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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
There is a real sense of utopianism caught up in these modes of mid century American expression. It's around cars. It's around big suburban homes, that get destroyed and magically rebuilt.
Dan Hassler-Forest:It's really interesting to see that aesthetic kind of change from something that looks really cinematic, but that is colorful and shot on film and all those things compared to like the Marvel green screen aesthetic.
Ida Yoshinaga:Very grateful to Dan for mapping out the political economy so that we can get to these questions of inclusion and justice.
Charles Acland:It really is a work, I think, that that reveals something about Hollywood, and it's spectacular, insightful.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Okay. Hello. My name is Dan Hassler-Forest. I am a media scholar and writer working in The Netherlands at Utrecht University, And I am the author of the new book Fast and Furious Franchising published by University of Minnesota Press. And I'm really happy to be on this podcast.
Dan Hassler-Forest:I'm very happy to welcome my three top picks for a guest on this show. I said if you could get through these three people, that would be amazing. Not expecting that I would be able to get the dream team, but we did today. I'll say a few words about myself and then a very, very brief like introduction and then the three guests can introduce themselves and we'll get into discussion of the Fast and Furious book. My work as a writer and media scholar has been focused primarily on pop culture and the way it intersects with politics in a nutshell.
Dan Hassler-Forest:We don't have to go into London. My PhD was on superhero movies after nineeleven. I've done a lot of writing on science fiction and politics. And I do so much teaching on blockbuster type movies and given so many lectures on the ways in which the political economy of the entertainment industry has shifted over the years, specifically in the twenty first century into the kind of content based franchising model that we now have. That when I heard about this book series, I was really keen to write something that that engaged with that more directly.
Dan Hassler-Forest:And they gave me a chance to research it a little bit more detail and to maybe try to turn it into a kind of a story. And it turned out, once I started looking at the different franchises that dominate basically our entire media landscape at this point, that the one that I thought best really encapsulated the larger transition that I think we've been going through wasn't the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it wasn't Star Wars or even Harry Potter, but it was the Fast and the Furious. So I ended up writing a book about fast cars and hot chicks and the way they became one of the most profitable franchises in the world. Or were anyway. It was kind of by accident it kind of became the rise and fall of the Fast and the Furious, which is the point I think we are at right now.
Dan Hassler-Forest:And then when I, know, once the book, once it came out and we started promoting it, that question came up, who would you like to talk to about it? Charles Ackland is like his book on the American blockbuster and his other work on American blockbuster movies and the ways in which the entertainment industry has shifted. It was for me always like such an amazing mix of theory and political economy that just it was it's always been dazzling. It's been a huge influence on every on all of my thoughts about this. So I'm really happy to be able to welcome him today.
Dan Hassler-Forest:We've never met in person so this is a great opportunity to finally e meet. Eiri Yoshinaga used to be a co editor of mine for the journal Science Fiction Film and Television. We worked together so so wonderfully for a number of years. But I first met her at a science fiction studies conference where she presented work on Disney and the political economy of Disney and the way it kind of, it constitutes, the way it incorporates indigenous and native cultures is really a kind of neo colonialist practice. And the way she writes about it so powerfully and so beautifully has also been a huge inspiration and influence on my own work, as well as having been a valued co editor for the journal.
Dan Hassler-Forest:And Marc Bald is one of my oldest sort of academic buddies, the person you sort of go to a conference to just be able to hang out with. Somebody who I guess has, it always seems like he's read every book, seen every single movie and also has thoughts about all of them. I think probably as a as a as an emerging scholar, one of those people on Facebook that you sort of try to mirror yourself after knowing that you'll never ever succeed. But also the author of The Anthropocene Unconscious, a fantastic book from Verso that we're all eagerly anticipating the sequel to at this point. The franchise must continue, Mark.
Dan Hassler-Forest:And that book is, was another inspiration for my own Fast and Furious book because Mark sort of beat me to it and became like the actual person to first write. Like seriously, though not entirely seriously, but very seriously about The Fast and the Furious and the way its petro cultural obsession sort of works within our understanding or imagination of the Anthropocene and the way we inhabit it. So that's just, that's my introduction of you. But I'd love to hear your own intro because I haven't said anything about where you work and what your, you know, your resumes or what you would even what you think you would like to say about yourself. So I'd like to ask Charles to give a few words of introduction and then we'll move down.
Charles Acland:Sure. Well, you so much. And again, Dan, thank you so much for the invitation and of course to University of Minnesota Press for organizing this. This is really great and it's a great opportunity to have an excuse to spend some very close time with the work and, of course, to have this conversation with everybody. I'm in Montreal at Concordia University in the Communication Studies department.
Charles Acland:And you mentioned my monograph American Blockbuster, and you provided a pretty good snapshot of what the book is, so that's great. It is... When I started writing that book, probably in the early 2010s, I guess, was when I started, It was at a time when supposedly the blockbuster was passe, moviegoing was passe, the monoculture was over, it was all going to be long tail. It was so counterintuitive to say, No, no, no. It's just burrowing in for a different era.
Charles Acland:Indeed, as I was trying to figure out what was going on with that, I realized that the long history of blockbuster films hadn't really been treated from a scholarly perspective, and that the stories that the blockbuster starts with Jaws really was the dominant tale, which of course isn't right. And of course, that's the period when movie franchising really starts to take off, when I was starting to write about them. It's not that it was new, but it was that it was really starting to become the dominant way in which the economics and the kind of, which I say, cultural and aesthetic decision making was being made. So your work here, I think, really completely addresses what is, in many ways, the dominant. Whether or not Fast and Furious is moving up or down in its franchise life cycle.
Charles Acland:It really is a work, I think, that reveals something to us about Hollywood, it's spectacularly insightful, the work. Should I let other people introduce themselves before I go on with a commentary?
Dan Hassler-Forest:That's fine. Thanks so much, Charles. How about you, Ida?
Ida Yoshinaga:Okay, so I'm Ida Yoshinaga. I work at the Georgia Institute of Technology, specifically its School of Literature, Media and Communication. So I'm part of a cluster of film scholars. We also have a cluster of digital media scholars, And I'm coming to the issue of film, television, streaming, media as a scholar of diversity, inclusion, and social justice. So my training originally was as a sociologist of race and gender, which I spent a whole bunch of time on mostly teaching.
Ida Yoshinaga:And I came to science fiction studies asking the same kinds of questions we were asking in social science and in literary studies. How do you have Given the vast diversity and complexity of humanity today, how do you get more of these different groups and populations' stories represented? And this is something I brought to science fiction studies when I arrived maybe fifteen years ago and have been just doggedly trying to pursue. So I'm very excited because Fast and the Furious, of all the different IPs out there, is really known for its diversity brand And its emphasis, of course, on family, right? So the diversity and family themes are at the center of this brand, which is sort of a naked way of saying, Hey, Latinx folk, hey, Black folk, hey, Asians, right?
Ida Yoshinaga:This is your franchise. So I do want to address those issues. And I'm very grateful to Dan for mapping out the political economy so that we can get to these questions of inclusion and justice.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Great, thank you so much Ida. Mark.
Mark Bould:Hi, thanks. Yeah, I'm Mark Bould
Mark Bould:Speaker 1, Professor of Film and Literature at the University of the West of England in Bristol in The UK. I was mainly a science fiction scholar for most of my career. I also write about pop culture, afrofuturism, more recently the cultures of climate change. I actually co founded the journal that Dan and Eda edited.
Mark Bould:Repeatedly scidled away and left them with all the responsibility. Yeah, Fast and Furious. It's my favorite of all the sort of these kind of world franchises, just ahead of Resident Evil. There was something special about it. I remember not seeing the first one when it came out because I had the odd choice to see that or Gone in sixty Seconds, the Nicolas Cage movie.
