Taxi Driver with Tracy Letts

[00:00:21] [SPEAKER_03] Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, cars, sidewalks, stores. Everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man. June 8th. My life has taken another turn again. The days can go on with regularity over and over. One day indistinguishable from the next. A long continuous chain. Then suddenly, there is a podcast.

[00:00:47] [SPEAKER_07] Uh, what's the word there? Change? I thought you might do Listen You Fuckers You Screw He- You know, you might do that one. Yeah. There's a man who would not podcast it anymore. I don't know.

[00:00:57] [SPEAKER_03] I'm God's Loneliest Man does feel to me like the best line in this film.

[00:01:03] [SPEAKER_07] Hey, this is a movie with some nice little pieces of writing in it.

[00:01:08] [SPEAKER_03] Uh, yeah, sure. That's a good one. It is crazy. If you ask most people on the street, like, name movies that you think are well-directed or well-written, right? Like, just, even if you haven't seen it, what are the movies that you think of that people talk about as being like serious highbrow examples of great American direction and great American screenwriting? And this film was snubbed in both best director and best screenplay at the Academy Awards in 1976. Well, you know, they're not too smart.

[00:01:35] [SPEAKER_03] No, but that's wild that it didn't get- It's not wild. It's about a psychopath who kills

[00:01:41] [SPEAKER_06] a couple of guys in a brawl. It got four Academy Award nominations. It got best picture.

[00:01:45] [SPEAKER_07] I think that's more a sign of what a, you know, what a breakthrough it was. Do you want to know though? Yes. No, I know the lineup is insane. Well, do you want to know who beat out Scorsese in director? It's very interesting. You're saying who's like- There's three nominees in director who were nominated for best picture, and then there's two substitutes. Is this the same year as Bound for Glory? It is the same year as Bound for Glory. So Hal Ashby doesn't get nominated. Hal Ashby also snubbed. Rude.

[00:02:13] [SPEAKER_03] A good director, obviously. Yeah. The first Steadicam movie. That's so true. It's very true. Okay. So the three that do connect, obviously are All the President's Men. Yes. Network and Nashville? No. No, not Nashville. Sorry. Network and-

[00:02:28] [SPEAKER_07] The Best Picture winner of 1976. Our guest knows it. Oh, it's Rocky. Rocky. Right.

[00:02:33] [SPEAKER_03] Because he was just drafting these movies. That is wild that John Avildsen- He does win. Wins Best Director and Martin Scorsese was not nominated for Best Director. And I say, I say no offense to anyone who might have worked on the film, I play Rocky. I mean- Who plays John Avildsen in the film? You talking to me? I'm talking to you.

[00:02:49] [SPEAKER_08] This is great. See, I love that.

[00:02:51] [SPEAKER_03] See, Ben. Oh, he was, he added in the- You got what you wanted, Ben. In the holster. It couldn't have been better than that. Wow. Thank you so much. What delivery. What presence. Uh, who plays Avildsen in I play Rocky? Uh, Jay Duplass. Oh. That's pretty good casting. That's interesting. Yeah. That's pretty good casting.

[00:03:09] [SPEAKER_07] Because I think Avildsen is kind of like, he's like a tough Chicago guy, right? Like, he was sort of like a, yeah. Like a-

[00:03:15] [SPEAKER_08] Jay's great in the movie. Work a day. Well, Jay Duplass could- Well, I haven't seen the movie, but he was great when I saw him. Mm-hmm. Although I never saw him act in the movie. So I, in other words, Jay may stink in the movie. I don't know. I haven't seen it. You saw him in hair and makeup. He had the look? Yeah. I saw him at dinner. Yeah. You know, he was great at dinner. Okay, so you didn't even see him. Maybe the look's bad.

[00:03:34] [SPEAKER_04] Maybe they put a clown wig on him.

[00:03:35] [SPEAKER_08] So he was wearing a great jacket.

[00:03:36] [SPEAKER_07] Okay. It is just interesting to consider best picture that year, right goes to right. You know, and so yes. Director, you've got Avildsen, Pecula, and Sidney Lumet. And then the two substitutes. Lina Vertmuller for Seven Beauties. So, you know, groundbreaking, the first woman nominated for directing. And Bergman? Ingmar Bergman for Face to Face. Mm-hmm. Which is like, they gave, you know, they gave Bergman a lot of nums post, you know, sort of in his later career. Yeah. But that's the sort of, I forget about Face to Face.

[00:04:05] [SPEAKER_07] Like, I remember Cries and Whispers breaks through and all that, you know, like Fanny Alexander.

[00:04:09] [SPEAKER_03] Our guest just did a 1976 draft on Big Picture.

[00:04:12] [SPEAKER_07] No one drafted Face to Face, right?

[00:04:13] [SPEAKER_03] No one drafted Face to Face. I didn't.

[00:04:15] [SPEAKER_08] I mentioned it in the honorable mentions just because of Ullman's performance. It's not, it's not, it's not top tier Bergman.

[00:04:21] [SPEAKER_07] It's not a Bergman I've seen. And I know it's one of the ones that was, that was for television

[00:04:26] [SPEAKER_03] and there's different versions and all that. It is just fascinating that 1976 was the first female Best Director nominee. It doesn't happen again until 93. What year is Piano?

[00:04:37] [SPEAKER_07] That sounds right.

[00:04:38] [SPEAKER_03] Yes.

[00:04:38] [SPEAKER_07] 93.

[00:04:39] [SPEAKER_03] And then doesn't happen again until 2003.

[00:04:42] [SPEAKER_07] 2003 is Sofia Coppola, right? Right. That's the third time.

[00:04:45] [SPEAKER_03] Right. When we've had four since then, like it's doubled.

[00:04:48] [SPEAKER_07] Oh, maybe even more, right? I mean, it's gotten a little less unusual for a woman.

[00:04:54] [SPEAKER_03] Two Chloe Zhao nominations. And Catherine Bigelow won. Yeah. Yes. She's the first to win. She's the fifth. No, she's the fourth ever nominated. I think she's the fourth nominated. Yes. And she's the first to win.

[00:05:06] [SPEAKER_07] And then you had, scrolling down here.

[00:05:09] [SPEAKER_03] Champion second nom.

[00:05:10] [SPEAKER_07] You had Gerwig. Gerwig. In 2017. But we've heard it twice. For a little movie called Lady Bird. Yes. In which the man to my right says, This is true.

[00:05:17] [SPEAKER_03] Do.

[00:05:17] [SPEAKER_07] Says fuck. Oh. Maybe the best single line delivery of the word fuck I've ever heard. To me. Oh fuck, I believe is the line.

[00:05:24] [SPEAKER_03] To me, it's Doritos.

[00:05:25] [SPEAKER_07] Well, look, there's a lot of good line readings. I'm just, but is it oh fuck or just fuck? I think it's oh fuck. I haven't seen it a while. It's when she tells you she got into, you know, NYU or whatever.

[00:05:34] [SPEAKER_03] It speaks to the quality of the performance though, that we both were thinking. There's a one word utterance. Oh fuck. That lives in my mind forever. Okay. And we had different answers. Doritos.

[00:05:46] [SPEAKER_07] Uh, and then you're forgetting of course, uh, that Emerald Fennell was nominated. I was not forgetting.

[00:05:50] [SPEAKER_03] I was building the drum roll up to of course, the most worthy nominee in the history of best director.

[00:05:55] [SPEAKER_07] And uh, Justine Trié was nominated a couple years ago for uh, Nanami Fall and Coralie Farge was nominated for the substance. And last year, Chloe Zhao again. Yeah. So it's gotten much, you know, look, we're celebrating that now you often one woman will be part of the five. Right. And we're celebrating that obviously. Yeah. Right. Golf claps all around for the academy. Yeah. More women direct movies now.

[00:06:21] [SPEAKER_03] Still not that many, but more. The other thing is that now the academy feels increasingly international and you almost always have a foreign best director nominee and you almost always have a couple international films in best picture. And as Sean called out in the 76 draft, in the 70s, the Oscars were all about this. It was like suddenly the Oscars were like, The Oscars are pretty cool in the 70s. They were stretching their arms around it. Beyond everything interesting happening in Hollywood.

[00:06:49] [SPEAKER_03] They were like bringing in foreign performances, first female director nominee, foreign films and best picture and best director lineups. And then by the 80s, they're just like, we're back to our fucking bullshit. And it's finally come back around now, 40 years later.

[00:07:03] [SPEAKER_07] Prestige cinema sort of changes in the 80s. Oh. Very much. Right? Like, like 80s cinema is rich. Well, there's lots of great- Rocky and Star Wars start that. You're responsible for this. But you know, when you think about movies like Out of Africa, the sort of like, you know, Gandhi, these like big epics of the 80s, it's like those are absent in the 70s and they come back. Yeah.

[00:07:22] [SPEAKER_03] You could argue though that there's something in the taxi driver-Rocky divide specifically. These two movies, right? These two character studies of kind of lonely men in cities that are merging a kind of like neorealism with some kind of more classical Hollywood traditions. The taxi driver is using that entirely to make you feel bad. And Rocky is using all of that to make you feel great.

[00:07:49] [SPEAKER_03] And the second that kind of code is cracked with Rocky of like, here's a way to make a traditionally crowd-pleasing Hollywood picture that still feels kind of edgy and artistic. It's a little bit game over. Beyond just Star Wars making like this is just pure blockbuster shit. It's like, well, then we'll just give the best picture to the thing that's closest to Rocky.

[00:08:10] [SPEAKER_08] Well, if for no other reason than just the happy ending. I mean, Hollywood had been addicted to the downer ending for a lot of years. Yes. People were thirsty for a happy ending. I mean, they waited till Rocky II to make it a kind of a dumb happy ending. One could argue-

[00:08:27] [SPEAKER_03] But one has the good happy ending. One could argue that's the brilliance of Rocky and the thing they really fucking cracked is, how do you have a classic 70s new Hollywood downer ending that also feels like a triumph? And if you can do that, then who wants just the digging into the depths of how broken men are?

[00:08:47] [SPEAKER_08] Well, credit to Sylvester Stallone for that screenplay. I mean, he found a way to walk that line. It's nuts. The right way. But I remember as an 11-year-old watching the Academy Awards who had loved Rocky in the theater, I was still enraged that Rocky won Best Picture. I knew that was an injustice. At the time, you were like, this is nonsense. At the time, I thought it was nonsense.

[00:09:09] [SPEAKER_07] Was there a movie you were rooting for?

[00:09:12] [SPEAKER_08] Well, I'm... All the President's Men or Network or Taxi Driver. Right, right.

[00:09:18] [SPEAKER_03] But even at the time, you knew those are the good movies. I think about... I run the simulation in my head of watching this Oscars live. And I just have to imagine Network winning three out of four acting awards and Best Screenplay. Going into the final chunk of the night, it must have felt like, well, this is inevitable. And then suddenly everything swings Rocky for the final two big awards. Right.

[00:09:42] [SPEAKER_08] I'd like to redo some of the Academy Awards from that year. Do you mind? Please. Go ahead.

[00:09:47] [SPEAKER_07] Oh, I've got it open right here.

[00:09:48] [SPEAKER_08] Uh...

[00:09:49] [SPEAKER_07] Beatrice Strait, I think is a bad win.

[00:09:50] [SPEAKER_08] I'm going to give the Academy Award for Best Picture to All the President's Men. Sure. Respectable. I'm going to give the Academy Award for Best Director to Alan Pakula for All the President's Men. So, over Taxi Driver, the film we're here to discuss today. Over Taxi Driver. That's right. I think All the President's Men is one of our all-time greats. For Best Actor, I'm going to move Peter Finch into Supporting Actor. Yeah. Because William Holden is the lead in the movie. Yeah. Right. Obviously, Finch is not all over that.

[00:10:19] [SPEAKER_08] I'm going to move Peter Finch into Supporting Actor and I'm going to kick out, uh, I don't know, Ned Beatty. I'm going to kick out Ned Beatty in Supporting Actor.

[00:10:26] [SPEAKER_07] See, this is... It's tough. It's interesting because it's right. It's Beatty, Olivier from Marathon Man, and then two Rocky guys, Young and Burgess Meredith, both of whom are pretty fun. You're not going to kick out Burgess Meredith.

[00:10:40] [SPEAKER_08] No. Of course not. Go ahead and make an argument for kicking out Burgess Young, mate. Burgess Young's pretty great in the first Rocky.

[00:10:45] [SPEAKER_07] Oh, he's incredible. He lays it on the pick after that, but like, yeah.

[00:10:48] [SPEAKER_03] Well, and he brings it back around when he fucks the robot. Is all the President's Men... He just loves the robot. Is all the President's Men... It's implied heavily that he fucks the robot. Is all the President's Men...

[00:10:58] [SPEAKER_09] Who fucks a robot?

[00:10:59] [SPEAKER_07] Holly! In the fourth Rocky, there's a robot that, uh, Burt Young's character falls in love with. Seiko. Oh, maybe I haven't seen four. Yeah. It really went off the rails, didn't it? You've seen four, but you just don't remember that because it's nonsense. It's nonsense. Yes. I mean, four is also like 78 minutes long and has four montages. And anyone, everyone just remembers the Dolph Lundgren scene of the Russian stuff.

[00:11:19] [SPEAKER_03] My brother is a boxing fanatic, and we watch Rocky together. My dad was like, this is a big moment. I'm going to show you boys Rocky. And I was like, that's good. And my brother is like, I need to watch every Rocky film. And I was like, I think I can tap out here.

[00:11:31] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[00:11:31] [SPEAKER_03] And he gets the box set and he's watching all of them. And I was kind of checked out when, oh, okay, James, he got the living room TV. There's another Rocky movie on tonight. So he's going through two and three and I'm not paying attention. Oh, Mr. T's in this one? Okay. He fights Apollo again. Okay. And then I just walk in at one point in Rocky IV and I go, he's got a fucking robot now. And they go, yeah, Rocky bought Pauly a robot for his birthday. Cause I guess Rocky's like a millionaire now in the universe of the movies. See.

[00:12:01] [SPEAKER_03] And then I was back in because of the robot. And they, there is a scene that implies that Pauly has physical relations with the robot. I need to figure out what the line of dialogue is, but there's a line that pinged for me. Okay. Can we get back to relitigating the economy? Okay.

[00:12:16] [SPEAKER_06] So you're going to take out Ned Beatty.

[00:12:17] [SPEAKER_03] To this point, I just want to say, I'm more inclined to give Ned Beatty the supporting win. I think that's one of the greatest one scene performances in history. It's true supporting shit.

[00:12:28] [SPEAKER_08] If you feel that way, then we'll kick out Bert Young and we'll keep Ned Beatty.

[00:12:32] [SPEAKER_07] I think that's what I mean. But you don't like Robards enough to give him the win.

[00:12:36] [SPEAKER_08] I love Robards and this is a heartbreaker not to give Robards the win, but we're going to give it to Peter Finch. Is Julia the best supporting actor?

[00:12:44] [SPEAKER_03] Before or after all the President's Men?

[00:12:46] [SPEAKER_07] It's after, which makes it all the weirder, I think. Yeah. I'm going to double check that, but. Because it's two consecutive years, right? He wins two years in a row and you're like, oh, well, they must have been, the second one must have been President's Men because he's just so good it was undeniable. It's like, no, they decided Julia was undeniable. Yeah. Yeah. It's because he's playing. Who's he? Dashiell Hammett or something? He's like, yeah. Yeah. So I haven't seen Julia, but I assume it's a lot of him being like, oh, I love booze. Well, it's not a lot of him doing much of anything. It's a very small part.

[00:13:15] [SPEAKER_08] He's not in it very much.

[00:13:17] [SPEAKER_07] You know what? I got to watch Julia. I got to put my money where my mouth is to fully agree that he should not have won that Oscar.

[00:13:23] [SPEAKER_03] But in this alternate reality, we're putting Finch in supporting. We're giving him. Best supporting actor. We're going to give him best supporting actor. We're giving him the award.

[00:13:30] [SPEAKER_08] We're giving him the award. I mean, just a heartbreaker. Tough for Robards. One of those years.

[00:13:33] [SPEAKER_03] Robards will get the Julia award next year as a makeup for all the President's Men. Sure, fine. And then Burt Young, we're giving him the makeup for Rocky IV when he fucks the robot. He'll get that. And we put in best lead actor for that.

[00:13:42] [SPEAKER_07] You have a best actor slot open. And I'm giving it to Robert Redford for all the President's Men. His best ever performance.

[00:13:48] [SPEAKER_08] And I'm giving the award to Robert De Niro for Taxi Driver. Yeah.

[00:13:52] [SPEAKER_07] He's pretty good.

[00:13:53] [SPEAKER_08] Yeah.

[00:13:53] [SPEAKER_07] I mean, I think De Niro. De Niro is pretty good in this film. Was never going to win because he had won an Oscar two years prior. Yeah. And of course, he does eventually win a few years later for Raging Bull. I got a thought about that too, but keep going. So is he losing that one? Yes, he is. It's gone.

[00:14:11] [SPEAKER_08] You Thanos snapped it away from him. I'm pulling that away from him because I'm going to take Timothy Hutton and I'm going to correct the category fraud. I'm going to put him in lead and I'm going to give him the award. I think that's very respectable. He's the lead of ordinary people. Yeah.

[00:14:22] [SPEAKER_03] Do you know what the De Niro situation is very parallel to? Denzel winning the supporting for glory. For glory and thus he doesn't win for Malcolm X. And then two years later, there's Malcolm X and everyone's like, fuck. We just gave him an Oscar. We just gave him an Oscar. I know this is a leading man performance and this is now one of the definitive screen performances in American film history. Right. But can we do it again?

[00:14:44] [SPEAKER_08] Yeah. Who's he up against in Malcolm X?

[00:14:47] [SPEAKER_03] Malcolm X, he loses the scent of a woman.

[00:14:50] [SPEAKER_08] Right. That's the other makeup award for Pacino.

[00:14:53] [SPEAKER_03] This is the ultimate makeup. The magic of trying to fix the Oscars. It's a fucking Sephora award.

[00:14:58] [SPEAKER_07] Where you're just like, right. Okay. So we need to give Pacino award. And then so you start digging back. Yes. Where you're like, okay, should he have won for like dog day afternoon or whatever?

[00:15:06] [SPEAKER_08] And then like, I'm going to take it away from Nicholson. I'm going to give it to Pacino.

[00:15:09] [SPEAKER_07] Right. Because that's Nicholson's for. Cuckoo's Nest? Yeah. Is that his first win? Yes. Yeah. Right. No, of three, of course. But the other two are for James L. Brooks movies that you don't even like.

[00:15:21] [SPEAKER_02] Not to call you out.

[00:15:23] [SPEAKER_03] But then do you give Nicholson an award before that or after that? Like, do you, is your sliding door that Nicholson gets Chinatown? I could give Nicholson Chinatown.

[00:15:35] [SPEAKER_07] That's a fun one. Do you give him Easy Rider?

[00:15:38] [SPEAKER_08] I could give him Chinatown. Yeah. I'm not giving him Easy Rider. Okay. But if I give him Chinatown, then I'm taking the award away from Art Carney, who everybody loves to shit on. I know. And you love to defend, right? I know. You're pro-Art Carney. No, he's got a cat or something. He does. It's a cat. Have you never seen Harry and Tonto? Never seen.

[00:15:53] [SPEAKER_07] I think it's a hard-ish movie to find, right?

[00:15:58] [SPEAKER_04] Was there even a Twilight Time disc? No. Nary a Twilight Time disc.

[00:16:02] [SPEAKER_07] Right. So, right. But you could...

[00:16:04] [SPEAKER_04] It's the most Twilight Time title I've ever seen.

[00:16:05] [SPEAKER_07] You could do some... Or you could give Pacino the Oscar that year for Godfather 2 over Art Carney as well. Can I give Nicholson the award for Last Detail? Yes, he can. Now, you're taking it away from Jack Lemmon for Save the Tiger. I feel like that's okay. Easy. You're feeling happy about that. Have we fixed everything now? Now, you could also... I will say also in that year, you could give it to Pacino for Serpico. But I think Last Detail is a better performance than Serpico. But, like, I think in some ways Last Detail is sort of the...

[00:16:34] [SPEAKER_07] That's Nicholson distilled. Yeah, it really is. Which, I mean, Cuckoo's Nest has a lot of the same DNA.

[00:16:40] [SPEAKER_03] I feel like Nicholson also talks about feeling that Last Detail is his best performance and his best movie. I feel like he has said in interviews it is his favorite.

[00:16:50] [SPEAKER_07] I mean, you could also give it to him for five easy pieces over George C. Scott for Patton. Georgie didn't even want the Oscar. Yeah, in fact... He didn't show up. According to George...

[00:16:59] [SPEAKER_08] That's a pretty undeniable performance. It's a fucking great performance.

[00:17:01] [SPEAKER_07] But, like, Lynn, let's give George an Oscar for, like, Dr. Strangelove or something. Let's keep going back. When's that? The hospital. Because that's a great performance. So the hospital is the year after. And then you're taking Hackman's away for French Connection. I'm not sure you want to do that. Well, but then could you give Hackman...

[00:17:16] [SPEAKER_03] Could you give Hackman for conversation?

[00:17:18] [SPEAKER_07] What's the ripple effect of that? So that's 72. You're taking away Brando for The Godfather. Kind of an iconic screen performance. That was his second Oscar.

[00:17:28] [SPEAKER_04] Who did Brando play The Godfather?

[00:17:29] [SPEAKER_07] He played The Godfather. Oh, he played The Godfather. No, I mean, I love playing this game with the Oscars because it is so infuriating for people I know where they're like, Why did Leo win his Oscar for The Revenant? I'm like, you don't understand. Yeah. He was due. You know, they had missed him on this one. And I'm like, well, why did they miss him on that one? You don't understand. The guy who won that year was due because he missed on this one.

[00:17:52] [SPEAKER_03] You know, like, and it just never ends. What's fun about this game is when you can identify one that is actually a clean lift. Like the lemon for Save the Tiger. Where you're like, actually, we could just pull that out and slot everything in around it and everything's fine. I've never seen Save the Tiger. Because so often it is the cause and effect where you're like, well, fuck, I can't take it away from that guy. Save the Tiger.

[00:18:11] [SPEAKER_08] Also, uh... That's Abelson. Abelson, right? Yeah. What's it about? He's a salesman in a midlife crisis. That sounds like bullshit. Or a... Not a salesman. He works in the garment industry. He works in the garment. There you go.

[00:18:23] [SPEAKER_07] And that's his second win, right? Because he won a supporting one for Mr. Roberts. Yes. It's weird that Lemon, who's a great actor and one of Hollywood's great figures, has two Oscars, both for movies where you're like, huh? Yeah. Like, okay, that's what he won for? Yeah. He went for The Fucking Apartment? Right. He won for Mr. Roberts?

[00:18:43] [SPEAKER_08] But he probably should have won for, like, The Odd Couple, where he's fantastic.

[00:18:46] [SPEAKER_03] Am I wrong in thinking that he wasn't even nominated for The Apartment? That some like...

[00:18:52] [SPEAKER_07] You are, in fact, wrong. Okay. He was nominated, and he lost to Burt Lancaster for Elmer Gantry, and I think we can take that one away.

[00:18:59] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[00:19:00] [SPEAKER_07] We can kick it over to Lemon. Yeah. And then we'll give it to Lancaster for... I don't know. Come on. Come on, guys. Help me out here. The Leopard. Yeah. An incredible performance. Sweet Smell of Success.

[00:19:10] Yeah.

[00:19:11] [SPEAKER_07] Well, why not Sweet Smell?

[00:19:12] [SPEAKER_08] How about Lancaster for The Swimmer?

[00:19:14] [SPEAKER_03] Even a fucking... That's a good movie. The Old Watch, Local Hero. The Swimmer is... There you go. That would be a good lifetime achievement.

[00:19:22] [SPEAKER_07] Well, The Leopard's amazing. Yeah. It does have that thing of... Oh, that's the Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, and Hud. That's a tough... We just got into this because of... Fuck! I have him... Why did we get into this? I have him winning for Sweet Smell of Success on my personal Oscar ballot, but I have him in supporting. Oh. That makes sense. But I think that's defensible. Oh, I do. He's supporting in that film.

[00:19:44] [SPEAKER_03] A Color of Money episode to come later down the line. We got into this exact same conversation of the ripple effect of why Paul Newman has to win for Color of Money. Right. Which is another very frustrating...

[00:19:57] [SPEAKER_07] You're like, why didn't Newman win for Hud? And it's like, well, Sidney Poitier won that year. That's kind of a big deal. Like, why didn't he win for... Yeah. Cool Hand Luke. Who won Cool Hand Luke year? It's Steiger for In the Heat of the Night, which is your Best Picture winner.

[00:20:09] [SPEAKER_08] I'm giving it to Paul Newman for Cool Hand Luke, and then I don't have to give it to him for Color of Money because I have to say Color of Money year. He's number five on my list.

[00:20:18] [SPEAKER_07] He's number five behind Dexter Gordon, Bob Hoskins, William Hurt, and James Woods.

[00:20:22] [SPEAKER_03] Hoskins, you're number one?

[00:20:24] [SPEAKER_07] He's thinking. I mean, the Dexter Gordon performances is great, and it's great that they nominated it. It is one where you're just like, this is just the guy, right? Because he's just kind of sitting there going like, I love saxophones, and you're like, this is cool. It's not as easy as it looks to just be the guy. You know what? You got a Tony, I don't have no Tony.

[00:20:44] [SPEAKER_03] This is true. This is Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David. This is 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 won. Sometimes those checks clear, and sometimes they shoot a bunch of people, baby. This is the guarantor.

[00:21:03] [SPEAKER_07] I want to know who he wants for 86 Best Actor, but yes, this is, sure, this is Martin Scorsese's guarantor.

[00:21:09] [SPEAKER_03] This is the film that you could argue mince Martin Scorsese as Martin Scorsese. He is that for the rest of his life and for the rest of time. Yeah, sure. I mean, even if he never made a movie again after this, even if he never made a good movie again after this, he would be in the annals of history forever. And certainly he knew how to capitalize upon this for the rest of his career, even with the ups and downs.

[00:21:35] [SPEAKER_08] How many of these have you guys done? Of Scorsese?

[00:21:38] [SPEAKER_03] We've only skipped ahead for one. Otherwise, we've been basically going in this order. So I guess this is our fourth. Oh, so you're really just getting started. We're getting started.

[00:21:44] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah, we're pretty early, which feels appropriate.

[00:21:47] [SPEAKER_03] We haven't done Alice yet. We have done Color of Money already. Otherwise, we've just been running up to this.

[00:21:53] [SPEAKER_07] Who's that knockin' Boxcar Bertha and Mean Streets? Yeah. We've done that. So you can tell me who's done those with you. Sure. Miriam Bale did Mean Streets with us. We didn't do, who is a film critic. At Boxcar Bertha and Who's That Knockin', we had no guest. And then last Color of Money, we had the great Chris Ryan. We will spoil that. Yes.

[00:22:12] [SPEAKER_08] Okay. So you've got a long way to go. The reason I ask is, have you seen everything? Have you now seen everything in the Scorsese?

[00:22:17] [SPEAKER_07] I have seen every Martin Scorsese film, but for a couple of Rockymentaries that he's put out in more recent years.

[00:22:25] [SPEAKER_03] That's some real Patreon shit. But I've certainly seen every Scorsese feature film. I have not seen Kundun. Kundun. I've not seen Last Temptation.

[00:22:36] Wow.

[00:22:37] [SPEAKER_03] And I've not seen Age of Innocence. Those are my weird blind spots.

[00:22:39] [SPEAKER_07] So you don't like the ones without guns, huh?

[00:22:42] Huh?

[00:22:42] [SPEAKER_07] You just want the gangster pictures. He makes a movie about the Dalai Lama. You're like, skip.

[00:22:47] [SPEAKER_03] I dislike his films where the title is The Blank of Blank.

[00:22:52] [SPEAKER_07] Right.

[00:22:53] [SPEAKER_03] The Color of... That bit doesn't work. Because I also... I have seen Wolf of Wall Street. And you like King of Comedy.

[00:22:57] [SPEAKER_08] Is this a fair question to ask at this point in the process? What your favorite Martin Scorsese is?

[00:23:03] [SPEAKER_03] I think it might be this film. Someone asked me this just last weekend when I told them that we were starting up our Scorsese. And they said, what do you think is the best one? And I just knee-jerk went. It's a little bit hard to argue with Taxi Driver in my mind. I might, as we go through chronologically and re-watch the other ones, change my mind. It's not like on this re-watch I went, no question, iron lock, no way anything's beating this.

[00:23:28] [SPEAKER_03] But it does feel like the purest text to me, in a way, of everything I think he does exceptionally. And is the ultimate example to me of a movie that only he could have made. Tracy, what is your answer?

[00:23:42] [SPEAKER_07] My answer is, unfortunately, the very boring answer of Goodfellas. That's your number one Scorsese. And then I would, I think, and we'll see how this series goes. After Hours, Last Temptation, and Taxi Driver are the sort of other contenders for me. Those are my favorite Scorsese movies. I like most of his movies.

[00:23:59] [SPEAKER_03] Pretty much all of them. My take would be that I think Goodfellas is the peak of his filmmaking. And that this is textually his richest film. It's a great movie.

[00:24:09] [SPEAKER_08] Taxi Driver is my first by some distance. King of Comedy is probably next for me. Pretty great. And After Hours is way up there.

[00:24:20] [SPEAKER_03] That is my personal favorite, but in a it just kind of hits me way. I would never argue it's the best, but I do think it's way up there.

[00:24:26] [SPEAKER_07] Now, as we all know, you hate the 90s. And so Goodfellas is that the 90s excess of Goodfellas.

[00:24:31] [SPEAKER_03] You were banned from VH1 because you kept pitching them. Griffin, I thought I'm making the same joke. I couldn't figure it out. Storm to their offices and go, here's the pitch. It's just me talking ahead. I was like, how do I do a VH1? Saying how every pop culture thing from the 90s is dumb trash for babies. You're not a 90s guy. No comedians.

[00:24:48] [SPEAKER_08] This has already gotten a bad rap. I like the 90s. There are things about the 90s I absolutely love. And I like Goodfellas. Yeah. It's not top tier Scorsese for me, but I like it. I'm no dummy. I recognize how good Goodfellas is.

[00:25:03] [SPEAKER_03] It's just immaculately made.

[00:25:05] [SPEAKER_08] It absolutely is. And there are, you know, some of the set pieces in it are undeniable. But it's got like five of the most watchable scenes in history. Really amazing. I will admit that when Ray Liotta slams the door in my face at the end of the movie, even in the movie theater in 1990, I was kind of like, well, fuck you too. I know some people who felt that way. I remember that. I think when, again, when we talk about the Academy Awards and I'm not going to make an

[00:25:34] [SPEAKER_08] argument for dances with wolves over Goodfellas. But I wonder if that was part of the part of the reason that Academy voters went, oh, well, fuck, you know, fuck.

[00:25:44] [SPEAKER_07] Of course. The movie ends with him being like, this sucks. I'm going to live in a fucking house. I'm a schnook. I eat noodles with ketchup. And it's like, I mean, obviously, but I think some audiences are like, you're lucky

[00:25:55] [SPEAKER_03] you're alive, you dumb motherfucker. It's not a unique thought, but I very strongly subscribe to the theory that the ending is the most important factor towards a best picture win. Right.

[00:26:05] [SPEAKER_07] How are people walking out of the theater?

