June 9, 2023 • 12 mins
Idiocracy became a cult classic almost immediately, but for that to happen, the people making the film, like Mike Judge, had to contend with an almost comically low VFX budget, near-zero promotion from the studio, and a generally bruising production in which neither the filmmakers or the studio seemed to want to work together.
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Watch This Tonight is a movie recommendation podcast and TV recommendation podcast, produced by Voyage Media. You can find other Voyage Media podcasts at voyagemedia.fm
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Trying to figure out, "What should I stream tonight?" Come back to Watch This Tonight as your podcast for the best TV recommendations for what to watch on streaming platforms. Please leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts if you're enjoying the show, and mention a movie or TV show you want me to cover (and I will). Subscribe for future episodes.
Reach out to us @BenamorDan (Twitter), watch_this_tonight (Instagram) or @watchthistonightpodcast (TikTok).
Watch This Tonight is a movie recommendation podcast and TV recommendation podcast, produced by Voyage Media. You can find other Voyage Media podcasts at voyagemedia.fm
Thanks for listening.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, An Bettimore.
(00:22):
I'm a producer, writer of filmand television and now a podcast producer.
And despite having every streaming service,I never know what to watch. So
anytime I watch something good, Italk about it on the show. This
way, you'll never have the sameproblem 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 deepdive on Idiocracy. So Indiocracy came out
(00:44):
in two thousand and six. Iwas in college. I saw every movie
that came out, and I meanI literally would go to the theater with
my buddy Omar shout out to Omarat noon and we would stay there until
midnight. We would see every moviepossible. And I think then I saw
maybe one poster for Idiocracy and thatwas it. And I was totally the
(01:07):
person who would have seen it.Like a lot of people, I ended
up discovering it later I think onDVD probably, and just absolutely loved it
immediately. As time has gone on, like a lot of Mike Judges movies,
obviously, like Office Space, peoplehave discovered Idiocracy and now you see
it playing all the time, likenow it's in the TNT Saturday at two
pm slot, and it's just ona lot. So it was interesting to
(01:30):
look back because it was extremely painfulmaking this movie, sounds like for everyone
involved. And despite that, Ithink it's just a great movie and it's
still really really funny, and itonly gets funnier as time moves along.
Fast company dot Com I interviewed MikeJudge on the ten year anniversary of the
movie. This is a movie,by the way, the grossed, according
(01:53):
to fast company dot com, fourhundred and forty four thousand dollars of the
box office. If by any chanceyou have not seen the movie and you're
listening this anyway, it's very simpleto explain. They basically take the most
average man on planet Earth. Theyshow like a chart. At one point
he's like the middle of the graph, Luke Wilson, and they freeze him
(02:15):
for five hundred years, and thenhe wakes up and he is by far
the smartest man alive in the futurebecause we have all become incredibly dumb,
which, by the way, oneof the maybe one of the great sort
of montages of all time. Theway that they demonstrate this is they show
the changing name of food Ruckers.So it's I'm actually gonna look it up
(02:38):
because I always referenced this that Ialways get it on. So it's starts
as food Ruckers, and it's itstarts 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, andthen in twenty five oh five it's just
butt fuckers. No, that's howthey demonstrate the passage of time. Anyway,
(03:04):
So they interviewed Mike Judge on thetenth anniversary. He said the reason
that they did some screenings on thetenth anniversary views because Maya Rudolph was talking
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
(03:27):
with latte's and sexual favors. It'sobviously similar to the Starbucks in the movie,
which is again one of the hilariouslines of the movie is Luke Wilson
is like, we gotta go toStarbucks 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
(03:50):
didn't exaggerate nearly enough. Now itseems like it would be optimistic to think
they'll even be a country in fivehundred years. I guess the Earth would
be completely wasted and there'd be somepeople living in a bubble on Mars as
the last colony of humans. Theyalso asked him about if it was basically
satisfying that the movie kind of tookon this second life after it was initially
(04:12):
unsuccessful on its theatrical release, andhe says it's not all that sweet because
the success is maybe partly because theworld is getting bad. He said,
Office Space was given a chance inthe theaters and it didn't do that well.
