The following is a human-made transcript of Episode 212 of the podcast Modern Technology Watches, the subject of which was the film Cheaters. The discussion has been lightly edited for readability without substantially altering the content; if you need a verbatim quote for reference purposes, please confirm it from the original audio if possible.
The transcriber of this episode was Betty Sulwe.
ROB:
I’m going to switch you and Dominik for the state. You had the lowest scores in the regional competition, so he’s going to compete at state.
GILA:
That’s not fair! No one told me you couldn’t choose more than one answer. It’s called “multiple choice!”
(Opening theme music)
ROB:
Hello.
GILA:
Hi Rob, how are you?
ROB:
Oh, I am chilling. How are you?
GILA:
You’re chilling, huh? No I’m good, I’m good. Are you chilling because we’re in the middle of a huge snowstorm?
ROB:
Yeah, so big record breaking nor’easter is hitting us here at Modern Technology Watches headquarters at the Modern Technology Podcast Network Studios, in our apartment.
GILA:
In our apartment, our studio apartment studio. It’s glorious today.
ROB:
It’s delightful. It’s beautiful outside.
GILA:
Huh. So, you excited?
ROB:
I’m excited because this is episode 212.
GILA:
212, I do love a palindrome.
ROB:
This is episode 2-1-2, for our old-school-area-code-having Manhattan friends, and this is the penultimate episode of season two of Modern Technology Watches, the podcast in which I, Rob Vincent,
GILA:
And I, Gila Drazen.
ROB:
A married couple of film geeks.
GILA:
That’s us.
ROB:
With a combined video collection introduce one another to gems from that collection the other has not yet seen.
GILA:
Correct. And I’m very excited because it’s my pick.
ROB:
It is your pick.
GILA:
And in the past recently, we have done films that are explicitly political, we have done films that are not explicitly political but political, so today we’re doing not that.
ROB:
We’re doing not that.
GILA:
Well, I shouldn’t speak too soon.
ROB:
What are we doing instead of that?
GILA:
Well, I’ll tell you what we’re doing instead of that. So close your eyes or look down or something, because I gotta go over there.
ROB:
I will close my eyes while you go over there because I do not want to be spoiled for what’s happening over on that side of the table from which we are broadcasting. We’ve been using a different seating arrangement to that we’ve been using traditionally. We’ve got a little mixer set up, we’ve got a couple of little Shure 58s set up. And it is on this nice little L-shaped desk that I’ve got, and we are on either side of it facing one another, which is a nice way to do a podcast because we get to look each other in the face.
GILA:
It’s a lovely way to do a podcast. However, when it’s my turn to go to the shelf, it does make it a little more difficult for you not to see what’s going on. Hello, I’m back.
ROB:
Hello, welcome back. May I open my eyes now?
GILA:
Yes, you may open your eyes because I have put the DVD in the kangaroo pocket of the sweatshirt I’m wearing.
ROB:
Okay. And listeners, you can open your eyes too if you were playing along.
GILA:
(laughs) Although, you already saw the name of the episode, so no surprise for you guys.
ROB:
That is true. So what’s the name of this episode going to be?
GILA:
The name of this episode is going to be…
ROB:
The name of this episode is going to be “Cheaters.”
GILA:
Yeah.
ROB:
You have handed me the DVD of Cheaters.
GILA:
Cheaters, it was an HBO original movie. It came out in the year 2000.
ROB:
Okay. So this is a made for cable.
GILA:
This is a made for cable.
ROB:
Starring Jeff Daniels, and is that “Jee-na” or “Jen-a” Malone?
GILA:
“Jen-a.”
ROB:
Jena Malone. “Cheaters, putting the system to the test,” and kind of a strange-looking Photoshop job on the cover here. But all right, let’s have a look. Looking at the back-copy here, this is 106 minutes long, it is from the year 2000.
“Cheaters, putting the system to the test. To cheat or not to cheat? To win or not to win? To cover-up or not to cover-up? Chicago Steinmetz High School doesn’t have a hope of winning the state’s academic contest. Their rival – Whitney Young – is a winning school that hand-picked its way to the top. But one teacher and his students know they can succeed with the right amount of study, the right application, the right discipline… the right answers. When one of them steals the test papers, the biggest question becomes, should they cheat their way to the trophy? Winning will make or break the rest of their lives. And for the first time, they have all the right answers – except one.”
Okay. That all seems fairly straightforward. It looks like a bunch of kids and Jeff Daniels.
GILA:
Yes. So pardon me for showing you another high-school movie, but it’s a little bit different. I remember watching this movie with my brother. We loved it. And a long time ago, I bought two DVD copies of this movie and two DVD copies of another thing we were fully obsessed with, kept one pair, sent the other to him. Yeah.
ROB:
A film by John Stockwell, I don’t know that name.
GILA:
You probably will once we look it up.
ROB:
All right. Jeff Daniels, I do know that name, famous as Dumber… or was he Dumb?
GILA:
I think he might’ve been Dumber.
ROB:
Okay. But also the sidekick cop in Speed, which was pretty great. Jena Malone, Blake Heron, Luke Edwards, and Paul Sorvino. Where do I know the name Paul Sorvino?
GILA:
Paul Sorvino, first of all, Mira Sorvino’s dad, but he is an Italian actor who’s gotten a lot of work for a long time. He played Lord Capulet in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, among other things. He was in the first couple seasons of Law & Order. I know how much you love that.
ROB:
Based on that, I’m going to bet he played a zillion Italian gangster dudes in a zillion things, and I’ve probably seen his face.
GILA:
No question.
ROB:
Written and directed by John Stockwell. All right. I’m ready to check this out.
GILA:
I will also tell you that one of my great takeaways from this movie was the song “Get Off This” by Cracker.
ROB:
Which cracker?
GILA:
The band Cracker, not Uncle Cracker and not some generic white person, the band Cracker.
ROB:
Okay.
GILA:
So we’re going to ask our friend Torley to play a little music, and then we will be back with a hard-hitting and insightful discussion of 2000’s Cheaters.
ROB:
2000’s Cheaters.
(Interstitial music)
GILA:
All right, so Rob,
ROB:
Gila,
GILA:
Are we back?
ROB:
We are back.
GILA:
We are back and we have watched Cheaters.
ROB:
We have just watched Cheaters.
GILA:
We have literally just watched Cheaters. So, what did you think?
ROB:
…Eh.
GILA:
Could you say more about that please?
ROB:
Eh, I mean, okay.
GILA:
Could you say it with some words?
ROB:
(laughs) I’ll try. This movie, as I mentioned at the end of it before we turned the mics back on, it pushed a couple of my stress buttons, I think. Also, combine that with my natural antipathy toward high-school movies. This movie didn’t have a lot going in its favor for me. I managed to appreciate things about it. I like Jeff Daniels, I like him in other things. I could see what he was doing in this, but it’s like what they tried to do in Election with Matthew Broderick, which is take an actor who is Joe Generic White Guy, likable in everything he does, and make him the asshole, and I don’t think it works quite as well in this. The high-school kids are generally annoying. There are no good guys in this movie.
GILA:
That’s very true.
ROB:
And I’m sure I’ll say more when we get into the plot, but just the whole dynamic of basically how every character in this movie dealt with every other character, I did not enjoy watching. The fact that it’s a dramatization of an actual event – an event that I didn’t hear about when it happened, I was not familiar with this particular scandal – it was interesting in that sense. It makes me want to look into the real event more, which I guess is one of the things you can ask for from a fictionalization of real events. I may want to “for more information on the Steinmetz Academic Decathlon Scandal, visit your local library.” (laughs) Or maybe I’ll just do some web searches about it.
GILA:
You could do some web searches about it. I have done them. Not in the distant past, not least because I knew I was going to show you this movie, and I wanted to make sure I was brushed up on the situation. It makes sense that you didn’t know because this happened in the spring of 1995. You were a teenager.
ROB:
Yeah. I was a high-school senior in ’95. I was class of ’95.
GILA:
And I can’t imagine that a story about academic decathlon cheating in Illinois would’ve made it here.
ROB:
Not that I noticed. It might have done, it might have just got by me.
GILA:
But it’s interesting. If you look at, when you do your web search, you’ll see the best source of information, the best sources of information are the local Chicago media. This wasn’t a huge national story.
ROB:
That makes sense.
GILA:
I mean, I always really liked it. I like the music. Okay. So I was involved nominally in academic decathlon in ’95, ’96 year as a sophomore in high school.
ROB:
What was your involvement in academic decathlon?
GILA:
I went to team meetings. We studied. But I couldn’t participate, because Shabbat.
ROB:
For those unfamiliar?
