we need to talk about the warren beatty dick tracy zoom tv special

we're all technocrats now

Where were you at 10:30 p.m. eastern standard time on February 10, 2023? I can tell you precisely where I was: Sprawled on my couch after coming home from a nice little date, already in my pajamas with my face lathered in so many creams and serums it looked like a plump little glazed donut, figuring out what I’d watch on TV that evening. Was I going to finish season three of The Sopranos, I wondered (I’m watching the show for the first time, no spoilers, please! I hope Tony lives and everyone has a nice happy life!!), and let my DVR take care of whatever this unspecified “Dick Tracy Special” was coming up on TCM? No, no. The Sopranos would be too much mental stimulation before bed. TCM it was, and I was forever changed. Society was forever changed.

One day, if the human population isn’t completely wiped out by a bird flu pandemic or in a water war, we’ll tell our grandchildren—if they’re not working down in the coal mines, that is—where we were when the Warren Beatty Dick Tracy Zoom Special dropped. Warren Beatty saw the Rihanna concert was happening this weekend and said, “No, no. You think that will be the appointment television event of the weekend, but you are wrong.” An icon, a legend, the moment, he did not disappoint. Because here’s the thing: This wasn’t the first time he has done this. Thirteen years ago, Beatty filmed a thirty minute “movie” (a television special, in character as Dick Tracy, with Leonard Maltin) that aired precisely once on TCM before falling into cult obscurity. Beatty was ensnarled in a legal battle surrounding the film rights to the legendary comic book character; lest he let anyone else make a Dick Tracy project, he made a “sequel” to his 1990 film to hang onto them. This time, Beatty is back in character as an elderly Dick Tracy who has a lot to gripe about, from Beatty’s 1990 “adaptation” of “his life” to his own dissatisfaction with the 2010 special. A third installment in his Dick Tracy “trilogy,” it is a fever dream of a television special that should make Adult Swim seriously consider reviewing their programming plan, a “short film” even more bizarre and surreal, simultaneously self-indulgent and self-aware, and brilliantly stupid than the last one.

Dick Tracy Special: Tracy Zooms In has everything: Cheap faux-Zoom graphics and tired commentary on modern communication (It’s 2023! We get it! No one in the silent generation is allowed to make “who woulda thought we’d have video chat” jokes anymore!); “Dick Tracy” shitting all over the Academy Award-winning Dick Tracy—from its acclaimed production design (“That’s a lotta reds, even for Beatty”) to its portrayal of crime as musical comedy—and his grievances with Beatty himself; an extended clip of a previous Beatty interview talking about how he works by dialectics and “Dick Tracy” giving picture-in-picture commentary of older Dick Tracy adaptations that amount to little more than mutterings of “exactly” and “good, good, yes, yes, yes.” The special packs a dizzying array of material into a ten-minute long, meta four-way “Zoom” sequence with Ben Mankiewicz, Leonard Maltin, “Dick Tracy,” and Warren Beatty: There’s thinly veiled commentary on the indignities of aging, particularly in a business that prematurely casts its greats out to pasture (“Dick Tracy” asks Beatty: “Do you feel I’m too old to do new things?”) and old-man-shaking-his-fist-at-the-cloud condemnation of the rise of home entertainment at the expense of the theatrical experience. Beatty teases the idea of making a legitimate Dick Tracy sequel, but not without “Dick Tracy” telling him, “If you want to do another movie about me, you might want to have somebody you trust enough to argue with”—that’s the tried and true number one Warren Beatty Labor Law—“who actually knows about me.” They even manage to get a good self-indulgent joke about his looks (“I think you look too good to play me,” “Dick Tracy” tells Beatty) in there. (If anyone knows if Miss Elaine May had even so much as a once-over on all this, please let me know. The suspense is KILLING me.) I won’t give away the ending—you really have to see it to believe it—but I promise you: every act of this special is a spectacular elevation of derangement from the last. Give the king himself Ben Mankiewicz an Emmy for his work committing to this extraordinary bit. Beatty is credited as co-writer and co-director, producer, actor (as “Dick Tracy and Himself”), and his name is the first in the list of Special Thanks!? King shit! The height of comedy!

