Griffin Newman, a host of the podcast “Blank Check,” stood in the Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria. Above his head hung a black motorbike, made for Tom Cruise’s climactic cliff-jumping scene in the 2023 movie “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning.” “I had several childhood birthday parties here,” Newman said fondly. The thirty-six-year-old actor and comedian was visiting a “Mission: Impossible” exhibition, together with his co-host, the Atlantic film critic David Sims, and a few colleagues. Their podcast, now in its tenth year, discusses directors who had a big success early in their careers and were then given a “blank check” to make a passion project.
“When we started, we were focussing on directors who started out with beloved hits and then made reviled flops,” Newman said. Examples: M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” gave him the clout to make “Lady in the Water” (Michael Medved: “A work of nearly unparalleled arrogance and vapidity”); the Wachowskis’ “Matrix” films begat “Speed Racer” (Première: “Heretofore undreamed of levels of narrative incoherence”); and Cameron Crowe’s “Jerry Maguire” led to “Aloha”(Variety: “Unbalanced, unwieldy, and at times nearly unintelligible”).
Few of Cruise’s movies qualify as blank-check projects, apart from “Mission: Impossible”—he’s “more franchise-minded,” Newman said—but he looms large for the podcasters. Newman, wearing a blue Skywalker Ranch Fire Brigade sweatshirt, wandered over to some 3-D-printed mannequins dressed in Cruise’s actual costumes.
“These clothes look like they would fit me, right?” Newman said. As a teen-ager in the Village, he’d let his hair grow and worn sunglasses indoors, to match Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible 2” look. “I didn’t understand that my hair was curly,” he said. “So I kept being, like, ‘If it keeps growing, eventually I’ll get the cool, windswept look.’ And it just turned into a brunet Carrot Top thing.”
“Blank Check” began as part of the Upright Citizens Brigade’s nascent podcast network, recording in a tiny studio with the Kaufmanesque (Andy, not Charlie) premise of critiquing “The Phantom Menace” as if the original “Star Wars” films didn’t exist. Ben Hosley, the podcast’s executive producer, said, “At the time, I lived in a windowless closet, then I would go to work in a windowless closet.”
The team eventually ditched the “Star Wars” premise for the current format and hired a staff of nine, including a dedicated researcher. Their unabashed movie nerddom is part and parcel of the show’s success—Sims and Newman first connected with their other producer, Marie Bardi-Salinas, when they competed against her in a movie-trivia league at Videology, a now defunct bar and video store in Williamsburg. Newman said, “So many of our friends, who also are our most popular, most recurring guests, we met there.” He listed the directors Alex Ross Perry and Leslye Headland, and the IndieWire film critic David Ehrlich, who have appeared on “Blank Check” a combined twenty-four times. The director Chris Weitz, who has been on six times, said, “It’s honestly better than getting invited to the Vanity Fair parties.” Kogonada is a fan. Stephen Colbert was introduced to the podcast by his daughter, during a drive from Charleston to New York; he now binge-listens on weekends. (“My idea of cleansing my brain is to put on a good six to eight hours of podcasts while I reorganize my sock drawer,” he’s said.)
To mark the show’s tenth anniversary, Newman and Sims are taping a special episode at Town Hall, on June 6th. “We’re doing a really serious film,” Hosley said. “We’re covering ‘King Ralph,’ ” directed by David S. Ward. (Vice: “King Ralph is its own Stanford Prison Experiment.”)
Conversation turned to more recent blank-check movies. “Ryan Coogler’s ‘Sinners’ is one,” Sims, who was dressed all in black, said. After the success of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” Coogler “gets to go to the studio and be, like, ‘Hey! I have an original thing.’ ”
Newman said, “ ‘Sinners’ is the only old-school big-budget blank-check project off of a Marvel movie. Most of them have been smaller and more personal, like ‘Jojo Rabbit’ ”—Taika Waititi’s follow-up to “Thor: Ragnarok”—“or ‘Hedda’ ”—which Nia DaCosta made after “Candyman” and “The Marvels.”
“Oscar-y projects,” Sims added.
In the old days, Newman said, the deal with the studios was “if you do one for them, you will get one for you.” Referring to Marvel, he continued, “Now if the movies succeed they go, ‘Well, that wasn’t really because of you. That was because of the I.P.’ ”
A curator appeared. Hosley gestured toward a stained pair of pants on one of the Cruise mannequins. “Is this authentic dirt?” he asked. It was. ♦