Why stories work
Friendship director Andrew DeYoung on his writing bible; springtime slappers made from paper; resoling 20-year-old grails, & more unbeatable recon
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
Check our new Ultimate Spyplane Guides to Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, Naoshima, Teshima & more.
Our list of 35 Spyplane Icons — celebrating pinnacle design excellence of the contemporary slapper era — is here.
We just published two new Shorts Reports — Erin’s is here, Jonah’s is here.
Blackbird Spyplane back with you.
Today we’ve got:
Turbo talk with the writer and director of the funniest comedy, and possibly the greatest movie, of the year.
Exclusive early SpyAccess to beautiful clothes from NYC’s Archie, who we just partied with in the Bay in the company of a bunch of other cool people, all of whom looked great.
Resoled secondhand footwear discoveries like the 2000s-era ACG lungs-logo bangers above?? Intel on how it can & should be done.
Let’s get to it —
Andrew DeYoung has directed shorts for brilliant comedians like Spyfriend Kate Berlant and John Early, so when I (Jonah) heard he’d written and directed his feature debut, Friendship — starring Spyfriend Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, no less, and produced by Big Spyplane Consigliere and Sweetheart Nick Weidenfeld — I was in without hesitation. Nick showed me and Erin the movie last year on the day they locked the cut, and we didn’t stop laughing from the opening scene to the final frame.
A24 picked it up, and over the past few weeks Friendship has been smashing it in limited release. In New York the other day, I hit the Angelika to see a matinee with an old buddy of mine in a packed theater, and it killed.
This week, I was stoked to chop it up with Andrew for an edition of the Spyplane feature we call V.I.P. R.A.D.A.R.
Blackbird Spyplane: Did you write this movie for Tim? It’s so hard to imagine it without him.
Andrew DeYoung: Yeah, so this started with me thinking about how I’ve never seen something where two dads, who are friends, go through a breakup. I started to play around with that idea, and as I wrote the script, I started to think, Who could possibly play this guy? Tim kept popping in my mind, and I wrote it toward what I felt were his strengths. I didn’t tell him at all until I sent it to him.”
Blackbird Spyplane: A ton of people are seeing it, and it’s only in 6 theaters. It’s the biggest limited-release movie of 2025 so far. It reminds me of something I heard people saying when Challengers made a ton of dough last year, which was that no one ever stopped liking movies like this, but for some reason people stopped making them. Why do you think it’s been connecting?
Andrew DeYoung: “I know I’m riding a Tim wave, and a Paul wave. Both those guys are beloved, so that’s helping. But my hunch is that it feels like an anomaly. It’s a singular, weird thing, and we’re in a culture that’s constantly dumbing down its films to achieve the maximum audience — and sometimes that backfires, and it builds up a deep, hard cynicism in people. So when we see something that’s respecting us, we’re desperate for it.”
We asked Andrew to share three recommendations off the beaten path. Here’s what he chose:
“There’s a podcast that’s essential in my life called Awake in the World. It’s a Buddhist podcast, the dharma practitioner’s name is Michael Stone. He died in 2016, but they release his talks, and he’s incredible. I return to them constantly to ground myself and sober myself up emotionally. He has this way that’s deeply compassionate and medicinal in how he talks about Buddhism in the modern world.”
“I have this book about writing and story structure, Into the Woods by John Yorke. This helped me write the movie. It’s the one and only writing book — everything else sucks. He’s a British TV writer, and the reason he wrote it is, he’s like, ‘There’s all these writing books that tell you how to structure things, but they never tell you why these structures are in place.’ He talks about every move, and the psychological and emotional reasons we see these structures recur. I came across it years ago, I think I just saw it at a bookstore. No one’s ever brought it up to me, but I keep putting people on to it. It’s my writing bible. Any time I’m blocked, I look at it, and there’s always something that kicks up the dust.”
“I walked the Camino de Santiago last year. I had some time off, and I’d heard about this pilgrimage route and I felt, ‘I need to just be alone and walk all day every day.’ There’s many routes. The most popular one starts in France and you go into Spain, over about 5 weeks. I did one for eight days. You walk 30,000 steps a day, stay at hostels and dinky hotels, and meet people along the way. There’s every age on the walk. It’s astonishing. There’s something about how it simplifies daily life: ‘I get up in the morning and all I have to do today is walk.’ You get some space from all the noise of daily life, and you get to question that noise. I had Salomons on. I know they’re popular, but they’re also designed for this kind of thing. I was returning them to their rightful place.”
Friendship, with Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Kate Mara, and a tremendous cameo from Spyfriend Conner O’Malley, goes into wide release this weekend.
Meanwhile —
The other day Blackbird Spyplane co-hosted an afternoon hang in Oakland. It was the opening party at Understory for a 2-week Archie pop-up, where the NYC clothing line is debuting its SS25 pieces…
Archie designer Mark Smith Clarke is a self-taught patternmaker, and he founded his line in 2018. He designs everything in NYC, and that’s where every garment this season was made, too.
The twist with this event was that, rather than envisioning it event as a straightforward pop-up, Archie and Understory decided to call the s--t a bookshop. Specifically, “Mount Analog Bookshop,” named for a surrealist novel Mark loves.
So there’s a selection of vibey old books for sale, plus some “Mount Analog Bookshop” tees and caps (like the two below bottom right, shout out to flapped sun hats), along with the Archie clothes.
I was especially f--king with the Archie jacket cut from a dense-weave brown washi-paper-linen blend (above top right), with scooped hand pockets and Riri cobrax snaps; the ultra-breezy button ups, cut from linens, cottons, and (above top left) 120s wool gauze and recycled polyester; and the brushed organic-cotton-silk-blend shorts (above right), which were giving “lightweight moleskin.” Among a bunch of other pieces!
If you weren’t able to make the party, the clothes are hitting the Understory site tomorrow.
But right now, we’re stoked to present early SpyAccess to the full collection — plus the Mount Analog caps (cut from linens & worsted wools), tees (printed on mockneck Cambers!), and books — to our Classified Spyfriends: