Daniel Scheinert's The Death of Dick Long

For a limited time, our friends at the EarBuds Podcast Collective are pairing a podcast with our headlining film.

This week: S-Town. An oldie but a goodie from Serial Productions and This American Life, S-Town focuses on the life and mysterious death of clockmaker and Alabama resident John B. McLemore.

— Arielle at EarBuds Podcast Collective

Each week, Drew creates a watchlist with film recommendations provided by you, the tnmn community.

Last week’s category: Diane Keaton movies. The results are posted to our website and Letterboxd account every week.

This week’s category: movies you love, that your dog would hate. If you don't have a dog, submit a movie your hypothetical dog would not tolerate. Reply to this email with your submission and why we should watch it. We’ll feature it in next week’s newsletter.¹

¹ If your submission doesn't comply with the category, I will become an excellent tailor, proficient in the most complex of stitching scenarios. Then, I will buy several hundred Apple AirTags — the little tracking devices that parents stitch into their kids’ shoes when they go to Disney World. I’ll hide an AirTag in every pair of shoes and article of clothing in your closet. I’ll activate the AirTags, but I won’t track your location. You think I’m some kind of creep? No. But Apple has a security feature that notifies you if you are traveling with an AirTag that isn’t associated with your account. So every time you travel more than a few feet, your phone will ping and tell you that you are traveling with an unknown AirTag. Nobody will be following you, but the notification will become a mild annoyance. And no matter how many AirTags you uncover stitched into your garments, you will never find them all. There will simply be too many, and you will learn to live with the slightly annoying notification. So, ya know. Follow the category.

A spoiler-free description of the movie.

Zeke and Earl try to cover up their friend's death.

If you like these things, then you’ll like the film.

→ Imbeciles in trouble. Fargo. Raising Arizona. Bottle Rocket. There’s a long history of film portraying intellectually incapable characters in over their heads.

→ Bad police work. Evidence overlooked. Breakthroughs halted. Suspicions dismissed.

→ Shooting fireworks from places you aren’t supposed to shoot fireworks from.² This happens in the film. If you like this kind of thing, you’ll be overjoyed to see it. If not, it’s over very fast.

² I took some time to reflect on fireworks in film history by Googling “films where someone shoots fireworks from their bum” – the results of which I under-examined to a criminal extent. The first result didn’t answer my question. The link led me to an old YouTube compilation of people shooting fireworks from their butts. I watched 45 seconds and fondly remembered the Internet I grew up with. The second result didn’t answer my question either. Upon clicking the link, I was taken to a Reddit thread where a user called ClassOnWeed asked about films where characters get shot in the butt. ClassOnWeed’s inquiry: “I just watched 'Forrest Gump' and 'Training Day' back to back and by chance both Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington get shot in the ass. Since both were amazing movies I'm thinking there must be others. Thanks!” Among others, notable replies cited Bad Boys 2, Blazing Saddles, The Great Outdoors, Mindgame, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, and Mystery Men.

But no matter how many films were identified as part of this obscure “ass shooting” category — I found myself helplessly taken with the polite, coy demeanor with which ClassOnWeed phrased his question. I clicked his profile link to better understand and further experience the magic of ClassOnWeed. I learned he’s been a Reddit user for 7 years (and counting). He’s posted 541 times as of the time I’m writing this, and he’s currently active in 43 subreddits. From my observations, he can most often be found arguing the rules of football to strangers on r/soccer and r/NUFC. Whether he’s in opposition or support of the original post he’s replying to — ClassOnWeed NEVER seems as if he’s on Reddit to get a rise out of others. He’s just a friendly neighborhood contributor.

When time allows (i.e. there are a lot of soccer rule disputes to discuss, clearly), he spends time contributing to posts on r/Fantasy. An illustrative example. Approximately one year ago, reddit user NotSureWhyAngry created a post proclaiming that he doesn’t understand why people like the fantasy novel, The Will of the Many. He even goes so far as to say that perhaps people like this book because the state of fantasy literature has fallen to forgettable mediocrity these days. ClassOnWeed replied with a balanced take. “You admitted that you (and deliberately, or not, Will isn't clearly explained) don't fully understand how the magic system works so we don't know how big a deal this is. The sword fight is clearly explained by his upbringing. "Smart" doesn't make you good at games. It's weird the amount of intelligent people I come across that say they're good at Chess that I can easily beat with queen odds [sic] never mind a pawn. It's just how practiced you are, and who you've learnt from. I agree the book has some large negatives but this is just nitpicking.”

