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March 28, 2024, 06:41:33 PM

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Better Call Saul - the sixth (and final) season

Started by Blue Jam, February 24, 2021, 12:26:37 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Blue Jam

This is really nice- Vince Gilligan and Paul Donachie on some choice examples of the cinematography from S6:

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/06/awards-insider-better-call-saul-shot-list-vince-gilligan

Yes, that Planet of the Apes bit was totally intentional.

up_the_hampipe

Quote from: Blue Jam on June 22, 2022, 02:46:45 PMAMC have made Thomas Schnauz's script for "Plan and Execution" available. Enjoy:

https://deadline.com/2022/06/better-call-saul-season-6-script-plan-and-execution-thomas-schnauz-it-starts-on-the-page-1235048703/

Fascinating read, cheers for that! I wasn't expecting to see descriptions on how the audience might/should react, but it was quite funny. Holy shit, what the fuck?!


Blue Jam

The scripts for BCS are always worth a read because with the stage directions they always read like a novel. There's a lengthy discussion of the art of writing stage directions in one of the recent BCS Insider podcasts, the writers take this very seriously!

Here are a couple of "script to screen" things AMC have put out in this massive Emmys push they're doing right now:

"Nacho's last speech" from "Rock and Hard Place":


"When the candle flickers" from "Plan and Execution":


The table readings are also a lot of fun (I believe these were from the DVD extras):

"Uno":


(awwww they're all so young)

"Switch":


I love the way no-one is able to keep a straight face at Mark Proksch's "HEY! IT'S ME!"

I hope the scripts are eventually released as a book. It'd be a big and expensive book but I'd buy it.

Blue Jam

#1145
Here, have a few more- "Five-O", "Bingo", "Klick", "Chicanery" and "Winner":

https://sites.google.com/site/tvwriting/us-drama/show-collections/better-call-saul

Looks like these five plus "Plan and Execution" are all legit and may have been put out by AMC for the Emmys and that. Would be good to have a complete collection as a book or even an e-book.

Blue Jam

Quote from: Blue Jam on June 20, 2022, 07:22:13 AMEven The Bob is getting a bit impatient here:

SPOILERY INTERVIEW CLIP WITH SPOILERY URL

It looks like
Spoiler alert
the name of this new character and the legendary guest star playing them
[close]
has been revealed:

ANOTHER SPOILERY URL

Spoiler alert
I guess she was attending the Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony in the capacity of a cast member then!
[close]

Blue Jam

New season 6B teaser:


Spoiler alert
Bob doing his deeper, extra gravelly Nobody voice there. There's already been plenty of speculation that the way this speaker sounds older and more serious than Jimmy or Saul suggests this is the voice of Gene Takavic, possibly talking to Jeff, and I suspect that may be right. Could also be a complete red herring of course.
[close]

Just two weeks to go now...

Blue Jam

The title of 608 is

Spoiler alert
"Point and Shoot"
[close]

While for 609 it's

Spoiler alert
"Fun and Games"
[close]

JamesTC

Saw somebody point out that Bob's heart attack was during the filming of Episode 8. Meaning that if the worst happened and the show had to end, we'd have been left with this current cliffhanger as the end of the show.

DrGreggles

They'd have just got Ted McGinley in to play Jimmy for the last few episodes

Blue Jam

#1151
Another teaser:


Spoiler alert
They've re-cast Jeff the cab driver! Original actor Don Harvey apparently had another commitment. Better than delaying the series any further I guess but that's a shame, he was great in that role, simultaneously child-like and menacing. Having to recast the part entirely suggests Jeff will be making more than a fleeting appearance

Apparently New Jeff is Pat Healy, who previously worked with Odenkirk on The Post.
[close]

Elderly Sumo Prophecy

This mid season break thing is getting right on my tits to be honest. The hype has gone.

dontpaintyourteeth

At least it isn't a year long break this time, like the Hank-on-the-toilet cliffhanger.

Quote from: dontpaintyourteeth on July 03, 2022, 02:38:20 PMAt least it isn't a year long break this time, like the Hank-on-the-toilet cliffhanger.

That's how you get piles.

Blue Jam

Yeah, I'm pissed off at Vince and Peter for letting Bob laze about in a hospital bed when they could have cracked the whip and had him back at the grindstone

;) Just one week now...