Mark Bould:I love the original of Gone in sixty Seconds and I'm about the Roger Corman Fast and Furious. So I made the wrong choice. It wasn't till Tokyo Drift that I thought, hold on, this is actually something interesting. Then through four and particularly five, this is something special. So I had a long interest in the franchise and I've been waiting for Dan to write this book for forever because he's just so much more rigorous than me.
Mark Bould:He's less flighty, less magpie like, he has a very orderly way of presenting stuff that I'm absolutely envious of. So it's great to be here.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Well, thank you so much. Thanks for everybody for the... I don't deal with compliments very well. So if we can tone them down a little bit, I mean, I'm sure that the publisher would like it if you say nice things about the book, but just say that I'll just tune out if you do. But it's a...
Dan Hassler-Forest:It's it's enough of a compliment to even to even have you here at TV talking about this. So I've asked... We've asked all the guests to bring to come in with like at least one topic that they would just like to talk about. And then we'll see if that turns into a conversation or if it's a question that I feel compelled to answer in some way. But at least we have a couple of major topics.
Dan Hassler-Forest:And then I think the plan is to have the conversation kind of devolve into chaos from there at some point, but we'll see how long we hold out into this. Well, if Mark insists that I'm orderly in my way of presenting my ideas, we'll see how that holds up today. So Charles, what aspect of the book or the topic would you like to begin the conversation with?
Charles Acland:Well, thank you. I think that one of the places to start, in a way it's also where you start your work, which is to describe for us the ways in which Fast and the Furious, on the one hand, is a franchise that often gets overlooked. It's not given the same kind of critical attention. I already mentioned the kind of ways in which a sort of global diversity component is absolutely central, and you talk quite a bit about that. And it stands out.
Charles Acland:It makes it something that provides us with, what you say, a little bit of a wedge compared to the ways in which other kinds of franchises are talked about. It's a little bit distinctive. But the other thing that you do is to make it absolutely clear to us that it is a perfect exemplar of how Hollywood operates today. It is the American film industry that if you dig into it, you're gonna see the American film industry doing what it does. And I think that there's a way that one can look at the oddness of it, the oddballness of it, and think that, Oh, this is outside of that system.
Charles Acland:No, no, no. You make it clear to us. It's absolutely part... I would actually point to Barry Hertz's book on the Fast and Furious franchise, Welcome to the Family, I think it's called, where I think he kind of... When you read that, it's much more of a journalistic vein, but it's very, very good, that kind of interviews.
Charles Acland:But you see how deep the kind of Hollywood lineage is of this franchise, right? The people who have worked in the business for years and years and years producing this work. What do we end up with? We end up with, I think, a franchise that is a quintessential product of what the American film industry does, right? The highly capitalized component, the big, the loud, the spectacular, and of course, the multidimensional components.
Charles Acland:Right? It is the thing, one of the points that I make in my blockbuster work, and you make it as well about franchises, which is that these movies are not movies. No single movie is a movie. These are different kinds of textual and economic entities. As a result, they're producing different kinds of dynamics of power right?
Charles Acland:Than just simply, Oh, this is whatever, an artistic statement or expression or whatever else it might be. So I think that you absolutely demonstrate that. But here's the question I to present to you. The particular kind of genius, should I say, of the American film industry, the kind of aesthetic, is that spectacles invariably are technological spectacles. And in fact, let me just read a quote, one of my favorite quotes of all time.
Charles Acland:Because it's a favorite quote, I opened up my American Blockbuster book with it, and it is, of course, from Dialectics of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno. And the quote is, A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together. And I just think, so wonder what they would say about a franchise that is automobiles and bombs.
Charles Acland:Right? When you look at these films, it is astonishing how often these gearheads are looking at screens. Right? There is so much technology woven into the narrative, into the frame, into the mise en scene, the kinds of... Especially, and it becomes almost baroque by the time you get to the seventh film where it's the god's eye, right?
Charles Acland:You know, we live in a world now where, as we know, cars are kind of computers, right? So there's something here about not just the car chases, but the technological spectacle, which I think is so beautifully and elaborately laid out for us in these movies. And so I'm curious what comments or what observations you might have along those lines about the technological spectacular elements of this franchise.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Well, that's such a great point and such a good question. One thing, you know, that you notice once you start watching these movies, especially if you... I did a screening last week of the first film, that we proceeded with like a kind of a moderated lecture on the franchise. And the moderator had put together a super cut of trailers from movie number one all the way up to, well 11, I guess if you include the spin off film. And it's really interesting to see that aesthetic kind of change from something that looks really more like, you know, well, I would call it cinematic, but that is colorful and shot on film and all those things.
Dan Hassler-Forest:And that feels to many people more authentic and real looking at it today and compared to like the Marvel green screen aesthetic. But, but it's... But then we started watching the film and one of the first things that you then notice is they... The internal combustion engine is made into its own spectacle through the use of what now is very, almost nostalgically crappy CGI. It's like these races, these quarter mile races, they just take a few seconds really.
Dan Hassler-Forest:So how are we going to dramatize them? We're going to use new technology to make the flawless operations of this complicated machine into its own kind of spectacle as we follow the NOS into it. We use green screen, but in a kind of, again, a kind of a sweet way to, or an innocent way to keep the camera focused on the drivers as they move at these impossible speeds. And so I think in the way that even if we look back on the first film and today now of course Vin Diesel's recently said that he's desperate to make like a finale to this unfinished sequel and Universal isn't because it kind of moved in a direction that they think is no longer really profitable. So it can't be like Fast and Furious Endgame.
Dan Hassler-Forest:And Vin Diesel wants it to go back to its roots and to please the fans by making an authentic sequel that returns us like the making... Like the keeping it real type, know, Dom in his auto body shop, the streets of Los Angeles at night, you know, and have like a nostalgic mid budget blockbuster crowd pleaser. I love the kind of historical irony of this of saying like the thing that at the time was kind of a hit because of the way it was innovative in its use of complicated technology and where the cars really always worked perfectly in the same way that Luke Skywalker's X wing always works perfectly. There's never a question of is this technology going to abandon us? It's doing the same thing.
Dan Hassler-Forest:I think there's a number of points in the book where I draw the comparison between how the kind of mysticism that's almost, you know, that's almost fascist adjacent to like, we have this, we need like a strong masculine personality to inhabit the spirits of these machines. And then the machines will do their divine kind of work for us, you know? So you have to have both of those things.
Charles Acland:I think that's brilliant because you are right that there is the kind of... What do you want to say? The mysticism, the magic, right, of technology that keeps getting pushed. There's the sweaty arms gripped on the steering wheel realism component of the performances. But then there's also the magical component where the technology will strategically work or not work depending on the narrative necessity.
Charles Acland:Suddenly there will be a device that appears that will stop guns from working, And suddenly the bomb that's going to go off doesn't go off because there's some... Right? And this kind of hacking component, right? That there's always a way to sort of hack and change. And often it's not introduced narratively, it just kind of magically appears.
Charles Acland:And it's probably a little unfair, but there are moments where I thought, Am I in Hogwarts or something? Like there's a kind of Harry Potter... Like the way magic sort of appears.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Yeah. Yeah. There's when Gal Gadot's character is handing out the the the the GPS devices, you know, and it is kind of like handing out magical broomsticks to everybody. It's like now you can do magic and you can drive, which also fortuitously is a way for us as viewers to keep track of what's going on because the GPS is explaining everything to us.
Charles Acland:That kind of magic bending of components also includes the kind of frictionless movement through the world. So you can sort of suddenly appear... Nobody crosses customs anywhere. It's like you're in Rio De Janeiro, and suddenly you're in Rome, and suddenly you're in a Mission Impossible idea that you just kind of pop up. And that to me is connected to that kind of technological ease.
Charles Acland:Just think about all of the kind of power relations that are sort of pushed down. Right? And that becomes the front and center component that facilitates this kind of story and these kinds of films.
