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Episode: Decoder Ring: Calling Dick Tracy! It’s Warren Beatty Again

Author: Slate Podcasts
Duration: 00:48:58

Episode Shownotes

(While we work on the next season of Slow Burn we're showcasing new episodes from Slate's narrative podcast Decoder Ring.) Oscar-winner Warren Beatty first secured the rights to the comic book character Dick Tracy in the lead up to his 1990 movie adaptation. Decades later, Beatty kept playing Tracy in

bizarre late-night specials airing on cable TV, that confounded nearly everyone. Why is one of the most famous movie stars of the 20th century, spending the twilight of his career playing a comic strip detective of dwindling renown? In this episode, we investigate: What’s going on between Warren Beatty and Dick Tracy? This episode was written by Willa Paskin. It was edited by Lacy Roberts and Evan Chung. It was produced by Sofie Kodner. Decoder Ring is produced by Willa Paskin, Evan Chung, Katie Shepherd and Max Freedman. Derek John is Executive Producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. In this episode, you’ll hear from author and artist Ryan Estrada, journalist Kim Masters, comic book store owner Matt Live, and media lawyer Celia Muller. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at [email protected] Want more Decoder Ring? Subscribe to Slate Plus to unlock exclusive bonus episodes. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of the Decoder Ring show page. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Summary

In this special episode of Decoder Ring, host Willa Paskin investigates Warren Beatty's unusual dedication to the comic character Dick Tracy, exploring his motivations behind reviving the character over decades. Beatty's deep connection to Dick Tracy, originally depicted in a 1990 film, reflects both personal and professional challenges he faced in Hollywood. The podcast features insights from various guests, addressing themes of nostalgia, aging fame, and the legal complexities surrounding intellectual property rights. Ultimately, the episode questions why Beatty continues to engage with a character that symbolizes a bygone era as the franchise faces transition into public domain in 2027.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Decoder Ring: Calling Dick Tracy! It’s Warren Beatty Again) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

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On a seemingly normal Friday evening in July of 2012, Turner Classic Movies, the cable channel that plays old films all day, was airing a seemingly normal Dick Tracy marathon.

00:00:44 Speaker_10
Calling all cars. Mobilize every truck.

00:00:47 Speaker_13
Dick Tracy is a comic strip character, a square-jawed detective who's been around for nearly a hundred years. You can recognize him by his outfit. He always wears an acid-yellow trench coat and fedora.

00:00:58 Speaker_13
He used to be a household name, appearing in daily newspapers and on the radio and in black-and-white detective films and serials.

00:01:05 Speaker_00
Hello? Hello, operator? Dick Tracy speaking. Get me the police air drone. Hurry it up.

00:01:11 Speaker_13
In 1990, the character got the full Hollywood treatment when the Oscar-winning movie star Warren Beatty directed, produced, co-wrote, and starred in a high-profile adaptation.

00:01:21 Speaker_08
Hey, tough guy, you wanna try that on somebody your own size?

00:01:26 Speaker_13
That movie and some of the old black-and-white pictures were all part of the TCM marathon, as you'd expect. But then, five minutes before 10 p.m., TCM ran something unexpected.

00:01:39 Speaker_17
Everyone on social media is like, the weirdest freaking thing just aired.

00:01:45 Speaker_13
Ryan Estrada writes and draws comics all over the world. When he woke up on the Saturday morning after TCM's marathon played, he learned he'd missed something bizarre. Something called Dick Tracy Special.

00:01:59 Speaker_17
I guess, like, if you were really obsessed with, like, I need to know what's on Turner Classic movies, you might have known something called Dick Tracy Special was coming. But this was completely unannounced.

00:02:09 Speaker_13
When Ryan went to check out Dick Tracy Special for himself, intrigued by the Internet's confusion, he was not disappointed.

00:02:17 Speaker_04
Yeah, it is very, very weird. How are you, Detective Tracy? I'm fine.

00:02:22 Speaker_03
Call me Dick. You look just wonderful. Pomegranates. Pomegranates. Pomegranates. Pomegranates. Pomegranates. Pretty good for my age, huh?

00:02:31 Speaker_13
That's Warren Beatty talking about the anti-aging powers of pomegranates in character as Dick Tracy. It's the opening minutes of the special, and we've just seen him drive onto a studio lot and walk into a nondescript soundstage.

00:02:44 Speaker_13
He's now sitting at a round table across from the film critic Leonard Maltin, who is the guy complimenting his good looks.

00:02:51 Speaker_04
Can we take your hat and coat? I don't take off my hat and coat. Do you mind if I ask what your age is? I'm going to be 107 in July. No. Yes. No. Yeah. 107. Do you have some secret you can share with everybody? Small portions. Small portions. And exercise.

00:03:11 Speaker_04
And of course, pomegranate. Once in a while, you know, I'll have a blueberry.

00:03:20 Speaker_13
Ryan was immediately fascinated, or maybe baffled is a better word.

00:03:25 Speaker_17
It feels like they're trying to make a comedy sketch, but nothing was written, and they're not comedians. So the rest of it is Leonard Maltin playing clips to fill the rest of the 30 minutes.