GILA:
Oh, right, that meant I wouldn’t go to any competitions on Saturdays. So yeah, I left the team. My particular brand of observance was not compatible with participating in the academic decathlon in much the same way as a couple of years later, my senior year of high school, I was auditioning for all-state choir and the auditions were on Saturday. And not only was it a Saturday, not only was it Shabbat, it was Yom Kippur. It was the most solemn day of the Jewish year and two of us in choir were Jews. And a lot of people wouldn’t necessarily mind going on a Saturday, but Yom Kippur is a bridge too far. So we had to appeal to the state to say, “We cannot be there on Saturday, you have to have some sort of system in place.” And they did. We went to our audition site the day before, taped our audition pieces, and then they played them during the time slots where we would’ve auditioned on Saturday. We were both alternates. But had I auditioned second alto I would’ve made it. Things happen.
So yeah, the idea of academic decathlon as an extracurricular never really registered for you?
ROB:
I don’t think any of the schools I went to, and I went to a handful of different high schools, I don’t think any of the schools I went to had it as much of a thing. But then I was generally not interested in very many extracurriculars. That’s the life I lived in high school. I was a theatre kid, but nothing else beyond that.
GILA:
Yeah. I mean, academic decathlon at my school was not as intense as it was in the movie. The idea of the way that it was portrayed in the movie is just, really, it’s a lot.
ROB:
Yeah, it was kind of built up as like… what’s the other one we watched with the a capella groups?
GILA:
Pitch Perfect.
ROB:
Yes, it was built up as this huge level thing with a massive crowd.
GILA:
So I will say one reason I was a little worried about doing this one, is that this is not the easiest watch-along.
ROB:
In what sense?
GILA:
Well, the DVD is available, but definitely out of print. I don’t believe it’s streaming anywhere. It may be available on HBO Max, because it was an HBO movie, but I don’t know. It is possible that it is available on YouTube, but that is obviously in contravention of many laws, so I would not suggest that as an option.
ROB:
Oh, heavens, no.
GILA:
Heavens, no. And when I say possible, I mean, completely; I saw it earlier this afternoon.
ROB:
(laughs)
GILA:
But this is an obscure, dark little movie. It is dark. That’s the thing.
ROB:
I don’t know if I’d call it dark even.
GILA:
I mean, first of all, just in terms of the cinematography, it’s dim. It’s a dim movie.
ROB:
Oh yeah, it’s got that made-for-television feel to it.
GILA:
Yeah. But the other thing is there are no good guys. There are no winners. Even at the end when they either won’t talk about it or they say nothing happened, I find it dark. And I think that part of the reason I was excited to see it now is because to a certain extent, these were negative actions that had repercussions.
ROB:
(laughs)
GILA:
And frankly, there’s not been a lot of that in the world right now, and I just needed to see some good old fashioned comeuppance.
ROB:
(laughing) I could see that, yeah.
GILA:
(laughs)
ROB:
Like we both said, I think there were no quote-unquote “good guys” in this film. It’s like why most of Tarantino’s stuff just bores the crap out of me; everyone’s an asshole, there’s no one to cheer for. And I had some criticisms that I muttered to you during the movie, and those were just elements of the actual events. And so if this were a totally fictional movie, I would say, “okay, there’s no real conflict because everyone’s a jerk and there’s just no through-line, no real satisfaction to how the story comes out.” I’d say, “the writers were maybe just not putting much effort into it.” And the fact that it’s based on reality means reality just wasn’t putting that much effort into it.
GILA:
(laughs)
ROB:
But then they took a story that basically had all this nothing going for it and they decided, “hey, let’s make a movie.” And I think the result kind of just… feels like that.
GILA:
Okay, fair enough.
So like I said, this was a movie that my brother and I were just obsessed with when it came out. I couldn’t tell you specifically why, I don’t remember, but we really liked it. And I was fully into this movie. It doesn’t have a lot of redeeming values necessarily, but, redeeming virtues, I suppose. But I like it, and I recognize that part of it is the nostalgia of it.
ROB:
These kids are about our age.
GILA:
Yeah. I mean, I don’t know, they never said what grade they were in. This took place during what would’ve been my freshman year of high school.
ROB:
Yeah, and my senior.
GILA:
Yeah, they’re our age. They’re definitely our peers, our contemporaries. That’s another part of it, is seeing something about kids our age. Well, not anymore, but at the time. And also just getting to see high school then.
ROB:
They’re probably still our age really.
GILA:
Well, yeah, those of them who are alive. There have been a few deaths in this cast. But it was fascinating seeing this movie where hardly anybody had a cell phone. Not a lot of cell phones happening.
ROB:
Yeah. No, the one who had the cell phone was… either dad or the teacher of one of the rich kids.
GILA:
He was the coach of the team from that high school. And he had the phone in his car. Like, in his car, he had a car-phone.
ROB:
Right, which came before personal mobile phones generally.
GILA:
There was a car-phone in Sixteen Candles.
ROB:
Back then it cost more than the car.
GILA:
Unless you got a really, really, really expensive car and then sometimes it came with it. So the other thing is this is of a moment for me. This music and the clothes, this is what going to high school looked like for me.
ROB:
I think that might be another reason why you and I have such different reactions to it, is you are being nostalgic for something that you appreciated, whereas I don’t have nostalgia for this era. It’s an era in which my life was miserable, and there was a non-zero chance I wouldn’t survive the era. So I don’t generally enjoy looking back at the ’90s. I especially don’t enjoy looking back at high school in the ’90s. It’s not to the point of being triggering or anything like that, it’s just the setting does not thrill me.
GILA:
Okay. And also it takes place in the Midwest, so there’s that too.
ROB:
Sure.
GILA:
Okay. So I can give you good news and I can give you less-good news about the Wikipedia entry for this movie. Which would you like first?
ROB:
Okay. What’s the good news?
GILA:
The plot section is incredibly detailed.
ROB:
And what’s the not-good news?
GILA:
The cast section is really skimpy.
ROB:
Okay. Well, I couldn’t tell most of them apart anyway.
GILA:
(laughs) Okay.
ROB:
There were like three or four kids that looked like David Hogg, plus two girls and a fat guy. (laughs)
GILA:
Not inaccurate, yeah. But the cast list on the Wikipedia page doesn’t even list half the team, let alone anybody else.
ROB:
Neither does my brain, so it’s okay.
GILA:
Okay, that’s fine. But I have done some poking around and I will tell you that at least two of the cast of this movie have passed away in the last 20 years, for what that’s worth.
ROB:
You said there would be reason for me to know about, is it John Stockwell or James Stockwell?
GILA:
John.
ROB:
John Stockwell, not Dean Stockwell?
GILA:
Not Dean Stockwell.
ROB:
(as Dean Stockwell) “Sam!!”
GILA:
Also, I’m wrong because the movies he directed – and he’s mostly gone back to being an actor – but the movies he directed are not necessarily things that would really blip your radar. Blue Crush, he directed Blue Crush.
ROB:
Okay. I’m aware that that’s a movie. I might have seen five minutes of it.
GILA:
It’s a surfing movie, it’s fun. And a couple of other things. Crazy/Beautiful, Kirsten Dunst is bipolar. Okay. I mean, now that I think about it, there would be no reason for you to know who he is. Sorry about that.
ROB:
(laughs) Man, you just dashed my hopes of knowing this writer-director’s work.
GILA:
I also think that part of the reason that the cast listing on the Wikipedia page is so short is because so many of these people weren’t actors, or have not really continued acting. Although, in a weird coincidence, two of them, two of the kids on the team, were both in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.
ROB:
Which I did see. But you couldn’t ask me anything about it.
GILA:
(laughs)
ROB:
And not for the reason you think, I was just really bored. (laughs)
GILA:
Yeah, I get that. I liked the first one, diminishing returns on the second two.
ROB:
I’m aware there were more than one, but I didn’t see more than one.
GILA:
Wait, are you telling me you did not run out to see A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas?
ROB:
Gordon Bennett, what?
GILA:
Yeah, I am sorry to say. (laughs)
ROB:
Oh boy.
GILA:
So there was Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, followed by Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, followed by A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.
ROB:
Oh, he was in – I’m looking at John Stockwell now – he was in the movie Christine which I did see. Oh, and My Science Project, of course. In City Limits, which was an MST3K episode. Nothing in the directing part of this seems to strike my brain in any way but, no, I liked My Science Project. That’s one of those ’80s teen sci-fi movies that nobody freaking remembers, but I do.
GILA:
You know we have a thing for remembering a lot of the ’80s movies that nobody else remembers. But sorry, honey, the sci-fi kind of took me out.
