Notes from Upstream: Juror #2 Is A Movie Worth Watching

It's Thursday, or as we know it here at 'Political Questions,' "Max Cossack Day." You'll be unanimous about his verdict here.

In his book The Science of Hitting, baseball great Ted Williams wrote, “First, get a good pitch to hit.”

Then execute a smooth, controlled swing. Pay attention to timing and rhythm. Stay disciplined. Hit to all fields. (Nowadays this last tip comes as, “Take what the pitcher gives you.”)

As Clint Eastwood’s most recent movie proves, the Ted Williams baseball principles operate in moviemaking too.

First, get a good story to tell. Then, execute the story in a controlled way. Pay attention to timing and rhythm. Stay disciplined. Take what the story gives you.

Imagine coming up with a flawed premise for a story and spending a year or five writing it or filming it. The most common mistake storytellers make is to waste time and effort on a bad beginning.

Exercises in futility become novels which never get published or screenplays which never become movies, or worse, do get published and get turned into movies, and, to put it bluntly, stink.

Fun fact: Eastwood started shooting Juror #2 at age 93.

A few years back, when Eastwood was only 88, Toby Keith asked him how he stayed so energetic. Eastwood replied, “I just get up every morning and go out. And I don’t let the old man in.”

Eastwood’s answer inspired Toby Keith’s final hit song Don’t Let The Old Man In. As Keith tells it, he “wrote the idea.”

No spoilers here, but I will point out that Juror #2 begins with a coincidence. In storytelling, coincidence is usually a cheat. A coincidence violates the promise the storyteller has made to follow storytelling rules. These require causal connection between new and earlier events.

What about genres like fantasy and science fiction? Writers like Tolkien and Heinlein almost always follow the conventions they start with in defining their worlds. And causal connection controls all events even in the fantastic worlds they imagine.

There is one major exception. A coincidence or other unlikely event can occur at the beginning of the story and even serve as its premise or “inciting incident.”

That’s how Juror #2 works. The coincidence and inciting incident is the unlikely nexus between the juror protagonist and the death in dispute in the trial at which he’s serving.

Juror #2 is a recovering alcoholic named Justin Kemp. His wife is going through a high-risk pregnancy for their first child. She already had one miscarriage. Despite his complaint of potential hardship to him and his family, the court seats him on the jury in a murder trial.

Early in the trial, Kemp recognizes that the victim’s death connects to him personally. He may even have caused it himself. He keeps his mouth shut about this fact from fear of personal consequences not only to himself but to his wife and their expected new baby.

As screenwriter Jonathan Abrams said in an interview, “It’s about the buy-in.” If the moviemakers can convince moviegoers to buy into the premise, they will engage.

Kemp’s connection to the death is the only coincidence in the movie. Everything afterward follows Ted Williams rules: Eastwood exercises a smooth control of the story. He pays close attention to timing and rhythm. He stays disciplined. He and Abrams take what the premise gives them.

Meanwhile, as complications entangle Kemp, his moral choices challenge him more and more. How can he extricate himself without hurting the people he holds most dear or in the alternative committing a terrible injustice?

Kemp is a decent man. Indeed, the movie has no villain. It portrays decent people in a decent legal system in a decent society. These decent people face ever more complicated and conflicting choices, not between good outcomes and bad outcomes, which is easy, but only among bad outcomes, which is difficult.

Juror #2 presents these tough choices not only through dialog, but through events, that is, through dramatic action.

We have all sat through movies slowed by too much talk. Some storytellers believe that the best way to dramatize issues is to set their characters yammering on about them, and the more pompous the talk, the better.

In Juror #2, even the talk is action. The lawyers speak not just for exposition but to win. And the moral tension never lets up, not even at the end.

In an interview on Awards Buzz, screenwriter Jonathan Abrams talked about working with Eastwood. The two men discussed various ways to end the movie. Eastwood always wanted to “push it further.”

“And so, Clint wanted to push if further than that…he kept pushing me further and further, but he shot like I said three endings that each pushed the thing a little bit further.”

The “thing” Eastwood was pushing was the unresolved tensions among the characters’ conflicting moral choices. For this reason, the ending they chose may frustrate some. Others will see it as true to life.

Nothing in the movie shouts, “I love Trump” or “I hate Trump.” The lack of specific partisan slant helps explain why the movie received so many positive reviews from so many different people.

Warner Brothers decided the film was a money loser. At its release in late 2024, the studio placed it in fewer than fifty U.S. theaters. The result was the famous self-fulfilling prophecy. Almost no one saw it. I myself never even heard about it.

When other Warner Brothers executives reminded CEO David Zaslav of Eastwood's history of delivering hits, Zaslav said, “It’s not show friends, it’s show business.”

Put another way, “What have you done for us lately?” Actually, even in recent years, Eastwood movies have earned huge money for Warner Brothers: American Sniper (2014), Sully (2016), and The Mule (2018) all brought in the big bucks Zaslav demanded.

Of course, Eastwood made those movies back when he was in his eighties, still just another kid with a crazy dream.

Eastwood’s history is to alternate excellent but less commercial films with big money makers. Since he had just made the box office failure Cry Macho, some pattern recognition could have benefited Zaslav.

Probably Eastwood’s age makes him seem dispensable. But a studio head who treats artists as disposable is self-destructive not only to art but to profit, and in Hollywood, that’s the worst crime there is.

I won’t try to write the situation any better than Owen Gleiberman wrote it in Variety:

"Eastwood, for all his genre cred and iconic stature, is one of the few major filmmakers left making studio-financed adult dramas. To the modern studio executive, he must look like a glitch in the matrix–not an artist to be protected, but an error to be corrected."

Juror #2 is hardly the first movie to fail commercially on its first release.

When Embassy Pictures released the Mel Brooks movie The Producers in 1967, they premiered this tasteless extravaganza in the cinematic wilderness outpost of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The most famous comic movie star of his time was Peter Sellers. By coincidence he caught the movie at a private screening and loved it. He paid personally for a full page Variety ad touting it as “the greatest comedy film of our time.” Since then it’s been nothing but champagne and Broadway for Mel Brooks and The Producers.

Likewise, the comedy Office Space has transformed from 1999 box office disappointment to fan favorite.

Like The Producers or Office Space and countless other movies and books, Juror #2 may gather the larger audience it deserves. I hope so.

Max Cossack is an author, attorney, composer, and software architect (he can code, which thanks to AI, he is told is a skill which now lacks commercial value). He wrote Blessed With All This Life, a story of music, friendship and love.