Sweet Charity

[00:00:01] Blank Check with Griffin and David, Blank Check with Griffin and David Don't know what to say or to expect All you need to know is that the name of the show is Blank Check Dun dun dun dun dun dun Dun dun dun dun dun dun

[00:00:33] The minute you walked in the joint I could see you were a man of distinction A real podcaster Bop bop ba-dow Is that what you wanted, Ben? As the opening? Yeah I kinda wanted you more to do a Sammy D speech The whole speech? The whole speech

[00:00:58] No, don't you do it. No no no no no no Put that down, put that down It's a challenge I'm looking at my phone No, no, put that down David's eyes are turning red Not interested in it. No no no, we're keeping this one on track

[00:01:10] We're keeping this one on track? Yes Well this is a famously lean, concise, focused, stripped-down movie Just realized we need to check a 60s box office game, right? Oh yes we do Welcome people to the show Come on, what if this is someone's first episode? Jesus, embarrassing

[00:01:28] This place sure is full of podcasts. I'm the only one in here I've never heard of That's good, I like that Look at some of the dialogue lines Incredible line in the movie It's a great line in the movie

[00:01:39] And you think it's not as good of a line on this podcast when I say it? This room is full of podcasts, it's not something that makes the most sense in the world Hey, podcaster! Yeah, there you go, that's what I thought you were gonna do

[00:01:51] Look, this is a podcast You could tell from the minute we walked in the joint That this was a podcast, right? We are three podcasters, it's called Blank Check with Griffin and David, I'm Griffin I'm David And I'm the producer, hi my name is Ben

[00:02:06] I don't know if that's ever been said before He spoke on mic so he did have to explain himself But also I don't know if you've ever said it as I am the producer, hello my name is Ben and split them up like that

[00:02:16] Well the thing is, is that maybe if you're a new listener This is a clean entry point It's a clean entry point Clean entry point And you just know me as Ben and I'm the producer Yeah, that's all you need to know That's it There's no other baggage

[00:02:28] Nope Come on Didn't you hear David, he said lean I mean it's the first of it's a guest list episode I think I can allow it No you gotta do it faster though You can't, when you take pauses that's ridiculous Fuckmaster tiebreaker Yes The futzer

[00:02:47] That's a new one The voice of reason Wishful Ben Sure Santa Haas Santa Haas I don't have the full list in front of me I'm just pulling some from memory Yeah just do some from memory Not Professor Crispy No He has graduated to a series of different

[00:03:02] Nicknames over the course of a different mini-series Such as Producer Ben Kenobi, Kylo Ben, Ben Eichamalan, Ben Sait, Saybenything... Warhaws? Ben 19, uh, uh, uh, fuck, Cameron What's James Cameron? James Cameron is That's a very obvious one Oh, Ailey Benz with a dollar sign

[00:03:23] God remember when we thought this was going to be a clean entry point episode Yeah I know it's getting further and further away from Ben 18, The Fennel Maker, you drink Ben Haasley, uh, fuckin' I'm freestyling now The Miyazaki one is the one that's wild The wildest

[00:03:37] Nausicaa of the Hitch of the Jersey Ditch Ditch of the Jersey Uh, Hitch, another nickname we have for Ben is Hitch No, that's not one The Cure for the Modern Man Nope We call him The Cure for the Modern Man No we don't Yeah we do

[00:03:50] No we've never done that We're gonna do it right now Anyway it's Bronco Haasley, what's up? Come on there's a lot more Benglish Okay Bronco Haasley is really good And what's his Sam Raimi one? Someone had a really good, um Well the obvious thing was uh, Spider-Ben 3

[00:04:38] No that's not the obvious thing But then in homage to Ben's request that we nickname that series No it's Haas the Great and Powerful, that's what it is Yeah it has to be that Can we give him an Haas nickname? Yes, Haas the Great and Powerful

[00:04:53] I was gonna say in homage to when Ben suggested that we call that mini-series Spider-Pod 3 cast That the nickname is Spider-Ben 3 Haasley No, it's Haas the Great and Powerful No that one's just too clean

[00:05:05] And you're too into that, you're like we have to pay homage to Ben's stupid suggestions No It's actually pretty funny and smart Um, no Haas the Great and Powerful is good because one, it sounds like the thing It does sound And two, he is great

[00:05:20] Okay you know what, fine I'm powerful I'm just gonna sometimes off my column, Spider-Ben 3 pod Haasley Those are all his nicknames throughout this show Anyway we did that, so welcome to Blank Check Do the rest of the spiel

[00:05:32] It's a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers And are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want Sometimes those checks clear, sometimes they bounce baby This is a huge opening bounce

[00:05:49] It is, the rare opening flop Yeah

[00:06:25] We're talking about Bob Fosse Bob Fosse And I believe, David's doing the hands I believe this miniseries is called Pod That Cast Yeah so he thinks it's called Pod That Cast but there's Z's C-A-Z-Z-T And I think it should be Pod That Jazz Cast Pod That Jazz Cast

[00:06:44] Just because I think jazz is a good word The other option is Podcast Beret Yeah, I mean, option two, David wins Option two, David wins Yeah Pod That Jazz Cast?

[00:07:00] Pod That Jazz Cast, which is what you put in an email subject line to one of our future guests I know but then I, what did I put in brackets after that? You said working title

[00:07:09] I said working title and then I did a punch up, I came with Pod That Cast Punch down At least it's a punch sideways, at least it's a lateral punch It's a clean side punch No, you're like those bad comedians, you were punching down

[00:07:22] Oh no, David's using his hands a lot this episode First he had fussy jazz hands, now he's giving me the wagging finger You're here to cambe and then I did a punch down Pod That Jazz Cast

[00:07:34] I mean if you really hate it, I'll give you Pod That Cast I think it just, it doesn't sound like you're, you can't hear the Z's It's hard to hear them You have to pronounce it, it's about performance Pod That Cast Oh no, I think he's struggling

[00:07:50] He's really struggling Struggling? Let's buy clean delivery And Pod That Cast It's funny, it's All That Jazz of course is a song in Chicago Yes Which he never did film but also he made a movie called All That Jazz He did Referencing that song

[00:08:07] And he did Chicago on Broadway He sure did Yeah But he never filmed it No Because he was sitting there and he was like, Marshall's gonna need this one And they were like, who? And he was like, you'll see Frankie Not Frankie, Rob Marshall Jesus Christ

[00:08:22] Jesus, Frank Marshall Frank Marshall made it Frank Marshall Coming off of arachnophobia or something in Chicago, that'd be interesting Following up Congo with it Exactly, right Chicago No, All That Jazz, I'm sorry Ben you have to make a decision Griff is gonna be annoying about this Yeah

[00:08:39] For every episode he's gonna be like, it's called Pod That Jazz Cast I was overruled by a jury of my peers I know, I know And it's all riding on me right now It's all Mario Van Peebles, like rated X by an all white jury

[00:08:50] Like you know how he did that? That's what Griff's gonna do about the Pod That Jazz Cast Yeah, I've seen you do it three times now Three and he missed a couple He's done it a lot Yeah And every time I, it's, you know what it is too

[00:09:04] It's hearing the nicknames and knowing that then we would have to revisit this title throughout the series It's only five episodes, right? Only 12 episodes, a clean five Five and then a bonus, we'll do a Patreon Sure But the thing is, there's a legacy to this

[00:09:18] You have to think about your legacy Ben's thinking about the legacy You gotta think, you know, years ahead Right David wins Wow! And I wasn't even, well it's okay, I'm happy, I'll take the victory Take the victory You gotta take the W's where you get them

[00:09:31] No but look David's turning off a big dub The hands, I can't, he's inspired by Fosse He's really using the hands to express himself this episode The spirit of Bob David's also wearing like a little hat, tilted back I'm suddenly way too horny Even by my standards

[00:09:51] That's all in black I mean I'm not but I'm wearing a black shirt I'm wearing a congratulations shirt He's wearing a congratulations shirt Look, Bob Fosse, one of my all time favorite filmmakers Someone I've talked about wanting to do since the beginning

[00:10:03] He's probably been under a March Madness bracket like four times or something Kind of face plants every single time He does and I don't know why apart from I guess he's not quote unquote cool these days Or it's a short filmography It is just fascinating, fucking filmography

[00:10:23] I agree, we've always wanted to do him so we decided to do him And now we're doing him Now we're doing him That truly is the story Yeah I mean he's just like him, Beatty, I guess Barbra Streisand There's a few where it's like these little filmographies

[00:10:38] Compact but fascinating Yes We've always had them on the pile Yes Now we're taking this one off the pile Yeah I'm doing too much handstuff Excited to do it, this is the only movie of his I hadn't seen before Same

[00:10:53] Have I? I don't know if I've seen Lenny Oh really? Maybe I've seen in high school I don't really remember Lenny Lenny was the one for me 90s, big Fosse revival period on Broadway Because of the success of the Chicago revival Right Is that what you're saying?

[00:11:13] And then they do that Fosse, the review show Indeed His name is floating around a lot So I feel like as a kid growing up in New York City I'm like Bob Fosse, some dance guy You're walking down 37th street and someone goes Fosse Right Whoa

[00:11:26] Okay get over here But what? Fosse Fever Oh David's moved from hands to arms No I know, I know I was like musicals as a kid but the Fosse thing I was like I don't get with this thing What is this thing?

[00:11:38] Especially as a child that's not like fun musical Did he write the music? No he was a choreographer, he was a director Is the show's name after him? Is it his life story? No it's like a review of his pieces

[00:11:48] Yeah if you were doing a show based on his life story It wouldn't be on Broadway It would be in the red light district I remember being on vacation with my family I don't remember where Okay And it might surprise you to hear that often

[00:12:02] My parents would be like let's go to a museum Sure Go outside and I'd be like There's a really good movie on TV in the hotel I want to stay here Would they leave you in the hotel? I guess it depends on your age Yeah

[00:12:14] At a certain age they probably could just be like You know what? Yeah But when I was like maybe 13 on vacation with my family I saw Lenny on TV I was flipping through channels, Lenny comes on I think I actually filibustered to stay and watch the entire thing

[00:12:29] Or maybe then I rented it and watched it in whole It was one of those movies where I watched the first Like Lenny starts and the first three minutes I was like What the fuck is this? And my dad was like

[00:12:38] This is a Lenny Bruce biopic directed by Bob Fosse And I was like the dance guy? My dad was like Bob Fosse is secretly one of the best directors of all time Good director Would be a good director Really you think that? And he's like yeah

[00:12:49] Bob Fosse is like really fucking dark I was like Bob Fosse is dark? And that movie is such an unconventional biopic That it still feels like more biopics should be pulling from So then after that I watched the other four And was like

[00:13:07] Maybe I didn't see Star 80 until later Yeah I was gonna say you saw Star 80 as a teenager movie? I saw Cabaret and all that jazz pretty quickly after But I was just like this guy fucking rules I think this guy really actually

[00:13:18] In a way few people can say Introduce some new things into like the filmic language Certainly the movie musical No I would say just the movie The movie language Movies It's sort of like the vertical editing style

[00:13:34] That sort of like then Oliver Stone and other people take to the next level But also like I would argue he was kind of the first guy To really sort of use editing as choreography If that makes sense Yeah baby it does make sense Right?

[00:13:49] Like the beauty of all movie musicals was Long takes, sweeping cameras, this and that Modern musicals, too much coverage Fucking five cuts Every dance sequence cut to ribbons It's just meaningless They're cutting on rhythm but it's just like arbitrary And with Fosse the move from image to image

[00:14:05] Feels like a dance in and of itself He's doing freezes He's doing slow motion This movie is fucking There's a lot of very interesting stuff Every technique The freeze frame thing in particular is fascinating Because it's like you're doing the opposite of a musical now Right

[00:14:20] You're telling me you're literally freezing an image And holding it This is a movie that I mean We'll dig into his life because J.J. Birch our beloved researcher Did send us a message at like 3am last night He's gotta take it easy

[00:14:34] I mean we threw this at him late It wasn't, no it was 2.25am Yeah Uggghhh Is that yeah J.J. you know Right this will be the context heavy episode Because Bob Fosse didn't make a movie until he was in his 40s He lived a life

[00:14:49] He said 45, 42 years of a man's life in 17 pages And then J.J.'s follow up is if I can read this One thing I don't think I mentioned enough Is that he was literally never not having sex

[00:15:00] With a ton of women that were not any of his three wives I mean look I don't know I guess you probably didn't watch Fosse-Verdon I did Oh you did I did Okay well I assume other people watched that too Yeah And that kind of

[00:15:12] You know that kind of relit maybe The understanding people had That this guy was a total horndog And he was up to no good Right yes After the Chicago revival it was like Ah Bob Fosse he had a bowler hat or something What did he do?

[00:15:23] Jazz hands great And then Fosse-Verdon was like This man fucked 24 hours a day He was no He was a rascal And had these like very sort of unusual years long Emotionally tortuous relationships With these women who were his muses And his collaborators

[00:15:38] And he seems like just a very stressful person To be around in general I think He was a man with a lot of demons And that's why I think This is his one movie where he's sort of trying to play by the rules Of the movie musical

[00:15:51] As it was known at that point in time Sure But also he's throwing a lot of other shit on there And the movie musical is also maybe on its last legs Right? The classic music When's Hello Dolly? That's 1969 as well The same year as this

[00:16:06] This is the year where it's sort of like collapsing It's like what are we doing here We're spending a fortune on these Very very like elaborate pretty costumed musicals That are kind of long And audiences are like Like Fosse's putting all his shit into this movie

[00:16:21] But he's also trying to do a musical that functions The way that audiences are used to movie musicals functioning largely Yeah And then Cabaret he completely breaks the thing down And reconstructs it in one movie But that's three years from now of course

[00:16:33] And then everyone's like Fosse the musical guy And he's like what if I make like three back to back to back Biopics of like the darkest most haunted I mean All That Jazz is kind of a musical It is but another very weird very unconventional musical

[00:16:47] Such a good movie Yeah I mean just an absurd blank check where like Ben was talking about It's not kind of it is a musical But it's a It's an odd version of a musical It's in my autobiography Ben you were talking about The Legacy right? Yeah

[00:16:58] Not wanting to call this miniseries podcast Because of the legacy it will leave behind right? Yes I've been watching a lot of old Fosse interviews As opposed to the recent ones The recent interviews aren't as good No he was on Meron but it was weird It was weird

[00:17:13] He got allergic to the cats Yeah and just a lot of dead silence There was one after All That Jazz came out Or when it was about to come out where they were asking him The thing that everyone asked him at the time which is like

[00:17:24] You made this movie about you dying? Like you had a near death experience And then you made a movie that spoiler alert Is about the death The thing killing you Are you like trying to control your own legacy? Are you like trying to get ahead of it?

[00:17:40] And he said like I mean that's Any of this shit What are you talking about? Anyone who makes a movie is trying to outlive themselves Sure They're trying to leave something behind Yeah And he made a lot of movies about people who are like

[00:17:55] Struggling to figure out what they leave behind And the impact they make on the world And all these sorts of things Before that he made a movie about a lady named Charity Yeah Charity Is this your figure shit? Yeah Charity What is her

[00:18:07] She says her full name and now I can't find it Charity Hope Valentine There you go Good name Right Charity Hope Valentine This is so my kind of movie What's the movie called? We haven't said it Sweet Charity Sweet Charity Sweet Charity

[00:18:20] Adventures of a girl who wanted to be loved Just trying to make it in the city Yep On your own That's That is my kind of story It's your favorite sort of movie I really love it This movie is great David as you put on Letterboxd

[00:18:32] She seems like a good hang She seems like a great hang I feel like this is not enough You know devoted to this movie In this movie to how good a hang she is People are always like Oh Charity what are you up to now?

[00:18:42] Oh boy what's going on? And I'm like she's a good hang People are like you know what Charity you're a good hang I mean I think Give me a song called You're a Good Hang You're a good hang Sweet Charity Bob Fosse Robert Louis Fosse to his friend

[00:18:57] Was born in June 1927 on the north side of Chicago His parents Cy and Sadie His dad's a Hershey salesman A traveling salesman for Hershey Which sounds a lot better than like if you're a traveling salesman For trumpets or you know Aluminum siding or whatever

[00:19:16] It's like I'm a traveling salesman Get out of Wait I'm selling chocolate Oh okay come on in I love chocolate Let's maybe bring door to door chocolate bars back Yes his dad was a traveling salesman His mother was an opera extra He was the fifth of six children

[00:19:34] He had double pneumonia when he was a little boy And this is such a thing with so many filmmakers Especially back in the day Scorsese being the one I'm thinking of obviously Where it's like what's their childhood? They got sick when they were a kid

[00:19:47] And they were always being coddled Or they were always in the hospital Or they were always in bed rest They walked the world outside from a window And their mother took them to the pictures Right All the time And they were like oh my god the pictures

[00:20:00] I also think it is this thing He always was sort of a weirdly sickly looking man Yeah yeah he's not the sort of live You know strong dancer type that you might imagine Despite being in good shape in that sense

[00:20:13] And he obviously also had his vices of drinking And smoking obsessively and all of that But I think it's a big thing you get into When you start digging into his early life Was like he so badly wanted to be Fred Astaire

[00:20:25] And people kind of kept on saying to him Directly or indirectly Like you're kind of creepy You're really You're not reading as Good at what you do Right right right But you're not charming anyone in a Clean all American showman kind of way But as a little boy

[00:20:41] He was a good boy His mother coddled him while his brothers roughhoused outside I was a good kid so I had to be a good kid You're trapped by your own publicity That's the Fosse quote about himself Very clever Yeah

[00:20:56] When he was nine he took his sister Patsy To the Chicago Academy of Theater Arts Because he had a crush on one of his sister's friends And there he met Fred Weaver His early mentor Who was the guy who got him into dancing

[00:21:12] And he's like 13 at this time? He's nine Jesus Nine year old boy So Fred Weaver's motto apparently Remember this There's always someone better than you Remember that You're not the best There's always someone better than you And everything's been done before Anytime you learn about classic Broadway dancers

[00:21:31] It just sounds very intense Yes It never sounds like anyone was having any fun With Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire It's just like no This is 12 hours a day Sweating Learning every step All that shit Another nice lady Marguerite Comerford Taught him ballet He kept his dancing

[00:21:51] That he was being taught secret course He didn't want to be mocked by the boys So he would hide the tights And the ballet shoes The boys he said would accept the tap Sure Maybe the tumbling Not the ballet, not the tights So what happens is

[00:22:09] As you say Very young He gets more into tap He's not into ballet He gets together a bunch of kids And they start doing shows Reviews around town Like the YMCA or whatever churches And he pretty quickly gets pulled into the burlesque circuit Yeah, well, right

[00:22:28] I guess so Cause it's God, he signs a contract with Frank Weaver That gives him like 15% of his dancing earnings For 10 years When he's like a teenager It's like the Rick Mackey deal Oh my god So he's working with Charlie Grass That's another dancer Who is more ballet

[00:22:48] Fossey was more into tap So they would do interplay stuff, right? You know, one's doing one, one's doing the other And they do kind of like Acrobatics Flipping off of each other or whatever It's hard to describe dance Yes, it is Hard to, you know Put all that

[00:23:05] It is funny though when you read this stuff Like, you know A shittier biopic of someone like Bob Fossey Would have a moment where someone does something by accident He goes like, wait a second That's interesting Yeah Right, and suddenly the style is born

[00:23:17] That there was some aha moment But it really does feel like this guy Was just seeing things from a slightly different angle From the beginning And was just constantly adding new angles to things But that's what like I'm not a dance expert I enjoy dance

[00:23:33] But I rarely attend like dance performances Right, I love Broadway musicals And I love dancing and Broadway musicals Right I don't go to a lot of ballet or modern dance Because I'm not good at seeing like What they're recognizing What's different about what they're doing or whatever

[00:23:48] And so when you hear like, oh Bob Fossey invented this move You're like, I guess now that you've told me that I can see that That that's different But I'm not good at, you know No, no, no No, no I mean like

[00:23:59] When I went to college very briefly My best friend was a dancer I'd go to those dance shows I'd be like, I don't know how to judge this I dated a dancer I didn't know how to judge it It's hard to judge it It's an embarrassing

[00:24:10] I'm not judging it like good bad No, I know what you mean But I would just be like If I'm watching dance as part of a narrative I fucking love it As you said I fucking love watching dancing in musicals

[00:24:19] And if I'm just watching a top bottom dance show I'm too much of a dummy to fucking understand what's going on That having said Fossey style dancing always jumps out It certainly does That is very true There's an aggressiveness There is a darkness I don't know Yeah, Nelly

[00:24:36] My girlfriend Musical theater person You know, went to college for that stuff Yeah She really, I think put I'll read here How she sort of encapsulated his approach to dance It's based in small isolations Isolations meaning isolatingating the movement of just a hip or hand or shoulder

[00:25:00] Like everything being still but one movement The focus on one part of the body And I really see that in this film And I haven't seen any of his other films Look, we're three guys who admit we don't know about dance

[00:25:15] So I'm sure we're going to step in it and try to talk about these things But I do think there's that weird Sometimes staccato nature to the Fossey thing It's like really It's like just hitting the shoulder But then that opens itself to your hip

[00:25:29] Then that opens to your leg But it's not like Fly Girl Every limb is moving at the same time It's not a fluid graceful thing It's like there will be moments of fluidity That end abruptly Yeah, it's very like jerky stiff kind of He starts

[00:25:45] Well, I guess this comes later But like he loves doing the hand shit they talk about A lot of jazz hands He just fucking loves the hands And they're like keep them on your fucking finger And he just couldn't stop

[00:25:54] He always was self-conscious that he didn't have good hands And was wearing gloves at a very young age Because he thought his hands were ugly I'm sure he had very nice hands He hated his hands What if I saw a picture of his hands and I was like

[00:26:04] Jesus fucking Christ Anyway, as you mentioned A 13 year old Fossey and his partner Charlie Grass I think that's the name right? Yeah, Charlie Grass Charlie Grass made their debut professionally With an 11 minute performance in 1940 at the Oak Theater So that was his first, I guess, pro credit

[00:26:23] They get to be mildly successful Weaver is driving them around You know, they're getting on trains even Despite all of this he kept it secret from his friends People thought he was gay, I guess It's 1940, you know, like whatever What would one man imagine?

[00:26:42] A 1940's kid getting into tap and ballet But it does feel like a part of the formation of the Fossey style Is trying to find a way to make dancing hypersexual Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah Right, no, you're right Defensive, you know, sort of like, yeah

[00:27:01] As you also mentioned He starts dancing in burlesque clubs He basically says, I can romanticize it But it was an awful life I was lonely, I was scared You're in hotel rooms, 13 or 14 He was basically, I would say Sexually assaulted by older women

[00:27:19] I think his odd relationship with sexuality has formed in these years Yeah, I mean, I think we'll get into it more But like, you know, just, yeah Sexual encounters at way too young an age Where he clearly had no idea what was going on

[00:27:31] Just exposure to a lot of adult stuff You're behind the scenes It's like very seedy for the time Clubs as well And it's an unseemly element Boozing, smoking Boozing! If you are attempting to be an entertainer This is the space where you don't want to end up, right?

[00:27:48] Yeah This is either like, you couldn't make it In the legit, clean world of entertainment Or this is where you start and you move past And I think Fossey kept a foot there always He could never totally shake it

[00:28:01] And it's probably because he was in it at such a formative age I mean, his whole identity was shaped around these people In 1945 he is drafted to serve in the United States military There's a war on I don't know if you know about this Yes World War II

[00:28:19] Oh, there was a sequel World War II They've always been doing fucking sequels People like to claim it's a modern pox And they're probably, you know Everyone's obsessed with franchises They'll probably bring it back soon enough But you know what?

[00:28:35] The next one they won't even call it World War III They'll give it a subtitle Let's not Let's call it World War Revolution It's World War Legacy World War Rising Rising, right Salvation Look, he requested to do entertainment stuff As an 18 year old burlesque dancer might

[00:28:57] That was denied But then luckily as he joins boot camp The war ends Because it's 1945 And so he did actually get kicked over to the naval liaison unit Where he was doing more just like touring and stuff Just imagine if they put him on combat training

[00:29:14] They're like, it's taking this guy fucking 17 minutes to fire the gun He's got to do this whole fucking rigmarole with the finger Throwing things in the air What's he doing over your shoulder? The guy's in front of you Sliding it down his back

[00:29:28] They would do shows at bases all over the world Guam, Hawaii, Okinawa All the way to Tokyo They would do sketches With inside jokes He would play girls in drag and so on And he also eloped before leaving for war Oh boy, that marriage was annulled

[00:29:53] By his mother because they were both underage Correct So that doesn't even count as one of his three marriages Right, that's the fourth bonus That's not on main feed, that marriage And also supposedly a stripper much older than Fossey

[00:30:07] Showed up on his mother's doorstep saying she was pregnant with Fossey's Son Son, JJ put song here by mistake which is funny And Weaver quote dealt with it His mother dealt with it, whatever that means We can imagine And then he moves to New York Yep

[00:30:25] Live in the YMCA Right near Broadway And quickly he was cast as the dance lead In the national production of Call Me Mister With Buddy Hackett and Carl Reiner He's just, you know, teaching him how to dance He meets his first, not an old wife Yeah, Marian Niles

[00:30:44] Who becomes the first sort of major female muse mentor Toward relationship in his life He was 12 to 15 years his senior He said he never even knew quite how much older she was than him Even after they got married

[00:31:00] Back in the day, people didn't really know how old people were You could really just kind of be like I'm 20 You could really just kind of fuck her I'm gonna jet IDs didn't have pictures Yeah Just a couple sentences Like I don't know, got two eyes and nose

[00:31:15] So they worked together for Brown hair or some shit This thing says you have eyes I can see you do, so that's good It all checks out here He starts working Now can I smoke on the plane? Of course you can sir, right this way

[00:31:28] You know then they move people to the back Like it was like you could smoke on the plane And then it was the back couple rows are smoking Yeah That must have been bizarre Just this like little cloud Like hanging at the back of a plane