ROB:
He directed some episodes of L Word, bunch of stuff I’ve never heard of. Okay.
GILA:
All right. We should also, I think, probably mention that this movie is based on real events. A lot of things are one-to-one to the real world, but a lot are not. Steinmetz High School, real place. Whitney Young High School, real place. Illinois, real state.
ROB:
Oh, okay. I was wondering.
GILA:
(laughs)
ROB:
I have been there.
GILA:
Dr. Jerry Plecki, real guy. The principal, that’s really the guy’s name, Connie Kiamos.
ROB:
Played by, what’s his bucket?
GILA:
Paul Sorvino.
ROB:
Yeah, Paul Sorvino, who is a total… The instant I saw his face, I knew I recognized him from a bunch of things. He’s a That Guy.
GILA:
He might be in the book even. Connie Kiamos.
ROB:
Connie.
GILA:
Well, Constantine.
ROB:
(as Beldar Conehead) “Our young one, Connie.”
GILA:
(laughs) Who, at various points, lit cigarettes in the middle of his office. And recognizing that people felt differently about smoking 25 years ago, but I don’t know, my high school principal would’ve never done that.
ROB:
I had some who would’ve.
GILA:
Do we want to even touch on the cast or…?
ROB:
We might as well. Who is on there?
GILA:
Let’s go top to bottom on this. Okay.
So we start obviously with Jeff Daniels as Dr. Gerard Plecki.
ROB:
He was there. Of all the actors who must have read for that role, he’s the one who got it.
GILA & ROB:
(laughing)
ROB:
I mean, I don’t dislike Jeff Daniels, I like him a lot in other things he’s done. I don’t know anything about the real guy. Maybe behind the scenes the people who knew anything about the real guy thought, “hey, Jeff Daniels, perfect.” Again, not knowing anything about the events, if I were casting this as a work of fiction, I don’t think that teacher would be a Jeff Daniels type.
GILA:
Probably not, but I don’t know.
ROB:
Me either. But he worked with what he had… but he worked with what he had.
GILA:
(laughs) Fair enough. All right.
Next, we have Jena Malone as Jolie Fitch.
ROB:
In the beginning, it seemed like she was going to be the one who was going to either hook up with one of the boys, or turn out to be the queer one, or have a thing for the teacher. I couldn’t tell which of those, but it seemed like one of those tropes would happen, again, if this were just any movie, but since it were based on real events, obviously it’s limited by that.
GILA:
Right. I think a lot of those questions were left open. I think they were trying to hint at something there, but at the same time, Jolie was always sitting alone in the front seat of the car when Dr. Plecki was driving, and the rest of the team was squished in the back of the station wagon. But there was a similar relationship shown between the coach at Whitney Young and that one jackass from the team.
ROB:
Also, she managed to be one of the kids with any personality at all. So yeah, she was there and she was one of the less-annoying of the kids.
GILA:
Well, and you know that she was kind of a, let’s say, darling of indie cinema for most of the oughts. Donnie Darko, Saved.
ROB:
I don’t know that one.
GILA:
Takes place at a Christian high school. It’s fantastic. It’s a satire that takes place at a Christian high school.
ROB:
All right.
GILA:
Okay. She was in The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. She was a voice in Howl’s Moving Castle. She’s done a lot of stuff. And also she was in Into the Wild and then she was in The Hunger Games.
ROB:
Who was she in The Hunger Games?
GILA:
She was in Catching Fire and… she was in the last three of the four.
ROB:
Oh, those are the ones I didn’t see. I fell off of The Hunger Games pretty hard. (laughs)
GILA:
I never even got there. Oh, she’s in Stardust.
ROB:
Neil Gaiman Stardust?
GILA:
No, the David Bowie movie.
ROB:
Oh, because I saw the Neil Gaiman movie. I have it somewhere I think.
GILA:
No no no no no no no no, the David Bowie movie that made $9,000 at the Box Office. The David Bowie movie that was basically the Beatles Chicken movie from Saturday Night Live. They didn’t get the rights to any of the music.
ROB:
Oh, I think I heard something about that.
GILA:
And David Bowie’s estate was definitely not onboard.
ROB:
Mm-hm.
GILA:
Yeah.
Okay, up next, Paul Sorvino as Constantine Kiamos.
ROB:
Yeah. He was that guy, and he was in that role. (laughs) Again, it was like what are you going to do with that part? Just be that guy.
GILA:
And he’s a good actor.
ROB:
He is, I’ve seen him in a bunch of stuff that, he’s definitely capable of using material to its full advantage.
GILA:
And I think part of the advantage that this movie had being an HBO original movie was that HBO could kind of throw its weight behind it and you could get Jeff Daniels, and you could get Paul Sorvino, and classing it up a bit, I think, from what it could have been had it been not an HBO original film.
ROB:
Perhaps. I asked at the beginning if this was going to be… I saw the kids and no one believes in us and stuff, and I’m like, “okay, so this is going to be Stand and Deliver except with cheating,” because I read the back of the DVD.
GILA:
Right. And I said, “not exactly.”
ROB:
And I’ve seen Stand and Deliver, Edward James Olmos is great. No one in this movie was Edward James Olmos. They weren’t even almost Edward James Olmos.
GILA:
(laughs) Next we have Luke Edwards as Darius Bettus.
ROB:
And which one was he?
GILA:
He was the one who said, “thank you for giving us this dream, but you know it’s not ever going to happen.” He was the really serious looking one. He hooked up with Jolie.
ROB:
Did he hook up with her?
GILA:
Yeah. There was one part in an early study montage where they were just making out on the couch. It was a passage of time montage.
ROB:
Oh, I remember someone was kissing, I guess I didn’t notice who it was.
GILA:
Yeah, Jolie and Darius were hooking up and then…
ROB:
Oh, and Anni-Frid from ABBA was in the foreground looking peeved.
GILA:
Right, and then she was making out with Matt.
ROB:
Yes.
GILA:
Yeah. Now you remember.
Next we have Blake Heron as Matt Kur.
ROB:
And which one was Matt Kur?
GILA:
Matt Kur was the mad one who was probably the best looking of them. The short one who was the one who got the test.
ROB:
Yeah. I don’t even think while watching the movie I could have picked out which one he was because, again, three or four of these kids were the same-looking white kid.
GILA:
He was from Massapequa. He was born in Massapequa.
ROB:
Somebody had to be. I used to work there and that was rough enough. (laughs)
GILA:
And he is unfortunately no longer with us.
ROB:
Oh, what happened?
GILA:
Accidental drug overdose four years ago.
ROB:
That’s a shame.
GILA:
And the last person on the list on the Wikipedia article is Dov Tiefenbach. If you had to guess, which one of those actors was one named “Dov Tiefenbach,” perhaps “Tiefenbach?”
ROB:
She wasn’t the lady saying you can’t use the photocopier?
GILA:
No, no. Dov Tiefenbach played Irwin Flickas. You remember which one that was?
ROB:
That was the one who snitched?
GILA:
Yes.
ROB:
It looked like they were setting him up to be a likable one possibly, trying to force that, and it didn’t work. And then he turned out not to be likable, I guess, in the frame of this movie in context. Yeah, okay, so he was that kid.
GILA:
I’m trying to think of anything I’ve seen him in where he’s been likable and I can’t. He leans really hard into quirky.
ROB:
I don’t want to pick too hard on any of the child actors in this movie. Were they children? Were they really children?
GILA:
No. I mean, they were all contemporaries of ours, and this movie was made five years after the fact.
ROB:
Yeah, okay. So they were adults playing children?
GILA:
Yes.
ROB:
Okay. In that case, I can say they mostly sucked.
GILA & ROB:
(laughing)
GILA:
Wow! Except for Jena Malone. She was 15 when they were recording.
ROB:
Okay. Well, she also, I think, came out of this better than anyone else. (laughing) Except maybe Jeff Daniels, but that’s because he’s Jeff Daniels and she’s not. I did not enjoy any of the performances in this movie really, but she came close.
GILA:
Okay, and that’s what we have.
ROB:
Oh, maybe Paul Sorvino.
GILA:
And maybe Paul Sorvino, that’s what we’ve got. That’s the entire cast list. Does not include the kid who played Paul Kurgan.
ROB:
Which one was that?
GILA:
The fat kid, I liked him. He had personality sort of. Watching this movie back 20 years later, that script kind of… pfft.
ROB:
His character description must have been, like, “the fat kid, plus he’s a rapper for some reason.”