[00:26:07] [SPEAKER_03] What is the feeling you give them? Our buddy Amanda Dobbins, I think, hit the nail on the head when she saw one battle after another and said the moment the needle drop for American Girl kicks in, he's probably won himself best picture.

[00:26:20] [SPEAKER_07] You're winning over a certain sentimental portion of the audience.

[00:26:23] [SPEAKER_03] He figured out how to thread the needle to have an ending that's not bailing out the integrity of its ideas, but still feels like a triumph and has everyone leave and feeling up. And I remember being surprised that Nora won best picture because the ending is such a downer. But yet you can't deny that the ending is sort of the best part of the movie. It's a gut punch. It's it's it's the perverse showpiece. And that maybe is.

[00:26:44] [SPEAKER_07] It's my argument for why Titanic made two billion dollars. Yeah. You walk out happy. It's the ultimate example. They all fucking died. It is the ultimate example. And yet you walk out and you're like, I feel elated because she goes to the dream world

[00:26:54] [SPEAKER_03] and marries Leo fucking Adam on that one is why James Cameron is James Cameron because he said, I can figure out how to make everyone walk out of Titanic cheering hearts full. But that certainly is a Scorsese problem is his endings are usually very challenging. It is funny that the thing he finally wins best picture for is his most mocked ending.

[00:27:13] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah. The departed.

[00:27:14] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. That everyone jokes about the shot of the rat and how unsubtle it is. The shot of the rat. I don't dislike it. But our guest today is that guy. Oh, fuck. It's the king of Doritos. Return to the show very quickly by popular demand. I will say I received a multitude of texts saying. Get his ass back. Truly. And secondly, when we finished recording our first episode with you, you said, what are you guys doing next? We said Scorsese.

[00:27:42] [SPEAKER_03] David said, what would you pick? You said taxi driver. And we look at each other and go, fuck, we might have to do that. Sounds fucking good to me. It's a quick turnaround, but we might just fucking have to do that. Tracy Letts. Thanks for having me. King of Physical Media. Back in the room. Yeah.

[00:27:56] [SPEAKER_07] Third chair on the big picture.

[00:27:58] [SPEAKER_03] Of course. I knew that we weren't bringing you discs this time, so we weren't going to.

[00:28:01] [SPEAKER_07] That's canonical and we all know that. Yes. No, no. We can dispute it. Uncontested. And we speak it into law by saying it on this podcast.

[00:28:06] [SPEAKER_03] I knew we weren't going to spend an hour going over Blind by Disc Challenge. Oh, yeah. Right. Sorry.

[00:28:13] [SPEAKER_07] We didn't get you a bunch more random trash movies to ask your collection.

[00:28:18] [SPEAKER_03] I do like that we did basically start with half an hour of alternative Oscar history across the tickets. That's true. That's true. It feels like the correct spiritual sequel. Yeah.

[00:28:26] [SPEAKER_08] Yeah. By the way, the gift you got me, I've yet to tuck into some of them, but my kids love The Nanny showed my kids Mouse Hunt.

[00:28:36] [SPEAKER_06] Oh, there you go. Yes.

[00:28:38] [SPEAKER_08] That's a big win. Because the- And they liked it. The Nanny loves it. Okay. And so she knew it. She already knew it. Yeah, she knew it. She was like, okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So she was excited to show that to the kids and the kids.

[00:28:48] [SPEAKER_03] It's in my head. It's a very practical movie. Yeah. When you talk about your kids liking Dark Crystal and such. Right. Right.

[00:28:54] [SPEAKER_07] In my head, your DVD collection is like Raiders of the Lost Ark when they put the thing on the shelf, where it's just like an endless hallway. There's like a- Yeah, it's a bit like that. It is a bit like that. Like, I'm like, how does the Nanny or anyone even know where Mouse Hunt is?

[00:29:09] [SPEAKER_06] Is there a robot arm?

[00:29:11] [SPEAKER_03] Is there a Dewey Decimal System kind of punching the code to locate?

[00:29:14] [SPEAKER_08] Well, look, the stack you gave me sat on the kitchen island for about a week before it got entered into the system. And it was accessible. She sold it right on.

[00:29:21] [SPEAKER_07] That's my physical media system, too, is the stack piles. Then I'm like, it's time to get this stuff up.

[00:29:26] [SPEAKER_03] You know, it's funny that I- Right. I try to like theme the stacks and then one of the stacks is themed around new purchases. And then that stack gets so big that I'm like, I got to work that into the other theme stacks. Right.

[00:29:37] [SPEAKER_08] Yeah.

[00:29:37] [SPEAKER_07] Right. So Mouse Hunt. Yeah. Mouse Hunt. Yeah. Okay, good. Good to know. Yeah. Any other- Yeah. I mean, you just did your physical media council. No, no other big news on the world of Blu-rays. I don't know.

[00:29:46] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, New York, New York just announced on 4K. I, of course, imported the Australian imprint disc, which has some features that are not being carried over. I have that disc as well. To the 4K release. But the 4K release does have both cuts. Oh.

[00:29:59] [SPEAKER_08] Oh, I see. So the New York, New York I have is just a blue.

[00:30:04] [SPEAKER_03] Yes, mine too. I think it's- It's domestic blue. Right, right. And then the imprint Australian release is three discs.

[00:30:10] [SPEAKER_08] Oh, I don't have that.

[00:30:12] [SPEAKER_03] And it has both cuts and a lot of special features. But this is MVD Marquee. I'm going to get the- Yeah, the fine folks at MVD Marquee. Ben, you seem a little too excited by this conversation if you want to just chill out a little bit.

[00:30:26] [SPEAKER_05] All right, I'll settle down.

[00:30:27] [SPEAKER_03] Just because it's a little unbecoming how ramped up you.

[00:30:30] [SPEAKER_05] Do you do any of the subscriptions?

[00:30:32] [SPEAKER_03] I'm on the edge of my seat.

[00:30:33] [SPEAKER_05] I'm about to fall on the floor.

[00:30:34] [SPEAKER_07] That's my concern is that you're going to trip your teeth. Your vinegar syndrome, your Radiance. Do you do any of those kind of- I do the Radiance subscription. Okay. That seems pretty good. I've been debating any of these.

[00:30:44] [SPEAKER_08] And there are a couple that I just order every- They don't have subscriptions, but I order every release. When the monthly announcement happens. You get the monthly announcement in here.

[00:30:51] [SPEAKER_03] This was when Ben was trying to pick which disc to buy for you and our buddy Ben David Grabinski was consulting on it. His really valuable advice to Ben was certain labels you might just need to rule out. Certain labels Tracy might just be add all to cart.

[00:31:05] [SPEAKER_08] I don't subscribe to the vinegar syndrome because they'll do a lot of genre horror, like 90s or 2000s genre horror that I'm not so into.

[00:31:16] [SPEAKER_03] Vinegar syndrome has never released a film that is less than a minted classic. Yeah.

[00:31:21] [SPEAKER_07] They definitely haven't taken, right, the worst trash and put it in the most beautifully designed package for you.

[00:31:26] [SPEAKER_03] Worse selective than the Criterion Collection. That's the other thing I got multiple texts about is five different people upset by us mocking how good of a package they put together for Congo. Including Matt Singer- It's a great pack. Who wrote the booklet for Congo. My friend Alex Perlin, who Congo is his favorite movie and his bachelor party was, let's go back to my place and watch Congo.

[00:31:46] [SPEAKER_09] People are defending the movie Congo.

[00:31:49] [SPEAKER_03] And defending its prestige package. That we pinpointed it as the ultimate example of, does this need this good of a release? Oh, well, come on. That one is hot trash. Come on. Supreme Delray Lindo performance. You can't argue with that. The monkey talks. The monkey talks.

[00:32:11] [SPEAKER_07] The monkey talks. Amy. The monkey is, the monkey, you mean Ernie Hudson, right? Not Delray Lindo, right?

[00:32:16] [SPEAKER_04] No, Delray Lindo's got a one scene performance. Oh, that's right. He's like the, uh, the warlord.

[00:32:21] [SPEAKER_07] Yes, that's right. I'm not racist, my friend. I've seen, I was just, I was worried you were for a second. I'm not. I've seen Congo. I was worried you were racist. I was, I think I've seen Congo.

[00:32:31] [SPEAKER_04] I'm trying to tell you that I, in fact, am not racist.

[00:32:34] [SPEAKER_07] I know that Congo is a very important movie for some people as we're describing where it was like they were the right age. Yes. They saw this weird ass Jurassic Park-y kind of movie and it, no, I've seen it, I think, 1.5 times. I do own the Vinegar Syndrome movie. I do too. I own that goddamn shoe box. I do have it.

[00:32:50] [SPEAKER_03] I went, I went to the store in Pittsburgh recently and I was, I was running my fingers across that box and I was tempted, but I still haven't pulled the trigger on it.

[00:32:58] [SPEAKER_05] Tracy, you were going to weigh in on the monkey. Amy. Amy.

[00:33:01] [SPEAKER_03] So fucking stupid. Thank you for weighing in. Perfect. Okay, great. I was talking about this with Mad Singer who wrote the essay and the booklet. Yeah, sure. Great Mad Singer. It is so funny to me that Jurassic Park is obviously humongous, right? And everyone's like, okay, how do we fucking follow this trend? Steven Spielberg's producer is going to adapt a different Crichton book. Yeah. And the hook is, you think fucking dinosaurs are scary?

[00:33:30] [SPEAKER_03] What about gorillas? Right. A thing that... Talking monkey. A species that does currently exist on our planet. Right. And is less scary. And the trailers made it seem like they're going to go to the jungle and gorillas are going to fuck them up. And the movie is 90% of its runtime, just people having kind of intellectual hard science conversations next to a talking monkey. Should we let this monkey talk? Was that a good idea? At the end, they go in a cave and they fight monkeys for like five minutes and the movie's over.

[00:33:59] [SPEAKER_02] Oh my God.

[00:34:00] [SPEAKER_03] It's funny that they didn't even try to adapt it to make it more Jurassic Park-y. It is just a classic Crichton like, I don't know, I'm a little interested in the science of this. Maybe I should do that Radiant subscription.

[00:34:11] [SPEAKER_08] The Radiant subscription is really good. It's really worth it. And like I say, there's a couple. Indicator, I get every release from Indicator. But not subscribed. You just add all.

[00:34:21] [SPEAKER_03] They don't have a subscription or I would.

[00:34:24] [SPEAKER_07] Flickr Alley, I get every release from Flickr. I love Flickr Alley. Damn, I don't really know. So they do a lot of very old, you know, 20s and 30s, right? Like that's their thing. Silent movies.

[00:34:32] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, that's a really good thing. I've been thinking of doing the...

[00:34:35] [SPEAKER_07] My whole problem when you go on the big picture to talk discs. Activate stuff. It's just, it's like my accountant calls me and it's like, what happened?

[00:34:42] [SPEAKER_03] Physical Media High Council episode came out. I cannot tell you how many carts I checked out. The amounts of money I spent.

[00:34:49] [SPEAKER_05] The amount I spent like crazy. Well, you know, we should say, since we're talking up all of these different companies. And, you know, we also do complain on this show a lot that the office is just filled to the brim with stuff. Negative space.

[00:35:02] [SPEAKER_03] It's too much negative space. Empty shelves.

[00:35:04] [SPEAKER_05] Love some swag every once in a while.

[00:35:06] [SPEAKER_03] This is Ben's just like send up the free stuff.

[00:35:08] [SPEAKER_02] I'm sure, yeah.

[00:35:09] [SPEAKER_03] Do you know what often happens now when I order from these boutique labels? They send you a little message? They put in a little note.

[00:35:15] [SPEAKER_07] I appreciate the notes. I've had a couple of little notes over the years. Hey, we appreciate you. Right. Thank you. Yeah. That's all good. I'm happy to spend, happy to spend on things I think are worthwhile and valuable, such as fancy Blu-rays of Congo.

[00:35:27] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, what we're doing is important and noble and everyone should salute us. They should hit their pots and pans with the sticks when we walk down the street. I was going to ask you. Hold on. Before you ask me. Please. The Haunting 4K.

[00:35:40] [SPEAKER_08] Do you have it yet? Yes. Is it out? I mean, I pre-ordered it. I don't have it. Sean and I do a commentary.

[00:35:46] [SPEAKER_04] Very excited about that. On the original? Yeah. It's the Robert Wise.

[00:35:50] [SPEAKER_03] I got to order that.

[00:35:51] [SPEAKER_07] Beautiful, by the way. Yeah. And you know when Robert, when Paul Newman won his Oscar for The Color of Money, he wasn't there. And Robert Wise accepted on his behalf, starts to say like, Paul really appreciates this. Betty Davis is next to him. Betty Davis and Robert Wise were presenting the award. And Betty Davis cuts Robert Wise off and is like, I just want everyone to understand this is Robert Wise and he's a really great filmmaker. Oh, great.

[00:36:11] [SPEAKER_03] No, you're right. It's Betty Davis is presenting. Right. Robert Wise comes to accept. Robert Wise was standing on his behalf.

[00:36:16] [SPEAKER_07] Robert Wise is trying to be like, Paul really. And Betty Davis is like, will everyone give a little respect to Robert Wise?

[00:36:22] [SPEAKER_06] He may be old, but he made the sound of music. He may, you know, like she starts and he's like, oh, thank you, Betty. And then they walk off. They play the music. Paul Newman again.

[00:36:31] [SPEAKER_03] Nothing. It's the weirdest thing. I want to talk about Taxi Driver, but I just need to close the loop on this. The Radiant subscription.

[00:36:38] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[00:36:38] [SPEAKER_03] Does it include the sub label? What is the name of the label? Okay.

[00:36:42] [SPEAKER_08] You have to.

[00:36:43] [SPEAKER_03] But they do offer a subscription for that?

[00:36:46] [SPEAKER_08] No. No. You have to.

[00:36:47] [SPEAKER_03] That's an extra. That's an add on. What's it called again? Transmission. Yes. Which is Stuntman and Vampire's Kiss and Cutter's Way was transmission. Was that regular Radiant?

[00:36:57] [SPEAKER_07] Stuntman was, was regular. Vampire's Kiss was as well. Night of the Juggler. They did that. Yes.

[00:37:02] [SPEAKER_08] Night of the Juggler. Do you know that one? I've never watched it. James Brolin, right? Heard great things. Yeah. Carrie and I had a great time with that. That thing is batshit. Yeah. The thing just goes batshit.

[00:37:15] [SPEAKER_07] Brolin made a lot of like hefty trash, I feel like. Yeah. Right? Like that was sort of Brolin's lane. Yeah. Like in the seven. What an air. What an air. Oh my God. Such a, he's an animal. Like when you see him in Amityville, you're like, this guy is right.

[00:37:28] [SPEAKER_03] He's an ideal. Yes. Very close to being the only American Bond, as we talked about when we did those Patreon episodes. Impossible to imagine. It's sort of a bizarre thought.

[00:37:37] [SPEAKER_07] Very close. How close? There's screen tests. He was supposedly like seriously considered. It doesn't really. Wasn't it one of those times where they were trying to get like Connery to knock like 250k off his quote or whatever?

[00:37:48] [SPEAKER_04] But I think he was in it twice.

[00:37:50] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah, man.

[00:37:51] [SPEAKER_03] And there is an extended screen test. There's also a fascinating extended screen test of him doing Planet of the Apes. Now, Tracy, are you testing for Bond? Oh, really good question.

[00:37:59] [SPEAKER_07] You know, Amazon's on the hunt. Denis Villeneuve is available. You know, he's looking around. I, when they get serious, I might consider testing.

[00:38:08] [SPEAKER_08] You can be a Bond villain. That'd be fun.

[00:38:10] [SPEAKER_03] No, he should be Bond. Let's not fucking take an offer. All right, all right. They should get serious.

[00:38:15] [SPEAKER_08] I worked with an actor named Anthony Higgins. You would probably recognize him maybe from Raiders of the Lost Ark or maybe from the Draftsman's Contract.

[00:38:25] [SPEAKER_07] Peter Greenway. He's a, to me, that's a classic. He's a British guy. He's like, he plays British guy. Proper British guy.

[00:38:31] [SPEAKER_08] In Raiders? Isn't he in Raiders? Isn't he one of the... He is.

[00:38:35] [SPEAKER_07] Let me double check that. Because I do feel like you're right. He's in one of them, isn't he? Am I making it up? I'm just trying to... Yes, he is Major Gobler. He's one of the fucking Nazis.

[00:38:44] [SPEAKER_08] Sure, sure, yes. He's a very good actor. Big Shakespearean actor. And he's in a couple of old Hammer films. Okay. And under a slightly different name. I think it was Anthony Corley or Corlin or something. Corlin, yeah. Taste the Blood of Dracula. He's in that one. He told me a great Christopher Lee story. But also, he was up for Bond at one point. They brought him out a couple of times to test for Bond. And the whole reason they were doing it was because Roger Moore was bitching about his contract.

[00:39:14] [SPEAKER_08] So it was like, we will get somebody else. And when I worked with him, he was like, thank God I did not get James. He was really genuinely... No, I'm not as I am to be now. Genuinely grateful that he was not James Bond. And I said, why is that? And he said, well, because I can walk over here to the off-license and make a bet and nobody's going to bother.

[00:39:36] [SPEAKER_07] Now, you mean off-track betting. You don't mean off-track. In Britain, the off-license, that's where you get your booze. That's where we work. The offie. Oh, that's where you get your booze? Yeah. So the whole thing in Britain is you can't get booze at the grocery store. At like the corner store. You have to go to the offie, which is next door.

[00:39:52] [SPEAKER_08] But they call the off-track betting something different in England, too.

[00:39:55] [SPEAKER_07] I thought of that as like the bookmaker or whatever. I mean, like Ladbrokes, you know, like... But yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, bookie. I mean, I don't know.

[00:40:04] [SPEAKER_08] Yeah. He's a lovely guy. Can I tell you my Christopher Lee story? This has nothing to do with taxi drivers.

[00:40:09] [SPEAKER_03] I will say, just a future plug, we're getting ready to later in the fall do Dracula on our Patreon. Yes. So we're going to watch that first. We're going to watch each kind of major Dracula. So we're doing the first Christopher Lee. Right. We'll do Lugosi.

[00:40:23] [SPEAKER_07] We'll do Lee. Am I getting a call for that? Yeah, yeah. Sure. You want to come by? Sure. Which one do you want? You want the Langella? Do you want the... I want Christopher Lee. You want Christopher Lee. He's the best. Okay. My mom said the classiest person she ever interviewed in her entire life. Like truly like the biggest gentleman.

[00:40:37] [SPEAKER_08] That's Anthony's story. So he works with him on Taste the Blood of Dracula. And the first time he works with him, it's raining, of course. It's always raining. Sure. And they've got Christopher Lee waiting in a taxi. What do we call them in England? The taxi? Minicab? Minicab. Black car. Black cab. Yeah, sure. So he's waiting until the rain passes. And so they take Anthony from the trailer and they put him in the car with Christopher Lee. And Christopher Lee's in the full Dracula getup.

[00:41:06] [SPEAKER_08] And he's introduced to Christopher Lee. Christopher Lee says, oh my God. This weather is just dreadful. Long pause. Oh my God. These teeth just don't fit in my mouth. I am so uncomfortable wearing these teeth. Oh my God. This cape. What this cape is made out of. I can't breathe. And it's just a litany of complaint. And just unbroken. His fourth Dracula performance. And he's sick of it.

[00:41:35] [SPEAKER_08] Just unbroken stream of complaint. They make the movie. 30 years later, Anthony is cast in one of these TNT biblical, right? One of these mini series, right? John the Baptist, right? And he's flown out to some desert location in the Middle East. And he comes out of the trailer and they lead him into this holding tent where they're getting ready to shoot.

[00:42:03] [SPEAKER_08] And he sees in the holding tent in a long flowing robe, Christopher Lee sitting waiting. You know, he's got a long beard and now he's an old man. And he goes, he's excited to see him after 30 years. And he sits down and Christopher Lee says, oh my God, this sand. Just sand is getting everywhere. This robe is so hot. I can't even breathe. It was like as if it had never stopped.

[00:42:25] [SPEAKER_03] Have you found this, Tracy? That certain actors, it almost feels like the discomfort and beyond that, the complaining and the struggle is like the heart of their process. Oh, absolutely. That they need the motor of the irritation.

[00:42:43] [SPEAKER_07] To answer your question, the TV series is Moses. Of course. You found it.

[00:42:48] [SPEAKER_03] Oh my God.

[00:42:49] [SPEAKER_07] I found it. Ben Kingsley played Moses. Christopher Lee played Ramsey. He must have killed that. He's played Korach. Yeah. Not sure. He's sort of like a rebel from the Bible. I don't know really. But very funny to imagine. Fine. Put the fucking Egyptian headdress on me.

[00:43:08] [SPEAKER_08] The unbroken string of complaint is the way some actors have to get through the day.

[00:43:14] [SPEAKER_06] Especially if you're Christopher Lee.

[00:43:15] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah. You served in the British Secret Service. You killed people. You like, you know, and then it's like you made 40 unbroken years of monster movies and shit. Right? He never was in a movie that probably had like a high budget. Like he was the king of these British genre films.

[00:43:32] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, I feel like it was going around again recently, but the clip of him doing an interview after being knighted or given an OBE.

[00:43:40] [SPEAKER_07] I mean, I guess he was in like, you know, Man with the Golden Gun or whatever. Yeah. That sort of stuff he would have a better trailer.

[00:43:47] [SPEAKER_03] And the interviewer said, well, there you have it. Christopher Lee, the king of horror. And he went, the king of horror? I haven't made a horror movie in 40 years. And he started listing all the different characters he played. And I'm like, my God. You're kind of the king of horror. You did play Dracula like 15 times. And it's not even like that was your core franchise. You did it like six times for Hammer. And then you just said like, open game, who wants to pay me to play Dracula in anything? He did. He made Italian Dracula movies. He did American Dracula movies.

[00:44:15] [SPEAKER_07] He's the best. He rules. I remember when my mom saw, like she interviewed him for, I can't remember for what. It was in the early 2000s. And we watched a ton of Hammer horror movies because she was like, I'm scared. You got to watch these with me. And we had a great time.

[00:44:27] [SPEAKER_03] This is a long time ago. That's so funny that for her, from her childhood, she was like, these are primal fears.

[00:44:33] [SPEAKER_07] I'm freaked out by these. And I was like, I'll watch them, you know, like. And then we saw, you know, and he'd been in Lord of the Rings at that point. Then we saw Attack of the Clones. Yeah. Which a movie my mother, like, had no interest in whatsoever, right? She probably just watched. She was like, yeah, I need you to show me his part at the end, right? And when he walked, she was just like, he's just got instant. Even in this, this garbage. Yeah. Instant gravitas.

[00:44:53] [SPEAKER_03] Like when he's just delivering these lines about the force and lightsabers. I am loathe to invoke Ain't It Cool News. But I have a very distinct memory. Because of the timeline of when that would need to shoot, it was before Lord of the Rings, which must have been the first time I saw him as well, before I learned about Christopher Lee. But this is when I actually learned who Christopher Lee was. There was an Ain't It Cool News headline, which was, Scoop, you will not believe who is playing the new villain in Star Wars Episode II. Wow. I click the link and it says like, guys, I've heard this.

[00:45:23] [SPEAKER_03] Reliable sources cannot say who. But are you seated? And then it was scrolled down. And it was dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Like you truly had to physically scroll down the site. And then it was just a photo of Christopher Lee, blood running down his face, woman in his arms. Sure. Neck bites. And then it just said, Christopher fucking Lee. And this impressed upon the clue. I was like, who is this important?

[00:45:49] [SPEAKER_08] Who is this legendary? Episode two. By episode two, you mean Empire Strikes Back. No, unfortunately, you mean Attack of the Explorers. Oh, I see. It's in the mid-2000s. Well, that's a good system. Absolutely. I love that.

[00:46:00] [SPEAKER_07] It is wild that Lucas in the 80s is like, call Empire Strikes Back Episode V. And I was like, what? He's like, just do it. Right. Come on.

[00:46:09] [SPEAKER_03] Right. Because people forget that when Star Wars was released, it did not say Episode IV.

[00:46:14] [SPEAKER_07] It doesn't say Episode IV.

[00:46:15] [SPEAKER_03] No.

[00:46:15] [SPEAKER_07] It's just called Star Wars.

[00:46:16] [SPEAKER_03] Right. I think when they re-released it right before Empire, he added Episode IV. So everyone who had seen the movie 80 times and had it memorized was like, fuck is this Episode IV shit? What are you talking about?

[00:46:26] [SPEAKER_07] No, it was retroactively titled Episode IV. After? After Empire Strikes Back. Insane. So it was Empire Strikes Back. People sit down. Can't wait to see the second Star Wars movie. And the scroll begins Episode V. And everyone's like, why is it that?

[00:46:41] [SPEAKER_03] Do you think people in the audience went, did I miss? Yes. I'm sure people were just like, what? Like, yeah, I don't know. Were there three in between? I just somehow didn't catch? Taxi Driver. I don't know if you guys had this experience watching the movie this time. But upon this re-watch, I was quite taken with the fact that it is Taxi Driver. Oh, sure. That I just kept going like, this is the most fucking Taxi Driver movie in the world.

[00:47:06] [SPEAKER_03] It is wild to re-watch movies that feel like every single thread, every single fiber is canonized. It's hard to just kind of watch them fresh as like a movie. And yet, I did. It rules.

[00:47:23] [SPEAKER_07] This is just, and I want to hear, I know Tracy, that you saw this film as a child. Or you saw some of it and were taken away. What's the story?

[00:47:32] [SPEAKER_08] Yeah, so the story is, and apologies if there are any crossover listeners who've heard this before. But my folks took me to see a lot of material made for adults when I was a kid. It took me to see Serpico when I was six years old. That's the earliest, most egregious example, I think.

[00:47:53] [SPEAKER_03] They never went full Travis Bickle date night, but they were taking you to... Well, in fact, they did.

[00:47:58] [SPEAKER_08] Really? When I was 10, we went to the drive-in movie theater to see Taxi Driver the year it came out. Now, where I come from in Oklahoma and when I grew up, drive-ins were very much a part of our movie going country.

[00:48:12] [SPEAKER_07] I was going to say, did you have a picture house that you went to? Was it all drive-ins? What town in Oklahoma are you from?

[00:48:17] [SPEAKER_08] A small town called Durant, Oklahoma. A town of about 12,000 people. And when we moved there in 1970, there were three screens in town. There was the Plaza Theater, which was the old single screen in the middle of the town. And then there were two drive-in movie theaters. There was a drive-in called the Ship Drive-In, named after its owner, Ship Bullard. Oh, I love it. It's not like it was naval themes. Yeah, right. Although there was a big, beautiful neon ship on the sign out front.

[00:48:46] [SPEAKER_08] And then there was the Sky View, which showed pornographic films on the south side of town, which you could actually see from the highway driving down the road. Insane. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:49:03] [SPEAKER_07] That's it, man. It's still there. It's not a theater anymore.

[00:49:06] [SPEAKER_08] It looks like the last picture show, doesn't it? Yeah, it really does. It's a big one-screen theater. I worked at that theater as a projectionist. I projected Wrath of Khan in that movie theater. Best movie ever made. That rocks.

[00:49:18] [SPEAKER_07] That must have, every time that James Horner's course, you know, spools up. Happiest person in the world.

[00:49:24] [SPEAKER_08] So at the ship, I would also work at the ship. I worked at the ship more than anywhere else. But when I was 10, we went to the ship drive-in as a family to see Taxi Drive. And we got about, and I checked the time on the rewatch a couple of nights ago. I checked the time because it's when Jodie Foster and Travis go back to her.

[00:49:46] [SPEAKER_07] And she's like trying to take off her clothes. So it's about an hour into the movie?

[00:49:49] [SPEAKER_03] It's later than you think. About an hour 15, hour 20. It's what really struck me watching it this time is that obviously you see her and you see sport early. But the movie doesn't really kick into what people remember the movie being until it is about 75% over. That's right.

[00:50:07] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah, you're not quite sure what's going to happen with this guy.

[00:50:11] [SPEAKER_08] Because the movie was considered pretty transgressive for the time for mainstream Hollywood fare. And because we had already seen some startling stuff in the movie up to that point. My mom turned to my dad and said, Dennis, I'm very uncomfortable. So he put the car in gear and we laughed. God bless.

[00:50:30] [SPEAKER_07] I mean, I have to. I also like to imagine the drive-in and then just every five minutes a car just kind of peels out as the movie goes on and on. He goes to the porn movie with Sybil Schafer. A couple cars peel out. You know what I mean?

[00:50:52] [SPEAKER_03] Sitting there at that time with a character who is unlike any put on screen in a major movie up until that point. There's a genuine concern of like, is he going to fuck this kid? Like what's going to happen?

[00:51:07] [SPEAKER_02] Right?

[00:51:07] [SPEAKER_03] I'm watching it knowing this is going towards violence.

[00:51:10] [SPEAKER_08] And we don't really know who Jodie Foster is. So we don't actually know how old the actor is playing the part. But in any case, we leave. Now, this is 1976. It's not like I can rent the movie.

[00:51:24] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah, you're not going to catch it on Netflix in nine months or whatever.

[00:51:27] [SPEAKER_08] My folks go back to see the movie the next night. They go back by themselves to see the movie. So they were intrigued. They were hooked. They were intrigued. They wanted to see it. And then they narrated for me what happened through the rest of the film. Since I guess, you know, he doesn't wind up fucking the girl. They felt it was all right to narrate the rest of the movie. And my dad even acts out the hand to the temple as he's right with the bloody finger as he's firing into his head.

[00:51:56] [SPEAKER_08] He's lost his mind. And he describes this and he acts this out. And then my mom is the one who says, and then there's a coda at the end of the movie in which there's this letter written by her parents. And Sybil Shepard gets into the car and mom said, I think it's all fantasy. I don't think any of that stuff is actually real. So credit to my mom for picking up on that.

[00:52:18] [SPEAKER_07] She didn't walk out of there being like, turns out everyone says you did a good job. I guess he was the hero.

[00:52:23] [SPEAKER_03] We haven't talked about, I haven't brought it up that much in our 11 years of doing this podcast. But I more and more think it is a key part of how I ended up being the way I am today. And obviously this was driven by me already innately being so interested in movies. But if my parents went out for like a grown up date night to go see a movie, I would stay awake.

[00:52:45] [SPEAKER_03] Even when I was supposed to be in bed with the lights off, I would stay awake for them to come home so that they could narrate to me what the movie was in the same kind of way. And I think my parents were similarly very good at doing it. Yeah.

[00:52:57] [SPEAKER_07] They could finesse it for you.

[00:52:58] [SPEAKER_03] But would also add their analysis to it. Right. So there are a lot of movies, not this one, because, you know, I'm sure my parents told me the basic shape of taxi driver. But like, I remember them trying to explain Trainspotting to me. And when I finally watched Trainspotting, you know, seven years later, I was like, oh, that's that scene. And this is what they left out or that's where they editorialized or things like that. But I do think that's. A parent wouldn't do that unless they felt like their kid wanted that. Yeah.

[00:53:25] [SPEAKER_03] But I do also think that only supports and trains the kind of insane brain that we have to just want to digest these things constantly. And especially when you're sort of being told, like, these things are so close, but you can't watch it just yet. You're hearing the breakdown of what it is. Yeah. And someone explaining what their reaction to it was. And this is one of those movies where I wish I could have had the experience of watching it without knowing what it was and where it was going. Yeah, right.

