Idiocracy (Deep Dive Into A Movie That 'Was Too Optimistic')

0:01 Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, An Bettimore. I'm a producer, writer of film and television and now a podcast producer. And despite having every streaming service, I never know what to watch. So anytime I watch something good, I talk about it on the show. This way, you'll never have the same problem I do. I watched this tonight. There's always something good to watch. Let's get started. Today on the show, we are doing a deep dive on Idiocracy. So Indiocracy came out in two thousand and six. I was in college. I saw every movie that came out, and I mean I literally would go to the theater with my buddy Omar shout out to Omar at noon and we would stay there until midnight. We would see every movie possible. And I think then I saw maybe one poster for Idiocracy and that was it. And I was totally the person who would have seen it. Like a lot of people, I ended up discovering it later I think on DVD probably, and just absolutely loved it immediately. As time has gone on, like a lot of Mike Judges movies, obviously, like Office Space, people have discovered Idiocracy and now you see it playing all the time, like now it's in the TNT Saturday at two pm slot, and it's just on a lot. So it was interesting to look back because it was extremely painful making this movie, sounds like for everyone

1:38 involved. And despite that, I think it's just a great movie and it's still really really funny, and it only gets funnier as time moves along. Fast company dot Com I interviewed Mike Judge on the ten year anniversary of the movie. This is a movie, by the way, the grossed, according to fast company dot com, four hundred and forty four thousand dollars of the box office. If by any chance you have not seen the movie and you're listening this anyway, it's very simple to explain. They basically take the most average man on planet Earth. They show like a chart. At one point he's like the middle of the graph, Luke Wilson, and they freeze him for five hundred years, and then he wakes up and he is by far the smartest man alive in the future because we have all become incredibly dumb, which, by the way, one of the maybe one of the great sort of montages of all time. The way that they demonstrate this is they show the changing name of food Ruckers. So it's I'm actually gonna look it up because I always referenced this that I always get it on. So it's starts as food Ruckers, and it's it starts as food Ruckers. That's in twenty seventy five, in twenty one fifty, it's foot Buckers, in twenty two twenty five it's butt Truckers, and then in twenty five oh five it's just butt fuckers. No, that's how they demonstrate the passage of time. Anyway, So they interviewed Mike Judge on the tenth anniversary. He said the reason that they did some screenings on the tenth anniversary views because Maya Rudolph was talking

3:14 about it in relation to the election. Obviously it became relevant again with the rise of Donald Trump and all that. Mike Judge said. In addition to any political similarities to the film, there apparently was a Fallacio cafe in Switzerland with latte's and sexual favors. It's obviously similar to the Starbucks in the movie, which is again one of the hilarious lines of the movie is Luke Wilson is like, we gotta go to Starbucks and Dak Shepherd says that we don't have time for a hand up. They asked Mike Judge, what would you do differently if Idiocy you're made today, and he says, there's things I didn't exaggerate nearly enough. Now it seems like it would be optimistic to think they'll even be a country in five hundred years. I guess the Earth would be completely wasted and there'd be some people living in a bubble on Mars as the last colony of humans. They also asked him about if it was basically satisfying that the movie kind of took on this second life after it was initially unsuccessful on its theatrical release, and he says it's not all that sweet because the success is maybe partly because the world is getting bad. He said, Office Space was given a chance in the theaters and it didn't do that well.

4:23 It didn't do horribly, but it didn't do great. This wasn't given a chance at all, so it is really nice to see it getting attention, although it's usually the tension is more just about how dumb things are getting in mainstream politics, so it's all very surreal. They also asked Mike Judge about the anti intellectualism in the film, and he said, yeah, the way I sort of imagined it. He talked about when he took math in junior high, and he said the math teacher was really disappointed in the test scores and just said the only person who got them all right was Mike Judge. Here, and this is Mike Judge's quote. This is him telling about his experience. He said, and then these guys has turned around like we're going to beat the shit out of you after class. And I literally had to run an hide because I'd gotten everything right on a math test. So I was kind of imagining my junior high taking over the world. There's a website called Inverse that also did a really great oral history of ideocracy that I'm gonna quote from here, but depending on where you'd look, it says the budget was around three million. Mike Judge said that when they were making the movie, it was an impossible schedule, an impossible budget. Every day it seemed like was at least sixteen hours. It was rough, but DVD sales would ultimately become more than twenty times the film's box office. Part of the reason that this whole thing happened where it was like, they made this movie, but they didn't really market it, and it just seems like everybody was pissed off at each other. When Office Space was done, even though it didn't do well right away, Tom Rothman, who was president of twenty Century Fox, so they wanted to do another movie with Mike Judge. This is

5:54 according to Mike Judge an inverse. Mike Judge pitched them three or four ideas and the one they said is the big commercial movie you should do is this one, which he initially called three thousand and one. According to Timothy Sorestead, who was the cinematographer, he said that it was a very frustrating process for Mike because he had his deal with Fox, he had done Office Space, and he was still doing King of the Hill. I think it was pretty clear by the time he got around to making Idiocracy that not only did he not want to work with Fox, they didn't really want to work with him. Mike Judge said they were gung ho about it. There are always battles with the studio and that's kind of the fun thing to talk about. Ultimately, Fox paid for both Office Space and Indiocracy, So credit to them, So Mike Judge really kind of takes the high ground here. He talks about the development process of coming up with the movie, and he said, I started talking to other writers. Eton Cohen was over at my house and I told him about the idea, and the next day he said, I really liked that idea. I was thinking there could be a fart museum.