00:03:36 Speaker_13
Some of those clips are from Warren Beatty's own Dick Tracy movie, so things get very self-referential.

00:03:43 Speaker_04
The Warren Beatty movie, to tell you the truth, I think that the scenery is a little phony.

00:03:49 Speaker_13
It goes on like this for nearly 30 minutes. And then Dick Tracy gets an urgent call on his wrist radio. I think you should get over here, Tracy. And abruptly walks off set.

00:03:58 Speaker_04
I'm just going to be on my way.

00:04:01 Speaker_13
Ryan and others intrigued by the special online had so many questions. What was this? Why was this? Was it performance art? Was it serious? Had they even wanted people to see it?

00:04:14 Speaker_17
This is purposely bad. This is the most fascinating thing in the world.

00:04:19 Speaker_13
Still, there was only so much wondering they could do about a one-time 30-minute special, even when as confounding as this. So Ryan went on with his life. And then, in July of 2023.

00:04:31 Speaker_19
Uh, hello? Uh, hello? Hello? Hello? Are you there, sir? Uh, what? I'm here. Who is that?

00:04:45 Speaker_13
Eleven years after Dick Tracy's special aired, Turner Classic Movies dropped another half-hour special. It's called Dick Tracy Zooms In. It takes place on Zoom, and it's even more self-referential than the first.

00:04:59 Speaker_04
Detective Tracy, how are you? I'm fine, Mr. Beatty. How are you? I'm fine, thank you. Long time no see.

00:05:07 Speaker_17
Leonard Maltin has Warren Beatty join the Zoom. And now it is Dick Tracy and Warren Beatty who are the same 85-year-old man in a different coat.

00:05:19 Speaker_04
I don't get it. What's going on here? I didn't place the call. It's so awful, but I love it so much.

00:05:27 Speaker_13
Seeing the second Oddball special rekindled Ryan's curiosity. He'd already been intrigued. Now he needed to know more. Why did these exist, coming 11 years apart and more than 30 years after the Dick Tracy movie came out?

00:05:43 Speaker_13
What the hell was Warren Beatty doing?

00:05:45 Speaker_17
When the second one happened, I was like, I have no idea why this was made, and I want to know everything about it.

00:06:01 Speaker_13
This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. Decades ago, before comic book characters ruled Hollywood, Warren Beatty procured the rights to Dick Tracy and never let go.

00:06:11 Speaker_13
Beatty is now 87 and still playing Dick Tracy in these unheralded, one-time-only specials airing on cable.

00:06:20 Speaker_13
Why is Warren Beatty, one of the most famous movie stars of the 20th century, spending the twilight of his career to say nothing of his life, playing a comic strip detective of dwindling renown?

00:06:33 Speaker_13
The answer includes pettiness, contract law, the fickleness of fame, and the most bedrock reality of all. One day, we all get old. So today on Decoder Ring, grab your popcorn. What's going on between Warren Beatty and Dick Tracy?

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00:08:18 Speaker_13
So why is Warren Beatty popping up as Dick Tracy on late night TV every decade or so? You'd think the easiest way to find out would be to ask him directly. But he didn't respond to our interview request.

00:08:30 Speaker_12
And honestly, it probably wouldn't have helped. The thing about Warren, from my point of view, is that he can never say a simple declarative sentence.

00:08:40 Speaker_13
The journalist Kim Masters has been covering Hollywood for decades.

00:08:44 Speaker_12
Everything is this elliptical answer. And I actually had this rule, which is never call Warren Beatty without going to the bathroom first, because you could literally sit on the phone with that guy for hours.

00:08:55 Speaker_13
Kim had this experience a number of times because for decades, Warren Beatty was right there at the center of Hollywood. Beatty was born in 1937 and got famous in the early 60s with his very first movie.

00:09:09 Speaker_13
But it was only at the end of the decade that he really found his groove.

00:09:14 Speaker_05
This year's Miss Bonnie Parker. I'm Clyde Barron. We rob banks.

00:09:19 Speaker_13
Bonnie and Clyde, which co-starred Faye Dunaway and Beatty, is widely regarded as the starter pistol for the new Hollywood era.

00:09:27 Speaker_13
When American filmmaking became fresh, gritty, urgent, unpredictable, seemingly overnight, Beatty not only starred in that film, he produced it, long before actor-producers were a commonplace.

00:09:39 Speaker_13
Over the course of the 1970s, he began shouldering more and more responsibility on a handful of commercial and critical hits. The Parallax View, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait.

00:09:52 Speaker_13
Until by the end of the decade, he was a quadruple threat, an actor, writer, producer, and director.

00:09:59 Speaker_12
But just as important to his public persona was what he was up to off screen. Warren could be very seductive, as we know, because God knows how many women he was involved with.

00:10:13 Speaker_13
Beatty was in the language of the time a womanizer, a skirt chaser, a pussy hound.

00:10:18 Speaker_13
His sexual conquests were legion, notorious, and often high-profile, including but absolutely not limited to Natalie Wood, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Cher, and Carly Simon, whose smash 1971 hit, You're So Vain, has long been rumored to be about Beatty.

00:10:36 Speaker_10
And all the girls dreamed that they'd be your partner

00:10:47 Speaker_13
All of this lent itself to Beatty's overall aura. Everyone wanted to be connected to him. Women, directors, studio executives. He was sexual, political, charming, erudite, talented, and the insouciant cherry on top, also notoriously difficult.

00:11:06 Speaker_02
I've read that I was pain in the neck. This may probably have something to do with the fact that I'm a pain in the neck.

00:11:14 Speaker_13
Beatty was a self-described control freak. He didn't have a temper. He didn't lose his cool. But he had a well-earned reputation as a slow, obsessive perfectionist.

00:11:24 Speaker_12
I mean, this is a Warren Beatty thing. In movie after movie, where he wants take after take after take, sometimes these became kind of legendary.

00:11:34 Speaker_13
Like with the 1981 movie Reds, his passion project, and a three-hour historical epic about American leftism.

00:11:42 Speaker_08
If you refuse to support the capitalist war machine, they will follow your example. And if the workers of the world stand together, the war can be stopped.

00:11:50 Speaker_13
Beatty directed, wrote, produced, and starred in the movie. Its shooting schedule, the allotted editing time, and the budget all ballooned. Beatty would have actors do 50, 60, 70, even 80 takes.

00:12:02 Speaker_13
And when the movie was released, Beatty refused to do press for it, saying the film should speak for itself. But if the production was tortured, the results were not.

00:12:12 Speaker_08
For best achievement in directing, the winner is Warren Beatty.

00:12:20 Speaker_13
After winning the Oscar for Best Director, Beatty was seemingly on top of the world, an all-powerful Hollywood legend. And he followed it up by walking away. He waited six years to appear in another movie. And when he returned, it didn't go great.

00:12:39 Speaker_08
Hello, adventure.

00:12:41 Speaker_11
Ladies and gentlemen, we're about to begin the descent into Ishtar.

00:12:46 Speaker_12
Ishtar, you know, was the infamous bomb that everybody had heard of in that era.

00:12:50 Speaker_13
Ishtar was a comedy written and directed by Elaine May and co-starring Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. It's actually not bad, but that didn't matter. Its box office failure was a national news story, and Warren Beatty took much of the blame.

00:13:03 Speaker_13
The backroom Hollywood whispers started. He was a pain in the ass. He was distracted by women. He hadn't had a hit in a decade. Did the kids even know who Warren Beatty was?

00:13:15 Speaker_12
Was it a risk to let him direct again? He didn't want to be known as difficult. He could get really angry. If you asked him about that for one story or another, he would get really mad. But the truth is, everybody knew.

00:13:28 Speaker_12
He wouldn't do an interview without going over his lighting. He was just extremely particular about many things. And so here in Hollywood, I think there was a flashing yellow light.

00:13:39 Speaker_13
Beatty needed a comeback. And it was at this point that he turned to another middle-aged character who also had a lot of name recognition, but nowhere near the juice he once did. Dick Tracy debuted in the funny pages of the Detroit Mirror in 1931.

00:14:02 Speaker_13
In an era when newspaper comic strips tended to be funny, he immediately stood out.

00:14:08 Speaker_15
At the time, there's nothing actually talking about crime.

00:14:10 Speaker_13
Matt Live co-owns a nonprofit comic book store and educational space in Florida and is a longtime Dick Tracy fan.

00:14:17 Speaker_15
Really, up until Dick Tracy, the only crime stopper that you had was like Zorro. Green Hornet wouldn't come out until later. The Phantom hadn't even come out. There weren't superheroes yet.

00:14:27 Speaker_13
But Dick Tracy was a proto-superhero. He was created by the cartoonist Chester Gould, who found inspiration in the city where he lived — Prohibition-era Chicago.

00:14:36 Speaker_09
— Ganglords move freely here. Al Capone enters Chicago court at height of his career and leaves still king of bootleggers, his reign of terror still to take its toll of dead in an underworld at war.

00:14:49 Speaker_15
And that was the thing Chester Gold wanted to do is he was so mad about the mob running Chicago, right, in the late 20s and early 30s, that he wanted to create a good cop who actually wasn't getting paid off by the mob, who wasn't being bribed, somebody who could come in and clean up the streets.

00:15:06 Speaker_13
So Gould dreamed up a clean-cut paragon of decency, an Elliot Ness type with a powerful punch and a cool two-way radio wristwatch. Motivated by his love for the pure Tess Trueheart, he was a cop who always got his man.

00:15:23 Speaker_13
And he was named... Plainclothes Tracy.

00:15:26 Speaker_15
You know, plainclothes like a plainclothes detective.

00:15:28 Speaker_13
Gould quickly sold the concept to the Tribune Company, who loved it, but had a suggestion.

00:15:33 Speaker_15
Don't call him Plainclothes Tracy, call it Dick Tracy. It'll jump off the page more, and Dick is another name for detective.

00:15:41 Speaker_13
Dick Tracy was born. Every day he would appear in the newspaper, just four boxes at a time, in serialized storylines that stretched on for weeks.