Describing this, of course, simply does no justice for how profoundly, jaw-droppingly wild it was in the moment. Nothing could have prepared me for the sheer giddiness and glee of feeling like I had taken a way-too-high-for-me dosage edible a couple hours before and it was just starting to kick in. It cannot capture the deranged delight of logging on to Twitter dot com to see how many others were taking in this astonishing spectacle in real time. It cannot do justice to how, for those brief and glorious thirty minutes watching it live, I felt the way film industry people must have felt in the icon’s most prolific era: “This man is out of his fucking mind,” I cackled to myself. “He’s insane. He’s a madman. He’s a maniac. He’s….brilliant. The man is brilliant. Beatty, you sonofabitch, you’ve done it again!” 

Is Warren Beatty squatting on the film rights to Dick Tracy and maintaining them once every ten-ish or so years (until the character goes into public domain in 2027) via these cheap but legal excuses for movies petty and perhaps narcissistic? Yes, sure! But it’s not like Beatty didn’t already try to make a sequel; that’s how we got into this mess in the first place. But a studio financing another Dick Tracy film by Warren Beatty now? To quote the great Tiffany Pollard’s mother: “That’s never gonna happen. Ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, Tiffany. Ever, ever, ever, in a million years. Ever, ever, ever, ever.” It couldn’t even get made in 2008. Forget about now. Beatty is 85 years old; very few of his peers are still directing these days, regardless of their legendary resumes. (Save, perhaps, for Scorsese and Spielberg, but a large part of that is due to their constant work—a new project nearly every year—and balance of commercial appeal blockbusters with critical-but-not-commercially appealing passion projects). Few of them have retired by choice. And don’t get me started on why, no, they shouldn’t have to dip into their own pockets to finance their swan songs. 

So, sure. Beatty could let the rights go, give someone else a turn, pass the baton with grace. Why should Beatty be the only person allowed to make a Dick Tracy movie these days? Artistically speaking, there are plenty of other directors who could do something new and weird and fresh and exciting with Dick Tracy’s existing IP. But we don’t live in a world where we can hope for that best possible situation anymore. We live in a world where entertainment is increasingly consolidated under the umbrella of major corporations who do not give one single atom of a shit about art. Existing IP vehicles of the ‘90s are high art compared to existing IP content of today. 

Think about it: If Beatty were to release the rights to Dick Tracy, they’re not going to be bought by, like, the Daniels or Rian Johnson (I wish) or a studio like A24 or Neon. They’ll revert back to Disney, who will promptly churn out another ten-part streaming series from hell, with some asshole like Chris Pratt playing Dick Tracy, the entire production filmed in front of a green screen, and post-production that renders the picture so dark and lacking in contrast that you can’t even really discern how bad looking it is anyway. And instead of Dick Tracy being a beloved but, perhaps now in the era of modern comic culture, niche character with adaptations appreciated by people with at least some modicum of taste and intelligence, he’ll be a character shoved into a largely terrible vehicle that people without a single operating brain cell will love and appropriate simply because of the platform producing it.

Look, this isn’t about caping for a comic book character from the 1930s. It’s not about Warren Beatty’s classic stubborn streak and need for a constant white-knuckled grip of control on everything he makes. (Okay, it’s a little about that.) It’s about principle. It’s about flipping a defiant middle finger to capitalism, and protecting something, anything, from the dumbing down of culture at large. I like to think Beatty knows that, and is at least protecting us from the alternative. 

Or, maybe I’m intellectualizing and justifying it all too much. Maybe Beatty is just a crazy old guy sitting at home watching Adult Swim who decided he wanted to make a silly little video to potentially end his film career on the weirdest possible note. Either way, I’d follow this crazy motherfucker off a cliff and thank him for it.

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