The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected diverse communities due largely in part to social factors such as inadequate access to housing, income, dietary options, education and employment — all of which have been shown to affect people’s physical health.
Recognizing that inequity, Harlem-based chef JJ Johnson sought out to help his community maximize its health during the pandemic — one grain at a time.
Johnson manages FIELDTRIP, a health-focused restaurant that strives to bring people together through the celebration of rice, a grain found in cuisines of countless cultures.
“It was very important for me to show the world that places like Harlem want access to more health-conscious foods,” Johnson said. “The people who live in Harlem should have the option to eat fresh, locally farmed and delicious food that other communities have access to.”
Lack of education and access to those healthy food options is a primary driver of why 31% of adults in Harlem are struggling with obesity — the highest rate of any neighborhood in New York City and 7% higher than the average adult obesity rate across the five boroughs.
Obesity increases risk for heart disease or diabetes, which in turn leaves Harlem’s residents — who are 76% Black or LatinX — at heightened risk for complications with COVID-19.
“For decades, people in Harlem have been buying food at supermarkets that have been injected with antibiotics and pesticides because they can’t afford healthier options at organic grocery stores,” Johnson said. “Harlem isn’t a food desert because it doesn’t have food. It’s facing food insecurity because of the food its residents have access to.”
Despite his intentions to break this cycle, Johnson says the concept of FIELDTRIP was met with skepticism over concern as to whether Harlem residents would be open to trying its exotically seasoned rice bowls and salads — even if they were the healthy alternative.
“When I opened FIELDTRIP, many people in the community didn’t think it was owned by a Black person,” Johnson said. “In the heart of this pandemic, people saw me and my staff — which is primarily Black and Latinx — behind the counter and realized they wanted to support us.”
While dishes from eastern cultures may not traditionally be sprawled across dining tables in Harlem, Johnson saw his hometown as the prime location for breaking down barriers within the food industry when FIELDTRIP opened in 2019.
“It’s become this engraved part of Harlem that when the lights come on at FIELDTRIP, there’s a sense of hope installed throughout the community,” Johnson said.
That connection with local residents has been put on full display during this pandemic.
To maximize the restaurant’s ability to feed those facing food insecurity during the pandemic, Johnson joined forces with Chef Erik Bruner-Yang who created The Power of 10. This initiative was built on the idea that if a restaurant were to receive $10,000 a week during this crisis, it could create 10 full-time jobs and provide 1,000 free meals to its direct community.
Born out of Washington, D.C., The Power of 10 partnered with Capital One earlier this year to expand nationally to help restaurants like FIELDTRIP thrive in cities across the country such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Charlotte, North Carolina, Richmond, Virginia and Fairfax, Virginia.
Since May, this partnership has helped enable The Power of 10 to donate more than 200,000 meals and provide income to workers at 38 restaurants.
“We were eager to do our part to help in this urgent and unprecedented time of need,” says Andy Navarrete, Head of External Affairs at Capital One. “Restaurants play a vital role in unifying the communities we serve.”
This work comes as part of Capital One’s Impact Initiative, an initial $200 million, five-year commitment to support growth in underserved communities and advance socioeconomic mobility by closing gaps in equity and opportunity. The Impact Initiative builds upon Capital One’s core mission to change banking for good and its priorities around racial equity, affordable housing, small business support, workforce development and financial well-being.
Through this support to The Power of 10, Johnson could assist Harlem’s residents in ways that weren’t possible before.
FIELDTRIP began distributing free “JJ Boxes” — prepared meals that consist of organic produce from local farms in the Tri-state area. Johnson first sought to give these meals to essential workers in the area but soon expanded FIELDTRIP’s offering to any people in need.
To date, this initiative has helped FIELDTRIP distribute more than 3,000 free meals.
“Many of these people receiving these meals had lost their jobs and had very little money,” Johnson said. “The Power of 10 helped us ensure that those families still had fresh produce that they could cook at home and put a delicious dinner on the table every night.”
This funding has also allowed FIELDTRIP to continue working with local farms to use the freshest ingredients possible in its meals in an effort to help Harlem residents stay healthy.
“In every community we serve, we’ll look at who needs help and how we can be there for them,” Johnson said. “As I expand FIELDTRIP, my goal is to make our food so affordable that people chose us over fast food every time.”
Indie music has grown to include so much. It’s not just music that is released on independent labels, but speaks to an aesthetic that deviates from the norm and follows its own weirdo heart. It can come in the form of rock music, pop, or folk. In a sense, it says as much about the people that are drawn to it as it does about the people that make it.
For their new album, Future Islands put a large emphasis on group collaboration, they told Derrick Rossignol in an interview for Uproxx. During the process, the band made a point to give the project the time and space it needed to come into its own, without the input of producers or the pressure of a looming deadline. The result is one of the most inspired entries into the Future Islands catalogue, an exciting listen from start to finish.
Garcia Peoples – Nightcap At Wits’ End
While the new album from Garcia Peoples is a little more succinct in its runtime than some previous efforts (no 30-minute songs like there were on 2019’s One Step Behind), Nightcap At Wits’ End does not shy away from experimentation. Each of the album’s twelve tracks exist as an interconnected cyclical arrangement, wherein each song flows into the next. Needless to say, the latest from the prolific psychedelic group is a journey well worth your while.
Mary Lattimore – Silver Ladders
Sometimes, you just need the soothing sounds of a harp to decompress. On her new album Silver Ladders, Mary Lattimore is armed with little more than just a harp and a loop pedal, teaming up with Slowdive’s Neil Halstead in the producer’s seat to create ambient soundscapes for a sense of ultimate intentionality and retrospection.
Prateek Kuhad – Cold / Mess EP
Along with Frank Ocean and Bruce Springsteen, Barack Obama’s list of his favorite songs of 2019 featured an unfamiliar name: Indian singer-songwriter Prateek Kuhad. While he’s not sure how the title track from his new EP caught the ear of the former president, Cold / Mess doubles down on the low-key heartthrob tendencies that caught the attention of his new label Elektra Records and delivers a quiet but impressive collection that will be sure to catch on with American audiences.
Slow Pulp – Moveys
Although Moveys is the debut album from Chicago’s Slow Pulp, it boasts the confidence of a veteran band. Perhaps this can be attributed to the massive upheavals the quartet each experienced individually during the album’s writing and production process, but the intensity and exploration that is demonstrated in the band’s fuzzy pop-rock tracks make Moveys one of the most impressive debut albums of 2020.
Touche Amore – Lament
On their fifth album, the post-hardcore band teamed up with famed metal producer Ross Robinson to craft their most direct and accessible music to date. Lament is an album about the simultaneous appreciation for one’s platform as a performer and discomfort with becoming a source for venting about grief and personal struggles. At just 35 minutes, the album is incredibly intense, poignant, and generally impressive.
Hundredth – Somewhere Nowhere
Hundredth is the latest punk band to make the transition to a more hazy, shoegazey sound (see: Title Fight, Turnover). The band’s impressive versatility is on full display throughout Somewhere Nowhere, wherein the band takes on a more indie-pop approach with a sound more evocative of Tame Impala than Converge.
Petey – Checkin’ Up On Buds EP
On his new EP, released with little fanfare, Petey is “combining elements of emo, electronic, and folk music into a sound that is unmistakably Petey,” according to Derrick Rossignol for Uproxx. Checkin’ Up On Buds only includes four songs, but it sets the bar incredibly high for whatever comes next from the relatively mysterious singer-songwriter.
Michelle – “Unbound”
Although Michelle haven’t announced a formal project yet, they have been releasing music consistently since signing to Atlantic Records earlier this year. “Unbound” is the latest, a unique and genuinely exciting indie-pop song that takes on a more danceable, R&B approach than their (also great) previous summery track “Sunshine.”
Stevie Nicks – “Show Them The Way”
Stevie Nicks is taking full advantage of Fleetwood Mac’s viral moment by releasing “Show Them The Way,” her first new solo single in nearly a decade. Featuring Dave Grohl on drums, the track is distinctly Stevie Nicks, but also takes on a more epic stance as it spans nearly seven minutes and was inspired by poem she wrote after waking up from a dream she had about the 2008 presidential election.
