Here’s an in depth look at an extremely rare set of high heel shoes that were sent out to selected members of the Critics Choice Association to promote David Fincher‘s MINDHUNTER in preparation of the 2018 Emmy Awards.
Shoutout to The Fincher Analyst for their original post about these shoes and a huge Thank You to Chris Evangelista, who was kind enough to sell me his set! Be sure to visit slashfilm.com for more of Chris‘ amazing work!
And if anyone has more info on these shoes or happens to have a copy of the original letter from Netflix, then pleaseget in touch with me!
Brian: Hello, Andrew. This is the first day of the Austin Film Festival, and I’m glad to sit down with you. I wanted to talk to you about your writing in your career. The first question I want to ask you is about your origin story, what made you want to be a writer, and who were some of your favorite writers growing up?
Andrew Kevin Walker: I really focused on screenwriting in college. I knew when I was a young kid that I wanted to work in the film industry. I remember, I was just talking to somebody about it because it was Jaws fiftieth anniversary, because it was so influential for me, and it really made me realize what a director does, et cetera. I was really into film early on and nerding out, reading American Film magazines and stuff in high school. I went into college studying film at Penn State, I was probably thinking I wanted to be a director but I really focused on screenwriting. There was an amazing screen writing teacher that was there at the time, I think he may still be teaching at Temple, his name is Jeff Rush. It was at Penn State that I focused on writing. Some my favorite writer’s? William Goldman is probably my favorite screenwriter of all time. My favorite novelist is [William] Somerset Maugham, which is not too surprising, I guess, there’s a couple of Somerset Maugham references in Se7en. As far as screenwriters go, Waldo Salt and William Goldman, some of the guys who were writing real classics, you know. My favorite two movies are Midnight Cowboy and Lawrence of Arabia.
Brian: That covers a lot.
Andrew: That covers the city and the desert I guess (laughs).
This week on On Story, we’ll travel back to the 90s with a retrospective on the crime thriller Se7en, with its screenwriter, Andrew Kevin Walker. Directed by David Fincher, Se7en stars Brad Pitt as David Mills, an idealistic young detective with a short fuse, who’s still adjusting to the violence and apathy of life in the big city. Mills is paired with William Somerset, a jaded Detective Lieutenant who’s only one week from retirement, played by Morgan Freeman. Mills and Somerset are tasked with investigating a pair of homicides that are exceptionally depraved and theatrical. The detectives realize that the two murders are only the beginning of a sadistic killing spree where each crime will be based on one of the seven deadly sins: gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath, pride, and lust. Mills and Somerset begin a desperate game of cat and mouse as they try to get inside the mind of this depraved killer and catch him before he can carry out his plan.
The film was nominated for a BAFTA award for Best Original Screenplay. Se7en was screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker’s first script to be sold. During Se7en’s three-year development period, Walker wrote the scripts for two horror movies: the sci-fi slasher Brainscan, about a troubled teen who’s seduced into committing crimes by a hypnotic interactive horror game, and the psychological horror Hideaway, about a man who survives a near-death experience and finds himself psychically connected to a serial killer. Walker has continued writing and producing in the crime thriller and sci-fi genres throughout his career. Walker wrote the script for 8mm, which follows a private detective investigating a snuff film which may depict a real murder. Walker collaborated with David Fincher again on the 2023 film The Killer, and on an episode of the animated series Love, Death & Robots. His writing credits also include Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, the animated comedy Nerdland, the crime thriller Windfall, and many more. AFF moderator Andy Volk sat down with Andrew Kevin Walker for a post-screening conversation on his experience writing Se7en based on a one-sentence logline, getting the script in front of director David Fincher, and working with the film’s production crew to craft a version of New York City lost in time.
Academy Award-winning writer and director Bong Joon Ho is busy with development for his first-ever animated feature, Ally, an animated ocean adventure co-written by Bong and Jason Yu, set to make a big splash worldwide next year.
However, after taking some time to celebrate his exhibit at the Academy Museum, where Bong got to pick David Fincher‘s brain, he spoke with Collider‘s Steve Weintraub about his favorite films from fellow filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro, why his Q&A with Fincher was so meaningful, and what’s on the agenda for the rest of the year and beyond, including an exciting update on his next live-action film.
From sparring with Rupert Murdoch to gaining David Fincher’s respect, the behind-the-scenes battle to bring Fight Club to screen was as twisty as the movie’s plot.
When Bill Mechanic was the chairman and CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment, he had one simple operating principle: Get in trouble.
Though his tenure as studio head from 1996 to 2000 was filled with hits, including blockbusters like Independence Day, Titanic, and Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, Mechanic was also known for being one of the few who listened to his gut and greenlit material considered uncommercial.
On his watch, the studio released the gory best picture winner Braveheart, the Farrelly brothers‘ gross-out hit comedy There’s Something About Mary, and the now-beloved Office Space.
Taking risks on offbeat movies gained Mechanic respect around Hollywood, but it also ruffled feathers among his bosses.
At the time, Fox was owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and Mechanic said the Australian-born billionaire was rarely a fan of what his studio was releasing.
“I always thought what Rupert wanted was Page Six,” Mechanic told Business Insider, comparing the mogul’s movie tastes to what showed up in the gossip column of the Murdoch-owned New York Post. “He didn’t think movies were there to challenge.”