And I think also when I was in high school in this era, the kids who wore the sized baseball caps that didn’t have the opening with the little clicker that you could change the size of, or the little strap that you could pull to change the size of? The kids who were the fitted baseball caps were mostly the assholes. (laughs) So I have issues. I have traumas. I have preexisting conditions. (laughs)
GILA:
So one thing that I thought was interesting about…
ROB:
I’m sure some lovely people wore those things.
GILA:
Oh yes, I’m sure. I’m sure they did. I think one thing that was interesting about the character of Paul was that he was set up as a smart kid, but also he had been running for class president, he had other interests.
ROB:
Okay, I had forgotten that bit.
GILA:
So Darius and Jolie were both seriously disaffected and Matt was angry, and Agnieska and Dominik were new Americans.
ROB:
Yes, character description: “foreign.” (laughs)
GILA:
And Paul was just like “hail, fellow, well-met!” Not Wilmette, that’s a suburb of Chicago, but well-met.
ROB:
(laughs)
GILA:
Ha! Ha! You like that?
ROB:
I see what you did there. But yeah, so there was a cast in this movie.
GILA:
(laughs) Are you ready for the plot?
ROB:
(singing) Ready as I can be!
GILA:
Okay. Also, can I tell you the other reason this movie popped into my head to show to you? Because a few weeks ago we were talking about Stand and Deliver and I was like…
ROB:
(laughs) So you were like, “he likes this movie, let’s show him a much worse movie!” (laughs).
GILA:
No, it was not even that. (laughs).
ROB:
Sorry.
GILA:
Oh, it’s fine.
ROB:
Hi. I’m just going to crap in your corn flakes.
GILA:
Oh no, it’s totally fine. I mean, I was listening back to our last episode, and I was kind of ranting and raving about how bad that was. So I may have earned this.
ROB:
(laughs) This is not…
GILA:
None of this is retaliatory.
ROB:
This is not retaliatory, we’ve always brought our honest feelings about the movies to this little project,
GILA:
But you said Stand and Deliver and I was like, “Oh yeah, they used Stand and Deliver in this movie.”
ROB:
Yes, they did. (laughs) There was a bit of Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, which was a movie with Raul Julia that was on Mystery Science Theater. And the character was obsessed with the movie Casablanca, and they got this across by showing him watching Casablanca a lot. And the riff that the Mystery Science cast used was like, “oh, come on, you can’t put a better movie in the middle of your bad movie and expect that to make the movie good,” or something to that effect. (laughs) So and these kids were watching Stand and Deliver in the movie.
GILA:
As research.
ROB:
As research.
GILA:
Are you ready for the long and excessively detailed plot summary?
ROB:
I mean, it couldn’t be longer and more excessively detailed than Metropolis.
GILA:
Okay. I’m just going to hand you this and show you what it says.
ROB:
Yeah, that’s a long plot section.
GILA:
Yeah, but look at the note on it. That’s why I passed you that. (laughs)
ROB:
Yeah. There’s the little Wikipedia template at the top of this that a person – Wikipedia has templates that, if you’re dissatisfied with a section but don’t want to fix it yourself, you can put a little template up for somebody else to come and fix the problem that you see. And this one is, “this article’s plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed.”
GILA:
So that’s why I said this is a long and excessively detailed plot summary.
ROB:
(laughs)
GILA:
Wikipedia thinks so.
ROB:
I see.
GILA:
Are you ready?
ROB:
Let’s do this.
GILA:
All right. The thing that we don’t have, is it never says this is the ’94-’95 academic year in Chicago, Illinois. Just doesn’t say that.
ROB:
I don’t think it worked all that hard at explaining that they were in Chicago. Had you not said so, I wouldn’t have immediately known, possibly until footage of Mayor Daley showed up at the end.
GILA:
Mayor Daley, Chicago Sun-Times, they said a few things about Chicago.
ROB:
The characters were like, “pizza should be deep.” (laughs)
GILA:
We did very well. Okay, are you ready?
ROB:
We were eating pizza while watching this and it was a fluffy pizza.
GILA:
It was an accidental deep dish pizza.
ROB:
It wasn’t even deep dish, it was just thick crust.
GILA:
It was thick crust. It was very fluffy. It was a fluffy pizza.
ROB:
It was nice though.
GILA:
It really was.
ROB:
We made it from scratch.
GILA:
We did.
ROB:
Go us!
GILA:
Woohoo!
GILA & ROB:
(laughing)
GILA:
“Students at Steinmetz High School are less than enthusiastic about anything in the classroom, except for Jolie Fitch, a junior who enjoys Dr. Jerry Plecki’s English class and is involved heavily in all discussions, especially on his favorite book, Paradise Lost.”
ROB:
Can we say something about the opening to this in which they made all that very obvious. He’s up there asking the class, asking, “what does anyone think about what Satan said about ‘it’s better to rule in hell than serve in heaven?’” And he’s just going around, “Anyone? Anyone?” And getting all these blank stares back until she pops up and says, “I’m the perky, smart girl, and I’m going to give the long detailed answer.”
GILA:
Yeah, after he had to break up a fight.
ROB:
After he had to break up a fight. And that’s the other thing, is this opening shot of the movie, rows and rows and rows of students of color and then three white kids. And it’s the little white girl who puts her hand up and answers the question while the Black kids are fighting. And then when the team comes together, and I’m jumping ahead a little bit, but when this academic decathlon team comes together, it’s all white kids. And every time they show the greater crowd of students, mostly Black kids. If this were totally fiction, that would be such a bad look. The fact that it’s based on reality, it’s still such a bad look. I mentioned to you while this was going on, the movie’s already doing something that’s pissing me off. And then you said, “well, it was all white kids in the real life scandal.” But yeah, not a good look.
GILA:
Not a good look.
“Dr. Plecki is offered the position of academic decathlon coach, a job all the other teachers consider to be a waste of time for everyone involved. Dr. Plecki holds an open call for the students after class, but no one arrives to participate. He is about to leave for the day when Jolie comes in and convinces him that he needs to look for the smarter students and recruit them. He succeeds in recruiting seven students, Darius, Matt, Paul, Dominik, Irwin, Agnieszka, and Jolie. They spend the next few months studying hard for the regional competition.”
ROB:
Yeah. And when he recruits them, they show up because he bought a bunch of burritos, and they were lined up on the table, and half the kids are just like, “huh-huh, we’re just here for the free food,” which I think they were setting up as some kind of comic bit, but it’s really not. When you’re talking about kids in a disadvantaged school, free food can be a big deal.
GILA:
There was a sequence in the section where they’re studying for the regional competition. They’re quizzing hard on everything, and it’s a montage. But there’s a brief bit where you see each of them at their after-school jobs answering the questions. So you see Matt is changing the oil underneath a car, and Darius is serving mass, and Agnieszka is taking care of her little sisters.
ROB:
Yeah, which in the beginning, I’m like, “okay, does she have babies?”
GILA:
No, they’re her sisters.
ROB:
But yeah, that was an interesting move on the part of the director. I don’t think it was necessarily successful, but it was non-standard.
GILA:
But I also think it sort of brought home the point of what a disadvantage of this team was at. Because the kids at Whitney didn’t necessarily need to have after-school jobs in the same way, and they could just sit and do what they needed to do. And at one point, one of them leaves practice to go to work. And Dr. Plecki is like, “you can’t leave. You have to stay here. You can’t do anything else.” And he was like, “No, I need to go to work.”
ROB:
Yeah, that scene was aggravating because people have to go to work. The other one has to take care of her little sister to make sure the baby’s getting fed, and he’s all, “no, you have to stay here and do this work, this studying.” And then gets called out on that by one of the kids.
GILA:
It’s Darius, by the way, who calls him out.
ROB:
Darius Rucker calls him out and tells him to get a tendercrisp bacon cheddar ranch.
GILA:
A what?
ROB:
(laughs) Darius Rucker did commercials for Burger King selling their tendercrisp bacon cheddar ranch sandwich.
GILA:
Ah. I’m sure you’re shocked that I paid no attention to that. (laughs) And I liked Hootie.
ROB:
It was a meme on YTMND for a while.
GILA:
“At regionals, the team faces their biggest competitor in Whitney Young Magnet High School, who have consistently won the regional and state competitions for almost a decade. As expected, Whitney Young is victorious and Steinmetz places 5th overall, but still high enough to qualify for the state competition.”
Now, the way it’s set up is that the team from Steinmetz – our intrepid heroes, so to speak – are the scrappy underdogs. And everybody from Whitney Young is an asshole.
ROB:
Yeah, the snooty rich kids.
GILA:
The snooty rich kids.
ROB:
So if you’re following normal teen movie rules, the scrappy underdogs would be the heroes and the snooty rich kids would be the assholes.