Blue Jam

Actually I am a bit pissed off at the revelation that

Spoiler alert
Don Harvey couldn't film BCS because he's under contract to HBO for We Own This City and couldn't be released for an AMC show. Grrrrr, you need to LWYR UP, Jeff:

https://movieweb.com/better-call-saul-teaser-jeff-recasting/

Might have to check out We Own This City though!
[close]

JamesTC

Would probably never have gotten the chance to sit a little over a meter away from him while he chatted about his career for an hour if he had never nearly died and delayed the series, so I'm okay with it.

niat

Quote from: Blue Jam on July 03, 2022, 03:33:02 PMMight have to check out We Own This City though!

You definitely should, it's excellent. If you liked The Wire, it's a must-watch.

Blue Jam

Nice to see Kim has got a job managing The Lionesses:



Six more days...

Blue Jam

Official 6B trailer just dropped:


As you were probably expecting it gives away almost fuck-all, but at the end there is one shot of
Spoiler alert
a be-mulleted and be-combovered Saul in his Trump Towers mansion, padding about in his underoos and sock garters while deciding which garish shirt to wear to his tacky little strip-mall office that day. Looks like a time-jump, and that's definitely a deeper, raspier, Saul-ier voice he's using too.
[close]

Blue Jam

Spoilery still:

Spoiler alert


Saul never had guns like that but I guess you can't ask a cardiac patient to lay off the exercise and eat more Cinnabons can you? Looks like we'll actually get to see Saul living in that ghastly mansion then, and find out why dear sweet Jimmy became the kind of person who'd actually want a house like this.

Good to see the dodgy combover has landed. This has made me as happy as biggy.
[close]

NoSleep


poo


Old Nehamkin

Quote from: poo on July 08, 2022, 10:19:22 AMWhen dis start again?

Will be available on UK netflix this coming Tuesday morning.

mjwilson



Blue Jam

Thanks for that @dontpaintyourteeth, but does anyone know that paywall workaround? Love Racy, should be a good 'un.

Meanwhile the new Employee Training web series starts on Monday on AMC and the AMC YouTube channel and this time it's... the UNM film students! Yesssssss!

https://mobile.twitter.com/BetterCallSaul/status/1545466494439411712

dontpaintyourteeth

Quote from: Blue Jam on July 09, 2022, 12:28:11 PMThanks for that @dontpaintyourteeth, but does anyone know that paywall workaround? Love Racy, should be a good 'un.

Meanwhile the new Employee Training web series starts on Monday on AMC and the AMC YouTube channel and this time it's... the UNM film students! Yesssssss!

https://mobile.twitter.com/BetterCallSaul/status/1545466494439411712

bugger, didn't know about the paywall. hope someone knows a workaround- it's a good interview