[00:31:42] Cool kids in the back Yeah, sure Alright, so he's with Marian Niles But then they both get cast in a Broadway production called Dance Me a Song And that's where he meets Joan McCracken Who's wife too And I think that was a very exciting time for Bob Fosse

[00:31:58] And a very rough time for Marian Niles Who was, you know, losing her status as the object of his affection Sure But then they start working with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis On the Colgate Comedy Hour Gotta bring that back Colgate Comedy Hour? No, just like

[00:32:18] Networks should just be like There's a toothpaste that's sponsoring an hour of entertainment for you Right, like just go all the way back to the beginning of television Anyway, so they're dancing on the Colgate Comedy Hour

[00:32:30] Which must have just been absolutely the funniest fucking shit in the world Toothpaste jokes Big toothbrush joke, you know There's nothing better than that Classic running sketch Dean Martin lit at 1pm or whatever But McCracken is like, you should be a choreographer, Bob

[00:32:47] You're too good to be a nightclub dancer or whatever this is McCracken actually, I'm sorry, might be the one with the age difference I was thinking of But he says that she was the one Yeah, she was 10 years older than him, Joan McCracken So yes, that's

[00:33:01] I'm sorry, I gotta You got it fucked up I fucked up big time That's why you gotta be put in the box Put me in the box, yeah, put me in the box He said yes Joan McCracken, an inspiration for Holly Golightly Oh wow

[00:33:16] No, this interview I watched the other night He was saying that she was the first person who actually was like Your ambitions should be much larger Yes, exactly Don't just dance Come on, Bob, you're smart You should be teaching people how to dance You should be designing dance

[00:33:28] Yeah Exactly 51 Bob Fosse gets the summer stock lead role in Pal Joey A musical that is very crucial to the Bob Fosse story A good show One of those shows that's not really about much It's kind of like Sweet Charity

[00:33:42] What if there was a guy called Joey, you know? He's a good pal Yeah Have you ever seen Pal Joey? I feel like they revive it on Broadway every 20 years I feel like there was a Stockard Channing Pal Joey like 20 years ago Am I wrong about that?

[00:33:53] Let's see Stockard Channing, yeah, I'm seeing her She played Vera in the 2008 Broadway revival There was also one in 95 with Peter Gallagher Peter Gallagher, I remember that one Yeah Can you imagine what Fosse would have done with those pussy willows? What are you gonna do? Teasing him out

[00:34:14] Just two eyebrows doing Fosse movements Put tap shoes on those things You could You could, yeah, you could have an eyebrow tap That'd be good MGM signs him at this point to a contract So he's doing that but he's also still doing Pal Joey

[00:34:32] He never actually got to play Pal Joey on Broadway He would play him nationally on tours and stuff But MGM's like, let's put you in movies They put him in Stanley Donnan's Jumbo Did that ever even happen or is that a film that actually

[00:34:50] Did? Am I wrong about that? Yeah, it did Yeah But it's a flop He was in another Stanley Donnan movie, Give a Girl a Break Because replacing Gene Kelly who was getting too expensive But yeah, none of this stuff is good His role gets kind of cut down

[00:35:09] He wanted to be Fred Astaire He wanted to be the sort of hyper-masculine, super charming Confident, smooth, leading man of musical theater Everyone's like, eh The other thing is it's like MGM is like, Louis Mayer is dead Like recently dead

[00:35:26] MGM is sort of, well, will still be grand old MGM But they don't, the ship is rudderless The appetite for these kinds of movies is fading a little bit It's not the golden era, I guess, anymore I might be stepping a little bit ahead

[00:35:42] But another thing is he starts losing his hair very, very young Which is when the hats come into play That is why he's into the hats Both looking at me I know, I'm just saying But it's also why he puts all of his fucking actors in hats

[00:35:57] Because he's like, yeah, we all wear hats What are you talking about? Hats are cool Also, that was an era for balding men Where hats were also very, I think, just like part of everyday wear More so than it is We've seen mad men Yes

[00:36:12] They wore their hats and took the train Those cuckoo crazy ad guys and gals The only successful kind of real mark he makes in this period is Kiss Me Kate He's in Kiss Me Kate and he's given a 45 second Minute, that'd be long

[00:36:29] Second segment that he can choreograph for himself And you can see it and it does feel very fossy But he was kind of like, you know He's like, I'm doing terrible out here Have either of you seen Kiss Me Kate the movie? Probably as a kid

[00:36:44] Not in a long time A friend of the show, Joe Garden and I went to see that about 10 years ago Maybe at Film Forum They did like in the post Avatar 3D boon Film Forum did a whole festival of 3D movies

[00:36:58] One of those classic posters where a guy is spanking a lady to teach her a lesson That's like the end of Act 1 where people are like, holy fucking shit It's the taming of the sheep He spanks a lady and people are like standing up and hooting and hollering

[00:37:09] It's a fucking Jerry Springer show audience Film Forum did a really great series of 3D It's a classic red and blue 3D, right? Right But when all the sort of digital 3D technology was perfected in the 2000s

[00:37:21] A lot of those movies were converted to be able to be projected in digital 3D Without the fucking color tinting and modern glasses and all that stuff So you could see really clearly and everything And that movie is like really fun on a 3D level

[00:37:34] It's cool to see a 3D musical The film is just kind of like whatever It feels so perfunctory And then there are these 45 seconds where Bob Fosse comes out And you're like, what the fuck just happened? It truly is

[00:37:46] It's like the way I talked about the fucking Anthony Lane's Spider-Man 3 Sandman review Where he's like, there's a minute in the middle of this where you wouldn't rather be anywhere else in the world And then the movie goes back to normal and you're like

[00:37:59] We're just going to pretend that didn't fucking happen And it's so cool because it's not just him as a performer But it's also like him as an author Just completely changing the language, the energy, the vibe of the movie in 45 seconds

[00:38:10] And there's clearly like he hits upon something Where it's like, fuck, wait a second Maybe we're not using this guy the right way Well, when the movie comes out George Abbott, who's a big Broadway director, sees it And is like, like you, what's this? Who's this guy?

[00:38:30] Brings him in to do choreography for a musical he's got going called 7 1⁄2 Cents Which he cleverly retitled The Pajama Game Because 7 1⁄2 Cents is a terrible title for a musical Or for anything really So I mean, imagine people walk up 7 1⁄2 pennies And they're like, no, the ticket's a dollar

[00:38:48] Can I get 1 to 7 1⁄2 cents? Here's my 7 cents and I broke one penny in half I assume that's how much it costs And they're like, no, you owe me a dollar And also good luck using that half penny on anything

[00:38:59] And the guy's like, well I got you now because it's sharp Give me a ticket for free! He's holding the penny to his neck What happens next? The guy says, the movie's called The Pajama Game I'll accept one set of pajamas And he's like, oh, okay, alright

[00:39:13] And he hands over some pajamas Jerome Robbins is working on The Pajama Game This is a big break for Bob Fosse He calls his dad, he says, I'm choreographing the dances For a new show, an Abbott show Dad says, what's choreographed?

[00:39:25] He says, I'm gonna be making up the steps for the other dancers The dad says, you're gonna give away your steps! Not joking, that's the quote How old is he at this point? I mean, if it's 19 Let's say, like 54 Or whatever, yeah Early 20s, 23, 24

[00:39:43] You've already lived a lifetime Yeah, a little bit That's crazy We haven't covered older directors But if we do, it is often It's like, yeah, they got their start at 5 Working the Grand Ole Opry He was sweeping up peanuts at the circus Or whatever

[00:40:01] Sid Lemaire was like a child star And then he was a TV director by 12 It was also a time in the world where you just had to grow up faster That's true Well said, thank you Ben I don't know what I'm doing I'm very loose

[00:40:17] Standing up and doing a falsie I'm very loose today, I don't know what's going on with me Then they do a film adaptation Of the Pajama Game So he kind of works on that I think he's just credited as the choreographer Or whatever, but that's like

[00:40:31] He does a lot of Behind the scenes He's learning how to make movies Him making a big splash on Broadway And then he's hiring him to do the movie And either hiring him to just do the choreography again Or just pretty much running with everything he did

[00:40:45] He doesn't get to make the films No But they're all running off the juice of what he's Sort of launched on Broadway Yeah, Pajama Game is a good show And he won a Tony for doing the choreography Of the Pajama Game So good for him

[00:41:01] Then he goes from Pajama Game To Damn Yankees, another classic Joan McCracken I think is at this point Getting ill Cause she died in 61 They divorced a little before that But she died at the age of 43 Fairly young So he's working on that

[00:41:19] And who does he meet making Damn Yankees? Uh oh His eye turns to a lady called Gwen Verdon Who is An actress and dancer In this new show Have you ever seen Damn Yankees? Yeah, do you know what Damn Yankees is about?

[00:41:35] I think a Damn Yankees movie is pretty fun It is fun and it makes sense that you liked it as a kid It's a high concept musical Does it have anything to do with this Rock and roll super group featuring Bob Dylan, Tom Petty Ted Nugent

[00:41:49] Wasn't Ted Nugent in it? Someone else Oh, it doesn't have to do with that It's Tommy Shaw Ted Nugent, Jack Blades Anyway, it doesn't matter Um No, it's basically like At the time It's set during the 50s Contemporary time

[00:42:11] When the Yankees are always the team that wins the pennant Those damn New York Yankees Sort of like the 90s around where people are like It's no fun And the Washington Senators, their basement Well, there's the worst team in baseball

[00:42:23] And so they make a deal with the devil To beat the Yankees That sounds fun But what's funny is that It's also like the lead character Is just a fan of the team Yeah, right, right The movie's not about the Yankees

[00:42:39] That's what Angels in the Outfield is about It has to be a devoted fan Right He's just like these damn Yankees I'd fucking do anything for them to win again And then like a musical theater Satan shows up And he's like anything?

[00:42:53] And now I'm thinking about Angels in the Outfield Because that's obviously That's an old movie, right? And then they remade it in the 90s Is this Joseph Gordon-Levitt? I remember I saw it in the 90s And the concept is like

[00:43:07] He's like dad, when will you love me again? And dad's like, I don't know, when the Angels win the pennant Right It's something like that And he's like okay, I pray to the angels The literal angels come help I watched it and I was like

[00:43:21] So the angels are so bad that this guy feels confident Making this promise And then like I'm like why do you want your team to be associated with this movie? Like that's all I was just always confused It's just the thing I find so funny

[00:43:35] Why would the team be like yeah, sure, sure, yeah, the script looks good Yeah, use our logos, that's fine Our team is so shitty That a deadbeat dad can be like Yeah, sure kid I never have to see this fucking kid again Zero chance

[00:43:49] You would literally need divine intervention When I was a kid and I would look at the standings And if the angels were doing okay I'd be like I don't understand this Canonically this team is bad Only divine intervention can help them Same with damn Yankees obviously

[00:44:03] Only Satan could help the Washington Senators Anyway, he has an affair with Gwen Verdon Okay While he's making it And you know what else? He gets addicted to amphetamines You got a problem with that? Well it was bound to happen sooner or later

[00:44:19] In those days they were over the counter Those greenies They would fucking give them to children to lose weight or whatever You could get them easy Oh god, what a time If I was alive I'd be dead Probably And of course Joe McCracken is also having

[00:44:41] A total health meltdown Like she's dying And so she eventually was like Putting an oxygen tank And he would visit her And apparently Eventually the visits Less and less He's you know Obviously they get divorced He would still call her and they would have long conversations

[00:45:03] Until her death in 1961 But he's at that point Getting with Gwen who he married in 1960 So a year after the divorce Luckily we have an entire movie coming up About this That we will talk about So much goss All of his behaviors with women So much drama

[00:45:23] He gets a chance to choreograph his hero Fred Astaire In Funny Face It falls apart in contract negotiations Fosse says in retrospect The dumbest thing that happened in my life He really wishes he had done that He works on some other shows

[00:45:37] The bells are ringing, new girl in town I thought he did a musical Maybe it came later The musical version of Hell, the Conquering Hero Was it productions only? He was working on a Broadway adaptation Of Preston Sturgis' movie Not the best known Sturgis But yeah

[00:45:55] But I think it was a big hit at its time And on its face Seems like very good material It was kind of a hit And it is a good movie I think it's lasted less but at the time it was kind of a big hit

[00:46:07] And then he has a massive seizure Which he blames on a horseback accident But actually it was because He had pills He didn't have enough Well he was taking the pills while on horseback That was right And because the show Was so chaotic I think

[00:46:27] Yes it only ran for like Briefly, it was a famous bomb He did also do emergency choreography For How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying He co-directed Sid Caesar in Little Me He finally starred in Pal Joey on Broadway And then Sweet Charity Comes along

[00:46:45] Versus a show, a Broadway show Starring Gwen Verdon Who was in a musical called Redhead That he worked on And so him and Gwen Verdon are like Look we're in love, I love drugs I love you, I love dancing Why don't we do a Broadway show

[00:47:01] That you'll star in They'll pay us money and I'll use that money to buy drugs Nom nom nom I don't know if that's what he said So Apologies to people who I know, terrible They think about doing Chicago Because Verdon did want to play Roxy Hart

[00:47:23] But that doesn't happen They thought about doing a Breakfast at Tiffany's musical Speaking of Which weirdly doesn't happen for like 60 years Have they done it? The Amelia Clark production I believe was a musical Am I wrong about that? Amelia Clark did Breakfast at Tiffany's on Broadway

[00:47:41] And I think that was the first time they made it a musical Uh Horrible It's never really worked Truman Capote eventually Decides that Gwen Verdon is too old To play Holly Golightly And then probably sarcastically pointed out She was actually based on your last wife

[00:48:01] I know he doesn't talk like that He was actually based on your last wife There you go, that's pretty good Then they think about doing Funny Girl But Streisand gets that They think about doing something called Berlin Stories Which of course will eventually turn into Cabaret

[00:48:17] But that never does happen Not as good of a title I would say Berlin Stories Life is a series of Berlin stories He remembered that he'd been told to watch Federico Fellini's Nights of Carabira Carabira Cabiria I always get it wrong Nights of Carabira

[00:48:41] That's a clean take for you So he went to see it at the Bleaker Street Cinema And he shows it to Gwen Verdon And to some producers And he's like, this is a musical I mean, the Fellini movie is so colorful And exciting and crazy

[00:48:55] I mean literally black and white But yes Zippy It's not an obvious thing It is a funny thing that like Broadway has always Everyone thinks this movie is too depressing to be a musical To be clear Broadway's always been inundated with Movie adaptations

[00:49:15] Because now people go like, you're a fucking Broadway Mrs. Delphi over here, Bill Juice over here It's all the fucking movies The difference is that like I think they were trading less on The name brand recognition of films And the movies they were choosing to adapt

[00:49:29] Into Broadway musicals were often more odd There are obviously still examples of this There are things like The Band's Visit where you're like Who would ever think to make a musical out of that? And it fucking works and it's a big hit, right?