Jeff Tweedy – “Gwendolyn”
Ever prolific, Jeff Tweedy is gearing up to release Love Is The King, his latest solo album while his band Wilco takes a short break after 2019’s Ode To Joy. “Gwendolyn” is the third single from the forthcoming effort, a groovy folk-country number featuring Tweedy’s signature hazy vocal and light percussion. “Folk and country type forms being the shapes that come most easily to me in a comforting way,” he said in a statement.
Kississippi – “Around Your Room”
While Kississippi came up in the underground emo scene, Zoe Reynolds’ ambitions have always laid in spaces far greater than the basement or club. “Around Your Room” is a perfect indication of where Reynolds is planning to take Kississippi on her forthcoming LP, an impressive indie-pop track that at times sounds like like Taylor Swift’s Red. Although there is no official release date, this record is sure to be a game-changer.
Another Michael – “New Music”
Philadelphia-based trio Another Michael have signed to Run For Cover Records for the release of their debut album. The lead single “New Music” is a dreamy, lushly-produced indie number that is centered around the spiritual experience of musical discovery, featuring Michael Doherty falsetto vocals morphing into an inescapable earworm hook (which is great to sing while cooking).
Wild Pink – “The Shining But Tropical”
Wild Pink’s catalogue is one of the most impressive and underrated in indie rock. “The Shining But Tropical” previews the New York band’s new album A Billion Little Lights, which is due out in February, and is already one of our favorite albums of 2021. It’s what Steven Hyden calls for Uproxx the band’s “most ambitious and overall best work, infused with deep lyrical craft and impeccable melodies that set Wild Pink apart from the indie-dude pack.”
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Underground art rap stalwart Open Mike Eagle is gearing up to release his new album Anime, Trauma And Divorce this week and to accompany the pre-order link, he shared the animated video for the opening track, “Death Parade.” The animated video, Mike says, is about “the cycle of trauma — the personal trauma that’s been a throughline in my life and how traumatized people tend to inflict more trauma on themselves and others.”
To that end, the video depicts an animated Open Mike taking some hits in life as he encounters a variety of different characters representative of various relationships we all have at one point or another in life. The second verse sees Mike’s lyrics interpreted visually, referencing wrestling, X-Men comics, martial arts, and politics.
Mike’s new album is set to come out on his own Autoreverse Records imprint on October 16. It also features the single “Bucciariti” featuring Kari Faux, with the video tapping Paul F. Thompkins, Jordan Katz, and Demi Adejuyigbe. Earlier this year, Mike commented on current events with the incantation of “Neighborhood Protection Spell (Lana Del Biden Nem).”
Watch Open Mike Eagle’s “Death Parade” video above.
Anime, Trauma And Divorce is out 10/16 on Autoreverse Records. Pre-save it here.
James Blake has been staying quite busy in the last few months. Not only did the singer host a handful of livestreams at the onset of the lockdown, but Blake has worked with a bevvy of artists on a recent releases. The singer collaborated with Flatbush Zombies on their upcoming full-length and hit the studio with Slowthai for an energetic single. Blake has now revealed he has a new project, and fans won’t have to wait long before hearing it.
On Tuesday, Blake took to Twitter to share that his EP Before drops on Wednesday. While the announcement comes as a surprise, Blake did previously tease the project with a snippet of him working on the EP in the studio.
In order to celebrate the unexpected release, Blake will take over Boiler Room TV’s livestream for a listening party. Blake’s Boiler Room appearance marks his first time on the series in seven years, so he’s sure to impress.
According to press materials, Blake’s EP credits a handful of contributors. Mount Kimbie, who Blake also worked with for the recent Slowthai single, will apparently appear on the project as well as his girlfriend Jameela Jamil. While it’s not yet clear of Jamil offered vocals on the project, she did help with production and arrangement throughout the EP.
Check out Blake’s Before cover art and tracklist below.
Polydor
1. “I Keep Calling”
2. “Before”
3. “Do You Ever?”