It didn't do horribly, but itdidn't do great. This wasn't given
a chance at all, so itis really nice to see it getting attention,
although it's usually the tension is morejust about how dumb things are getting
(04:33):
in mainstream politics, so it's allvery 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 themath teacher was really disappointed in the test
scores and just said the only personwho got them all right was Mike Judge.
(04:54):
Here, and this is Mike Judge'squote. This is him telling about
his experience. He said, andthen these guys has turned around like we're
going to beat the shit out ofyou after class. And I literally had
to run an hide because I'd gotteneverything right on a math test. So
I was kind of imagining my juniorhigh taking over the world. There's a
website called Inverse that also did areally great oral history of ideocracy that I'm
(05:15):
gonna quote from here, but dependingon where you'd look, it says the
budget was around three million. MikeJudge 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 timesthe film's box office. Part of the
(05:36):
reason that this whole thing happened whereit 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. WhenOffice Space was done, even though it
didn't do well right away, TomRothman, who was president of twenty Century
Fox, so they wanted to doanother movie with Mike Judge. This is
according to Mike Judge an inverse.Mike Judge pitched them three or four ideas
(05:59):
and the one they said is thebig commercial movie you should do is this
one, which he initially called threethousand and one. According to Timothy Sorestead,
who was the cinematographer, he saidthat it was a very frustrating process
for Mike because he had his dealwith Fox, he had done Office Space,
and he was still doing King ofthe Hill. I think it was
pretty clear by the time he gotaround to making Idiocracy that not only did
(06:20):
he not want to work with Fox, they didn't really want to work with
him. Mike Judge said they weregung ho about it. There are always
battles with the studio and that's kindof the fun thing to talk about.
Ultimately, Fox paid for both OfficeSpace and Indiocracy, So credit to them,
So Mike Judge really kind of takesthe high ground here. He talks
about the development process of coming upwith the movie, and he said,
(06:41):
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 wasthinking there could be a fart museum.
And Mike Judge said, I thought, maybe his head's in the right place
for this. So initially when theywrote the movie, Mike Judge said that
there was no president Camacho. Thecountry was run by an orating system AI
that was just super annoying and thatultimately didn't work. They showed it to
(07:04):
some actors, people just didn't likeit that much, so he you know,
they rewrote it and eventually they gotto Camancho Euton. Cohen said that
he thought it was kind of satisfyingthat conservatives thought they were making fun of
liberals and liberals so they were makingfun of conservatives. So it's a movie
that you could really watch with anybodyacross the political spectrum and they will find
(07:27):
it funny. Money was a constantissue apparently on the shoot. Mike Judge
said there was a meeting where theyargued over a shot that cost three thousand
dollars and at some point Mike Juddsaid, I'll just pay for it.
I'd rather pay thirty thousand dollars thanever have this meeting again. One of
the concept artists also spoke in thisand he said that I put a big,
frank Gary structure of a woman holdingthe Washington Monument like a stripper pole.
(07:50):
He's just talking about his different ideas. The cinematographer said, the VFX
company that came in, the guythat 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 goingto go behind here? And he would
get all flustered and nervous. Quote. They found a VFX company that would
do it for the price, butyou get what you pay for. We
(08:11):
were ten million dollars short of whatwe needed. The part in the movie
where they have the it's a movieof 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 rentedout of theater and they projected up this
image if this guy's butt farted it, and he said, everybody started laughing,
(08:31):
exactly as they say in the script. The cinematographer says that Mike Judge
told him that basically Fox didn't evenwant to cut a trailer. But Mike
Judge says, I gotta keep saying. Fox did pay for the movie.
It's not like they were really thebad guy office space. They spent money
promoting it. It didn't do wellthe box office. It caught on its
own on VHS and ended up makingthem a lot of money. So I
(08:52):
think they looked at it like,well, what did we do wrong there?
