It’s March, and you know what that means: everyone is getting ridiculously invested in a bracket that will have little material impact on their lives. They’re hyping up their favorite contenders and booing the other team. They’re going deep on career stats, and thinking long and hard about who’s going to come out on top.
I’m talking, of course, about March Madness. No, not that March Madness, Blank Check’s March Madness.
For the uninitiated, Blank Check is amoviepodcast hosted by David Sims, a film critic at The Atlantic, and actor Griffin Newman, who you might know from Amazon’s The Tick series, Disney’s Disenchanted, or Netflix’s He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. To quote the intro Newman gives at the beginning of every episode, Blank Check is “a podcast about filmographies, directors who experience massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want. Sometimes those checks clear, and sometimes they bounce, baby!"
The podcast is nearly a decade old at this point, and about halfway through that run, Newman and Sims began handing control over to the fans for one part of their year. Though they choose directors they already want to talk about most of the time — they’re currently covering Die Hard and Predator helmer John McTiernan — once a year they let fans pick the miniseries by voting through a month-long tournament bracket. Past winners include Nancy Meyers, Stanley Kubrick, John Carpenter, and Park Chan-wook.
The other past winners are Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs) and Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future).
Currently, the Blank Check community is in the process of deciding this year’s winner. Contestants include Spike Lee, Edgar Wright, Richard Linklater, and others, though at this point, about half have been knocked off the board. David Lynch and Denis Villeneuve are also in contention, and given how strong Lynch’s online fanbase is and how hot Villeneuve is coming off ofDune: Part 2’s success, it could easily come down to those two auteurs.
This may sound inconsequential, because it is. But I look forward to this every year because it’s a chance to broaden my horizons. Unlike at the Oscars, I’m rarely rooting for my favorite filmmakers to win. I use Blank Check as an excuse to learn about new directors who weren’t on my radar before. So, while I love Lynch, I would be kinda bummed to see him win. I’ve seen all of his movie and TV work; there isn’t much room for discovery. Between Blank Check covering David Fincher — whose work I know well — and Kubrick — I’d only seen A Clockwork Orange and The Shining when he won March Madness — I had a much better time with Kubrick, because it offered me the chance to venture into the unknown.
And the actual podcasts that result are almost always a treat, as Sims and Newman’s knowledge is complemented by a series of dossiers compiled by their researcher JJ Bersch. These provide huge amounts of context for the hosts to draw from as they discuss each film.
There are so many choices for what to watch, play, read, listen to, etc. that I find having an excuse to watch something, even a flimsy one like this, really helpful. I could do a Villenueve deepdive just for fun, but it’s much more gratifying to watch the movies as part of a community of people who are also discovering them.
