The new Apple TV+ film “The Beanie Bubble” takes an unconventional route to tell an unconventional story.
Based on Zac Bissonnett’s book, “The Great Beanie Baby Bubble,” the film examines the lives of three women — based on various real-life figures — at the heart of making Ty Warner’s infamous plush animals a global phenomenon. For directors Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash, they were less interested in telling the story of the Beanie Baby creator, Ty Warner, and more how the system undermined the women working for him.
“Their big obstacle was getting out of the system, or learning what was wrong with the system,” Kulash told TheWrap. “We don’t want to take you on a journey of the product at all. What we want you to do is go in thinking [about] making this cool product and then realize, along with the women, that there’s a bunch of values baked into that about what’s important in our society.”
Gore and Kulash went on to discuss how telling the story of how Beanie Babies became “plush little Lotto tickets” is the ultimate story of capitalism, as well as their own connection to the ’90s toys.
How did you look at the Beanie craze when it was happening?
Kristin Gore: I was not a big fan. I was vaguely aware of it. I was in college, so I was not the right age to be tuned into it. I had only a vague awareness of it because it was such a big deal; you can’t help but know about it.
Everyone has a sister, or an aunt, or cousin or a grandmother who has a bag or bucket of Beanie Babies still in their closet somewhere, and those people came out of the woodwork when we were making this film. It wasn’t until this book came along that I realized it’s insane that people lost their mind over stuffed animals and treated them like gold for three years, but even more interesting were these women’s stories behind the phenomenon.
Damien Kulash: I had little to no experience with Beanie Babies for this, despite the fact that I have that collector’s gene where I will go crazy over the weirdest things. The event in global history was eye-rollingly absurd that it seems like the kind of ridiculous thing you want to look under the cover of and if what we’d found underneath was economics and irrational exuberance with money we probably wouldn’t have cared very much. But what was so crazy was the stories fueling this thing were so universal. The relationship, especially the female relationship, to the American Dream that we saw repeat over and over in the book was so universal. It was so much what we’re living through today and what we feel like has been happening in America throughout the 20th century.
How did you settle on what to adapt from the book and blurring the lines of fact and fiction?
KG: Because what we were so drawn to was the women’s stories, and because that really demonstrates a cyclical pattern that connects to a lot of the ills of capitalism in general and speaks to a larger story of marginalization that I think so many people can relate to, we wanted to use the book as our launchpad and the guiding light for a bigger narrative that explores those larger themes.
There were things that we needed to focus on more than others to highlight the themes that we cared the most about. So it was a really exciting challenge. And because we wanted to tell the story through this unconventional, nonlinear structure that jumps around between time periods but keeps you emotionally on the same roller coaster, that created an opportunity to consolidate some things. We wanted to remain very true to the spirit of the story, especially to the themes that were so crucial to us.
Was there something from the book you wish you could have included?
DK: We had to make a choice: Would we tell the story of how insane it was that people felt this way about Beanie Babies and how insane it was that the craze itself was so extreme? Or did we want to use that as a jumping off point for what we felt was a much more universal and timeless story? And that was an easy choice for us to make early on.
We wanted this to be a rags-to-riches story, not for the Beanie Babies and not for Ty Warner, but for the women in this story. What we want you to do is leave the film pumping your fist for them because they made the right choice. Their big obstacle that they had to fight their way through was getting out of the system, or learning what was wrong with the system. We don’t want to take you on a journey of the product at all.
Because this isn’t Warner’s story, how did you want to approach your interpretation of him as a character?
KG: It was really important to show the complexity of the character and the charisma and the brilliance that coexists with the capacity for cruelty and betrayal — and have that also connect to the larger systemic inequalities that he’s a standard symbol for. There’s a lot going on there. But he’s such a interesting, fascinating foible-filled character, and you need to fall in love with him and understand the character is quite broken.
Zach [Galifianakis] was the only person we ever thought about because Zach has that range that he often doesn’t get to put on display. Everyone knows what a comedic genius he is, but his capacity for pathos is really, really striking. And to give him that sandbox to showcase that range was exciting. So that was important to both of us, for Ty to be as complicated and layered and irresistible — and also toxic — as possible.
DK: We’re not trying to tell the story of the real Ty nor do we know the real Ty. Our Ty, like Kristen said, is standing [in] for the American Dream. The reason we structured the film in such an unconventional way is that in the very same scene where one person is falling in love with the opportunity he presents, another is walking out the door because she’s so disgusted with how it all went down. We needed that character, and the person playing that character, to be able to be simultaneously inviting and charming and warm and also capable of cruel things.
“The Beanie Bubble” drops on Apple TV+ this Friday.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