00:15:50 Speaker_13
His escapades involved gruesome plot turns and vivid villains like Flat Top, whose head was flat, and Bebe Eyes, whose eyes were small, and Prune Face, who was exorbitantly wrinkled.

00:16:03 Speaker_13
Tracy and his rogues gallery became so successful, they ran in 680 newspapers, with an estimated readership of 25 million. There was a radio serial, B-movies, a TV show, and Dick Tracy paper airplanes, tin cars, and decoder rings.

00:16:22 Speaker_13
And when comic strip superheroes finally did come along, Tracy was their obvious competition.

00:16:28 Speaker_15
You may have heard that Batman is the world's greatest detective. That's 1939. Honestly, that's a dig at Dick Tracy because the popularity of the character was so large.

00:16:39 Speaker_13
But as the 20th century wore on, Dick Tracy and Batman's paths started to diverge. While Batman's star rose as he appeared in a goofy and beloved TV show in the late 1960s, plans for a Dick Tracy series fizzled out.

00:16:54 Speaker_13
In the 1980s, Tracy was still famous, but he was on the decline, which is when he caught the eye of a man in a similar situation.

00:17:03 Speaker_07
Dick Tracy is a great old American comic strip. And I thought, I gotta make a movie of this. This could be fun.

00:17:12 Speaker_13
Warren Beatty had grown up reading Dick Tracy. In 1985, he signed a contract with Tribune Media, the company that's owned Dick Tracy since the beginning, giving him the televisual rights to the character.

00:17:25 Speaker_13
The newspaper strip is a separate thing, and it would and has continued. After Ishtar flopped, Beatty committed to the project.

00:17:34 Speaker_13
In 1988, Disney greenlit a Dick Tracy movie, an expensive and flashy tentpole production that Beatty would produce, direct, co-write, and star in.

00:17:44 Speaker_03
Take the bad men away. They scare me.

00:17:46 Speaker_10
Up, bad man. Get out of here.

00:17:49 Speaker_13
If you've never seen the film, the last 20 years of comic adaptations will have taught you to expect something dark and gritty. But that's not the movie Warren Beatty made.

00:17:58 Speaker_06
It's a naive kind of subject. So I'm going to make a picture that was dealt in primary emotions, primary colors. That was a kind of a sweetness to Dick Tracy that I, you know, I always kind of liked.

00:18:11 Speaker_13
And it is sweet. And a little snoozy. It looks fantastic, though. Like a comic strip come to life. Beatty used painted backdrops and the simple bright colors that were used in the Sunday papers in the late 1930s.

00:18:24 Speaker_13
So the action seems to be popping off a printed page. It's a neon noir that's creatively faithful to the comic, right down to its villains.

00:18:33 Speaker_11
I want them dead, both of them. I want this no-face dead, and I want Tracy dead. What's the matter? You bums forgot how to kill people?

00:18:40 Speaker_13
That's Al Pacino as the main antagonist, big boy Caprice. Beatty used his Rolodex to further flesh the film out. Dustin Hoffman and James Caan played lesser bad guys. Stephen Sondheim, who'd worked with Beatty on Reds, composed five original songs.

00:18:58 Speaker_13
Two were performed by the nightclub singer Breathless Mahoney. who in the film's flashiest bit of casting was played by Madonna, who Beatty immediately started dating in real life.

00:19:15 Speaker_13
During the shoot, Beatty was up to his same perfectionistic, controlling ways. Kid Masters again.

00:19:22 Speaker_12
It became a real thing in Hollywood that the filming of Dick Tracy was going on and on. There are delays, there are budget overruns.

00:19:33 Speaker_13
Still, Disney was betting big on the film.

00:19:35 Speaker_09
As the movie's release date approached, they put another $50 million into promoting it.

00:19:48 Speaker_13
There were Happy Meal tie-ins and Disney World attractions. There were Dick Tracy watches and two-way radios and action figures. Before it even came out, Disney was already talking to Beatty about a sequel.

00:20:00 Speaker_13
The film was so well-hyped that a week before its release, an industry tracking survey found 100% of potential moviegoers were aware it was coming out. The movie opened on June 15, 1990. It got decent reviews.

00:20:21 Speaker_13
It made $50 million in 10 days, more than any film in Disney's history. And it was ultimately nominated for seven Oscars, all of which makes it sound like a success. But that's not how it was received.

00:20:36 Speaker_12
It was clearly a disappointment in the end.

00:20:39 Speaker_13
Dick Tracy had the misfortune of coming out just a year after another big comic adaptation, Tim Burton's Batman, starring Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. Batman made $400 million and half a billion more in merchandise.

00:20:53 Speaker_13
And Dick Tracy looked like a dud in comparison. In fact, it barely broke even because of how much the studio had spent promoting it.

00:21:01 Speaker_13
A Disney executive would even bemoan Dick Tracy in a widely leaked memo as being exactly the kind of overblown movie Disney shouldn't be making.

00:21:11 Speaker_12
The gist is, you know, we're spending too much and movies like Dick Tracy are bad and we've got to get everything under control. We're taking these huge swings and they're very dangerous.

