Do Revenge

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Teen rom-coms have a rich history of incredible needle drops.
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Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You, Cruel Intentions.
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The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and my personal favorite, Can't Buy Me Love.
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And while most of these movies will have episodes of their own on NSYNC,
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we couldn't wait to talk about this year's surprise Netflix hit, Do Revenge.
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Do Revenge is a movie that embraces the history of incredible musical moments
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in high school movies and picks up that baton and runs with it.
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And a little later in the show we're going to talk to Rob Lowry,
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music supervisor for Do Revenge, about his work on the film,
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clearing dozens of songs, and specifically the closing song Meredith Brooks' Bitch.
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All that, plus some background on the movie and the song, on this week's episode of NSYNC.
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Hey, welcome to NSYNC, the podcast that explores your favorite music moments
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in TV and film. I'm your host, Rachel Brodsky.
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And I am your other host, Aviv Rubinstein.
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Aviv, I want to thank you for letting me strong arm you into making our second
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ever NSYNC episode about the movie Do Revenge. I hope that you enjoyed it.
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Yes. So this was puzzling, right? So when we started talking about doing this
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show, it was like classic needle drops from classic movies.
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And then it's like the next one is the Netflix movie that just came out.
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So why exactly are we talking about?
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A brand new Netflix movie that just came out.
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First off, when this movie came out on Netflix in September,
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I saw so much conversation online about its needle drops.
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And I knew that when we started this podcast, I wanted to talk to music supervisor,
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Rob Lowry, who has just been over the last few years,
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it's like every movie or show people seem to be excited about in like the TV
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and movies like Geist, it seems like Rob is in some way involved in it.
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So I knew that I wanted to talk to him on this podcast at some point.
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And the movie Do Revenge itself, it is new.
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Is it new? How new is it?
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Yes, it's clearly influenced both musically, visually, and like script wise
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by so many classic films.
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It's It's clearly a movie that is really interested in what came before,
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and it's building on it and it's kind of reanimating the genre of a teen movie, but for 2022.
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That is why I wanted to talk about Do Revenge. I'm sold. A movie that is technically
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new, but very interested in the classics.
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And also the classic needle drops, right? So today we are going to be talking
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about the 2022 Netflix film Do Revenge.
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I spent 17 years meticulously curating the perfect life.
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I had the perfect friends, the
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perfect boyfriend. Maybe you could send me something to keep me company.
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But you know where all of that got me? Absolutely destroyed. Max ruined my life.
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He'll never get away with this.
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Is due revenge even like correct grammar? Oh, I'm sorry, schoolhouse rock.
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Are you dragging my sentence structure right now?
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I think that one of the main reasons why this movie has been so popular over
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the last couple of months on Netflix is it's a very, it's got a lot of very dark humor.
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It subverts today's like teen concerns.
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Like I think you see that a lot of younger people are very concerned with,
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well, A, how they come off on social media, But then at the same time,
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there's a lot of classic concerns like social relevance, class, money.
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Yeah, it's interesting. They pay like there's like a environmental protest.
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In this movie that has nothing to do with the plot. They just walk by a bunch
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of high schoolers protesting environmental conditions. It does feel like this
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kind of teen comedy, tongue in cheek teen comedy of the new millennium.
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We should stop saying new millennium, it's 2022.
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To back up a little bit, this movie was directed by Jennifer Caton Robinson.
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She's best known for creating the MTV show Sweet Vicious and also the Netflix movie Someone Great.
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Jennifer Kate Robinson also co-wrote the latest Thor movie,
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Thor Love and Thunder, alongside Oscar winner for Jojo Rabbit,
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Taika Waititi, who's a big director fave of mine and who also is embroiled in
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as many love triangles as the characters in this movie.
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But Robinson didn't write this screenplay for due revenge on her own, right?
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No, she co-wrote the screenplay with Celeste Ballard. Do you know anything about Celeste Ballard?
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I know that Celeste Ballard wrote the comedy version of Lost, which was on TBS.
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It was called Wrecked, and it didn't, that didn't, wasn't like a huge hit show,
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but I remember it being very funny. And she also wrote, I Shit You Not,
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the Space Jam sequel that came out last year, Space Jam, A New Legacy?
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Oh.
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Oh yeah. So this is her follow up to Space Jam, A New Legacy,
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which was her first feature film writing credit.
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Okay, okay, well I didn't see Space Jam, A New Legacy.
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It's great, it's just as good as the first one.
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This seems like a real step up, no?
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I would say, it would be like a step up to the streets. Ha ha ha.
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Cool. Well, together, Ballard and Robinson have created, in my opinion,
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teen movie magic together.
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This is an ensemble cast of Camilla members.
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Who memorably portrays Veronica in Riverdale, which I've only really seen the
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first couple of seasons of.
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I've heard that it's kind of- I am shocked, shocked that this show is in its sixth season.
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I'm amazed that it's gone on that long. Yeah.
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People love it. Yeah. Yeah.
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I really loved the first season or two of Riverdale because I grew up reading the Archie comic books,
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like, voraciously like I had a huge collection of Archie comic books that when
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I was bad my parents would take away from me.
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That's an incredible fun fact.
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It is yeah.
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So Veronica Lodge herself.
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She stars as Drea Torres is our one of our main protagonists in Do Revenge as
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well as Maya Hawk one of my favorite Nepo babies.
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Yes I think one of the one of the good ones.
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Definitely very talented singer.
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Oh, is she? I haven't heard her record.
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She is a singer, yeah.
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So Maya Hawke, you would immediately recognize from Stranger Things,
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seasons three and four, and she is a fan favorite of that.
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And you might, for our older audience, recognize her face because she is an
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exact clone of her mother, Uma Thurman. Yeah.
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Her personality seems a bit like her father's though, the very little that I
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know, Ethan Hawke who actually hails from speaking of my hometown Ethan Hawke
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hails from my hometown of West Windsor, New Jersey.
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He was like one of our Claims to fame rounding out the cast we have Austin Abrams
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who plays problematic problematic fave not the actor, but he plays a problematic fave in the film.
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Yeah, and and he's like the,
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There's like a love pentagram in this movie, but he's the third in the triad, I would say.
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The love pentagram.
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Yeah, there's like, how many love triangles are there in this movie?
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High school, so yeah, there's a few. And then finally we have one of my faves,
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Sarah Michelle Gellar, who plays the headmaster.
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So the Sarah Michelle Gellar connection is something I desperately want to unpack
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about this movie, but first of all, we gotta give a little bit of background on the movie.
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And because Rachel is such a big fan, I'll let you kind of take it away on what
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is this movie, what is it about, why should we care, as like old people,
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you and I now, why should we care about this movie?
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This movie, it's loosely inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train.
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If anyone grew up, it really doesn't matter
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what era of the teen comedy you grew up in, you will recognize bits from every
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era of the teen comedy in this film, such as Clueless, Election,
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10 Things I Hate About You, Mean Girls.
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I personally saw a lot of Jawbreaker in this film.
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I did too.
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I loved Jawbreaker.
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The ones that I really saw closely were Jawbreaker and Cruel Intentions.
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There is a clear Cruel Intentions connection, especially because this movie
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is very concerned with money, class, privilege, how one uses or abuses their privilege.
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And of course Sarah Michelle Gellar was the main antagonist in Cruel Intentions
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and she She doesn't really hold the same kind of role in Do Revenge.
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Her presence offers a wink to the audience, older audience members like you and me.
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And she is antagonizing, let's say.
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She is antagonizing, yes. She's
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playing a beleaguered headmaster of a very privileged private school.
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The other thing about Cruel Intentions that will prove to be its own episode
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on this show is that it has an iconic soundtrack that this movie tries to emulate.
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And so the reason that we're talking about this movie today
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is not just because it's like an interesting and fun throwback
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to 90s teen tongue-in-cheek sex comedies or rom-coms or whatever it's because
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it tries to Capture that same lightning in a bottle that movies like cruel intentions
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ten things I hate about you and she's all that did in the late 90s. Yes.
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I also want to say that this movie will be a treat for the eyes and the ears
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So the soundtrack is just great needle drop after needle drop.
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Well, just broke a view.
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I just love it. I would like to like it on record. This is a treat for the eyes and the ears.
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It really is though. The essential plot, I'm going to pivot.
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The plot is essentially that Drea Torres, played again by Camila Mendes,
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is super popular and she wants to get revenge on her boyfriend for allegedly
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publishing their sex tape.
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Bella's character, Drea, despite being extremely popular and concerned with
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getting into Yale, actually comes from a lower middle class background,
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as opposed to her peers who are all immensely privileged.
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And her foil in the film, played by Maya Hawke, is an exchange student who is
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haunted by a rumor from her past. And these two girls team up together to take
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action against their tormentors.
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That's like the main plot of the film, except it takes a few turns.
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Are we going to go into spoilers in this?
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So I was going to say that we could remain relatively spoiler-free,
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but the backbone of the story, as Rachel mentioned,
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is Strangers on a Train, which involves two strangers meeting on a train,
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each wanting to commit a murder, and them realizing that they could do each
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other's murders and get away scot-free,
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one of whom is like way more into it than the other, so he does that murder
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first and then the other guy's like, I was just kinda kidding.