Mechanic would famously test his boss’s patience when he gave the green light to adapt a book by a then-little-known author named Chuck Palahniuk. It was called Fight Club.
Bong Joon Ho’s Academy Museum conversation with David Fincher turned into a sharp look back at Zodiac and a brief but revealing update on Netflix’s Quentin Tarantino-written Cliff Booth film.
Very few crime movies get more revered with age. David Fincher’s 2007 thriller Zodiac, written by James Vanderbilt and following the way the Zodiac killer case pulls inspectors, reporters, and cartoonist Robert Graysmith into a years-long spiral of obsession, did. With Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr. anchoring that descent, the film opened as a chilly, meticulous procedural and has kept growing in stature over the years, less because it offered closure than because it turned uncertainty, fixation, and spiritual erosion into the point. So it made perfect sense that Bong Joon Ho would be the filmmaker hosting a 4K screening at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and a post-film conversation with Fincher recently as part of the museum’s A Weekend With Bong Joon Ho series.
Bong Joon Ho made that admiration plain right away. After recalling how immaculate Fincher’s office was—even down to the colored pencils arranged by shade—he got to the question underneath that story: whether Fincher’s obsessiveness really matched its reputation. Fincher did not deny it. If anything, he leaned into it, saying, “No, I mean… Look, I feel like you should do everything in your power to be as clear in what you’re trying to communicate as you can possibly be.”
Since his feature debut in 2000, filmmaker Bong Joon Ho has become a crucial contributor to the tremendous growth of South Korean cinema and its globalization. Known for his inquisitive mind and meticulous eye for detail, Bong’s creations, which span both realistic and fantastical realms, continue to impact the evolving atmosphere of the South Korean film industry as well as art and culture around the world.
For one weekend in April 2026, Bong returned to the Academy Museum to create exhilarating memories on stage. On April 11, director David Fincher joined Bong for a conversation and screening of Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), a masterpiece thriller showcased via an original poster in the current exhibition, Director’s Inspiration: Bong Joon Ho.
Since its early April debut on HBO Max, people have been talking about the Alien3 Assembly Cut all over again. How has the conversation changed compared to when it was released in 2003?
Both rule number one and rule number two is you’re not supposed to talk about Fight Club, but those rules were broken in a fascinating way Wednesday night at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, alongside the world premiere screening of the new 4K restoration of the beloved film, prior to its upcoming one-night nationwide theatrical screenings and debuting on disc and digital. The screening included an insider’s look back at the highly contentious debate over how to market the decidedly subversive and provocative film, which found the filmmakers and cast frequently at odds with the studio releasing the movie, 20th Century Fox (now 20th Century Studios).
As a longtime fan of Fight Club, it was a thrill to see it on a big screen again, with the new 4K transfer looking terrific and highly detailed but not, thankfully, causing a movie that purposely exists within a world filled with so much grit and grime to look too clean and pristine. The sound presentation was also better than ever, capturing every brutal punch — and eventually explosions — along the way as the Narrator (Edward Norton) and Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) grow their following. The film’s examination of consumerism and angry and aimless disaffected men remains as compelling, satirical, and darkly witty as ever, and even though it’s been used in so many TV shows and films since, “Where is My Mind?” remains a perfect needle drop at the film’s conclusion.
The screening was presented by the Marketing and Public Relations Branch of the Academy, and thus the film’s marketing campaign was the focus of the pre-screening guest speaker presentation. Fight Club has an interesting place in cinema — and marketing — history, as in its initial 1999 release, it was highly divisive with critics and a box office bomb. However, it went on to became a sensation via the home video market, gaining an ever-growing cult following and a critical re-evaluation as the years went by.
As Academy Governor David Dinerstein noted in his intro at the screening, “When Fight Club was released in 1999 by 20th Century Fox, it posed a unique challenge… The film defied easy categorization. Was it a crime thriller, a dark comedy, a psychological drama? In truth, it was all of those and something else entirely. Marketing a film like Fight Club meant grappling with its tonal complexity, its subversive themes and, of course, its unforgettable twists – elements that made it compelling but also difficult to distill into a traditional marketing campaign.”
However, Dinerstein added, “In retrospect, the very elements that made Fight Club difficult to market — its audacity, its controversy, its refusal to conform — are precisely what cemented its lasting cultural impact. Fight Club is not just a movie, it has become a cultural event.”
The main speaker of the evening, Steve Siskind, was the head of Media at 20th Century Fox at the time Fight Club came out, which gave him plenty of insight into the struggle over how to market it. As he put it, “It’s not an exaggeration to say that Fight Club was one of the most contentious and fascinating marketing campaign processes I’ve ever witnessed.”
Eric Roth is an Academy Award-winning screenwriter best known for adapting Forrest Gump, for which he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. He has received additional Academy Award nominations for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, A Star Is Born, and Dune: Part One, and is widely regarded as one of Hollywood’s most sought-after writers. Roth co-wrote Killers of the Flower Moon with Martin Scorsese. He continues to work in films as both writer and executive producer. His latest project, the 2025 film The President’s Cake, is now playing in theaters.
The Fincher Analyst 