00:21:22 Speaker_13
Beatty was reportedly furious. He was proud of Dick Tracy. It had made $140 million. It even won three Academy Awards. But the film's reputation as a disappointment was cemented. Any talk of a sequel evaporated. And that seemed... Like, that was that.

00:21:42 Speaker_13
The yellow trench coat might have been hanging in Beatty's closet, but he was working more slowly than ever on other things. He appeared in only four movies over the next 25 years, and Dick Tracy seemed to be on ice. Literally.

00:21:58 Speaker_13
The character popped up in a Disney TV special called Dreams on Ice, starring Nancy Kerrigan. In one segment, she plays Tess Trueheart, Dick Tracy's long-suffering girlfriend, alongside a figure skater dressed as Dick Tracy.

00:22:12 Speaker_13
That was the only time Dick Tracy appeared in anything for two decades. And then in 2012, one night on TCM.

00:22:24 Speaker_03
Pomegranates. Pomegranates. Pomegranates. Pomegranates. Pomegranates.

00:22:30 Speaker_13
What the heck was going on? We investigate after the break. This episode is brought to you by Z-Biotics. Let's face it, after a night with drinks, it's tough to bounce back the next day. You have to make a choice.

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That means with Discover, you could turn $150 cash back into $300. It pays to Discover. See terms at discover.com slash credit card. So the first mysterious Dick Tracy special arrived as if out of nowhere in 2012.

00:24:41 Speaker_13
The second one, which tiptoed out 11 years later, also came with no notice or advance press. People on social media and gossipy Hollywood message boards immediately started trying to piece together why.

00:24:56 Speaker_13
People like Ryan Estrada, who you heard from earlier. And Ryan says that a theory emerged.

00:25:02 Speaker_17
As you look through it, people started talking about apparently this was a rights grab.

00:25:07 Speaker_13
The idea was that Warren Beatty was making these specials in order to hold onto the rights to Dick Tracy. And he could do that, it was suspected, because the original contract granting him those rights must have some kind of a loophole.

00:25:23 Speaker_17
I'll bet that in the contract terms, it said that the rights will reverse unless a Dick Tracy movie or Dick Tracy special is made. So he literally called it Dick Tracy special, not even the Dick Tracy special.

00:25:34 Speaker_13
And you know what? Ryan's onto something. And to explain exactly what, we have to talk contract law.

00:25:45 Speaker_01
If you have a film that is going to be based on a character or a set of characters that are in existing works, you have to get rights to those existing works.

00:25:56 Speaker_13
Celia Muller is a media lawyer and self-described copyright nerd. She took a look at the legal documents pertaining to how Warren Beatty got the rights to Dick Tracy in the first place.

00:26:06 Speaker_01
So Warren Beatty, he enters a contract with Chicago Tribune Media in 1985. He secures the film and television rights. This kind of agreement happens all the time in Hollywood.

00:26:17 Speaker_01
The copyright owner is saying to the rights holder here, you can hold my stuff for a minute. You can hold my stuff for X amount of time under X conditions and you can do this with it.

00:26:29 Speaker_01
It just so happens that this contract, that this contract said that you can hold this stuff forever.

00:26:36 Speaker_13
There's no end date. Warren Beatty can theoretically hold on to Dick Tracy until the day he dies. But there is one complicated way the Tribune Media can wrest the rights back.

00:26:49 Speaker_01
If Beatty has not done anything with the IP within five years, then Tribune Media can send a formal notice saying we want our stuff back. And if he still doesn't do anything with with the rights within two years, then they get the rights back.

00:27:05 Speaker_13
So to get real concrete, the contract says that if Warren Beatty hasn't used the Dick Tracy IP, or intellectual property, for five or more years, Tribune Media can send him a letter that they want the character back. Then a two-year timer starts.

00:27:24 Speaker_13
Beatty must begin shooting a new movie, TV series, or television special before that two-year timer goes off, or else the rights go back to Tribune Media. Now, fast forward to the mid-2000s.

00:27:38 Speaker_13
Beatty hasn't done anything with Tracy except for a Disney on Ice special for nearly two decades. Then a story appeared in the Hollywood trade papers. The Tribune Media was working on a potential new Dick Tracy TV series.

00:27:52 Speaker_01
Beatty was publicly miffed. Part of me wonders whether Beatty just was ticked off by this and decided to push back.

00:28:00 Speaker_13
He sued, saying Tribune Media hadn't given him proper notice to reclaim the rights. And the courts agreed with him. Dick Tracy was still his. But then Tribune Media tried again.

00:28:12 Speaker_01
They sent him a very, very formal letter meeting all of the requirements of a contract that says we want Dick Tracy back.

00:28:19 Speaker_13
That's when the two-year timer started. Make a movie, TV show or special with Dick Tracy or forever lose the rights. One year and 50 weeks later, Warren Beatty started shooting Dick Tracy's special. Once in a while, you know, I'll have a blueberry.

00:28:39 Speaker_13
That could have been it. But there's a little more to the story. Because when Tribune Media learned of the special and its content, their response was, and I'm paraphrasing legal documents here, What the hell is this? How is this a TV special?