[00:49:39] And often those things work better than the movies that are Beloved and are too iconic Sometimes it's a bad idea to do, right You know, Rocky But this is a particularly odd choice of a movie To adapt into a Broadway musical It's not typical?

[00:49:53] It wasn't good, the Rocky musical You saw it? No, but it wasn't a hit It wasn't a knockout How many rounds does it stay up for? Okay, sorry Keep losing comedy points It was down for the count So Fosse's like, alright, alright

[00:50:11] It would be set in a dance hall Wouldn't be about a prostitute Right? It can be about A dancer A taxi dancer This was the fucking Tiffany's thing I was gonna say It's this era of writing these We can't say that she's a sex worker

[00:50:27] What kind of imply is that? You write a romantic love or you do a foreign film And you really get into it and the American version comes up You put it on stage, you put it on the big screen And they're like, she's just a lady

[00:50:37] With a lot of friends She bounces around from place to place Breakfast at Tiffany's has that weird thing Where because that's a movie that I think children watch So often You kind of watch as a child and you're like What is her deal? What is the thing here?

[00:50:51] I remember seeing it as a kid and being like One, obviously the Mickey Rooney thing Is completely insane. Even when you're a kid You're like, this is completely insane It's truly insane I remember my mom being like, yeah and this was like a comeback for him Anyway

[00:51:05] Two, you're just sort of like, okay she's a lady But you're mostly bored And then at the end when she puts the cat in the street I remember as a kid I was like I was so compelled by that Because it's so good when she banishes the cat

[00:51:17] And then she goes and gets the cat back The fucking song's incredible You love that song. You're a real simp for Moon River I fucking love it. I know you do Moon River's like a top ten jam for me But yes, I think Wisely, like Fosse's like

[00:51:31] We have to give her an actual equivalent Yeah, she needs to have a job that would not be A job that would blend with high society Because Knights of Cimbri is explicitly about A prostitute Ben Who is not given any respect Or love in the world

[00:51:47] She's sort of a Dangerfield-esque character Rodney And let's say sex worker too Yes, yes, I'm sorry No, it's okay But yes, it is Sort of he turns it into this more kind of like Bubbly, modern woman You know But she's a taxi dancer

[00:52:07] Which is, by the way, an incredible, incredible Job title And she doesn't dance with you in a taxi She just sort of functions like a taxi You can rent her for a dance I believe that's where the title comes from The Tokyo Vice has this kind of

[00:52:21] Similar arrangement Like where it's like a club Where gentlemen just go and you can kind of Have time with them and dance with them These things are truly about companionship Yeah, yeah, because the taxi dancing doesn't exist in the United States It does still exist in other countries

[00:52:35] Yeah, it's like, you know I mean, obviously sometimes perhaps Things go further, deals are made, what have you But the idea is explicitly Like you are a lonely person Or you don't want to go back home To your wife too quickly

[00:52:49] You go there and you dance with someone You pay the money and you pretend like you're a guy Who is able to, you know Attract any woman from across The dance floor So they work on Sweet Charity with this concept Obviously he is Drawing from his own life

[00:53:05] In this sort of underbelly Of dance The dance world, you know For this For Elaine May To I guess pair with the show I think the idea would be like The initial idea Was that like the first act of the show Was going to be Sweet Charity

[00:53:25] And the second act would be something else So it would be like, and now we're done And now Elaine May is here to do some comedy And then she was like I don't know, whatever She hadn't made much progress on whatever he'd hired her to do

[00:53:37] And he was like, you know what Sweet Charity can be a two-act show And he's like, I'm going to do a Broadway show I don't know, the 60s are weird He finally gets Neil Simon aboard Neil Simon works on the show That name sounds familiar

[00:53:53] Yeah you've heard of that guy He's done stuff, a lot He's done a lot of stuff Big Broadway guy If we ever do Mike Nichols we're going to have to talk a lot about Neil Simon Herbert Ross, a lot of Neil Simon Sure, let's do Herbert Ross

[00:54:07] That'd be great We treat it as a franchise Any adaptation of a Neil Simon thing? Just a quick three years That would take forever What if we just do the sweets? The sweet life of Griffin David That's what we call the series Fosse is credited as the writer

[00:54:27] Initially under a pseudonym called Bart Lewis But eventually he gives sole credit to Simon To protect himself If the musical failed He didn't want to be seen as overreaching creatively He didn't want it to be like Bob Fosse presents a Bob Fosse show Everything's good

[00:54:43] Shortly before the musical premiered Fosse called up Simon and said the ending was not dark enough And Neil Simon was like That's pretty funny because the ending is pretty dark For a Broadway show The Knights of Cabiria ends with her getting Pushed over the bridge again Right

[00:54:59] Knights of Cabiria, it's full loop You're just stuck in a fucking It's like inside Llewyn Davis It's just repeating the same cycle over and over again Yes, Knights of Cabiria does have a similar ending to this Except in this She doesn't get pushed over the bridge

[00:55:13] But she gets pushed over the bridge She's walking back to town sadly And then she runs into A bunch of young people who are dancing And they kind of like start doing a parade around her Which happens in every Feline movie

[00:55:25] People are always just doing a parade around you There's like clowns blowing trumpets And there's a little tear that goes down her face And it's sort of like Yeah, it's sort of a weird British sweet melancholy ending And you go to a French bistro And you smoke cigarettes

[00:55:41] And you debate it I assume that's how it was seeing Feline movies Right Knights of Cabiria is like one of Feline's ultimate love letters Should we do Feline? Maybe I have an idea for next year's Bracket We'll talk about it in six months But Feline famous wife guy

[00:56:01] No, but that movie is like that and Lestrade Were sort of the two ultimate Love letters to his wife as a movie star Right There's something fascinating about Bob Fosse Also now Gwen Verdon becoming The greatest muse of his career I'd say overall And like similarly using this

[00:56:19] Basic text to do the same thing for her And when you read about the production Like her performance Is the thing that everyone fucking talks about This is the whole thing with Bob Fosse And of course I think why that show Did well to be called Fosse Verdon

[00:56:33] It was about the two of them I think if you only engage with Bob Fosse Movies You are like god this guy was a singular genius Right And then once you realize more about him You're like oh god they were a pair

[00:56:47] And she was so crucial to everything he was doing But yes Everyone said She was incredible She said doing the show was absolutely exhausting Because you know it's a very high energy Character and you're on stage constantly Yeah So it was hard and she was getting old

[00:57:05] By Broadway star standard And so The thing is in the 60s There's two films 64 and 65 that are such hits That the musical kind of gets cool again It had been on the downswing But Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music Are such smash hits

[00:57:23] That Universal Pictures sweeps in And they're like alrighty by the rights Half a million dollars You're going to make a move But then you have the run of as you said Hello Dolly, this, Dr. Dolittle There's this run of colossal Over budgeted

[00:57:39] They're kind of collapsing under their own weight Not this so much Dr. Dolittle and Hello Dolly are good examples for sure Because this is a little leaner And it's well directed And it's interesting Where as Hello Dolly is very staid

[00:57:53] And I was like what's the narrative thread of this thing That's the issue of this movie Yes It's tiring Yes it is I had to watch it I'll say in three installments There's literally intermission There is intermission That's when I was like okay I'm going to break

[00:58:13] It was great but I had to pace myself Yes There is this weird Julie Andrews Created musical That's a spoon That doesn't really translate outside of Julie Andrews Right It's true And these two very specific family musicals That are kind of like unreplicatable Yes I think that's true

[00:58:37] Because the movie musical Well it's Bob Fosse who makes it cool again In fact in the 70s But we'll get to that This was a stat I read last night All That Jazz was the last musical nominated for best picture Beauty and the Beast

[00:58:51] And then there wasn't another one until Moulin Rouge So if you We should be doing that Everyone thought we were doing Boz We should do it We'll be legends It is fascinating that like Cabaret winning best picture Doesn't start a Let's do more of these

[00:59:13] How the fuck do we follow this And it's like he does another one And then no one Fucking knows what to do with musicals until Boz Lerman Really? Moulin Rouge is the first moment People are like oh there's maybe like a new energy

[00:59:27] Here and then Chicago is so indebted to Fosse the following year winning best picture Well you know what some of the other big musicals of the 70s Are now that I'm looking Obviously there's Fiddler on the Roof That's 71 And that's more like Hello Dolly

[00:59:41] Very long, very highly produced The highest grossing movie of the year There's the Rocky Horror Picture Show So that's the other direction Which is happening more in the 70s You've also got Grease, you've also got Hair The Wiz Where it's like rock-ish musicals Contemporary, new musicals

[00:59:59] Jesus Christ, Superstar Yeah yeah yeah That's showing up Shirley MacLaine is attached to star In Sweet Charity, she had actually been a chorus girl On the Pajama Game And Alfred Hitchcock had noticed her When she was promoted as an understudy To a role, Alfred Hitchcock saw her

[01:00:19] And she says that being in Pajama Game Changed her life So she demanded that Fosse direct the film He wasn't sure He wasn't like I'm definitely gonna do this But the main reason this film is happening is because she wants to do it

[01:00:31] I guess so but it's also just The universal is like musicals What do we got? And she's a big star This opens on Broadway like two years before the movie comes out It's like a pretty quick turnaround Three years, yeah 66 to 69

[01:00:47] And yeah we're Shirley MacLaine at this point She's a big ass fucking star She's such a babe One of the least surprising David Crutchins You guys don't like Shirley MacLaine? Well yeah of course Look at her Don't you wanna hang out? The fact that her and Warren Beatty

[01:01:06] Are siblings is a thing I can never keep in my head It just doesn't compute in a weird way They're both hotties Put that into the computer What does this say? Folks I wish I could tell you what David's doing It's like you could see the paper

[01:01:22] Coming out of the printer He ripped it What did it say? It says they're both hotties Maybe it's just the name thing Maybe it's also just like It just feels impossible that both of them could be Have such legendary careers Entirely separate from each other

[01:01:40] They're very very separate from each other You know I mean She'd done Woman Time 7 a couple years ago Which is kind of like an insane Vittoria De Sica movie where she plays 7 women She did Gambit I feel like it's been a while since she's had A huge hit

[01:01:56] Gambit's fun She did Irma LaDouce That's like 63 So I do feel like I guess it's just been a minute But that's fine We support Shirley MacLaine She's sort of in the rat pack She's cool She could roll with the rats They bring in Ross Hunter to produce it

[01:02:18] He had just produced The Thoroughly Modern Millie movie Always get Thoroughly Modern Millie And Sweet Charity confused They're both about gals with short hair going You know like so IAL Diamond Of course a classic Billy Wilder guy Comes in to write the screenplay He writes a gritty screenplay

[01:02:38] That is more Knights of Cabiria And Hunter the producer is like No no no we want a G rated We don't want this There was quite a fight Ben About whether Charity could say up yours Well I'm glad that That fight ended the way that it did

[01:02:58] Bob Fosse says I felt if she couldn't then we might as well make Mary Poppins All the way So Hunter the producer leaves the movie Saying fine if you're gonna make Smut I won't be involved Up yours sir Now John McMartin

[01:03:14] I think is so much fun as Oscar In this movie he played the role On Broadway I'm just gonna tell you a person that was considered for the job Do you know this? There's other names that you might hear At this time Alan Arkin, Robert Redford Anthony Perkins

[01:03:30] Okay Alan Alda Imagine him in that elevator Goofing around You think about the elevator Talk about some elevator antics Seriously Do you think that was George Lucas' When he did elevator antics This is my homage to the fact that They have a freak out in an elevator

[01:03:50] And the intermission happens in the middle of the freak out This is the funniest intermission What does that even mean What the fuck am I saying I know what you mean My wife was like wait is the movie over And I was like no no no

[01:04:04] And then I was thinking that would be crazy That was the end of the movie It's just weird to have an intermission that's also positioning itself Like it's a cliffhanger to like a Lone Ranger Serial or some shit Will they escape the elevator

[01:04:16] Will he have another panic attack And then they like You know when they come back they're like Finally the epic conclusion to the elevator antics And you're like in the middle of a musical Where they're just stuck in a box I don't know

[01:04:30] Look that's the scene to talk about His name again I'm sorry the actor John McMartin I was trying to figure out why he looks so familiar to me And the answer is He has a pair of incredibly good Guest starring episodes On both Cheers and Mary Tyler Moore

[01:04:48] Oh yeah He's a visiting lecturer In Cheers and that's season 7 And he was in let's see He plays a lawyer The episode's called Mary Gets a Lawyer Mary doesn't want to give up her source She's being sued And Lou Grant gets her a lawyer

[01:05:06] And the lawyer falls in love with Mary And she tries her best to reject him And he's so dejected he shows up to court Like dead drunk and they have to sort of like Puppeteer him He's good at playing Abel Emile I've watched both of those shows

[01:05:20] In their entirety There are a lot of episodes They jumped out to me where I was just like These are fucking really interesting performances The episodes built around them Good for him Did he win a Tony? I want to look this up now He must have right?