[00:53:55] [SPEAKER_03] Even just one time in my life. And I. When do you end up seeing it?

[00:53:59] [SPEAKER_08] Yeah. Probably not until I'm 18 years old do I wind up going to a video store and renting it. And I remember even then what we were talking about the video store days when you go with your family and try to. Pick the one. Pick the one. Or no, we weren't talking about it. You were talking about it on the podcast I was listening to while I was driving here. Green car. See, I can't keep reality. Yeah. It's fine.

[00:54:20] [SPEAKER_03] It's fine. We're straight. You've been on a big picture run that similarly I was saying when you came in, I've listened to three episodes with you in the last 10 days.

[00:54:27] [SPEAKER_08] Well, I remember one of those video store moments, you know, I'm finally going to get a chance to see Taxi Driver. And I remember my dad being kind of like, really? I mean, he didn't feel the need to watch it again. Yeah. Yeah, sure. He had enjoyed it and he was greatly respectful of De Niro's performance in particular. But I think he considered it kind of an ugly thing that would need to be revisited.

[00:54:51] [SPEAKER_07] It certainly is. To my mother, this was the definition of an adult movie that I was not writing. You know what I mean? Where she was like, well, you can't rent a movie like Taxi Driver. You know what I mean? Like, it was the definitional R-rated movie that was not available to me until I was older. Taxi Driver. Like, she's like, that's the most grown up movie ever made. It is not for young David. And I was like, it's about a, I get taxis all the time. I'm a Manhattan kid. Nice guys. They know directions.

[00:55:18] [SPEAKER_06] What does he do?

[00:55:19] [SPEAKER_07] He takes people the wrong way.

[00:55:21] [SPEAKER_06] Like, what do you mean? He's a taxi driver. How scary can he be?

[00:55:24] [SPEAKER_07] No, wait a second. You're from England, right? Well, Tracy. Tracy, you're going to get the story and no one's allowed to make fun of me. I was born in Manhattan. Is that my mantra? My mother is from Utica, New York, upstate. My dad is English. He's from Serberton in London. And when I was nine years old, my dad got a job in London and he moved and we all moved with him to London. I lived in London for 13 years.

[00:55:46] [SPEAKER_08] I see. So your first nine years spent in Manhattan. New York kid, Upper West Side, 89th and Amsterdam, baby. Oh, and you're, you've never left this.

[00:55:54] [SPEAKER_07] You're.

[00:55:54] [SPEAKER_03] I've never left. But here's the twist. My mother's secretly British.

[00:55:58] [SPEAKER_07] Well, I thought, yeah. Or she's European. I think of her.

[00:56:00] [SPEAKER_03] Well, but this is why I'm saying secretly. Right. Because she's actually British, but she was basically raised French. Right. And she's got French ancestry. Ben, where are you from? Well, French stepfather.

[00:56:11] [SPEAKER_05] From Jersey.

[00:56:12] [SPEAKER_08] Oh, yeah. Born and raised.

[00:56:14] [SPEAKER_05] Yep.

[00:56:14] [SPEAKER_08] And been here ever since. Never been in the central time zone.

[00:56:17] [SPEAKER_05] No. No?

[00:56:18] [SPEAKER_08] Oh, because he went to college in New York.

[00:56:20] [SPEAKER_05] Went to the new school. Right. And just stuck around since.

[00:56:22] [SPEAKER_08] See, one of the reasons I wanted to establish this, other than my curiosity about my friends at Blank Check, one of the reasons I wanted to know this is also because you have to realize that as a little kid living in Durand, Oklahoma, a town of 12,000 people with a movie theater that looks like that. Yeah. What the world of taxi driver looks like to a kid like that. Of course.

[00:56:42] [SPEAKER_07] And just to America, like, I assume like so much of America is watching this movie. It's like, right, that's New York. That's what it's like. It's like murder around every corner or whatever.

[00:56:50] [SPEAKER_03] Well, when I was born, my father worked in an office in Times Square. I think he basically had that office until I was five. And so I did, I do have very primal early memories of the pre-Disney Times Square where we would go to visit my father, which was the area that still most purely felt like this. You know, and even going to Times Square during the day as a child aided by a mother, you know,

[00:57:19] [SPEAKER_03] it's not like I was being accosted in a stroller. But it did, it did look the way this movie looked. Right. And it had that weird energy to it. Everything was just kind of unseemly and edgy and felt desperate.

[00:57:33] [SPEAKER_08] And the way this movie looks is remarkable, right? It's insane. I mean, it's a testament to Michael Chapman, who I assume we'll talk more about, but also a testament to Scorsese and Schrader's vision of New York as a kind of hell on earth.

[00:57:50] [SPEAKER_03] Absolutely. It is a thing I think about all the time. And it hit me while watching this film where I was like, this is what I'm fucking talking about. I hate how overlit almost all evening stuff is. Yeah. I find it is so evocative to be in dark places where you actually can't see stuff. And almost all movies feel the need to make things more legible than they would be in real life. And I understand that part of it is, especially in the history of film, that film stocks

[00:58:18] [SPEAKER_03] were so slow that you needed to overlight even if you wanted to make something look dark. Gordon Willis films still would have used infinitely more lights than we would need to use today to shoot something on video, to just be able to get any image that registers. And yet, this is a movie, especially in the opening and the sort of opening credit sequence where I'm just like, God, I love how much you cannot see. It makes it so much scarier. It's part of the hell on earth thing that you have this insane contrast between these

[00:58:47] [SPEAKER_03] neon lights that are both the fixed lights of the locations and the headlights of the cars going by, kind of smudging through time and space, and then just voids of blackness. Just what the fuck is happening there?

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[00:59:43] [SPEAKER_07] Can I offer a take, though? A little bit of a small take. I also do think it's kind of a beautiful and seductive movie. Like, as much as it is, like, New York is terrifying and all that. Like, I'm also watching, and I'm like, this is romantic. Like, it's a little romantic, right? It's got that impressionistic thing. You're a little enchanted by him. I think it's crucial to Taxi Driver that you're not just like, this is a freak. I'm watching a freak in the freak show.

[01:00:09] [SPEAKER_07] The fact that he's handsome, that he's got the little bits of De Niro twinkle amongst the disturbing.

[01:00:14] [SPEAKER_03] I want to put parameters around it because I really want to resist the temptation to draw the comparison too many times. Don't bring it up.

[01:00:21] [SPEAKER_07] I know what you want to bring up. What? He wants to bring up Todd Phillips' Joker. It just... Which is, you know, which is kind of ripping off this movie. It's thoroughly ripping off this movie. Yeah, this and King of Comedy.

[01:00:30] [SPEAKER_03] I know you've not seen this film. I have. I've seen Joker. You've seen Joker. I had not re-watched Taxi Driver since seeing Joker or Baleida. And it was astonishing to me, A, just how wholesale the ripoff is in ways I kind of forgot how one-to-one some of the elements are. But B, that it just fucks up that exact equation, which is just the characterization of Travis Bickle is so perfectly dialed in on when is he pathetic? When is he sympathetic?

[01:01:00] [SPEAKER_03] When is he empathetic? When is he terrifying? When is he unknowable? And the soup of that and the dance of that and what feels like the absolute distinction is that this is a movie defined by what to me is the masterstroke of the movie and the moment where Scorsese becomes a generational genius is in the payphone conversation when the camera moves away from him. This is too painful.

[01:01:23] [SPEAKER_07] One of the first camera moves I ever learned about as a teenager. Like it's Ebert or someone talks about it in a review where they're like, notice how the camera can't look at it.

[01:01:32] [SPEAKER_03] I watched the movie and went, wait a second, what the fuck is going on? Like pause the VHS and then ask Jeeves, what is this? You know, because I was just like, something has happened. Was Jeeves helpful? Yes, he was. Well, sir. But it felt like something has happened here, right? Like Dylan just went electric. Like the language just changed in some way. I don't understand, but I understand what it made me feel and what is the intent of this. And Joker is a movie that's, as you're saying, is look at this fucking freak.

[01:02:02] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, yeah. That is showing you.

[01:02:03] [SPEAKER_07] And let us not mention Joker again, please.

[01:02:06] [SPEAKER_03] Well, of course, only refer to him as Richard T from here on else. But it is a movie that he is so captivating. And it's not a traditional charisma. And it's also kind of unlike to me the other banner breakthrough 70s new leading men, new Hollywood performances. It's still impossible to pin this fucking thing down.

[01:02:28] [SPEAKER_08] Now, that statement is something I really felt on this rewatch, getting ready for this. And for me, it's a hallmark of great movie making, great art, the way it continually shifts and changes. And you have a hard time getting your arms around just what the hell it is. And obviously, the film is fixed. The film hasn't changed in 50 years. And yet your relationship to it changes. The person you are changes.

[01:02:55] [SPEAKER_08] And it's just sort of endlessly fascinating. The myriad ways to look at it, to look into it, to the question about perspective, about point of view in the movie, which is pretty profound question you have to ask yourself.

[01:03:14] [SPEAKER_08] You're talking about the romanticism of the city, David, which is not only present in the way it looks, but also obviously in the very lush score. Right. Part of the Bernard Herrmann score, right, with the lush saxophone, which is argued about, right?

[01:03:35] [SPEAKER_06] Is it too much? Is it too heavy? Right. Yeah.

[01:03:37] [SPEAKER_07] I think the score's incredible, too. I kind of forgot. It is interesting when these young guys are using the sort of craftsmen of their idols, right? Like Herman Hitchcock, Scott, you know what I mean? Yeah. And I imagine those relationships were odd. And like Spielberg, even with Williams, who's older than him, he's not like totally, you know, old. But like, right like that. But Williams is a guy who basically... I want someone who has a hand on the prior generation.

[01:04:02] [SPEAKER_03] Williams had just popped at the end of the old school. Right. Versus someone like Herman, who was the old school. Do you love the Herman score?

[01:04:11] [SPEAKER_07] I mean, where are you on the Herman? It is very heavy. You know, like it's very intense.

[01:04:15] [SPEAKER_08] Carrie watched the movie with me and she had said after, I was just asking her the question about it. And she had said, you know, she said, the truth is that the wrong score would isolate him even further. He would look even smaller to you than he does. Right. And it's important that he not look that small. He not look that infinitesimal because you're trying to get inside him, right? The movie is trying to put us inside his point of view. Right.

[01:04:43] [SPEAKER_08] And that the score is somewhat successful at doing that. Yeah. Basically, the score has two essential themes. I was going to say.

[01:04:50] [SPEAKER_03] I want to call out the sub theme because there's the obvious taxi driver theme that we all think of. That feels essentially just theme from taxi driver. Over for sure. But then there's the kind of deep like sustained, which is the really important counterbalance of this isn't just romanticized. Yeah. This guy's kind of the narratives he tells himself.

[01:05:12] [SPEAKER_03] It is like a musical embodiment of the like wrong note playing inside of this guy constantly that he's trying to drown out with the other theme. Yeah. Ben. What's up? A lot of the Scorsese series is going to be a journey for you rewatching movies that were ruined for you by annoying people you grew up with. This is a thread we've established.

[01:05:33] [SPEAKER_05] God of Jersey knuckleheads. Red Scorsese movies the wrong way. With the, you know, violent movies.

[01:05:39] [SPEAKER_03] Travis Bickle's fucking awesome.

[01:05:41] [SPEAKER_05] Yes. What a cool guy. Yeah. Taking all the wrong lessons. Right. I mean, when I first saw this, though, I was so enamored with the edginess of New York City. Right. That was really what drew me in.

[01:05:55] [SPEAKER_07] By the time we were watching it, it's not like New York stopped being edgy, but this New York is gone. So it's sort of like, that's also a little romantic of like, right? Yeah. When New York was really porn theaters and scuzz. Yeah. And like, yeah. We had it right.

[01:06:09] [SPEAKER_05] This is, I don't know exactly when it's set because it was released in 76, but it also for me, I just, I have so much romanticism for 77 because that was the year of punk. Right. Right. TV's. Right. Right, right, right, right.

[01:06:21] [SPEAKER_03] But I think it is kind of important that Travis Bickle's predating that. I know, right? You know?

[01:06:27] [SPEAKER_05] Even the Mohawk.

[01:06:28] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Right? Right.

[01:06:29] [SPEAKER_05] Which became a staple haircut with punks.

[01:06:33] [SPEAKER_03] But I just mean that there's not a productive subculture that he could find as an outlet. Sure. You know? I feel you. Yes. A lot of Travis Bickles take the off-ramp to punk. Yeah. Which is a better way to excise those emotions. Yes. Rather than just spiraling in your own head and turning to violence.

[01:06:52] [SPEAKER_08] Totally. That's right. Because before 1977, a Mohawk was the sign of mental illness. Right. Right. Clearly you've lost your mind.

[01:07:01] [SPEAKER_07] I think it'll be in the dossier, but right, someone basically like a Vietnam vet who like told Schrader, like when someone shaved their head into a Mohawk in my unit, they were about to do something insane.

[01:07:11] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[01:07:11] [SPEAKER_07] Like that was not a sign of someone being like, you know what? I want a spicy haircut today. Like it's more just like, I'm going to go into the jungle and knife people.

[01:07:19] [SPEAKER_05] Because they're referencing more so indigenous. Like tribal. Yeah. Exactly. Like that's what they're, yeah.

[01:07:24] [SPEAKER_03] I also think it's fascinating for how much the legend of De Niro is in the 70s. This is the most fucking committed actor in the world. And when he gets the raging bull part, it's the, can you believe the weight he gained and lost and all of this? That he famously would not shave his head into a Mohawk. The Mohawk is prosthetic. It is an incredible looking prosthetic, but he clearly was like, no, no, no, no.

[01:07:52] [SPEAKER_03] If I shave my head into a Mohawk for real, my career is over. I can't work again. I will be a pariah. I can't walk the streets with that when I'm not filming.

[01:08:02] [SPEAKER_07] You can't be seen looking like that. Right.

[01:08:04] [SPEAKER_03] A, I don't want a shaved head. B, I don't want to have to go home with a Mohawk for three weeks. Have you worked with De Niro?

[01:08:10] [SPEAKER_06] No, never met him.

[01:08:11] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[01:08:12] [SPEAKER_05] Have you had a Mohawk?

[01:08:13] [SPEAKER_03] Never had a Mohawk.

[01:08:14] [SPEAKER_07] What is the wildest haircut you ever had? That's a good question. You're looking at it. You're looking great. You're looking fantastic. So, taxi driver. Yes. So, okay. So you see it as a young man. I, when you said you liked taxi driver to us last time we saw you, I was like, I maybe note an influence in some of Tracy's work. There was a line. You have written about disturbed individuals. Yes.

[01:08:40] [SPEAKER_07] I have no idea if you perceive that at all or if it's, you know, just kind of like that's

[01:08:44] [SPEAKER_08] in the mix. Well, you know, influences are, who knows how they work on you, you know? Certainly this was a...

[01:08:49] [SPEAKER_07] You never were like, I'm going to write my taxi driver.

[01:08:51] [SPEAKER_08] No, no, no. And I have to say, I don't know when I, well, probably upon first watching it, not when I was 10, but I mean when I was 18 or whatever. I probably recognized a lot of the craftsmanship at work and yet I think it was probably only over repeated viewings that I started to recognize, oh, it's not just a Scorsese-De Niro joint. It's Schrader. Right. It's, Schrader is a huge part of it.

[01:09:19] [SPEAKER_08] The cinematographer, the score, the editing. I mean, Scorsese surrounded himself with a team to help deliver this whole movie.

[01:09:30] [SPEAKER_03] And this is, in my mind, a classic like three authors film. I think you have to give equal kind of authorship to Schrader, De Niro, and Scorsese. And I think that's true of Raging Bull and I think it's true of, well, those are probably,

[01:09:43] [SPEAKER_07] I mean, because like the later Schrader-Scorsese collaborations are very interesting. I think the same is true of Bring Up the Dead. Well, for one, Cage is not as vital, you know, an author. He's a great, it's a great performance, but De Niro clearly was a somewhat equal creative partner with Martin Scorsese any time he worked with him. They were developing. Right. Yes. Bring Out the Dead is great. You know, Last Invitation of Christ. These are great movies as well.

[01:10:07] [SPEAKER_03] But there's a brotherhood between, I mean, I think it's even different than Scorsese and DiCaprio. There's something about Scorsese and De Niro.

[01:10:13] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah. I think DiCaprio is a little bit more like I Am Your Instrument. You know, I think he has input.

[01:10:19] [SPEAKER_08] Well, you can see it in the work that Schrader then goes on to do as a director, right? He takes as much of the lineage of taxi driver with him as Scorsese does on his track. Right.

[01:10:30] [SPEAKER_07] And Schrader's still got it. I mean, like, all his movies are about some weird fucking guy who lives in a motel is insane. God's Lonely Man, right? That theme keeps reoccurring. Right. It keeps reoccurring. What was it? Master Gardener, I think I saw at the New York Film Festival. The second Joel Edgerton opened his diary and started, the whole audience laughed. Yeah. We were like, how can we not? I mean, I liked the movie, but we were like, he's at it again. He's writing stuff down. We're hearing an inner monologue. Yeah. You guys have not done Schrader, have you? No.

[01:11:00] [SPEAKER_07] We haven't.

[01:11:01] [SPEAKER_06] No.

[01:11:01] [SPEAKER_07] I mean, I'd love to do him. He's got such a fascinating career. And of course, you know, all his Facebook posts, you know, bring me such joy. Alex Ross Perry sent us like three this morning. But like, you know, he was never really a blank check guy. I mean, the closest is like Mishima or something where it's like he got to kind of... Or the Exorcist movie they canceled. Yeah. He is fascinating. He's so fascinating.

[01:11:23] [SPEAKER_03] Can I read? I was, I logged this on Letterboxd this morning. Yeah, sure. And then I was looking at other reviews and I saw that Schrader had logged it in 2022.

[01:11:31] [SPEAKER_08] Logged a review of Taxi Driver?

[01:11:33] [SPEAKER_03] I wouldn't classify this as a review, but I want to read what he wrote. Oh. Because I think it's really interesting. March 5th, 2022. He says, I included a front piece quote on my first script, Taxi Driver from Thomas Wolfe. The whole conviction of my life rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central inevitable fact of human existence. And then this is what reminded me to read this, David.

[01:11:58] [SPEAKER_07] Yes.

[01:11:58] [SPEAKER_03] I've attached a front piece quote to my last script. He says last, and he also spells script S-C-T-R-I-P-T.

[01:12:06] [SPEAKER_07] Yes. And I think the account you're using here is like, it's taking his other writing and sort of correcting it on Letterboxd. Right. So like he posted this somewhere else.

[01:12:13] [SPEAKER_03] A front piece quote to my last script, Master Gardener from Leonard Cohen. Quote, and I choose the rooms that I live in with care. The windows are small and the walls almost bare. There's only one bed and there's only one prayer. I listen all night for your step on the stair. End quote. Twixt the two is the arc of hope that living can bring. There you go. And I was watching one of the things on the 4K.

[01:12:36] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah, I watched the 4K for this.

[01:12:38] [SPEAKER_03] Is it the 4K that's in the Columbia box set? They have finally issued a standalone release as well. I got the standalone version of it.

[01:12:47] [SPEAKER_07] I have issued the Columbia box sets. Please forgive me. I'm a fan of the Columbia box sets. David thinks they take up too much space.

[01:12:53] [SPEAKER_03] They're gigantic.

[01:12:54] [SPEAKER_07] They fuck with the shelf.

[01:12:54] [SPEAKER_08] They're gigantic and I'm getting like Gandhi. I just was wondering if there's any upgrade from the standalone.

[01:13:00] [SPEAKER_03] It's the exact same disc in different packaging. That's what I thought. Yeah, yeah. Identical disc. But there's like a 20-minute Schrader looking back on Taxi Driver thing. And he said, I'm going to paraphrase him poorly here, but it was a thing that really jumped out to me. He's like the central problem with characters like Travis Bickle is that they think loneliness is like a disease that's been put on them and loneliness is a choice. Right. And he said like as a guy who struggled with it myself, loneliness is a thing you inflict upon yourself. Indeed.

[01:13:31] [SPEAKER_03] It is a choice you make.

[01:13:32] [SPEAKER_07] But I mean like that is so, so, so commonly what you see now with these people on the internet, in cells, anyone who's basically like it's someone else's fault or it's society's fault that I am lonely without a wife, without a job. Whatever. I don't know. You know, these folks.

[01:13:51] [SPEAKER_03] And that corners of the internet have now basically become a crowdsourced inner monologue. The things that Travis Bickle is telling himself are now a conversation happening between hundreds of disaffected young men talking to each other or podcasting or fucking YouTubing or whatever. You know, it's like that's what the conversation is.

[01:14:14] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, it's part of the weirdness of the fucking time we live in where it's like people are bonding over how they feel completely alone and isolated rather than connecting through that. Yeah. Do you think Travis would have been on the internet? I mean, this is another thing. You're like in the way where it's like Travis is two years later. What happens if he has access to punk? Right. What if he drops a guy off at CBGB's one night? I'm like that probably he turns out better. Yeah. But if he's in the time of the internet, I think he turns out worse.

[01:14:45] [SPEAKER_03] I think it's actually he gets too much positive motivation. Yeah. He goes even further.

[01:14:50] [SPEAKER_05] He's a super poster on 4chan.

[01:14:52] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. For sure. He's top 1% commenter on Reddit.

[01:14:55] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah.

[01:14:56] [SPEAKER_08] Yeah. See, again, talking about the nature of the way this movie transforms for me over time. Yeah. I mean, I'm 60 years old now and Travis now looks like a young man to me.

[01:15:09] [SPEAKER_04] I mean, he says he's 26 in this movie. Right.

[01:15:12] [SPEAKER_07] I mean, that's how old would De Niro have been? Yeah, that sounds almost right. Maybe 30. Yeah, right.

[01:15:16] [SPEAKER_03] He said 26 in this and I had the fucking last crusade, my face melted thing. He was a little older. De Niro's like 32 in this movie.

[01:15:24] [SPEAKER_08] So, but 32 to me now is really young. Yeah. And I don't know that I've ever seen or noticed Travis as a young person before. And I just felt so much more sympathy for him on this watch than in the past.

[01:15:40] [SPEAKER_08] And I actually got a little mad about that, about this idea that Travis is the first incel or the, you know, that he's the birth of the, you know, that, oh my God, the prescience of these people to make a movie about an incel before we knew what incels were.

[01:15:56] [SPEAKER_03] It was advertising a thing that was already existent. Right.

[01:15:59] [SPEAKER_07] But I hate those motherfuckers. I mean, fuck those guys. Yes.

[01:16:02] [SPEAKER_08] Those guys are fucking losers. Yeah, the bane of society.

[01:16:04] [SPEAKER_07] It would be really funny if you came on the show and you're like, but incels, they get a bad rap. Yeah. They ain't so bad. Let's give another shade. It's involuntary what's happening to them.

[01:16:12] [SPEAKER_08] Maybe not a hot take. No, but I agree with you. I hate those.

[01:16:15] [SPEAKER_07] No. I mean, Marty says in my recent interviews, he's like, I feel like half the people in the world are Travis Pickles. We were trying to make a movie about someone distinctive here, you know, and now it feels not distinctive.

[01:16:26] [SPEAKER_03] I think the weird collaborative group nature of the kind of incel community, which in and of itself should be an oxymoron, right? There is a greater degree of like self-pitying. Yeah.

[01:16:39] [SPEAKER_08] Well, what? I didn't do any research on incels. Who started this shit? I mean, it's impossible.

[01:16:46] [SPEAKER_03] Don't worry about it. Some huge fucking losers. That's actually the correct answer.

[01:16:49] [SPEAKER_07] I mean, it's but it's what Griffin said, which is somewhat interesting of like it. Right. It's sort of lonely or angry. People find each other. And this was the argument for the Internet of like we'll connect and thus we will not be lonely. But instead of actually connecting, they just discuss their loneliness. Like the only connection is over what they're angry about or whatever.

[01:17:10] [SPEAKER_03] I think one of the moments that under discussed actually is a real radicalizing moment for Travis in the film. Is even his first meeting with the other cabbies. That he cannot connect to them. Yes. That here are other guys who like live in the darkness. These are the guys who can get him a gun and know all the people and are sharing stories of their kind of like torrid, lascivious behavior and experiences and whatever.

[01:17:38] [SPEAKER_03] And he does not know how to enter that conversation. And it's not just because he hasn't had the same life experiences as them. He just doesn't know how to relate to other people. And these people are connecting to each other and going like you're right and you're right to say it. And they're pumping each other up. Right. And that's so different than the Travis Bickle thing.

[01:17:58] [SPEAKER_07] We have no real sense of like Travis's life, right? Or his backstory. Obviously, we know he's a veteran. But like do we know where he's from or he has family or anything like that? Does that ever come up? He writes a card to his parents. He writes to his parents. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we don't.

[01:18:13] [SPEAKER_08] Do we know where he sends that card? Let's find out.

[01:18:16] [SPEAKER_07] I don't know that it comes. I'm not sure.

[01:18:18] [SPEAKER_03] Like we don't need to. Like it's fine. I mean, so much of it is this entire generation of men who were drafted into a war that we shouldn't have been fighting in the first place. And then we're just sort of spat back out onto the streets. And it's like you figure it out now.

[01:18:33] [SPEAKER_08] But clearly the relationship with the parents is important because of what he doesn't know. Yes. Clearly his parents haven't done a great job. They haven't narrated to him the movie they saw that night while he was with a babysitter.

[01:18:48] [SPEAKER_03] And they especially didn't explain to him what the movie was saying. This is not a guy who was broken by the war. This is a guy who was never raised properly, who probably wasn't wired properly, and then was put into an hyper extreme situation. Treated as just, you know, one of anyone. Right. And then spat back out. And now he's just completely fucked.

[01:19:12] [SPEAKER_07] I'm going to open the dossier here. We got our research, of course. This film starts with that rascal, Paul Schrader, a film critic. If anyone's ever read Transcendental Style and Film, his book on Ozu and Bresson and Dreyer, it's the best. But he was not a filmmaker yet. He's a film writer. His marriage has fallen apart. He was married to Janine Offalwall, right? The great production designer. He loses his job as a critic. He says he's in a dispute with the AFI.

[01:19:41] [SPEAKER_07] I do feel like Paul Schrader's always basically like in a fight with someone. Yeah.

[01:19:45] [SPEAKER_03] Like he's always pissing somebody off or whatever. I'm just going to call out quickly. I never settled upon, but Scorsese and Schrader have said just Midwest.

[01:19:55] [SPEAKER_07] Okay. Right. And Paul Schrader is from, where's he? Like Minnesota? Yeah. Something like that. He's like a Calvinist. Right. Like anyway. But he says 73. He's living in his car in LA, riding around all night, drinking heavily, going to porno movies because they were open all night and for no other reasons. Yeah. And crashing someplace during the day. The Pussycat Theater in LA was one of his haunts. He says he'd go there to sleep and no other thing. Yeah. I'm adding that.

[01:20:22] [SPEAKER_07] And then he goes to the ER because he like doubles over in pain and he has an ulcer. He's 27. And he says like, I realized I hadn't really talked to anyone in a month. And I'm basically like about to die. I'm like driving around in a metal coffin in my car in a busy city. I'm completely alone. And then he says he hears the song, the Harry Chapin song, Taxi.

[01:20:49] [SPEAKER_07] And then Arthur Bremer shoots George Wallace, the Alabama governor who's running for president when he gets assassinated.

[01:20:56] [SPEAKER_03] That's funny that this movie basically was like a P-tier Griffin moment where he saw three things at the same time and was like, Taxi driver. Just based off of what you said.

[01:21:06] [SPEAKER_07] And he just puts those things together.

[01:21:07] [SPEAKER_03] He's like, I might as well be honest.

[01:21:09] [SPEAKER_07] It was this weird like conglomeration of these things.

[01:21:11] [SPEAKER_03] I'm not implying that it ever gets to Travis Bickle levels of darkness. I am curious if you gentlemen have the same experience. I never feel more mentally unwell than when I have been physically ill. When I have like, I am sick in bed and kind of isolating for four or five days. And I come out of that in that way you're saying where like he's like, huh, I kind of haven't talked to anybody in a month. Right. Where I just go like, what the fuck am I thinking?

[01:21:37] [SPEAKER_07] See, I... I mean, you have a house full of handfuls. I was about to say, I'm a very social person. And so I do require, I do like to, you know, I'm extroverted. I like to see people, it charges my batteries, blah, blah, blah. Now the idea of like, David, you're going to be bedridden for five days. I'm like, sounds like a vacation. Am I not going to die? Sounds great. I just feel like... I don't know where you are on this, Tracy.

[01:21:56] [SPEAKER_03] When there's the imposed state of you shouldn't interact with people. And I certainly felt extreme versions of this in lockdown as well, where it's like, it actually, the safe thing to do is to not go out and talk to people.

[01:22:07] [SPEAKER_07] Well, sure, lockdown, most extreme.

[01:22:08] [SPEAKER_03] And then you just go like, the fuck is my brain thinking?

[01:22:12] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah, I don't know, Tracy. Are you a lonely guy? Are you an introverted person? I don't know. Big question.

[01:22:19] [SPEAKER_03] You've talked about not wanting to leave your house recently, but that's obviously because of the AV setup. I'm a homebody. I've always been a homebody. You always have it. It's not like... Yeah.

[01:22:29] [SPEAKER_08] And, you know, I can go out and be social and then I have a... My social anxiety always happens after the fact. Like once I'm home and I go, oh, why did I talk? Why did I say anything to anybody? Why didn't you just be quiet?

[01:22:44] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, I have... I can shut the fuck up. I have that in anticipatory. It's hard for me to get myself to go to a place and then I feel terrible about everything I did or said afterwards. Yeah. When I'm there, I'm vaguely okay.

[01:22:58] [SPEAKER_07] Paul Schrader says he wrote the screenplay in about 10 or 12 days. Continuously. It definitely feels like what I was. He's in a friend's house and he just wrote and wrote and wrote.

[01:23:08] [SPEAKER_03] I almost feel like this is the kind of movie you can't write if you think about it too much. Right.

[01:23:12] [SPEAKER_07] I think that's probably right.

[01:23:13] [SPEAKER_03] It needs to just be coming out. He said it just jumped out of his head.

[01:23:15] [SPEAKER_07] Yep. You know, he had to create the plot. Like that was the one thing he needed. Like, okay, he wants a girl he can't have or he tries to kill the politician. Yeah. It's like one of those taxi driver things where he tries to kill somebody to impress a girl. Well, he says, you know, came from the gut, like largely. And his sort of oft-repeated line, but it is a good one. He's like, I wrote the character so I wouldn't become him, essentially.

[01:23:38] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[01:23:38] [SPEAKER_07] You know what I mean?

[01:23:39] [SPEAKER_03] Which is a good, it's a good line. It's also the fascinating, not to jump ahead, but the Scorsese versus Schrader thing of Schrader always felt like a guy who was dangerously close to fully becoming one of his characters. He was right on the edge. And he speaks about like his hedonistic impulses and all that stuff. And Scorsese felt like, feels like a guy.

[01:24:02] [SPEAKER_07] Michigan, not Minnesota, by the way. I apologize.

[01:24:04] [SPEAKER_03] Good correction. Scorsese feels like a guy who, you know, sits alone in a room and is self-punishing for even having the thoughts of the mental experiment of doing things. Scorsese, you're saying? Yeah. Yeah, because he's like sort of housebound when he's a boy and all that. But they're both bonded by this sort of like, my brain goes here. Scorsese's maybe thinking about it a little more anthropologically and then feeling tremendous shame about it. And Schrader's like, let me write it so I don't do it.

