Blockbusters and Birdwalks

INTRODUCING 1999: BEST. MOVIE. YEAR. EVER., a conversation

• Garrett Chaffin-Quiray

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 5:06

Remembering the fin de siècle energy that birthed our 21st century, we’ve curated this 15-part series to overlap with, and extend, Brian Raftery’s 2020 book “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen”. 

Screenings include: “Following” (Christopher Nolan, 1998), “Varsity Blues” (Brian Robbins, 1999), “The Blair Witch Project” (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), “The Matrix” (The Wachowskis, 1999), “Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace” (George Lucas, 1999), “South Park - Bigger, Longer and Uncut” (Trey Parker, 1999), “Free Enterprise” (Robert Meyer Burnett, 1999), “Eyes Wide Shut” (Stanely Kubrick, 1999), “Twin Falls Idaho” (Michael Polish, 1999), “American Beauty” (Sam Mendes, 1999), “Three Kings” (David O. Russell, 1999), “Boys Don't Cry” (Kimberly Peirce, 1999), “Topsy-Turvy” (Mike Leigh, 1999), “Magnolia” (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999), and “Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes” (Cass Paley, 1998).

***

Referenced media:

  • “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen” (2020) by Brian Raftery
  • “The Blair Witch Project” (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)
  • “Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace” (George Lucas, 1999)
  • “Following” (Christopher Nolan, 1998)
  • “Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes” (Cass Paley, 1998)
  • “American Beauty” (Sam Mendes, 1999)

Audio quotation:

 

A Book Recommendation Sparks The Theme

SPEAKER_00

Early this calendar year, 2026, I visited with a friend who I had met in college. I was in the film school, he wasn't, but he was making movies and I wasn't. So you can see what a funny little thing that was.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00

He put in my hands a book called Best Movie Year Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen by a journalist and now book writer named Brian Raftery. These kinds of surveys that choose an arbitrary point in time to say, everything depends on this. I'm sold by the bravado that goes into that, but I'm also to a degree in agreement.

SPEAKER_01

Reading the stuff back. It's like, oh yeah, I forgot. Oh yeah, oh that did come out this

Cultural History Over Hot Takes

SPEAKER_01

year. Right. But also it's it's interesting because the author doesn't really sort of weigh in too heavily on the actual like whether he liked the movie or not, or whether it was good or not. It basically is just kind of like an overview of this the group of films that he selected and the way the way in which they sort of made their entrance onto the scene and then kind of what happened afterwards, sort of what or what they represented.

SPEAKER_00

I think that's that's correct. It's a cultural history and not a textual analysis. What he offers, but I have no ability to give the world, is access to more than 100 celebrities, important personalities, whether they're performers or the crew of these movies. He interviews them and they're excerpted at great length in quotation, and they're well cited, so I don't think he's bluffing.

Memory Triggers And 1999 Hype

SPEAKER_01

A lot of them are quite informative. Uh like take Blair Witch Project, for example. Uh he had like lots of details about the actual premiere of that film, the way the actors were kind of treated, and that kind of stuff that I was oblivious to, and I was an early, early adopter or fan of that film.

SPEAKER_00

An idea that comes up a lot when we examine cultural products is the way it memory holds you if you were alive at the same time. So for me, that was the case. When, for example, he wants to talk about Star Wars Episode I, The Phantom Menace. That's the one that instantly came to mind. And Jar Jar Binks is is on the cover of the book. Like I'm drawn to that because it puts me back in the place I was at that time.

The Messy Problem Of Periodization

SPEAKER_00

The other thing that it invites is the issue of periodization. By that I mean this is about 1999. It's in the title of the book. And so we borrowed that as a way to sketch our series. But the trouble is, 1999 is an unclean thing. Movies have a long life to get made. Our opening text is a movie called Following Christopher Nolan's feature film debut. But it debuted in 1998. It didn't find an audience, that scant little group of people who saw it, until 1999. The final movie in our series is Wad, The Life and Times of John C. Holmes, which I think was made in 1999 and did a festival circuit, and I saw it in a theater in New York City in 2001. So these movies are spread out over a period of time and can't just be cleanly dropped into a 12-month period. Raftery acknowledges that in this book. He includes following. So I find myself feeling very glad that my friend Chris Metzler put the book by Brian Raftery in my hands. I think it's a good book. I wanted to investigate this period of time more deeply than I feel he did because, as you say, his book is a lot of quotation and setting who was doing what and when. But it's not as much about what do we think

American Beauty Then Versus Now

SPEAKER_00

about it. The very clear example that comes from this is, and it's covered in the book, the Academy Award winner for 1999 was American Beauty. Right. In 2026, we can't mention that movie and not know about Kevin Spacey's career since 1999, his personal picadillos. Yeah. To pick the sort of lightest word that I can apply.

SPEAKER_01

At the time, I recall thinking that the Academy had made the right decision. Me too. Now I don't think that so much. As we've talked about with the passage of time and like allowing art to kind of steep in our collective consciousness or respective consciousnesses. My opinion of that film is not as strong now as it once was, but that's why we're going to talk about to explore why.

Blockbusters Grow As Meaning Shrinks

SPEAKER_00

From his epilogue, Raftery writes, two decades after the culture rupture, that was 1999, movies have somehow managed to simultaneously expand and shrink. Major studio films have never been more expensive, with budgets of $150 million to $200 million becoming so normal, they're barely worth marveling at anymore. And because of those costs, the mega movies need to reach as many people as possible, which sometimes means they have to say as little as possible.

SPEAKER_01

The most popular art can't possibly be that good because the more people it appeals to, the less best efficity there can be.