Dan Hassler-Forest:So I'm seeing Mark and Ida both, like, nodding along vigorously to many of these comments. Is there anything you want... I don't know if you wanted to add to this?
Mark Bould:I mean, obviously, it's the car, not the driver. I think it's... Oh, no. It's the driver, not the car. It's that way around isn't it?
Mark Bould:That's the kind of magical thing and I think coming back to what Charles is saying about the screens, one of the other key signature shot in the earlier films as well as the fuel or the noise going through the engine was the going from driving to the streets into the visual virtual space within the TomTom. That's how old these films are. People had dashboard TomTom's. And in four, we get them driving through the streets, the grid map for them, you get a visual that takes us into this kind of virtual space and it comes out on Giselle's screen, on Gal Gadot's screen, she's looking at it. So that blending of screens and reality which is then also picked up by the blending of sort of live action and CG is right there in the very first parts of the franchise, but obviously that balance shifts considerably.
Ida Yoshinaga:I want a Fast and Furious. So when I look at Fast and Furious, but also think about IPs in general, right? I'm really struck by how many of our IP modes and motifs come from what feels like mid century US cis white men, right? So Rob Cohen, who did the original film, was a very interesting director, but he is really from that era. People don't know he made a small film about the Rat Pack.
Ida Yoshinaga:He made a film about Bruce Lee. He's very interested in the mid century and maybe not as interested in cars per se as capturing these little cultural moments. The IP master that I really associate with that racing car fetishization of the era is George Lucas, right, who did American Graffiti. And after that, even if he switched over to science fiction, every podrace, right, every you know, motorcycles without, you know, floating motorcycles going through the Ewok planet, you know, kind of chasing has been an homage to that kind of, you know, mid century car. And Crystal Skull, of course, with Shia LaBeouf and his, you know, Wild Ones gear, right?
Ida Yoshinaga:But I want to see a Fast and Furious where the cars spy on you and gather data for a corporate, you know, like that would bring it up to the twenty first century and our real relationship with cars. Anyway, I'm very interested in diversity labor. So I'm a political economist like Dan, as you know, but I'm also interested in the behind the scenes sausage making. So one of the things that really strikes me with this series that I would like, if there's any myth, right, or cultural folklore in our entertainment industry among audiences and media critics, etc, related to this series, it is the myth of diversity. That somehow, you know, this series brings forth social justice because I don't want to mock this because many people fought for this for decades, but representation matters, right?
Ida Yoshinaga:So to have this old mid century cis white male desire be repopulated for the music video era, the digital media era, right? By people of color, that people who look global, people with all kinds of non standard English accents, that this was some kind of progress. And in my own research, one of the first things I learned in the history of Hollywood diversity is it's always been diverse, right? Because before film was proven as an industrial sector, women and people of color and Eastern European people were very, very much the test cases for jobs and roles. And then once it got unionized and established and institutionalized, the cis white men basically moved in and took over things.
Ida Yoshinaga:So if you look at, for example, one of the older IPs, Frankenstein, made by what many people think is a queer director, starring Boris Karloff, who's Anglo Indian, right, for that kind of diverse, exotic look. We've always had diversity. I'm named after a Hollywood actress and filmmaker who was one of the few women in the film industry during the classic Hollywood
Dan Hassler-Forest:show. I never knew you were named after Ida Lupino, of course, that makes so
Mark Bould:much sense.
Ida Yoshinaga:And went on to do lots and lots of TV episodes, right? So the diversity has always been there. And to bring us to the blockbuster era, people not just like Spielberg and Lucas, but people like Jerry Bruckheimer, who today gets credited for Top Gun as well as CSI, he learned very early in his career that you need to be inclusive. And this is a hardened Republican, very conservative. He and Don Simpson, when they were a team and producing stuff such as Top Gun, such as, I think they did Beverly Hills Cop, they did Flashdance, right?
Ida Yoshinaga:They learned very early and Flashdance, notoriously according to industry folklore, I don't know if this is true, they came down to three different actresses for the lead for Flashdance, which didn't become an IP, but its writer went and did a lot of hits, Jo Esterhaz. But the industry rumor is they had it narrowed down to three women, two white women and Jennifer Beals, who's part African American. And they had the crew basically vote on who's the most fuckable. And so if you know that term in Hollywood history, it's a way of institutionalizing misogyny. What would be the most sexually appealing?
Ida Yoshinaga:And they ended up with Jennifer Beals. So Jerry Bruckheimer made Eddie Murphy a movie star. Later he makes Johnny Depp a movie star in his career. So this is a money thing. Dick Wolf, who's a TV IP auteur who does a Law and Order and the the one Chicago series, etc, he learned very on.
Ida Yoshinaga:He did a diverse show, NYPD Undercover. Then he did one that wasn't diverse, Law and Order, the original iterations, all these balding white guys, right? Who looked like actual New York City cops. I was told by the network in the notes, this will not fly, include women, include POCs, right? And so all his series since then, including the Chicago series, including the FBI series, the CIA series, has at least superficially a certain kind of diversity casting.
Ida Yoshinaga:So I really like you to address what does the diversity in the series mean? And for me as an Asian American, at people like Justin Lin, who basically, he's had small indie hits, but he really made his career on this series. James Wan, who made his bones doing horror stuff, right? Because he hates puppets, he hates dolls. So James Wan and Bloom House has a whole bunch of IP stuff, including before the Bloom House years, Saw, right?
Ida Yoshinaga:So these are Asian Americans and he did Fast, I think was it six or seven? He did one of the ones.
Dan Hassler-Forest:James Wan did seven.
Ida Yoshinaga:Right. So, what does it mean that Asian American directors and also Pacific Islander stars like Jason Momoa, right? And of course, the rock Dwayne Johnson. Is it only superficial or does it mean more if they have more voice or input?
Dan Hassler-Forest:Oh yeah, thank you. Two thoughts. One thing is, I love your point that diversity is not new in the way that Hollywood operates. It just sort of changes, it shifts colors or shadings a little bit in the way that we talk about these things. So, I mean, having been teaching for about twenty years now, I still read the same paper every year, which is students saying, it's always been bad, but fortunately things are starting to change finally.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Right? So in our perception, we're never quite there, but we're kind of reaching for it. And there's always films that sort of seem to be like the ones that are pointing the way. And I think especially now looking back on the Fast and Furious and also digging through a lot of the ways in which reviewers would write about it and fans would talk about it. One of the things that stood out at the time was that it was being perceived as something that was more meaningfully diverse than similar other action movies and franchises.
Dan Hassler-Forest:So they would say, and I think like a lot of this is sort of coming out of the neoconservative sort of action, like the rise of action cinema in the 1980s, which was very strongly dominated by white male icons like Jean Claude, like queer coded, you know, action stars like Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Van Damme. And so having action movies that are at least set in environments that are more explicitly multicultural was perceived as something that was progressive in some ways. And it's interesting, another scholar actually in the in the one edited collection of... That's focused on The Fast and the Furious that came out just about like while I was writing this book, They did a... They did one of those quantifications of the numbers of lines that people have per movie and then and then coded that based on you know sort of different axes of identity.
Dan Hassler-Forest:And so and you can so you can actually you can actually take note of how the film it starts off with a diverse visual environment but few speaking roles for characters for people of color, right? So you see a lot of diversity on the screen but the people who are doing most of the talking are either white or they're racially ambiguous, right? And I've always understood this in the context of things like Marianne Arriga's idea of like the Hollywood Jim Crow, this idea like, yes, we would like to present an image that seems progressive and diverse to some extent because that in parlance of the time would be politically correct. So we'd be vulnerable if we didn't, but at the same time, we have to have main characters who represent the the assumed white male audience. Right?