4. “Summer Of Now”
Before is out 10/14 via Polydor. Pre-order it here.
A good conspiracy theory gets the blood running. It should be equal measures absurd and just-believable-enough — meaning that you’re definitely entertained, even if you don’t take the ideas espoused seriously. Or maybe you do take them seriously. Maybe you get hooked on more and more increasingly batsh*t insane ideas until you reach “holy-Jesus-this-is-ALL-real” levels of lunacy. Then you ascend to the next level of conspiracy doc watching, spending hours with videos that are only found deep at the bottom of YouTube rabbit holes.
Hopefully, it won’t come to that. You’re better than to fall for that extremist drivel. The docs presented here are a little more reasonable. Many of them have some undeniable truth at their core. They get you saying, “You know, that makes a lot of sense.” You might even corner someone at your next cocktail party and bounce a few fresh ideas off them. God knows people are tired of hearing about your sourdough starter.
The docs below are sensational and fun, but we’re not here to speak to their veracity. That’s for you to decide. And Snopes. Unroll the tin foil and enjoy!
Bob Lazar is a legend in the UFO community. The former scientist (now pyrotechnician) actually worked at Area 51’s S-4 facility. A military installation where, allegedly, Lazar and other “top men” were reverse-engineering extraterrestrial tech. What stands out most in this whole story (and doc) is that over time — as some documents have become unclassified — some of Lazar’s claims have been proven. Most notably that element 151 (a specific nuclear isotope) exists.
That doesn’t mean Lazar’s decades-long claim to extraterrestrial technology isn’t an Andy Kaufman-level performance artist bit, but it’s certainly enough to get you hooked on the movie.
Erik Nelson and Werner Herzog first teamed up to make the much-lauded documentary Grizzly Man with Nelson producing and Herzog directing. In A Gray State, those roles were reversed to tell the story of aspiring filmmaker David Crowley’s untimely death by apparent suicide in his Minnesota home. That’s the easy part of this documentary. But the story gets wilder in a hurry.
Crowley was a libertarian filmmaker working on a feature film about America being a police state and getting overrun by a foreign authoritarian regime. He was spending his time raising cash for his film by touring the far-right and libertarian circuits with the likes of Alex Jones and Ron Paul. He had gotten far enough in the filmmaking process to produce three trailers for his film and raise $60,000 for the budget. Then, Crowley along with his wife and young daughter were all found murdered in their home. From then on, right-wing conspiracy theorists latched onto the deaths with wild ideas about what “really” happened to the Crowleys — something no one can know for sure.
The film explores all of the conspiracy-making and the actual filmmaking by Crowley, in a head-scratching documentary about an event that provides fertile ground for conspiracy theorists to seed their wildest ideas.
The Family is a limited-run series that’s easily bingeable over five, 45-minute episodes. The docuseries outlines the conspiracy conducted by The Fellowship, originally led by Doug Coe, who set out to turn American politics towards fundamentalist evangelicalism through the backdoors of Washington, DC. The Fellowship eschews any teachings or the actual words of Jesus Christ in the pursuit of power, domination, and pure greed on the national stage to make America into their version of a fundamentalist Christian nation.
It’s a chilling portrayal of how a religious power-conspiracy reached the highest echelons for decades. It’s even more chilling that the quest for Christian domination of America hasn’t seemed to slow down.
This is perhaps the most frustrating entry on the list. There’s little fun to be had here and a lot more grimacing. Luckily, the doc takes a very tongue in cheek approach to the rise of flat earth conspiracy by showing those who believe the lie and fail over and over again to prove themselves right.
So where do the grimaces come in?
No matter who much evidence and failed tests the flat earthers seem to find or run into, they remain unwavering in their belief. If anything, the documentary is a testament to the current age of social media bubbles and YouTube echo chambers people can fall into.
This docu-series from the History Channel is conspiracy theory-lite. Each episode covers a mainstream conspiracy theory in a very introductory way. They hit on the main talking points from “experts” but rarely draw any conclusions, which is kind of the point of conspiracy theories as entertainment. The difference here is that each episode is based around a place like Fort Knox, Area 51, the White House, and so on. There are three exceptions with episodes about Free Masons (naturally), the FBI, and Black Ops.