We spent money promoting it. Ifthe people are going to find it,
they're gonna find it anyway, which, by the way, up being
true. One of the members ofthe creative team wrote in the center,
you know this royal history. Itwas 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, Ihad to keep it off my resume for
(09:13):
years to try and get another movie. The movie was strangely prescient about the
popularity of the shoes crocs. MikeJudge said crocs were just a start up
in Denver. Deborah McGuire, thecostume designers showed me pictures of these things
and said, yeah, they seemperfectly horrible and for our world, meaning
for the movie. And Mike Judgesaid, if it's a startup, if
(09:35):
it's a startup, what if bythe time the movie comes out, everyone's
wearing them? And the costume designersaid, oh, that's never gonna happen.
So Mike Judge said, I'm happyfor 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 oneof those things where you can see critics
have put reviews later. At thetime when it came out, I think
the reviews were more mixed. Youknow. Now it's mostly positive, but
(09:58):
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 actioncomedy 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 waswritten in twenty sixteen. Obviously, like
(10:18):
way after the fact, after itwas already a cult classic kind of movie.
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 supposedto. The fact that the movie looks
kind of shitty, I think it'spart of what it's part of its charm.
The fact that the vfx are likesuper clunky. Again, if it
(10:41):
was like so slick and they gotevery dollar they needed to make it really
beautiful. In terms of the wayit looked, I don't think it would
have been as funny. I thinkit actually perfectly fits the tone of the
movie. Apparently, Terry Crews wasin talks with Mike Judge and Fox over
a possible Idiocracy spin off featuring hispresident Camadra character. They came apparently very
(11:03):
close to doing Idiocracy themed campaign adsopposing Donald Trump's presidential campaign. It sounds
like maybe Fox did not give thempermission to do so, but Terry Crews
told Business Insider the ads would havefeatured Camacho wrestling in a cage match against
the other presidential candidates. So whata shade of the world was deprived of
(11:24):
that. All these movies that I'vecovered where I've done this kind of deep
dive are movies that have stood thetest of time, and almost uniformly,
the making of these movies was extremelypainful, and people were pissed at each
other. They were like, manytimes not happy they even made the movie.
A lot of times the things thatare great about the movie are things
(11:45):
that they explicitly tried not to have. So it's just been fascinating to see
that. Very encouraging if you're acreative person. So if you work on
a project and you're like, thissucks. I hate everybody, like,
this is all going We're all gotevery possible way. Uh it might maybe
it'll be great, maybe a greatmovie. That is the show for today.
(12:05):
If you're listening to an enjoying theshow, please leave us a five
star review on Apple Podcasts or anywhereyou're listening. Until next time. Bye bye m
Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, An Bettimore.
(00:22):
I'm a producer, writer of filmand television and now a podcast producer.
And despite having every streaming service,I never know what to watch. So
anytime I watch something good, Italk about it on the show. This
way, you'll never have the sameproblem 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 deepdive on Idiocracy. So Indiocracy came out
(00:44):
in two thousand and six. Iwas in college. I saw every movie
that came out, and I meanI literally would go to the theater with
my buddy Omar shout out to Omarat noon and we would stay there until
midnight. We would see every moviepossible. And I think then I saw
maybe one poster for Idiocracy and thatwas it. And I was totally the
(01:07):
person who would have seen it.Like a lot of people, I ended
up discovering it later I think onDVD probably, and just absolutely loved it
immediately. As time has gone on, like a lot of Mike Judges movies,
obviously, like Office Space, peoplehave discovered Idiocracy and now you see
it playing all the time, likenow it's in the TNT Saturday at two
pm slot, and it's just ona lot. So it was interesting to
(01:30):
look back because it was extremely painfulmaking this movie, sounds like for everyone
involved. And despite that, Ithink it's just a great movie and it's
still really really funny, and itonly gets funnier as time moves along.