GILA:
In this case, everyone’s an asshole. No one wins in this movie. But the coach from Whitney Young is taking bets at the first round of regionals. And he says to Dr. Plecki, “Jerry, you want in on this action? $20 gets you 400 if Steinmetz wins.” And at the end, he walks up to Dr. Plecki and says, “I can’t take your money. You just didn’t know what you were up against.” Asshole!
“The students are overwhelmed by the thought of facing Whitney Young in the next round. But an opportunity arises when Matt’s friend steals a copy of the test for the state finals and gives it to him.”
Not exactly how it happened, but that’s okay.
ROB:
Yeah, he sold it to him.
GILA:
A, he sold it to him. B, Matt was there.
GILA:
“Hey man, if I show you something, would you give me $20?”
ROB:
A more disturbing proposition, I’ve never heard.
GILA:
(laughs) I’d be like, “what is it?”
ROB:
It’s it.
GILA:
What is it?
ROB:
It’s it!
GILA:
(laughs) “Irwin then brings it to Dr. Plecki, who feels that using the test is the team’s best chance to defeat Whitney Young at state.”
ROB:
Mm-hm.
GILA:
Mm-hm.
ROB:
Yeah, so the teacher who is also being set up as the heroic teacher who cares about these kids, nope, he’s a jerk too. He’s a dumbass. He’s an asshole. He’s making bad choices.
GILA:
And you see him rehearsing a speech in his car on the way to school the next day. “I’m a teacher, I’m supposed to spout all the same platitudes. Winning isn’t everything. Cheaters never prosper. Da-da-da-da-da.” He’s like, “but I have to tell you that’s not true. Winning is everything. Cheaters do prosper.” And he goes through this whole speech, and you don’t know when he’s going to give it. So he brings it to the team, it’s the night before. They’re at practice. (I almost said “rehearsal.”) And he says to them, “we’re either going to do this all together or we’re not going to do it at all. Are people on board?” And six of the seven are totally on board. Oh, and Irwin has been told that he will not be competing at state, getting switched out for Dominik. This is important.
ROB:
Yes.
GILA:
So six of the seven have gotten on board to do it, and then the one holdout…
ROB:
Is Annabel Lee?
GILA:
Is Anni-Frid, yeah. (laughs)
ROB:
Yeah, and she’s like, with these big doe-eyes, raises her hands, (as Agnieska) “isn’t cheating wrong?” (laughs) It’s like, “yes, Virginia.”
GILA:
So Dr. Plecki takes her out for a drive and he drives her to Whitney Young. And that’s when he gives the speech he had been practicing earlier. And he says, “look, the system is stacked against you. This is ostensibly a public school, but look at the discrepancy in funding.” And she comes around.
ROB:
She comes around. But also the fact that he stops in the middle of this study session, apparently bundles her into his car, and drives her around town and takes her on the Disney tour of the rival school. I had some teachers I liked, I wouldn’t have gotten into a freaking car with any of them. (laughs)
GILA:
As a former teacher, so many issues, so, so very many issues. So many of the things that happened in this movie made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. They were having late night study sessions at Dr. Plecki’s house. They knew Dr. Plecki’s mother. Irwin just shows up at Dr. Plecki’s house, and Mrs. Plecki, his mother, is like, “oh, Irwin, it’s so nice to see you.”
ROB:
Yes. “and will the other kids be coming over to study?” I’ve never been a teacher. I’ve worked with children, I’ve worked in child-focused industries. And yeah, there are lines.
GILA:
There are definitely lines, and there are especially lines when you’re a high-school teacher. When you’re a middle-school or a high-school teacher there are lines, and one of the most important is you don’t ever, you’re never alone with students or a student. You are never alone one-on-one with a student ever.
ROB:
Even before all the other bad decisions that led his career and life swirling straight down the tubes, he was already doing a lot of things he shouldn’t have been.
GILA:
Absolutely.
ROB:
He was not good at being a teacher, I guess. He might have been good at the actual teaching part, but-
GILA:
(overlapping) He was good at the teaching part, he was not good at the-
ROB:
(overlapping) At the added responsibilities.
GILA:
Exactly.
“After some persuasion, all seven members agree to dismiss their conflicting feelings about cheating and begin copying the answers on various items.”
Okay, hold on, because we’re skipping something here. So Dr. Plecki hands out the various sections of the test, everybody’s working on them. And then they’re all putting their answers up on the board. And the principal comes in and says, “oh, burning the midnight oil, huh?” And doesn’t even notice that there are answers up on the board!
ROB:
Yeah, test answers, a bunch of numbers for the test questions, and then the lettered answers.
GILA:
And each section is up there. So after everything’s up there, they’re all trying to learn the answers and they’re repeating numbers and letters. And finally, one of them says, “just write the answers on your hand.” So then they begin comparing cheating strategies. “No, write it on your shoe.” “No, stick of gum.” “No, program it in your calculator.” “No, program it in your pager.” And then they’re all tossing ideas around, and you hear Jolie saying, “we could wear skirts, and write the answers on our thighs.”
ROB:
(laughs) Yeah. Again, everyone’s a bastard.
GILA:
Mm-hm! Absolutely. I’m assuming it’s like three in the morning at this point.
ROB:
On the night before they’re supposed to go and do this thing.
GILA:
On the night before the state finals, yes. And they’re all discussing their different strategies, and Paul’s like, “on your shoe, on your shoe, on your shoe is the way to go.” And Agnieska says, “well, if anybody has a beeper, I could program it into your beeper.” And then Jolie says, “welcome to the team, Agnieska.”
I’ve always been a bit split on who the ringleader really was. Was it Dr. Plecki? Was it Jolie?
ROB:
Yeah, because when the test questions were first presented in front of the room, he pulls them out and says what they are. I, as the viewer, kind of expected her to be the one that stand up and go, “but no, that would be wrong.” But instead she’s like, “yeah, I’m all into this.”
GILA:
And when they’re trying to convince Agnieska before Dr. Plecki takes her out, Jolie says, “this is the ultimate affirmative action.”
ROB:
Yeah. Again, in a room full of white kids. (laughs)
GILA:
Also, this is wrong.
ROB:
What is wrong?
GILA:
“Dr. Plecki then tells Irwin privately that because he had the lowest scores in the group, he will be out of the state competition; however, he will be guaranteed a spot in nationals.”
This happened before. Then Irwin calls Dr. Plecki out. And he’s like, “are you saying I’m not competing? I brought you the tests! I brought you the tests!” He was very fixated on, there should have been some sort of quid pro quo because he brought the test. He had scored the lowest out of the team in the regionals, which is why he got bounced from the team.
ROB:
Yeah. And that happened before the test answers became a thing.
GILA:
Correct. So then Dr. Plecki says, “do you want to participate in state? I think there’s a way we can do it.” So they fucking sneak Irwin in disguised as an alumni judge. And the thing is, as you said, a lot of the guys in this movie look literally interchangeable. The one who does not (laughs) is Irwin Flickas.
ROB:
Yeah, because he’s got the sort of moppy curly hair.
GILA:
He’s got the moppy curly hair. The actor is very Jewish. I don’t know about the character, but the actor is, Dov is a Hebrew name. He’s got a big beaky Jewish nose, I can say that.
ROB:
(laughs) He’s maybe the least white person in that room full of white people.
GILA:
Okay, that’s fair. How would you not recognize him? That’s my question.
ROB:
They put a hat on him.
GILA:
They put a hat on him and they made him tuck his hair up.
ROB:
It’s like when Superman puts on his glasses and everyone’s like, “oh Clark, you just missed Superman.”
GILA:
Okay.
“At the state finals, a much more confident Steinmetz meets Whitney Young again. The team successfully gets through the exams with the answers they secretly wrote down and with Jolie coaching them in the Super Quiz.”
Okay, hold on. So everybody’s trying to access their answers. All right. So let’s start with Jolie, who wrote hers down on a stick of gum. A proctor walks by.
ROB:
She puts the gum in her mouth and chews it.
GILA:
And then tries to take it out and read the answers. They’re gone. So she kind of has to fake her way through.
ROB:
Or not fake her way through.
GILA:
Well, she has to go through it without the answers.
ROB:
Right. She has to honestly take the rest of the test.
GILA:
Right. And then you’re looking at Dominik is sitting there clicking through his calculator, which makes perfect sense in the math section. But how are you going to do that in language and literature?
ROB:
(laughs)
GILA:
Paul’s sitting there looking at his shoes. Matt’s got his hand all written up. I honestly don’t understand how they didn’t get caught then.
ROB:
It seems like in the real world’s version of events, they might have done something more subtle.
