The Rundown: The Trailer For ‘Pam & Tommy’ Is A Mayhem-Stuffed Masterpiece

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

There’s an art to making a trailer. It’s not as simple as slapping some clips together and putting a title at the end. You’ve got to take the viewer on a ride, titillate and tease with spoiling, get the anticipation and excitement bubbling without overselling, give them just enough that they must have more. And you have to do it all in about two minutes. It’s not as easy as it looks. A well-done trailer can be a magic trick. Godzilla vs. Kong was not an especially great movie but the trailer… buddy, that was a thing of beauty.

This brings us to the upcoming Hulu series Pam & Tommy, which focuses on the theft and subsequent release of the sex tape starring Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, and all the hoopla that surrounded it. The trailer dropped early this week and, with minimal hyperbole, it might be one of the best trailers for a television show I’ve ever seen. I’ll post the whole thing here but please meet me below for a spirited discussion about guns and mullets and prosthetics.

Right Isn’t that freaking incredible Tell me you don’t want to watch this show now. I don’t even know if it will be good. I’m not sure how they can string this all out over a bunch of episodes. And, right now, today, as I sit here typing this, I don’t care. I’m in. This sucker has everything.

Let’s start with the most important thing, even if it requires jumping around in the trailer a bit to do so. Look how much Lily James looks like Pamela Anderson…

… and look how much Sebastian Stan looks like Tommy Lee.

That’s not nothing. It’s a lot more than nothing. It’s important. It’s always good to have your characters look like the real people they’re portraying, I suppose, but it’s extra necessary here because Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee have such super-identifiable and specific looks. It could have derailed the whole thing if they didn’t pull that off. So that box is checked off. Which is good. Because now we can get to the important stuff.

Stuff like, for example…

Seth Rogen and Nick Offerman as the thieves who pilfered the tape. I shouted at my computer the instant I saw this shot. This is when I knew I was in. Look at them. Have you ever, in your entire life, seen two shadier-looking dudes It’s perfect. Perfect casting, perfect hair and wardrobe, just perfect. I love that this is where Nick Offerman went after playing a walking apple dumpling-like Ron Swanson for a decade. I’m legitimately happy for him.

And I’m happy for Seth Rogen, too, because…

Perfect.

Beautiful.

No notes.

Every movie and show should feature a shot of Seth Rogen struggling to move a massive safe he has just stolen. Even the Pixar movies. The Muppets made a heist movie with Charles Grodin. We can do this.

This isn’t even the best shot of Seth Rogen in the trailer. That honor goes to…

Seth Rogen is:

It’s beautiful. Hang it in the Louvre. Oh, hey, speaking of things that let you know this sucker is set in the early/mid-1990s…

It is wild to think this was all just 30 years ago. It feels like the Stone Age now. I don’t even remember what we did before high-speed internet. In my mind, we went straight from, like, cave drawings to Facebook. Maybe not an improvement.

Anyway, other highlights…

Again, flawless, beginning to end. We are definitely watching this show. I don’t know if it will live up to this trailer — or how it can — but I do know that my entire body is ready now. I might strap on three watches and pearls for the premiere. It’s only right.

The Hollywood Reporter did another one of their actor’s roundtables this week. These can be a blast when there’s a fun group with good chemistry, or even when there’s just one person who says enough wild stuff to carry everyone else. It helps when things get loose, when people get way off topic and start vibing. It can be something as simple as two people realizing they have a shared experience or a shared passion and lighting up about it, or as nutty as, to choose the craziest hypothetical example I can think of, Nicolas Cage steering the conversation toward a grudge he holds against a horse named Rain Man that tried to kill him.

Something like that. Anyway, let’s see what this crew of thespians ended up discussi-…

CAGE Well, at least you had a nice horse. My horse on Butcher’s Crossing, named Rain Man, wanted to kill me.

God yes. Mother of God in heaven, yes. Yes. This is perfect. Nicolas Cage sitting around with other actors, in this case Jonathan Majors and Andrew Garfield, telling them about a horse named Rain Man that tried to murder him. This is the best day of my life.

Tell me more at once.

MAJORS Rain Man Where’d you shoot that

CAGE Montana. I was in Blackfoot Country. Rain Man kept trying to knock me off and would try to run my head into roofs, and then I’d get off and try to be nice to him, and he would headbutt me. It was not fun. I’ve always had good experiences with animals. I always had great experiences with horses, but Rain Man wanted to kill me.