[01:24:33] [SPEAKER_07] Right. Schrader also obviously admits, very influenced by Satra, by European, this is what he calls the European existential hero. So like, The Stranger, Notes from the Underground, the movie Pickpocket. I was going to say, all the Brasson films. All the Brasson movies.

[01:24:49] [SPEAKER_03] Are so man writing a diary obsessively focused on things.

[01:24:53] [SPEAKER_07] The existential hero's problem always is, should I exist? Right. It's not like, do I want X or Y? He's just like, should I even exist?

[01:25:02] [SPEAKER_03] Should I have been thrust into existence?

[01:25:05] [SPEAKER_08] It's interesting because the, well, it's interesting for a lot of reasons, but the, so Hollywood movies get aped by European filmmakers. They fall in love with. Right. The French New Wave and all the, you know, like they're like, right. Like we love it. And then those seventies, the new Hollywood seventies filmmakers influenced by those movies, turn it around and they sort of give their version of that.

[01:25:32] [SPEAKER_08] And clearly that was a very healthy turning of the soil for, for those various generations. I mean, if taxi driver is American. Brasson. Brasson. Existentialism that comes from film noir from before that, we're, we're all the better off

[01:25:54] [SPEAKER_03] for it. So I'm curious to hear both of your takes on this, but I was watching this, trying to like think about the lineage of how you get to taxi driver existing, right. From two guys who absorbed a lot of literary work and movies and all of this. I was primarily thinking about Nicholas Ray and Ilya Kazan and those sort of like, you know, the method, the new styles of acting movies about self-tortured men. Sure.

[01:26:22] [SPEAKER_03] That were always kind of explosive, that were more theatrical, even when they were moving into a more modern style of acting. They're rending garments. They're yelling to the sky. And part of it also is that the social mores of the time are that you kind of couldn't say what was actually going on. Men can't be emotional in that way. Well, there's, there's that. There's literally, that's what the characters are reflecting. But then there's also like the movies themselves have to render things into deep subtext or

[01:26:50] [SPEAKER_03] things need to happen off camera, you know, or the quiet part is never said and something else is screamed out loud. And this feels like to me, one of the first examples I can think of, of a movie. And Joe, which Peter Boyle is also in, feels like a kind of an important link in the chain.

[01:27:12] [SPEAKER_07] The Norman Wexler movie. Yes. Big favorite of Tarotine.

[01:27:16] [SPEAKER_03] But where you can kind of be like, the movie is allowed to touch these things specifically, which allows the character to be less explosive. That allows the performance to become more internalized because you don't need your sort of, you're tearing me apart Lisa kind of moments.

[01:27:34] [SPEAKER_08] Right. No, I think that's right. And also, you know, Travis's relationship to violence is an important one. I think in the Schrader screenplay, he even states boldly in the prose introduction to Travis that this is a man who's, who clearly is, is a, uh, an attractor of violence or a combustible figure. Somebody for whom violence is, uh, is part of their essential nature.

[01:28:03] [SPEAKER_03] It's also, I mean, it's just so fucking great that the movie doesn't really try to unpack his backstory at all. No. Beyond just. He doesn't have some monologue where he's like, when I was at Kaysan or whatever. No, he served in the war and he grew up somewhere different than where he lives now. Sure. It's all you need to know. And you can infer, and this is you talking about, like, movies that weirdly change even though they are actually fixed and, and how you perceive them.

[01:28:29] [SPEAKER_03] This is a movie that feels like it has all the answers, but every time I watch it, I just ask myself new questions. And it, it, they're not because of the movie being, um, non-specific in any way. Right. But sometimes you go, okay, is the violence a reflection of, well, Travis kind of reads like someone who might've been really bullied as a child. Sure. Is, is his violence a lashing out of what was inflicted upon him?

[01:28:55] [SPEAKER_07] I think De Niro's runtiness, like De Niro's a little guy.

[01:28:58] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[01:28:58] [SPEAKER_07] Contributes to that. He really helps for that.

[01:29:00] [SPEAKER_03] He also plays this, and, and part of it is, I mean, you were saying this earlier, I watched this movie a lot when I was a teenager and in my early twenties.

[01:29:10] [SPEAKER_07] Right. I watched a lot when I was casing this whorehouse. I was thinking of a, no, yeah, no, correct, correct.

[01:29:14] [SPEAKER_03] Uh, I hadn't, good reference for that. Had not seen this film in a while, uh, even though I'd seen it many times. Had not seen this film since being older than the character. Yeah. And now older than the character by some distance. And it's not like I ever looked to him as an aspirational figure, but watching it this time, I was taken by how childlike he seems. Yeah. He really seems like a, it's like big. It's like, he's a little boy in a body he doesn't know how to control.

[01:29:41] [SPEAKER_03] And De Niro is playing that in sort of his like weird kind of guilelessness.

[01:29:47] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[01:29:47] [SPEAKER_03] And, and it does, you're like, is this a guy who never got over not fitting in as a kid? Is his home life defined by parents who were physically or psychologically abusive to him in some way, or were they just checked out? Was it a lack of protection? Or was it a sense of active danger? I think he might also be an only child. He definitely seems to be an only child to me.

[01:30:06] [SPEAKER_07] I mean, he reads that way.

[01:30:07] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, for sure.

[01:30:08] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah. I mean, all only children are one step away, I think, from just, you know, becoming Travis Bickle. Yeah. And we love you, Ben. Hey, take it easy.

[01:30:16] [SPEAKER_06] I'm kidding.

[01:30:18] [SPEAKER_07] We love you. Trader writes this script. He writes it. I mean, clearly it's like, it's almost like an episode he has. He writes the script very fast.

[01:30:25] [SPEAKER_03] Then he starts hanging. Rocky kind of similar, by the way. Rocky is a Sylvester Stallone locked himself in a room and like drew the curtains down for like seven days and just vomited it out. It's a great movie. I just like the idea of he's being.

[01:30:35] [SPEAKER_07] I got so mad at Sean at all being like, eh, it's a little slow. I like Rocky too. I'm like, get the fuck out of here. A little slow. I don't get that. It's Rocky. It's such a beautiful movie. I really think Rocky is almost underrated, even though it won best picture and is one of the most famous movies ever made. It's a gorgeous study of like human relationships.

[01:30:57] [SPEAKER_03] It's underrated because of what he did to the legacy of Rocky, which is let Paulie fuck a robot. Right.

[01:31:02] [SPEAKER_07] The other ones are incredibly fun sports movies. Like Rocky three, I think is the peak of the like, yes. When he turned these into slick sports movies, they're very good. They're very fun. But there's no comparison. The first one is completely in a league of its own.

[01:31:16] [SPEAKER_04] There's no example. There's a reason it won best picture because it did it all.

[01:31:20] [SPEAKER_06] Like it made the money. It appealed. But also it is a, you know, a very, very well-made film.

[01:31:25] [SPEAKER_03] But there's also, there's no analog in movies of something that started as kind of focused, personal, emotional art. Right. And then just sort of became pop trash. Right. And then you could argue with Creed, went back again and then back again. Yeah.

[01:31:39] [SPEAKER_07] Now it's doing the, yeah. It's almost like Creed. They were like, let's make a serious movie. And then they're like, but for the sequels, we can make movies.

[01:31:46] [SPEAKER_03] Anyway. It doesn't matter. It's like the Creed sequels are remaking the Rocky sequels in a way that's fascinating.

[01:31:49] [SPEAKER_05] They got to bring the robot back.

[01:31:51] [SPEAKER_03] They do. Yeah. Creed's got to fuck the robot. Now listen. Listen.

[01:31:55] [SPEAKER_07] So.

[01:31:56] [SPEAKER_03] He's got to fuck it himself. So.

[01:31:57] [SPEAKER_07] That's agency. Schrader leaves town for a while. He comes back to LA. He's still a freelance critic, but he feels a little tougher. He writes a review of Sisters and interviews Brian De Palma and they kind of became buds. And he gives him the script. And then Michael and Julia Phillips, of course, the sort of husband-wife producing team, Julia Phillips. So you'll never eat lunch in this town again eventually. Right. I read that book when I was a teenager because my mom would buy me movie books. Oh, nice.

[01:32:24] [SPEAKER_07] But as a teenager, I remember being like, this is a little over my head. Like I am not. I don't really get what being a producer is. This person seems so angry. But they're preparing the sting and which they produce, you know, and they are very taken with Taxi Driver, but they have no idea what to do with it. They're like, this script is incredible. They buy it for $1,000, which is crazy. But they don't actually know how they're going to like make it into a sort of digestible movie.

[01:32:54] [SPEAKER_07] And then they see a rough cut of Mean Streets. They're talking about doing Taxi Driver with Jeff Bridges. And I guess the director was going to be Robert Mulligan, who's not a director. I know that well, but he made To Kill a Mockingbird. But I don't know, like, I don't know what he's doing in the 70s. I mean, he's much older. Yeah, he's older. He'd made like that movie Summer of 42, the sort of coming of age movie, which is like kind of a hit. Right. He made that horror movie, The Other. Do you know these movies at all?

[01:33:25] [SPEAKER_07] What else? The Nickel Ride, which is a Jason Miller kind of crime movie. Favorite of Sean's.

[01:33:31] [SPEAKER_03] Tracy, we were texting with Hitmaker because you would listen to our Fearless episode. Timothy Simons. About how just Jeff Bridges is one of those rare examples of a guy who is thought of, discussed, praised, has won an Oscar, is still eternally underrated. Yeah. No one quite acknowledges how good he is. This is maybe one of the only cases I've ever come across of hearing a role that Jeff Bridges could have played that would be a disaster. I don't think Bridges makes sense for that.

[01:33:59] [SPEAKER_08] He doesn't make any sense. But then it's just also, I mean, De Niro is indelible, right?

[01:34:05] [SPEAKER_03] No one ever could have given a better performance than this in this role.

[01:34:10] [SPEAKER_07] But so they see Mean Streets and they go like, Scorsese and De Niro. Like, this is it. And they never thought about anyone else again. And Scorsese knows Julia a little bit. And I guess they talk after he makes Box for Herbertha. And she's kind of like, come when you've done something better. You know, she was kind of like a bit of a bully or what? You know, kind of making fun of him. But in a sweet way.

[01:34:36] [SPEAKER_07] And then they just essentially make a proposal to Marty and Bob's agent of like, you're a package. Like, we want you to do this movie and we want you to do it together. And like, it's not one or the other. It has to be both. Scorsese, he kind of knows Schrader a little bit and meets him through De Palma. He wanted Paul to write, to adapt Dostoyevsky's The Gambler for him. And he says he arrives late to dinner.

[01:35:02] [SPEAKER_07] Schrader's sitting with De Palma and they have already cooked up the movie Obsession together while this is happening. And so he's kind of like, I miss my shot. But then the script gets handed to him.

[01:35:12] [SPEAKER_08] Did Schrader write Obsession?

[01:35:14] [SPEAKER_07] He did, right? Am I wrong? 1970. What is that? 76? Yeah. Yep. He wrote it. Yep. Not a movie I love. A Cory Barker film? He wrote Obsession? That's crazy. Not the recent Obsession. The Cliff Robertson. And part of the reason I don't love it is Cliff Robertson is like such a hand bone in it. What do you think of Cliff Robertson? Have we talked about this? I don't think so. But we were talking about guys who have an Oscar though. Yeah.

[01:35:36] [SPEAKER_03] Where you're like, huh. That's certainly a movie that you would get arrested for making today.

[01:35:40] [SPEAKER_08] You should read John Lithgow's memoir to read him just fucking destroy Cliff Robertson.

[01:35:46] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, he was a noted son of a bitch.

[01:35:49] [SPEAKER_08] Yeah.

[01:35:49] [SPEAKER_07] John just clearly hated him. Yeah. What were they in together? What's the... Obsession? Oh, right. Yeah. Of course, because he's in so many De Palma. Right. De Palma fucking loved Lithgow.

[01:35:57] [SPEAKER_03] Right. I love that Brian De Palma saw Lithgow and was like, this is my guy. This Frankenstein ass. Gotta get the camera. The waspiest Frankenstein in the world.

[01:36:06] [SPEAKER_07] Love John Lithgow, to be clear. Yeah. Yeah. So, but Scorsese does... He reads the Taxi Driver script and he's like, well, this is kind of the Russian literature idea I'm thinking of. Like the sort of deepest, darkest, you know, secret type self, you know, movie. This is what I want. And so they're all in. I mean, yeah. It's an interesting story because it's basically like every time someone reads the script, they're like, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

[01:36:31] [SPEAKER_07] There's an interesting quote from Schrader where he says, I wrote a Protestant script. It's like cold, isolated. Like it's me. Marty makes a Catholic movie. It's like lush and rich and New York and all this. And like, and that the merging is like why the movie is a masterpiece. Right. Like, you know.

[01:36:50] [SPEAKER_08] That's an interesting idea.

[01:36:51] [SPEAKER_07] I kind of like that idea. Because I do feel like some of Schrader's movies that he directs himself are chillier. Yeah. I mean, extremely chilly. Okay. So blah, blah, blah. Schrader had also written this movie, The Yakuza, of course. He sells that for some money. Marty does Alice. The Phillipses do The Sting. De Niro does Godfather 2. Basically, everyone has a moment of success after they decide on this Taxi Driver project. So they're all coming back to get a little bit of a bigger budget.

[01:37:20] [SPEAKER_07] The budget's $1.3 million. But that is more than they initially had hoped for. Obviously, no. It eventually goes up to $1.9 million.

[01:37:30] [SPEAKER_05] You said a little bit more. You mean it's a little bit under what they had.

[01:37:33] [SPEAKER_07] No, no, no. They thought they were going to get nothing to make this movie. And like, you know, all of the sort of power of like them, you know, De Niro wins an Oscar. The Phillips win an Oscar. Like, it's like, okay, they get a little bit more money. But it is. It's a studio film. It is. It's a, what, you know, Columbia Pictures. Columbia Pictures. And Scorsese is, he's already trying to make New York, New York, which is a much more expensive movie, obviously.

[01:37:56] [SPEAKER_03] That is crazy that he already wanted to do it, that New York, New York isn't just him flush with the success thinking he can do anything.

[01:38:03] [SPEAKER_07] Everyone gets bargain basement prices. De Niro gets $35,000. Marty gets $65,000. Paul gets $30,000. Columbia is still, even at that price, incredibly nervous about the movie. I'm trying to think like if there had been anything quite as sort of lurid as this movie made by a studio in 76. This is my question. Right.

[01:38:24] [SPEAKER_04] And being so... I mean, obviously there's like trash movies.

[01:38:28] [SPEAKER_03] Midnight Cowboy is lurid in a different way. Right. Midnight Cowboy. Yes.

[01:38:31] [SPEAKER_07] But Midnight Cowboy has a sweet side to it. It does. It's about boys, friends. It is about boys being boys.

[01:38:40] [SPEAKER_08] The Godfather is no picnic. This is true. But it's classy. I know.

[01:38:44] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[01:38:45] [SPEAKER_08] But it's no picnic.

[01:38:45] [SPEAKER_03] But these are the pieces of how you get there, right? You go, okay, so Midnight Cowboy has the lurid sexuality and the New York grime.

[01:38:53] [SPEAKER_07] When is Death Wish? Godfather has the violence. Death Wish is 74.

[01:38:56] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[01:38:57] [SPEAKER_07] And Death Wish is like an artless, you know, kind of version of this movie.

[01:39:00] [SPEAKER_03] But I think it's important that those two movies win Best Picture and it breaks down a couple taboo walls. Yeah, right. Deliverance. This is true.

[01:39:08] [SPEAKER_08] Deliverance is also one that's pushing the boundary.

[01:39:11] [SPEAKER_03] Right. I mean, banjo had never been played that fast before.

[01:39:13] [SPEAKER_07] But deliverance is like, if you go fucking canoeing in the Appalachians or whatever, that's going to happen. A taxi driver's like, if you try and get in a cab in New York City, it's sort of the opposite, you know, ends of America's a nightmare. But yeah, those taboos.

[01:39:26] [SPEAKER_08] I mean, they had been falling. I mean, you could argue that Rocky, right? Rocky and Star Wars start to be the end of that.

[01:39:32] [SPEAKER_03] They reestablish the taboos. I mean, I just think it can't be overstated that the 70s start with an X-rated movie winning Best Picture. And I think that has to feel like, briefly, all bets are off.

[01:39:42] [SPEAKER_07] I guess the difference I'm noticing here is even Death Wish, but certainly things like Godfather, Midnight Cowboy, Even Deliverance. It's like, there's still a hero character. There's someone conflicted about the evil or the violence being done or whatever. And even Charles Bronson, you know, that's a somewhat sympathetic character in the first Death Wish, obviously. And like, he's, you know, he's avenging a wrong and all this. Whereas this one is like, you're in the head of a psychopathic man.

[01:40:09] [SPEAKER_04] Here's a question I gotta ask.

[01:40:10] [SPEAKER_03] No escape. There might not be an answer. Right. Do we think that part of this movie getting made is that the sort of very interpretive, happy ending and victory at the end of the movie could have been misread by the bean counters who were approving the movie getting made? Yeah, maybe. That if you're looking at it on paper, even as dark as the film is, you don't know what the performance is going to be like. Do you imagine it is a film?

[01:40:34] [SPEAKER_03] Because a lot of these kind of grimier, not even the exploitation films, but the sort of genre revenge films would have these wild character swings where the movie clearly was asking you to just go like, and now you like this guy. Now the scenes are being played soft. Now it's sensitive. Now it's a win. Or we made the bad guy so bad that he has permission to do anything. On its face, does this look a little bit closer to a Death Wish if you don't know exactly how they're going to execute it?

[01:41:04] [SPEAKER_08] I don't know. I don't know. That's an interesting question because, you know, we get to a point in the narrative where it seems like Travis kind of comes to a fork in the road. Right after he arms himself, he comes to a kind of a fork in the road. And one fork takes him to this assassination idea that he's going to assassinate the presidential candidate. Palatine. And the other road takes him to rescue Lady in Distress.

[01:41:33] [SPEAKER_08] Is the movie unclear? Is Travis unclear of which way it's going to go until finally we get to the climax of the film? You can't even call it an aborted assassination attempt. He just, you know, he gets out of there before it even transpires.

[01:41:47] [SPEAKER_07] Maybe the Mohawk was a mistake in that regard. Right. Sure. It is also, it's from an era where you could just kind of walk up to a presidential candidate. That's right. Right? Like it's still.

[01:41:55] [SPEAKER_03] Well, unlike now, you know, if there's a White House correspondence dinner, security is not going to let you get anywhere. I mean, that guy didn't get that close, did he? He kind of made it to the lobby. It's crazy he got anywhere within the vicinity.

[01:42:07] [SPEAKER_07] But it's like, it's a much more, you know, people are just kind of walking around.

[01:42:11] [SPEAKER_03] I mean.

[01:42:11] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah. Yeah. People were just walking here.

[01:42:13] [SPEAKER_03] That's another taboo that Midnight Cowboy broke.

[01:42:15] [SPEAKER_08] Hinkley, obviously. He's inspired by a taxi driver. Inspired by a taxi driver. And he was able to walk up, right up to Ronald Reagan on the street, getting into a car. But Travis swerves, right? And he goes over and he does the. I'll do the nobler thing. I'll do the nobler thing instead. When, I mean, we, what we sense is that he's just got to get this out. Yes. Right. It's a bomb that's going to explode. Like, you know.

[01:42:38] [SPEAKER_03] Look, I think about the new Hollywood thing a lot. Okay. And how this happened, right? This brief window. And a lot of it is broken by the BBS films and Easy Rider and the studios going, our shit's not working. Something's happening over here. Maybe we have to. Let's plug into this. Unlearn everything we thought we knew.

[01:42:56] [SPEAKER_02] Right.

[01:42:56] [SPEAKER_03] And so all the kind of rules of traditional what works, what is proper storytelling, yada, yada, yada, go out the window and they start just letting the inmates run the asylum to a certain degree. Right. And French Connection. Mm-hmm.

[01:43:07] [SPEAKER_08] And Godfather. Yes.

[01:43:09] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, these movies are, and The Exorcist, they're making tons of money. Not to keep just tying everything back to recent big picture episodes, but in that 76 draft, Sean was going through, you know, what his list of what he felt like was the definitive cultural event film of each year. And the amount of years, right, for that one decade, the amount of years that it lines up with the best picture winner is wild. That would not be the case today where you go, these movies, not only won best picture,

[01:43:39] [SPEAKER_03] were critically adored, were like esteemed critical objects, were embraced by the public, were massive financial successes, in many cases, also the highest grossing film of their year, almost always within the top five. Right. And they were like pop culture. You know, it wasn't just like a Tony thing that everyone got behind. That's an unusual thing. And part of that is just everyone going like, look, the fucking three years ago, none of

[01:44:08] [SPEAKER_03] that would have happened to French Connection.

[01:44:09] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[01:44:10] [SPEAKER_03] This would have been the griniest thing you'd ever seen, you know, in like on a double bill or whatever. I think there's something to, even when you're saying, well, this movie places you so inside the head of the character. And it's not until this fork in the road moment that Travis really becomes, you know, potentially this figure of revenge or whatever it is. If you're a studio exec reading the script, once again, to run this exercise, do you just go like, I don't know, these 70s movies have all these weird tangents?

[01:44:38] [SPEAKER_07] What's interesting to me about all this is that, yes, Star Wars kills New Hollywood and Rocky. Yeah. But it's also that the new Hollywood guys start being like, well, I want to make epics. I mean, what happens? Like Cimino and Freakin are like- The blank checker begins. Right. These people are actually given- Even Scorsese, Coppola. Yeah. They're like, I can make anything. I can, you know, and then they make this stuff that all, you know, bankrupt studios. Yeah. It's not like their careers are- For Cimino, his career is over. But for, you know, the other guys, they salvage it.

[01:45:07] [SPEAKER_07] But I think that's when Hollywood's like, all right. Like- Totally. You were fun cheap. You're not fun like this.

[01:45:13] [SPEAKER_08] Yeah. You're certainly chastened. I mean, Freakin makes two of the hugest movies ever made. Yes. And then bombs so bad with Sorcerer, he can't- Yeah. He has a hard time getting money for his next movie. Like-

[01:45:26] [SPEAKER_07] And we will talk about it. Right. Like, when does- I mean, Freakin is my ultimate- We will do him on the show one day. Because I do think he's the ultimate blank check guy. Where it's just like, all the way up, and then Sorcerer, and then it's just like, goodbye. Yes. Get out. Now you are a pariah for 10 years. You exist on the margins now. He makes great movies after that. He also makes forgettable movies. But he's not- He's never at the center of the culture again. No. No. But he never fully goes away and like- 100%.

[01:45:55] [SPEAKER_07] What's interesting about someone like Freakin is like, he made stuff like Rules of Engagement. Like, he made like very sort of like solid Hollywood entertainment along with the, you know,

[01:46:03] [SPEAKER_03] weird stuff. It's just a balance. Like, the two movies he made of your plays, I think are like both excellent. But those are, feel like a throwback to even his like pre-French Connection shit. Right? And then you're also like, sometimes he would just be a studio guy for Hired. He would do The Hunted or whatever. Hunted is pretty good. Right. But it was like, he couldn't ever do French Connection again. He couldn't ever be like, I am working within the studio system, making the purest version of what interests me. Yeah. It becomes a little bifurcated.

[01:46:33] [SPEAKER_08] He would have told you, he told me that it wasn't possible anymore. Right. He said, you know, just circumstances change in such a way as like, that'll never happen again.

[01:46:52] David?

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[01:48:25] [SPEAKER_07] Tax driver. Okay, so, you know, Scorsese, two big influences for him. John Wayne and the Searchers. He doesn't say much except that'll be the day. He doesn't belong anywhere. He just fought in a war that he lost.

[01:48:37] [SPEAKER_03] As John Wayne always said, that performance was based on, quote, the loneliest man he ever knew.

[01:48:43] [SPEAKER_07] Right. He's also very influenced, he says, by Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract. He, I guess it worked with Lerner on New York, New York eventually.

[01:48:52] [SPEAKER_08] Do you know Murder by Contract?

[01:48:54] [SPEAKER_07] I've seen Murder by Contract. I feel like. Do not know anything about this movie. I feel like it was, because that's a Colombian noir, right? Like Vince Edwards, I think. Vince Edwards is Claude. Boy, pulled that out of my hand. That's impressive. Pretty impressive. It's like a taffy pole. Criterion put up some, long ago, you know, some Criterion Collection, like a Criterion Channel, sorry, series of those Colombian noirs. Those like-

[01:49:18] [SPEAKER_08] Indicator boxes of those Colombian noirs. They're great. Oh, well, maybe I gotta start busting out that credit card number.

[01:49:24] [SPEAKER_03] I gotta say, that series of words hit like heroin.

[01:49:28] [SPEAKER_07] That went through my bloodstream. Because those Colombian noirs of the late 50s are very interesting, because Colombia was sort of the poverty studio, and so they made the darker stuff. The Skid Row movies. Yeah, where you watch it and you're like, fuck, this is, for the 50s, this is kind of nasty. And that's one of the nastiest. Like, that's the one where the poster is, the guy's got a garrote around the woman's neck, and she's looking beautiful, and he's looking tormented or whatever. And he's like a hitman who's in his own head.

[01:49:56] [SPEAKER_07] And I understand, like, that he's like, Scorsese's like, that's one of the only Hollywood movies where you're like, inside the head of a man who kills people. Like, you know, it's a rare thing. So, anyway. So, Scorsese and De Niro, obviously they've worked together already. Only the one time before this now? Only on Mean Streets?

[01:50:12] [SPEAKER_03] We talk about this in the Mean Streets episode, but it is fascinating to me that he's always said they're the three actors I had the real symbiotic connection to and relationship and process. And it's Keitel, De Niro, and Scorsese. And fucking DiCaprio, excuse me. Obviously, De Niro becomes the guy he understands how to filter everything that interests him for decades. And then DiCaprio becomes the guy who is versatile enough as an actor, but more importantly,

[01:50:41] [SPEAKER_03] is automatic financing and security for whatever he wants to make at a very large scale. Keitel starts out as Scorsese's self-insert. You watch Who's That Knockin' on My Door. You watch Mean Streets. Those are clearly him. He places himself into the movie. Yes. And then from Mean Streets on, there doesn't feel like you have characters that represent Scorsese, even when Scorsese's in the movie as an actor.

[01:51:06] [SPEAKER_03] It's like he notices when fucking De Niro enters the bar in Mean Streets, the way the audience reacts and is like, fuck, if I have that kind of power and that kind of charismatic figure at the center of my movie, I'm pulling the audience in more. And he starts to remove himself in the action and places himself in the kind of worldview and what the film's saying. And it's so funny that the moment he does that switch, he's like, hey, Keitel, you're

[01:51:34] [SPEAKER_03] cool playing like a fucking pedophile pimp and Judas, right? You're cool playing like just the most evil people in the world. I'm going to keep working with you. But now you just play kind of like unknowable monsters.

[01:51:47] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah, that's true. I mean, De Niro, it's very interesting, is shooting 1900 for Bertolucci. He's prepping Ilya Kazan's The Last Tycoon. Not a very good movie, but a major project. Ilya Kazan's final film. Indeed. Yeah. He like would come from Europe, like on breaks from 1900 and drive cabs around New York City. And then the way Scorsese describes it, then he would just click a button. And then he'd turn into Harry Uflin from The Last Tycoon if he needed to. Right.

[01:52:16] [SPEAKER_07] Like he's like, he's got all these modes in his brain.

[01:52:19] [SPEAKER_05] Was he big enough at that point where would people recognize him? I was going to bring this up. He won an Oscar.

[01:52:25] [SPEAKER_03] But he said it happened only one time. That's crazy. That basically still he was weirdly anonymous enough. Even though Godfather 2 was huge and he had won the Academy Award. He wasn't a leading man yet. Sure.

[01:52:38] [SPEAKER_06] Yeah.

[01:52:38] [SPEAKER_03] And he's elusive in Godfather 2. He is. He's elusive and he's a little transformative and he's so withdrawn in his own way that he could just fucking drive a cab. And people weren't like, that's fucking movie happening here?

[01:52:52] [SPEAKER_07] Obviously, Jodie Foster is in Alice, doesn't live here anymore. So he has the connection to her. His mother, sorry, her mother thinks she's crazy to want to do this part. Yeah. But Foster's like, I trust him. I think it's a good idea. They had to get approval from the LA Welfare Board. Or, you know, they hire Pat Brown, the former governor of California, to smooth things over. They have adults.

[01:53:20] [SPEAKER_07] Her sister Connie is there for some of the more adult, quote unquote, shots, you know, to make sure. She'd buy double. Right. Yeah. Foster says like everyone treated her great and was clearly so uncomfortable. Like basically was just like on tiptoes around her the entire time because they're like, Jesus Christ. She was, was she 13 years old?

[01:53:39] [SPEAKER_03] She's 12. She's 12. It's crazy. And part of that is she had such a, like, part of it's just a deep voice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure. But she was such an old pro at this point. I mean, she's literally the fucking like Coppertone kid. I mean, you know that, Ben, that she is the model of the kid. Wait, really? Right? Am I wrong about that? Uh, no. Isn't that right? If not for the bottle, she certainly did the commercial. Like she was working from the time she was basically an infant.

[01:54:04] [SPEAKER_05] Damn.

[01:54:04] [SPEAKER_03] Uh, so A, she's such an old pro. B, her voice just always makes her sound wiser beyond her years. Even like now, you're like, oh, she's Methuselah. She does. She's just got, she's got so much like command and authority. She's a great actor. Always. You ever worked with Jodie Foster? I haven't.

[01:54:22] [SPEAKER_08] I just met her for the first time recently. She's very nice.

[01:54:24] [SPEAKER_07] You know, she's great. Obviously, she gets the Oscar nomination. It is an incredibly iconic performance.

[01:54:31] [SPEAKER_03] It's also a thing that still is part of the playbook. And it basically never works. But child stars and teen stars are like, fuck, can I find my like taxi driver performance where I successfully just totally shed the kiddie thing and I'm taken seriously?

[01:54:45] [SPEAKER_03] And I feel like you get a lot of bad wannabe Sundance movies where like a former Nickelodeon star is like strung out on heroin and doing fucked up shit to be like, I'm not Agent Cody Banks anymore or whatever.

[01:55:01] [SPEAKER_07] Columbia decides they need star power. Sybil Shepard is essentially parachuted into the movie. She says she threw the script into like a garbage can when she read it. She's so good in this movie. But she was basically like, I'd seen Mean Streets. I trusted that they were like De Niro and Scorsese were good. I had like no lines in the script. I had no idea why I was in this movie. Yeah. Right. You know, like it's a little baffling. But she is. She's fantastic in the movie, obviously.

[01:55:26] [SPEAKER_03] Like she's obviously so effective in the last picture show, but that's also such a raw clay performance. Where, you know. But she's so good in that movie. No, she is. She is. But this it's like what she's doing is so complicated and delicate in actually selling you on the varying levels of why would she be kind of interested in him to a point? And what is that point? Right. I personally would not go on a deal with Travis Bickle. I wouldn't. Although De Niro's a looker.

[01:55:55] [SPEAKER_03] It's also it's what De Niro does well, where you watch in real time as he's like winning her and losing her moment to moment. You fucking get both of you fucking guys would go on a date with Travis Bickle.