GILA:
But apparently they didn’t.
ROB:
Is that documented as part of the thing that they were all using these cheating methods?
GILA:
I don’t know. I will admit I’m not that familiar with that part of the story, but just the fact that they didn’t get caught at that point at all.
ROB:
It’s goofy as portrayed in the movie, it seems like they all would’ve been caught.
GILA:
You see her take this piece of gum out of her mouth.
ROB:
But also the kids had their own calculators and brought them in somehow programmed with this stuff in their memory. As someone who took tests in high school around that point, they had a box of dollar-store calculators they passed out to everyone, you weren’t allowed to bring your own. But also it seems like in the real world, they wouldn’t have had the tests just hanging out on a shelf in the back of an unrelated room somewhere where some kid’s dad worked either, but there we are. But it was DeVry University, which, I guess it was DeVry in real life.
GILA:
Probably.
ROB:
And DeVry is something that I only know from the constant television commercials in the ’80s and ’90s.
GILA:
I think DeVry was one of the for-profit schools the Obama administration was shutting down, and then Betsy DeVos was like, “fuck yeah, for-profit schools. Who cares if you can’t get a job with this certification?”
ROB:
Right.
GILA:
Okay.
“At the end of the day, Steinmetz wins the state finals with an overall score of 49,000,” – and a bit – “raising the ire and suspicions of Whitney Young who resolve to investigate.” At the end of the regional competition, there had been basically a montage of the award ceremony where every medal was going to Whitney Young. And you just keep hearing, “Whitney Young, Whitney Young, Whitney Young.” And they did the same thing for the state, but it was Steinmetz, Steinmetz, Steinmetz. And at the end of the state, when they announced that Steinmetz had won, they all go down and the theme from Rocky starts playing.
ROB:
Because of course it does.
GILA:
Because of course it does. There’s a dance party on stage, and I don’t know how realistic that was, but whatever. And that was when Paul grabbed the mic and started rapping.
ROB:
Like you do.
GILA:
Like you do. And they smash cut basically to an assembly at school where the band is doing its very best to play the theme from Rocky, and it’s not going well.
ROB:
But also, the band is playing music, and this one student is singing something. The band, the singer, all people of color cheering for the white kids on stage.
GILA:
The drill team, who were on stage dancing, also all young women of color. And then the principal started trying to do the dance with them, and don’t do that. Save your dignity, Paul Sorvino, please.
GILA & ROB:
(laughing)
GILA:
“As Steinmetz celebrates their victory, a spiteful Irwin writes an essay, detailing how he feels betrayed by Dr. Plecki and how they received an advance copy of the test. Suspicions heighten when the essay is turned in to the principal, who questions Irwin about the truth of his writing.”
ROB:
They’re questioning him about the truth of his writing with Dr. Plecki right there which is, if you’ve got this kind of situation going on and you call a kid in to ask about this confession he’s making about how his teacher is making the kids cheat, would you have this conversation with him with that teacher in the room saying, “oh yes, he’s one of our creative writers.”
GILA:
I probably would not.
ROB:
That is not the way you conduct that sort of investigation.
GILA:
No. And then Irwin, he sits down in class, open-topic essay, and he writes confession really big across the top of the page, and then writes this whole thing. And he is like, “I changed the names.” And Jolie says, “Yeah, ‘Dr. Plicky?’ Real creative.”
ROB:
So that happens, and then Principal Paul Sorvino asks him, “is this true?” And with Jeff Daniels standing right behind him, he’s got to say, “no, it was fiction. I thought it would be funny if the teacher made everyone cheat.”
GILA:
If the Cinderella story of a team only happened because they cheated.
ROB:
Yeah. And the principal goes, “okay, well, you have to write a recantation.”
GILA:
What?
ROB:
He makes the kid write a thing that says he made it all up just in case any questions are asked as a result of this flight-of-fancy essay he wrote. And even the principal is an asshole in this. Everyone’s an asshole.
GILA:
Everyone wants to believe. Which yes, absolutely, everybody’s an asshole, but poor Dr. Kiamos, man.
ROB:
(laughs)
GILA:
“The Illinois Academic Decathlon board arrives at the school with news that the team will need to re-take a test to validate their scores, noting that their state score was nearly 10,000 points higher than their regional score.”
They’re like, statistical anomalies, this couldn’t have happened, individual scores, whatever.
“If they refuse, they will lose their championship. Feeling betrayed by Irwin and angered by the board’s ultimatum, they refuse to cooperate and plan to seek an injunction to halt the state from re-testing them.”
ROB:
Right, that’s when they’re watching Stand and Deliver.
GILA:
That’s part of when they’re watching Stand and Deliver. And then the lawyer happens.
ROB:
Right. They watch the bit in Stand and Deliver where Jaime Escalante, played very well by Edward James Olmos, is like, “you’re only making them retake the exam because they’re Spanish last names from the barrio,” the whole impassioned speech he gives, and they basically echo that in their like, “we would be legitimizing your baseless accusations if we re-took the test, and so we refuse.”
GILA:
And then a lawyer agrees to represent them pro bono because they refuse to take the retest. They’re summarily stripped of their title, and then this lawyer offers to represent them seeking injunctive relief against the Academic Decathlon Committee. There’s a press conference and Dominik, the young man who is a new American, says, “if we didn’t have Polish surnames and come from a poor school, you wouldn’t be questioning these scores,” verbatim. Just fucking rips off Jaime Escalante.
ROB:
(laughs)
GILA:
And that section of the movie, you start seeing news coverage, you start seeing… It becomes a whole thing. And Dr. Plecki gathers them together. Well, after the win, he says, “look, now’s the hard part, is keeping quiet. You can’t tell anyone. You can’t tell your parents. You can’t tell your friends, if you have any left after all of this, you can’t even tell your priest. The only people you can trust are standing in this circle.”
ROB:
Yeah. And also, the kid standing up and echoing the words of Jaime Escalante in that story about the famous minority kids who were done dirty by the system, and then echoing that as a bunch of white kids who cheated. Again, not a good look.
GILA:
“As the media siege becomes more and more brutal, Angela Lam, a student on the academic decathlon team from the year before, talks to the press about how she was given the answers to the Super Quiz in the state competition by Dr. Plecki.”
ROB:
Yeah, and that came out of nowhere. I’m guessing that’s something that happened in real life as well.
GILA:
I guess, yeah.
ROB:
But no hints were made toward that. The movie was giving the sense that this heel turn was just something that was this bad decision that Dr. Plecki made this time. But then they add in the element that apparently he was trying to help someone cheat in the previous year.
GILA:
And in the middle of all of this Irwin Flickas, who still feels wronged that he has not been asked to participate in any of the media stuff, sends his essay to the newspaper, which publishes it on the front page.
ROB:
Yeah. He calls the reporter. Then the reporter, you see her calling Dr. Plecki in the middle of the night. And she goes, “we just got a very interesting essay from your student Irwin and we’re going to publish it in tomorrow’s paper. Do you have any comment?” And he just gets freaked out and hangs up the phone and goes and sits on his stoop. And then you see the next morning all the newspapers getting thrown onto the lawns, and he picks up the newspaper and it says “WE CHEATED” and it’s got a picture of his class. The one real laugh the movie got out of me was this scene where he sees that and freaks out and starts trying to collect the newspapers from his neighbors’ lawns. And one of his neighbors catches him stealing his newspaper, and he just runs away in his pajama pants and robe.
GILA:
“Gerry, my paper!”
ROB:
Yeah. “What the hell are you doing?”
GILA:
So he’s running up and down the block in his PJs trying to pick up everybody’s newspaper so no one will see it. Buddy, that ship has sailed.
ROB:
Yeah. And then you see one of the kids waiting for the bus to school and that image from the paper is on the side of the bus. I’ve never seen a bus ad that changes every day with that day’s front page news.
GILA:
Me neither, but, movie.
ROB:
Movie.
GILA:
Dr. Plecki gets to school, the principal sends him home.
ROB:
Right. You see all the other kids showing up at school and the other kids are reading the paper and giving them shit.
GILA:
Jolie says, “who died?” So at various points, the rest of the team, they want to kill Irwin. They really do. Several times. They try to do him physical harm.
“She encourages the current team members to come clean if they cheated. Dr. Plecki is immediately suspended from his teaching duties and the team members are taken to the Board of Education headquarters where they are interrogated individually.”
Why does the Board of Education have six identical interrogation rooms?
ROB:
Honestly, from my experience in the public education system, that would be the thing that would surprise me the least is if the Board of Education had an interrogation room set up with that security camera up in the corner, bringing in the flickery black-and-white image to each one. (laughs)
GILA:
So you see each of these six kids being interrogated separately.