Dan Hassler-Forest:And other... Because otherwise we won't make enough money. And so as the series progresses and becomes what I call like a mega... Mega blockbuster, like it's no longer really a blockbuster, it's this whole different thing that is this giant franchise that is everywhere at all times. New characters joining the ensemble tend to be more white than the ones that came before.
Dan Hassler-Forest:So it sort of tilts away from that kind of diversity while sort of, while at the same time sort of beating this drum of saying, no, we have Charlize Theron, we have like a woman now. Right? So, and so I like one of the challenges for me in writing the book was on the one hand, right, sort of being I think fairly critical of this thing and the way that it's limited in the way it represents a kind of meaningful movement towards enhancing diversity. That it's not really that it maybe it starts off being a little bit ahead of the curve and I think what... Like just my basic sense now it's sort of it's sort of got the rest of the culture kind of caught up with the way it's presenting itself and it ended up kind of lagging behind.
Dan Hassler-Forest:And then it starts feeling like that scene in Avengers Endgame when they all like all the women strike a pose. It's like we're all girl power and it's where you know, when everybody collectively groans. That's the feeling I had in the Fast and Furious Presents, you know, the Hobbs and Shaw film where they're like, oh, we're all gonna... We're gonna defeat them with authentic islander weapons now. Right?
Dan Hassler-Forest:And and it just like... It it just seems so it just seems so forced forced and artificial that I don't think like it's it's it's like Moana in that sense. It's like a vanilla bland version of paying tribute to something that is quite far away from what it actually, what from the work it's actually doing. But I, but I also at the same time, you know, I think like one point that Charles brought up was how this franchise is kind of one that's not, not, it doesn't seem like the obvious, like big franchise or brand. It's one that honestly, and when talking to people, what I was working on, was really quite a, like quite a long time when I was a little bit...
Dan Hassler-Forest:I would always put it in quotation marks. Yes, I'm writing a book on The Fast and the Furious, but it's really about franchising. You had to kind of apologize for a franchise that was... And I think mainly because it's perceived as being low brow, as being like you know not not geared... It's like geared towards a blue collar, like a working class audience.
Dan Hassler-Forest:And like a diff... It's very different in the... It has a lot of similarities to something like Mission Impossible, but Mission Impossible is like the Apple brand. And this is like, you know, the Fast and Furious is not Apple, right? It's like the lower...
Dan Hassler-Forest:It's like the cheaper version of that thing. And I think that... And I became more and more aware of like, why should I be embarrassed to talk about this? Because that's exactly the point of this and why it's so meaningful to so many people around the world who at the time that Hollywood was really not that you know not... Didn't project an image of meaningful diversity or of having like any kind of affiliation with working class people.
Dan Hassler-Forest:These movies really were doing that. And the fact that for a time they were like kind of like an underdog you know. They I think one thing to maybe like the fact that the first three movies weren't like they weren't piling on success after success. They were things that people were watching on DVD you know. The first movie was a hit but then most people I think sort of came into it through watching it on TV and home video and so it didn't feel like the kind of taken So it always made...
Dan Hassler-Forest:Tried to maintain that kind of underdog quality of we're not, you know, we're not the major leagues. We're like the guy... We're the working class guy who lives down the street who works in his garage and who like, you know, likes to have a Corona with their barbecue and keeping it real. Right? So, and of course that becomes a very difficult thing to maintain once it's making, you know, dollars 1,600,000,000 when we get to this, like the seventh movie.
Dan Hassler-Forest:That tension between on the one hand being critical of something that isn't really as diverse or progressive or as equitable as it wants to be or as it seems to project. But at the same time also being appreciative and respectful of the ways in which these characters and their stories and the craftsmanship in these movies really is very meaningful to a global audience. And that the way that it goes... That the movies like earlier than most, I think of the sort of of its peers go out of their way to say, we're your people. Know, the way that I think it's the sixth movie opens with like they're all there in their jets flying around the world, but they're actually being Robin Hoods to poor people in countries that you rarely see on the screen in a Hollywood movie.
Dan Hassler-Forest:You know, when Ludacris is taking what seems to be taking money out of the ATM is in Costa Rica, something like that. Right? And he's like in the global South somewhere and people are sort of poking fun at me. He's like like Dom Toretto, he's a man of the people. He's actually hacking the ATM to like create this fountain of money that's for everybody.
Dan Hassler-Forest:You know or Dom racing in Cuba in the opening of is that the number eight or nine where it's like you know and I won but now I'm going to give my car to somebody who's more deserving because they have no money. Know there's really that kind of feeling that you don't get with any of the other major franchises that codes it as being blue collar. And that allows them to get away, I think, with more than is justifiable when you look very precisely at what is going on in the films.
Ida Yoshinaga:Thank you. I just want to say briefly that, you know, you mentioned Tokyo Drift as a... Was it? Or Fast Five, one of them, as a reset or, you know, the beginning of that turn, right?
Dan Hassler-Forest:Of course, yeah. Confusingly, So of course, have all these weird titles, but the fourth one was called Fast and Furious and that was the Reset one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ida Yoshinaga:But before that, to set that up, so everyone remembers, well, the Asian American community, Justin Lin's first film, Better Luck Tomorrow. It was A Crime Keeper. What we should have taken away from that as genre scholars, as science fiction studies scholars, for those of us who are, was that he was a genre guy from the beginning. And what people don't know, none of the shitty film Annapolis with James Franco that nobody remembers, deserved like a budget Top Gun, but what no one remembers is he also did a mockumentary called Finishing the Game, and this was about racism in Hollywood against Asian Americans, because the concept was we're going to finish Bruce Lee's last film. So he uses as a vehicle to comment on racial capitalism in Hollywood.
Ida Yoshinaga:So I think when he got together with Chris Morgan to do Tokyo Drift, that was a corrective because these modified cars that were racing all over different urban streets, that came from Asia. So he was relocating the franchise to somewhere that was, I don't want to say authentic because these urban trends happen simultaneously in different parts of the world, but at least he was relocating it to one place where the trend had begun. So he makes these moves that are very smart and thoughtful. Because also Chris Morgan, I know people have made fun of him as a screenwriter, like The Onion famously had an interview of the writer, FMF, and had this five year old kid playing.
Charles Acland:Yeah, oh yeah.
Ida Yoshinaga:You know, Chris Morgan also comes out through genre, right? Like Cellular, which is a thriller, a very smart, and I would say, if not feminist, woman led thriller.
Dan Hassler-Forest:That's the Kim Basinger Jason Statham, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So
Ida Yoshinaga:they knew what they were doing in rebooting the thing, and they probably had seen that Bond had been, if not floundering, Bond was really struggling for relevance in the 2000s. And so I think they thought, hey, what if we just, you know, do away with Bond and take a lot of the bones of it, the linguistic structure, right? And then let's take it in this direction. And Universal was struggling for a hit. Remember, it had tried for years to put together its dark universe, which is like a huge disaster, right?
Ida Yoshinaga:It was trying to come up with some kind of counter to what Disney was doing, what Marvel was doing, MCU was doing. So there's both diversity and authenticity, but there's also very canny business and formal decisions. So George Lucas had two film scholars in 2005 write a book called Blockbusting, which traces a history of the blockbuster from the beginning of Hollywood to currently. And so the question, even though there are diversity issues, is always how do you make money? How do we keep the beast going?
Ida Yoshinaga:So diversity kind of fits into that formula. Physical moviegoers and actual theaters are Latinx. That's Letty, right? That's Dom, who's vaguely, I don't know if he's biracial. Like I've never figured out Dom's ethnic origins really, even though I know there was a movie dedicated to that with John Cena in it.
Ida Yoshinaga:But yeah, I mean, it's very catty. And for that, you can only do a certain amount of superficial diversity. Anyway, I wanted to know about Mark's thoughts because can we say these films have been less harmful on the environment? Because you can't do a practical effect with a car jumping on a building to another building, right? Isn't that better for the environment than old school like stunts?