Dex Sawash

LOS ANGELES — Rhea Seehorn insists she is a rule follower. And not the kind who, like her character Kim Wexler on AMC's "Better
Call Saul," follows some rules in public while bending others in secret to whatever ends she believes are just.
She never sneaks a grape from the salad bar. She stands on the foot-shaped stickers at the airport to ensure proper social distance. She
becomes enraged when someone cuts in line.
"I have an issue with people thinking they're better than anyone else," Seehorn said over coffee and eggs at a Beverly Hills cafe, one of
two times we met around the Los Angeles area last month. "It makes my blood boil in a way that I think is a bit irrational."
This made for a fine line, I suggested, between her and her character, a lawyer who faces dire consequences for her increasingly
Machiavellian machinations when "Saul" returns for its final run on Monday. Kim has that reaction toward people who flout the social
contract, too. Seehorn acknowledged as much, but there was an important distinction, she said.
"The problem is, Kim's ideals aren't off," she said. "But the way she's going about them is."
Across five and a half seasons, Kim's long slide toward perdition has become arguably the narrative keystone of the series. It wasn't
always that way. When it began, "Saul," a prequel to "Breaking Bad," seemed primarily focused on the transformation of the slippery
but fundamentally decent Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) into Albuquerque's sleaziest lawyer, Saul Goodman. Kim's ultimate role was
uncertain then, even to the writers.
"We had no idea, when we started, how important her character was going to be," said Peter Gould, the showrunner and a co-creator.
"If you watch the pilot of the show, she has probably three lines of dialogue."
It soon became clear, however, that Seehorn's character, who began (outwardly) as a straight arrow with a promising legal career,
would be integral to Jimmy's metamorphosis. Like Jimmy, Kim was breaking bad. Unlike Jimmy, though, Kim never appears in
"Breaking Bad," which has led many fans to assume the worst. The stakes have always been potentially higher for her than for the guy
with his name in the title.
That seems like a lot to carry, given that "Saul" is one of the most critically acclaimed series on television. But if it is, Seehorn, 50, who
has been acting on screens and on stages since the '90s, handles it gracefully. Unlike the tight-lipped, inscrutable Kim, Seehorn isn't
afraid to be vulnerable, either professionally or, as it turns out, in conversation. She has no problem, for example, talking at length
about a rash. She is funny, and has a blinding, unguarded smile that made me wonder if I had ever actually seen Kim Wexler's teeth
(all those tooth-brushing scenes notwithstanding).
"Kim would think I was a giant dork," she said. "She would not hang out with me at all."
Still, there was something Kim-like beneath the dorkiness. Several times during our conversations, she acknowledged feeling as if she
were getting away with something, as if all the colleagues, critics and Emmys forecasters must be lying. She wasn't breaking rules.
But like Kim, she fought back a nagging fear, she said, that someday, somehow, she was going to be found out.
"I feel like I walk around in the world and pretend to be a normal person," she said. "And I'm not."
Sign up for the Watching newsletter, for Times subscribers
only. Streaming TV and movie recommendations from critic
Margaret Lyons and friends. Try the Watching newsletter for 4
weeks.
7/9/22, 8:18 AM Rhea Seehorn Is Getting Away With It - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/arts/television/rhea-seehorn-better-call-saul.html 2/5
PERCHED ATOP the Brentwood hills with views across Los Angeles, the Getty Center seemed like a good place to ruminate on lofty
questions of art, ego and fraud. We met there at Seehorn's suggestion, which made sense: She earned a degree in studio art before
pursuing acting full-time. She still paints whenever she can.
Unwittingly, she had also chosen the opening week of an exhibition of a newly restored Willem de Kooning painting, "Woman-Ochre"
(1955), which had been stolen from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 1985. The thieves were most likely a middle-aged
married couple, schoolteachers, who in broad daylight walked into the gallery, cut the painting from its frame with a razor and took it
home, where it hung in their bedroom until they died. (It wasn't recovered until 2017, at an estate sale.)
They sounded a lot like Kim and Jimmy: Kim especially has derived an evident, at times erotic thrill from secretly breaking the law
with Jimmy. Unlike this couple, though, Kim hasn't been able to stop. Her particular delusion was to think that she could commit
crimes, however justifiable in her mind, without eroding some small part of her moral integrity.
"Based on what she came from and the way she views the world, she thought she could tip the scale slightly in the world and right
some wrongs," Seehorn said. "And it became out of control."
Seehorn came up much differently than Kim, who was essentially homeless as a child, with a grifter mother. But there was enough
dislocation in the early life of Seehorn, who was born in Norfolk, Va., that it seems no accident she has proved so adept at inhabiting
the character.
Seehorn's family moved a lot because of her father's job in counterintelligence, doing stints in Japan and Arizona before settling in
Virginia Beach when Rhea was in elementary school.
"She was universally liked," said Trish Goodwin, one of her best friends since childhood. "She was smart and she did her work, but she
wasn't an annoying brainiac."
When Seehorn was 12, her parents split, and around that time she started going by her middle name, Rhea (pronounced: RAY; her
first name is Deborah). Her mother had done musical theater in high school, but Seehorn was more drawn to the passions of her father,
a Vietnam War veteran who loved drawing and painting.