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And so a similar thing happens in this movie where one of the revenges gets
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enacted and the other one starts having, let's say, second thoughts and there's
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some trouble from there.
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But I guarantee you it does not play out in the same way as the Hitchcock classic from 70 years ago.
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I want to read a quote from Kate and Robinson when she spoke to Vulture about the movie's aesthetic.
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She said, when one of my executives from Netflix watched the movie,
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he said it was like John Hughes fucked Wes Anderson, which I loved.
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But that was exactly what I was going for.
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All of these directors very directly influenced the look of the film to the
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point that we used anamorphic lenses.
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Those lenses, especially old ones, can distort the picture and I wanted it to
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feel really crisp, beautiful, and clean.
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We found these newer anamorphic lenses that could lend themselves to achieving
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that Wes Anderson look, pushing the vibrancy and color without distorting the image.
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As someone who has used anamorphic lenses in the past, this is not a correct
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understanding of what anamorphic lenses do, but I get it.
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See, I really wouldn't have known that.
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Anamorphic lenses do this thing where they compact the image horizontally,
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so the image coming out of the camera
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is squeezed skinny, and then in post-production you spread it back out.
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So the biggest hallmark of anamorphic lenses is if you see lights in the background,
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you'll get this kind of horizontal lens flare.
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So this was created digitally in movies like Star Trek, but it has a lot of
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these old prestige-y movies where it's shot in anamorphic and you get these
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nice twinkly background lights, which I think is what she's referring to, right?
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Where you get kind of a wider wash of color in the background of certain frames,
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but the distortion only happens at the very edges of the frame,
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and we usually correct for that stuff. So like I get the idea.
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The science behind it is a little different. I just like pushed my glasses up.
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The minute you said lens flare, I thought of Star Trek. I do like what you said
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about the kind of like mixing of John Hughes and Wes Anderson.
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Yeah, I think so. There's John Hughes, there's definitely Wes Anderson,
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but there is this kind of darker, Heathers-esque sort of streak in the movie
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where like these people are trying to kind of ruin each other's lives and in
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pretty significant ways.
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Well, there's a trip to a institution featuring a great guest appearance by Sophie Turner.
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And so yeah, it's an interesting picture.
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Yeah, it's just a lot of fun. I personally as a writer just really love the
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dialogue and like how all these kids are trying to like appear the most woke
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while still like trying to ruin each other's lives.
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And like, I love the boyfriend character. Max kicks off his,
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who like allegedly has shared his girlfriend's sex tape,
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but starts the year by, like at a school assembly, he's announcing the creation
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of a male ally, like a straight, like a cishet.
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Cishet, straight male ally.
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Straight male ally club that's a Oh my God.
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He learned how to be more feminist and this is kind of covering his tracks because
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he's clearly a terrible person.
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I mean, we all, you don't have to be in high school to know somebody like that who's,
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who might be performatively woke, but clearly like doesn't really,
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like their actions in private are completely the opposite of their actions in
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public. We all know someone like that.
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And this is part, this is also where like the idea like election and Alexander
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Payne's kind of dark comedies come in, which is like, this could be a scene right out of election.
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And we have a voiceover a la Tracy Flick about the perfection that's expected
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of Drea and her high school persona.
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Quick aside, if you haven't read the sequel to Election, I recommend it.
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What? There's a sequel to Election?
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Yes, it shows where Tracy Flick has ended up in 30 years after graduating from high school.
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Awesome. Yeah, it's called Tracy Flick Can't Win. Yep.
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Shit, I gotta buy this.
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Yeah, you'd like it.
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I recommend it. I do love, I think Election's like a perfect movie.
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Also kind of ahead of its time.
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Super ahead of its time.
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Critics were a fan of Due Revenge. The Daily Beast called it a generation-defining
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masterpiece, saying that once a decade there comes a high school comedy so stylish,
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so witty, so instantly influential that it cannot be topped.
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Netflix's colorful new romp is that movie.
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The New York Times, meanwhile, called it as a playful, sharp-tongued satire
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that feels like the 90s teen comedy hammered into modern emojis.
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Crown, knife, fire, winky face. I love that. RogerEbert.com gave the film three
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out of four stars and said the film manages to blend all of its influences into
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a distinctive movie that is fully committed to its vision of high school as a handsomely costumed,
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art-directed snake pit filled with sadists who get off on other people's pain and embarrassment.
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That RogerEbert.com review was written by Matt Zoller Seitz,
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who is a, I'm a big fan of his film criticism.
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And he, his main criticism of the film was that it's a little too long,
00:18:07.514 --> 00:18:09.005
especially in the beginning.
00:18:09.615 --> 00:18:14.859
So I wanted to know what your kind of view of the film is.
00:18:15.660 --> 00:18:20.924
What did you like about it? What felt new to you? What felt familiar to you?
00:18:22.305 --> 00:18:25.207
Clearly, I really couldn't get enough of this film. I was a huge fan.
00:18:25.328 --> 00:18:28.249
I'm like kind of like from the from the jump.
00:18:28.950 --> 00:18:32.962
Honestly, like one of the biggest reasons why I love this movie is the soundtrack.
00:18:32.962 --> 00:18:41.725
The soundtrack is such a potent mix of old favorites plus some more obscure
00:18:41.725 --> 00:18:45.081
pop hits from the 90s, which we'll talk about in a bit.
00:18:45.081 --> 00:18:49.264
In that way, Do Revenge felt instantly familiar to me.
00:18:49.684 --> 00:18:54.709
I feel like I've seen this movie before, but it like the language of the film
00:18:54.709 --> 00:18:58.252
feels so contemporary. I think this is true of...
00:18:58.933 --> 00:19:03.836
Any new, great art that it feels familiar.
00:19:04.156 --> 00:19:09.680
It's clearly pulling from influences from the past, like classic influences
00:19:09.680 --> 00:19:12.542
from the past, but how is it like building upon that?
00:19:12.542 --> 00:19:17.205
How is it making it relevant to today? I feel like Do Revenge really found that
00:19:17.205 --> 00:19:19.567
formula. They threaded that needle so perfectly.
00:19:20.308 --> 00:19:27.933
I really do love also any teen content that can kind of make fun of itself a little bit.
00:19:28.113 --> 00:19:32.776
And yes, sure, do revenge is really, really aware.
00:19:33.317 --> 00:19:39.321
It's kind of weaponizing, like woke culture satirizing it a bit. Yes.
00:19:39.641 --> 00:19:43.704
While still being a diverse movie, there are a lot of diverse characters,
00:19:43.704 --> 00:19:45.204
a lot of like varying perspectives.
00:19:46.185 --> 00:19:52.950
There's a real tension of haves and have nots that like, I feel like the first
00:19:52.950 --> 00:19:57.933
iteration of Gossip Girl tried to do, but really, really did did not succeed.
00:19:58.184 --> 00:20:04.198
I like that Do Revenge had significant stakes for its most popular character
00:20:04.198 --> 00:20:05.819
who doesn't come from a lot of money.
00:20:07.780 --> 00:20:11.943
And you know that she needs to go to this school and be successful at this school
00:20:11.943 --> 00:20:17.366
in order to get into a great school. I mean, of course, I think even Maya Hawke's
00:20:17.366 --> 00:20:21.909
character says, hey, even if you don't get into Yale, you're going to get into a great school.
00:20:22.110 --> 00:20:28.135
But good college, but the way she says that is a little There's a layer to that
00:20:28.135 --> 00:20:30.277
that we don't want to spoil. Yeah.
00:20:30.277 --> 00:20:35.704
Yeah. Yes, and the haves and the have that is like a tension of a privileged
00:20:35.704 --> 00:20:40.250
discussion that feels really like relevant and And like the conversations that
00:20:40.250 --> 00:20:44.736
are being had in this film are not, although it takes place in high school.
00:20:45.426 --> 00:20:50.209
These ladder up to your 20s, your 30s, your 40s. It's like, how are you perceived?
00:20:50.209 --> 00:20:52.610
And where does your privilege get you?
00:20:53.251 --> 00:20:56.793
But it's also just a really fun movie to look at. The costumes are bomb.
00:20:57.334 --> 00:21:01.836
The costumes are super cool. There's this interesting cycle of teen movies where
00:21:01.836 --> 00:21:08.941
the writers of teen movies are writing about and drawing inspiration from the
00:21:08.941 --> 00:21:12.283
references that they experienced when they were teens, right?
00:21:12.283 --> 00:21:17.887
So the John Hughes movies did a lot of winking to like the 50s and 60s.
00:21:18.648 --> 00:21:21.610
Ducky sings like a Motown song in Pretty in Pink.
00:21:21.610 --> 00:21:25.743
And then in the 2000s, we were calling back to the 80s.