MAJORS Rain Man …

CAGE I’m so glad I got through that movie alive. The director’s name was Gabe [Polsky]. The last shot, it was just like, “Gabe, I’m not getting on a horse again.” Then one of the Native Americans said, “Oh, Nic’s just going to get off the horse. We’ll get on …” “OK, fine. I’ll do it.” So I got on the horse and literally, again, he kept trying to throw me off. I was like, “That’s it. That was my last shot, and you had to make it almost like a stunt. You did make it a stunt. You almost killed me on my last shot in the movie.” As you can tell, I’ve got post-traumatic stress disorder from Rain Man.

GARFIELD We can keep talking about Rain Man if you want.

CAGE I haven’t let go of it.

Three things here:

Moving on…

MAJORS Rain Man is in Montana with, I think, a man named Scotty.

CAGE Do you know Rain Man

MAJORS I know Rain Man. I’ve ridden Rain Man.

GARFIELD Whoa. Whoa.

CAGE You’ve ridden Rain Man So was he nice to you Was Rain Man nice to you

MAJORS I think he may have been a little older when I got him.

First of all, it’s hilarious that Nicolas Cage was like, “There’s a horse who wants to murder me,” and Jonathan Majors was like, “I know that horse.” That’s just incredible. I want to know everything about Rain Man now. Has he tried to kill other Hollywood stars Is it just Nicolas Cage Did Nicolas Cage, like, kill his brother Do we have a John Wick situation on our hands

But also, Majors has a point. Maybe Rain Man was just a young stallion who hadn’t settled in and matured yet. Maybe he’s cool now. Maybe it was all just attributed to youthful energy.

CAGE I just wrapped three weeks ago.

AHAHAHA

AHAHAHAHAHA

YES

YES

YES

GARFIELD Isn’t it like horses can feel energy

CAGE No, I’m good with animals. I mean, seriously, it was a clear decision on Rain Man’s part that he wanted to kill me. And they wouldn’t give me another horse. And then we were being chased by a herd of bison, and I’m on Rain Man, and I’m not sure he’s going to get me out of here. I don’t know. I’ll stop talking.

GARFIELD Please don’t. Please keep talking about Rain Man.

I did not foresee typing this next sentence when I started this week, or at all, ever, really, but here we go: Andrew Garfield understands me better than anyone else in Hollywood.

Give me a Rain Man documentary at once.

I’ll be honest here: I don’t get NFTs. I don’t understand them and I don’t feel like I have the energy to learn. This could all change, of course. By July, I could be full-on NFT-crazy. Stranger things have happened. There was one year where I was really into the idea of getting a pet lizard. I never did and that’s probably for the best, but I say it here to make a point, which is that I’m kind of an idiot.

Anyway, Quentin Tarantino wants to sell an NFT of the Pulp Fiction script and it’s becoming a whole thing.

When Quentin Tarantino and the movie studio Miramax agreed on the rights to “Pulp Fiction” in the early 1990s, cryptocurrency didn’t exist. Now, Mr. Tarantino is courting controversy — with a crypto twist — over ownership of the cult movie’s script that could set a legal precedent for intellectual property rights.

This feels like an extremely Quentin Tarantino thing to do. Right Like, if I told you, “Quentin Tarantino is in a legal battle over an NFT of a script,” you’d probably be like, “I can see that,” right But more importantly, it is deeply, deeply funny to picture some like 88-year-old judge who passed the bar exam while Bill Gates was in kindergarten presiding over this lawsuit. That would make me so happy. Just a slew of lawyers thinking they’re making killer legal arguments and then the judge interrupts to ask if an NFT is “a Nintendo thing.” I would watch a live feed just to see their faces sink.

On Wednesday, the director announced auctions of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, associated with his original handwritten screenplay, despite a pending lawsuit by Miramax.

I repeat: An extremely Tarantino thing here. He’s going to make a movie about this soon. The plaintiff can be named, like, Guentin Paranpino. Best case scenario is that he releases the movie while the trial is still going on.

Mr. Tarantino has been thwarted before. In November, after he announced plans for an auction, Miramax sued, claiming breach of contract and various intellectual property violations. In December, the director’s lawyers denied the accusations, but the sales did not proceed.

I kind of ran out of things to say about this issue already but I wanted to include this paragraph anyway because it contains the word “thwarted.” That’s a good word. Let’s all try to use it a lot more going forward.

Hey, speaking of NFTs…