[01:05:36] I don't know He must have I'm not sure When did it go from the Anthony Awards to the Tonys Terrible question One of the worst questions ever asked That's a great question He was nominated for 5 Tonys and never won Including for Into the Woods in 2002 Played the narrator

[01:05:58] Oh wow So I would have seen him in that That was the Vanessa Williams production Yeah and he was nominated for Tony for that And for High Society for Showboat Which I saw Showboat That was my first Broadway show 1995's Showboat revival Old Man River Remember that?

[01:06:18] We should fucking revive Showboat with David I think if we revived Showboat with me In the role of the guy who sings Old Man River Which is not the character I can't remember the character's name right now I think people might not like that People might not

[01:06:32] I think people might not like that at all I feel like that's also a low that we have somehow Avoided up until this moment Which is podcasters leading Broadway revivals I just remember We were going to go see Showboat My parents got a soundtrack album

[01:06:48] And they were like Especially because Showboat has no plot I feel like my parents would do the same thing Or my dad would just try to sing the song for me And be like get ready for this song Gary, Indiana Great song And I got really obsessed

[01:07:04] With Old Man River Because it does I could tell from the performance you gave Clearly You reached down somewhere deep To pull that out If I could sing any more of Old Man River I would truly get cancelled I am not going to do that

[01:07:22] I've been hoaxed too many times But the 2003 Opening Oscars Billy Crystal song Where from Mystic River He does Old Man Eastwood You sang in Paint Your Wagon Don't Sing Anymore That was one of the jokes, I remember that I guess it does Seabiscuit Coldfinger Sweet Charity

[01:07:46] Chita Rivera gets cast Over Rita Moreno And Mitzi Gaynor Nichelle Nichols is up for the role Of Helene which eventually goes to Paula Kelly I almost thought it was Nichelle Nichols She has a very similar look Highest budgeted Universal film since Spartacus

[01:08:04] Which will also be discussed on this podcast this year Yeah, crazy Did JJ, was he able to track down A consistent number The reporting seems to be all over the Fucking place of how much this movie cost Yeah, I'm not Don't see a full number from him

[01:08:20] But 20 million is a number I've seen Which is crazy The 8-20 range seems to be thrown out And the movie ended up at like 3 Shirley MacLaine alone got paid 1 And they were like, the whole roadshow engagement I think made 1 million dollars in total

[01:08:34] And then they like squeezed an additional Like million and a half Cutting it down I think that's the undercut of this movie How did you watch it? I have the Blu-ray I have the Blu-ray I use like Broadway HD You can only watch it streamable on Broadway HD

[01:08:52] Which is like a subscription service Which look, I will say to our listeners Check it out Yeah, Broadway HD first of all, like free 7 day trial If you want to support a bad company, Amazon You can get a 7 day trial but also with a cheaper Monthly price

[01:09:06] Broadway HD, a lot of good shit If you're not interested for the long term They do have this movie It's the only place it's streamable or rentable They have Liza with a Z Which we plan on covering on Patreon It's a very important concert film

[01:09:20] And they also have the Filmed production Of Fosse's Pippin Cool So it's like those, look if you want to sign up for Broadway HD For all week and cancel your membership And watch those 3 things 3 important pieces for this mini series It's a lot of cool shit

[01:09:38] You saw what? The Wiz Maybe I'll sign up I signed up and I I think I'm going to fucking keep this I should watch more musicals That's what I'm thinking I like musicals I feel like I'm learning that though With this You long resisted them

[01:10:00] For some reason you thought of them as homework No, I just I think they're goofy There's something about The sincerity You know what I mean Yes I was too ironic I was too removed from everything Man God, I was looking at some Fucking, I mean like

[01:10:25] Once again, foreshadowing When it came out Stanley Kubrick said That All That Jazz was maybe the best movie he had ever seen And I saw some Fucking dude on like the R slash movies Being like I'm very conflicted because I think Stanley Kubrick

[01:10:41] Is the most brilliant filmmaker of all time And I trust his opinions But I hate musicals so much How could he think a musical was that good And it is fascinating how some people Are just like, I refuse to accept People breaking into song

[01:10:55] It will never make sense to me It's true, some people are like that But you know what? Musicals rule They're so much fun I miss going to Broadway shows I went to one recently and had a great time How many trombones do they have in that production?

[01:11:11] 76 beautiful trombones Wow 76 trombones Did you count them? No, I took Hugh's word for it Maybe he was Scamming me You know The opening number of Music Man Which is incredible and is done very well Is set on a train car

[01:11:33] And it's all the salesmen being like, he doesn't know the territory They're talking about him And you can see him The trick is that Hugh's sitting there And he's going to stand up at a certain point I see him I'm like, okay, there's Hugh They do five minutes

[01:11:49] I see those biceps And then he stands up and everyone Loosens out There's something about Broadway shows like that You couldn't do that in any other medium It's the best Just the applause break for someone being like, it's me You knew it was I know

[01:12:07] You know what they should do? They should be like, Music Man, new revival of Music Man And you walk in and you sit down and you're so fucking amped You brought the whole family Curtain goes up, long day's journey into night Harold Hill got you again

[01:12:19] You see him escaping with a suitcase full of money And the money's like flapping in the breeze His performance is just running out of the theater That would be good Okay, Robert Surtees Shot this movie A great cinematographer, he shot like The Graduate

[01:12:33] And The Bad and the Beautiful And apparently Fosse Looks incredible This movie has a lot of color in it Is the thing I noticed I put this movie on my cinematography Ballot for 1969 and I had to really think About it Give me the others

[01:12:51] I can't even remember who I bumped now My nominees are Raoul Coutard's work for Zed Nestra Almendros for My Night at Maud's I've never seen My Night at Maud's But Almendros the goat David's looking at me like I just

[01:13:07] One, it's a great movie and you should see it But two, no, no, no It's real Griffin canon It's about a guy who's just like, I don't think I want to have sex And the lady's like, come on Spend a night with me I have feelings about this

[01:13:21] Who are the guy and the gal? Jean-Louis Trintignant And who's the gal? Very embarrassing of me not to know her name Which is of course Francoise Fabienne It's a great movie You know, all of Romare's movies The moral tales Someone's being like, let's fuck

[01:13:39] And the person's like, it seems immoral That's not what they're all like Haskell Wexler for Medium Cool Robert Surtees for Sweet Cherry And Laszlo Kovacs for Easy Rider It's just like a lot of exciting new visuals This thing does Just look fucking unbelievable

[01:13:55] But what I was trying to say about Surtees Is that Pabbie apparently was just Asking Robert Surtees so many questions Because he's never done this before Sure So he's just like, what is this? How does this work? So he's very into As he puts it

[01:14:11] I'm just a schmuck dancer I don't know anything about the camera He's not just here to be like Well I'll handle the musical side of things He's like, no, I want to know And he's not just interested in photographing dance He's like really interested

[01:14:25] In the unique opportunities that film provides as a medium Which is just so crucial to why he is successful as a filmmaker Yes Beyond his success as a choreographer Yes Yeah, no This is a movie that is just So important And so important

[01:14:43] And a movie that is just So in love with the possibilities Of film construction 100% He was very inspired by John Huston's Moulin Rouge A film I've never seen I haven't either Which he thought found new ways to shoot dancing Because of course as you sort of mentioned

[01:15:03] Fred Astaire, Greg Kelly Fox News host You know Full body It's like a shot of a guy dancing Moulin Rouge, she says that's the first time I'm seeing a leg Or the flash of a face Or something It's more exciting Yes, maybe this eventually gets taken down

[01:15:23] A job to ribbons But it's new at the time And there's such a specific intentionality To Fosse So once again, it's the rhythm thing It's that he's constructing very specific What you quoted Nelly is saying The focus on one body part as a time

[01:15:39] So that's the dance, that close up That insert shots That creating offbeat staccato Editing rhythms around those can accentuate things And make that feel like it's own form of movement Rather than obscuring a movement Which I think a lot of coverage does When you're like

[01:15:55] It's three similar angles That are just sort of cut on the beat Interchangeably In general though He sounds like the kind of guy we cover on this podcast In that he's meticulous He's not trying to do everything Everything has to be exactly right

[01:16:11] He missed nothing, says Shirley MacLaine As the result he saw too much Being the repository of all he saw Rendered him indecisive So his movies cost more money Probably because he takes He does more takes He takes longer to do everything

[01:16:27] Look, if this movie has a fundamental issue It is that he is trying out So many different techniques And ideas And he's trying to make it feel like It's a very maximalist film It is Perhaps a narrative that cannot support that There's no strong narrative really

[01:16:45] And of course famously Gwen Verdon is there And people say Must've hurt, she's not playing this role Shirley got the part But you wouldn't know with her She was stoic Helping all the dancing And also it was just like Not a movie star, Shirley MacLaine is

[01:17:05] It's an expensive movie, I understand how this works This is true, yes Chita Rivera says the fact that she was there at all Blew me away But Gwen did it for Bobby, did it for Jack Cole I felt no resentment from coming from her She did her job

[01:17:19] And of course the craziest thing about this is the ending Fosse shoots two He just assumes I understand the game I'm playing here They're never gonna fucking let me have The ending where she finds quiet contentment And they shoot the fucking happy ending

[01:17:33] And the studio goes like this sucks They shoot an ending that's basically The ending you see, she jumps in the Or she gets pushed in, I think she jumps into the river She does And then he shows up And he's like I'm sorry, I was crazy

[01:17:47] I love you It doesn't make any sense, especially since that already happened Like it's sort of a repetition Of a thing that already happened It's just funny because that was always the like It sounds like the thing the studio would force

[01:17:59] And the director would lose their shit over And the director preemptively was like They're gonna want this fucking bullshit And he showed them and they were like This eats ass, this is bad Why don't you do that fucking sad ending? Everyone loved on Broadway One reason

[01:18:17] So did you watch the other ending? Because I've never seen this It's bad, it's bad It's passionately, you can tell everyone's just like This sucks I've seen Ford's voiceovers And then they lived happily ever after, I guess It truly was a Blade Runner Universal

[01:18:35] Is slightly inspired by the fact that They had just put out Funny Girl and Finian's Rainbow And those also both have bittersweet endings So I think they're thinking like We can get away with this And I don't think the ending of this movie is what hurts it

[01:18:47] Like it's not like the movie had You know, it had other issues This movie is both dramatically And comedically effective In large stretches But there's just like It's like one of those novelty desserts Like a Serendipity 3 Ice Cream Sundae It is not an S tier Broadway show

[01:19:07] It's got some great songs It's got like, you know This movie has an incredible Shirley MacLaine performance But you're not like Oh narrative and dance And songwriting Are blending into this perfect concoction You know what I'm thinking about? Like Frozen Hot Chocolate Where you're like This looks incredible

[01:19:29] Every separate element you put on here is delicious How do I approach this as a food? You know If I just want to eat the ice cream It's hard to get to the ice cream underneath

[01:19:39] And it's like the ice cream of this show probably works best in a cone And then he put everything else on top of it Which it's like maybe would work for like A Pippin adaptation You know You can throw the bombast on top of it

[01:19:51] But this is in essence like a character study And it's a story of vignettes Of passing moments You know I think people thought the bittersweet ending would work But I think by the time people got to that ending They were like what is this movie?