His unaggressive but humorous approach to discourse of all sorts is something I admire. I guess. I think I’m done here.

What I liked about it.

In 2022, Daniel Scheinert and his longtime collaborator, Daniel Kwan — together known as the Daniels — released their cinematic masterpiece, Everything Everywhere All At Once.

The film’s reception was stratospheric, thrusting the Daniels — the minds behind outlandish music videos like DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s Turn Down for What and films like Swiss Army Man — into the spotlight.

Prior to Everything Everywhere All At Once, one of the Daniels directed a smaller independent film all on his own. The film, entitled The Death of Dick Long, premiered at Sundance in 2019.

The film is a comedy of errors. A very weird, perverse train wreck from which you cannot avert your eyes — all centered around a pair of outrageously dimwitted criminals.

Some might suggest it’s a spiritual relative to films like Fargo.

Trade the bomber hats and icy midwest for cutoff graphic tees and wooded trailer parks. Replace the freezing-red-faced Minnesota-nice protagonists with two lonely, shame-addled southerners and a persistent cloud of vape smoke. Pepper in some Creed and Nickelback, and you have something resembling The Death of Dick Long.

Though to call this film a hillbilly Fargo would disrespect the originality of the premise. This isn’t just Fargo with different weather.

The Death of Dick Long is a deeply humanist piece, intent on exploring characters, who exhibit some genuinely unusual behavior, with real empathy.

The film’s center of gravity is the dissonance between writer Billy Chew’s bizarre script and the unflinchingly sincere delivery of every other element of the film. Some people refer to this as irony, but I used more words to say it.

The aesthetics capture the details in lower-income Alabama. Cheap wood beadboards, worn-down churches. Cars with mismatched panels. A woman wrestling with her lawn mower to prevent it from rolling away down a hill.

Accompanying the aesthetics is a sober, piano-led score and a slew of performances from a cast that never, not once, winks at the camera.

In fact, what really makes this piece work is the performances — played comically straight in spite of the unusual script.

The emotional core of the story is firmly grounded in Michael Abbott Jr.’s downtrodden turn as Zeke, and Virginia Newcomb’s fierce portrayal of his wife, Lydia. Newcomb, in particular, plays her role so laser straight that she could have easily wandered from the set of a high-profile crime thriller.

Other notable performances. Sarah Baker plays the clueless Officer Dudley with the innocent obliviousness of a lost dog trying to solve a murder case.

And Andre Hyland’s Earl possesses a hysterical unearned arrogance considering the endless bounds of his ineptitude — best characterized when he disdainfully refuses a packet of honey dijon mustard at a restaurant like it’s a stale bottle of cabernet.

I suspect films like this are quite hard to make. To hum on each of the comic frequencies it does for much of the film, The Death of Dick Long relies on a shared, concentric vision between the director, writer, and cast.

Fortunately, Daniel Scheinert is no stranger to landing powerful, if not objectively unusual, themes. So, as the leading characters would say: “Wanna get weird?”

Enjoy the film.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”

→ There was a real life Dick Long. He has nothing to do with the film, but he died in the 1920s. The director discovered this by Googling the film title: “…if you search it in quotations – I think we've now buried this, but there's a real guy named Dick Long who died in the 20s. When we were making the movie, you would Google “The Death of Dick Long,” and you'd get his obituary.”

→ The director set comedy “ground rules” to avoid simply making fun of the south. In Scheinert’s words: “One of my favorite parts of the whole process was setting up rules to have fun and look for comedy, but not base any of the jokes off of the media representations of small-town America. Instead, we went in like anthropologists with a sense of humor.”

One great line of dialogue from the film.

tnmn is member-supported. Right now, the very best way to support us is to contribute to our tip jar or share us with a friend.