00:21:25.743 --> 00:21:30.016
And now we're in the 2020s calling back to the 2000s. And so it makes sense
00:21:30.016 --> 00:21:37.462
that this is firmly rooted in like 1996 to 2001 in terms of its Cultural look
00:21:37.462 --> 00:21:41.605
cultural references and this is like how these this is like part of these
00:21:41.806 --> 00:21:44.848
fashion trends pop culture trends musical trends like coming back
00:21:44.848 --> 00:21:50.271
every 25 years is because the creators are now the age the the audience is now
00:21:50.271 --> 00:21:54.935
the age of the creators and So a couple of references that you might not have
00:21:54.935 --> 00:22:01.979
noticed or that one might not have noticed there is a Classroom that is located in Horowitz Hall,
00:22:01.979 --> 00:22:06.783
which is a reference to share Horowitz from clueless Of course,
00:22:06.783 --> 00:22:10.735
Sarah Michelle Gellar is the sometimes conniving headmaster,
00:22:10.735 --> 00:22:20.471
is a reference to Cruel Intentions, but my favorite very small homage was for,
00:22:21.221 --> 00:22:30.356
the character of Russ, who is like the bad boy boyfriend artist that Camilla mended to Straya.
00:22:31.297 --> 00:22:36.399
But he's dressed exactly like Johnny Lee Miller from Hackers. which is...
00:22:36.900 --> 00:22:37.820
A, a masterpiece.
00:22:38.321 --> 00:22:40.523
I've only seen Hackers like one time.
00:22:40.523 --> 00:22:47.428
It is a mess, that movie. But he just looks like he's copy-pasted out of Hackers.
00:22:47.428 --> 00:22:53.573
And it's cool because I think that these movies and homages work the best when
00:22:53.573 --> 00:22:56.935
they're quietly winking to the audience,
00:22:56.935 --> 00:23:02.180
like, hey, this is a cool thing that this character who's a misunderstood artist
00:23:02.180 --> 00:23:04.782
obviously would model his fashion sense after.
00:23:04.782 --> 00:23:08.925
And no one has to go up to him and say like, hey, Johnny Lee Miller out of Hackers,
00:23:08.925 --> 00:23:13.308
like what are you doing? And so I think this movie is overall successful.
00:23:13.989 --> 00:23:16.311
I'm a little bit cooler on it than you are.
00:23:17.232 --> 00:23:23.116
I like the kind of tongue in cheek satirizing of all of this stuff.
00:23:23.556 --> 00:23:26.779
I like that this movie is at points impossibly horny.
00:23:28.080 --> 00:23:30.221
And there's like also a paint fight.
00:23:31.643 --> 00:23:36.886
But what I wish- I wish that is like a copy and pasted from 10 things I hate about you, by the way.
00:23:36.886 --> 00:23:42.749
Right, exactly. And yet I was hoping for in the culmination,
00:23:42.749 --> 00:23:45.631
the climax of the story, a murder.
00:23:45.631 --> 00:23:49.894
I was hoping for. I don't know, just because, because I felt like some of the
00:23:49.894 --> 00:23:56.868
characters deserve to be murdered and the like heightened stylized version of this movie.
00:23:57.644 --> 00:24:03.108
It's okay to just like have the two main characters kill the guy that deserves
00:24:03.108 --> 00:24:07.831
to be killed, bury his body, and then drive away on the bridge.
00:24:07.831 --> 00:24:11.914
But that's sort of my biggest criti- I overall really like the movie,
00:24:11.914 --> 00:24:15.677
but my biggest criticism is like, go further. Give me something wild.
00:24:15.677 --> 00:24:20.260
I guess so, but I think that kind of creates an ethical question. Is it?
00:24:21.561 --> 00:24:23.963
And there are no other ethical questions in the movie at all.
00:24:24.744 --> 00:24:32.390
Well, what is it? Is it worse to be killed, literally, or to be cancelled?
00:24:33.211 --> 00:24:37.053
That is, and I think that that's a really interesting question that I would
00:24:37.053 --> 00:24:40.176
have actually loved if the movie tackled, right?
00:24:40.176 --> 00:24:44.059
Like, don't do this to me, please just kill me. I would rather be killed than
00:24:44.059 --> 00:24:50.064
cancelled. Right. Is I think an interesting and very in keeping with the tone
00:24:50.064 --> 00:24:53.486
of the film. Also, there are several references to the craft,
00:24:53.486 --> 00:24:55.168
which we also can talk about.
00:24:56.689 --> 00:25:00.952
Oh, that's a good catch. I also, I wanted to, before we move on,
00:25:00.952 --> 00:25:05.655
point out how much I loved the, I don't know, I haven't read anything yet that
00:25:05.655 --> 00:25:09.678
would indicate this was purposeful, but in the movie, they do like a makeover
00:25:09.678 --> 00:25:11.359
for Maya Hawke's character.
00:25:11.840 --> 00:25:12.600
It's amazing.
00:25:12.600 --> 00:25:16.363
To kind of infiltrate the, who starts out a little bit like nondescript.
00:25:16.984 --> 00:25:21.067
From Laney, Laney Bond. Frumpy, kind of.
00:25:21.067 --> 00:25:24.289
She's glasses and a ponytail. How are we ever going to make her hot?
00:25:24.289 --> 00:25:30.414
And so they put her like mean girl style in the like they infiltrate the popular group.
00:25:31.716 --> 00:25:36.499
And to me that like, in addition to like the mean girls reference to me that
00:25:36.499 --> 00:25:41.043
felt very like, like, like Judy Greer and Jawbreaker. Oh, my god.
00:25:41.443 --> 00:25:42.424
They have fernmayo.
00:25:42.424 --> 00:25:48.409
Huge fernmayo. They turned her into fernmayo. Yeah. Even the costuming felt
00:25:48.409 --> 00:25:51.558
super familiar in that the very neon-like.
00:25:53.793 --> 00:25:55.814
I'm meant to be popular costuming.
00:25:56.615 --> 00:25:59.777
That may be where I wanted the murders to, like where I was like,
00:25:59.777 --> 00:26:04.080
oh, this is going to end in like a bloodbath is like the jawbreaker of it all
00:26:04.080 --> 00:26:08.864
or the cruel intentions of it all or the mean girls, which ends with Regina
00:26:08.864 --> 00:26:10.024
George getting hit by a bus.
00:26:10.024 --> 00:26:16.049
So that's, I think, kind of, that's where I'm at with it.
00:26:16.049 --> 00:26:21.552
Okay, so you wanted a little bit more, you wanted more like aggressive,
00:26:21.552 --> 00:26:24.054
aggressive violence and not passive aggressive violence.
00:26:24.054 --> 00:26:28.398
I agree. And that might be, you know, the difference between our genders and
00:26:28.398 --> 00:26:31.360
how we're socialized where I'm a man. So I'm like, just fucking hit him.
00:26:34.082 --> 00:26:36.604
Just fucking hit him on the head with a rake or something.
00:26:37.065 --> 00:26:43.469
Well, Aviv, we did get the hits in Rob Lauer, music supervisor, Rob Lauer is neo-drop.
00:26:44.070 --> 00:26:44.750
Yes, we did.
00:26:44.750 --> 00:26:48.113
And I wanna go into them real quick. If you watch Do Revenge,
00:26:48.113 --> 00:26:54.238
you'll notice there's a potent mix of hits that you would hear on either like
00:26:54.238 --> 00:26:57.680
today's like top 40 radio and TikTok.
00:26:57.680 --> 00:27:01.583
For example, like you've got the Olivia Rodrigo needle drop Brutal.
00:27:01.583 --> 00:27:03.024
You've got Caroline Polacek.
00:27:03.625 --> 00:27:05.366
Excellent song, excellent needle drop.
00:27:05.366 --> 00:27:08.808
Yes. You've got Caroline Polacek, So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings,
00:27:08.808 --> 00:27:12.411
which really hit on TikTok last year, despite it being a couple of years old.
00:27:12.731 --> 00:27:16.733
You've got Muna's Silk Chiffon. My favorite needle drop that I've,
00:27:17.944 --> 00:27:22.788
I didn't like we're not going to center the discussion on but I was obsessed
00:27:22.788 --> 00:27:29.273
with this early in the film at the like the opening party scene is a Robbins
00:27:29.273 --> 00:27:31.975
Do You Know What It Takes to Love Me.
00:27:32.295 --> 00:27:34.737
But I think I think the title is just Do You Know What It Takes.
00:27:35.458 --> 00:27:39.941
And of all the Robin songs that Rob could have picked for this,
00:27:40.071 --> 00:27:42.343
I'm obsessed with the fact that
00:27:42.343 --> 00:27:49.688
this is this song is from Robyn's 1997 album that Show Me Love was on.
00:27:49.688 --> 00:27:54.251
Oh my god, I haven't heard that song since it came out.
00:27:54.671 --> 00:28:00.895
It's not like dancing on my own, Robyn. This is like, old, obscure Robyn.
00:28:01.456 --> 00:28:05.719
I think that that's a perfect kind of representation of the rest of the movie, right?
00:28:05.719 --> 00:28:11.592
Where he's taken this new, brand new artist, this artist that everyone knows
00:28:11.592 --> 00:28:17.267
contemporarily, and finding a needle drop from them that is of the era that
00:28:17.267 --> 00:28:18.728
this is paying homage to.
00:28:19.649 --> 00:28:24.312
Some of the other classic needle drops or classic songs that they needle drop
00:28:24.312 --> 00:28:27.114
are Third Eye Blinds' How's It Gonna Be,
00:28:27.114 --> 00:28:33.499
Celebrity Skin by Hole, Harvey Danger's Flagpole Sitta, which made me very happy,
00:28:33.499 --> 00:28:37.462
and the impression that I get from the Mighty Mighty Bostons who actually show
00:28:37.462 --> 00:28:39.143
up in the movie Clueless.
