The Beanie Bubble Directors Brought OK Go Flair to Their Directorial Debut (But Only A Little)
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The post The Beanie Bubble Directors Brought OK Go Flair to Their Directorial Debut (But Only A Little) appeared first on Consequence.
The Beanie Bubble, a film that depicts the remarkable rise and fall of Beanie Babies as both a cultural and economic phenomenon, begins with a sequence that captures so much about that moment in time: Inspired by a real-life incident, we see thousands of Beanie Babies flung out of a truck involved in a highway collision, their flight through the air captured with the bright colors and elegant slow motion you might associate with… an OK Go music video.
That’s not a coincidence, as the new Apple TV+ film is co-directed by OK Go frontman Damian Kulash and screenwriter Kristin Gore (who happens to be Kulash’s wife) — who knew, as soon as they read about that 1999 accident, it would be “an incredible metaphor for everything we’re trying to get across,” Gore tells Consequence via Zoom.
Adds Kulash, “We didn’t have to imagine anything. It was just like, well, a truck explodes and then Beanie Babies fly through the air. That’s a good half of our film.”
The Beanie Bubble stars Elizabeth Banks, Sarah Snook, and Geraldine Viswanathan as the three women who were instrumental to Beanie Babies becoming a billion-dollar business, both for the Ty company and its official founder Ty Warner (played by Zach Galifianakis). It’s the latest entry in a new sub-genre of American film exploring the intricacies of famous business deals (and who might have been screwed by them), following this year’s Blackberry and Air.
The trend feels “pretty bizarre” to Gore, she says, because “we’ve been working on this since 2015, so we didn’t expect to come out at the same time as a bunch of other product movies. And we also didn’t mean to make a movie about a product. For us, it was always about these other themes that were so important to us. But there’s the 25 year rule where you see, culturally, there tends to be an inflection point where people are like, ‘what happened 25 years ago?’ And you see a lot of things coming out in entertainment around that. But it’s a weird sub-genre to accidentally be a part of, because we didn’t intend to.”
Gore says the actual intention was “to tell a story about, you know, women and the American dream and our value system, in the sandbox of fun, colorful toys. I would hope that, you know, a lot of the passion that goes into making movies doesn’t always have to be about products and consumerism. I think there are a lot of really important more human stories to focus on.”
Kulash acknowledges, though, one reason for their recent popularity: “As capitalism has taken over for democracy, it’s sort of like, well, these are the gods and bosses around here.”
It’s a response that makes Gore laugh, even as she says, “That’s so depressing.”
“But,” continues Kulash, “movies about Vietnam didn’t mean that people were in favor of the Vietnam War. It’s just that that was the big cultural battlefield. And despite the fact that the American military was very active in the nineties, we didn’t grow up feeling a war. This was the cultural battlefield, you know.”
And Beanie Babies were the spoils of war. As the film depicts, the under-stuffed toys developed by Warner became immensely popular in the 1990s, and thanks to the concept of limited editions, rarer Beanie Babies came to have real value on the secondary market, creating a whole miniature economy around their sales. Unfortunately, the phenomenon ended up being a short-lived one, and Beanie Babies have never regained their previous value.
The film’s structure deliberately makes Ty Warner a supporting character, because according to Kulash, “we didn’t want to tell the story of Beanie Babies, and we didn’t want to tell the story of Ty Warner. Ty Warner, the person in our film, is really just a stand-in for the American dream. He’s the opportunity everybody sees and goes, ‘What?’ And then falls into.”
That’s why the focus is on the three women, fictionalized versions of real players in the story, whose narratives are intercut across different timelines. “We wanted to run them all at the same time,” Kulash says, “so that you notice that one woman is walking into this situation going, ‘This is amazing,’ in literally the same scene that another one is walking out of it going, ‘This is the worst thing ever.’ And it’s the same man, the same system, the same treatment — more or less. That’s what our system is.”
Gore agrees, adding that “all of that felt really irresistible to us because it’s all the things we care about and we wanted as a mission statement for our work. We want to try to do stories that bring some joy, while also getting at more things that we feel are meaningful.”
“It’s a very small bullseye,” Kulash notes. “Things that are fun and joyful and also don’t feel glib, things that are both smart and fun at the same time — it’s a small intersection, and that feel meaningful. All that really heavy stuff was packaged up in this really, really fun world. That was, as [Gore] said, irresistible.”
The Beanie Bubble (Apple TV+)
While there are cleverly constructed sequences in the film, overall The Beanie Bubble avoids leaning too hard into the visual flash and technical wonder that OK Go music videos were famous for delivering. “There are only a few shots in the film that require the type of prep that OK Go videos require,” Kulash confirms. “That very specific sort of ‘We’re going to spend a lot of time getting half a second of real-time to work.'”
The reason for that, he explains, is that “if you had asked me, the singer of OK Go and the person who makes those videos, what type of film I should make that would be a good OK Go film… I mean, I’ve thought about that for years, but it’s like, you can’t do that for 90 minutes logistically, but also like energetically, I think it would hurt to watch that.”
Instead, he says, he and Gore embraced “figuring out how our brains work together. We almost always like the same things, but we almost never get there for the same reasons, or in the same way.”
“Damien’s brain works backwards,” Gore explains. “He starts at an endpoint and he goes backwards and I go forward, I layer organically, and so then we meet in the middle and make it all work.”
And together, Kulash says they were able to apply “the OK Go, analytical, pull it apart and put it back together process to the narrative structure and the narrative itself rather than to the visual — realizing that instead of telling a linear story about [Ty Warner’s] history, we would tell a non-linear story about a pattern and a feeling.”
That opening shot utilized (by Kulash’s count) approximately 10,700 replica Beanie Babies — replicas that Kulash says were hard to come by: “Those Beanies had to be made during a supply chain crisis and Chinese New Year, which shuts down every plush manufacturer around the globe.”
It was also the last sequence they shot, “over three days on an incredibly hot road highway in rural Georgia,” Gore says. The reason it was the last sequence shot is that it involves all of the Beanie replicas which had previously appeared throughout the film — something of a cast party for the movie’s most important props, except they got thrown onto scorching concrete.
“I think it was cathartic for everyone,” Gore laughs.
“Most of the people were like, ‘Oh, I want to take one home,'” Kulash adds. “And we’re like, ‘God, I never want to see these things again.'”
The Beanie Bubble is in theaters beginning Friday, July 21st, and will be available for streaming on Apple TV+ beginning July 28th.
The Beanie Bubble Directors Brought OK Go Flair to Their Directorial Debut (But Only A Little)
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