ROB:
They’re all brought in the same school bus to the place, and they’re just sitting around looking uncomfortable. But also, they’re all sitting in the same school bus. Would they not use that opportunity to get their story straight because they know what’s coming?
GILA:
So the section of when they’re being interrogated by the school board’s lawyers, they’re literally saying the exact same thing to each of them. “You want to tell us anything?” And they’re like, “we didn’t cheat. We didn’t cheat.”
ROB:
Yeah. And then they come in and do the classic…
GILA:
“We’ve got signed confessions from all your teammates, and they say you were the ringleader.”
ROB:
And they’re saying that to every single kid, and it gets to one of them.
GILA:
“Despite being pressured, they refuse to come clean and insist they did not cheat. However, Dominik ultimately breaks and confesses after a heart-to-heart talk with one of the investigators.”
Which, that was so bad-police, “I know you’re a good Catholic.”
“As a result, the state title is stripped from Steinmetz and awarded to Whitney Young. Dr. Plecki is fired from Steinmetz High School, and the team members are harassed by the other students for ruining their reputation.”
There is a live shot going on from the steps of the school after this has all happened. And then Irwin Flickas is seen on the steps, and he just gets jumped. And no one does anything to help him.
ROB:
Nope. It seems about right.
GILA:
“Dr. Plecki decides to leave Chicago in hopes the media will disperse and leave the team members alone. Before he leaves, he meets with his team one last time by Lake Michigan in downtown Chicago, where the students present him with a gift: John Milton’s book, Paradise Lost, signed by the team and the gold medal in Language and Literature that they didn’t return to the board. With the team disbanded and Dr. Plecki gone, Jolie feels that she’s lost a mentor that actually cared about her academic possibilities and her team that supported each other.”
ROB:
Yeah. In the scene where they give him the signed book, they all wrote a different part of what they were…
GILA:
I think they each read a different part of it. I think one person wrote it. But they all read it.
ROB:
It was a total Breakfast Club end-credits moment of like, “you taught each of us, the rebel, and the princess, and the basket case,” and then there’s Judd Nelson with his fist up in the air.
GILA:
You did say that to me during the voiceover. But it was like, “the lessons you taught us will last us the rest of our lives. You’re the best teacher we ever had.” It’s a lot.
ROB:
Yeah. There was that moment when he was sitting in the classroom with them after the media circus happens. And he’s just like, “maybe we should just give back the medals and see the end of this craziness,” and Jolie turns around and she’s like, “no, you taught us that we need to go for what we want and this and that!”
GILA:
“You taught us we need to get our foot in the door and you’re going to let them slam it in our face?”
ROB:
Yeah. So that’s the thing that they’re thanking him so much for teaching them. (laughs) Just go ahead and cheat.
GILA:
“In the end, Jolie gets into college and recognizes the merit of her achievements without cheating. In the epilogue, it is stated that Dominik, Agnieska, and Paul went off to college, Matt worked in a warehouse, Darius’ whereabouts are unknown, Irwin went to college to become a journalist, and Dr. Plecki started a business.”
ROB:
Before that too, the voiceover at the end comes out of nowhere because it’s Jolie’s voice, and it’s following her to college. And that was a bit jarring because I had no idea she was supposed to be the main viewpoint character in this whole thing.
GILA:
I didn’t either. I mean, you see her at the beginning. At the very beginning is what turns out being her interrogation, but we didn’t know that yet.
ROB:
Right. So it’s just a bunch of pictures of some girl. I don’t know why they would’ve made her the voiceover character at the end to try and sum everything up. But I mean, she was there, and she was probably the one out of the kids with the most screen presence and charisma.
GILA:
It also said at the end that Steinmetz hadn’t fielded an academic decathlon team since the scandal. They weren’t allowed to!
ROB:
(laughs)
GILA:
They were banned from competition!
ROB:
Welp!
GILA:
They came back in 2006. So that is the end of the Wikipedia entry for 2000’s Cheaters.
ROB:
Yes. And at the end as Jeff Daniels is driving off and like, “don’t worry, you can move to New York City and be a museum guide.”
GILA:
He was driving while listening to people commenting on the scandal.
ROB:
Oh, and that was kind of interesting because you’ve got all these talk-radio shows and people are calling in and like, “oh yeah, well, everyone cheats at my school except for the stoners, because they don’t care about their grades.” And someone else is like, “yeah, I cheated in high school and got into a good college. And I cheated in college and got into a good law school. And then I cheated in law school and I’m in a big firm now and pulling down 700 grand and it’s great. And I don’t need to know any of that calculus crap.” It’s funny because I could kind of see what they were saying at the end, maybe it’s some kind of injustice and the system is stacked and everything. And I happen to agree. I’m no great fan of standardized testing as it exists in this country. I think the public education system is hideously broken. It was in my time, and so many things still are as evidenced by younger people I’ve known and their stories as they come out of it. And yeah, this movie could have been better at saying what it was trying to say at the end. This movie was restricted by the real events that it was talking about, but it still could have had a point of view that maybe would’ve come across more effectively.
GILA:
Because at the end, at the very end when they’re all together at the lake, Dr. Plecki says, “look, I’m leaving. So if anybody asks you, tell them it was all me.” But you are forcing them to look at things, to actually talk about why they’re willing to warehouse you in these substandard schools and give a good education to the privileged view. All of a sudden he’s like, “we did this for the betterment of society!”
ROB:
He’s still trying to justify what he did. And he says like, “oh, I see what we did as a kind of civil disobedience.” And it’s like, no! No, that’s not what that is at all. That’s not what that means. It’s not affirmative action. It’s not civil disobedience. I have no great feelings about, one way or another, about the implications of doing something like this in real life. Because when I was in high school and probably now, if faced with a situation like this, I would think, “well, it’s all bullshit anyway.” So in some of these high-school movies that you show me, it’s like, well, what would I have been doing if this situation happened to me while I was that age in high school and whatever? I would not have ended up in the extracurricular in the first place, I would have, when they tried to recruit me, just told them what to go do with themselves. But I feel like the characters in this movie, had they been my peers, they would’ve been just more of the assholes that were around me. And I don’t think any of them would’ve endeared themselves to me by either genuinely winning this thing or by coming out as having cheated in this thing.
GILA:
And it’s interesting. I was thinking about, obviously Dr. Plecki was trying to spin what he had done and what they had done as some sort of net world positive. But I’m thinking back to what he said at the very beginning, when he was trying to get all these kids to join the team. He’s like, “I’m going to push you hard. You’re going to work harder than you’ve ever worked. Weekends, holidays, two hours before school, five hours after every day, all-day weekends.” And he says, “but you want to go to college? You’ll get in. You’ll get into any college you want to go to. You’ll get a full scholarship to any college you want to go to because we’re going to win this and this and this and this and this.” And when it was becoming increasingly clear that it wasn’t going to happen, was it that he wanted to deliver for these kids by any means necessary? Or during the initial meeting, somebody said, “oh, you’re going to make us famous.” And Darius said, “no, we’re going to make him famous.” And that’s the question? What would the glory have been? Was it the school? Was it Dr. Plecki? Was it these individual kids? And where do you go when you feel like you’ve taken people as far as you can, and you’ve promised them things that you can’t deliver.
ROB:
Stand and can’t deliver.
GILA:
Exactly. Stand and sort of drop it on the floor.
ROB:
(laughing) Stand and whiz it down your leg.
GILA:
Yep. Stand and whiz it down the toity.
GILA & ROB:
(laughing)
ROB:
And that’s a thing, though, too, because at the end when he’s saying, “tell them I made you do it and so on.” There’s the lesson of this movie is like, “I’m going to tell you to still lie. Now that everything’s out in the open and now that everyone’s suffering the consequences just keep on lying, just make it a different lie.”
GILA:
Well, but the question is, is it completely a lie? He is the one who brought the test to the team. He gave it to them.
ROB:
This is true.
GILA:
And he said, “if you’re going to get it, it’s going to be under very specific circumstances,” to kind of tie them all together. The lawyer for the school board, after he was announcing that they had broken this cheating ring, he said, “these kids are like a cult, and he’s the cult leader.” But they’ve spent all their time together for nine months. That’ll do it.
ROB:
(laughs)
GILA:
He said, “I’ve worked with really hardcore criminals. These kids are the most skilled liars I’ve ever seen.”
ROB:
Yeah. “They scared me.”
GILA:
“They scared me.”
ROB:
Coming at it from the other point of view too, if I were one of the students in this situation, that might have affected me one way. But if, when you were a teacher, one of your students came up to you with the test, what would you have done with it?