00:28:39.644 --> 00:28:47.030
They absolutely do. You've got Fatboy Slim's Praise You, which I was just bowing
00:28:47.030 --> 00:28:49.171
down to the screen at that point when they played that.
00:28:50.513 --> 00:28:54.395
And then you kind of circle back to some newer hits. You've got Hayley Kiyoko
00:28:54.395 --> 00:29:00.500
for the girls, and Pom Pom Squad, big favorite of mine, and Tate McRae.
00:29:00.901 --> 00:29:04.603
And you've got Rosalia in there. Billie Eilish is in there.
00:29:05.785 --> 00:29:12.429
And then the movie closes out. Well, technically the movie, the credits run to Cranberries.
00:29:14.511 --> 00:29:19.995
Yes. And there's another Cranberries, there's like a string quartet version
00:29:19.995 --> 00:29:24.059
of Cranberries earlier in the movie as well.
00:29:25.820 --> 00:29:30.584
But I really wanted to talk about Bitch because it's the most interactive needle drop.
00:29:30.884 --> 00:29:34.268
By that I mean the movie closes out with the two main characters like riding
00:29:34.268 --> 00:29:39.213
off into the sunset across the bridge in Miami just scream singing the words to bitch.
00:29:40.024 --> 00:29:42.636
Another homage to to curl intentions.
00:29:44.485 --> 00:29:49.127
Yes, and I wanted to know what you thought of this needle drop and just the
00:29:49.127 --> 00:29:51.629
scene in general Why do you think it worked?
00:29:52.390 --> 00:29:55.031
So I think I mean, I really like the scene. I thought it
00:29:55.031 --> 00:29:58.354
was a pretty cathartic way So these to
00:29:58.354 --> 00:30:02.410
end the film these that are two main characters have gotten over their differences
00:30:02.410 --> 00:30:07.080
They're driving over the the bridge in Miami in that old classic car That's
00:30:07.080 --> 00:30:11.303
like basically the same one that Reese Witherspoon drives at the end of cruel
00:30:11.303 --> 00:30:17.247
intentions and yet they're singing instead of like it's colorblind I think in in Cruel Intentions.
00:30:18.088 --> 00:30:21.430
Reese Witherspoon's character is actually driving off to Bittersweet Symphony.
00:30:22.230 --> 00:30:25.152
Oh that makes sense of course. By the Verve.
00:30:25.373 --> 00:30:29.035
Yeah this this is a much more raucous song.
00:30:29.035 --> 00:30:36.840
I liked the needle drop and I think it's weirdly kind of thematically fitting
00:30:36.840 --> 00:30:39.582
in a way that the listener might not know.
00:30:39.582 --> 00:30:44.325
So we all know you know the hit, bitch, bitch, lover, child,
00:30:44.325 --> 00:30:48.588
mother, sinner, saint, will not be restrained. Ashamed?
00:30:48.588 --> 00:30:50.590
Ashamed.
00:30:50.590 --> 00:30:56.714
That was a massive hit in the 90s, but Meredith Brooks had been making music since the 70s,
00:30:56.714 --> 00:31:02.779
and she started her career in an all-female band called Sapphire,
00:31:02.779 --> 00:31:08.743
and they did like, kinda heart, Fleetwood Mac-y sort of things,
00:31:08.883 --> 00:31:16.851
and then throughout the 80s she was doing like dance hall songs and never really
00:31:16.851 --> 00:31:21.535
broke through were in the main stream and was like always kind of.
00:31:22.483 --> 00:31:28.207
It seemed like runner up chasing the trend. The trend was never her.
00:31:29.768 --> 00:31:36.412
And that continued into the 90s when she had her first massive major,
00:31:36.412 --> 00:31:41.556
I think probably only massive major hit with Bitch, because many,
00:31:41.556 --> 00:31:45.638
many people, including myself until a few months ago, thought this was,
00:31:45.638 --> 00:31:47.380
did not know who the song was by.
00:31:48.360 --> 00:31:51.862
Everyone and their mother thinks that the song is Alanis Morissette.
00:31:52.964 --> 00:32:04.191
And so there is an interesting kind of reinvention of Meredith Brooks in her own career,
00:32:04.191 --> 00:32:09.535
where she was this new wave person,
00:32:09.535 --> 00:32:13.898
she was this female prog rock person,
00:32:13.898 --> 00:32:21.954
and then she decided to to be authentically herself and write a song about all
00:32:21.954 --> 00:32:26.848
of the different things that she was, that she can contradict herself because
00:32:26.848 --> 00:32:27.768
she contains multitudes.
00:32:28.228 --> 00:32:31.671
And that's the song that became a huge hit for her.
00:32:32.512 --> 00:32:38.375
And this has become kind of a metaphor for the movie. The movie is all about reinvention.
00:32:38.755 --> 00:32:41.898
The movie is about how you present yourself to the world, how you interact,
00:32:41.898 --> 00:32:46.040
and how you can be more than one thing at the same time. I think it's actually
00:32:46.040 --> 00:32:49.142
like a perfect song thematically to close out the film.
00:32:50.004 --> 00:32:54.520
But let's talk a little bit more about the song itself. Bitch.
00:33:35.830 --> 00:33:39.713
Bitch came out in 1997 on May 20.
00:33:41.074 --> 00:33:47.738
It was the lead single from Brooks's second album Blurring the Edges also came out in 1997.
00:33:47.738 --> 00:33:54.522
Bitch was co-written by Brooks and Shelly Pekin, which I once had the pleasure of interviewing.
00:33:54.522 --> 00:33:59.926
Bitch did come out around a time in the mid 90s when Alanis Morissette,
00:33:59.926 --> 00:34:03.008
along with other singers of the era.
00:34:03.008 --> 00:34:06.750
You could call it the Lilith Fair era if you wanted to,
00:34:07.410 --> 00:34:10.953
speak in blanket terms, but you had singers like Fiona Apple,
00:34:10.953 --> 00:34:18.879
Tori Amos, Liz Fair, and many others singing emotionally about their feelings.
00:34:18.879 --> 00:34:24.293
And it did tend to, this movement did tend to be boiled down unfairly,
00:34:24.293 --> 00:34:29.206
just kind of dismissively call them, oh, they're all just sad women singing about their feelings.
00:34:29.206 --> 00:34:33.149
But the beauty of Bitch is, as you as you put it,
00:34:33.149 --> 00:34:39.313
Aviv, it's a great song about how women are not just one thing,
00:34:39.313 --> 00:34:46.358
even though the patriarchy would often just kind of look at them as like,
00:34:46.358 --> 00:34:49.160
oh, if you're if you're not married, then you're just single.
00:34:49.160 --> 00:34:52.142
Like, like, think of how Fox News looks at women.
00:34:53.623 --> 00:34:57.886
They're defined by the things that are put upon them. Right.
00:34:57.886 --> 00:35:05.010
So, Pekin told Billboard in an interview, I'm not an angry young girl or whatever
00:35:05.010 --> 00:35:07.632
the phrase of the moment is, but I'm human.
00:35:07.973 --> 00:35:12.305
It's not to excuse ranting and raving, but I don't think there's anything wrong
00:35:12.305 --> 00:35:18.299
with having a mood. I don't think we all need to keep the mask on all the time.
00:35:18.679 --> 00:35:28.745
By using the word bitch, Pekin and Brooks are reclaiming that word as a term of endearment to say,
00:35:28.745 --> 00:35:37.811
as you said earlier, that women contain multitudes and can hold two truths at the same time.
00:35:37.811 --> 00:35:45.267
So it's just a discussion of women being complex humans. like a sort of a pushback
00:35:45.267 --> 00:35:48.545
at society is sort of flattening them.
00:35:50.187 --> 00:35:55.211
It connects so well with the end of the movie because these two characters,
00:35:55.211 --> 00:36:01.656
Maya Hawks and Camila Mendes, you see them in the beginning of the movie and you kind of want to like,
00:36:01.656 --> 00:36:10.282
oh, one's the ultra popular mean girl, really, and the other is kind of a wallflower character.
00:36:11.544 --> 00:36:17.949
And then you see them showing so many different kinds of feelings throughout
00:36:17.949 --> 00:36:21.091
the film as their narratives progress.
00:36:21.091 --> 00:36:26.755
And it kind of gives you like a reminder not to just assume things about people
00:36:26.755 --> 00:36:27.876
based on how they appear.
00:36:27.876 --> 00:36:32.139
It's the age old, don't judge a book by its cover.
00:36:32.139 --> 00:36:37.002
And then the way that they drive off into the sunset singing bitch together
00:36:37.002 --> 00:36:42.126
kind of seemed to me like a like a happier Thelma and Louise instead of driving
00:36:42.126 --> 00:36:43.847
off a cliff to their certain deaths
00:36:44.087 --> 00:36:47.209
after fighting for themselves, like fighting back.
00:36:47.209 --> 00:36:50.551
Spoilers for Thelma and Louise. Everyone knows the ending of Thelma and Louise.
00:36:50.551 --> 00:36:52.213
You're telling me the boat sinks?