00:28:55 Speaker_13
This is a clip show.

00:28:56 Speaker_01
This doesn't count. This was supposed to be a contract about making movies, not about Warren Beatty putting on the Dick Tracy costume and, you know, sitting down to ramble for half an hour.

00:29:07 Speaker_13
Filings and suits and countersuits start to fly. One even contains a dictionary definition of the word special. They all ultimately wind up with a judge who issues a summary judgment on the whole thing in 2011.

00:29:20 Speaker_01
The judge says, OK, look, we're really sorry. We're really sorry, Tribune Media.

00:29:26 Speaker_01
But, you know, despite the fact that you're saying we don't think that this special was very special, you agreed that the Dick Tracy character could show up in a Disney on Ice performance with Nancy Kerrigan and that that counted as a special.

00:29:41 Speaker_01
So this has to count as a special, too.

00:29:43 Speaker_13
In other words, Warren Beatty held onto the rights to Dick Tracy because of a three-minute icecapades act from 1995 that, trust me, is very difficult to find a copy of.

00:29:58 Speaker_13
All of this contractual wrangling is why Warren Beatty started playing Dick Tracy again, after nearly two decades of silence. He had to, or he would lose him. Use him or lose him. But there is something this contract does not explain.

00:30:18 Speaker_13
Why did Warren Beatty care so much about not losing Dick Tracy? He'd made a movie with a character already, decades ago. Why not move on? Why not let the character go? Why not take a payout or a credit on some new TV show?

00:30:35 Speaker_13
Why spend one's precious time on what feel like late-night cable TV pranks? The legal documents cannot explain this. But as Ryan Estrada read about these specials on the internet, he thought maybe he could.

00:30:50 Speaker_17
So basically my thing was just that these specials are the pettiest thing anyone in Hollywood has ever done in public.

00:31:00 Speaker_13
Ryan has spent a lot of time thinking about these specials, and the only way he can understand their existence and quality is if Warren Beatty is holding a grudge.

00:31:11 Speaker_13
Beatty's a control freak who doesn't want to be told what he can and cannot do, and he remembers all the people who maligned his movie, refused to make a sequel, and tried to yank his rights away.

00:31:24 Speaker_17
I imagine, like, 40 years later, he's, like, mad at some, like, bean-counting whippersnapper, that he's like, I am gonna spend the rest of my life making sure that if I don't get to make a Dick Tracy product, no one else ever will again.

00:31:39 Speaker_13
Ryan thinks this is what Beatty cares about, not only about getting to keep Dick Tracy, but keeping anyone else from having him.

00:31:49 Speaker_17
He's just like making sure, like, I don't want to turn on Disney Plus and have a Chris Pratt, Dick Tracy show on. I'm the only one.

00:31:57 Speaker_13
And so Beatty is squatting on the character, not trying to make something new or good, just trying to make something easy.

00:32:05 Speaker_17
Like he's literally said, I'm going to do this whole special without leaving my couch. We're doing it all in Zoom. No cameras have to come to my house. Easiest thing in the world.

00:32:15 Speaker_13
I have to admit, when I first heard this theory in a semi-viral tweet of Ryan's, I found it juicy and fun and convincing. Not only does it explain the special's quality, it also makes sense of what Warren Beatty has allowed to happen on his watch.

00:32:31 Speaker_13
Total Dick Tracy neglect. The character is now barely known to most anyone under 50. An intentional plan to strip Dick Tracy of his value could hardly have worked better. And yet I no longer think petty vindictiveness can explain what's going on here.

00:32:50 Speaker_13
And that's because I talked to someone who worked on these specials.

00:33:08 Speaker_18
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00:34:09 Speaker_13
Have you heard about double nomics? It's OK if you haven't. It's extremely niche and practiced by Discover. Here's an example. Discover automatically doubles the cash back earned on your credit card at the end of your first year with Cash Back Match.

00:34:27 Speaker_13
That means with Discover, you could turn $150 cash back into $300. It pays to Discover. See terms at discover.com slash credit card. Aaron Machnowski wasn't even a year old when the movie Dick Tracy arrived in theaters.

00:34:45 Speaker_13
But a couple decades later, fresh out of college, he wanted to work in show business. And so he went out to L.A. and answered an anonymous posting on a talent agency's job list.

00:34:55 Speaker_16
For something along the lines of a, I don't know, A-list, quote-unquote, writer-director seeks assistance.

00:35:03 Speaker_13
He got a response telling him to meet at a Starbucks.

00:35:06 Speaker_16
And then was told to follow these labyrinthine directions to go into a back hallway, up an elevator, to a room.

00:35:14 Speaker_13
He was told that in about an hour, Warren Beatty would walk through the room. He was to stop him and ask about the assistant job.

00:35:23 Speaker_16
When he came out and I was kind of very nervous and kind of jumped up and was like, oh, you know, Mr. Beatty, hi, my name is Aaron, et cetera. And he said, oh, you know, I think we both went to Northwestern, right? I was like, yeah, I did.