Fast company dot Com I interviewed MikeJudge on the ten year anniversary of the
movie. This is a movie,by the way, the grossed, according
(01:53):
to fast company dot com, fourhundred and forty four thousand dollars of the
box office. If by any chanceyou have not seen the movie and you're
listening this anyway, it's very simpleto explain. They basically take the most
average man on planet Earth. Theyshow like a chart. At one point
he's like the middle of the graph, Luke Wilson, and they freeze him
(02:15):
for five hundred years, and thenhe wakes up and he is by far
the smartest man alive in the futurebecause we have all become incredibly dumb,
which, by the way, oneof the maybe one of the great sort
of montages of all time. Theway that they demonstrate this is they show
the changing name of food Ruckers.So it's I'm actually gonna look it up
(02:38):
because I always referenced this that Ialways get it on. So it's starts
as food Ruckers, and it's itstarts 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, andthen in twenty five oh five it's just
butt fuckers. No, that's howthey demonstrate the passage of time. Anyway,
(03:04):
So they interviewed Mike Judge on thetenth anniversary. He said the reason
that they did some screenings on thetenth anniversary views because Maya Rudolph was talking
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
(03:27):
with latte's and sexual favors. It'sobviously similar to the Starbucks in the movie,
which is again one of the hilariouslines of the movie is Luke Wilson
is like, we gotta go toStarbucks 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
(03:50):
didn't exaggerate nearly enough. Now itseems like it would be optimistic to think
they'll even be a country in fivehundred years. I guess the Earth would
be completely wasted and there'd be somepeople living in a bubble on Mars as
the last colony of humans. Theyalso asked him about if it was basically
satisfying that the movie kind of tookon this second life after it was initially
(04:12):
unsuccessful on its theatrical release, andhe says it's not all that sweet because
the success is maybe partly because theworld is getting bad. He said,
Office Space was given a chance inthe theaters and it didn't do that well.
It didn't do horribly, but itdidn't do great. This wasn't given
a chance at all, so itis really nice to see it getting attention,
although it's usually the tension is morejust about how dumb things are getting
(04:33):
in mainstream politics, so it's allvery 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 themath teacher was really disappointed in the test
scores and just said the only personwho got them all right was Mike Judge.
(04:54):
Here, and this is Mike Judge'squote. This is him telling about
his experience. He said, andthen these guys has turned around like we're
going to beat the shit out ofyou after class. And I literally had
to run an hide because I'd gotteneverything right on a math test. So
I was kind of imagining my juniorhigh taking over the world. There's a
website called Inverse that also did areally great oral history of ideocracy that I'm
(05:15):
gonna quote from here, but dependingon where you'd look, it says the
budget was around three million. MikeJudge 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 timesthe film's box office. Part of the
(05:36):
reason that this whole thing happened whereit 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. WhenOffice Space was done, even though it
didn't do well right away, TomRothman, who was president of twenty Century
Fox, so they wanted to doanother movie with Mike Judge. This is
according to Mike Judge an inverse.Mike Judge pitched them three or four ideas
(05:59):
and the one they said is thebig commercial movie you should do is this
one, which he initially called threethousand and one. According to Timothy Sorestead,
who was the cinematographer, he saidthat it was a very frustrating process
for Mike because he had his dealwith Fox, he had done Office Space,
and he was still doing King ofthe Hill. I think it was
pretty clear by the time he gotaround to making Idiocracy that not only did
(06:20):
he not want to work with Fox, they didn't really want to work with
him. Mike Judge said they weregung ho about it. There are always
battles with the studio and that's kindof the fun thing to talk about.
Ultimately, Fox paid for both OfficeSpace and Indiocracy, So credit to them,
So Mike Judge really kind of takesthe high ground here. He talks
about the development process of coming upwith the movie, and he said,
(06:41):
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 wasthinking there could be a fart museum.
And Mike Judge said, I thought, maybe his head's in the right place
for this. So initially when theywrote the movie, Mike Judge said that
there was no president Camacho. Thecountry was run by an orating system AI
that was just super annoying and thatultimately didn't work. They showed it to
(07:04):
some actors, people just didn't likeit that much, so he you know,
they rewrote it and eventually they gotto Camancho Euton. Cohen said that
he thought it was kind of satisfyingthat conservatives thought they were making fun of
liberals and liberals so they were makingfun of conservatives. So it's a movie
that you could really watch with anybodyacross the political spectrum and they will find
(07:27):
it funny. Money was a constantissue apparently on the shoot. Mike Judge
said there was a meeting where theyargued over a shot that cost three thousand
dollars and at some point Mike Juddsaid, I'll just pay for it.