00:36:53.934 --> 00:36:58.917
Instead of driving off a cliff, here you have these two women like grasping
00:36:58.917 --> 00:37:03.000
hands, driving off into the sunset and just singing at the top of their lungs
00:37:03.000 --> 00:37:07.102
about how they're humans and not just one thing.
00:37:07.102 --> 00:37:13.226
Yeah. that the song itself was kind of a, as you mentioned, a reclamation of
00:37:13.226 --> 00:37:17.559
the word. And this is that moment made in cinema, right?
00:37:18.090 --> 00:37:22.743
They are spoilers for this movie. These two characters realize that they're
00:37:22.743 --> 00:37:27.597
both kind of evil and they both, their secret power is just like bullying.
00:37:27.997 --> 00:37:29.538
And they're okay with that.
00:37:30.359 --> 00:37:35.463
And they also are capable of love and friendship and affection And all this other stuff.
00:37:35.463 --> 00:37:40.226
And so they are reclaiming that they're both bitches as they are driving over
00:37:40.226 --> 00:37:41.447
this bridge singing this song.
00:37:41.447 --> 00:37:46.491
So it's like, I think once again, kind of the perfect, it does what the song
00:37:46.491 --> 00:37:52.175
wants, right? Which is to reclaim that name as something that it's okay for people to be sometimes.
00:37:53.877 --> 00:37:59.281
Yeah, and I wanna draw a comparison again to Mean Girls because in Mean Girls
00:37:59.281 --> 00:38:09.168
you see Lizzie Caplan plays someone who was bullied for allegedly being gay, which she isn't.
00:38:10.049 --> 00:38:16.634
But there's a rumor around that Regina George in the film starts about her being gay.
00:38:16.634 --> 00:38:22.939
But you see someone who was bullied, Lizzie Kaplan's group of friends,
00:38:22.939 --> 00:38:27.522
or they're really just, they bully just as hard. It just isn't. Yeah.
00:38:27.522 --> 00:38:32.046
Yeah. The problem is not what clique you belong to, the clicks themselves.
00:38:32.046 --> 00:38:33.546
Exactly. And I think that...
00:38:36.128 --> 00:38:41.221
Do revenge is it explores that same kind of like doesn't matter really where
00:38:41.221 --> 00:38:46.214
you fall on the spectrum in high school like this is about ultimately survival
00:38:46.214 --> 00:38:51.378
and how people survive and that that can really come at an emotional cost.
00:38:51.738 --> 00:38:56.761
I want to read a quote real quick from from Shelly when I spoke to her in 2020 about bitch.
00:38:57.422 --> 00:39:02.605
Women are complicated we're not two-dimensional and men who would be worthy
00:39:02.605 --> 00:39:07.969
of being with us realize that and they embrace it and they love it. We're not boring.
00:39:09.630 --> 00:39:13.473
And then that's kind of where the lyrics, you wouldn't want it any other way, came from.
00:39:13.473 --> 00:39:19.457
Would it surprise you to know, Rachel, that Shelly Pekin recorded a version
00:39:19.457 --> 00:39:22.839
of Bitch on her own as like a demo?
00:39:23.060 --> 00:39:25.521
Would it surprise you to know this?
00:39:26.542 --> 00:39:33.747
It wouldn't. I believe that Bitch started out as more belonging to Shelly Pekin.
00:39:34.208 --> 00:39:34.748
Yes.
00:39:37.811 --> 00:39:41.613
And she kind of, it became more of a collaboration.
00:39:42.414 --> 00:39:46.337
Yeah, it became more of a collaboration. Shelly Pekin is the one that had the
00:39:46.337 --> 00:39:52.122
idea for the song. She spoke to the Tennessean in 2018 and said that the song,
00:39:52.122 --> 00:39:56.665
this is her quote, Shelly, The song was born because I was so frustrated.
00:39:57.006 --> 00:40:00.529
I had 10 years of album cuts, but I never had a single. I was coming home from
00:40:00.529 --> 00:40:05.132
a session one day full of PMS in a big funk and said, what am I doing?
00:40:05.132 --> 00:40:09.115
I thought to myself, my poor boyfriend who I was living with, I'm married to him now.
00:40:09.576 --> 00:40:12.257
He's gonna have to deal with this when I get home and God bless him,
00:40:12.257 --> 00:40:17.551
he loves me any way I am, I thought. He loves me even when I can be such a bitch.
00:40:18.162 --> 00:40:24.607
So I think it's important to look at even this song that's all about kind of
00:40:24.607 --> 00:40:26.849
embracing labels and shedding labels,
00:40:26.849 --> 00:40:33.934
came from this moment of insecurity that she had of being judged for like a
00:40:33.934 --> 00:40:35.295
feeling that she was feeling.
00:40:35.295 --> 00:40:43.460
And instead of cowering in the corner about that, she used her work to reclaim that.
00:40:44.041 --> 00:40:48.124
Yeah, I think that that's something that it's a very human feeling.
00:40:49.525 --> 00:40:51.306
It's not just directed at women.
00:40:53.508 --> 00:41:00.073
I think anybody has a lot of fear in relationships, especially long-term relationships,
00:41:00.073 --> 00:41:05.257
about what's the other person going to say when they realize who I really am.
00:41:05.757 --> 00:41:08.639
We all kind of think of ourselves in our worst moments as monsters.
00:41:11.542 --> 00:41:16.886
And is my partner, who I love, going to run away when they see the swamp creature I can be?
00:41:17.406 --> 00:41:23.297
The goblin mode. But I love what Shelly said, I love what Shelly said to you
00:41:23.297 --> 00:41:30.092
in this Grammy interview about her version of bitch, which we can listen to a bit of right now.
00:41:47.583 --> 00:41:52.907
So in 2020, Shelly said to me, women who love that song and relate to that song,
00:41:52.907 --> 00:41:57.230
they don't think of it as aging at all, which lends a lot of credence to it
00:41:57.230 --> 00:41:59.151
being used so perfectly in Do Revenge.
00:41:59.151 --> 00:42:04.475
The message is still the same. The version I cut from my album is way darker
00:42:04.475 --> 00:42:07.077
and more cinematic, but it doesn't have to be that.
00:42:07.077 --> 00:42:11.861
I loved Meredith Brooks' version too, but as far as the use of the word at the
00:42:11.861 --> 00:42:16.704
time, Meredith and I looked at each other and We didn't assess it as we wrote
00:42:16.704 --> 00:42:19.867
it because while we were writing it, we were just in the zone.
00:42:19.867 --> 00:42:23.229
This is what we wanted to say. This is how we want to say it.
00:42:24.090 --> 00:42:27.592
And after we were done, we looked at each other and said, will anybody ever
00:42:27.592 --> 00:42:34.376
put this on the radio with the word? Then she reminded us that the Stones did it, Elton John did it.
00:42:35.177 --> 00:42:37.579
Nobody ever kept their songs off the radio.
00:42:38.840 --> 00:42:43.303
And I assume she's saying using the word bitch, but two women calling themselves
00:42:43.323 --> 00:42:46.325
a bitch that they were like when
00:42:46.325 --> 00:42:49.807
you think about it that song coming out now would be
00:42:49.807 --> 00:42:52.649
as Shelly put it beige when you
00:42:52.649 --> 00:42:56.052
think about the language and pop that gets by and the things that are spoken
00:42:56.052 --> 00:43:03.017
of today she says it's pornographic sometimes I wonder if that song bitch loosened
00:43:03.017 --> 00:43:09.501
the lid for more risque language on the radio the Shelly Pekin version of bitch
00:43:09.501 --> 00:43:12.183
which is as she described darker,
00:43:12.183 --> 00:43:20.589
more cinematic, feels like Meredith Brooks by way of Marilyn Manson and Eric Clapton or something,
00:43:20.589 --> 00:43:25.673
but it is a little bit more ominous versus Meredith's version,
00:43:25.673 --> 00:43:28.475
which is much more in a major key.
00:43:28.836 --> 00:43:31.077
And it's tonally, it's triumphant.
00:43:31.077 --> 00:43:37.522
Yeah, exactly. This is threatening and the other one is triumphant.
00:43:37.522 --> 00:43:41.722
I think this would have been good for like the trailer of Do Revenge.
00:44:04.313 --> 00:44:08.556
What do you think the staying power of this movie is going to be so the Daily
00:44:08.556 --> 00:44:13.480
Beast called it a generation-defining masterpiece as you mentioned do we think
00:44:13.480 --> 00:44:18.844
that this is going to have the same staying power as Something like clueless
00:44:18.844 --> 00:44:21.907
or something like cruel intentions Okay,
00:44:21.907 --> 00:44:26.780
so I want to start by saying that I think is just like a defining a generation-defining
00:44:26.780 --> 00:44:30.193
masterpiece feels a little heavy-handed.
00:44:31.454 --> 00:44:37.157
I don't... I love this movie, but I don't love it as much as that sentence.
00:44:37.598 --> 00:44:44.762
I think this is a great movie. I like that Netflix and Hulu and other streaming
00:44:44.762 --> 00:44:52.467
platforms have become kind of the de facto living space for teen comedies and rom-coms,
00:44:52.467 --> 00:45:00.232
two genres or two sub genres that really, really ruled the decades that you
00:45:00.232 --> 00:45:03.375
and I grew up in, like the 90s and early 2000s.