[01:20:05] They've lost it long before the ending And the most critical reviews of this film Maybe not the most critical reviews But if you read a lot of the critical ones They're like Verdon figured out how to make this character Like a character

[01:20:19] He figured out how to make this character Specific and compelling enough And there was an energy that carried you along And Shirley MacLaine is doing Shirley MacLaine movie star stuff And she's not bad in it But you don't feel like I'm so compelled by what's going on

[01:20:33] I like her I do too I think she's a cutie pie It could get lost in the show A little bit I do like this movie a lot That's what Vincent Camby thought He did not recapture Miss Verdon's eccentric line Eccentric lines are great

[01:20:53] Calls MacLaine a dull shapeless dancer And an ordinary singer This is the thing with Camby though He often at certain points Is just like why are there missiles falling? He starts out being like There's some problems with this movie And by the end you're like

[01:21:09] You just insulted her family He could get kind of insane But yeah it says the movie too long I like the way it's sourced material This is kind of the reaction And the roadshow version The 157 minute roadshow version With the overture, the intermission Exit music and all that

[01:21:27] Goes over really badly And so as you say they try to Get a compressed version I think this was a moment That's almost a little similar What happened with 3D movies And what happens with IMAX now The roadshow was a very specific Reserved occasions

[01:21:45] Movies that could live up to that hype It was you know like a lot of Fanfare around it You got a program, you were expected to dress up Nicely, it was in great old theater Like movie palaces and shit Right? The film's longer

[01:21:59] You get a proper intermission whatever And it was like almost every film they had put in that format Lived up to that format And then there was sort of the IMAX thing Where it's like what if we start taking movies That weren't shot in IMAX

[01:22:11] And then we're going to be putting them up and saying this deserves to be an IMAX movie And this is when the roadshow Is starting to collapse as well At the same time the musical is starting to collapse

[01:22:19] People are like I don't need to pay extra for this I can fucking wait and see this in six months With twenty minutes trimmed out of it And I can wear a t-shirt or whatever Sweet charity Sweet charity

[01:22:31] It made, according to this, it finally scraped eight million dollars Okay But it was a bum Do you guys want to talk about some of your favorite moments in the film? I like when they sing Hey Big Spender That was one of the standout songs

[01:22:43] Where I was like hey I knew that song Like that's like a part of our culture It's like a huge song This is a movie where we can actually go through the plot Because it is just a series of musical numbers And like different men Yep Pretty much

[01:23:01] She's charity, she's a taxi dancer She's only got $427 And she loses it in the first moment of the movie Her boyfriend's a fucking jerk Yeah he's no good I want to say this guy sucks Do we want to rank the boys in terms of badness? Because he's bottom

[01:23:17] He's Charlie He's the worst one Tattoo's pretty cool though And then I guess Sammy Davis Jr. He doesn't romance her but does he count as a boy? Because if so he's number one Yeah if we're saying like sweet charity boys Like who are the guys

[01:23:35] Otherwise you've got obviously Ricardo Montalban He's very charming He kind of blows it at the end there He blows it but there's something That's like a real fucking Griffin night You want to talk about some real Griffin shit It's like so do you hook up?

[01:23:53] No I just stayed in the closet while they had sex with someone else But then afterwards they were nice to me And then you've got John McMartin as Arthur Sorry he's Oscar That's it, those are really the boys Who's your favorite boy? I guess they're all bad

[01:24:07] That's why I'm pro Sammy Davis Jr. Just bring him in The other guy obviously is her boss Herman Stubby K And what a name You were trying to get his name I could have just told you Who obviously played Nicely Nicely He originated Nicely Nicely

[01:24:25] Which is the guy who sings Sit Down You Rockin' the Boat What's this guy doing in your musical He stands up, kills one fucking number At the end, sits back down He's a human cigar And his name was Stubby K Which was actually not His His birth name

[01:24:45] Oh his name was Stubbard K His name was Bernard Cotsen Wow Would you believe this man Was the son of Jewish Immigrants into New York City And he was raised in Rockaways, wow Stubby K, sit down you're rockin' the boat I love that song

[01:25:05] I just think we're missing guys like this for movies Well now it's like who is it It's like Josh Gad It's like these people that Disney picks up as like You're the funny guy, you come in You pop And I mean no disrespect when I say this

[01:25:19] These days you're maybe hiring A Colin Farrell to play a Stubby K Well that can happen I'm not sure if they're hiring a Colin Farrell Who are you thinking of What movie are you thinking of With like a funny sidekick role Let me think about that

[01:25:35] Let me think about that I mean like I guess Leto and House of Gucci Should have been played by a Stubby K Would've been fun I'm a pigeon I must learn how to fly, soar like a pigeon I think people want hunks to show

[01:25:51] That they can play a Stubby Oh you're thinking of the Kangdar Of course It's a different performance but Horrible Bosses But you know I think with Colin Farrell I think both of those are good performances The thing with Colin Farrell is it more seemed like he was like

[01:26:07] Can you put some shit on my face I'm sick of people thinking I'm Oz So fucking hot Like it wasn't like I'm gonna prove to you, I'm not gonna deglam It was more just like hide me Yes, yes, right It feels

[01:26:23] When Colin Farrell does it, it feels more like Edward Cullen being like this is the skin of a monster I don't want to be seen anymore Jared Leto's like What if I look like this Um, anyway Stubby K So yeah she's a dancer

[01:26:39] Her boyfriend pushes her off a bridge in Central Park And steals her money Oh good very bad don't do it One of the worst dates I've ever witnessed And then we go right into Hey big spender Which is done all slow and drawn out

[01:26:53] This is when I just feel like You're not seeing musical numbers with this kind of energy The amount of like fucking restraint In how long he takes to wind that thing up Teasing The teasing There's nothing finer than a trumpet sounding like Wow wow wow

[01:27:09] There's just nothing better It's so good I don't disagree but I don't know why I'm so excited I'm so excited I don't disagree but I don't know why That was funny It's not even It's an obvious point and yet There was just something about how he put it

[01:27:33] He did the trumpet It was the plunger They put a plunger at the end of it They do He didn't do the thing where he like blew on his thumb And pretended the hand was One hand was gripping And the other one was the plunger

[01:27:49] I guess it is also funny That this instrument That we can use to play Somber stuff at a military funeral And this amazing jazz music It's like It is It's just immediately like boy The sound That's what it means Like who was that guy Who was like guys

[01:28:15] I figured out if you put a thing in it It does this noise You know that thing I used to unclutch shit And all the other trumpet players are like what What if I put that on top of the thing I blow into You can't

[01:28:27] You can't do that The trumpet is a noble instrument And then like guys are like Get this guy, this guy's good Pay him money Is there an argument Is there an argument I want to ask, this is a serious question This is a serious question

[01:28:45] This is a serious question This is a serious question Is there an argument for the trumpet being the funniest instrument Now I know we're all riding high We've all been laughing This trumpet run's been really fun Obviously we can't ignore the tuba The tuba is kind of

[01:29:01] Because tuba is kind of The big chunk Yeah and it's just I mean just a very comical thing It also looks so funny It's funny that you have to wear it You operate in a tuba right

[01:29:15] I sure did, my band teacher took one look at me and said tuba You have a tuba vibe Your band teacher would just throw the tuba at kids And anyone who could actually hold it Like support it It was like alright that's your instrument buddy

[01:29:27] I just think like hacky people will go to like triangle Xylophone Kazoo Like these fucking simplistic sort of childlike Instruments Or like that's the funny That's the funny Instruments or like that's the funny thing Right Yeah but the trumpet is actually sort of the secret powerhouse

[01:29:47] Especially because it is taken seriously And it takes skill It does But it looks so fucking funny And it makes Robust fart sounds It does It can do That's what I'm saying it can play taps But it can do farts as well Big spender

[01:30:09] I feel like is the only number Maybe if my friends could see me now But like I feel like big spender is the only number In sweet charity that people are guaranteed to know Today right It's a song Absolutely

[01:30:23] Right like that's the end so it's like right at the start It doesn't really have anything to do with the plot Except just We want you to spend money on us We're the girls Is Shirley Walker the one who does the single version of it

[01:30:35] I mean that's what's known Shirley Bassey is who you mean of course Right Shirley Walker is the fucking Batman the animated series Is that right Yeah the memoirs of Vizelman Am I wrong You are correct about both Shirley Walker and yes Shirley Bassey You know Shirley Bassey

[01:30:53] He loves gold She's the Bond singer Who is she talking about who loves gold Goldfinger No but Only gold It is still just funny that song is called goldfinger And she's like he loves gold Only gold He loves gold Only gold He loves gold

[01:31:17] That's like the last minute of the song Every time it's intensifying I get it she's like gold And you're like okay Anyway Shirley Bassey This song becomes like a crossover Like pop hit I think like when Ben's watching this movie And it's like a two minute song

[01:31:35] It's not like a long song Your reaction is like holy shit Hey Big Spender is from this that's what this song is Yep definitely It's not even like I think most people wouldn't associate with it Even though probably everyone knows this song Right true

[01:31:49] Other people who covered it Chaka Khan apparently Bette Midler Peggy Lee Okay Jennifer Love Hewitt in a promo for her TV series The Client List That was one of those That was sort of like ooo behind the scenes of escorts Or whatever right

[01:32:03] NBC is ready to show you a shoulder On prime time television I think it was lifetime actually Oh really You know I think it's just kind of a funny song It's a very funny song Right like it's a song you can do on SNL Yes

[01:32:21] Sort of because of the noise And I don't know because of the word big maybe Yeah but it's also There's something very It's a song that's really kind of like giving you a come Come hither finger Yeah But it feels that way musically as well

[01:32:37] You know like there's something about it I also think it's one of those Songs where the lyrics are So clean And clear and directly Verbalized Sure That you like know all the words to the song Before you finish listening to it the first time I know

[01:32:57] I just loaded up Rich Man's Frog You're right you know even if you never heard it before basically Right The next big number is Rich Man's Frog Which did you have the exact same realization I did Go ahead Every single move In this number is repurposed somewhere

[01:33:13] In the Austin Powers trilogy This feels like this was one of the single biggest influences on Mike Myers The three main guys are all Wearing the fucking Austin Powers outfit And every fucking move As a kid who watched those movies too much And like they literally repurpose

[01:33:27] Every single gesture Which makes sense But can I just say as a broader thing I just love the idea of like a bunch Of rich people doing a dance about How rich and fancy they are And this is what it is

[01:33:41] Of course this is what rich people do They're all like It's not a ballroom dance They're all doing weird interpretive dance The camera's going like This is the skull and bones club to be Yeah absolutely Everyone looks like yes Peter Fonda dressed as Austin Powers basically Right

[01:34:01] I love her the giant menu The menu that's like weirdly big That's sort of like Gallagher-esque prop comedy Do you think Gallagher was ripping off this movie Yeah absolutely Remember when Ben said the trumpet thing Ha ha ha You remember that feeling

[01:34:17] That something like that happens in an episode At least we got that This has been absolute shit but at least Ben said that At least we got that, that episode's earned its keep You know like the dance move That's like you kind of freeze like an Egyptian painting

[01:34:29] And then you kind of like slide Yes I like it when they do that Yeah I feel like look there's a lot of musicals Especially 60s and 70s I mean American Imperious has this as well The Rain where it's like You do the extended

[01:34:45] Ten minute just dance sequence Plotless Not even really singing No main characters are involved Really It's just a bunch of dancers Either it's like a dream sequence So it's removed from the plot Or no main characters are involved and the main characters are watching it happen

[01:35:03] Or whatever it is I feel like most of them save this for like the third act It's kind of wild that this happens in the first 30 minutes But the dancing Evokes stuff Do you know what I mean guys I'm like I poo pooed this as a young man

[01:35:19] A kid couldn't pay attention And I'm like they're saying stuff with their bodies They sure are I'm trying to think how I would describe this dance It's almost like a rich man's frog I'm rewatching it It's so fucking good Imagine being one of the rich people though

[01:35:35] And then fucking up your dance move And everyone's mad at you Everyone's like doing this And you're like doing this What's the other reason why And this is a sequence where he Let's it play out in long takes Yes definitely

[01:35:51] Because he does want to just showcase the choreography The choreography is so spectacular And it's so visual He does sort of a hair thing Where the color goes negative That kind of stuff You know what's another thing he does That's incredible Because even like classical

[01:36:09] Or golden age movie musicals They use camera movements a lot As a part of their choreography You put the camera on a track And you have these kind of crazy Absolutely Or you dolly around or whatever I feel like he is able to make

[01:36:25] Whip zooms feel like choreography There are like rhythmic zooms In this movie The zooms are really important They're really cool And the zooms in and out sometimes And freezing Like an image And then moving it around And sometimes the people will freeze There's that sequence

[01:36:49] It's after she gets out of the park When she's walking to her job That is just a series of the freeze frames And then the audio is moving It's very cool He's just throwing every fucking technique at the board Like he's just What can I do

[01:37:05] But yes she meets Vittorio Vitale And a younger Ricardo Montalban He's not exactly young But he's in his late 40s Killing it Killing it It's the peak of Hollywood Saying anyone who isn't Anglo-Saxon Is allowed to play anyone else Correct You're Jewish you play a Mexican

[01:37:27] You're Mexican you play an Italian man You're Spanish you play a Jew Like everyone's the same If you aren't With a transatlantic accent Yes He sort of plays Marcela Mastroianni type He's just broken up with his girlfriend He's a big fancy movie star

[01:37:47] And he takes her to this club Takes her to his apartment A guy like that paying attention to a girl like her And so she does a big song about how she can't believe she's in this apartment It's called If They Could See Me Now