In the end, this can be a mild way to scratch that conspiracy theory itch without too much investment.
This is the sort of documentary that you wish was a batshit crazy conspiracy theory. But, no, it actually happened as a conspiracy to steal our data and sell it to the highest bidder and then let them at us personally, emotionally, and politically. The results have not been ideal.
The Great Hack is the sort of viewing that feels mandatory to understand what’s going on with our social media accounts and the companies behind them. On the flip side, it’s harrowing to watch how easily the conspiracy to manipulate the masses was carried out and how little has been done in the wake of these revelations.
There are so, so many docs about the existence of extraterrestrials out there. What’s interesting about Unacknowledged is that it’s less about the existence or contact with otherworldly beings and more about how governments — the U.S. in particular here — are able to manipulate the masses and create their own realities/narratives. The film lays out with evidence from the government, newspapers, and very high-level sources that we have contact and technology from extraterrestrial life.
Where Unacknowledged really gets deep is how the government allegedly operates with the information they have about aliens. This is the sort of film that leaves you saying, “hum…” at the end.
Speaking of rabbit holes, MKUltra is a deep one. Fake hippy communes and brothels, Charles Manson, the CIA dosing people randomly for decades, a massive institution-spanning coverup in the highest offices of the land, MKUltra has it all.
Wormwood — from acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris — dives into the very dodgy 1953 “suicide” of CIA employee Frank Olson who was part of the LSD-dosing experiments under the umbrella of MKUltra. The docuseries uses dramatic reenactments to fairly decent effect with Peter Sarsgaard and Tim Blake Nelson turning in believable performances. Those flashbacks are inter-spliced with a present-day investigation that looks into CIA handbooks on assassination and how deeply MKUltra seeped its way into American society.
The case of Jeffrey Epstein might be the most insidious and deep-reaching conspiracy of our time. While this doc-series doesn’t dive too deeply into the conspiracy bullet points beyond the scant evidence we have, it leaves the door open for so, so many questions about what the hell was going on with this person, his underage sex trafficking ring, and the elite group of people he provided underage girls for.
The most damning episode is the third, when Epstein brokers a deal for his first round of sex crimes with some high-ranking officials that current president, Donald Trump (a close friend of Epstein), would later appoint to his White House and the U.S. justice system. If that’s not conspiracy fodder, we don’t know what is. And that’s before the series even gets to his “suicide” in jail while awaiting trial.
Sometimes someone can be shot in broad daylight (see: JFK) and there’ll still be decades of confusion as to what really happened. This four-part series dives into the assassination of a German businessman and politician, Detlev Rohwedder, who was tasked with privatizing former-Communist East Germany’s industry after German Reunification, which started in 1990.
The series looks at the role of Germany’s far-left terrorist organization, RAF, in the assassination. But there’s much, much more going on with this seemingly straightforward murder. The doc is full of political jostling, backdoor rapacious capitalism, and conspiracies that place blame on easy scapegoats. All of this makes for a fascinating watch and an easy binge.
It’s not necessarily a conspiracy that the cattle industry is a very bad thing for the planet. Yet the film treats the whole industry like one huge conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, man! You can perhaps get some interesting information from a lot of the posturing about secrets and lies, but it’s still a very sensational doc.
This look into the cattle industry from a very skeptical point of view is an easy 90-minute watch.
Oliver Stone has settled into a role as an agent provocateur of the American film world. He’s become known for his documentaries that take off-kilter looks at world figures like Chavez and Putin. In this series, Stone examines why so much of our history has been largely erased from the national narrative. This series becomes a conspiracy theory goldmine by actually showing us how backbench political dealings and straight-up erasure of people and history have molded and skewed not only our perception of our history but our perception of our very identity as Americans.
It’s a real conspiracy that’s based on real-life events that we should know but rarely do.