00:35:37 Speaker_16
He's like, yeah, I went there for a year before I left to go to New York to become a degenerate. And then he said, oh, I have this other meeting. Can you wait here for a bit?

00:35:49 Speaker_16
And then I proceeded to wait for, I think, five or six hours until he came back out and was like, yeah, I'll tell you what, why don't you come back on Monday and let's give this a go.

00:36:01 Speaker_13
So Aaron became Warren Beatty's assistant. This was after the first Dick Tracy special filmed in 2008, and Beatty's attention was squarely on his next film, Rules Don't Apply, which was to be his first movie in 15 years.

00:36:13 Speaker_13
Aaron started working closely with Beatty. He became a co-producer on Rules Don't Apply, which came out in 2016 and flopped. The same year, Beatty mispresented the Best Picture Oscar to La La Land instead of Moonlight.

00:36:27 Speaker_13
Aaron says that Beatty turned his attention back to Dick Tracy in 2020, in the early days of the pandemic. It's not clear if it was prompted by a legal notification this time. Tribune Media has changed hands and fractured since the original lawsuits.

00:36:41 Speaker_13
But if keeping the rights was the motivation for a second special, Aaron says that swiftly slipped into the background.

00:36:48 Speaker_16
Maybe that was sort of the genesis of why we would start to think about this. But as anyone would tell you, I think that has worked with Warren. He doesn't do anything that is mailed in.

00:37:06 Speaker_13
Aaron is not the only person I spoke with who worked with Beatty on these specials, but most of them didn't want to be quoted. And I get it. He's a legend. They like him. He's a good guy to know. Why risk maybe pissing him off by talking to a reporter?

00:37:21 Speaker_13
But what I gathered in those conversations echoes what Aaron said. Dick Tracy's special, the one that came out first in 2012, it filmed on the Disney lot.

00:37:33 Speaker_13
Beatty made sure the table he and Leonard Maltin sit at had the exact same proportions as Charlie Rose's table, because it needed to be the best.

00:37:42 Speaker_13
And to shoot Dick Tracy's special, Beatty hired Emmanuelle Lubezki, a cinematographer already acclaimed for shooting children of men, who's gone on to win three Oscars.

00:37:56 Speaker_13
And while the second special, Dick Tracy Zooms In, does not have an Oscar-winning cinematographer, there were still no shortcuts.

00:38:04 Speaker_16
He's a very exacting writer, a very exacting creative. He is incredibly detail-oriented and will agonize over, you know, the smallest of punctuation in a script.

00:38:19 Speaker_13
Before writing a word, though, Beatty instructed Aaron to comb through all the old Dick Tracy movies and sent him clips for inspiration.

00:38:34 Speaker_13
And when Beatty landed on the idea of the special taking the form of a Zoom call, it wasn't because Zoom calls are easy to record.

00:38:43 Speaker_16
Dick Tracy is a character that's known for technology and using gadgets in his crime-stopping escapades. And so he thought, well, here's Zoom. That could be interesting.

00:38:53 Speaker_13
And Beatty didn't just sign into Zoom and hit record. He shot the special with the crew on real cameras over the course of multiple days, doing all his customary numerous takes with both Leonard Maltin and a new participant, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz.

00:39:11 Speaker_13
And then they edited the footage for five or six months.

00:39:17 Speaker_16
It's amazing how much time you can spend editing a half hour of TV.

00:39:21 Speaker_13
But was there any point in this process where you're like, this is so much work and it's going to air in like the middle of the night on TCN? Like, was there any part of you that was ever like, wow.

00:39:30 Speaker_16
Um, yeah, I, I, well, I guess the obvious answer is like, yes, but less so in, oof. I think what more impressed me was the level of dedication that Warren put into this project.

00:39:47 Speaker_16
It just seems like such a, it's like such a niche little piece of the Dick Tracy story. Like I said, he can't take anything lightly, creatively, that he is involved in.

00:40:01 Speaker_13
Aaron is saying, look at it this way. Here's a guy who never half-asses anything, who just doesn't know how. And I see that. But it doesn't account for this important thing. A thing that it would be more uplifting to forget. The specials are not good.

00:40:20 Speaker_13
They are fascinating. They are strange. They are semi-watchable. but not good.

00:40:33 Speaker_19
Hello. Are you there, sir? I'm here.

00:40:39 Speaker_13
But this, to me, is really why these specials are intriguing. Forget pettiness. What we have here is a window into a deeper psychology. Warren Beatty works slowly. But in this case, he was forced by a legal loophole and a deadline to spring into action.

00:40:58 Speaker_13
It's like he tricked himself into getting to work. But why did he want to work on this? What is yoking him to Dick Tracy?

00:41:08 Speaker_13
I think you could hear part of the answer in how Beatty talks about Dick Tracy in this interview from 1998, almost a decade after the movie came out.

00:41:18 Speaker_05
What struck me about this guy, this guy Dick Tracy had been around for a billion years, was that he just kept never getting married. And I think that's the thing that fueled me on Dick Tracy. that he was a good guy, basically.

00:41:31 Speaker_05
And, you know, he really was a sort of a star detective. And he ran around in his yellow coat and hat, and he didn't really make much advance in his personal life.