I'd rather pay thirty thousand dollars thanever have this meeting again. One of
the concept artists also spoke in thisand he said that I put a big,
frank Gary structure of a woman holdingthe Washington Monument like a stripper pole.
(07:50):
He's just talking about his different ideas. The cinematographer said, the VFX
company that came in, the guythat 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 goingto go behind here? And he would
get all flustered and nervous. Quote. They found a VFX company that would
do it for the price, butyou get what you pay for. We
(08:11):
were ten million dollars short of whatwe needed. The part in the movie
where they have the it's a movieof 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 rentedout of theater and they projected up this
image if this guy's butt farted it, and he said, everybody started laughing,
(08:31):
exactly as they say in the script. The cinematographer says that Mike Judge
told him that basically Fox didn't evenwant to cut a trailer. But Mike
Judge says, I gotta keep saying. Fox did pay for the movie.
It's not like they were really thebad guy office space. They spent money
promoting it. It didn't do wellthe box office. It caught on its
own on VHS and ended up makingthem a lot of money. So I
(08:52):
think they looked at it like,well, what did we do wrong there?
We spent money promoting it. Ifthe people are going to find it,
they're gonna find it anyway, which, by the way, up being
true. One of the members ofthe creative team wrote in the center,
you know this royal history. Itwas 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, Ihad to keep it off my resume for
(09:13):
years to try and get another movie. The movie was strangely prescient about the
popularity of the shoes crocs. MikeJudge said crocs were just a start up
in Denver. Deborah McGuire, thecostume designers showed me pictures of these things
and said, yeah, they seemperfectly horrible and for our world, meaning
for the movie. And Mike Judgesaid, if it's a startup, if
(09:35):
it's a startup, what if bythe time the movie comes out, everyone's
wearing them? And the costume designersaid, oh, that's never gonna happen.
So Mike Judge said, I'm happyfor 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 oneof those things where you can see critics
have put reviews later. At thetime when it came out, I think
the reviews were more mixed. Youknow. Now it's mostly positive, but
(09:58):
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 actioncomedy 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 waswritten in twenty sixteen. Obviously, like
(10:18):
way after the fact, after itwas already a cult classic kind of movie.
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 supposedto. The fact that the movie looks
kind of shitty, I think it'spart of what it's part of its charm.
The fact that the vfx are likesuper clunky. Again, if it
(10:41):
was like so slick and they gotevery dollar they needed to make it really
beautiful. In terms of the wayit looked, I don't think it would
have been as funny. I thinkit actually perfectly fits the tone of the
movie. Apparently, Terry Crews wasin talks with Mike Judge and Fox over
a possible Idiocracy spin off featuring hispresident Camadra character. They came apparently very
(11:03):
close to doing Idiocracy themed campaign adsopposing Donald Trump's presidential campaign. It sounds
like maybe Fox did not give thempermission to do so, but Terry Crews
told Business Insider the ads would havefeatured Camacho wrestling in a cage match against
the other presidential candidates. So whata shade of the world was deprived of
(11:24):
that. All these movies that I'vecovered where I've done this kind of deep
dive are movies that have stood thetest of time, and almost uniformly,
the making of these movies was extremelypainful, and people were pissed at each
other. They were like, manytimes not happy they even made the movie.
A lot of times the things thatare great about the movie are things
(11:45):
that they explicitly tried not to have. So it's just been fascinating to see
that. Very encouraging if you're acreative person. So if you work on
a project and you're like, thissucks. I hate everybody, like,
this is all going We're all gotevery possible way. Uh it might maybe
it'll be great, maybe a greatmovie. That is the show for today.
(12:05):
If you're listening to an enjoying theshow, please leave us a five
star review on Apple Podcasts or anywhereyou're listening. Until next time. Bye bye m
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