European soccer is in the midst of its international break as national squads face off in the UEFA Nations League, and for Portugal that means leaning heavily on star Cristiano Ronaldo. However, this Wednesday when they host Sweden they will be without the services of their star as he isolates after testing positive for COVID-19, the Portuguese national team announced on Tuesday (via ESPN).
No other players have tested positive, but Ronaldo played in Sunday’s scoreless draw with France and against Spain last week, posting a picture on Monday of he and the entire Portugal team having a meal together.
Ronaldo won’t just be absent from Portugal’s action on Wednesday, but as he continues to isolate it seems likely that he misses Juventus’ first games back from the international break, including possibly the first Champions League game against Dynamo Kiev. The Juventus team had been quarantined prior to the break at a hotel in Turin after two staffers tested positive, but Ronaldo left early to join the Portuguese squad.
Given the more stringent protocols in place in Italy, a country that had one of the world’s worst COVID-19 outbreaks earlier this year, he will have to not only meet those protocols but also deal with potential punishment for leaving quarantine early to go to Portugal.
After the lockdown was put in place, the competition series Verzuz offered some much-needed entertainment and only continues to grow in popularity. September’s Verzuz saw legends Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle competing to an audience of over 3.7 million. Since each battle is announced with little warning, many musicians have challenged one another to put their discography side-by-side. Now, Swae Lee is talking the possibility of tapping his brother for a Rae Sremmurd Verzuz battle against Migos.
Swae recently sat down in an interview with Power 106 to chat about his upcoming album. The conversation eventually turned to Verzuz, and the interviewer asked if Swae was willing to battle it out against Migos.
“All I’m gonna say is we got a nice catalog,” he said, seemingly confirming his interest. “It’s gonna be hard. We got some classics. I got some classics. SremmLife got some classics. You know what I’m sayin’? The numbers don’t lie. That would be good because they got some hits, we got some hits. That’d be fun. […] They’d have to cut us all a nice little [check]. That’s gonna be action-packed. You know we gonna turn up.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Swae talked about his recent single, “Dance Like No One’s Watching.” “It was just so relevant. ‘Dance Like No One’s Watching,’ it was really a play on words. No one’s supposed to be watching because we’re supposed to be in the house. I think nobody really catch that.”
When it comes to huge action set pieces, The Boys outdid itself in Season 2 with an epic sea battle between the ragtag team and Chace Crawford’s The Deep. Although, it’s not so much a fight as a gruesome shipwreck that ends with a boat being rammed into the belly of a whale, covering everyone and everything in piles of aquatic blood and guts. While the opening moments of the gory showdown are heavily CGI, the ensuing carnage — including the massive whale carcass — was all practical effects. The Boys VFX guru Stephan Spzak-Fleet recently sat down with Comic Book to break down the logistics of creating the memorable scene and the massive amount of fake blood it required.
“I think they were telling me they had like 150 buckets of blood or gallons of blood for the whale sequence or something like that,” Spzak-Fleet said. Despite featuring all manners of crazy moments, The Boys producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were big on making sure the look of it felt “grounded” even while depicting pure insanity. That pushed Spzak-Fleet and his team to find just the right mix of practical and digital effects, and it shows in the final product:
With the whale, we had a lot of practical blood, and then as Eric has said on social media and stuff and in other interviews, they built this giant whale set that we didn’t have to do very much work to. We added a little bit of wetness to it here and there, but it was real. We had a real set and I’m telling you when you’re an actor or crew member or anybody and you go up and you see this real exploded whale set, it’s different, man. It connects with you in a different way than if I would have just put up a green tennis ball, so it was still the right way to go. It’s another reason why I love working on the show is we get to work with people and do things like that in that kind of way. It’s just so cool.
The Boys Season Two is available to stream on Amazon Prime.
Over the past year, the upcoming 2020 election has taken on an air of importance bordering on historical, as many came to see it as the last chance to save democracy in the United States. Therefore, it’s somewhat fitting that the Joe Biden campaign has tapped the original cast of history-making Broadway musical Hamilton for a virtual fundraiser event in an effort to preserve the functions of democracy the show depicted in their infancy.
