Blank Check with Griffin & David recently started their series on the Coen Brothers, so I’ve decided to write something about every movie as I follow the podcast (except for the ones I’ve previously written about: Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man, True Grit, and Inside Llewyn Davis [unless some kind of inspiration strikes upon a rewatch]). First up is their debut film, Blood Simple.
I’ve always liked Blood Simple, but it wasn’t the first Coen Brothers movie I watched, so my expectations were a bit too high. It’s darkly comic and features plenty of their hallmarks, but when you start with Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, etc., and then check out Blood Simple, it can be a little underwhelming. Years removed from all that, I can start to appreciate this movie a bit more. But this time around, it was the DVD release that I own that interested me the most.
When Blood Simple debuted on DVD in the early 2000s, it was a director’s cut of the film. The Coens went back and tightened things up (making this one of the rare shorter director’s cuts), and replaced a Neil Diamond song with their original choice of “It’s the Same Old Song” by The Four Tops. None of this mattered to me because I’ve never seen the theatrical cut (they did something similar with Miller’s Crossing, but that time it did annoy me, but I’ll get to that in a couple weeks). But they released this director’s cut at the height of cinephiles being annoyed with directors changing their movies, most notably George Lucas’s Star Wars Special Editions and Spielberg editing the guns out of E.T. I bring this up because the DVD release features a couple very strange elements that seem to be directly addressing the decision to tweak the film.
The movie begins with an introduction from the owner of the fictitious Forever Young Films, describing how modern technology has allowed the film to be updated by taking out the “boring parts” and upgrading the audio using the “Lucas method.” This apparently played theatrically before the film when it was re-released, as well. It’s a little tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement that they, like the name-checked Lucas, have gone back and messed with their film with modern technology and years of experience to present their original vision.
That would be plenty enough of a little in-joke for film fans, but for the DVD they added one much more ambitious bit of fuckery: a commentary track from Kenneth Loring (Jim Piddock) of Forever Young Films. The introduction was just a couple minutes long, but this commentary goes the entire film, and Piddock never breaks character. And, according to the few sites I could find that discuss the commentary, the Coens actually wrote the entire track. The dedication to the joke is funny in itself, but the commentary features plenty of legitimately funny nonsense.
I’m not going to transcribe this thing or anything (especially since there are a number of other articles that have already summarized most of it), but I did want to point out my favorite moments. Easily my favorite part is the claim that a fly was digitally created for a scene, but since it was 1984, it took so much computer power that it overloaded the mainframe and shut off power to the city for two days. The power outage also deleted months of work on the fly, which led one animator to commit suicide. Loring also claims that a dog is actually an animatronic. The opening scene in the car was filmed backwards and upside down. Fred Astaire was approached to be a body double. There was an entire Bulgarian subplot cut from the original film. Loring has an ongoing feud with someone named Adrian Butts, and he once had a bit of a run-in with Nick Nolte. Just a ton of utter bullshit that does that magical thing in comedy of being funny, then being tiresome, then becoming funny again.
The commentary is funny for its absurdity alone, but it’s also amusing as a satire on commentary tracks. As a dork who has listened to far too many of these things, I appreciated that Loring over-explained most scenes to the point that he would just describe what was happening on screen, which is something surprisingly common on these tracks. It’s a great example of how silly and pretentious a lot of these tracks can be. Of course, I am a fan of filmmakers and others over-discussing a film, but I can appreciate the comedy of this fake track and acknowledge that a lot of commentary tracks are filled with pointless bullshit. One could argue that a movie should just be watched, and a commentary track is a needless distraction.
That’s why it’s my favorite commentary track of all time, even besting Schwarzenegger's track on Conan the Barbarian (“I’m just getting laid a lot in this movie. It’s amazing.”) and Affleck’s savagely honest track for Armageddon. It’s the best kind of spoof: it’s funny on its own and as a…uh…commentary on commentaries.
It’s also interesting in what it says about the Coen Brothers. They clearly felt self conscious enough about tweaking their film with that fake intro. But to go to the trouble of writing a whole fake commentary shows that they find navel-gazing and revisiting old work to be a little ridiculous, even if they were doing it themselves. It’s the kind of self-deprecation I love: you acknowledge your faults as an excuse to indulge in them. Of course, I can’t find any real evidence that they actually wrote the whole commentary, and it’s probably likely that Piddock was allowed to improvise a lot of it. So perhaps it was more of a silly afterthought for them to include on the DVD rather than a real statement about any of this kind of stuff. But it is odd that there has never been a real acknowledgement of this track aside from sites like mine posting about it.
It wasn’t included on the Criterion release, either, which is why, I assume, that Griffin from Blank Check failed to mention it on their episode about Blood Simple because he bought the Criterion release rather than the old DVD. I’m not sure why it wasn’t included. I suppose it could be some kind of rights issue, but typically the old supplemental materials carry over onto Criterion editions, so I wonder if the Coens didn’t want it on there. Unfortunately, there are a lot of unanswered questions with this commentary, but that doesn’t take away from how fun it is.