[01:37:57] And she's dancing around Dances with the coat hanger The painting The hat obviously She does a lot of hat stuff The hat The collapsible hat Why don't you have a collapsible hat? I was asking myself that same question I wrote collapsible hat question mark

[01:38:17] It's sort of the classic Sweet charity situation Things are looking great A guy is interested in her Things are looking up And then immediately something weird and humiliating happens And she's just like Willikers fascinated by all the rich fancy person shit around her

[01:38:33] Look at all this movie star shit you have There's that line she has Where she's like You took back to his apartment But it wasn't an apartment I like that she's sort of more fascinated That she is dejected When the ex-girlfriend that he's complaining about

[01:38:51] She rolls with this punch Ursula is the ex-girlfriend She's still returning home to the girls Being like I spent the night with a movie star And you just got his hat You don't understand that he took advantage of me She's like he didn't take advantage of me

[01:39:05] It was fun And they're like it wasn't depressing I had a good time I slept in a closet A dumb waiter though He brings up supper What a boob Someone brings me supper In a dumb waiter And calls it supper That's a classy dinner Signed, sealed, delivered

[01:39:29] When she walks out of the closet And she sees Will podcast for supper When she walks out of the closet And she sees Ursula lying naked in the bed And her reaction is just like Those are unbelievable sheets There's no sense of like jealousy No

[01:39:49] I feel like she does Cause it's right then That she goes to the employment agency And there's some sense of like I gotta figure it out But yeah she doesn't take it hard I think it's more It's less about that she didn't end up with him

[01:40:03] And more about she was like god it'd be cool to have that kind of life Right, right, she wants to be fancy Can I go legit There's something about the way she's dressed throughout I mean she's kind of wearing the same trench coat With a black dress

[01:40:15] But it made me think a lot of like how When you're trying to fit in in these spaces You know that it's almost like You gotta wear like really simple classic stuff There's something about how she still sticks out But is kind of nondescript

[01:40:27] In the way that she's dressed But you can tell like she doesn't belong there She doesn't fit in Yeah But also like this would be the coolest Looking lady in Brooklyn today Oh my god people would be fucking Falling over themselves trying to get her attention

[01:40:43] She goes to an employment agency She has no special skills She kind of gets chased out of there when she admits That she's a taxi dancer And then she meets a guy in the elevator And the elevator gets stuck And they have a whole thing

[01:40:57] But the whole sequence in the elevator is so good She's so, cause obviously he's now the funny one Cause he's having a meltdown She's very sweet where she's just like I guess this is happening to me now Like I think she's very winning in this scene

[01:41:09] And the comedic business leads to Her doing this musical number About his face, like manipulating his face While he's passed out It's such a bizarre stretch Of a movie And to make it a fucking cliffhanger in the middle Is so funny Yeah, that is It's a nice face

[01:41:29] The song is called It's a Nice Face Yeah it's a nice face Can I say this thing and I don't mean this backhandedly In any way This performance does have that thing I feel like unmistakably You sometimes see in a movie musical Where you're like

[01:41:45] This is the person it must have done on Broadway There's just a familiarity There's an ease with it It doesn't feel like someone is trying to pop really hard They're just working as part of the show They know what they're doing, they're serving the show

[01:41:57] Versus like Shirley MacLaine This is like I gotta prove something I need to pull off a musical You know? Yeah and he's very funny But you're right It's precise what he's doing And it's such a type That kind of like nebbish In the late 60s

[01:42:17] It's a very Neil Simon type Obviously Imagine if it was Alan Alda I mean I can't do Alda But it would be really good And then they start going out They do a bunch of normal shit And also he's like Why don't we go to some alternative church

[01:42:35] Where Sammy Davis Jr. is gonna do a number for us It's truly like Now people will be like What is this ADR He's like let's go to my church And they just drive They are not seen while Sammy Davis Jr. Sings the rhythm of life

[01:42:51] The church they go to hasn't been taken over By the electric mayhem Look it's good I'm not complaining It's such a reference to Electric Dayglo Ken Kesey, all that stuff I just love That it's just referencing The 60s in that way Yeah I mean I think it's funny

[01:43:13] It's like the end of the 60s There's a lot of hippies in this But you don't like hippies I don't like hippies You like Sammy Yeah you do like Sammy These are more druggie hippies They're more my speed But I love the joke Of kind of justifying it

[01:43:33] Where he's like yeah It's my church of the month club Or something But it's the end of the 60s And how there really were all of these weird little Alternative religions And churches and wellness things Absolutely There could be something more than just Regular old Sunday services

[01:43:53] But once again what we're talking about Pretty much a ten minute sequence In which our main characters watch a musical number With characters who will have no bearing on the rest of the film Which is fun It's just fucking showcase shit And it's called The Rhythm of Life

[01:44:07] And it's Sammy Davis Jr. Having a blast I know I'm not saying anything new here But you watch this guy and you're like Oh right People used to like know how to do stuff David you haven't seen RRR yet right I actually booked tickets to see it

[01:44:23] I'll see if I actually get to do it I saw it with a friend of the show Passing future guest Brandon Hines And his wife Humblebrag And afterwards she just put it perfectly British actors can do anything Right Well that's the Bollywood thing

[01:44:41] They can sing, they can dance They can do action sequences They can do comedy, they can do drama Sammy Davis Jr. is the same thing This guy was trained, skilled Innate talent but also just trained to be able to do anything And always grab your fucking attention Yeah

[01:44:57] That's sort of how British actors are Or at least used to be Like this well the same kind of You've been given Every string to your bow You have to learn to do accents, to dance To do comedy, to sing Honestly look Still watching like Benedict Cumberbatch

[01:45:15] On SNL He has a comedic facility that is different than Dramatic American actors It clearly was part of his training And the fact that so many British drama school Serious actors also have to be part of A comedy troupe and have a sketch background

[01:45:29] And then like Andrew Garfield He's magically being a good singer in Tick Tick Boom And they're like do you have singing experience? He's like no but I've trained my voice before I just worked on it for a month He's a good boy

[01:45:41] So yeah I mean the plot is In the second act is really nothing It's just them dating for a while There's that nice sequence in the subway station Where they want to Like they're going to kiss through the bars My wife is going like don't touch the bars

[01:45:55] And then after that Is when she finally reveals Like oh you know I'm a taxi dancer And he already knew And he's been kind of trying to be cool with it But and initially He's like I'm cool with it That scene at the diner where they're sitting

[01:46:11] In the opposite booze in the opposite direction Don't look at me! They keep doing that bit Very funny bit And the whole birthday thing is It's cute, it's not my favorite part of the movie Dude the song when she goes It's basically the song about someone loves me

[01:46:27] Oh man that's when I like I started to get a little teary I want to say this is secretly maybe my favorite number In the movie I find something so I mean I really like that Song What is it? I'm a brass band

[01:46:41] The one where she's you know initially crying And then she's like In Yankee Stadium And there's a brass band going all around her And she's at Lincoln Center And there's fountains going off We're moving around New York City And it starts to set the template

[01:46:57] For what Fosse is going to do Which is like The non-diegetic musical The musical numbers are the inner life Right? This is clearly taking place in its own reality Even in a movie Where except that people break into the song and dance This is a fantasy sequence

[01:47:15] And I think that's the number that serves her Best as a musical performer Sure I think that plays to her strength I found it very sweet, it was very touching I don't know, you fucking know that feeling Right? Oh absolutely, it's a magical feeling If there is like

[01:47:33] An arc to this movie It is a story About trying to convince yourself that you are Lovable That you are worthy of being loved Like that is the battle Against whatever Internal you know Handicaps you give yourself Like you're not gonna love me because blah blah blah

[01:47:53] We should at least touch upon the gender politics Because I mean it's obviously a movie of its time But watching it now I mean it's crazy I understand where it's all coming from But it really is like

[01:48:05] What do you mean? She's like I'm not going to be a complete person Until someone marries me Oh man, all of that stuff He does acknowledge that it's a rude question Yes And she's like no no no it's not a rude question But obviously you're like Jesus

[01:48:19] Even the shot, that little insert shot Of him looking at the tattoo All of that really didn't sit well with me It made me feel gross It's a 50 year old movie I know, I just felt like we should just mention You know what I mean?

[01:48:33] Look but I'll say this I do think this is a movie that takes her side That argues that she is lovable Absolutely And that he is weak for holding that against her You do watch a lot of films of this era

[01:48:45] Where anyone who has slept with more than three people Is coded as like Unselfishable The movie also knows, and you kind of know In the back of your head He's not going to be able to deal with this Especially once he says he's cool with it

[01:48:59] And the whole group is like Great! And they do the whole birthday I love to cry at weddings thing Not birthday, wedding thing Where you just are meaning like he doesn't like this He doesn't want to hang out with Stubby Kay No, that's what I like about it

[01:49:15] The weird like Seediness of Stubby is a thing He's like Too waspy for Stubby Even putting aside the like Promiscuity of the environment Stubby is just a little too Yeah That actor, Stubby Kay was also in the 1956 musical, Lil Abner Fuck, playing what? He played Marion Sam

[01:49:43] I still find that Lil Abner Was one of those comic strips that was just like This town and these people and then also this like Goop Wasn't there a creature named like Smoo or something, Lil Abner I swear to God, there's a creature named like Smoo

[01:49:57] Um, I don't And I think there's Smoo Jr Yes, they're called Gobble Glops And they eat rubbish, or as they call it Glop, they cannot be touched They're living incinerators, waste goes in and nothing comes out That is insane Oh, there's Schmoos as well

[01:50:13] There's lots of, the Schmoos are the ones I was thinking Yeah, the Schmoo is this thing Yeah, they look like Goop They look like Stubby Kay Well, I'm not really in touch with any of that Um, but that's cool You don't fuck with Schmoos?

[01:50:27] No, I don't fuck with Schmoos But not that there's anything wrong with them Let's try to approach this with a modern mindset, David Um, look, Oscar turns her down He can't do it, right She walks, she's wearing this gorgeous dress She's on it, it's so cute

[01:50:41] She walks sadly through Central Park And a bunch of hippies Kind of, you know Including? Little Bud Cort Oh, is that true? Maybe his first movie? I mean, he can't have been that old There's a close up shot of him

[01:50:59] I don't even know if he gets a line Um, Sweet Charity, it's his second Well, he played a student in Up the Down Staircase The year before, he's uncredited in this as well There is a close up, you can see him With the classic glasses

[01:51:11] And one year later, he is Brewster McLeod And uh And he's in MASH He's not Rader or Riley He's Boone in MASH Lorenzo Boone But yeah, little Bud Cort You know Harold Remond You saw Brewster McLeod too Oh, I've seen it We went to see it together

[01:51:33] We saw it with my dad and the two of you went, eh, that makes a lot of sense And your dad was like, that movie's weird And you were like, yeah It's like this movie we saw together And he's like, yeah, I know, it's just weird

[01:51:43] I grew up with you telling me it's one of your favorite movies of all time And he's like, I know, is that fucking weird? Um, but uh What do you think of these hippies, Ben? I was just watching I was very into the moment

[01:51:55] While also being like, god This has been annoying in the 60s These flower children just walking around with guitars Handing people daffodils and shit Those two of my feels really like Get caught up on the hippies I am kind of a sap now, it's true

[01:52:09] It's really happened with age I've joined the club But just at the end there Life is just so fucking hard sometimes But you get through it It's a new day The sun comes up and you just gotta keep walking Yeah It's so profound but so simple

[01:52:27] Look, it's fucking I cried like a baby It's like the fucking Ursula giving Peter Parker the cake moment Where you're just like Just one isolated act of kindness From a stranger who owes you nothing And you just go like Fuck yeah, I'm gonna live another day

[01:52:45] Ursula's a babe We'll have talked about her for four and a half hours I hope we do Not four and a half hours though We're doing a main feed bonus Ursula episode Great, sure, that's what we'll do Um, yeah, no, it's a lovely ending

[01:52:59] It makes me very, you know, yeah It's perfect, it's as it should be I think Obviously it would be insane for there to be a happy ending But like, I just like It's also not too miserable No She is kind of a bossy brown face Maybe

[01:53:17] She was notoriously bossy Shirley MacLaine? Yeah Fair enough I love her in terms of in the air when pretty bossy Well yes, but I'm saying, look, still is She's still with us That's like the toughest person I've ever worked with Cool Don Siegel did I'm scared of her

[01:53:37] Yeah, truly, like, I'll find that quote There was a Don Siegel quote that is unbelievable about Shirley MacLaine I'll find it Two meals for Sister Sarah Box office game Two meals for Sister Sarah indeed Is the movie I don't know what this quote is though

[01:53:54] I'm gonna find it I pulled it up Are you ready to go? Here we go I think this is what you mean It's hard to feel any great warmth to her She's too unfeminine and has too many balls Too much balls She's very, very hard

[01:54:12] Is that the quote you mean? It's on his Wikipedia He thought she had big balls She had big ass balls This film opened in April 1969 Okay And it actually opened to number six at the box office So it's not in our top five

[01:54:28] But it is, you know, it is opening big-ish Sure, Rojo Right, but number one is a Disney family comedy Live action? Live action Is it a Fred McMurray? Nope It's not. Is it Apple Dumpling King? Nope Is it a Herbie? That's right Is it the original?