Last seen together in the show’s original run on Broadway in 2015 when it became a massive hit and drew multiple visits from then-President Obama, Jay-Z and Beyonce, and a whos-who of celebrities, the fundraiser will reunite show creator Lin-Manuel Miranda with his Tony-winning cast. Leslie Odom, Jr., Daveed Diggs, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Jonathan Groff, Christopher Jackson, Phillipa Soo, Okieriete Onaodowan, and Javier Muñoz will all appear (announcements do not list Anthony Ramos, who portrayed John Laurens and Phillip Hamilton in the original run — presumably Muñoz will take his place), while director Thomas Kail will moderate a Q&A session with them.
The Hamilton Town Hall streams live, October 16 at 9 pm ET. Access requires only a donation — no minimum amount is required — with instructions for viewing to be emailed in the donation receipt. You can find more information here.
What a lot of people may not realize about Hubie Halloween star Adam Sandler — while expressing surprise when he appears in the occasional dramatic role, as he did is in last year’s Safdie Brothers’ film, Uncut Gems — is that he actually graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. That is arguably the most famous film school in America, where directors like Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, and the Coen Bbothers graduated, as well as actors like Mahershala Ali, Donald Glover and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who graduated the year after Adam Sandler. Indeed, Sandler was trained as a legit actor before he was cast in Saturday Night Live, so Sandler’s dramatic roles are less of a departure than many may think.
Still, it came as a big surprise when Sandler turned in a remarkable, Oscar-worthy performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love, especially coming on the heels of movies like Waterboy, Happy Gilmore, and Big Daddy. Who would even get the idea of casting Robbie Hart from The Wedding Singer as the psychologically troubled lead in a prestige awards film alongside Phillip Seymour Hoffman, as well as two-time Oscar nominee Emily Watson?
What many may not know is that the role was actually written for Adam Sandler by the writer/director himself, Paul Thomas Anderson, who was connected to Adam Sandler through Tom Cruise, of all people. “I met Tom Cruise when [Cruise’s ex-wife] Nicole Kidman did SNL,” Sandler said this week on the SmartLess podcast. “Cruise had a Yankee cap dipped down low, and he looked up, and I was like in love with him,” Sandler beamed.
“Anyway,” Sandler continued, “Tom called me up, and he says, ‘I’m doing a movie with my friend Paul, and he’s interested in doing a movie with you. Can I put him on the phone?”
Sander said sure, but at the time, he only agreed because it was Tom Cruise who wanted to put them together. “Paul was very nice,” Sandler said, “and he says, ‘Hey, I loved Billy Madison.’ And I was like, ‘OK, thanks,’ but I didn’t know who he was.’”
“‘I just love your movies and your albums,’” Anderson added. “‘Is it OK if I write you a movie?’”
Sandler agreed to allow Anderson to write him a film, but he didn’t think much of it. “That’s great. You can do whatever you want, man,” Sandler said to him, dismissively. “He was sweet, and I could tell he was funny,” but Sandler really didn’t put much stock in the offer.
“But then, honest to God, it was like 11 in the morning, and I had nothing to do, and Magnolia just came out, and I said, ‘I think this is that kid’s movie. I’m going to go see that.’ It was sold out, and I was in the front row, and I was looking up at it, and I was f*cking terrified, and I was going, ‘Oh this guy is f*cking better than me. I don’t want to be in his this. I’m going to ruin his movie! Holy sh*t!”
After the movie, Sandler called up Paul Thomas Anderson and told him that he’d just seen his movie, and by that time, Sandler could hardly contain his excitement. “Are you still writing that movie for me?” he asked. A little while later, Anderson drove the script over to Sandler, left it with him to read, and when he came back, Sandler was “f*cking scared. I always said I could do this, but this was too much. But he talked me through it, and he made me comfortable.” And that is eventually how Adam Sandler’s first dramatic role came to fruition.
Meanwhile, there’s nothing public about how Paul Thomas Anderson and his wife, Maya Rudolph, met, but I like to think that they found each other through the mutual friend Adam Sandler since the two reportedly began dating a few months before the Punch Drunk Love premiere.
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