00:45:03.375 --> 00:45:11.981
So I do love that these movies can thrive on those platforms.
00:45:11.981 --> 00:45:17.485
That being said, I don't think that Do Revenge is going to have quite the same
00:45:17.485 --> 00:45:21.508
long tail as a movie be clueless or cruel intentions.
00:45:22.970 --> 00:45:24.911
Simply, and that's not to impugn
00:45:24.911 --> 00:45:31.916
its quality, but that's only because the amount of content is so vast.
00:45:32.217 --> 00:45:34.519
I actually, I super agree.
00:45:34.519 --> 00:45:40.043
I think that this might define the year. It might make it onto some best of lists.
00:45:40.483 --> 00:45:43.606
I don't necessarily think that it's going to break.
00:45:43.606 --> 00:45:48.609
I mean, it really remains to be seen, But I think that it's like,
00:45:48.609 --> 00:45:53.153
I've already seen do revenge inspire some like Halloween costume ideas,
00:45:53.153 --> 00:45:57.356
but I don't know that it's like, I think you'll see people dressing a share
00:45:57.356 --> 00:46:01.139
from Clueless for Halloween for like, who even knows how many more years,
00:46:01.139 --> 00:46:03.220
but I don't think the same can really be said.
00:46:03.220 --> 00:46:07.603
And I don't think that's the fault of the movie. I think that's more just the
00:46:07.603 --> 00:46:14.268
content landscape and how attention gets spliced and the amount of material that's out there.
00:46:14.268 --> 00:46:19.272
That being said, I do think this movie and the soundtrack will do great things
00:46:19.272 --> 00:46:23.855
for Rob Lowry's career as a music supervisor.
00:46:23.915 --> 00:46:29.319
Do Revenge has an 84% on Rotten Tomatoes while Clueless has an 81% and Cruel Intentions has a 54%.
00:46:29.319 --> 00:46:35.022
So this isn't to say that it's nothing to do with the movie's quality,
00:46:35.022 --> 00:46:38.925
though I do think that I would have liked a little bit more personality in the
00:46:38.925 --> 00:46:43.988
directing of this movie. Not in the musical Needle Drops by the way, those are spectacular.
00:46:44.368 --> 00:46:50.962
But I think the way that studios, you're exactly right in that the landscape
00:46:50.962 --> 00:46:55.999
of content is such that studios don't rally around movies like this anymore.
00:46:56.319 --> 00:46:59.283
And if this movie did come out in the 90s, there would be...
00:47:00.459 --> 00:47:04.802
Million dollar marketing campaigns. This would be in the theater for months
00:47:04.802 --> 00:47:11.566
and on home video and people would be you know having sleepovers and and watching
00:47:11.566 --> 00:47:15.289
it over and over and over again until I fell asleep like people did with Clueless
00:47:15.289 --> 00:47:18.011
and Cruel Intentions and it would win,
00:47:18.011 --> 00:47:24.115
you know MTV Awards and all this stuff but because of the way the Movies are
00:47:24.115 --> 00:47:26.637
made these days, especially with Netflix.
00:47:26.637 --> 00:47:30.720
We're like every month They've got a crop of new movies and they can't really
00:47:30.720 --> 00:47:33.141
focus on one thing too heavily.
00:47:33.682 --> 00:47:39.125
We don't have these kind of monocultural touchstones like we used to, which is kind of a shame.
00:47:39.125 --> 00:47:44.148
I couldn't agree more with that. It's different. I don't think it's necessarily
00:47:44.148 --> 00:47:46.790
better or worse. I think it's just different.
00:47:48.151 --> 00:47:51.573
And I know that this movie will stay with me personally, because
00:47:51.573 --> 00:47:54.555
I do love a smart rom-com and or
00:47:54.555 --> 00:47:57.377
a teen comedy even well into my
00:47:57.377 --> 00:48:00.979
30s but um not that
00:48:00.979 --> 00:48:05.823
not that far into let's not be crazy even vaguely
00:48:05.823 --> 00:48:11.227
in my elder millennial years but um I am excited to see personally as someone
00:48:11.227 --> 00:48:16.731
who nerds out over music supervision um I am excited to see what the what do
00:48:16.731 --> 00:48:21.474
revenge will do for Rob's career and I'm excited to talk to him about his his work on this movie.
00:48:21.945 --> 00:48:25.737
After the break, you'll hear our chat with Rob Lowry, music supervisor extraordinaire.
00:48:26.598 --> 00:48:27.579
We'll be right back.
00:48:35.465 --> 00:48:40.629
Hi, my name is Rob Lowry, and I am a music supervisor for film and television.
00:48:40.629 --> 00:48:41.890
Thanks for joining us.
00:48:41.890 --> 00:48:43.131
Thank you guys for having me.
00:48:43.131 --> 00:48:47.594
Rob, it's so good to have you on. We are longtime fans of your work.
00:48:47.955 --> 00:48:52.518
And you and I have spoken before a bit about your work on the first season of Gossip Girl.
00:48:52.918 --> 00:48:56.661
But I wondered if before we get into Do Revenge, if you could tell us a little
00:48:56.661 --> 00:49:00.824
bit about your background as a music supervisor, and then how you eventually
00:49:00.824 --> 00:49:02.645
came on board to work on Do Revenge.
00:49:02.645 --> 00:49:06.428
Yeah, I think, I mean, it is kind of, it's been a crazy year,
00:49:06.428 --> 00:49:12.853
I think, in terms of just kind of like the high profile visibility of stuff we worked on.
00:49:12.853 --> 00:49:18.557
It kind of started with Cha Cha Real Smooth, which premiered at Sundance back in January.
00:49:19.518 --> 00:49:26.742
We had The Lost City, which came out in March and was a big kind of box office
00:49:26.742 --> 00:49:28.203
hit, which was really fun.
00:49:29.144 --> 00:49:34.206
And then we had Bros come out, which was a high profile project that.
00:49:34.548 --> 00:49:38.270
Didn't necessarily translate to the box office, but has been kind of a nice,
00:49:38.270 --> 00:49:41.473
nice big hit on VOD and streaming.
00:49:42.394 --> 00:49:46.997
And Do Revenge. Yeah. So it's, it's been a busy, fun year. And also,
00:49:46.997 --> 00:49:50.200
I think just kind of you can see the diversity in the projects.
00:49:50.200 --> 00:49:55.404
It seems, Rob, that you're extremely busy. You've got like 10 credits this year,
00:49:55.404 --> 00:49:59.607
10 credits last year, 10 or so the year before that.
00:49:59.808 --> 00:50:03.050
How is it jumping from project to project,
00:50:03.050 --> 00:50:09.895
basically like one a month coming out or so, in various genres and various styles,
00:50:09.895 --> 00:50:14.019
some of them are TV, some of them are movies, what is it like doing music supervision
00:50:14.019 --> 00:50:17.661
for such a wide range of things in such quick succession?
00:50:17.661 --> 00:50:22.345
I mean, it's interesting as stuff comes out because, you know,
00:50:22.345 --> 00:50:26.989
for instance, if we had Bros come out in September and then we had Wendell and
00:50:26.989 --> 00:50:32.232
Wilde come out in October, And you know, Bros we actually started on last Christmas.
00:50:32.553 --> 00:50:35.815
So all things considered, it was a pretty quick turnaround.
00:50:35.815 --> 00:50:39.978
We finished the project, I think around May we mixed. So we have that,
00:50:39.978 --> 00:50:42.280
which is like maybe like a five, six month project.
00:50:42.280 --> 00:50:45.522
And then a month later you have Wendell Wilde come out, which we were on for
00:50:45.522 --> 00:50:50.485
over three years. Oh wow. It's funny, cause it's a little bit misleading in
00:50:50.485 --> 00:50:54.628
terms of timelines and when you might start and finish a project.
00:50:54.938 --> 00:50:58.509
But I think it's fun, cause I feel like you never really get burnt out something
00:50:58.509 --> 00:51:02.551
because there's always the opportunity to kind of move on to something else
00:51:02.551 --> 00:51:04.632
if you're feeling a little bit spent.
00:51:05.052 --> 00:51:10.114
And I also have two people that work with me, Emily Bender and Mia of Riggins who are both.
00:51:10.560 --> 00:51:15.664
Really wonderful and super hands-on and we kind of work as a trio on every project.
00:51:15.664 --> 00:51:19.306
So we kind of, someone might have a preference to work on one project one day
00:51:19.306 --> 00:51:23.089
or do a certain pull for a certain scene and then we'll kind of review it together.
00:51:23.089 --> 00:51:24.640
But it's nice to be able,
00:51:39.240 --> 00:51:43.583
to kind of Excuse me for putting words in your mouth get a little bit of you
00:51:43.583 --> 00:51:50.689
get energized jumping from like genre to genre. Let's say How did you come to work on do revenge?