6:49 And Mike Judge said, I thought, maybe his head's in the right place for this. So initially when they wrote the movie, Mike Judge said that there was no president Camacho. The country was run by an orating system AI that was just super annoying and that ultimately didn't work. They showed it to some actors, people just didn't like it that much, so he you know, they rewrote it and eventually they got to Camancho Euton. Cohen said that he thought it was kind of satisfying that conservatives thought they were making fun of liberals and liberals so they were making fun of conservatives. So it's a movie that you could really watch with anybody across the political spectrum and they will find it funny. Money was a constant issue apparently on the shoot. Mike Judge said there was a meeting where they argued over a shot that cost three thousand dollars and at some point Mike Judd said, I'll just pay for it.

7:38 I'd rather pay thirty thousand dollars than ever have this meeting again. One of the concept artists also spoke in this and he said that I put a big, frank Gary structure of a woman holding the Washington Monument like a stripper pole. He's just talking about his different ideas. The cinematographer said, the VFX company that came in, the guy that they sent down to excess with us clearly didn't know what he was doing. We would ask him what do you need from us? And what's going to go behind here? And he would get all flustered and nervous. Quote. They found a VFX company that would do it for the price, but you get what you pay for. We were ten million dollars short of what we needed. The part in the movie where they have the it's a movie of a guy's ass farting that wins all the Oscars, including Best Screenplay, they actually did that for real, Like they got two hundred extras they rented out of theater and they projected up this image if this guy's butt farted it, and he said, everybody started laughing, exactly as they say in the script. The cinematographer says that Mike Judge told him that basically Fox didn't even want to cut a trailer. But Mike Judge says, I gotta keep saying. Fox did pay for the movie.

8:41 It's not like they were really the bad guy office space. They spent money promoting it. It didn't do well the box office. It caught on its own on VHS and ended up making them a lot of money. So I think they looked at it like, well, what did we do wrong there? We spent money promoting it. If the people are going to find it, they're gonna find it anyway, which, by the way, up being true. One of the members of the creative team wrote in the center, you know this royal history. It was a huge stain in my career for years before it became a cult classic, and before it was something I was really proud of. Honestly, I had to keep it off my resume for years to try and get another movie. The movie was strangely prescient about the popularity of the shoes crocs. Mike Judge said crocs were just a start up in Denver. Deborah McGuire, the costume designers showed me pictures of these things and said, yeah, they seem perfectly horrible and for our world, meaning for the movie. And Mike Judge said, if it's a startup, if it's a startup, what if by the time the movie comes out, everyone's wearing them? And the costume designer said, oh, that's never gonna happen.

9:41 So Mike Judge said, I'm happy for the movie and sad for the world. I guess the movie also, you know, it's if you look at the Rotten Tomatoes, it's one of those things where you can see critics have put reviews later. At the time when it came out, I think the reviews were more mixed. You know. Now it's mostly positive, but you can look at you know, Variety's review and they say that Idiocracy is absolutely a satire for its time. What Judge is less short of here than in his previous perfectly pitched live action comedy Office Space, is how to build a complete movie around his key ideas. So that's the review that was written at the time. Another review was written in twenty sixteen. Obviously, like way after the fact, after it was already a cult classic kind of movie.

10:22 The whole film has a drab, so mambulant rhythm. Intentional or not, this is part of its genius, which again it's I think it all worked out the way it was supposed to. The fact that the movie looks kind of shitty, I think it's part of what it's part of its charm. The fact that the vfx are like super clunky. Again, if it was like so slick and they got every dollar they needed to make it really beautiful. In terms of the way it looked, I don't think it would have been as funny. I think it actually perfectly fits the tone of the movie. Apparently, Terry Crews was in talks with Mike Judge and Fox over a possible Idiocracy spin off featuring his president Camadra character. They came apparently very close to doing Idiocracy themed campaign ads opposing Donald Trump's presidential campaign. It sounds like maybe Fox did not give them permission to do so, but Terry Crews told Business Insider the ads would have featured Camacho wrestling in a cage match against the other presidential candidates. So what a shade of the world was deprived of that. All these movies that I've covered where I've done this kind of deep dive are movies that have stood the test of time, and almost uniformly, the making of these movies was extremely painful, and people were pissed at each other. They were like, many times not happy they even made the movie.

11:39 A lot of times the things that are great about the movie are things that they explicitly tried not to have. So it's just been fascinating to see that. Very encouraging if you're a creative person. So if you work on a project and you're like, this sucks. I hate everybody, like, this is all going We're all got every possible way. Uh it might maybe it'll be great, maybe a great movie. That is the show for today. If you're listening to an enjoying the show, please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or anywhere you're listening. Until next time. Bye bye m