for an early recording with a special guest who unexpectedly drops into town or who has only a short window of time to appear on an episode. It is in these moments that my end-of-semester term-paper writing experience pays off (or, I might say, comes back to haunt me).
- Bill Simmons, host, “NBA Summer Mailbag Plus Kevin Costner on His Best Baseball Movies, Acting Lessons, and Navigating True Superstardom,” The Bill Simmons Podcast, July 25, 2019, https://open.spotify.com/episode/2EVC9sBPepKktVsgglDqay.
- Credit for the development of the formatting of these production documents should also go to my former co-researcher Nick Laureano.