00:51:50.689 --> 00:51:53.411
So just to clarify you you are
00:51:53.411 --> 00:51:58.061
right because at any any given time we're really working on 10 to 12 projects
00:51:58.061 --> 00:52:04.199
For do revenge so Jan the writer director Jen and I met years ago when I was
00:52:04.199 --> 00:52:08.242
on a show called the bold type on on Freeform because the showrunner for The
00:52:08.242 --> 00:52:11.145
Bold Type had done Jen's first show,
00:52:11.145 --> 00:52:14.908
which was a show called Sweet Vicious, that only lasted a season on MTV,
00:52:14.908 --> 00:52:18.951
but is kind of like a cult classic and is one of the craziest,
00:52:18.951 --> 00:52:22.494
most fun shows ever. I wish it would have gone seven seasons.
00:52:22.954 --> 00:52:26.837
But Jen was a really big fan of the music on The Bold Type, and my friend Amanda,
00:52:26.837 --> 00:52:28.318
who was the showrunner, connected us.
00:52:28.318 --> 00:52:32.001
Jen and I just kind of became really good friends, kind of based off of that.
00:52:32.001 --> 00:52:37.442
And really, I've said this before in interviews and stuff, but Jen and I are
00:52:37.442 --> 00:52:39.242
like totally musical soulmates.
00:52:39.242 --> 00:52:43.203
We have the exact same taste. And even when we're not working on stuff together,
00:52:43.203 --> 00:52:48.314
we're kind of sharing stuff back and forth. So I got the script for Do Revenge
00:52:48.314 --> 00:52:53.386
probably about a year or a year and a half before they shot.
00:52:53.766 --> 00:52:55.506
And Jen sent me the script and...
00:52:56.861 --> 00:53:01.884
I think there was like 50 songs scripted into the film at the time.
00:53:02.225 --> 00:53:06.427
And so, you know, we'll start early at that point in terms of like clearing
00:53:06.427 --> 00:53:12.061
stuff. And there was kind of an idea that maybe we were going to do all modern
00:53:12.061 --> 00:53:14.593
bands covering these 90s songs.
00:53:15.093 --> 00:53:17.404
And so we kind of started to go down that path in pre-production.
00:53:18.376 --> 00:53:22.858
There was also some visual vocal on camera performances that we ended up shooting
00:53:22.858 --> 00:53:24.279
but didn't make it into the film.
00:53:24.600 --> 00:53:29.403
There's a deleted scene somewhere of Maya Hawke performing I Love You Always
00:53:29.403 --> 00:53:34.307
Forever at a high school talent show that didn't make it into the final cut,
00:53:34.307 --> 00:53:35.207
but it's really awesome.
00:53:35.628 --> 00:53:42.993
But yeah, so we started, I got the script in March 2020 and then we officially
00:53:42.993 --> 00:53:45.395
came on the project I think that summer.
00:53:45.395 --> 00:53:51.379
And then Jen had written Thor for Marvel, so she went to Australia while they
00:53:51.379 --> 00:53:54.822
were filming Thor and was also kind of, we were working on Do Revenge,
00:53:54.822 --> 00:53:56.904
we would zoom at crazy times and stuff.
00:53:56.904 --> 00:54:01.947
And then right when she got back in the spring of 2021, we basically started
00:54:01.947 --> 00:54:03.228
shooting Do Revenge then.
00:54:03.228 --> 00:54:08.132
So we were kind of working on it together for over a year in terms of sharing
00:54:08.132 --> 00:54:11.595
music and clearing music and just kind of figuring out the musical palette.
00:54:11.595 --> 00:54:16.138
Because as you can tell, I think we ended up clearing...I think there's 31 or 32 songs in the film.
00:54:17.720 --> 00:54:20.842
And it's obviously wall-to-wall music. And and some of those were scripted,
00:54:20.842 --> 00:54:25.365
some of them weren't, but it was a very, one of the more intensive projects,
00:54:25.365 --> 00:54:30.569
partially just because Jen and I are close and she's such a huge music fan and
00:54:30.569 --> 00:54:34.533
it's such an important part of her storytelling, so we were there kind of every step of the way.
00:54:34.913 --> 00:54:40.477
Having the music cues written into the screenplay, one of my many hats is as
00:54:40.477 --> 00:54:42.899
a screenwriting teacher, and that's like a big no-no.
00:54:43.620 --> 00:54:46.802
That's like a thing, that's a habit that I need to break a bunch of students
00:54:46.802 --> 00:54:52.026
of, is like you're not supposed to write music into your script and there are
00:54:52.026 --> 00:54:55.908
very famous examples of writers who do it, specifically like Edgar Wright,
00:54:55.908 --> 00:54:58.370
who wrote all of the music cues into Baby Driver.
00:54:58.370 --> 00:55:05.135
So how do you feel as a music supervisor when there are specific music cues
00:55:05.135 --> 00:55:06.476
written into the screenplay?
00:55:06.476 --> 00:55:09.898
It's a really good question. I mean, at the end of the day,
00:55:09.898 --> 00:55:13.641
I think as long, I mean, a big part of our job,
00:55:13.641 --> 00:55:16.883
I think, is kind of educating people, whether it's filmmakers,
00:55:16.883 --> 00:55:24.149
producers, whatever it is, about licensing costs and trying to be the realistic
00:55:24.149 --> 00:55:26.791
kind of at times bearer of bad news, I think.
00:55:27.171 --> 00:55:32.295
I'm not totally anti it as long as they know that they're not going to get the
00:55:32.295 --> 00:55:36.378
Rolling Stones' sympathy for the devil, even though they've written into it.
00:55:36.798 --> 00:55:40.791
And sometimes I think it can be helpful in terms of just giving a tonal idea
00:55:40.791 --> 00:55:41.712
of of what you're looking for.
00:55:42.082 --> 00:55:45.805
But I will say like, you know, two of my favorite projects ever,
00:55:45.805 --> 00:55:48.807
which would be like Cha Cha Real Smooth and Do Revenge.
00:55:49.568 --> 00:55:55.292
Both Cooper and Jen have just really wonderful music taste and They both.
00:55:55.655 --> 00:56:00.458
Are pretty prescriptive about writing music into their scripts.
00:56:00.458 --> 00:56:05.622
And so, you know, not all of it ended up in there, but it does give you a jumping off point.
00:56:05.622 --> 00:56:09.144
You know, if you have someone writing in like Fleetwood Mac landslide,
00:56:09.144 --> 00:56:12.827
like that's one thing, but you know, if you have with Cooper,
00:56:12.827 --> 00:56:17.330
like writing in like howdy tools into it, you're like, okay, this is, this is cool.
00:56:17.330 --> 00:56:23.715
This kind of paints a specific picture. And then with Jen, music is so important to Jen.
00:56:23.715 --> 00:56:27.137
It's just as important as the story and truly everything else.
00:56:27.137 --> 00:56:33.412
So she's always scripting needle drops in and some of it stays, some of it doesn't.
00:56:33.412 --> 00:56:38.225
But her vision in just development and pre-production stage in terms of how
00:56:38.225 --> 00:56:41.287
stuff's cutting together, where there's a montage, how music's going to play
00:56:41.287 --> 00:56:46.130
is just so crazy because there's so many pieces that were scripted that we ended
00:56:46.130 --> 00:56:48.072
up, you know, using in the final product.
00:56:48.472 --> 00:56:53.636
So I, those are two filmmakers that I just really trust inherently just because
00:56:53.636 --> 00:56:56.458
they're they're just visionaries in their own ways.
00:56:56.458 --> 00:57:02.142
You mentioned the overlap of music taste that that you guys already really had
00:57:02.142 --> 00:57:03.683
going into this project.
00:57:04.024 --> 00:57:09.988
And did you receive any guidance ahead of time like when you were heading into working on Do Revenge?
00:57:09.988 --> 00:57:14.271
Were you told ahead of time like we really want to create a balance of classic
00:57:14.271 --> 00:57:17.974
pop needle drops versus like contemporary one like a healthy mix?
00:57:17.974 --> 00:57:19.856
Like what did that look like going in?
00:57:19.856 --> 00:57:26.259
So the original idea was, you know, maybe we have modern bands cover all these 90s songs.
00:57:26.660 --> 00:57:31.513
And as we were kind of cutting the film together, that evolved to,
00:57:31.513 --> 00:57:35.586
well, maybe we have a couple covers and use mostly modern stuff.
00:57:35.586 --> 00:57:39.868
And I think somewhere along the line, we kind of looked at the stuff that was
00:57:39.868 --> 00:57:44.031
really working that that we had known was going to be in there from the script
00:57:44.031 --> 00:57:49.414
stage, stuff like, you know, Hole and Olivia Rodrigo and Harvey Danger.
00:57:49.415 --> 00:57:54.058
You know, I think there's a good balance of like, here are these contemporary
00:57:54.058 --> 00:57:59.702
artists that are so obviously wearing their influences on their sleeve.
00:57:59.702 --> 00:58:04.086
And so to be able to connect like Olivia and Hole, Jen and I were also wearing
00:58:04.086 --> 00:58:09.230
our hearts and influences on our sleeves in terms of it was so clearly an homage
00:58:09.230 --> 00:58:13.733
to all of these things that we loved growing up, but it doesn't feel derivative.
00:58:13.733 --> 00:58:16.615
It feels like its own thing. Like even reading the script, I was like,
00:58:16.615 --> 00:58:21.078
this is the first thing that feels like it's a part of the teen comedy canon
00:58:21.078 --> 00:58:22.900
since like Mean Girls, maybe.