It was while pursuing studio art at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va., that she discovered acting, in an elective class. She didn't
change her major, but she dove right in.
"I think ignorance was bliss," she said. "Because it seemed very simple to me at the time in a way that I understand now that it's not."
During her freshman year, her father died of complications from alcoholism. Goodwin, who also went to George Mason, remembered
when Seehorn got the call. "She was devastated," she said.
"She kind of saw that tether to art cut — that was how she connected with her dad," Goodwin added. "And I think it probably gave her
a lot more focus when she came back."
Seehorn with Bob Odenkirk in the final season. "We had no idea, when we started, how
important her character was going to be," said Peter Gould, one of the creators. Greg
Lewis/AMC, via Sony Pictures Television
7/9/22, 8:18 AM Rhea Seehorn Is Getting Away With It - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/arts/television/rhea-seehorn-better-call-saul.html 3/5
Soon after college, Seehorn moved to Washington, D.C., where she threw herself into theater, then later to New York. Sometimes it paid
the bills. Other times, she acted in instructional videos and did whatever other odd jobs she could find.
Christopher Walker ("We Own This City"), an actor and close friend who hustled alongside her in Washington, remembered her as
"extremely hard working" — and "a loud laugher."
"I don't think she felt the need to be quiet or tamp down, or be a compliant sort of person," he said. "I think there's maybe an
expectation sometimes, particularly for a woman, not to cut loose like that."
7/9/22, 8:18 AM Rhea Seehorn Is Getting Away With It - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/arts/television/rhea-seehorn-better-call-saul.html 4/5
"My last day, I left the set and I just thought, I'm going to be thinking about that ending for a very, very long time," Seehorn said about the end of "Better Call
Saul." Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times
7/9/22, 8:18 AM Rhea Seehorn Is Getting Away With It - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/arts/television/rhea-seehorn-better-call-saul.html 5/5
In Hollywood, where Seehorn moved in 2002, producers sometimes asked her in auditions to be more feminine, more likable, more like
what they expected from a pretty blonde. She ignored those notes as best she could — her heroes were Madeline Kahn, Gilda Radner,
Gena Rowlands — and found plenty of regular work anyway, often in short-lived sitcoms ("I'm With Her," "Whitney"). She was
grateful but restless.
One day, after failing to land a part in the Amazon series "Sneaky Pete," she was walking through the Sony Pictures Studio lot, and she
saw the infamous meth-lab R.V. from "Breaking Bad."
"In my head, I was like, I miss that type of storytelling where you really have to dig deep," she said. The next day, Sharon Bialy, who
was the casting director for "Sneaky Pete," rang her up. There was a "Breaking Bad" spinoff in the works, and she thought Seehorn
would be perfect.
"A lot of people pigeonholed her in the industry as a comedy actress," Bialy said. "But I had an instinct that she was so much more than
that."
Odenkirk said he and Seehorn had connected instantly. "I think she's rolled with the punches her whole life," he said. Instead of letting
it make her into "a cowering, delicate person," he added, "she's tough and she bounces back, and she's fun."
That toughness has found its way into "Saul." Gould said that it was evident from the beginning what Seehorn could bring to the role.
"There wasn't even a remote second choice," he said. But as the character grew, he added, Seehorn's specific qualities informed Kim's
evolution — and by extension, the story's.
"If we had not cast Rhea Seehorn in this role," Gould said, "we would be talking about a very different show right now."
IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE much fun awaits Kim in an arc that, as viewers know, seems bent toward tragedy. Seehorn was tight-lipped
about Kim's fate in the final stretch but not about her experience making it.
"The next six episodes, this whole season, was probably the most challenging work I've done in my career — but blissfully so," she
said in a follow-up phone conversation. "My last day, I left the set and I just thought, I'm going to be thinking about that ending for a
very, very long time."
Production of this final season created a lot of memories. There was the experience of sharing a house for a year in New Mexico with
Odenkirk and Patrick Fabian, who plays the object of Kim's loathing, Howard Hamlin. (Among other things, it involved delivering a
litter of puppies.) There was Episode 4, which was her first time directing television.
Then there was the day last summer when Odenkirk had a heart attack on set and nearly died right in front of her and Fabian.
"Did it change our friendship? Yeah," said Odenkirk, who had to be defibrillated three times and went 18 minutes without a regular
heartbeat. "We were going to be friends for life from the experience of doing 'Saul,' but ... we're going to be closer than that."
When Seehorn and I first met, at the Getty, one of the first things she offered was a disclaimer: "I'm not very good at playing me." She
said it laughingly, in what came to seem like a reliably self-deprecating manner, a reflex pointed out by several of her friends and
colleagues. I took it under advisement then but after spending some time with her, I'm not so sure.
By most measures of success — career, friendship, family — Seehorn has found it. She is engaged and seems to enjoy helping raise her
fiancé's two boys. Odenkirk, as Variety reported in a recent cover story on Seehorn, hopes to cast her in a coming mockumentary
created by him and his "Mr. Show" partner, David Cross.
It seemed to me that such successes were the result of a person's playing herself pretty well. Odenkirk appeared to agree.
"She doesn't know how great she is," he said. "She doesn't give her herself enough credit, but she showand hopefully she knows that."