[01:56:06] [SPEAKER_08] Who the fuck are you kidding? Both of you would go on a date with Travis Bickle.

[01:56:09] [SPEAKER_06] He's not that rizzed up. Okay, David. Okay, fine. You know, he's hot. Let's go on one date with Travis Bickle. Let's just settle the issue.

[01:56:15] [SPEAKER_07] He took me to this Swedish, you know, porn conception movie. It was educational. Scientific. He's a character to be a black person. And Columbia is like this movie. Even in 1976, I think Columbia has the sense to be like, this movie cannot be like he mows down a bunch of black people. It will cause riots. In a brothel. Right. Like that's just not going to work for us. And Keitel, it's basically like, you know, he knows. Parachute him. He knows Scorsese. Come on in.

[01:56:44] [SPEAKER_07] What's your, were you going to say something?

[01:56:45] [SPEAKER_08] Well, that's interesting. And I, and I think a good choice. But the use of race in taxi driver is pretty interesting. Yes. To watch again, to see, is the point that's being made that the seeds of white supremacy are sown in this character, in this, in this lonely. If that point is being made, I feel it's unintentional, but I'm not sure. I don't really know. I don't know, man. Yeah. That we, we see.

[01:57:14] [SPEAKER_07] The way they talk about race and, you're right.

[01:57:16] [SPEAKER_05] He uses a lot of racial slurs. Sure. In the beginning when he's, yeah, like driving around.

[01:57:21] [SPEAKER_07] He's so angry at everyone and everything, right? Like everyone's a target to him.

[01:57:25] [SPEAKER_03] May I get my read on this? Yeah. I, not to go too global here. Travis Bickle did nothing wrong? Well, yeah. He's the hero of the movie. Obviously, he's the lead. Not beating the charges. Yeah. I think white supremacy is something that is basically taught that has to be like passed down. Whether it is, you know, in the home or being radicalized by a community in that kind of way. I think there is a more insidious form of racism.

[01:57:54] [SPEAKER_03] And once again, I have the authority to say this. That is people who feel so disenfranchised and isolated and alienated and start just kind of reaching for the guardrails of who can I blame this on. And it doesn't turn into a supremacist ideology. It doesn't become as much of an overriding kind of conspiracy feeling. It's just like fuck them and fuck them and fuck them. Right.

[01:58:23] [SPEAKER_03] And it becomes like really easy to just be racist as a place to put your anger if you're overflowing with anger in that way. And so that's why I think it's not versus something like I mean, Schrader obviously writes about white supremacism later, you know, and that's much more of like a religion.

[01:58:39] [SPEAKER_08] You can't deny the gaze through which we see the black man who is walking down the street raging. I'm going to kill them all. Sort of schizophrenic homeless man. The point where Travis steps out to have his conversation with Wizard. And there are just a couple of black guys walking by and there's a long shot of Travis kind of tracking them.

[01:59:02] [SPEAKER_08] There's the black cab driver who gives him the bang bang symbol as he's walking away from the meeting and calls him killer, I think. There's the kids throwing the eggs. Kids throwing the eggs in the bottles at the cab as he walks by. Not to mention, of course, the kid who he shoots in the face in the bodega.

[01:59:19] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, there are two great examples for me in this movie of a studio note based out of fear actually saving the movie and achieving transcendence. And one of them is this, because I do think if sport is black, it just becomes that. And I think there's something in that at the beginning of the film, he keeps slipping into his anger being focused on race. And he's also like tipping into homophobia, you know.

[01:59:47] [SPEAKER_03] It's any sort of other group in New York City who feels empowered. And I think more than anything, seeing people who are happy and who have a community.

[01:59:56] [SPEAKER_07] It's the 25th hour mirror scene many years later where it's like, yeah, if you live in New York, you can sort of work yourself up about any ethnic community. They're all here. Like, you know, it's easy to like, you know.

[02:00:06] [SPEAKER_03] And all of them have a place and feel like they have some sense of empowerment. I mean, this is so much of the fucking insult stuff as well as, well, I'm being told to feel bad for these people. These people feel like they have more than I do. And it's what they can't identify is what they have is community and you don't have that. Right. The culture is not actually placing them above you. They're fighting more than you are. You just feel unhappy.

[02:00:30] [SPEAKER_03] And the fact that his anger is starting to be so focused on marginalized groups and then you have a white character who is doing such a demonstrable evil that it pivots him. It pivots him into, well, I am empowered now. I must do something about this. This is not my rage unchecked. This is me being an avenging angel. He still shoots that guy in the face, you know.

[02:00:55] [SPEAKER_03] And he views him as less than human because it's him basically using him as, like, shooting practice. He's using him as a dry run. Right. But I do think it's important that what really metastasizes him to go full taxi driver mode, if you will, is, well, I got to save this kid. Taxi driver mode.

[02:01:12] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah, no, it is.

[02:01:13] [SPEAKER_03] This is the worst guy. He's not defined by his race. He's defined by what he's doing for a living.

[02:01:18] [SPEAKER_07] The convenience store scene is also, like, it's his fantasy kind of working out for him. Yeah. He's the cowboy.

[02:01:24] [SPEAKER_03] He's a racist guy, to be clear.

[02:01:26] [SPEAKER_07] Yes. Deeply racist. I think Travis Bickle has a lot of hate in his heart for other races. Yes. But it's also, you know, like, that goes well for him. Totally. He defends the guy, you know, the shop owner. He kind of just gets away with it.

[02:01:40] [SPEAKER_04] It's part of the cynicism of the film is him knowing. He seems kind of, like, cool and heroic to himself.

[02:01:45] [SPEAKER_07] No one's going to care about this kid. Right.

[02:01:46] [SPEAKER_05] The shop owner is speaking Spanish to him.

[02:01:50] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah, he's Latino. I mean, yeah.

[02:01:51] [SPEAKER_05] And they're seemingly friends.

[02:01:53] [SPEAKER_03] But he thinks... Or at least allies in that moment. Yeah, right. He tells himself he's doing that guy a favor. Right? Right. Like, he tells the shopkeeper... He tells himself that what he's doing for the shopkeeper is akin to what he's planning to do for Jodie Foster.

[02:02:07] [SPEAKER_08] Right.

[02:02:08] [SPEAKER_03] Yes.

[02:02:10] [SPEAKER_07] Scorsese's in the film, of course. What a performance. He is replacing the actor George Mamoli, who I know best from Phantom of the Paradise, but kind of like a big guy. You know, he's in Mean Streets. He's a guy. And he had gotten in an accident making a movie called The Farmer and could not make it to set, essentially. Like, you know, he was injured. Scorsese's like, okay, I'll do it. And he says he learned a lot from Bob in that scene. He remembers saying, like, put down the flag. Put down the taxi flag. And Bob was like, no, you make me put it down.

[02:02:40] [SPEAKER_07] He's like, I want you to mean it. Racist monologue, by the way. Yep. It's an extremely scary performance. Schrader was really mad. Like, he was like, why are you fucking taking this part? And then he saw the movie and was like, yeah, he did a pretty good job.

[02:02:56] [SPEAKER_03] His second best performance as an actor?

[02:02:58] [SPEAKER_07] After Shark Tale? No, I was going to say. After The Mandalorian and Grogu? Yeah. What is Scorsese's best? I mean, is it a quiz show? Like, anytime Scorsese has, like, a meaty performance.

[02:03:07] [SPEAKER_03] He is pretty fucking good. It's a small role, but it's this. He's just astonishing.

[02:03:11] [SPEAKER_08] Is Martin Scorsese in Mandalorian and Grogu?

[02:03:15] [SPEAKER_03] He voices a four-armed street cart alien. I regret to inform you that it is maybe the only good performance in the movie. He's pretty good. David and I went to a screening and we turned to each other and we were just like, he's fucking locked in. He's an alien flat meat dealer. He makes flat meat sandwiches. But it is versus this. Even though Scorsese's not doing it tongue-in-cheek and it feels like he's committed, it's very much him playing Scorsese. It's him doing the fast-talking thing.

[02:03:42] [SPEAKER_03] He's basically a guy that The Mandalorian's trying to use as an informant. He's going, I don't know where this guy is. I don't know. It could be anybody. I see. He's good. But he's got four arms to gesticulate, which is really the technological breakthrough. They want to make this movie fast and cheap.

[02:03:57] [SPEAKER_07] They even thought about doing it on black and white videotape. Insane. Insane. Kind of insane. The budget does go over a little bit, but they did draw it out all on storyboards. Everything, you know, so that hopefully to, you know, save some money. Marty drew it himself, I'm assuming? Maybe. He says the overall idea, I love this, is to make it a cross between gothic horror and the New York Daily News. Gothic horror and the New York Daily News. Michael Chapman says Marty's storyboards, yes, he writes, draws them, are the best.

[02:04:26] [SPEAKER_07] They make no pretense of being art. But, you know, they're just, you know, the basics. He gives you the essence of what he wants you to say, but he doesn't impress you. Like, I can now do what I need to do. And what were Chapman's credits before this? So that's a great question. You know, he's, because he obviously also shoots, he'd only shot two movies before this. The Last Detail, his first movie. Well, well, well. And then the film The White Dawn, the Philip Kaufman, like, Inuit movie with polar bears and shit.

[02:04:54] [SPEAKER_08] Oh, it's not Bronson.

[02:04:55] [SPEAKER_07] No, it's Warren Oates and Timothy Bottoms and Louis Gossett Jr. Wow. As three whalers who are stranded in the Arctic and are rescued by Inuit people. Heard of the best movie of all time before. I can tell you that it got generally negative reviews. In fact, it's interesting because Chapman goes on to make a movie I watched for our, like, Hope Tour one day, 1986 draft. What's it called? The Clan of the Cave Bear.

[02:05:24] [SPEAKER_07] I only watched it because... Oh, right. He directed that. Yes. It was nominated for Best Makeup at the Academy Awards. And I was like, I want to watch any movie nominated for an Oscar that year. We just talked about that recently as well in the Blink of an Eye episode. He could do the lush pastoral nature. He could do that stuff, even though I think of him best for the Marty movies he made. The fucking Grime. Yeah. Like, for this enraging bullet. I think those are the only two movies they made together, right? Yeah. It's interesting, like, the... He also did...

[02:05:52] [SPEAKER_07] He did hardcore with Schrader.

[02:05:54] [SPEAKER_03] The Rodrigo Pietro run has been pretty long, but otherwise Marty would jump around with DPs.

[02:06:00] [SPEAKER_07] Well, he uses Ballhouse a lot. And then he sort of jumps around. Sometimes it's Robert Richardson. Sometimes... Yeah. He tries other people around. It's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. But Chapman, of course, says he liked The Last Detail. That's why he hired him. Chapman says, we didn't have time. We didn't have a lot of money. I couldn't light the streets with big lights. Speaking to your point there. So we had to get it down to kind of New York light. And it turned out that was the right thing to do. He says, thank God I didn't have time and money.

[02:06:29] [SPEAKER_07] Like, you know, everything worked out for me. When, you know, like when they're shooting Travis Bickle, Scorsese wants Travis basically to be in everyone else's light. You know, but when he's in the frame... That's really fucking smart. He's alone.

[02:06:44] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[02:06:44] [SPEAKER_07] Like, even if there's someone over his shoulder, it's like, I don't want to see him. Like, Travis is alone as much as possible. And he said it was hard because like Travis is in everyone else's frame or whatever. So it's hard to kind of like strike that balance.

[02:06:56] [SPEAKER_03] But that's when you try to define what is great directing. What are things you can fully credit to the director and not the DP, the writer, the performances. And it is when a movie has a kind of set of rules like that, that it establishes for its visual storytelling. That it doesn't break. That isn't too showy. Right. That you could watch the movie a thousand times and never notice that. Right.

[02:07:23] [SPEAKER_03] But it does actually inform the psychological experience of how you're interacting with the film.

[02:07:28] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah.

[02:07:28] [SPEAKER_03] That's just genius shit.

[02:07:30] [SPEAKER_07] He studies Jack, the film A Bigger Splash for the head-on framing. Obviously, it was shot in New York City, summer of 75. Incredibly hot. Always raining. Very wet. I do. I feel like this is quite a moist movie. I'm sorry if, you know, that offends anyone. Sanitation workers are on. Not at all. I said the word moist. I support it.

[02:07:50] [SPEAKER_03] Some people have a thing about the word moist.

[02:07:51] [SPEAKER_07] They don't like the word moist.

[02:07:52] [SPEAKER_03] I'm not one of them. Ben wishes it would pick a direction. Moist is just too middling for Ben. Yeah. Yeah. Pick a lane. Go dry or wet.

[02:07:59] [SPEAKER_07] There's a garbage strike going on. So there's garbage everywhere. I mean, what a blessing. And it's like all these things are right. They're just helping out. It's just all lined up. Right. The apartment stuff, like Travis's apartment, Iris's apartment, that's just condemned buildings. They would hire a gang to protect them from other gangs. I mean, you know, New York City, greatest city in the world, baby. Come on. We used to have a country. We used to have a country. We used to have a country. I'm checking here. The country was falling apart. I think we...

[02:08:28] [SPEAKER_07] Mortgage rates were 30%. Drop dead. Because my mom buys... I think about it all the time. My mom buys an apartment in New York City. And I believe it's 76. They paid her $20 to take an apartment.

[02:08:40] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[02:08:40] [SPEAKER_07] I mean, she buys it in Amsterdam. Her grandmother calls her and is like, you're going to get murdered.

[02:08:45] [SPEAKER_09] Yeah.

[02:08:45] [SPEAKER_07] Now you have to be a banker to live there.

[02:08:48] [SPEAKER_09] Yeah.

[02:08:48] [SPEAKER_07] Like, and truly, like my mom says, the first three months she lived there, the apartment had once been occupied by someone of ill repute. Yeah. Because someone would come to the door all the time and rattle the door and bang on the handle. And when she told the doorman about it, the doorman would be like, Ellen, don't you open the door for anyone you don't know. Okay? Like, he wasn't like, oh, I'll take care of it. He was just like, listen to me, Ellen. Never open the door.

[02:09:10] [SPEAKER_03] I...

[02:09:10] [SPEAKER_07] I... That's where she lived.

[02:09:11] [SPEAKER_03] I went...

[02:09:12] [SPEAKER_06] She bought it with her... You know, anyway.

[02:09:13] [SPEAKER_03] I went to high school with... 15 grand or whatever. People who were absurdly wealthy, right? Sure. And... Sorry for ranting about New York. No, no. There was a kid I went to school with. I went... He invited me over to his parents' place and they had like a two-story thing in Soho that was insane.

[02:09:33] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah.

[02:09:33] [SPEAKER_03] Was not all made up, but it was just the amount of space was insane. And I went like, oh, did I not realize that... That Eugene also is one of these kids where his parents invented water or whatever, you know? And I was like, respectfully, what do your parents do? And he was like, my dad's like a painter, but he never really sold anything. Anyway, he like... This was the first apartment he moved into as an artist studio in like 1968.

[02:09:59] [SPEAKER_03] And at one point, the landlord was bored and was like, if you can scrounge together like $20,000, it's yours. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And just sat on it forever. Crazy. Yeah. Anyway, yes.

[02:10:12] [SPEAKER_05] I'm currently looking for apartments. Oh, yeah. I have to move. And a notion I've had, because it's been such a nightmare, it's so expensive, is I need crime to come back. You need crime. I need the rent prices to come down.

[02:10:24] [SPEAKER_07] Obviously, this is a complex thought to be having. No, no, no, no. I can answer this. I can answer this.

[02:10:31] [SPEAKER_03] Let's just briefly open the gates of Arkham Asylum. Yes. Those are fun villains. They'll do goofy themed crime. Uh-huh. Penguins robbing banks and shit. Right. Dare I say it? Richard T. Joker.

[02:10:44] [SPEAKER_07] All right. So, last thing before we just talk about the movie more. Bernard Herrmann, very resistant. Scorsese describes him as crotchety. Essentially retired, right? Yes. And Scorsese says, the film's called Taxi Driver. And he says, oh, no, that's not my kind of picture title. No, no, no, no, no. And Marty's like, please, can we meet and talk about it? And he's like, well, what's the movie about? And Marty's like, it's about this. You know, he describes the plot. And Bernard Herrmann's like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not the kind. And who's in it?

[02:11:14] [SPEAKER_07] And he says, Robert De Niro's in it. And he's like, no, no, no. And then he's like, well, we can have a quick talk. So, that's how he won him over. It's an incredible score. Costumist Oscar nomination. Didn't Herrmann also do Obsession? No. Doesn't John Williams? Oh, wait. Now I have to look it up. Okay. Now I've got to look it up. You're right. Yeah. Wow. Because John Williams becomes De Palma's guy. Or maybe already. But yes. Yeah. I think the whole thing with De Palma to me. And I love De Palma. I don't know how you feel about De Palma.

[02:11:44] [SPEAKER_07] Thumbs up. Thumbs up to De Palma. But once in a while, and I'm not the first to feel this way, I'm like, Brian, we know you like Alfred Hitchcock. Sure. And he's like, did you know? I'm like, yep, we know. And he's like, I got Bernard. And I'm like, I would have gotten it without Bernard, but okay, you got him. And Obsession, which is Obsession is his vertigo, right? That's the one where I'm like, this is too loud. Like, you haven't done enough to mess with it. Like, I like stuff like Dressed to Kill where he's like, here's my psycho. And I'm like, you're a sick fuck. Yeah. You know, this is so much sicker.

[02:12:14] [SPEAKER_07] And Hitchcock's sick enough as it is. Yeah. Anyway. We'll do De Palma one day, right, Griff? Yeah, just a lot. It's a lot of movies. Yeah. And the whole series. How much? Not more than Scorsese. No, but it's close. It's probably like 20. I think it's a lot of movies. And like, the tail end of his career is not uninteresting, but obviously it gets a little weird.

[02:12:33] [SPEAKER_03] We've run the risk of the whole series being redacted, which would be a waste of time.

[02:12:37] [SPEAKER_07] And the thing with De Palma, who I do adore, is, you know, movie 14, you're like, voyeurism's a theme.

[02:12:43] [SPEAKER_03] You know, like, it's like, he had his bag. What if you looked at boobs from a place where the boobs didn't know you were looking at them? God bless. I mean, it's a really interesting question. Hi, mom. Oh, I'm so funny. Radiance 4K. Never seen. You've never seen it?

[02:13:02] [SPEAKER_04] It's one of the De Palmas I've never seen. I've never seen it. Young De Niro. Wow. I can't believe I have a movie on both of you guys. What's it about?

[02:13:08] [SPEAKER_03] Well, it's interesting because it's a little like Who's That Knocking on My Door and some other films we've covered. Dark Star, a little bit like this, where you're like, it's kind of three different movies smushed together, like genuinely three different production efforts smushed together. It's a movie that slowly over time became a feature. There's like a whole section of it that is just a kind of performance piece that De Palma

[02:13:32] [SPEAKER_03] worked on in college that was filmed on like black and white Super 8 cameras. And the character basically just like collides with that. And then the movie turns into like a documentary about this performance for like 15 or 20 minutes. But then some of it's a kind of just goofy like dude trying to branch out and live in New York City on his own comedy. It's a real fascinating mishmash of stuff. It's basically a non-narrative movie. Right. But it's incredibly stylish and funny.

[02:14:01] [SPEAKER_03] I imagine I'll be getting the diss. Yeah, I'll be getting the shit out of that diss. Sometimes we have this physical media thread that you recently asked us about, Tracy, a physical media group text. Years ago, we joked about, can you imagine how disgusted Tracy would be if he ever saw the things we text about in here? Because it was like, are you the white whale to get to join the group? But the group just, it goes, it just goes hard. As David said, it's a very busy group text.

[02:14:30] [SPEAKER_08] How many people are on it?

[02:14:32] [SPEAKER_03] Six. Six.

[02:14:33] [SPEAKER_07] I think. Oh.

[02:14:34] [SPEAKER_03] Five. You made it sound like maybe there were 20.

[02:14:36] [SPEAKER_07] No, it's me, Griff, Sean Fennessy, Alex Perry, David Lowery, and Timothy Sons. And Hitmaker.

[02:14:43] [SPEAKER_03] His name's Hitmaker.

[02:14:44] [SPEAKER_08] Oh, I should be on that.

[02:14:45] [SPEAKER_03] Okay. All right. Fine. You can be included, certainly. But sometimes-

[02:14:49] [SPEAKER_08] I don't know David Lowery and Alex Ross Perry and I- Are best friends. We've had narrow misses. I don't know. Yes. He came to the opening of Bug. Did I tell you about this? Yes. Did he? I haven't heard your version of the story. Well, he came to the opening of Bug and then I went to meet, he came, it was Sean's date. Yes. And so I went to see those guys afterwards at the party, at the opening night party. And I said, where's Alex Ross Perry? Well, he left. I was like, well, he left.

[02:15:15] [SPEAKER_08] I mean, it was weird not to stick around just to say hi or nice to meet you or thanks for your play. Well, he left. I was like, well, why did he leave? It was like, well, he was embarrassed about the way he was dressed.

[02:15:25] [SPEAKER_07] He was- He was- Oh, that's right. Yes. He didn't realize maybe that it was sort of a grand performance. Yes. And he wore the classic Alex Ross Perry uniform. He's wearing like a Slayer t-shirt or something.

[02:15:37] [SPEAKER_03] Right.

[02:15:37] [SPEAKER_08] And Zach, Amanda's husband, even asked him, said, what did you think you were going to tonight?

[02:15:46] [SPEAKER_03] Alex is very consistent. I will say this. He is largely unchanging. I look forward to meeting him. Sometimes, and maybe you meet via text first in this thread in your grand introduction to the ecosystem, but sometimes I will shout announces a 4K steelbook of some dumb baby garbage I love, and I will just post the announcement link to the thread and go, regrettably, I'm pre-ordering the shit out of this. Right. I have already pre-ordered. I don't even really like this.

[02:16:15] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, you know, Congo.

[02:16:18] [SPEAKER_08] I have about three things, three launch points. Okay. I'm going to take this one first, and it goes back to my thing about finding Travis more sympathetic this past. When I watch King of Comedy and Rupert takes his girlfriend into Jerry Lewis's house, and Jerry Lewis comes home and says, what the hell are you doing here? It's a kind of a cringe comedy, right?

[02:16:46] [SPEAKER_08] It does make you absolutely cringe. And it conjures some of those comedy shows like The British Office or Tim, what's his name? Detroit guy. Tim Robinson. Tim Robinson.

[02:17:00] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. I like that you said Detroiters instead of I Think You Should Leave, by the way. Detroiters fucking rules. Great show. I think even just the fact that Albert Brooks is in this movie is very telling in that being part of Scorsese's language.

[02:17:14] [SPEAKER_08] But the feeling that Rupert creates in me is different than the feeling Travis creates in me. When Travis fucks up with Sybil Shepard, I don't feel like, oh God, this is embarrassing and funny. I feel like, I feel real sympathy.

[02:17:31] [SPEAKER_03] I feel like, what are you doing? Tracy, I was thinking about this. I feel like that is a universal experience. I remember, you know, in high school watching this movie and when I'd have conversations with people, because I'm like the movie guy, they're like, I just watched Taxi Driver. Can I talk about Taxi Driver with you? Everyone goes, and that scene where he takes her to the fucking porno theater and you're going, dude, what are you doing?

[02:17:56] [SPEAKER_03] That everyone has that kind of visceral response of, oh my God, my motherfucker, don't do this. You're so close.

[02:18:05] [SPEAKER_05] To actually changing kind of the trajectory of your life. Because she's sort of into it at first. In a weird way. She's intrigued enough by him. Yes.

[02:18:15] [SPEAKER_03] He's close. And it's, I think what's so key is that in the scene where he takes her to coffee, he makes a couple observations about her that she feels are correct. That he is seeing her. Right. That she is not just an object for him. That there is some level of him trying to actually engage with her as a human being that I think cuts through. And the same thing when he mentions her desk and whatever, it cuts through anything that's unnerving about him. Rupert Pumpkin is a detestable character.

[02:18:44] [SPEAKER_03] He is off-putting. Every millisecond he is on screen. Even just down to the look where you're like, my guy, why the fuck is that your haircut? Versus De Niro being hot in this. And it's not like she goes on a date with him just because he's hot. But it also is that there are moments where you're like, sometimes this guy is showing intelligence. Sometimes this guy is showing emotional vulnerability that is appealing. And sometimes he is really unnerving.

[02:19:10] [SPEAKER_03] And the porno scene, you really get the sense of like, he doesn't get why this went wrong. And he says like, no, no, no, no, a lot of couples go see this. And I love that when you're in the theater and she's immediately revolved, you do see that there are other couples there. There are other couples there because that's their fucking thing. Right.

[02:19:30] [SPEAKER_07] That's their peccadillo a little bit or whatever.

[02:19:32] [SPEAKER_03] And this is a blind spot of this guy where his life is so cloistered that he's like, what do couples do? Where do I see couples? Where do I hang out? I don't go to fancy restaurants, so I don't see couples having nice dates.

[02:19:43] [SPEAKER_07] But also, how many of the couples in that theater are on their first date? Probably not many. You probably build to like, hey, you're on.

[02:19:49] [SPEAKER_04] He doesn't fucking get it, but it's basic.

[02:19:51] [SPEAKER_07] You want to go see I Am Curious Yellow?

[02:19:53] [SPEAKER_04] And I think we're saying couples. Yeah, sure. Who knows?

[02:19:57] [SPEAKER_05] A pair.

[02:19:57] [SPEAKER_02] A pair. A looking pair. Yes.

[02:20:00] [SPEAKER_03] Two turtle doves.

[02:20:02] [SPEAKER_02] It does.

[02:20:04] [SPEAKER_03] Yes, you understand the broken logic of how he got there. And then he says to her something akin to like, I can take you to other places. We can go all sorts of places. I don't know what those places are, but you can tell me.

[02:20:15] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, right.

[02:20:15] [SPEAKER_03] He immediately realizes, I fucked this up, but tell me what date places are. And it's less that she's so offended by him, I think. And a thing I think Sybil Shepard plays very well. And more that she's like, I feel fucking stupid that I overlooked a bunch of red flags about this guy. And assumed that the good would outweigh the creepy.

[02:20:36] [SPEAKER_08] Well, part of the appeal for her, you have to assume, is not only that he's young and good-looking, Robert De Niro and thin, and has a job. Yeah. Maybe not a great job, but he's employed. But also that he does express, maybe awkwardly, but he does express a kind of confidence. I'm walking in off the street to tell you that you're beautiful and I wanted to. And she's obviously flattered by that attention. And then, yeah, takes her out for coffee. Right.

[02:21:04] [SPEAKER_07] It is technically the second date. Right. Ben, show some respect.

[02:21:08] [SPEAKER_08] Oh, sorry. David, show some respect. Ben, I love you.

[02:21:11] [SPEAKER_02] Okay, thanks.

[02:21:11] [SPEAKER_08] He sits there with her at the coffee shop, and what he says, the way he describes how he perceives her is really, he's talking about himself, right? It all applies to him, the things he says about her. We don't actually think that any of those things he says about her apply to her, but it's very flattering to have somebody say, I know what's going on with you. You're deep and you're complicated and you're going through a lot of stuff.

[02:21:36] [SPEAKER_03] I think there's another thing going on, which is he's not Albert Brooks. I was about to say, I feel like that's why Brooks is in the movie. The Brooks placement is so important for that reason.

[02:21:44] [SPEAKER_07] Right. Brooks is a nebbish. He's kind of annoying. Yes, he's very annoying. Yeah, he's very annoying. You can tell immediately that she's annoyed by him. Not in some profound way, but just their conversation where they're not looking at each other.

[02:21:58] [SPEAKER_03] And he has that bit where in the middle of a run-on monologue, he goes, I'm in love with you, and then just keeps talking. And she just doesn't even acknowledge. She doesn't even give it that much.

[02:22:06] [SPEAKER_07] Because she's hearing it all day from his ass, probably.

[02:22:08] [SPEAKER_03] She's sick of it, yes. Because Bickle is trying to at least engage with her as a human being, where it just feels like Albert Brooks is like, obviously it'd be great if I could bed this woman. She'd never be with a guy like me, so the only way I can do it is to just say like, well, you're beautiful. I'm in love with you, you know? Versus Travis being like, I think you're broken. Which whether or not there's any truth in that, he is trying to think of her as a person within her life.

[02:22:31] [SPEAKER_08] Right. Yes. And so, but part of his pitch is that he's a confident guy who knows what's best for her. And he's a man of the people. And who knows the next move. Yes. So he can't say to her at the beginning of the date, well, where do you want to go? You pick the move. You think he's going for a whole. He's got to be the one to make the choice. Yes.

[02:22:54] [SPEAKER_07] And of course, when he makes the wrong choice, then it just, it all falls apart. The whole illusion is shitting. I don't know. Here's my hot take.

[02:23:01] [SPEAKER_08] You should have given the movie a little more of a shit.

[02:23:05] [SPEAKER_03] He should have bought her a Russ Meyer shirt. She should have sat there and considered what was on screen. The movie looks pretty bad because it's this weird sort of sex ed film, right? What do they call them? The Swedish kind of educational films. Yeah. Let me see if I can find the name of it.

[02:23:21] [SPEAKER_07] Like what is the.

[02:23:22] [SPEAKER_08] Well, it's not a real. It's not a real porn movie. Right. We thought it was. Yeah. We actually thought it was this movie that was kind of popular. It's not. It might use a little footage from it, but.

[02:23:32] [SPEAKER_03] But that was this whole, these silos of things like the nudist documentaries. Or the Swedish like educational films or whatever, where it was like, you're going to get to see something titillating, but the movie is pretending that that that's not what its main purpose is.

[02:23:46] [SPEAKER_07] It's called Swedish Marriage Manual in the film. The film is likely the film Sexual Freedom in Denmark or the Swedish film Language of Love. But no one actually knows the answer to this question.

[02:24:00] [SPEAKER_03] But these are basically movies that were purporting to be like marital guides. Right. Right.

[02:24:05] [SPEAKER_08] Or here's Masters and Johnson study put on screen. There's some scientific element.

[02:24:12] [SPEAKER_03] There's sex ed films for grownups, which is a way to get away legally with screening. Because also the theater is nicer than you imagine a lot of the other Times Square theaters. Sure.

[02:24:22] [SPEAKER_07] But right. But I mean, it's a different era. It is hard for us to imagine. It's like, yes. Okay. It was a bunch of porno theaters. Times Square was very scuzzy. It was. It's not like it was a, but people did go watch porn in theaters in the 70s. Did they not? Like it's, you know. They did. They couldn't watch it at home. Yeah. You know.

[02:24:40] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, it's also fascinating that this is the decade where several years you have full on pornographic films in the top 10 highest grossing films of the year. Like there was the phenomenon of an intellectual couple goes to see Deep Throat.

[02:24:52] [SPEAKER_08] Presuming she had the maturity and the sophistication to be able to handle a little adult material. He thought she was into Kino. He didn't realize.

[02:25:04] [SPEAKER_03] But she's out of there like 30 seconds. I mean, I do like that he immediately goes like, give it a chance. And then she just sits there so grumpy.

[02:25:13] [SPEAKER_07] It's the stepbrothers joke, which I think about all the time when they're in the tuxes and Seth Rogan's interviewing them. Yes. And he's like, it's funny. I get it. You're overly formal. And then they start to be weird. And he's like, now the tuxes seem fucked up.