GILA:
In that circumstance? If I were the coach of the academic decathlon team and one of my students came to me and said found the test?
ROB:
Yeah.
GILA:
I would have gone to probably my principal or I would’ve contacted the state AcaDec board. That’s what you call it in the know, by the way.
ROB:
AcaDec. (laughs)
GILA:
AcaDec. But that’s also because I don’t like making final decisions. I am a buck passer. (laughs)
ROB:
Well, I think that would be the right decision. I think it’s what I would do as well, because that’s a security hole in this whole process. And if it wasn’t this kid that took advantage of it, it would be the next kid. And if you’re ostensibly on the side of education, you would want to just take that test and pass it on to the actual authorities in charge of that sort of thing, and say, “look, this thing is leaking. You’ve got to either put together a new test or re-figure how you’re going to do things, cancel this year, do something. But it’s above my pay grade.”
GILA:
When I was a junior in high school, I took a course on English Literature. I loved it. The teacher was one of my favorite teachers in high school. Love you, Fisch! And the final was matching authors to the works of a list of books she wanted us to know, 25 items on this test. It was the final. It’s the fucking final. It was great. She had warned us, “they could be really hard.” And then it was literally a match-up and it was fantastic. And I was checking my answers and I was checking my answers from the bottom of the page up. And I began giggling uncontrollably. She said, “Gila, what’s going on?” I brought my test up and I said, “okay, Fisch, I’m done, but you need to see something.” She said, “what’s that?” I said, “well, you know how you look at answer seven and the answer is F?” She said, “Yeah.” And I said, “and number six is U?” She said, “yeah.” And I said, “and number five is C?” And she said, “uh-huh.” And I said, “And number four is K?” And she said, “oh my God!”
ROB:
(laughing)
GILA:
She said, “I’ve been giving this same test for 10 years and no one ever said anything!” I was like, “how? How did no one ever notice?” It was great. After class, I told everybody. I think she needed to rewrite the test for the next year. But I was like, “Fisch, come on.”
ROB:
(laughs) And was this a test she had put together in the first place?
GILA:
But she had only gone down the list and had never gone up the list.
So dearest, I make you a promise here and now. Whenever it is my turn for next pick, I will not pick a high-school movie.
ROB:
(comically-exaggerated sigh of relief)
GILA:
And I said it on the recording, so you know it’s real and other people can back me up.
ROB:
We have evidence now.
GILA:
We have evidence.
ROB:
(laughs) Okay.
GILA:
I made this promise in front of other people. And you know I made other promises in front of other people and I haven’t broken those.
ROB:
Well, I can tell you that the next movie that I pick for our season finale is not going to be of a type of other movies we’ve watched in the past.
GILA:
Okay. So that means it’s not a silent movie.
ROB:
(laughs) It is not a silent movie.
GILA:
It’s not a time travel movie.
ROB:
It is not a time travel movie. I don’t want to say much more about it than that, but it breaks up the sort of themes that I’ve been working with as well. Something a little different.
GILA:
All right. I’m excited. So…
ROB:
So.
GILA:
Firefly.
ROB:
Yes.
GILA:
Where is it?
ROB:
I’ve been playing around and stuff, but I don’t think this was an aggressively bad movie. I think it was aggressively middling, and just didn’t seem to have anything it really wanted to say beyond “here’s some stuff that happened.”
GILA:
Okay.
ROB:
So I didn’t find it an enjoyable watch particularly, but I didn’t actively hate it. You’ve shown me movies that I have hated. (laughs)
GILA:
Yeah, I know you didn’t begin this session by saying, “what the fuck did you just make me watch?” Which is definitely a step in the right direction.
ROB:
No, but this is obviously, to me, it’s the sort of HBO original movie or made-for-cable, made-for-television thing that I might have seen while flipping through channels. Maybe watched for a little bit, maybe even watched till the end, but moved on from that and forgot about it. I’m probably not going to remember much about this movie when we record our next episode, because there wasn’t a lot that made an impression as a piece of audiovisual entertainment or art to me. It was just kind of there and by-the-numbers, and I didn’t enjoy it, I didn’t hate it, my firefly is firmly horizontal, I think. Just chilling out and waiting for the next one to come along and hoping it’s a little better.
GILA:
Fair enough. Mine’s up. But it was my pick and my firefly has not not been up on my pick since the Tao of Steve.
ROB:
(laughs)
GILA:
You can describe the look on my face.
ROB:
(laughing) I don’t think I can.
GILA:
It still makes me sad. I’m sorry.
ROB:
It’s okay. I think that’s been the only one that you’ve actively apologized for.
GILA:
I felt bad!
ROB:
(laughs)
GILA:
Well, look, I really liked this movie at the time. But I’m also older. You’d think I would say the same thing about this movie, but no.
ROB:
(laughs) Well, it is what it is and it was what it was. And like I said, I’m probably not going to load this one in the player again myself, but I’m glad to have watched it with you,
GILA:
Likewise. And again, apologies to those of you for whom we have just spoiled the shit out of this thing that it’s kind of hard to dial up and see. So, sorry gang.
ROB:
I think there are different rules around spoiler warnings when it’s based on real-life events.
GILA:
And it’s 20 years old.
ROB:
Yeah, and it’s 20 years old. But mostly, if you read the newspapers in the right area of the country back then, you already know how it ends.
GILA:
(laughs)
ROB:
It’s hard to have spoiler warnings for the news. (laughs)
GILA:
Touche.
So if you have feelings about Cheaters,
ROB:
The film.
GILA:
The film, not the TV show.
ROB:
Or the real-life phenomenon.
GILA:
If you liked the song “Get Off This” by Cracker, or any of the other delightful mid-’90s music that soundtracked this particular film.
ROB:
That was something we didn’t really talk about either, but this is obviously people in the year 2000 going, like, “let’s make sure people know it’s the ’90s!”
GILA:
(laughs)
ROB:
And so every song is ’90s Mc-’90s playing their album from the ’90s. They made sure and showed a news clip from President Clinton when they talked about “you could meet the president!”
GILA:
You could meet president, which was like a big deal then.
ROB:
At some point, someone’s listening to the radio and they’re talking about the OJ Simpson trial. And it’s like, “it sure is the ’90s, isn’t it? Yeah!”
GILA:
(laughs) And there’s a lot of plaid.
ROB:
“We’re going to ’90s the heck out of these ’90s.”
GILA:
Indeed, indeed. So if you have any feelings about those things, if you want to tell us why you’re disappointed that we watched a really obscure movie that you can only find on YouTube and maybe on used DVD,
ROB:
(laughs)
GILA:
If you’re mad at me for this pick,
GILA & ROB:
(laughing)
GILA:
But if this has been on your list for 20 years, you haven’t yet gotten to it, and we just spoiled it for you, you can complain to us or you can ask us questions. You can do any of that by finding us online. You can see us on Twitter @MTPodcastNet. You can find us on the web at modern.technology. You can drop us an email at watches at modern dot technology. Or if you’re really feeling up to it, you could give us a call at United States telephone number 1-929-399-8414. Leave us a voicemail, we may play it on air. Sing us a song, you’re the piano man. Tell us a joke. Whatever you would like to do, we’d love to hear from you. So we’ve told you how to find us on social media, our website, how to email us, how to call us. And if you’d like to send a carrier pigeon, please wait until the snow melts.
ROB:
And if you want to do any of these things, but you haven’t written down that email address or that phone number, you could also go to modern.technology/contact, and you can email us from that page or you can get the phone number to leave us a voicemail.
GILA:
All of these things are true.
ROB:
So for this episode of Modern Technology Watches,
GILA:
This palindromic episode of Modern Technology Watches,
ROB:
This has been Rob Vincent.
GILA:
And Gila Drazen.
ROB:
And we will see you for our season finale in the future.
(Ending theme music fades in)
GILA:
We will see you at the movies somehow.
ROB:
Keep warm.
GILA:
(laughs) Keep safe.
GILA:
You’ve been listening to Episode 212 of Modern Technology Watches with Gila Drazen and Rob Vincent. Go to modern.technology on the web for more on this show, our other work, and our social media cheat sheet. Our music is “The Promise” by Torley Wong, released Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Find more from Torley at torley.com. Thank you, Torley!
Content from wikipedia.org is used under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0. This podcast is released under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0, and is a production of Joyful Firefly, LLC.
Send us email at watches at modern dot technology. And if you like us, tell somebody, or two somebodies, or even three.
(Ending theme music concludes)
ROB:
Also, we didn’t mention how fucked-up the girl looks on the cover. They made some weird Photoshopping decisions. It looks like her hips are broken.