Mark Bould:Yeah, so just before talking about one of the things that does modulate the diversity in the film is the concept of family in the way that family, although it's much mocked and perhaps rightly so, is evoked as a sentimental thing, but not as blood relations. Obviously, was all the trauma when Deckard Shaw was welcomed into the family, Justice for Ham. But, you know, that kind of articulation, however much they might play background characters or minor characters and the darker their skin color, the more likely they are to be a comedy sidekick. They are nonetheless welcomed into the heart of that family. And I think that does make a difference, even though I think Dan's absolutely right that it started off just ahead of the curve and is a little lagging now.
Mark Bould:Yes. So one of the things that fascinates that actually connects one of the things that fascinates me about the franchise is this kind of tension at the heart of it. The last chapter of my book is called The Dialectics of Dominic Therese because of this deep rooted tension that the films have between this utopian connection, these communities of choice that are mostly not white and the white guy is the chump. You know, he can never win a race. I do wonder whether he has that written into his contract the way The Rock and Statham and Vin Diesel have written to their contracts.
Mark Bould:They can't lose a fight. Brian can't win a race. But there is a real sense of utopianism there. It is caught up in, you know, this kind of odd modes of probably mid century American expression. It's around cars, it's around big suburban homes that get destroyed and magically rebuilt, being slightly bigger on exactly the same plot of land.
Mark Bould:So there's all those problems, but there's also that sense of agency outside of official culture. So seducing Brian away from the police, then away from the FBI, convincing Shay Wiggin to get punched in the face a lot as he helps them out, even though he's in the rocks, obviously is ambiguous position. It's a very typical American character type, the reactionary maverick. It's kind of Dirty Harry, but with a much more positive spin. But in this world of total surveillance, except in our cars it seems, it is possible to have agency and make make a difference.
Mark Bould:Obviously blown up onto, you know, into ridiculous proportions. The other utopian element, of course, is that no matter what you're doing, if you fall backwards onto the hood of a car, you won't be injured. Doesn't matter how far you fall, what velocity you're traveling at, that will protect you. And then there's the, you know, coming out of that same source, you have this petrocultural fantasy of cars as symbols of freedom, which in mythology, which, you know, roots into American advertising and the personal expansion of highways and the deliberate destruction of public transport in US cities. It ties into all kinds of cowboy imagery as well, though perhaps urban driving is slightly different.
Mark Bould:The idea that you can drive around LA that quickly or through New York that easily is absurd. It's another utopian moment. But this sense that all these physical elements at the same time are destroying the planet. So, you know, me today, me and Dan are sweltering in a European heat wave. How much of that is this franchise's fault?
Mark Bould:Films like to NBCUniversal like to award the films their green logo at the end, claiming they've pursued sustainable strategies in making these films. You know obviously you question that. But as you say, the use of real cars doing physical stunts hasn't declined in the films. They've just become bigger and much more enhanced or replaced by CGI, other kinds of digital interventions. But they have a carbon footprint as well as to the distribution methods of these.
Mark Bould:And so we have this kind of utopianism that's profoundly wrapped up in this, you know, the dystopian destruction of everything that we're living through. And one of the things I like about the franchise becoming so absurdly improbable, that's that's too kind, isn't it? Ridiculously impossible. I like the drive cars in space by turning the steering wheel. No matter how we can jump around the world without ever going through customs, John Wick can do the same thing, but you wouldn't want to stop him at customs.
Mark Bould:There's this kind of we can tell this is improbable. We can tell cars can't really do this No matter if we pay 3,400,000 for a Lycan Hypersport, there's no way you can jump through the Etihad Towers like that. So at the same time as we're being fed this myth, it is happening in a self undermining way. And obviously it depends what an audience is going do with that, that sense of the excess and stupidity of what we're seeing.
Charles Acland:Yeah, I just want to expand on that. I think you're absolutely right. And there is a way in which that utopian component feeds through so many different dimensions of the individual films, but also of the entire franchise. And it's funny, comment about the destruction of American public transit or the shaky status of it, it occurred to me, and Dan, you can correct me or not, in this franchise, I think there's every mode of transportation you could possibly imagine, except for public buses and subways. Right?
Charles Acland:Like, there's even sub... There's submarines. Right? There's there's... You know, so so there's an interesting kind of privatization.
Dan Hassler-Forest:There's tanks. There's helicopters. There's cargo planes.
Mark Bould:You do see buses on the streets of London because the red bus signals London. Oh, and they and they go into the London Underground as well, don't they? They have a fight coming up to the underground. That's because we're Britain and we're in the past.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Yes.
Charles Acland:I wanted to just expand a bit because on the utopian coast, because part of that family, that overlayer of family and environment in this kind of utopian way, is that the kind of family, again, very expanded definition of that term, it has so much agency, right? They can get things done. Other people can't, right? And it's part of the kind of subtle anti authoritarianism or anti institutionalism that you can see in a lot of American films, right? It's a kind of undergirding ideology.
Charles Acland:And so in a way, the films often become a little bit like workplace families that you see in a lot of American, whether it's situation comedies or... Right? So it's family in that sense that we come together for this project and the membership is fluid. But the idea that you can be effective and that there are ways in which you're going to act to defend the nature of your, quote unquote, work environment is key as a motivating feature. I think that, Mark, you're just making me think that it is one of the elements that sort of folds into the various other kinds of utopian components of the franchise.
Mark Bould:In that way as well, I think it sort of becomes a metaphor for making a franchise, this kind of shift in family that Justin Lin is no longer a member of. James Wan was a really unexpected entry to the family. Louis Loterie's come around as like the fifth dad and ruined everything. But the number of films written by Chris Morgan, Neil Moritz as the producer in the background, this kind of having to hold multiple cascading projects together. So James Wan takes over because of the pressure of doing the films back to back, the kind of rotating staff.
Mark Bould:I made a list because I'm getting old and I'm on some strange medication at the moment because I can't remember people's names. I thought, what I'm going to do is I'm just jot down a list of the key character names and the actors. And it took up a side of A four, narrowlined A four and I've not mentioned any of them. But the family members can't come back, so Lucas Black, who I adore, crops up again in two other movies. Everyone can come back.
Mark Bould:So, you know, if the definitely dead Giselle is alive, I'm looking forward to seeing John Cena in Fast Forever, which is this kind of odd title that promises is it a threat?
Dan Hassler-Forest:Actually, of the conditions that Vin Diesel has stated now publicly on Instagram for returning to indeed foreboding sounding Fast Forever is that he'll only do it if Brian comes back. So, and I think he means that seriously in the sense not to literally resurrect Paul Walker from the dead, but to have some kind of, you know, motion capture, Navi AI type representation that's another generation removed from the from the sort of icky looking, you know, composite of Paul Walker's brothers as doubles and a little bit of dinky CGI to make him smile. So, but it's just like for him, I think in his imagination, and I think this is so, like one of the things that I found most fascinating in working through this book, you know, coming to it from a very Marxist background and therefore always sort of tending, I think tending to think of Hollywood as a monolithic machine, right? As the things that it produces, they're just being produced to serve a very particular purpose and the people working in them. And And that's one of the reasons why I'm so glad that you're here as well, Ida, to talk to them, to have addressed this is like, doesn't matter who they are.
Dan Hassler-Forest:They just become cogs in the machine and to sort of read about and find out about all of the productive tension. Like what happens when Justin Lin comes in and reads the script and says, this is all just Geisha shit. Know, we can't... I'm not doing it this way. It has to be at least a little bit better.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Right? And by the same token, having Michelle Rodriguez for years saying, you know, we need more women and can't we have an all women Fast and Furious movie And then running up against different sort of institutional obstacles. Right? Or having a franchise that is utopian in the sense that it is meaningfully about having a found family, but nobody's allowed to be gay ever. Right?