00:41:44 Speaker_13
What Warren Beatty found interesting about Dick Tracy in the first place, what he thought he could sink his teeth into, was that Tracy was this decent, professionally accomplished star whose personal life was a mess.

00:41:59 Speaker_13
And that, that could have described Warren Beatty, too. Remember his reputation as a womanizer? When Dick Tracy came out, he didn't seem that troubled by it. He was dating Madonna. But on his very next movie, he went and found his own Tess Trueheart.

00:42:15 Speaker_02
Too fast to put a ring on your finger?

00:42:18 Speaker_13
Nothing's too fast that fits. In 1992, on the set of the movie Bugsy, he got together with his wife Annette Bening. They have four kids, and they've been together ever since.

00:42:29 Speaker_13
With Dick Tracy, Warren Beatty solved his personal life in fiction before he did it in fact. And the two have other overlaps. They were born in the same decade, for goodness sakes. They grew up together. They were famous together.

00:42:43 Speaker_13
And that also means they're getting old and less famous together. So, sure, Dick Tracy is a business proposition. He's a piece of IP at a moment when literally any IP is valuable. but it's also personal. And what's personal is not always rational.

00:43:04 Speaker_13
So Warren Beatty is frittering away the end of his career, not because of some grudge or some artistic vision, but because of a long-term attachment to a character and an obsessive way of working he just can't change.

00:43:20 Speaker_13
He's holding on, even if Dick Tracy and Warren Beatty both might be better served for Beatty to just move on. Which actually he's going to be forced to do one way or another soon. Dick Tracy is going into the public domain in 2027.

00:43:37 Speaker_13
And that means all this effort to keep the rights It's for nothing. In three years, anyone can have the character, no matter what Warren Beatty does. It's all kind of poignant. And so when you start looking for it, is the second special.

00:43:56 Speaker_13
Like, take this exchange in which Dick Tracy, as played by Warren Beatty, tells Warren Beatty he thinks they should collaborate on a new Dick Tracy project.

00:44:07 Speaker_04
You thinking about making a movie? I don't know what to think about making movies nowadays. Maybe another movie's a good idea. If you're thinking about making another movie about me, do you think you might just make it a little more real?

00:44:23 Speaker_04
Not with pink and blue streets. And would you think about maybe getting somebody a little younger than you to play me? But I don't know. I'm not sure. Maybe I should be played old by somebody who's able to do things old people can't ordinarily do.

00:44:42 Speaker_04
You've got the final say. You own the rights.

00:44:48 Speaker_13
It's impossible to tell their voices apart, but that's the point. It's like it's Warren Beatty's interior monologue.

00:44:55 Speaker_13
It's someone who used to be younger and more famous and more powerful and more productive talking to himself about whether time has passed him by or if he can still do the extraordinary. So long as he holds on to the rights. This is Decoder Ring.

00:45:23 Speaker_13
I'm Willa Paskin. While we're on the subject of comic book characters on TV, I wanted to tell you about a special Decoder Ring bonus episode for Slate Plus members available right now.

00:45:33 Speaker_13
Maybe you've heard about the new HBO series, The Penguin, about the Batman villain starring a barely recognizable Colin Farrell in the lead role as the waddling title character.

00:45:44 Speaker_13
To make that transformation happen, Farrell needed a lot of makeup, prosthetics, and a fat suit. The man responsible for that is the veteran makeup artist Mike Marino.

00:45:55 Speaker_13
Senior producer Katie Shepard interviewed Marino for her recent episode on fat suits. It was a fascinating conversation, but we couldn't squeeze it in.

00:46:03 Speaker_13
Now that The Penguin is streaming on Max, we wanted to share it as a bonus episode just for Slate Plus listeners. Here's a sneak peek.

00:46:10 Speaker_14
A penguin, as we know it, has a certain shape. And it wasn't so much like, hey, we need to make someone look overweight. It was more like, how do we get this person to look more like what everyone recognizes as a penguin, but in human form?

00:46:26 Speaker_13
If you aren't already a Slate Plus member, you can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free at the top of the Decoder Ring show page. Or visit slate.com slash decoder plus to get access wherever you listen.

00:46:41 Speaker_13
We're going to be releasing more bonus episodes soon, including answers to your mailbag questions. So sign up now. And don't forget, Slate Plus members also get to listen to our show and every other Slate podcast without any ads.

00:46:54 Speaker_13
And they'll get unlimited access to Slate's website. Again, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free or visit slate.com slash Decodering Plus to sign up. This episode was written by me. It was edited by Lacey Roberts and Evan Chung.

00:47:09 Speaker_13
It was produced by Sophie Codner. I produced a co-diring with Evan, Katie Shepard, and Max Friedman. Derek John is executive producer. Merit Jacob is senior technical director. I'd like to thank Ed Catto, Stephanie Zakirak, and Rachel Strom.

00:47:22 Speaker_13
Peter Biskin's biography of Warren Beatty, star, was also essential to our research. And we'll link to the various archival interviews we used on our show page. See you in two weeks.