[01:54:52] Yeah, what's that called? You gotta go through it Is it a Tim Conway? Is it a Fred McMurray? Is it a Dean Jones? Is it a Don Knotts? Yeah, Don Knotts, I guess, what's his pants Kurt Russell eventually Yeah Herbie, the love bug, I've never seen it

[01:55:08] You know what, maybe I have seen this one You've never seen it? Saw all of these as a kid Disney Channel used to have so few movies in rotation I definitely saw all of them Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, Herbie in Love I have seen all of them

[01:55:22] Herbie Rides Again Herbie Goes Bananas They redid the love bug of course in the 90s with Bruce Campbell, of all people And then of course they did Herbie Fully Loaded in the 2000s with Lindsay Lohan Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo and Herbie in Love do exist, right?

[01:55:42] I didn't make up those titles I'm not seeing Herbie in Love, I'm seeing that he went to Herbie Sorry, he wrote again, of course Then he went to Monte Carlo as we all do He must fall in love with one of them

[01:55:52] I remember where he flirts with a female car But he doesn't talk He's just a car that's imbued with some spirit He's got a little personality Doctor Strange Rides Again, Doctor Strange Goes to Monte Carlo Doctor Strange Goes Banana

[01:56:04] I think it's just a good, you can put it to anything It's a good four I agree Batman Goes to Monte Carlo, of course Batman Goes Bananas World War Goes to Monte Carlo World War Goes Love Bug A huge hit Clearly a fucking franchise

[01:56:24] Starring Dean Jones, who I best know as the original Bobby in Company He's on the Broadway cast album He quit the role almost immediately because he was like this is too dark too sexy We're gonna do a Herbie on Patreon No we're not That's a no from me

[01:56:46] There is another musical Is it Hello Dolly? No, but that's the correct star Is it Funny Lady? No Is it On a Clear Day You Can See From... No, it's Funny Girl It's 28th week It's just eaten I guess Barbra Streisand probably has just won an Oscar

[01:57:08] If this is April 69 Because it was a 68 movie Hello Beautiful, that's what she said to the Oscar Funny Girl Barbra Streisand Omar Sharif It's a William Wyler film One of the rare musicals to get a theatrical sequel Like a weird thing

[01:57:26] That's true, very weird to get a theatrical sequel And of course Babs Tied with Katherine Hepburn that year Very strange Number 3 at the box office is a war film Imagine how nervous you would feel In my memory they go like it's a tie

[01:57:42] And then they announce one of them And then they let them give the speech And then they announce the other one I can't imagine that's what they did I feel like that's what played out Because if you're like one of five And they announce the winner

[01:57:56] But they tell you someone else is one And you're like now I have a one in four shot I don't know My memory is they stagger it I'm going to watch it right now There they are, the best actresses of 1968 Katherine Hepburn

[01:58:10] I wish Ingrid Bergman could say my name like this Greta Nomen Blanchard Barbara Streisand holding Elliot Gould's hand Elliot Gould looking insane The photo of them in the fucking spot Who? Ingrid Bergman I want to say looks genuinely Charmed and surprised by this

[01:58:36] I'm going to show you her reaction It's certainly in a major category It's the only time it's ever happened Wow She's holding her chest Okay, okay Wow Wild right? So Babs gets on stage first And does Hepburn just wait for her to finish Or is Hepburn not there?

[01:59:08] Do they just say it at the same time? Do they both just make a speech simultaneously I don't know if Hepburn was there Maybe Hepburn wasn't even there Number 3 at the box office is a war film Two huge stars Two huge stars in a war film

[01:59:24] This is not a famous movie It's one of them John Wayne It's a famous movie I don't think this film is considered a classic But it's title is the kind of title people would know For something heroic sounding I don't know It's hard to describe

[01:59:44] Is Eastwood one of the two stars? Is it Where Eagles Dare? It's Where Eagles Dare! Who's the other star? The other star of Where Eagles Dare is I'm totally blanking Famous Welshman Famous? Is it Connery? No, Conner Scott If I say famous Welshman It's two people

[02:00:06] Which are Burton or Anthony Hopkins Famous Welshman Where Eagles Dare, never seen Has a fight on top of a cable car Sounds exciting One of those movies I probably will never see in my life Probably not It's 155 minutes

[02:00:26] Sorry to this man but I don't think I'm ever gonna watch this Number 4 at the box office Is another musical One that we forgot to mention Oliver! You ever seen that? No It's about little ragamuffins who steal Pickpockets You've got to pick a pocket or two

[02:00:48] They have a song about pickpocketing Have you never seen Oliver? I've never seen any musicals Ben, the whole fucking thing is about pickpocketing You've heard of Oliver Twist Jiminy Sweet No he's a pickpocket Ben doesn't know what Jiminy Sweet is

[02:01:04] Ben just reacted like we were throwing things at him He recoiled physically as if we had chucked a tomato at his head No he's Oliver Twist He's a little pickpocket He's an orphan who gets sucked in by a boy called the Artful Dodger

[02:01:20] He gets taken in by other pickpockets And bacon This is all connecting strands here for me But I don't know It's a great show And it's a good movie I mean it's a good movie, it's Carol Reed, obviously a master It's one of those Best Picture winners

[02:01:41] The 68 Oscars Now I have to look it up It's the most conventional winner Is that? Consider Yourself Or is it 69? I think it's 69 Dr. Dolittle is in the Bonnie and Clyde year You are correct, yeah, yeah. It's actually a much more boring lineup.

[02:02:04] It's Romeo and Juliet, Rachel, Rachel, good movie. Lion in Winter and Funny Girl. Yeah, okay, so that's like a pretty, that's a pretty. It's a consensus. All right, number five of the box office is, well I just mentioned it. Hmm.

[02:02:17] It was in the Best Picture and now it's a drama. Is it Lion in Winter? The Lion in Winter. Huge box office success. It was, I mean it's a movie that is, I've seen it and I love British history. Sure.

[02:02:27] You know, not the fastest moving movie I've ever seen. You know, it's just one of those things where you're just watching Peter O'Toole and Catherine Hepburn. Roar, you know, go for it. And Anthony Hopkins is really good in it too, you know? Sure. Like it's, it's just acting.

[02:02:44] I've got a beard and a big robe with fur on it. I'm the king. Yeah. And she's like, yes and I'm Eleanor of Aquitaine. I don't know what she does. Sure. You know, they're getting old. One of those, it's one of the many movies

[02:02:58] about Catherine Hepburn getting old that she just sort of kept doing. Well they're lions in winter, one could say. That's what they are. Sure. The Lion in, have you ever seen it? No. I've never seen it. Anthony Harvey film. So number six is Sweet Charity. Wow.

[02:03:11] Number seven is a film called The Killing of Sister George. Which is a black comedy from Robert Aldrich. Aldrich? Uh huh. Aldrich? Sure. Starring Beryl Reed and Susanna York. It's a stage play that's being, that was marketed on stage as a comedy

[02:03:30] and is being marketed as a film as a shocking drama and added explicit lesbian content. And was presented as a serious treatment of lesbianism. Wait. This was like an early film to acknowledge that girls might kiss. And they kiss in the movie? What's the name of this?

[02:03:44] I don't know. I don't know. It had an X rating because of a graphic sex scene. Wikipedia, how graphic was this sex scene? What are we talking about here? Yes. I don't know. But yeah. It was a controversial film. This movie is seen as a flop.

[02:04:04] And people go, maybe Fosse? Another in a long line of people who don't make the transition. Worked really well on one medium. I guess he's not a picture director. I guess it has nudity. All right, it was a big shocking scene. Sorry, I'm stuck on this.

[02:04:15] The Killing of Sister George. Remind me what the name of this movie is? The Killing of Sister George. Okay, thank you. There's also a film called 100 Rifles. Okay. A western with Raquel Welch and Jim Brown. Yep. Oh, it's got a good tagline.

[02:04:30] This picture has a message, colon watch out. Shit. They got 100 Rifles I guess. Yeah. Also Romeo and Juliet. That's a Farrelly movie. Correct. And Charlie, the Cliff Robertson movie. Oh, so he wins Best Actor this year? He wins Best Actor this year playing

[02:04:48] sort of flowers for algin and guy who gets super smart. Yes. Right, that's what it's about, right? I've never seen it. Yeah, yeah, yes. I've only seen the Simpsons episode that's a parody of it where Homer gets super smart. It's a born legacy which is a remake of.

[02:05:01] Yes, exactly. Give me my chems. I need my chems. Limitless, that's another one. I feel like 10 years ago Will Smith announced he was gonna remake Charlie and it was such a clear like, Will don't do this. Yeah, well that's better.

[02:05:15] You don't wanna play like a simple person who gets smart. Who gets so smart. Because the thing with Limitless is like he's starting regular and then gets smart. Yeah, Limitless. Charlie it's supposed to be like, oh he's someone with like low IQ who gets smart.

[02:05:29] Limitless, he's just a mess. Yes. Now Ben, I don't know if you know this but Bob Fosse's next movie after this is called Cabaret. I might have mistakenly said it was a Best Picture winner earlier, what I meant to say is that Fosse won the Oscar for it.

[02:05:44] He won Best Director for the movie Cabaret, his second film. Do you know what he beat at the Oscars that year for Best Director? We're gonna talk about this. I wanna tee this up now because Ben, I assume you're about to watch Cabaret for the first time.

[02:05:55] Have you never seen Cabaret? I have never seen Cabaret. Wow, shocking. Okay, Ben, I just wanna take a guess as to what you think. What year was this? 1972. My wife is home. Humblebrag, David's wife is home. Okay. Bob Fosse wins Best Director at the Academy Awards

[02:06:16] for directing Cabaret and he beats Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather. Wow. I just wanna speak to what an accomplishment that movie, what a triumph it is seen as because The Godfather's the highest grossing movie of the year. It's the most fucking beloved movie. It wins Best Picture.

[02:06:32] It's a cultural revolution and everyone's like, we have to give the fucking Oscar to Bob Fosse though. This guy just changed the game. It's just, it's a big fucking deal that his accomplishment there was on that level. For a guy whose first movie is like,

[02:06:48] well, what can I say? He lost the plot. That's really wild. Yeah. When people talk about good directing in movies, they usually say like Francis Ford Coppola in The Godfather. Well sure, it's just the ubiquitous best movie of all time. Right, well what a perfectly directed film. Yeah.

[02:07:06] But Cabaret also had a huge impact too. Huge, huge. Yes. And you'll see. You'll see. It changes the way people think you can make a movie musical in many regards. Yeah. Cabaret. I'm excited to do that. I'm excited to slither through the Fosse filmography.

[02:07:24] Have you seen none of these films coming up? No. Oh God, I love them. Cabaret's the only one I would have thought maybe been. I know. So I'll just. I think you're gonna love all these. And I think All That Jazz is gonna blow your mind.

[02:07:35] All That Jazz belongs in the pantheon of the biggest blank tracks we have ever covered. Why? Just because more than just budget? It's, well I guess we'll get into it. That's a big hype. But I mean it is the best. I love it to death.

[02:07:49] So maybe you're right. I don't know. It was so over budget that the studio was gonna shut down and a different studio was like, God damn it, we'll buy it from you. And they took it over. Wow. It was like, yeah.

[02:07:58] But also it's a guy making a movie about how much he sucks and how he's dying. It's like Bob Fosse eulogizing himself. All right, all right, all right. We'll get into it. We'll look forward to it. Come on, we're talking about other movies here. Sweet charity.

[02:08:11] I'm just trying to tee people up because I want people to be excited. They should be excited. Yeah. And we're gonna do Liza with a Z on Patreon. Liza with a Z on Patreon. And that's probably all we'll do, right? Yeah.

[02:08:20] There was brief discussion of doing a Lenny special. We don't need to do that. I don't think that's gonna happen. No. But Liza with a Z will happen. He becomes the first person to win a Tony, Oscar and Emmy in the same year

[02:08:30] for Liza with a Z, Pippin and Cabaret. Did he win a Grammy though? Don't know if he ever won a Grammy. So is he young? Look it up while I do the wrap up of the show. Please. Thank you all for listening.

[02:08:40] Please remember to rate, review and subscribe. Thank you to Marie Barty for our social media and helping to produce the show. Thank you to JJ Birch for compressing 42 years of a man's life into 17 pages of a dossier. Thank you to AJ McKee and Alex Barron for our editing,

[02:08:55] Lee Montgomery, the great American novel for our theme song, Pat Reynolds and Joe Bowen for our artwork. You can go to patreon.com slash blank check, blank check special features where we are covering the Batman movies we haven't covered before

[02:09:08] and also doing a little Liza with a Z. As we said, go to blankcheckpod.com for links to a bunch of other real nerdy shit. And as always, the answer to the question is he never won a Grammy. Much like his fellow E-ots, Al Pacino,

[02:09:23] Christopher Plummer, Maggie Smith, Jessica Tandy. Very, they're various. You never got that good. And there's another thing all those people have in common. What's that? Ever made it to Harold Knight? Never made a Lloyd team.