Dan Hassler-Forest:There are no queer characters except like a queer coded villain who gets to act out in this way. Because again, because of the complexity of doing a global mega franchise that has to be all things to all people at any given moment. But specifically in this context of is it going to be for China, right? Is it going to be for these countries and if so what do we need to put in them and how do we consolidate the ways in which the creative people working in them as a family have their own agendas and have their own motivations and need to be kept on board Right? And how do how do their labor situations affect the movement of the of the franchise in that way?
Charles Acland:Dan, I think that one of the things that you point out in the book is about the importance of China. Successively film after film, not all American films get that kind of access, let alone have that kind of success. And the idea that this franchise had it film after film?
Dan Hassler-Forest:For a time, yes, for a time.
Charles Acland:That's right, yeah. It's really notable, and I think it does feed into the particular organization of the political economic engine that constructs this. This is where, as all three of you are describing, the different kinds of contradictions that are evident in this machine. It says it's about this, but really it's also about this, and there's nothing disguised about that. I do think that there is something about the casting, and it's hard to get a grip on it exactly.
Charles Acland:Right? So on the one hand, the kind of, as Mark just described, the kind of expanding universe of characters and also star, like sometimes top level stars, sometimes mid level star appearances, Fast X or Fast 10, whatever it's called. The idea that there are four female Oscar winners. There are very few movies that have that. Right?
Charles Acland:Brie Larson, Rita Moreno, Helen Miriam, and there's one more... Charlize Theron. Four Oscar... I mean, this is this is bizarre.
Dan Hassler-Forest:And yet they're not advertised as such in the trailer, which is like... It's not an Academy Award winner. Right? It's like, no.
Charles Acland:No. No. No.
Dan Hassler-Forest:We're not we're not selling our movie based on this. Right? Weird. Like, we got the we got the chick from Fury Road in our movie. That's that's the thinking.
Dan Hassler-Forest:And
Charles Acland:yet the franchise over the years has successively built itself around Vin Diesel. I mean, can we imagine Vin Diesel not being there? Yes, there was the Hobbs and Shaw. Yes, it wasn't built around his character, but he... It's really striking how his presence, his star presence, as the face of the series.
Charles Acland:And yes, there are others, and yes, you do great analyses of the positioning of the stars of the various posters, which is really insightful. And of course Vin Diesel, he's a complex star persona. You know, the idea that his birth name is, I think, Marc Sinclair. There's something very interesting. Again, the way that this might get branded or described in terms of its internationalism, in terms of its diversity, and yet at the same time, all of this unspecified, unspoken, uncertain components.
Charles Acland:Yeah.
Ida Yoshinaga:I want to point out that with Vin Diesel, the reason why he's so central, not just being one of the two leads in the original film, is between Tokyo Drift and Fast and Furious, He started One Race Films. So his production company is one of the production companies behind the series. So the economic and legal and political investment he has. And The Rock, I don't know if you follow Hollywood entertainment industry gossip, and challenged him with that hegemony because The Rock has a very powerful indie producing team, which comes from his ex wife and the ex wife's brother, Latinx wrestling global wrestling industry and weightlifting industry, who has basically made his career. So The Rock has a diverse team, and so he brought his very powerful but indie team, who's basically responsible for everything from Scorpion King onward, right, to try to challenge Diesel.
Ida Yoshinaga:So they had a little kerfuffle. I don't know if you remember those reports about Vin Diesel, the rumors are lazy and makes the whole crew wait and you know, so that, I mean, I suspect that came from the Rocks team, but now they're all friends. Now that Black Adam has failed and you know, Henry Cavill as Superman, who the Rock's team was also managing, has failed. So The Rock kind of has to go back to what's safe and not challenge other franchises. So there's this whole, you know, political economic struggle over control behind the scenes.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Well, that's actually like the way in which those behind the scenes narratives were deliberately made central by Vin Diesel. Like he was the one to really initiate that and to be like, you know, to be on Facebook and to be very prominently advertising on Facebook and on Instagram. It's like we, not only do we represent a family, but the fans globally are our Fast and Furious family. And we listen to each other. And this was a, the Fast and Furious was a little bit ahead of the curve there.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Think like The Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson, they really pioneered that idea of like we got to get the Tolkien fans online or we're never going to succeed so they have to be like partners in this thing. But Vin Diesel and Justin Lin, they were like that's that's the key. If we're going to be Star Wars with Cars, right, for a new generation, which was their vision after geeking out together, after they organized the little sort of cameo appearance at the end of Tokyo Drift, they were like, we could make this thing into into our generation Star Wars and we're going to make it like a family saga that is ongoing and that has that we're going to develop a deep mythology. And I think more like a soap opera maybe than Star Wars but you know six of one half dozen of the other. Like the casting of many characters including Dwayne Johnson, where like I was so surprised to find out that that role in Fast Five had originally been written specifically for Tommy Lee Jones.
Dan Hassler-Forest:But then before they even offered it to Tommy Lee Jones, again, it's kind of like the lack of imagination in Hollywood for like, we want a tough cop now that Paul Walker is no longer in the cop role, he's joined the gang. We need the cop. Who's the toughest cop? Oh, the guy who won the Oscar for The Fugitive. Right?
Dan Hassler-Forest:He was amazing. He he stole that whole movie. So let's get... Just get him. But then they check out Facebook, and Facebook fans are saying, we want wrestlers.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Right? We want people from the world of martial arts. We also want people who aren't white necessarily, right, to be in these movies. When they announced that they'd cast Dwayne Johnson, it was really like, we've listened to you and this is our response. And same thing for Jason Statham, same thing for John Cena.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Right? It's like this idea, we're not removed from the fans, we're also fans of our own franchise. And having a family means that we're all sort of... We're reciprocal. It kind of bites them in the ass when, of course, it turns out that it really is about who holds power over who and about whose contract stipulates how much they get and how much time in their trailer, etcetera.
Dan Hassler-Forest:And then all of these, you know, of course, these rumors are very juicy and very fun to follow about the on... Onset conflicts. And they're easy for us to imagine because they're pitched in that way in their various roles.
Charles Acland:Yeah. You... Dan, the... One of the things about this, though, that I think is telling, I guess, of the era that we're living through at this moment, I almost want to connect it to the kind of poptivism sensibilities, right, that those kinds of political economic production structure components, right? We're going to make sure that we bring in this fan base in order to achieve these kinds of things, and we can see that the numbers are going to work, which doesn't mean that anything is going to work, right?
Charles Acland:But certainly those forces, but then what you end up with are works that in some way are presented as though they are kind of like handshakes with their audience. The films themselves have to include features of that celebration. And I've started to notice this in so many disparate works. And it isn't just the franchise works. It's so funny.
Charles Acland:It may seem like a bit of a leap, but the latest season of Hacks, the B story, if you will, are the fans of our title character, right? And the way that fans are mobilized, and there's never anything critical, right? There's always a way in which honoring the fans, paying tribute to the fans, and then strategically mobilizing them for the good, right? A kind of Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, we're going to put on the show. It's all versions of that.
Charles Acland:And I just think we've now crossed into another moment where this is beyond self reflexive and beyond, right? It's kind of folding in on itself as we're now presented with works that themselves present themselves as part of our lives in which we are already always invested. It's a very strange component. I do think that Fast and Furious is a really good example of this. It's hard to find...
Charles Acland:Again, maybe I'm just thinking of the last couple of movies where so many of the framing of the shot and the music of everybody as they turn, the way they're lit, they're like headshots with their own CVs, you know?
Dan Hassler-Forest:Well, it's... I absolutely agree that that's that's been one of... And I think it's been one of the most monumental shifts in the way that the entertainment business operates, right? And it's not just in movies and TV. Like recording artists won't get a contract unless they bring, you know, they already have a fan base to bring to the table.