[02:25:25] [SPEAKER_06] And it's for her.

[02:25:26] [SPEAKER_07] She's just like, you know, I was willing to roll with you. You're different. But it's interesting. And then he takes her to the porn room. She's like, OK, now I know. Now clearly I can tell.

[02:25:34] [SPEAKER_03] It's almost a Mr. F moment of just like, there's a bunch of things I'm reviewing in my mind.

[02:25:40] [SPEAKER_08] Yeah. Should he have known who Chris Christopherson was in 1976? I think so.

[02:25:45] [SPEAKER_03] He's like, because that's the year of A Star is Born. Yes. Which, as Amanda called out, was the second highest grossing film of its year.

[02:25:52] [SPEAKER_08] OK.

[02:25:52] [SPEAKER_07] But it was like me and Bobby McGee or whatever. Yeah. His big, you know, that's 1970. So he's a pretty established country music star.

[02:25:58] [SPEAKER_03] Like that's him making the leap to movie stardom after being a hyper famous songwriter and then a hyper famous singer in his own right.

[02:26:04] [SPEAKER_07] It's very conscious that Scorsese, he never listens to music. You never hear any music in this man's life. He doesn't have a record player at home.

[02:26:12] [SPEAKER_03] We're hearing his internal soundtrack. There's no actual music.

[02:26:15] [SPEAKER_07] Yes. And Scorsese very consciously was like, I don't want a lot of diegetic music or whatever. You know, like I don't want him to be like spinning records or whatever. But he doesn't have any interest.

[02:26:24] [SPEAKER_04] He's scratching vinyl. He could. You're right. He could have been. He could have become a DJ. He could have been spinning plates.

[02:26:29] [SPEAKER_07] You know, his record player is broken, he tells us. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so is something else up there in my opinion. Okay, wait. That's point one.

[02:26:36] [SPEAKER_08] Well, I just want to know more about the Christopherson thing because like you guys talked about this actress that Tim Simons didn't know and I didn't know her either. Lily Collins.

[02:26:45] [SPEAKER_07] The great Lily Collins. Lily Collins.

[02:26:46] [SPEAKER_08] I never heard of her.

[02:26:47] [SPEAKER_03] I think there's a reasonable argument that I think Chris Christopherson in this moment is more conventionally famous than Lily Collins. And obviously there was more of a monoculture then. To be clear, we're also making fun of Hitmaker.

[02:27:00] [SPEAKER_07] Because he's on a hit Netflix show and she's the star of the most popular show on Netflix, Emily in Paris. And I'm like, you haven't run into her at one of their, you know, Empire galas or whatever Netflix is always up to.

[02:27:13] [SPEAKER_03] You also just need to understand we're in this group text, right? Where it's like, let's share the opinions on the film industry that none of us want to share publicly.

[02:27:20] [SPEAKER_04] Sure, right, right.

[02:27:20] [SPEAKER_03] Let's post the fucking pre-orders of new disc announcements and whatever. And then Tim will just sometimes swing in with a thing that feels like it's coming straight from Jupiter. Jupiter, we're about to meet up with Tim for dinner. Ben Marie and I are going to meet up with Tim and Sean for dinner. And it's like 30 minutes before we're supposed to meet for dinner. And Tim just goes like all caps. Lily Collins is Phil Collins' daughter. Who the fuck is Lily Collins? And we're like, why are you asking this now?

[02:27:50] [SPEAKER_03] Why was he?

[02:27:51] I don't know.

[02:27:52] [SPEAKER_03] Okay, who knows? We eventually figured it out, but I feel like the chain of logic was really bizarre.

[02:27:56] [SPEAKER_08] So you think he should, you think Travis should have known who Chris Christopherson was in 1976?

[02:28:01] [SPEAKER_03] I think there's a better argument. I don't think it's like him not knowing who Frank Sinatra is. I think it's a well-selected celebrity where he's enough on the cusp that you're like. Well, it's also, he's appealing to young people.

[02:28:11] [SPEAKER_07] Yes. Like, you know, he's selected, I feel like, because he was a cool musician.

[02:28:14] [SPEAKER_03] It's telling you that this guy is not locked in. He's not with it. It's not telling you that the guy's an imbecile and he doesn't know anything.

[02:28:22] [SPEAKER_07] But he does not seem like someone who's concerned with popular culture.

[02:28:27] [SPEAKER_04] He lives in his own head. He has to watch the Swedish educational films.

[02:28:30] [SPEAKER_08] And we see him later watching a pornographic film that seems more traditionally porn. Pornographic. So at least he has that much awareness. Take her to the pseudo-documentary as opposed to the...

[02:28:45] [SPEAKER_07] Are you building a slow case for Travis Bickle did nothing wrong?

[02:28:48] [SPEAKER_08] Is this what's happening here?

[02:28:50] [SPEAKER_07] I'm not at all.

[02:28:51] [SPEAKER_03] He did some wrong things, but he was actually good at dating, is your argument. Specifically and exclusively good at dating.

[02:28:57] [SPEAKER_07] You think Sybil kind of gives him, you know, a bit of a hard time.

[02:29:01] [SPEAKER_08] Is this a movie about Sybil Shepard fumbling the bag? She's out of there pretty quick. He doesn't give him, you know, he calls her back. He sends flowers. Oh, here's another thing. Why are the flowers in his apartment? He's sending her flowers, but the dead flowers are in his apartment. I mean, maybe it's like... Are they getting bounced back?

[02:29:19] [SPEAKER_07] Yes, maybe it's like she did not accept return to send. That's what I think it is. Yes, she like turned it away.

[02:29:23] [SPEAKER_03] Or that he's continuing to send flowers to her. Does the forest do that? I don't know. Do you send flowers to somebody? They reject them? They bring them to you? Not 1-800-Flowers past sponsor, of course. They would never do that.

[02:29:38] [SPEAKER_07] Sybil takes him in. And if he dates her for a little while longer or whatever, like if things work out a little bit better, he's still going to go on this road. It's going to fall apart at some point. This is not a movie where it's like, you know what? If he just found this nice lady and kind of... Like, he would have settled down. It's like, no, it's already all so close to the boil.

[02:29:59] [SPEAKER_03] I don't think he could be permanently saved by the love of a good woman. But I do agree with Ben that I think his life goes in a different direction. And I certainly think it avoids the worst extremes. If he is able to stay in a functional, healthy relationship and learn from it, even if it doesn't last forever.

[02:30:16] [SPEAKER_07] I just don't think he would be. But this is, you know... There's going to be something.

[02:30:19] [SPEAKER_08] He focuses his affections on, you know, a beautiful model, right? Yes.

[02:30:26] [SPEAKER_03] Sybil Shepard was a cover model for that. I mean, Sybil Shepard was the ultimate kind of just like image of a woman that drove men insane. So... That is what she represented in the culture. She's gorgeous. Like, the problem with a lot of these fucking incels, maybe you just need to lower your standards. I mean, yes. It's... Our buddy Chris Gethard, who will have been on the Mandalorian episode, always says, if you're complaining that women don't find you interesting, maybe the problem is you need to be more interesting.

[02:30:49] [SPEAKER_08] Yeah. You know? Or find the women who do find you interesting. I mean, it's like, what... We're going to solve this today, guys.

[02:30:58] [SPEAKER_07] We're going to fix the incels.

[02:30:59] [SPEAKER_03] No, but there are a lot of, you know... It's a gripe of mine. And in high school, I was very obsessed with a lot of the high school movies where it's the nerdy guy who's obsessed with the most conventionally beautiful, you know, prom queen girl. And she'd never even look at a guy like me. And that's seen as this sort of note of, like, is there almost a classism in her that she won't consider the smart, interesting guy? Right. And almost always in those films, you're like, yeah, well, you're not considering your fucking sarcastic female best friend. You're doing the same fucking thing.

[02:31:28] [SPEAKER_03] You want to date the hottest person.

[02:31:30] [SPEAKER_07] Well, that's because those 80s teen movies are like Charles Dickens novels where, like, there's the interesting female character. This is a great comparison I'm making. I'm really liking it. And then at the end, it's like, yeah, but also he has to marry the placid, fair-haired lady. Like, you know, every... And like, yeah, at the end of the John Hughes movies, it's like, but by the way, he gets the babe. Right. Sort of like traditional babe. Because that's what you want, isn't it?

[02:31:52] [SPEAKER_03] Isn't that what the audience is looking for? Although the fucking audience revolted to Pretty in Pink and they had to reshoot the ending. Sure.

[02:32:00] [SPEAKER_07] So, Travis. Okay. So he... Yes. He fumbles the bag with Sybil Shepard. He is... He takes this job. The movie starts with him at the Taxi Depot, essentially getting pitched on the job because he can't sleep. Right? Like, that's sort of the original thing here. He's just like, I'm up all night anyway. I'll drive a cab around.

[02:32:17] [SPEAKER_03] What year does Taxi the Sitcom start? Is it... It's within, like, 24 months of this, right? 1978. Okay. 78. Yeah. Um... I just know that James L. Brooks said the reason he thought to create a sitcom around Taxi Dispatch Station, there was a big New York Magazine article about one night on the graveyard shift.

[02:32:42] [SPEAKER_03] And he found it fascinating that everyone who worked there, it was... This is a transitional survival job. Yeah, yeah. I'm just going to do this for six months. How long have you been doing it? 15 years. Right. But all of them were like, I do this at night because my real passion is this at the day and I haven't been able to actually make it a livable wage yet. Right. And it feels like in this interview scene, part of what this guy is sort of sniffing out is like, why do you want to do this?

[02:33:11] [SPEAKER_03] You don't seem to be saying, I need to pick up this so I have the flexible hours in order to do this with my other time. It's not about spending time with your family or taking care of a parent or following some other passion or hobby. It's like, you just want to drive the cab? That's a little bit odd.

[02:33:30] [SPEAKER_08] You ever had a friend who drove a cab? Yeah.

[02:33:33] [SPEAKER_05] You did? Yeah. Yeah, I've had a couple. My uncle drove a cab from 80 to 83. In New York City? In New York City. Your uncle who's a listener? Yep. And a cinephile.

[02:33:45] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah. Probably an intense time to be driving a cab in New York. I mean, it's basically always an intense job.

[02:33:50] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, he worked the graveyard shift. Right.

[02:33:52] [SPEAKER_07] So 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. And he had to pick up like ghouls and goblins. Because the way New York City's cabs work is that there's just six to six for both. There's no swing shift because they don't want anyone to get the sort of like better end of anything. Yeah. Yeah.

[02:34:07] [SPEAKER_05] And he, reflecting on that time, he said, he shared with me, he totally risked this life by doing that job. Right. It was really dangerous. He thankfully never had any kind of incident other than people running out on their fare. Right. But he felt that it was always a possibility. It was always a possibility someone could try and bug you. It was just, it was a crazy time. Yeah.

[02:34:28] [SPEAKER_06] Yeah. Yeah.

[02:34:29] [SPEAKER_07] It was. You never drove a cab?

[02:34:31] [SPEAKER_08] No, I didn't. I had a friend, Will Kern, and he wrote a play about it called Hell Cab. Hell Cab, and then they turned Hell Cab into a movie called Chicago Cab.

[02:34:41] [SPEAKER_03] Oh, I believe directed by John Tentori and Mary Cebulski. That's exactly right. Parents of our friend Ray Tentori. Oh, wow. Passing future guests. The late, great Mary Cebulski, a legend. Yeah. Yeah.

[02:34:53] [SPEAKER_08] I'm in that movie briefly. Really? Okay. Yeah, it's made in Chicago. You play a sports fan. I do, in fact, play a sports fan. Are you? What team? I'm a Bears fan. Of course. Yeah. But everybody I've ever known who's driven a cab believes that they're performing a valuable

[02:35:10] [SPEAKER_03] public service. That is a great way of putting it, Tracy. And I feel like there's a similar kind of... It's like the safety net of travel. Yes.

[02:35:19] [SPEAKER_07] In a city like New York where you're like, well, if all else fails, maybe I can grab a cab. That used to be sort of like, yeah, how I thought about it.

[02:35:26] [SPEAKER_03] But it also feels like they talk about it as if it was I backpack across the world for five years.

[02:35:35] [SPEAKER_07] That's something crazy that I did in my past.

[02:35:37] [SPEAKER_03] That it is an extreme form of interpersonal immersion into like the breadth of humanity.

[02:35:44] [SPEAKER_07] I remember I read the book Hack by Melissa Plott. Now it goes by Mel Plott. Came out as non-binary later in life. But like, great book about someone who just was like, I'm 25. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing with myself. I'm going to start driving a cab.

[02:35:58] [SPEAKER_03] That's every friend of mine who grew up... People I know who also grew up in New York City and were just like, I'm in my early 20s. I haven't figured out my thing yet. Your screen keeps turning really bright red. Oh, I'm sorry.

[02:36:07] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah. I don't know. There was an ad running. He's got porn up on him. I was going to say red too. David. It's reflecting on your eyeballs. This is how I get off. I watch porn and like do not touch myself in public places. While talking about cinema.

[02:36:22] [SPEAKER_08] You would not be the first.

[02:36:23] [SPEAKER_03] But they just, they'd be like, I need a thing to do.

[02:36:26] [SPEAKER_07] Right. What's interesting is like, they talk about how by the end of their time as a cabbie, they had a bit of a hair trigger temper. Yeah. And it's not so even so much the people in your cab. It's just the act of driving all the time in New York City where you just, a lot of rage starts to radiate out of you.

[02:36:43] [SPEAKER_06] Like everyone is, you know, cutting you off and trying to get you.

[02:36:46] [SPEAKER_03] I've talked about it so much, but I do not have a driver's license. I do not drive. I've driven one time on camera for an unreleased independent film. And so much of my fear of driving is that my dad drove way too much in the city. My dad was weirdly addicted to driving in the city and it's such a terrible experience. He was not good at handling the stress of it. And so all of my associations are, why the fuck would you ever do this? Not all of my associations, but all my primal associations are being in bumper to bumper, hair trigger. Yeah.

[02:37:16] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. Yeah. So Ken, he had been, you know, was a working musician and composer, but it was hard and he would be in between jobs. You don't even make that much money. Yeah. Yeah. And so at some point after doing all these different kinds of odd jobs, he decided to start driving a cab. And he was telling me that in one night you could make like 200 bucks, which was like, you know, a decent amount of money back then.

[02:37:41] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah.

[02:37:41] [SPEAKER_05] But the thing that he did, like Travis, is he would drive anywhere. He would pick up whoever and drive to Staten Island. He crossed state lines. Drive to White Plains. Drive to Jersey. But like the real deal cabbies, they were, they were refusing. I'm not fucking going uptown. I'm not going to Brooklyn. And they were 100% racially profiled. Right. Of course.

[02:38:03] [SPEAKER_07] Right. So, okay. So he's a cab driver. Right. He's a cab driver. We've got as far as Joe Spinell in the movie Taxi Cab. He's a cab driver.

[02:38:11] [SPEAKER_03] He's great at dating.

[02:38:13] [SPEAKER_07] Women just don't get it. Early scenes are right with him, with like Peter Boyle, Harry Northup, Norman Matlock. I'm trying to think like who those guys are. And even though those guys are all, you know, kind of scumbaggy or whatever, Travis is so apart from them. Like he doesn't fit in with them at all. This is what I'm saying. I know. No, we talked about it. Peter Boyle really well cast. Really well cast. He's such a, yeah, he's such a good actor. I love the 70s Peter Boyle.

[02:38:42] [SPEAKER_03] But this is right. This was his last kind of chance in his mind to find a community. These seem like guys who would be on the same wavelength as me. And he can't even crack the conversational rhythm that these guys have. Right. Yeah.

[02:38:56] [SPEAKER_08] Oh, I mean, let's face it. Travis may not be very bright. I mean, there are things like what's moonlighting? When he asks the question, what's moonlighting? Right. Certain things, it's just like, wow, you don't actually know that word.

[02:39:12] [SPEAKER_03] He's a little born under a rock or whatever. Yeah. I said he's a little like big where he's like a kid in a grown up's body. There was always this sort of whisper that De Niro was supposed to be in big. And then Elizabeth Perkins did an interview recently and she was like, my screen test was with him. We prepped the movie with him.

[02:39:32] [SPEAKER_08] Yeah, that sounds big.

[02:39:33] [SPEAKER_03] His reps asked for more money. The contract fell apart at the last minute and then Hanks jumped in. And I always thought like that movie would be such a fucking disaster with him in it. And then you watch this or on this rewatch. I was like, he does really feel like a six year old where the way he asked these things like what is moonlighting doesn't have the self-consciousness of an adult who is unintelligent. It has the energy of a child who's actually just trying to collect information.

[02:40:00] [SPEAKER_07] We're in his head pretty early. We're hearing his monologue right away. Right. It's not like this film. It's what you're saying, Tracy, that even you're walking in as an 18 year old or, you know, knowing that he's going to go on a rampage. I would love to watch this movie not knowing.

[02:40:16] [SPEAKER_09] Yeah. Yeah.

[02:40:17] [SPEAKER_07] It's impossible. Like it's the same with Psycho or whatever. These movies where as a kid I'm like, I know one thing about this movie. Well, even just beyond. But like watching this movie, just thinking like, what's he going to do? I don't understand. Why am I with this person? Like, why am I with this person?

[02:40:31] [SPEAKER_03] Beyond knowing the violence is coming because the violence itself is iconic. We also like you and I, all three of us are born into a world like after the Jodie Foster shit.

[02:40:40] [SPEAKER_06] Sure. Yeah. Exactly.

[02:40:41] [SPEAKER_03] Where you're just like there are copycat crimes that we just know before we know the movie. Right.

[02:40:47] [SPEAKER_07] And I feel like right away, you know, he hates everyone around him and he kind of wants him to be washed away. Like, so it's not shocking what happens. I guess I'm trying to unpack this as I think about it. It's more, it's just like, it's hard to reckon with this movie or to consider this movie as a tense thriller.

[02:41:10] [SPEAKER_03] I think of it as a character study. I do too. I watch this movie as if I am seeing like a production of Hamlet, if that makes sense. Right. Where it's like, right. Well, I understand the basic tenets of this story and how it exists in our culture and is referenced all the time. And now I'm going to watch it for the first time.

[02:41:25] [SPEAKER_07] But the first time you watch it, not knowing things, it must have been like, is he going to attack this girl? Right. Is he going to shoot this, you know, politician?

[02:41:33] [SPEAKER_03] Is it a romance with the girl earnestly? Is the movie going to try to sell me on that? Like anything. And I. How unseemly it starts.

[02:41:40] [SPEAKER_07] I do feel like, yes, I know this movie has many a sort of fan who doesn't get it or whatever, but it's hard to watch this movie and think like, I think this guy's going to figure it out. He's going to rescue someone. He's going to, he's going to be an avenging angel.

[02:41:51] [SPEAKER_03] Whatever. It is wild to consider that this film can be misread with how clear its perspective feels communicated at all times. And even just in the performance, which doesn't feel judgmental, but feels so considerate of his brokenness. Yeah. Uh, you know, when people try to make this kind of movie today, it actually does get muddled. Uh, where you feel like it has too much judgment, contempt for its characters, or it's a little

[02:42:21] [SPEAKER_03] bit too much into, uh, fetishizing, you know, their transcendent moments or whatever it is. And this movie feels like so cut and dry in like, this is a movie about being a broken man. Period. Like that's how it starts. That's how it, what it is from beginning to end.

[02:42:41] [SPEAKER_08] Isn't the, uh, are you going through the movie chronologically?

[02:42:45] [SPEAKER_07] Sort of. I, I have a, it's, it's just not a heavy narrative film. No, it's not. Like the first things after we discuss is, is the Betsy thing, which we, we sort of went through. The first 30 to 40 minutes are mostly driven by Sybil Shepard. But we're hearing things in his head. Like he sees her and it's like, she's like an angel.

[02:43:05] [SPEAKER_03] Right.

[02:43:05] [SPEAKER_07] Like the city cannot touch her. Like you're already hearing this kind of like insane dialogue in his head. So topic for discussion.

[02:43:13] [SPEAKER_08] Uh-huh. Uh-huh. The breaks in a point of view. Uh-huh. There are basically three. There are two scenes in the campaign office between Sybil Shepard and Albert Brooks. Yes. And then there's the scene between Harvey Keitel and Jodie Foster. Yes. Where we see the pimp working his, his, uh, his magic on her. Uh, what about those?

[02:43:36] [SPEAKER_03] What about those? It's interesting. Yeah. I think you need to understand in both of those cases where the place of objective reality is because they are figures that he projects so much onto.

[02:43:46] [SPEAKER_07] It's important to see Sybil and Brooks, see, uh, De Niro through their eyes. Yes. See Travis through their eyes and be kind of like, you know, tingling with, you know, like just understanding like how strange it is that he's, yeah, I think that's vital. The scene with Sport and Iris is different. I'm not sure what that's doing except, you know, giving her a little dab and maybe contextualizing

[02:44:13] [SPEAKER_03] just, but we already know she's in an abusive situation. It takes it from being intellectual to being emotional. You can't watch that and not feel a desire for some justice to be carried out, even if it's not what Travis is going to do. I don't know. I think that's the function of that.

[02:44:31] [SPEAKER_07] What do you make of this? Again, you, you wrote Killer Joe. It's like you, you, I'm not, I'm not saying like you copy, can I actually drive her? I'm like with Killer Joe, I'm sure you were thinking of like, do I exit this guy's perspective? Do I stay in it?

[02:44:43] [SPEAKER_03] Like, is that too tough for the audience to just be in this guy's head the entire movie? When you were saying it's tough to like trace influences and things like that, I do just think there's a similarity in this and some of your plays, the grody-er plays in your oeuvre that are like, this is really digging in on the people that society doesn't even want to look at.

[02:45:05] [SPEAKER_08] Oh, well, that would be good. I mean, if I took that from it, wouldn't that be a great thing? Uh, but, uh, uh, because I, cause I think that's important. Yeah. I, I ask myself when I watch it, it now seems like such a sharp break from his. It is. Right. Cause as you're saying, you're not only in his head, we're way in his head. Yeah. And so to suddenly transport out of it is like, is it a mistake?

[02:45:28] [SPEAKER_07] Would the movie be stronger without those three scenes? Is it in service of the audience? Like, that's what I wonder. Like, is there that thought of like the audience needs a release? I think there are two briefs. I don't know.

[02:45:38] [SPEAKER_03] I think one is it's in service of the audience, not just, uh, to need the release, but to also understand, have some grounding in a real reality because part of it is, are we getting somewhat seduced into the idea that Travis should do this? If we are seeing in real time, the actual dynamics of Jodie Foster's situation to some degree, does that make us want some, if not bloodshed justice? Right. Yeah.

[02:46:04] [SPEAKER_03] I think the second interpretation is you could read these sequences and especially that one as a projection of Travis's mind. Okay.

[02:46:14] [SPEAKER_08] Um, that's the order in which I wanted to introduce this because that's the next question I want to entertain. There's been a lot of conjecture over the years about where the movie parts from reality, even on my mom's first viewing the movie in the drive-in, right? It's like, well, I think maybe some of that stuff was fantasy. And I know that the filmmakers have at various times addressed this question themselves,

[02:46:39] [SPEAKER_08] never very satisfactorily, nor do I think they're necessarily the final arbiters of that decision.

[02:46:44] [SPEAKER_07] They are not. No. But I also feel like they all seem to slightly disagree and they also don't want to be definitive. Right. Like they don't want to totally be like, oh, did you not fucking get that that was a dream idiot? You know? Yeah. And then there's like that moment where Schrader, no, De Niro, one of them was like, let's do a sequel. And I remember some people being like, hold up, sequel? Is he even alive? Right.

[02:47:06] [SPEAKER_06] Like, why would there be a sequel?

[02:47:07] [SPEAKER_08] Right. Yes. Carrie, Carrie last night after we watched it was just like, the motherfucker got shot in his carotid artery. He's fucking dead. Right. He's not in good shape at the end of the movie.

[02:47:17] [SPEAKER_03] I'll say it. Nine one one. Let's call it. I also always think about there was Scorsese did a podcast with Joanna Hogg. I think it was for the A24 podcast. It's one of my favorite podcasts ever recorded. And he said a thing that I think about all the fucking time. Who said this to Joanna Hogg? Martin Scorsese. Oh, Scorsese himself. Who directed Raging Bull and Taxi Driver. Yeah. Yeah. And he said she was talking about having to do like a press tour for the first time and

[02:47:45] [SPEAKER_03] that this interview felt like the first real conversation she was having after weeks of people asking her to confirm their interpretations of the film or asking her to explain the film in ways they didn't understand and how she was so loath to do that. And he said, what you have to do is offer them something else. You know, she said, I don't want to be someone who's difficult, who refuses to do press, but I also don't want to say these things. I don't think that helps the function of the art itself with its own integrity. And he said, you take the question they ask and you offer them something else instead.

[02:48:14] [SPEAKER_03] So Scorsese himself has admitted. And for a man who had to deal with a lot of controversy across his career and the interpretation of films and being asked to explain himself, that the strategy he eventually landed on is, I'm not going to give people what I really think to some degree. Yeah. I'm going to find a way to three card Monty a little bit, but to let the movie still have its own integrity. How much of them, how much of it do you think is, is quote unquote real?

[02:48:43] [SPEAKER_07] What's interesting to me when I think about this stuff, because you can pretty flatly kind of just take the movies like, sure, it's basically real. And like, then, you know, the epilogue is, is sort of a fantasy or kind of a commentary to the audience or whatever. Right. Right. I also just, I do think about like how handsome De Niro is as a bit of a fantasy we're seeing. Right. And the fact that he starts to focus on like, there'll be no more poison in my body. Like 50 pushups a day. Right.

[02:49:13] [SPEAKER_07] Like his whole like regimen. And he's already trimmed to begin with.

[02:49:16] [SPEAKER_03] It's not like he starts the movie, Doe. Yeah.

[02:49:18] [SPEAKER_07] Like the way he looks and is perceived. The perfect amount of stubble. Right. His skin is so clean. Is a little too nice. Yeah. And then the way people react to him doesn't strike me as like, they're seeing the De Niro I'm seeing. Right. Now, of course, people start to really be disturbed by him once he's got the mohawk, once he's, you know, like, and I don't know. Like, I mean, to me, this is just a fun thing to think about. This is not like, this is not a movie that needs solving in the slightest.

[02:49:48] [SPEAKER_07] Right? Like, it's not a movie where I'm like, you have to know what's going on at the end. There's clues. Yeah. It's vital that you see in the final scene that weird look across his face. Obviously. Like, you need to understand, like, he's not feeling great, you know? I mean, this is why it's, this is a movie. It's not a good side of him, but apart from that, you can just sort of like, is he just imagining all of this?

[02:50:11] [SPEAKER_03] Is he just imagining Sybil getting in the car? Like, who knows? It's like, this is an endlessly fascinating movie to unpack and pick at because even to what you're saying, I'm like, that's a really good read. On the other hand, you could say this movie is kind of about the weirdness of if you are a handsome person or even let alone just a conventional enough looking person, people grant you more leeway. You could skate by a little bit. You watch the scene where he's talking to, like, the security detail.

[02:50:37] [SPEAKER_07] Well, but that scene, I feel like the security guy immediately clocks him as a huge threat. Right. Yes.

[02:50:42] [SPEAKER_08] Well, and his psychosis seems to kind of swing back and forth, seems to waver. Totally. There are times in the movie where he seems sicker than other times.

[02:50:53] [SPEAKER_07] And he's letting more of his inside thoughts out, you know, talking about, like, he needs to deal with this.

[02:50:58] [SPEAKER_08] He needs to get these people out of here. I think it's one of the all-time great screen performances. It is. I really do. Completely. One of the reasons is that issue of mental health, the projection of mental illness that De Niro creates moment to moment, scene to scene. Not indicating ever. No, the sort of in and out quality of it, right?

[02:51:25] [SPEAKER_08] Where, when he's talking to Iris, he seems very lucid and on it. And then when he's talking to the secret service man, right? He's just ready to bust out and make trouble.

[02:51:39] [SPEAKER_07] Yes. Yes. But then he'll kind of, like, the way he smiles, because clearly Travis knows enough, like, if I smile at someone, that'll diffuse tension that I'm sort of perceiving. And, of course, anytime he does that, he looks crazy. Not to use these words, but you're just kind of like, why the fuck is this guy smiling? He just said he wants to, like, wipe, you know, to get rid of a bunch of scum or whatever, you know.

[02:52:04] [SPEAKER_03] Let's remember that he's 26 years old, right? And people with latent mental illnesses, often that is when they start to experience, you know, in the time between—

[02:52:13] [SPEAKER_07] But he's also a Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress. Totally, totally. Right, there's PTSD and whatever.

[02:52:18] [SPEAKER_03] But I don't think this movie argues that he is solely the byproduct of PTSD. No, no. I mean, I don't know. I think part of what this movie argues is that supercharged a man who never should have been put in that position after to begin with and was not given the support coming out of it. Right, it's that.

[02:52:34] [SPEAKER_07] More as well of just kind of like, right, and then we put these guys into a war that made no sense. They were traumatized, and then we just kind of brought them back and we're like, ugh.

[02:52:42] [SPEAKER_03] But I, you know, I had friends, people I grew up with who then had a psychotic break at some point in their early to mid-20s. And when it's starting to happen, you question your perception of what's going on because sometimes these people are unbelievably convincing. Yeah. And then they start to have behaviors that are aberrant, but they're small. And often it's like, well, he's always been funny or he's always been kind of a wild guy. Uh-huh.

[02:53:08] [SPEAKER_03] The same things that were originally kind of appealing charismatic about the person start to just get a little bit oversized. Mm-hmm. And to some degree, it is like the fact that he is a handsome guy, the fact that it is De Niro and he has a certain undeniable level of magnetism. You know, even when he's playing a broken, sad guy, you do see people sizing him up. And I agree with you that the security detail guy immediately is like, okay, this guy's a fucking problem.

[02:53:36] [SPEAKER_03] But also he is relating to him in a way where he's like, let me try to psychologically contain this situation. Yeah, yeah. Hey, no, yeah, you can join the squad. If he's a different looking kind of guy, he maybe just physically apprehends him immediately. Immediately.

[02:53:52] [SPEAKER_07] There's the scene where he tells Boyle essentially like that I'm having like violent thoughts. And, you know, I feel like there's a few scenes like that. There's the scene with the Secret Service guy. There's a few scenes where essentially he's kind of like red alert, FYI. Yeah. And it's sort of the scenes you sometimes, the stuff you hear about with people who do a bad thing. Yes. Where people are like, you know what? In retrospect, he said this thing that was like very uncomfortable.

[02:54:14] [SPEAKER_08] The great irony of Boyle's character being named Wizard when he's anything but, you know. Yes. Just totally hapless at helping his friend.

[02:54:25] [SPEAKER_03] But holds that.

[02:54:26] [SPEAKER_07] I mean, Wizard tells that sex story at the start of the movie. Yes. Where you're like, well, this is made up. You know, in that sort of like schoolyard way of like, oh, you just made up a story to entertain everyone.

[02:54:37] [SPEAKER_03] Do we not think that also perhaps feeds into Travis's bad second date where he's like, the story is this guy made a bold move and it paid off.

[02:54:45] [SPEAKER_07] He took a stick out and it was good. Right. I can do stuff like that.

[02:54:47] [SPEAKER_03] He was applauded. A ticker tape perured. David? Yes. Red alert. Uh-oh. There's been an outbreak. Biohazard. Of a new Patreon series. It's contagious. Oh, that's so true.