00:58:23.421 --> 00:58:28.343
And, you know, I've missed those films and to be able to be a part of it and
00:58:28.343 --> 00:58:32.426
something that feels like an instant classic and people are quoting and losing
00:58:32.426 --> 00:58:36.469
their mind about the soundtrack and stuff like that's the kind of stuff that
00:58:36.469 --> 00:58:38.891
made me want to work in film and music.
00:58:38.891 --> 00:58:44.094
What we really wanted to bring you in to talk about, like a lot of this episode
00:58:44.094 --> 00:58:49.986
of NSYNC is focusing on Meredith Brooks' bitch needle drop that you kind of
00:58:49.986 --> 00:58:53.353
end the film on. I'd like to ask...
00:58:53.812 --> 00:58:56.674
If you had a particular favorite needle drop moment?
00:58:56.674 --> 00:59:01.677
Yeah, I mean, I've seen the film at this point 30 or so times.
00:59:02.238 --> 00:59:06.881
And it is a type of movie where even after it was finished, we did all these fun screenings.
00:59:06.901 --> 00:59:10.283
We had the premiere. And it is the type of film where I feel like every time
00:59:10.283 --> 00:59:12.365
I watch it, I have a different favorite.
00:59:12.905 --> 00:59:15.587
And as the film goes on, you're like, oh, I forgot about this song.
00:59:15.587 --> 00:59:21.131
I forgot about this usage. This is so good. But I really love the Maisie Dum Dum usage.
00:59:22.232 --> 00:59:25.394
I love the Juliana Madrid pretend usage.
00:59:25.394 --> 00:59:31.739
Like that to me, during the paintball scene, or like the balloon paint scene,
00:59:31.739 --> 00:59:35.762
that's kind of a nod and homage to 10 Things I Hate About You.
00:59:35.762 --> 00:59:41.686
It's just kind of one of those like heart swell moments, and it's their first kiss and all of that.
00:59:41.686 --> 00:59:46.890
So that was, that might be my favorite at the moment. And then in terms of the
00:59:46.890 --> 00:59:51.234
Meredith Brooks bitch usage, there was always the idea that they would kind
00:59:51.234 --> 00:59:53.375
of drive off singing to something.
00:59:55.217 --> 00:59:59.560
Actually, that's not true. I think originally they weren't singing along to
00:59:59.560 --> 01:00:04.764
it. And then as Jen was shooting, she was like, cause we were just gonna clear
01:00:04.764 --> 01:00:07.426
something and we would just put it in the car or whatever.
01:00:07.767 --> 01:00:13.611
But as Jen was shooting, she was kind of like, what if we had them singing along to something?
01:00:14.052 --> 01:00:18.755
And Jen had been like, kind of obsessed with the idea of using bitch.
01:00:19.135 --> 01:00:23.418
And so we had to clear it pretty quickly. You know, the song gets used.
01:00:23.418 --> 01:00:27.471
I'm not sure how often it's licensed, to be honest. I know that some of those
01:00:27.471 --> 01:00:32.644
kind of legacy artists who have those bigger hits, some of them are a little bit more sensitive.
01:00:32.955 --> 01:00:36.007
Some of them are fine to kind of let people use whatever.
01:00:36.587 --> 01:00:43.712
But I do think it's just such a perfect usage for Drea and Eleanor.
01:00:44.193 --> 01:00:47.115
And it feels very organic to them.
01:00:47.115 --> 01:00:50.687
And I feel like sometimes some of that stuff can feel a little bit cringe or
01:00:50.687 --> 01:00:55.801
a little bit like looking away, like, oh, but I feel like I think Kami and Maya
01:00:55.801 --> 01:00:58.783
are also just so good and just embody those characters so well.
01:00:58.783 --> 01:01:03.746
And it's just, it's one of my favorite scenes because it just feels like the
01:01:03.746 --> 01:01:07.509
perfect way to wrap the film and also just feels so like joyful and celebratory
01:01:07.509 --> 01:01:11.431
and kind of just like really embodying them and also very representative of
01:01:11.431 --> 01:01:13.173
the soundtrack to the film as well.
01:01:13.173 --> 01:01:17.458
Is there a needle drop in the, in the film that you really either in the scripting
01:01:17.458 --> 01:01:21.422
phase or in the edit that you really wanted and just couldn't clear,
01:01:21.422 --> 01:01:25.486
couldn't make work for whatever reason that we almost got.
01:01:25.769 --> 01:01:27.510
Other than I love you always forever.
01:01:27.510 --> 01:01:34.675
So we cleared almost 200 songs for this movie, which is, you know,
01:01:34.675 --> 01:01:38.257
I think by far the most we've ever done for a project.
01:01:38.617 --> 01:01:44.381
I don't really think we got, that's not true, we got one denial pretty early
01:01:44.381 --> 01:01:46.783
on, but that was when we were doing covers.
01:01:47.183 --> 01:01:50.225
When we decided we weren't going to do covers, some of the stuff that we had
01:01:50.225 --> 01:01:52.727
kind of of thought we might use, we were rethinking.
01:01:53.267 --> 01:01:59.091
And to be honest, I don't think there's a spot in the film where we had to use
01:01:59.091 --> 01:02:02.893
a second choice. There were some really, really difficult clearances.
01:02:03.934 --> 01:02:08.357
Whole Celebrity Skin was one of the more complicated, expensive,
01:02:08.357 --> 01:02:13.440
and just something that really came down to the wire, even though that was in
01:02:13.440 --> 01:02:14.701
there kind of from the beginning.
01:02:14.701 --> 01:02:20.805
So like that, the Olivia song, Fat Boy Slim was kind of one of the more difficult,
01:02:20.805 --> 01:02:24.307
expensive clears, Cranberries, which are in the end credits.
01:02:24.968 --> 01:02:29.771
But it's one of those things like when you get Courtney Love on board,
01:02:29.771 --> 01:02:32.873
when you get Billie Eilish on board, when you get Olivia Rodrigo on board,
01:02:32.873 --> 01:02:36.796
you know, that stuff helps kind of sell the excitement of the film,
01:02:36.796 --> 01:02:39.718
the support of the film, the cool factor of the film.
01:02:39.718 --> 01:02:43.321
You know, like it It took a little bit of time to get Olivia to approve because
01:02:43.321 --> 01:02:48.004
she's a little bit sensitive about how her music is used. She was someone who
01:02:48.004 --> 01:02:52.428
requested to watch the sequence it's in and all that stuff. But she was super excited about it.
01:02:53.769 --> 01:02:58.011
It's one of those rare films where even up until the last couple of months we
01:02:58.011 --> 01:03:01.232
were still trying to beat things if we felt like we could beat something.
01:03:01.793 --> 01:03:06.435
It was difficult resource-wise just making sure that we could fit everything into the budget.
01:03:06.975 --> 01:03:10.497
We ended up getting, I think, everything that we wanted for the film.
01:03:10.497 --> 01:03:15.239
I don't think there was anything that we were denied or didn't end up using
01:03:15.239 --> 01:03:17.660
because we didn't have the resources to. Well...
01:03:18.433 --> 01:03:21.816
You know, I think, Rob, that that's all the questions that we have for you.
01:03:21.816 --> 01:03:24.758
I did want to give you a chance, though, to plug any future projects,
01:03:24.758 --> 01:03:25.799
anything you're working on.
01:03:25.799 --> 01:03:31.183
Um, so yeah, so Gossip Girl, I have Miracle Workers. That's like a really funny show.
01:03:31.804 --> 01:03:35.626
And it's really fun to work on because it's just so it's like a live action
01:03:35.626 --> 01:03:40.430
Simpson show. And then a film I'm really excited about that we did with Chris
01:03:40.430 --> 01:03:44.273
Landon, who we worked on Freaky with. He also did Happy Death Day.
01:03:44.334 --> 01:03:49.377
He has a new movie called We Have a Ghost that'll be on Netflix sometime in the spring.
01:03:49.677 --> 01:03:55.122
I just started working on a documentary with Gia Coppola about boy band fandom.
01:03:55.122 --> 01:03:58.584
Oh, I think I know the writer of the book, it's based Maria Shur.
01:03:58.584 --> 01:04:04.989
Maria, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we're getting started on that, which is a lot of fun. It's a dream.
01:04:07.151 --> 01:04:10.293
Thank you so much to Rob Lowry for sitting down and talking to us.
01:04:10.293 --> 01:04:15.977
Thanks for putting so many bangers in one movie and thank you all for listening to our show.
01:04:15.977 --> 01:04:20.121
Tune in next week when we talk about another famous and infamous needle drop,
01:04:20.121 --> 01:04:26.205
and until then you can follow us all on all social media. We are at The Nsync Pod on all platforms.
01:04:26.585 --> 01:04:31.749
That's T-H-E-I-N-S-Y-N-C, wherever you get your social media.
01:04:32.150 --> 01:04:34.251
And until next time, I'm Aviv Rubinstein.
01:04:34.691 --> 01:04:36.823
I'm Rachel Brodsky, thank you so much.
01:04:37.877 --> 01:04:39.902
Saying we're all, we're just all, we're just bitches.
01:04:40.885 --> 01:04:42.148
We are all bitches.