Dan Hassler-Forest:It's not like we're going to develop you as an artist and make a few albums and then we'll go on tour and then we'll find people to listen to. No, you're not eligible unless you already have those people. And I think we're also seeing it like now is such a fascinating moment now that we're at the end of Dom's turn, know, the franchise anyway. I don't think the Fast and Furious brand is gonna disappear. It's just too valuable like every other major entertainment brand.
Dan Hassler-Forest:But they're stuck with Vin Diesel still because he's in charge, you know, he's in charge of it. So I think for Universal, it's like, how do we get rid of this guy and take it beyond like the confines of this one person and human labor? How do we make it into some... How do we loosen this up? But what we're seeing now is like we're seeing these things fold in on themselves, right?
Dan Hassler-Forest:I think there was there was for it for about a decade there was this sense that if we if we have the fans on board the fans will pull in the rest, right? They'll be the ones they'll evangelize, they'll spread the trailer and if they're happy then the rest of the people will be happy like the normies will also enjoy it and then we can have things like the big avengers movies and stuff like that. And now post COVID, you know, after after the... We've gone through this massive crisis and studios have tried to sort of just get back on the horse and keep churning out these increasingly ridiculous, increasingly expensive mega blockbusters, more and more of them are just they're just completely failing or at least they're failing according to the metrics that we have right now. Right?
Dan Hassler-Forest:So they're not making a billion dollars at which they have to in order to be hits. And like like like the past two weeks I've been fielding interviews for media about how like what does it mean that the new star wars movie really didn't succeed right? That it's like it's a movie that's made very much for the fans or at least some version of the fans. Like we'll just stick this full of nostalgia with puppetry and things like that and at walker is falling off of cliffs and all this kind of stuff. And people don't like apparently anybody who's you know over 10 and under 50 doesn't really care and they're like I'll catch it on disney plus if I ever catch it at all and meanwhile they're all going to see obsession and and backrooms right they're see they're going to see movies that are made by YouTubers with a fan base, right?
Dan Hassler-Forest:But who represent like a different... Like a new generation of... I don't know what you think, Charles, if that's like a new kind of blockbuster that's now suddenly emerging because of course all of the headlines about in the entertainment business right now are about who's going to be the next YouTuber to land a big hit like, you know, all the studios are looking for the next Backrooms.
Charles Acland:Exactly. That's right. Yeah. And again, that's part of, I don't know what you call it, the, you know, the way in which, at least the industry discourse and industry journalism and commentators will sort of congregate around a particular idea. There have always been sleeper hits and surprise hits, and you know, there's no...
Charles Acland:Whether or not it's... I remember, you know, Blair Witch Project. The industry's changing mode? Yes and no. But nonetheless, yeah, I mean, Backrooms Obsession, very, very interesting moment.
Charles Acland:But as your work demonstrates, when you start studying franchises, movie franchises or other kinds of cultural franchises of various sorts, A failure doesn't mean the franchise is going to fail. It can withstand a terrible movie. This is why sometimes people sometimes are surprised, Oh, look, look how bad this particular Fast and Furious movie is. Right? Oh, the franchise is on a downswing.
Charles Acland:No, it doesn't mean that at all. Because franchises aren't movies, each movie entry has a different kind of function. If it wins back, if it breaks even, then fantastic. But it does other things. It builds the story world.
Charles Acland:And sometimes it is this gift to fans to make sure that the fans are still around temporarily. It might introduce a character. It might continue a storyline, but it does all these other things by adding to the content of the greater entity. So it can fail, right? And again, The Mandalorian example is a good example of this.
Charles Acland:It just was bested in a way that surprised people. But anybody who's been paying attention to how interesting horror has been the last decade wasn't surprised, right, that these kinds of things would generate that kind of response.
Ida Yoshinaga:Horror is famously profitable, right? So you think of A24's films, you look at the production value, there's not a lot of I mean, there are effects, but there's not a lot of expensive production elements. And it's one of the two genres that for a long time was budget proof, right? Along with comedy. And comedy is no longer theatrical.
Ida Yoshinaga:It's basically gone to streaming. But horror is still there because it helps us discover auteurs like Sam Raimi, right? Who go on. So now those two guys, the obsession guy and the backroom guy are being courted by all the IPs, of course. But I know this, so I have the side of me that does critical theory and political economy and Marxism, and the other side, because I come from a family of merchants and small business people, it's like Fast and Furious is not highly merchandised.
Ida Yoshinaga:I didn't play the video game, so I don't know that dimension. But I was thinking when Avatar came out, unlike the Lucas Empire, there weren't a lot of toys and things you could buy with Avatar. I have two Avatar t shirts. Everyone always sees me with it and goes, Wow, I love that film. And then I realized part part of their response is, There's not a lot of Avatar stuff.
Ida Yoshinaga:So are we seeing a shift away from traditional merchandising? Has everything gone digital to things like skins and video game y things that were not polluting, for example, the Pacific Ocean? One of the critiques of Moana from Pacific Islanders was, well, more dolls to kill our ancestor, the Pacific Ocean was, right? More plastic dolls. Like, mean, thinking about Marx concerns, right?
Ida Yoshinaga:Is this a different kind of era of IP? Should we even care about this? Because it's capitalism and more capitalism, more destruction of the planet. But part of me does kind of notice those things. And I don't know what to do with that side of my head.
Ida Yoshinaga:That's like Avatar didn't have enough toys, you know?
Mark Bould:Yeah, I think it is a shift. I think Dan writes about this in the book as well, that shift to developing a story world that can be endlessly iterated and projected outwards is different from George Lucas adding characters so he can sell action figures. It's a very different dynamic. We can see this again, as Dan writes, can see it in the films themselves with the casting of characters. What's Brie Larson doing in Fast 10?
Mark Bould:Unless they're thinking maybe we could do a series of tests and little nobody investigate movies, which you know I wouldn't pay for. You know all the casting of Scott Eastwood himself, I remember talking to Dan about this some time ago, is because he looks like his dad. You've got a possible Brian replacement, you've got a possible Kurt Russell replacement because he's old, might get ill or die. And so you're left with this character operating on various levels. No one wants a Scott Eastwood action figure.
Mark Bould:What they want is the possibility of extensions of the universe into other story world, into other dimensions.
Dan Hassler-Forest:I think that's where there's this really interesting shift, I think from seeing merchandising as being one thing, right? Which I think we saw in the 1980s after Star Wars, like most studios thought, well, what are movies that we can develop into something where we can have like mcdonald's happy meals and we can sell action figures and toys. And it's like one of the my favorite example is dune and where like the dune like the there are a number of action figures like the milkable cat that comes with fade around that stuff like that. That it's just like, what child would buy this crazy Billy the Lich stuff?
Ida Yoshinaga:Do you remember the popcorn cup of the sandworm?
Dan Hassler-Forest:Yes. Yeah. Was... It's so crazy because they're just thinking we can turn everything into a toy and that will make the film into a cultural phenomenon and that will make it profitable in some way. And that's no longer the way it works.
Dan Hassler-Forest:It's like one of the book... One of my favorite books that I came across really quite late in writing actually because it was Andrew DeVart's Derivative Media. And in that book he beautifully connects like this idea of how derivatives work in the financial market to how media operate, not just in terms of how they're produced and financed, that there are basically financial commodities, but also in the sense that everything is thought of as being a derivative that needs to operate in the market, but specifically in one like at the moment that you can put it out there. So the way you make, if you're making a blockbuster and you're thinking you're hedging your bets literally, right? So it's all hedging.
Dan Hassler-Forest:It's like we got to put the largest number of possible characters that we can put in there because they may be seeds that we can develop into other derivatives further down the line, like Mark was saying, right? So we can have a possible replacement here. We can have a possible spin off over here. We can have a Netflix animated series that latches on to this little aspect of movie in this way. We may be able to sell socks.