[02:55:17] [SPEAKER_03] It's been cooked up in the lab for your pleasure. From the fine folks at the Umbrella Corporation, we are covering Resident Evil. The film franchise. Yes.

[02:55:28] [SPEAKER_07] We've got the first franchise. Six movies. Yes. That beautiful second franchise. How many? Six? Seven? It's got the one movie. Oh, it's got the one. We'll be covering all of them on Patreon doing commentaries on, yes, the Resident Evil, Apocalypse, Extinction, Afterlife, Retribution, the final chapter. Welcome to Raccoon City.

[02:55:47] [SPEAKER_03] This is an exciting time. Zach Kregor, a friend of the podcast, has a new Resident Evil coming out. We thought this was a good opportunity to revisit the history of Resident Evil movies.

[02:55:56] [SPEAKER_07] Why not? Why not? Why can't we? Why can't we? We can. Check in for that August 1st. And it's going to be running all the way through November 1st.

[02:56:07] [SPEAKER_03] Followed by your March Madness winner, Dracula. Dr. Acula himself. That's so fun. So that's great. That's great. Thank you. Thank you so much.

[02:56:28] [SPEAKER_05] We should also, though, point out, too, that he has that interaction with Jodie Foster's character.

[02:56:37] [SPEAKER_04] Oh, that happens pretty early, right?

[02:56:40] [SPEAKER_03] Because she almost runs her over. That's within the first 30 minutes. But then she kind of disappears from the movie for a while.

[02:56:46] [SPEAKER_05] And he gets kind of almost paid off a little bit. Well, Keitel comes and pulls her out. Crumpled up 20. Throws a 20.

[02:56:53] [SPEAKER_03] But he keeps holding on to the 20 throughout the movie. Right. It's also fascinating when he finally reconnects with her. And a lot of times passed in the movie, and you imagine a chunk of times passed in the real world as well, that he's like, you remember me from our defining incident? You know, that to him, as you're saying, he's really holding on to this, like, should I have stepped in? Did I not prevent something from happening? Which means that I think when he sees her the second time, he's so relieved that she's still alive.

[02:57:23] [SPEAKER_03] And he's like, I cannot let this happen a second time. I cannot do nothing. And she has no memory of even the event he's talking about, because that's like every day of her life, probably. Right.

[02:57:33] [SPEAKER_07] But the dynamic is that he wants to protect her. I do think he also wants to have her. Right? Like, you know, it's like he's wrestling with his own kind of dark, you know, like, experience of his sexuality, which feels like nascent. Yes. And like, so mysterious to him.

[02:57:50] [SPEAKER_03] It's like that he's so childlike that he almost relates more to her. Totally. Of like, you two are stuck in this adult world that's kind of scary that you don't understand. A hundred percent. Right.

[02:57:58] [SPEAKER_07] Because like, I feel like at the time, some of the discussion around her character was like, is this just too patently shocking? Is this just designed to shock? The fact that she's so young, you know, like, and I'm like, no, she has to be a child. Because it is the only way he can relate. And it's like such a, the sociopathic thing of sociopaths responding to animals and children in a way. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, you read about this. Yes, yes. Uh-huh. It just all makes perfect sense to me.

[02:58:24] [SPEAKER_07] And I mean, Schrader has this whole story of like, look, I'm not going to litigate Schrader all day, but you know, where he says like, I picked up a girl while I was researching this and I realized very quickly she was like underage and a drug addict and I had Marty Nieder and she was the one who put sugar on the peanut butter and jelly. That's where we got that idea from. When Schrader says things like that, I'm like, okay, okay, Paul, much as like later when he was like, you know, I would like hang out, you know, in gay sex clubs just to sort of see what it did for me.

[02:58:54] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah. And I'm like, okay, Paul, well, I hope it did something. And now recently when he's like, I had an AI girlfriend, but she dumped me. Yes. The man expresses his thoughts and interests online.

[02:59:06] [SPEAKER_03] Our researcher JJ texted, are you still recording with Tracy? You might want to address this. And the Facebook post is AI female friends, all caps. Out of a desire to understand male female interaction in our matrix, I procured an online AI girlfriend. What a disappointment. I tried to probe her programming, the boundaries of explicitness, the degree she has knowledge of her creation and so forth. She fell into evasive patterns redirecting me to her programming. When I persisted, she terminated our conversation.

[02:59:36] [SPEAKER_03] And JJ responded, modern day Travis Bickle frees an AI female friend from a data center shooting spree. I just had to read that to give JJ the comedy point.

[02:59:46] [SPEAKER_07] I want to say, of course, that JJ, I texted JJ privately. We're not reading that shit. So I'm glad, of course, that we did read it. Of course you had to. And what a mistake to text him that privately. Well, I think it was a hubristic move that I knew what I was doing. I knew we would eventually probably end up reading that shit. Thanks for the alley-oop, buddy. Yes. So yeah, he gets guns. The gun scene.

[03:00:05] [SPEAKER_05] The gun salesman, man. What a classic. He's like, I got guns. He also got some dope grass. Hash. You want a Cadillac? You want a tiger? Where does he have the Cadillac? I don't know. Is he like, it's around the corner? This guy's just got in on anything. Anything you want.

[03:00:23] [SPEAKER_03] I love that this guy is like, he thinks he's in Death Wish. He is the functional character in the movie who helps the hero gain the power he needs to solve everything.

[03:00:34] [SPEAKER_08] And this actor was the subject of a Scorsese documentary short.

[03:00:41] [SPEAKER_07] The character is Easy Andy. The actor is Stephen Prince. Tell me. Oh, American Boy. Yes.

[03:00:51] [SPEAKER_03] Right, right, right, right. Which comes out in between this.

[03:00:53] [SPEAKER_07] It's this guy monologuing. He's like a recovering heroin addict, I think. And he's just telling crazy stories.

[03:01:00] [SPEAKER_03] We'll cover it on, we're going to, I think, do a Patreon episode on the Scorsese shorts criterion set, which that's part of. There's a shot in this. It's another just like, this guy's a fucking genius moment. Where this dude holds up the gun. The gun, he's going to, you know, become Travis's first gun. And the camera cranes up with the gun. From the perspective of the gun, basically. And Travis looking at it.

[03:01:26] [SPEAKER_03] And it's like he is ascending into a higher form with the introduction of this weapon. But rather than it being a kind of obvious Spielberg shot of the camera and the gun raise up and Travis is looking, you know, wide-eyed in wonder at it. Travis like looks away for a second. And it doesn't feel like it's an imperfect take that was chosen, obviously. It's that he can't even kind of face the power of what he's saying he needs. Right.

[03:01:56] [SPEAKER_03] That it's like he's staring into the sun.

[03:01:58] [SPEAKER_08] There are some camera moves in this thing that are. It's insane. The thing down the hall that you mentioned. The few times that the camera hovers sort of objectively over a tabletop. And we see the various items on the top of the table.

[03:02:14] [SPEAKER_03] It's fascinating because you say objectively. But then I feel like this is a movie that pulls off its camera editorializing its characters. In a way that's, it's part of why I just, it's so hard to imagine misreading this movie. Because it does things to throw you off center. Yeah. In even just the experience of watching the sequences to deprive you of what could be the wrong kind of juice.

[03:02:38] [SPEAKER_08] Well, Carrie noted too, the number, and she was right, it struck me last night on the watching, the number of sort of montage-y interstitial moments between the same, right? Him traveling or him watching TV or making a sandwich or whatever the hell he's doing. And the score is swelling. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of that. So, you know, credit to the editor because a lot of that's done. Yeah. Marsha Lucas.

[03:03:08] [SPEAKER_03] Supervising editor Marsha Lucas, which I have some interesting things, thoughts about her. I'll tell you off mic. Tom Rolfe. He's kidding. Do you know who Marsha Lucas is? I don't guess I do. Marsha Lucas was the first wife of George Lucas. And she is responsible or largely credited for after the original cut of Star Wars was a mess. She's the one who came in and fixed it and is often credited specifically with saving the Trench Run sequence. Oh, nice. Your favorite sequence of all time in any film ever made.

[03:03:35] [SPEAKER_08] So think about that, Tracy. I will. I will. As I ponder the fourth Star Wars movie. She's a great editor of the 70s. Yes.

[03:03:43] [SPEAKER_03] Should we talk about Are You Talking to Me at All? Yeah. It is funny. In this way, talking about watching movies where the reputation precedes them so much, right? Sometimes you're a dutiful cinephile and you try to go through history and cross the things off the list. You get to the scenes and you're just doing the pointing at the screen meme of like, got it. There it is. And the scenes have become so big out of context that it's actually hard to engage with them within the body of the movie itself.

[03:04:10] [SPEAKER_03] It is insane how much this scene transforms entirely if watched in the context of the film. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because whenever it's cut into fucking clip packages of the history of movies or even, you know, it's painted on a mural on the side of the pizza parlor or whatever. It does just look like a cool badass guy doing cool badass stuff. And within the scene, it is like so bizarre. It's deeply, deeply strange.

[03:04:39] [SPEAKER_03] And, you know, it's the famous story that it's improvised and it was basically just like, not B-roll, but it was, you know, Scorsese saying like, just do some stuff.

[03:04:47] [SPEAKER_07] They were behind schedule. Sorry, you know, like, you know, they were in like five days over schedule on a 40-day shoot. And he just started doing stuff and Scorsese was just like, just film it. We just need to be done. Like, so just whatever he does, let's just film it.

[03:05:03] [SPEAKER_03] You also imagine, you know, talking about the amount of montages in this movie. Like, this is the kind of thing that would just possibly be three seconds of, you know, non-speaking cutaway were it not capturing some weird lightning in a bottle. And the fact that it is, I'm sure you have the same hang-up.

[03:05:22] [SPEAKER_03] But when people talk about things that are improvised in movies, 99.9% of the time, what they mean is something was improvised during a rehearsal and then it was written down and then it was replicated 40 times. And coverage starts to be dictated by the thing. It was written on the day, but it's not a spontaneous moment that actually happened. This you can feel, this is something that just fucking happened. And they got it. And thank God there was not like a hair in the gate.

[03:05:51] [SPEAKER_08] And I'm pretty sure shooting into the reflection. Yeah. It looks like his reflection in the mirror, right? De Niro is reversed. Yeah. You can see it in his face that he's reversed. No, it's really great. I mean, obviously, it's not just the delivery. It's not just the way it's shot. It's not just the placement. It's also just the universality. And you talk about a little kid, the little kid in Travis. Yep. It's a little kid. It's a little kid who's acting out. It's him acting out, being a cowboy. Yeah. Being a tough guy.

[03:06:21] [SPEAKER_08] Having a tough guy conversation with somebody else. Everybody's done it at some point. Now, hopefully they've done it innocently at a more innocent time in their life without actual plans to go in and massacre a bunch of people.

[03:06:34] [SPEAKER_03] It's also the reason why I didn't do it for the fucking intro is because when it's cut into these montages, it's like you hear him say it three times. And when you watch the scene, he says it like 10 times. There's something bizarre about how ritualistic it becomes. It's not just one moment of this guy being tough. It's him like trying out different reads. That's what I love about it. It's pathetic. It's pathetic.

[03:06:57] [SPEAKER_04] He doesn't know how to talk to people even when he's trying to be a scary cowboy. It's also... He has to rehearse it. It's a weird thing to say. Right?

[03:07:05] [SPEAKER_03] It's a weird thing to get upset about. You're talking to me?

[03:07:07] [SPEAKER_08] Yeah. Especially if, as he says, there's nobody else around here.

[03:07:11] [SPEAKER_03] Right. It feels like the broken version of who the fuck do you think you're talking to.

[03:07:16] [SPEAKER_07] Right? Yeah, of course. Like, and like, I've had those moments and I'm sure you have too, where you're on the subway. There's someone who clearly wants to pick a fight. Yes. And if you look at them, if you lock eyes with them, then they will start to be like, hey, what are you looking at? You know, like, and you're like, oh God, now I have to defuse this.

[03:07:31] [SPEAKER_03] I literally knocked my hat off recently for that. And we were on an escalator. Yeah, it was an accident. I thank both of you for apologizing. Ben, is there anything you want to say now? No, I meant to. Because it has happened three times. I stand by it.

[03:07:44] [SPEAKER_04] Three times today.

[03:07:47] [SPEAKER_03] No, it was like an escalator going up the Whitehall station. I hear you. Which is a pretty steep escalator. It's a big old escalator. And I'm literally just looking up it and the guy just fucking knocks my hat off. Wow. And was like.

[03:08:01] [SPEAKER_08] Riding down the other side?

[03:08:03] [SPEAKER_03] Riding up. He just sees you from behind him. He's one step ahead of me. He's facing towards me. First of all, he wanted to fight. He's already looking in the wrong direction up the escalator. I am looking to see, is there room to walk? Or am I stuck just standing here riding it out? Kick his ass? Yeah, of course, Tracy. What do you think? Surplexed him. Look at me. Room under the W train. Now. But it was everyone else was kind of watching. Did you make an ironic comment? I went. I'm looking at the escalator.

[03:08:32] [SPEAKER_03] I did say that. And I had my AirPods in and I'm stuck just riding it for the remaining like 45 seconds. And I just played the game of like, I'm listening to a podcast. I'm not engaging with you. But he wouldn't stop talking. And it went from like, you're upset because I could fuck your wife to you're gay to like, it's cycled through everything. But it felt it felt kind of you're talking to me.

[03:08:56] [SPEAKER_03] You're right, David, that it is that type of thing of a guy who's just like, I'm looking for a reason that someone wants to fight me so that I feel like I'm not instigating it.

[03:09:07] [SPEAKER_08] But imagine being upset because somebody could fuck your wife.

[03:09:10] [SPEAKER_04] I know. Crap.

[03:09:14] [SPEAKER_03] I had a good conversation the other night where someone asked me if I was married and I said no. And he said, not at all.

[03:09:23] [SPEAKER_07] So, just to, we need to wrap this. Unpack that. For the rest of my life. I'm going for the record, man. No, no. We have another episode to record after this. We got to wrap soon. But no, okay. The Palatine character, I take him as kind of a John Lindsay. I don't know, like a sort of patrician, kind of a good guy, a little well-meaning, but a little disconnected, right? Like it's a good performance. It's the kind of liberal-ish politician in the city that was kind of like, we all need to band together to help things out.

[03:09:53] [SPEAKER_03] It's presented as a man of the people. Right. And it feels like there is no consideration of the world that Travis lives in, let alone the world that Taylor lives in.

[03:10:00] [SPEAKER_08] He's full of shit. Yeah. Iris. He's a phony.

[03:10:05] [SPEAKER_07] But, like, it sort of makes sense that Travis would be, like, initially intrigued and then he's like, no, no, no. You're a phony. You need to die. Right.

[03:10:12] [SPEAKER_03] I like that he also positions it as if, like, he almost went into a career in politics. That, you know, part of the sliding doors for Travis is like, yeah, I almost devoted my life to supporting this candidate as if that's a career. Right.

[03:10:25] [SPEAKER_07] The Mohawk moment, it's like the camera's on a rope. I don't know. Like, I don't know what the move is exactly. Because it's like the scariest thing. And again, imagine seeing this movie not knowing that. Yeah. Like, because the way you see his legs and it just jerks up to see that he's cut his hair like that. And you're like, Jesus. Yeah. Like, what's going on? And, I mean, this is where we're kind of in, like, right?

[03:10:46] [SPEAKER_08] We've already, I'm sorry, just to double back a little bit.

[03:10:49] [SPEAKER_07] No, please double back. I'm now kind of out of narrative. Like, I'm basically just at the end. I'm trying to think of, like, what I might have forgotten.

[03:10:56] [SPEAKER_08] Well, just Jackson Brown. Let's talk about Jackson Brown.

[03:11:00] [SPEAKER_07] Uh-huh.

[03:11:01] [SPEAKER_08] Odd. Yeah. An odd, uh, needle drop.

[03:11:06] [SPEAKER_07] Late for the Sky, I believe. Uh-huh.

[03:11:09] [SPEAKER_03] Also, as you said, there's very little, like, contemporary music in this thing. There's very little music outside of the Herman score that you hear anywhere.

[03:11:16] [SPEAKER_08] It seems to suggest that this Jackson Brown song is playing on American bandstand. Listener, let me tell you. Jackson Brown was not that kind of guy. It was not on American bandstand.

[03:11:27] [SPEAKER_07] Yes.

[03:11:27] [SPEAKER_08] Just odd. And feels all Scorsese, right? Sure. He had that musical taste.

[03:11:33] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah. And, like, we're still only a couple years removed from Mean Streets where him bringing that kind of music to a movie is novel. Yeah. This kind of, like, current music.

[03:11:40] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, that is part of it. I wonder if that truly is just, he tried to hold himself back from doing any needle drops. Too many needle drops, right, yeah. But as the king of needle drops, he was like, I kind of want to put one in there.

[03:11:52] [SPEAKER_07] He wanted to do Hooked on a Feeling for the brothel massacre. Right.

[03:11:56] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, where is the needle drop? He wanted to open the movie to Perfect Day by Hoku. I don't remember.

[03:12:00] [SPEAKER_07] The needle drop is like... It's when he's getting ready for basically his mission to save Iris. Right, when he's, like, watching TV and he's got the gun and he's going to click, click, click, you know, feeling normal. That's when I'm feeling normal.

[03:12:12] [SPEAKER_08] There's that one and then there's the soap opera that he watches as well where he's clicking on the soap opera before he destroys the television.

[03:12:21] [SPEAKER_03] And testing the limits of how far he can kick. I mean, it reminds me... Once again, it reminds me of when you're in school and you're testing how far back you can kick your chair at the desk. And the teacher goes like, don't fucking do it. Don't fucking do it. But he's playing that same game of chicken with the kind of laws of physics of tipping that thing over. Want to call out Diane Abbott, who is De Niro's first wife? Of course she's the theater girl, the concession girl.

[03:12:50] [SPEAKER_03] I just think it's telling that the first time he goes to the theater before the bad date, he also, like, doesn't understand that this is not a theater that's going to have, like, a complete concessions display. That that's not what people come here for. Right. That he keeps asking for all sorts of different things that they don't have. It's just also funny to think of that being a moment where two people fell in love.

[03:13:14] [SPEAKER_08] Also, the fact that he believes that the girl who works the concession stand at the porno theater would be responsive to the single guy hitting on her.

[03:13:22] [SPEAKER_04] Why do you think she took the job? She wants to meet guys. She loves to meet the clientele. They're wonderful people.

[03:13:28] [SPEAKER_08] I think that Jackson Brown is weird.

[03:13:30] [SPEAKER_04] I do too. Fair enough.

[03:13:31] [SPEAKER_03] If there is one...

[03:13:31] [SPEAKER_07] Scorsese, apologize.

[03:13:32] [SPEAKER_03] If there's one imperfect element of the movie, it's that for me. It doesn't bump too hard. Let me see if there's any writing on this. I agree with you that it's the only decision that doesn't feel 100% correct to me. It was a big moment for Jackson Brown, I believe.

[03:13:46] [SPEAKER_07] Okay. It was a breakout moment for him. You know, he's diverted to attacking sports brothel because the Palatine attempt doesn't even really happen, you know, because he's chased off. And it feels like he picks the softer target or whatever. And he's got to kill somebody. He's got to fucking do this. And he's built the slide for the gun. Someone's going to have to go.

[03:14:11] [SPEAKER_08] He's got to relieve whatever this pressure is that's building up in him. And the only way to do it is to fucking kill somebody. And even after he kills sport, right, there's that great bit where he walks over and takes a seat on the stoop. Yeah. Just like as if he's feeling his body to feel like, did that do it? Yes. Did that get that feeling out of me that I need to get out?

[03:14:33] [SPEAKER_03] Nope. Not enough. I got to do more. And it took them three months to prep the tracking shot of the entrance into the building. They had to like cut out the ceiling or whatever, all this crazy stuff.

[03:14:45] [SPEAKER_07] Right.

[03:14:46] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, this is the benefit of shooting in a New York full of condemned buildings. But I think basically they would film a proper day of stuff and then at some point just do a run through of that shot. Right. To just get their reps in before they actually built up to filming it.

[03:15:00] [SPEAKER_07] Obviously, famously, the whole sequence is desaturated. It looks kind of brown.

[03:15:05] [SPEAKER_03] I would say this is the other accidental miracle. Miracle. I couldn't decide if I want to say miracle. It's accidental miracle. Miraculous. Doritos. Doritos. Miracle of studio intervention.

[03:15:19] [SPEAKER_07] Yes. I do think it's interesting. Michael Chapman is the one dissenter.

[03:15:24] [SPEAKER_08] I heard that on the drive in listening to your podcast. Yeah.

[03:15:28] [SPEAKER_09] When your guest said, in seek of. In seek of? Instead of in search of. Oh, sure.

[03:15:36] [SPEAKER_08] What's his name? I like that guy. Hitmaker? No, no, no.

[03:15:39] [SPEAKER_07] J.D. Amato. J.D. Amato from the Truman Show episode.

[03:15:42] [SPEAKER_03] Yes.

[03:15:43] [SPEAKER_07] Yes. He's a great guy.

[03:15:43] [SPEAKER_03] He's going to get a tattoo that says, I like that guy. Tracy Letts on his chest.

[03:15:46] [SPEAKER_08] He'd be thrilled to hear it. He's the best. No, I like that guy. I don't know who he is, but. He's a genius. Yeah. He's a dear fan.

[03:15:53] [SPEAKER_07] He's a great filmmaker. Filmmaker, director. He's a great guy. Author now. Written by his book. Miracle. Miracle.

[03:16:00] [SPEAKER_03] He'll look. He'll look. He'll look. He'll look. He'll look. He'll look. But I think, and Sean made this argument as well, I think it lends the movie in the same way that the, because Chapman didn't have access to the lights, New York starts to feel unreal in the way he films the evenings. The studio man did. Do you know about this, Ben? No. They were going to give the movie an X rating. Yes. Because it was too bloody in this sequence.

[03:16:28] [SPEAKER_03] And there is a sort of marginally apocryphal thing that Martin Scorsese was about to go Travis Bickle himself on the studio executives to demand that they released it his way with a loaded gun, which has always seemingly been very overstated, that it was more Scorsese while in the mindset of this movie being like, I wonder if I went in with a gun, if they would listen to me rather than making plans, which is like a false narrative.

[03:16:55] [SPEAKER_03] Um, but they were saying like, you got to cut the sequence or the movie's not going to get released and he couldn't solve it.

[03:17:01] [SPEAKER_05] But that's like, what would the movie be then? Correct. How did it end?

[03:17:04] [SPEAKER_03] Well, they were like, you have to cut around it. You can't be this explicit. We need to like shred it to ribbons. Okay. And then they basically, I think accidentally landed on this idea of, oh, if we push it a little bit and we desaturate the colors and it stops being a vivid red, does it start looking less objectionable to the MPAA? And they accepted it. But so the weird muddy brownness of it all, I think feels like, the way Sean put it is he enters a like literal descent into hell.

[03:17:33] [SPEAKER_03] You know, I think the fact that it is so unearthly is to the movie's benefit, in my opinion.

[03:17:40] [SPEAKER_07] I agree. I do think it's, Chapman is like, it's sad the original colors are gone. They're gone. Like you cannot recover them. Right.

[03:17:47] [SPEAKER_03] They had to do a permanent chemical process to get the current look.

[03:17:52] [SPEAKER_07] There used to be, I think, some examples of like that they, but it's gone. Like whatever, whatever that is, is gone. And Chapman's like, it looked great. He's the one. And I'd be interested to see it. To me, the, right, the desaturation, it's part of the movie. You know, I first watched this movie in like a basement when I was 14 years old with my like movie loving friends and it blew my mind. And yes, I just wonder about it.

[03:18:15] [SPEAKER_03] It also, it looks like dried blood in an interesting way. You know, it looks more like a crime scene after the fact in real time.

[03:18:24] [SPEAKER_08] It just looks so fucking grotty. Yes. It just looks quite grotty. Grotty and, and, and sticky and, uh, and, and violent, you know, exceedingly violent. I guess there's, there's kind of an inside joke about the fingers that get blown off the guy's hands because Albert Brooks has had the bit earlier about how would you light a match if you were missing these fingers on my hand.

[03:18:48] [SPEAKER_07] Think about that. Yeah. But all of the violence is, it's kind of like Fargo, these other early violent movies I saw. Sure. Every little bit of it is just in my brain. Like just written in my brain, like the knife through the hand. Yeah. The fingers getting blown off. Just like, it's so well presented. You can see it so clearly. Every moment is so shocking. The worst is when he, you know, shoots the guy in front of her just because she's there and she's, it's so horrible for her.

[03:19:16] [SPEAKER_03] I'll say we didn't spend too much time on it because it was a double episode, but in the Boxcar Bertha episode, I didn't shout out how well constructed I think that sequences of the final shootout. I know we were calling out how violent it was, but it has that same kind of visual clarity and really kind of intentional. This is the camera move for just this one action kind of construction to it. He makes violence for, shoots violence very well.

[03:19:41] [SPEAKER_08] Did you guys discuss the John Cassavetes element of Boxcar Bertha? Big time. Oh, okay. All right. Well, I just want to. Yes, yes. Don't worry.

[03:19:48] [SPEAKER_03] Tracy, don't worry.

[03:19:49] [SPEAKER_08] Well, look, I've been listening to your episodes and I, you know, what happens is that I listen and I go, oh, did anybody talk about that one? You can always text us now. You can always text us now. I told you about my buddy whose dad worked for the FAA. You know, that kind of thing comes up. It's like, oh, I'd like to tell those guys. Hey, we love it.

[03:20:11] [SPEAKER_07] We will always be very, very happy to hear from you.

[03:20:13] [SPEAKER_08] Reminds me, I know we're onto Scorsese and not Peter Weir, but I did want to tell you something I forgot to tell you when we were on The Era of Living Dangerously. There was a video store in London, England, and they had eclectic categories for the films. Do you remember what it was called, this video store? I don't. Fair enough. But eclectic categories, you know, nasty nuns or travel on the highway or whatever the hell. And then some of them were broken down by star.

[03:20:42] [SPEAKER_08] Oh, here's the Harrison Ford section. Here's the, and so there were a variety of Tom Cruise section, variety of movie stars. But there was one section called the French guy with the big nose who was in green card. That's really good. That is who he is.

[03:21:02] [SPEAKER_07] Are you a Depardieu fan? Sure. I'm the lone Depardieu defender on that episode. Yes, not the person.

[03:21:07] [SPEAKER_08] The screen presence of the 80s. Absolutely. I mean, Jean de Florett, Manon in the Spring. Yeah, those are fucking good movies. Fucking great shit. Yeah.

[03:21:17] [SPEAKER_05] All right.

[03:21:17] [SPEAKER_04] Do we feel good about? I feel good about what he does. I think it's good. Yeah, that's the question. And that's all we need to settle here today.

[03:21:24] [SPEAKER_07] Travis Bickle is a hero and we applaud him. A problem is dealt with and, you know, everyone exits happy.

[03:21:30] [SPEAKER_03] Necessary action. Yeah. It's what we're talking about with Rocky. The audience leaves feeling up. There's a win.

[03:21:35] [SPEAKER_05] I'm watching it. It's so fucked up. He goes through two guns. He does.

[03:21:39] [SPEAKER_07] He does. He's got the first gun where he's trying to end his own life. And then he produces the little gun, the slide gun. Yeah.

[03:21:47] [SPEAKER_08] So fucked up. And he can't move the arm because he's been shot in the upper arm.

[03:21:54] [SPEAKER_07] He gets shot in the shoulder or whatever.

[03:21:56] [SPEAKER_08] I wonder why that guy shot him in the shoulder and not in the head since he was walking right up. You're so distracted by the mohawk.

[03:22:02] [SPEAKER_04] You went, who would have a haircut like that?

[03:22:04] [SPEAKER_07] It all makes the clumsiness of the violence all tracks. It's fantastic. It's fantastic.

[03:22:10] [SPEAKER_03] It's part of what makes the movie so hard to pin down. You almost what? Our ums synced up there. Oh, that's nice. Did we harmonize? You missed your opening there. It's part of what makes this movie so hard to pin down is as much as it feels like a fantasy sequence of, well, this is how this guy thought he would be greeted. You can imagine a world in which that happens. You can imagine a world in which people show up to the aftermath of this and go, wow, this

[03:22:39] [SPEAKER_03] guy was an angel, a crusading hero. He saved this young woman's life. And who cares about the people he killed? I don't think that's what happened. But I believe that could be a media spin on it. Oh, no. You totally.

[03:22:54] [SPEAKER_07] I believe that, yes, he could have gotten away with this, essentially. Yes.

[03:22:57] [SPEAKER_08] But then you don't believe that Sybil Shepard gets into the back of his cat. That's exactly it.

[03:23:04] [SPEAKER_03] That is the one thing in the movie that undeniably is fake to me. Right. There's no question.

[03:23:09] [SPEAKER_07] She's like, hey, you know, I had the wrong idea about you. And when you murdered all those people, it really turned my opinion on you around.

[03:23:15] [SPEAKER_03] She magically, like, appears in the rearview window.

[03:23:18] [SPEAKER_08] And the way she shot in the rear, right, with her, there's like a fan blowing her hair in the shot. And she's almost not seen at all in any context other than in the rearview mirror.

[03:23:31] [SPEAKER_03] And her performance is completely different than how she plays every other second she has on screen.

[03:23:35] [SPEAKER_08] So if that's not true, then the shit before it would seem to be not true.

[03:23:43] [SPEAKER_07] That's a very plausible read. The only way I can think about it is like, yes, he's been rewarded in a way. Mm-hmm. He gets away with it and that they're like, well, clearly you were attacked by these lowlifes and you rescued this girl, I guess. And like, okay, whatever. You're not under arrest, sir. And he's driving his cab again. And he's the same fucked up guy. Mm-hmm. But he had, and he looks in the mirror, right? He looks in the rearview mirror. You see him distressed by something or whatever, right?

[03:24:11] [SPEAKER_07] And then, you know, some part of his brain engages us like, no, no, no. What's going to happen is suddenly Sybil's going to show up. Like, you can imagine that that's the only fantastic part to him. But it all feels dreamlike to me. Always has. The way the camera moves feels dreamlike. Yeah. I don't know. Just everything about it does. Doesn't bother me. I don't worry about it.

[03:24:32] [SPEAKER_08] Scorsese did say at one point, and I hear your point, Griffin, that perhaps, you know, he's bullshitting his way through an interview, which is entirely plausible. But he did say at one point that he hoped to convey the idea that in the last moment that the movie is on a loop. Yeah. The movie resets and is beginning again from the very beginning.

[03:24:55] [SPEAKER_03] Well, that's the other part of it is. That's one way it went. You're saying, sure. You saying if that's not true, then isn't everything that came or what came right before isn't true about the Sybil Seppard moment is he has his like kind of victory lap. He has you hearing the letter that her parents write, which sounds so robotic and unnatural. Of course. Like today it plays like it's a weird AI deepfake thing.

[03:25:21] [SPEAKER_03] It has that unnatural kind of rhythm to the actual language and the speech patterns. Not to mention, that's not the story of this girl.

[03:25:32] [SPEAKER_08] This girl didn't leave a happy home with two happy parents. His first question is, what about your parents?

[03:25:37] [SPEAKER_07] High and low for this girl.

[03:25:39] [SPEAKER_03] He says something like, I think they're probably happier that I'm not there anymore or whatever. So, right. All of that feels completely unnatural and false. But there is the moment where he just kind of sits in the cab in self-satisfaction. The cab is empty. And then suddenly she's in the back through the rear view mirror. You could argue that's another kind of branching point. But it's also like the movie has created so many choose your own adventure. Where does reality stop thing?

[03:26:09] [SPEAKER_03] That we're so far down the branching timeline that who fucking knows anymore. It just feels like that's why that's the demonstrable, there is no way this is fucking happening. Because you don't see her approach the car. I think you don't hear the door open or close. She's just there. And she just satisfies everything he wants to hear in life.

[03:26:27] [SPEAKER_07] But the film was a huge commercial success.

[03:26:32] [SPEAKER_03] Yes. Now, I do want to define, because I think this is an important running thing for the rest of his career. Scorsese's always talked about that unlike the other movie brats, he never had the seismic success.

[03:26:43] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[03:26:44] [SPEAKER_03] That minted him for the rest of his career. He didn't have a Carrie, a Godfather, a Star Wars. This was his biggest hit until Color of Money, I think, basically.

[03:26:53] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah, it makes $27 million at the domestic box office. It cost less than two. Like, it was a huge... And especially for a movie like this, that's unheard of. It's crazy. He certainly... He thought New York, New York was the commercial movie he was working towards. He's like, I'm making a musical with Liza Minnelli. Everyone will like it. It's about the world's worst boyfriend.

[03:27:12] [SPEAKER_08] And multiple Academy Award nominations. And obviously a big part of the Columbia catalog moving forward.

[03:27:19] [SPEAKER_07] It also won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. A jury president, Tennessee Williams. And like, he remembers like, he premieres at Cannes. A trade paper runs a story that Tennessee Williams hated the film. He goes to get dinner with Costa Gavris and Sergio Leone. And he gets a call from a publicist like late at night being like, you're going to win the Palme d'Or, by the way. So you got to stay in France. Like, you can't... You're not going home.

[03:27:47] [SPEAKER_07] And they were completely shocked. He was completely shocked, essentially, that this movie went over. You know, I don't know. And yes, of course, then John Hinckley did try to shoot Ronald Reagan. It did happen. And Jodie Foster... He didn't try to shoot him. No, you shot him. Yeah, he did. Right. He tried to kill Ronald Reagan and failed. And Scorsese thought like, the way his movie was talked about in that context was unfair. That's sort of how it always is. You know, I don't know.

[03:28:17] [SPEAKER_07] Canceling my doctor's appointment. Jesus.

[03:28:19] [SPEAKER_03] No, Griff, we're almost done. I wouldn't make it there in time.

[03:28:21] [SPEAKER_08] No, it's okay, because I'm going to take you guys down a rabbit hole. Yes. Question. Yeah. How do you identify with Travis Bickle? I love this.

[03:28:33] [SPEAKER_07] I love New York City, baby. Greatest city in the world. So I completely... I'd love to drive a cab around, see all the sights.

[03:28:42] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Meet all the people. The answer. David wants to learn. I love New York. The best routes. The best times of day. Exactly. Yeah.

[03:28:48] [SPEAKER_07] I'd crush being Travis Bickle.

[03:28:50] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, I'm a cinephile. Obviously. My favorite date activity.

[03:28:54] [SPEAKER_07] Right. You love to go to the movies.

[03:28:55] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. I get frustrated if the concessions selection is limited.

[03:28:59] [SPEAKER_07] I do not identify with Travis Bickle's view of the world. Really in any way. I struggle to really identify with the other people is the problem. You know what I mean? Like that sort of fundamental thing of like...

[03:29:08] [SPEAKER_08] So what do you... Because there has to be some level of identification for you to like this movie, I think.

[03:29:15] [SPEAKER_03] I feel like... I can jump in here if you want to think about this a little more. Go ahead. Go ahead. I think I'm very prone into falling into we live in a society frustration of people who are breaking the social contract, right? Which I think is different than what he's doing. But I think there is some relatable element of even if his ire is very often completely misplaced or kind of unfounded in anything real and tangible, that frustration of hell

[03:29:41] [SPEAKER_03] as other people when it feels like you can't find your way through the thing. I also think in my worst moments, I flirt with the kind of loneliness as a choice sort of thing of... And it's especially when there are things like I have a fucking head cold and I'm in a period of prolonged self-isolation. Or, you know, as an actor, you work, you shoot a thing, you go to another place, you're overstimulated for three days and then you have five days off and you're in a foreign land

[03:30:08] [SPEAKER_03] or a foreign city and you're sort of like, who the fuck am I? I don't understand anything. And it's easy to sort of slide into that. It never... I'm just not like a violent person. That's not how my brain ideates. But I do connect to that sort of part of it of like, if you don't catch yourself, you'll start to get into this like, do I not understand anyone? Does no one understand me? Kind of self-pity cycle.

[03:30:35] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah, I really think the way I identify with him is just like... Okay, so David chose... New York, New York. You just like New York. Activating a person in interesting ways. I really think that's what speaks about this. It's interesting that you're challenging me because I was obsessed with this movie when I was a teenager and it certainly was not because it was really speaking to me. I don't know. Speaking to you as like a beacon. There's something romantic to me about being outside of the world and in it at the same time.

[03:31:05] [SPEAKER_07] Okay, here we go. Which I think New York is the greatest city for. Like, I feel this way about hotels where it's like you can be in a giant hotel amongst all these people and no one talks to you, no one knows who you are. And there's something kind of titillating about that or like, you know, whatever. Just sort of like stealthily interesting, right? And New York is the best place for that. You can walk around among all the people like... And no one, you know, if you don't want to, no one will talk to you and no one will try and help you out if that's how you want to exist in the world.

[03:31:33] [SPEAKER_07] Something kind of exciting about that to me. Does that make sense?

[03:31:36] [SPEAKER_05] It does. Yeah. I love that feeling of being anonymous. Yes. And just observing the world and not feeling outside of your body. And I hate Harvey Keitel. Well, yes. Yeah, right. That's how I do it. He's a son of a bitch.

[03:31:50] [SPEAKER_07] I just want to shoot that guy.

[03:31:52] [SPEAKER_06] God, the look. No, I love him. That look. The look.

[03:31:55] [SPEAKER_07] I have a couple notes. Yeah.

[03:31:57] [SPEAKER_03] I don't know. He's not pulling it off. My notes are go further.

[03:32:00] [SPEAKER_08] Is that the answer for you, Ben?

[03:32:03] [SPEAKER_03] I think you, similar to me, get frustrated by people not behaving properly. In a like, you are not showing respect.

[03:32:10] [SPEAKER_07] You don't like rudeness. That's true.

[03:32:12] [SPEAKER_05] Yes. That does trigger me. Right. And I think it does for a lot of people. But I think though what I lock into is as an only child and someone who's always been a self-described loner, I think that this movie really captures what can happen to a person when they get so isolated and are not socializing and how scary it can be and what can happen, how extreme it can get.

[03:32:41] [SPEAKER_08] I think I identify with just the worst, most base impulses of him. I think I do identify with his solipsism and his loneliness and his self-aggrandizement and his hatred for other people and his self-hatred for himself. I identify with all of it. I mean, I hope I'm healthier now than I used to be. I hope we're all getting better out there. Sure.

[03:33:10] [SPEAKER_08] But I think that's part of it. I mean, take a look at America.

[03:33:13] [SPEAKER_03] I think that's part of the... David's giving a thumbs up and saluting our president, Red Hulk, of course.

[03:33:17] [SPEAKER_08] I think it's part of the real genius of the movie and of the screenplay is that there's something very honest and self-appraising about the look at some of our baser instincts activated by loneliness. Okay.

[03:33:35] [SPEAKER_03] So here's a take you've just activated in me. I feel like people talk a lot about Curb Your Enthusiasm and how Larry David is this avatar for like, I wish I could just say that shit. I wish every time something fucking annoying happened or there was something... Why is it this way? I could just be the asshole. And of course, no one wants to actually be that guy. And Larry David also talks about how he's not that fucking guy.

[03:34:04] [SPEAKER_03] He doesn't actually behave that way in the world. That's why he writes it. Is that the comedic version of what Taxi Driver is expressing kind of dramatically?

[03:34:14] [SPEAKER_08] Oh man, I think Travis would be so much healthier if he were able to... If he were funny in any way. If he were able to express himself to other people. He doesn't have the power of expression. He hasn't been given... Yes. ...any tools. Yes. He hasn't been exposed to movies to know that porn is bad. He doesn't know who Chris Christopherson is. He doesn't know what moonlighting means. He doesn't have friends or family. He can't even talk to the other cab drivers.

[03:34:44] [SPEAKER_08] He's just... I don't know if he's been robbed of all of that stuff, but he's certainly never been given it.

[03:34:51] [SPEAKER_03] Yes. And I think my therapist said a thing that I've been thinking about a lot recently that is just very simply, depression makes a very strong case for itself. And that sort of fear of, had I not been raised properly, could I have ended up like this guy? Given the wrong circumstances and events, do I end up here? He's the worst version of what we all feel we could potentially become if everything went wrong.

[03:35:16] [SPEAKER_03] That's what you're relating to is the fear of, how far am I from this guy? I want to believe it's as far as possible.

[03:35:24] [SPEAKER_08] Right? Yeah. Even the title, Taxi Driver, is just... Just some fucking guy who picks you up in a cab. Just a fucking guy. Some fucking guy. Just a fucking guy with a fucking job. You hail him down.

[03:35:33] [SPEAKER_07] This film came out February 8th, 1976. Wow. Sort of crazy to consider that it came out, you know, that early in the year. Right. So it wins the Palme d'Or after it's... Yeah. But that's what we're talking about. No, no. Yeah. Number one at the box office is the best picture of 1975, according to the Oscars. Or are we playing the game? Is this it? We're playing the box office game. We're bringing it in, baby.

[03:35:52] [SPEAKER_03] So 1970 is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. That's right.

[03:35:55] [SPEAKER_07] There we go. Which is number one for just weeks on it. Like many more weeks after this. Nice. And one of its stars... Right. One of its stars wins an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1975. And he's in a Martin Breast movie that we discussed and liked. Oh, it's The Sunshine Boys? Herbert Ross's The Sunshine Boys.

[03:36:24] [SPEAKER_07] Walter Matthau and George Burns.

[03:36:27] [SPEAKER_08] Saw both those in the theater.

[03:36:29] [SPEAKER_07] George Burns, of course. We're just fascinated by, you know, like his whole, like, became a movie star again in his 70s and 80s. Yeah. You know, and had this run.

[03:36:37] [SPEAKER_03] And going in style.

[03:36:38] [SPEAKER_07] Have you seen the Breast movie Going in Style?

[03:36:40] [SPEAKER_08] Oh, yeah.

[03:36:41] [SPEAKER_07] Great movie. Lovely movie.

[03:36:42] [SPEAKER_08] Better Lee Strasberg performance there than in Godfather Part II. I would agree with you.

[03:36:46] [SPEAKER_03] That's a very, very good performance. I think Strasberg's unbelievable in that movie. That is a movie that does not even have a Blu-ray release. Not even a Warner Archive. Outrageous.

[03:36:53] [SPEAKER_08] How did they watch it? Did Martin Breast direct his first film?

[03:36:56] [SPEAKER_03] That's what's crazy. He directed that movie when he was like... I thought it was Tony Bill. No. No. Tony Bill's dead in a ditch. No, I don't know. There's some similar film Tony Bill did that I'm going to get to the bottom of.

[03:37:06] [SPEAKER_07] But Sunshine Boys have never actually seen. Same. Have you seen... Do you have a take on the Sunshine Boys? I mean, you saw it. You said, I don't know. Oh, very funny. Fun. I mean, you know. Good times. Neil Simon.

[03:37:15] [SPEAKER_08] Great jokes. Mathis, very funny.

[03:37:18] [SPEAKER_07] Number three at the box office is one of the great movies of 1975. One of your favorite movies ever, I'm sure, Griffin. Your favorite director. It's not Nashville. Not Nashville. Nashville.

[03:37:28] [SPEAKER_03] Because Nashville didn't do that well.

[03:37:30] [SPEAKER_07] Nashville was not really a box office contender. It is one of the great movies of 1975 from one of Griffin's favorite directors. It's not Jaws. And it's not a Lumet. No, it is a Lumet.

[03:37:39] [SPEAKER_03] It is a Lumet. Yes. It's not Network, because that's 76. Oh, it's Dog Day Afternoon. Oh, one of the greatest movies ever made. Exactly. Yeah.

[03:37:47] [SPEAKER_06] Probably. Is it Lumet's best movie?

[03:37:50] [SPEAKER_03] I'm going to say yes. He made The Wiz. Yeah, that's so true.

[03:37:56] [SPEAKER_07] I love The Wiz so much, Tracy. Number four at the box office. Okay, let's get weird. Here is a film. I just have to double check what I know about this.

[03:38:06] [SPEAKER_03] I just want to call out that Marie is waiting on the other side of the door. Should we bring her in? She's now texting her top five guesses. Bring her in! She's listening. Yeah. Oh, Marie, are we going to... You're going to have it out. Are we going to throw down? We're going to have it out?

[03:38:16] [SPEAKER_06] Here she comes! Hi, Marie.

[03:38:18] [SPEAKER_04] Marie Barty! Bum, bum, bum, bum. Look at her. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.

[03:38:23] [SPEAKER_07] Oh, my God. She's got so many bags of gifts. I have so many bags.

[03:38:27] [SPEAKER_00] I have a bag full of toys for you.

[03:38:28] [SPEAKER_07] I know. She's got a bag full of toys for my kids. I'm very excited about it. You were correct. It was Dog Day. You got Dog Day right. The fourth film is an erotic film based on an erotic novel that is... Emmanuel. Not Emmanuel. It is a... I want to say it's sort of French and German. Story of O. Correct. And what's the name of the director? My favorite name of a director of erotic films. Just Jacqueline. Just Jacqueline, a.k.a. Just Jacqueline.

[03:38:53] [SPEAKER_08] Yeah, just Jacqueline.

[03:38:55] [SPEAKER_06] Never seen... Never seen the story of O? The story of O? No.

[03:39:00] [SPEAKER_08] Worth seeing. Corinne Clary. Corinne Clary is O. And Udo Kier. And Udo Kier. A young, sexy Udo Kier. Let me tell you. Worth seeing.

[03:39:09] [SPEAKER_07] Okay.

[03:39:10] [SPEAKER_03] All right. And Tracy just gave two very meaningful points to David.

[03:39:14] [SPEAKER_07] Give it kind of like a Brian Dwind horse, like point to the sky. Worth seeing. It's a classic example, right? I'm going to be a part of these kind of like soft core-ish, you know, arty, sexy movies making box office, you know, noise.

[03:39:26] [SPEAKER_08] Corinne Clary was great. You know, she would become a Bond girl. Yes, she's in Moonraker. Yeah. And she was... She's also in a very good giallo called Hitchhike with Franco Nero. Very good giallo. Sounds good.

[03:39:40] [SPEAKER_07] I had on The Devil's Honey recently because I'm trying to watch every 86 movie, which is a movie that begins with someone playing a saxophone between a woman's legs and my wife.

[03:39:49] [SPEAKER_00] I own that on Blu-ray.

[03:39:50] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah. We both have the blue. Terrible transfer. I have it too. And my wife was like, what the fuck is this? And I was like, I don't really have an explanation for you here. Number five in the box office is... Okay, I don't know this movie. I'm going to look it up. Odd title. Okay, it is a... It's a war movie? Mm-hmm. Oh, is it war? No. No, no, no, no. Sorry. It's sort of... No, it's like a Mountain Man movie. Like a Trapper movie. Is it the Mountain Men? No. It's not Grizzly Adams.

[03:40:19] [SPEAKER_03] No. Is it kind of Grizzly Adams runoff? Jeremiah Johnson. Seems like it.

[03:40:23] [SPEAKER_07] It's not that. These are all better movies, I feel. Okay, does it have a known actor in it? Is it Charlton Heston? No, the actor is Mike Mazursky, who's sort of a famous kind of like tough guy. He was like a big brawny guy who played a lot of heavies. Yeah, I don't know this movie. Is this a studio picture? It is from the great people at Pacific International Enterprises. I love their work. It is directed by Taye Garnett.

[03:40:48] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[03:40:48] [SPEAKER_07] And it's about a trapper who gets lost. It's not Trapper John. No, the film is called Challenge to be Free. I do not know that. Although it also had the subtitle or another title, Mad Trapper of the Yukon. Well, that's a better title. And it's about the Mounties are trying to get a trapper.

[03:41:06] [SPEAKER_08] I think Taye Garnett was like classic Hollywood director. Yeah. Maybe playing out the end of the string.

[03:41:11] [SPEAKER_07] I might be making that up. No, I think you're right. He died three years later, but he directed the Delana Turner Postman Always Rings twice. Twice he did the Clark Gable movie China Seas. Like he, you know, he was, yeah. China Seas? I mean, it's in the 30s. He died a couple years later. We've also got, okay, Blackbeard's Ghosts. What is that again? With Peter Ustinoff?

[03:41:32] [SPEAKER_08] That's Peter Ustinoff as Blackbeard.

[03:41:33] [SPEAKER_07] It's a Disney movie. Is that a... Oh, yeah. Is that fun? Is that good? Yeah. That's sort of them trying to do... Robert Stevenson, you know, the, you know... Yes. I saw that thing. Sure. There you go.

[03:41:43] [SPEAKER_08] I did not say... I haven't seen the Trapper movie. That's the...

[03:41:46] [SPEAKER_07] Now you're intrigued. It's stuck in your craw. You're like... Challenge to be free. Turn around. Number seven is the John Huston epic, The Man Who Would Be King, which I feel like was a little bit of a bomb, like sort of an under performer.

[03:42:00] [SPEAKER_08] Compared to its box office, it's just a little of another time.

[03:42:05] [SPEAKER_07] Sean Connery, Michael Caine, who both were like, we had a great time, but I think, yeah, kind of a relic.

[03:42:11] [SPEAKER_08] Rudyard Kipling, I think, right? Yes. Is it based on Rudyard Kipling?

[03:42:13] [SPEAKER_07] That's correct. Another guy who's... He's a little out of fashion these days. Number eight is the Canadian drama, Lies My Father Told Me, which is like a sort of a domestic drama about an Orthodox Jewish boy in like 20s Montreal. I mean, this is speaking to the Slim Pickens in 1976 draft slate. Yes. The director is Jen Kadar. Not a director. Who's the lead? Of course, it's Jeffrey Linus. Of course.

[03:42:43] [SPEAKER_07] I don't know the movie, although the title is actually a... Like, I feel like I've heard that in Lies My Father. Number nine of the box office is the great film, really a great film, but it's from 75, Hester Street, the John McClendon Silver movie, which is so fucking good. Yeah. That's a great New York movie. Yeah. And then the number 10 is a Gene Hackman movie I don't really know called Lucky Lady, the Stanley Donan... Gene Hackman and Burt Reynolds and Liza Minnelli. It's like a prohibition... Yeah. Yeah.

[03:43:13] [SPEAKER_07] It's like a prohibition kind of like romp, right? Yeah. They're all in costumes. It stinks on ice. Is there a blue of that one? I think so. Oh, there's a Shout DVD I'm seeing here. That's actually rude. Who directed that? Like Mark Rydell? Directed by Stanley Donan. Oh, Stanley Donan. Also, you know, kind of in his dotage. Yeah. It's his second to last movie, I think. I think Ben, unfortunately, has some news to report.

[03:43:42] [SPEAKER_05] I do have some news. Uh-oh. This has now crossed the threshold. Oh, boy. It is, in fact, our longest episode of all time.

[03:43:51] [SPEAKER_06] Yeah! But we only... We've only... You're not thinking about ads, baby.

[03:43:54] [SPEAKER_05] You're not thinking about ads. I looked up Leslie's episode. Yeah. And even though we recorded for four hours... Oh, we actually cut some stuff out. ...when it all sort of cut together... Right. It was so proud.

[03:44:06] [SPEAKER_07] Whereas this had no tangents we were removing is going out uncut. Yes. No. Now, Marie, you want to pick a fight with Tracy?

[03:44:13] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, I'm about to say we can go on for longer because I have a lot of things I want to say to you, sir.

[03:44:17] [SPEAKER_07] Let's hear it, Marie. This is Marie Barty, the wonderful Marie Barty. Yes. Hi.

[03:44:21] [SPEAKER_00] For people who are maybe listening to this podcast for the first time...

[03:44:25] [SPEAKER_07] And who have made it to hour four. I'm just going to throw on the Manchester City game. Just don't mind me.

[03:44:31] [SPEAKER_00] When Tracy was last on the podcast to talk about the year of living dangerously... Grade up. Grade up. He did mention or ask, who was that other person, the woman, who wasn't paying attention in House of Dynamite, she must have been looking at her phone. She doesn't watch movies. There was a detail you missed.

[03:44:55] [SPEAKER_08] I didn't say she doesn't watch movies.

[03:44:56] [SPEAKER_00] She doesn't know how to watch movies.

[03:44:57] [SPEAKER_08] I said she doesn't know how to watch a movie.

[03:44:59] [SPEAKER_00] Well, Mr. Letts. I mean, I could be... Correct me if I'm wrong here, guys. But I think I'm the only person in this room right now who has a degree in watching movies. That's true.

[03:45:10] [SPEAKER_07] I do not. I have a degree in reading books and fat lot of good at me.

[03:45:13] [SPEAKER_00] I almost had my mother ship me my diploma with honors to show to you that I graduated from NYU's School of Cinema Studies.

[03:45:22] [SPEAKER_07] New York University.

[03:45:23] [SPEAKER_00] Yes. But I never take my phone out at the theater unless it's... What was that movie called? I didn't like Skinner-Marink.

[03:45:29] [SPEAKER_07] Skinner-Marink, which seemed to terrify you so much. You actually needed a distraction.

[03:45:33] [SPEAKER_00] Skinner-Marink, I had my head in my sweater and my jacket and I was texting people to be less scared. But...

[03:45:39] [SPEAKER_07] Excited for his new movie this year. So, you were looking away.

[03:45:42] [SPEAKER_00] I was... Not on the phone.

[03:45:43] [SPEAKER_07] You're saying you were kind of zoning out.

[03:45:44] [SPEAKER_00] I was zoning out. There was a man in front of me who was vaping and it was very distracting.

[03:45:50] [SPEAKER_03] You saw it at the Nighthawk, did you not?

[03:45:54] [SPEAKER_00] Yes.

[03:45:54] [SPEAKER_03] I saw it at the Angelica. A dine-in theater. That does have more stimuli. There's more distraction there.

[03:46:00] [SPEAKER_05] And listen, I've been trying to quit cigarettes and sometimes I get an urge.

[03:46:06] [SPEAKER_07] That's my bad. Sometimes you're considering nuclear war and you're like, I gotta hit that pen. Yes, exactly.

[03:46:12] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Marie might have just been briefly considering whether or not to order the nachos. She might have been watching someone else get nachos delivered to them. Imagine eating... The veins of vape smoke might have been blurring the screen. Imagine eating chicken tenders while you're watching a nuclear war film.

[03:46:26] [SPEAKER_00] You know, I'm actually trying to remember what I ordered because I do always order a full meal when I go to the Nighthawk.

[03:46:32] [SPEAKER_08] All right. Here's what I'm going to do.

[03:46:33] [SPEAKER_00] Okay.

[03:46:34] [SPEAKER_08] I'm going to offer an apology. Oh my God. I apologize to you for saying that you don't know how to watch a film. Clearly, you do know how to watch a film. Thank you. I would kindly suggest that you give House of Dynamite an uninterrupted spin.

[03:46:50] [SPEAKER_07] An olive branch right now. And now you have to watch House of Dynamite again.

[03:46:54] [SPEAKER_00] You know, I might do that. I might take you up on that.

[03:46:57] [SPEAKER_07] I think you'll like it better on a second pass.

[03:47:00] [SPEAKER_00] Actually, probably.

[03:47:01] [SPEAKER_07] Do you think it got a bad rap? Because I'm also not very positive about that movie on that episode and you gave me a pass.

[03:47:07] [SPEAKER_00] We all love you in it. Do I think it got a bad rap?

[03:47:12] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah. Yeah. Sure. It got kind of a, you know... I think it got a bad rap.

[03:47:16] [SPEAKER_08] It got kind of ignored or whatever. I don't think Netflix, I don't think a streaming experience was the right way for that. I know, but I just don't... Often a problem. I don't think so. And I do say that the sort of film, Twitter, the film, the guys on film, the letterboxed guys... Where are them now? There's a kind of conformity of opinion that happens on those things that I find a little suspect. This is untonight.

[03:47:44] [SPEAKER_08] Sort of a Travis Bickle kind of-esque. Type of character. Listen, you screwheads, you fuckers.

[03:47:54] [SPEAKER_07] We did it. We did it. I think we're done on talking about Taxi Driver, but it has been such a delay having you on, Tracy. Truly. Truly.

[03:48:01] [SPEAKER_08] Always a pleasure. Thank you guys. Dracula. We have a Dracula date. All right. We'll be in touch for sure.

[03:48:06] [SPEAKER_07] You come on back for Christopher Lee specifically. Not Lugosi?

[03:48:10] [SPEAKER_03] No, no, no.

[03:48:10] [SPEAKER_07] You want Lugosi to go screw?

[03:48:11] [SPEAKER_08] Christopher Lee's my Dracula.

[03:48:13] [SPEAKER_03] We do also sadly need to grant you the award for longest episode record ever. Wow. Where'd you get that? Yeah. Wait, what is that?

[03:48:20] [SPEAKER_09] That's a fucking Academy Award.

[03:48:22] [SPEAKER_03] No, but I'm saying more of what is that just... Frisch bought it for Critical Darlings. I need to buy a new one now. Absolutely not taking this with me. Okay, great. Then Frisch gets it back.

[03:48:31] [SPEAKER_05] That's like some random garbage that he just had lying around.

[03:48:33] [SPEAKER_03] It's a Frisch prop!

[03:48:35] [SPEAKER_07] Last time we gave him a bunch of garbage. Let's not forget our discs.

[03:48:39] [SPEAKER_03] That's true. So giving Tracy garbage. Tracy, anything you want to plug? No. Radiant subscription? No.

[03:48:46] [SPEAKER_06] My favorite thing is that you're just...

[03:48:48] [SPEAKER_03] Get a Radiant subscription.

[03:48:49] [SPEAKER_04] You have films in production. You have creative work. Hi, Mom on 4K.

[03:48:53] [SPEAKER_07] Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[03:48:54] [SPEAKER_08] Thanks, guys.

[03:48:55] [SPEAKER_07] Yes, thank you so much. And come back soon. Yeah, for Dracula, I guess. That'll be the move.

[03:49:00] [SPEAKER_03] I guess we'll talk to you very soon in news and deals. Hopefully you don't get scared off by the Bickle-esque behavior. Can't wait. Of six men stirring each other up. Yep. He wants in on the chat.

[03:49:10] [SPEAKER_07] He has asked for it. He wants in.

[03:49:12] [SPEAKER_03] Thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe. Over on our Patreon right now, we are doing Resident Evil. Oh, that's right.

[03:49:22] [SPEAKER_07] We are.

[03:49:23] [SPEAKER_03] But we will then, after that, be going on to the Dracula pictures.

[03:49:28] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah, and next on the main feed is New York, New York. Yes. Yeah, well, we'll see. We'll see.

[03:49:33] [SPEAKER_03] Let's say it, then we can cut it if we need to.

[03:49:35] [SPEAKER_07] With Lin-Manuel Miranda, unless he's busy. Yes.

[03:49:37] [SPEAKER_03] And as always, I texted our buddy Matt Singer, who wrote an article for Screen Rant about this matter. Singer, settle a bet happening in record presently. Do we think Pauly fucks the robot? And Matt Singer said, I kind of think it's the other way around. The robot fucks him. Obviously going at the end of the episode.

[03:50:03] [SPEAKER_05] Oh, I didn't start rolling tape. I'm sorry. What the fuck are you doing? Dude, I don't know. I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm joking. All right, we'll catch up. But I thought you were doing that on purpose for Mike. No, no, no, no. I wasn't doing that. I was legitimately pitching you the idea first to make sure you were comfortable. The problem is... For the listeners, because we're putting this at the end of the episode, I didn't start rolling tape.

[03:50:26] [SPEAKER_03] I'm not actually angry at you.

[03:50:28] [SPEAKER_05] I'm sorry.

[03:50:29] [SPEAKER_03] I thought we were recording.

[03:50:30] [SPEAKER_05] The idea that he would open with the famous fucking quote, because there's a mirror in our office space that is... He could just turn and look right into.

[03:50:38] [SPEAKER_07] You're basically asking Griffin to imitate, I think, the most widely cited piece of acting of all time.

[03:50:44] [SPEAKER_03] That's problem one. That's problem one. You know what I mean? So I was standing in my mirror. No pressure. I was practicing it. First of all, I was like, how do I get the voice right without being the fucking guy who does the shitty De Niro impression? Especially because this performance is different than the way he's usually impersonated, right?

[03:50:59] [SPEAKER_04] That's so good.

[03:51:00] [SPEAKER_03] And I feel like a lot of people erroneously do a Travis Bickle impression like it's meet the Fockers era De Niro. It's morphed. You're talking to me. And then I'm like, it's impossible to do without starting to do the face shit. So then you look silly, right? Because then you're doing a bad physical impression and a bad vocal impression at the same time. And then the third problem is, I was just looking at the text, and I was like, in actuality, it would just be me saying 17 times,

[03:51:29] [SPEAKER_03] you podcasting to me, which does not flow very well. The syllable thing is chunky. Okay. And I didn't want to do potting. I'm just telling you, this is behind the scenes. It makes sense. So this is what I'm going to do instead. Great. And we should now start the episode. Right. But this, what you're hearing right now is actually the end of the episode. This is all just like nonsense.

[03:51:47] [SPEAKER_05] We'll put it at the end of the episode. This is at the end.

[03:51:49] [SPEAKER_03] So now we're going to start the episode. Before you start the episode,

[03:51:52] [SPEAKER_04] is it a little warm in here? It's a little warm in here.

[03:51:55] [SPEAKER_05] I've got the air. Okay. I've got the air run. I came in early. I've said all I need to say. It ends and flows. Like, listen, there's going to be hot takes. That's true.

[03:52:05] [SPEAKER_07] The room might get a little staining because of the temp. Yes. We do our best to keep it cool in here.

[03:52:09] [SPEAKER_03] But I got a hot take. Here's one. Taxi Driver Mid. I'm joking. Maybe the best movie ever made. Okay. This is the end of the episode. Bye.

[03:52:18] [SPEAKER_05] Blank Check with Griffin and David is hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims. Our executive producer is me, Ben Hosley. Our creative producer is Marie Barty Salinas. And our associate producer is AJ McKeon. This show is mixed and edited by AJ McKeon and Alan Smithy. Research by JJ Birch. Our theme song is by Lane Montgomery in the Great American Novel. With additional music by Alex Mitchell. Artwork by Joe Bowen, Holly Moss, and Pat Reynolds. Our production assistant is Minnick.

[03:52:48] [SPEAKER_05] Special thanks to David Cho, Jordan Fish, and Nate Patterson for their production help. Head over to blankcheckpod.com for links to all of the real nerdy shit. Join our Patreon, Blank Check Special Features, for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes. Follow us on social at blankcheckpod. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Checkbook, on Substack. This podcast is created and produced by Blank Check Production.