Dan Hassler-Forest:We're probably not going to be able to sell action figures unless this happens, in which case we will, right? We can have amusement park rides but they know they can't be notoriously bad because it's again it's not so much about selling a particular kind of product like we sell movies or we sell or we use movies to sell toys but it's like the brand has to maintain its own value and that exists only as like a financialized property right so it only works in the way that like I don't know like the apple brand does right? Irrespective of the products that they make but at a different kind of level. That's, I think, what Fast and Furious, like all these other things, Harry Potter, all these other things has become.
Charles Acland:Yeah, Dan, I'm glad you brought Andrew DeWard's book into it, the derivative media work, because I think it does help us understand this component, and that when we think about movie tie ins or merchandising or toyification, I think that we do think of it in terms of the action figures. We have lots of examples of those. Mean, Barbie wasn't made because there were toys to be sold, among other things. Whatever, the Mario, there's all sorts of examples of the Lego. There are all sorts of examples of those that are still rooted in that toy component.
Charles Acland:But there are others that I think are rooted in a kind of financialization of the spinout possibilities that might not have to do with cultural entries or cultural texts per se, but might have to do with all sorts of different kinds of commodities. And this is where, I think, the example of Wicked a few years ago, which, if I'm remembering right, had the most deals of all time. 400 is the number that comes to mind, with different kinds of tie ins, cross advertising, product placement. I mean, it was really an extraordinary peak of sort of saturated commercial work that a text, or rather a series of text franchise was trying to do. And so I think that thinking about these in terms of a long term financial components where the return on investment is a kind of perpetual motion machine.
Charles Acland:That's going to be closer, right? Hollywood accounting... I mean, when you go through the post World War II economic structures of Hollywood, they really wrestled with the fact that, what do we do? How do we take account of the fact that maybe some of these movies might be revenue generators longer than four months? And in a way, we've just kind of expanded the timeline in the decade since, right?
Charles Acland:Where, okay, what if something might actually generate revenue for three years or five years or ten years? Or what about fifty years, sixty, right? We're into a different kind of capitalist rationale. And it's one that I think is worth wrestling with. And I think the franchise component is one of the ways in.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Okay. It's crazy how much The Fast and the Furious somehow unleashes in all of us, that we're all pumped full of Nas in some... In one way or the other and and racing down the tracks. I thought before we go, maybe we... Like, one thing I'd like to ask each of you is, like, I...
Dan Hassler-Forest:I'm I'm assuming that maybe not all of our listeners are Fast and Furious fans or have even maybe seen a single movie. When I asked people at a lecture two weeks ago, there were really only five people in the audience who had seen more than two of them. I guess now that we've been talking about this for so long, I'd like to just ask each of you, I know nobody has prepared this, if you were to recommend a single Fast and Furious movie to somebody who's never seen one, right? Which one would it be? Do you go OG and say, well, you gotta start at the start?
Dan Hassler-Forest:Or is it like, no, that's no longer what the Fast and Furious is? I don't know. Charles, which movie would you would you like recommend to any person?
Charles Acland:Fast Five, just because of the final, sequence dragging the vault, the bank vault, through the city, destroying it. It does everything that a chase and destruction of public property sequence is supposed to do. Would say Fast Five.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Okay. Fantastic choice. How about you, Ida?
Ida Yoshinaga:I have to say Hobbs and Shaw. You know, that final sequence, the third act with all these significant Maori and Pacific Islander actors. Rachel House, who Taika Waititi also put in Ragnarok, right? Cliff Curtis, who I really feel should have been up for Bond twenty years ago, right? It's such, I mean, yes, the
Dan Hassler-Forest:situation- We saw Red in the Avatar movies as well, by the way.
Ida Yoshinaga:Yes, totally. I mean, situation is ridiculous with those traditional weapons against guns or whatever. It's fine. Electronics is not working right now, you know. But honestly, the amount of talent in that last scene is incredible.
Ida Yoshinaga:Chris Morgan ridiculousness and all. Right,
Dan Hassler-Forest:how about Mark? What would you say?
Mark Bould:I would have said five, but that's gone. So I could cheat and say Better Luck Tomorrow, the Han Origin story, retconned into the franchise, which remains in terms of budget to box office the most successful film in the franchise by a considerable measure. But of course, it's not actually in the franchise.
Dan Hassler-Forest:The stealth prequel that is.
Mark Bould:I'd just be cruel and tell them two or three because there's three probably because they're so unlike anything else in the franchise, they'll be none the wiser.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Right. It's just like a standalone adventure and there you have it. Yeah. Okay. Then, all great choices.
Dan Hassler-Forest:I think I... Well, let me put it differently. My personal favorite, I would have to say, is gonna be Furious seven. In part, I think because having spent like so much time with these weird, crazy, fun, exhausting movies, it was the point where it sort of reached a... It reached its financial zenith for sure.
Dan Hassler-Forest:It was the biggest movie of them all. It has an ending that always whether I want to it, it just reduces me to tears, honest. I'm just... There's something so sweet and strangely tasteful in the way they ended this giant blockbuster ends up handling the the sudden and tragic death of one of its main stars and folding that into the story again in this inexplicable way where he remains alive in the story world while other characters around him are dropping like flies only to be resurrected one or two movies down the line. So all the movies are now ending with like his car pulling up to the driveway.
Dan Hassler-Forest:But of course we all know the one guy is dead. But I think Furious seven also because it just represents this... It's like the moment when these kinds of mega blockbusters were sort of so full of confidence in themselves. They knew what they were doing. The movie...
Dan Hassler-Forest:I think it plays better than the avengers movies that made like even more money but had that same kind of idea of we're an ensemble and the fun is really in recognizing these characters that we by now have come to know and love. Even weirdly if we've never really encountered them before. Right? It's like falling into an episode of fraser in the fifth season and you don't really know the show but it just feels immediately it's good and it feels nice. You can watch it.
Dan Hassler-Forest:And, I watched it with my 25 year old kid and he would... He never seen one of these movies. I'm like, okay, we're gonna... So I've done it. And that worked.
Dan Hassler-Forest:It worked. And he was like, anyway, I don't think he had like there were no tears, but there was a little bit of like, okay. Yeah. I get it, you know, at the end. So anyway, Furious seven would be mine.
Mark Bould:It does also contain the most implausible bit in the whole franchise, that Paul Walker could hold his own and then later defeat Tony Jarrah in a fight. It's just absurd.
Dan Hassler-Forest:That is a little bit...
Mark Bould:You can get cars into space easier than that.
Dan Hassler-Forest:The most implausible. On that note, I... Let me just thank Charles, Ida, and Mark so much for for being here to talk about this with me. It's the biggest pleasure so far since the book has come out to be able to talk with people that I hold in such high esteem in the work that they have done and who in so many ways have shaped the outcome of this book. So while you're not literally coauthors, I like...
Dan Hassler-Forest:I I hope that in reading through the book, you felt that like your energy was somewhere in there and that that I hope it did it some degree of justice anyway. So thank you so much and lovely to spend this time talking to you all. I don't know if we succeeded in descending into absolute chaos, but I think we got chaos adjacent, at least in some moments.
Charles Acland:We were suitably fast and furious.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Very good. Very good. Pedal to the metal.
Ida Yoshinaga:Thank you for the book, Dan.
Dan Hassler-Forest:I was gonna say it's my pleasure, but writing a book is no... Not really a pleasure. It's just nice to have it written. Right? It's like there's the like my favorite quote about writing what is it?
Dan Hassler-Forest:It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only desirable state is having written. So that will be it for now. Okay. I guess that's it.
Dan Hassler-Forest:Hang tight family and see you another time.
Mark Bould:Thanks, Dan.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Fast and Furious Franchising How the Serialized Blockbuster Remade Hollywood by Dan Hassler Forrest is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.