The Killing with Patton Oswalt

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

[00:00:19] You'd be killing a podcast. That's not first degree murder. In fact, it's not murder at all. In fact, I don't know what it is. Sure. Sure. Sure. That's what you wanted to do? I don't know. I'm not saying it's the best line in the movie, but...

[00:00:37] I like the monologue by the bald guy at the chess place where he's kind of like, you know, we are mediocrity, right? Where he's talking about that. That's really good. And you could do the voice and everything.

[00:00:50] Yeah. Yeah. You have my sympathies then. You have not yet learned that in this life you have to be like everyone else. The perfect podcast. No better, no worse. Exactly. I love that. That guy's great. Who's that guy?

[00:01:05] That guy, look, I'm sure we're going to get into it, David. That guy was a true former wrestler who Kubrick met through chess circles. Yeah. His name is... Yeah, we'll talk about him. He's exactly what that character is.

[00:01:18] It's just funny because then I also think of the Ed Wood guy, Tor Johnson, right? Who kind of is the same vibe. A Swedish guy with a bald head.

[00:01:27] He's Tor adjacent. He's very Tor adjacent. Look, I want to get into it. This is Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David.

[00:01:35] It's a podcast about filmographies. Directors who have massive success early on in their careers are given a series of blank checks, make whatever crazy passion projects they want. And sometimes those checks clear. Sometimes they bounce, baby. This is a miniseries on the films of Stanley Kubrick.

[00:01:50] Heard of him. It's called Pods Widecast. And in many ways, I think he is a guy who kind of defines the idea in most people's minds of a blank check career. Right?

[00:02:03] Because there are very few films at the beginning where he's sort of scrapping it out. And then from then on out, it is, hey, I set the terms.

[00:02:09] I work when I want to. I make exactly what I want at the exact size and budget and freedom I want. And you can go screw.

[00:02:16] Yeah, I think I would say the only difference is he's right. He's just very unique in the control he exerted. We'll talk about this plenty. That's I'm saying it's the ultimate. It's the ultimate. Right. It's the sort of thing people would aspire to or whatever.

[00:02:28] When they want a blank check career, they're going, I wish I had fucking Kubrick levels of freedom. I guess so. What a ridiculous thing to say. Only Kubrick gets that. Of course. But many fools aspire to it.

[00:02:40] Look, I want to bring our guest in. He is he's such a professional that not only has he not spoken yet and I don't mean to call him out for this. He's been hitting that mute button on and off whenever there's a noise that might disrupt the audio.

[00:02:55] He's trying to give us the cleanest track possible because this guy, he's he's a comedian. He's an actor. He's a writer. I think it's very important to say he joins a very, very small club in the history of blank check.

[00:03:09] Guess David. OK, who are lead roles in previously covered blank check movies. That's true. In a wonderful film. In fact, we are speaking to.

[00:03:19] The man who brought to life Remy the rat and Ratatouille, one of our all time favorite movies, and he's got a new movie coming out called I Love My Dad. Patton Oswalt, thank you for being on the podcast. Guys, thank you so much.

[00:03:33] Thanks for having me on to talk about Kubrick's The Killing. Look, there was there was some there was a lot of back and forth to make this happen.

[00:03:45] And in it, there was some confusion. And then there was a Hail Mary pass to throw the killing at you because I thought I had remembered you talking about this movie in the past. Oh, yeah. I've seen this movie many times in theaters.

[00:03:59] Rewatched it yesterday morning just to be fresh. And it's a it's just a fun movie to watch in terms of, oh, let's let's see how he's setting all of this up. You know, it bears up to repeated viewings. It's not a difficult rewatch at all.

[00:04:17] I've seen the killing like three times and any time you put it on two minutes in, you're just like, oh, yeah, this is coming up. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. This is great. The Killing. We're talking about killing Griffin.

[00:04:28] You know, why is it called The Killing? I guess we'll talk about it. But but that's my maybe my only note with the killing. I don't know if it's a great title.

[00:04:36] I mean, it's a it's it's arresting. But like, that's not really what's going on in this movie. Right. I don't know. You could call it the killing of a sacred horse. Because like the book is called the book had a different clean break. Right.

[00:04:52] That's what it's called. Break. Yeah. OK. That's you know, that's a pretty good title. I guess that's not like the most thrilling title in the world. Well, this is OK.

[00:05:00] Look, we're going to crack open the dossier. J.J. Birch, our researcher, put together a lot of stuff very quickly for this movie. But one of the things, Pat, I think that might be of specific interest to you.

[00:05:11] One of the working titles for this film that he pulled up because, you know, well, with a lot of these noir films. Oh, yeah. They're picking names. Distributors. Right. The studios. Right. It's that 70 percent of whether you're getting a green light or not. Right.

[00:05:23] Give me a title that I can slap on a poster. Yeah. So the whole noir crime genre is what are the words we can slap on a poster that'll get people to stop and come and look at it?

[00:05:32] Exactly. Even have to have anything to do with the plot. We don't care. Right. Let's go. Right. So if you have a good title, they might green light you on that alone. Yeah.

[00:05:39] And if you have a bad title, they're going to make you change it three weeks before the movie. Oh, hell yeah. They will. Whether or not it has anything to do with the movie.

[00:05:46] Clean Break was the name of the book. But one of the titles, one of the working titles that apparently was close to happening for this movie. I don't know if you know this was Bed of Fear. Oh, my Lord.

[00:05:59] OK, well, Patton, one of my favorite routines of yours of all time is your extended riff on Deathbed, the bed that eats people. Yeah. Well, you call at the time, I think the worst movie you'd ever seen.

[00:06:11] Well, no, at the time I had not seen it. I'd only heard of it because it had just come out on DVD. I have since did a screening of it at the Alamo Draft House. Like we're all going to experience it together.

[00:06:23] It was more about the idea that a guy it was the concept for me that a guy came up with the idea for a movie about a bed that is possessed and eats people.

[00:06:31] And he finished the script and he finished the movie. And all I can think of are all of the projects I've started and either given up on or they just didn't go anywhere. That one made it all the way through. That is insane to me.

[00:06:45] At no point did he crumple it up and go, stupid. No, come on. We're doing this.

[00:06:50] Well, it's my two favorite parts of the bit. Are you saying was he either just confident the entire time or was there the moment where the doubt hit him and he worked through it?

[00:06:59] Either way is bad for me. Either way is very it speaks badly of me and my follow through. If a guy either had 100 percent confidence or you like you said, had that crippling doubt, as you should have if you're working on something called Deathbed.

[00:07:13] And then absolutely no, I'm God damn it. I'm finishing this. My single favorite detail on that, though, and not to brag, but I have spent about 15 years working on some of the worst independent films of all time.

[00:07:27] Just terrible projects that never should have existed. And you go into post that guy writing that script, the amount of work and time and hours and sacrifice that everyone else has to commit to make that vision of reality.

[00:07:41] If you're on the crew of Bed of Fear and it's the Stanley Kubrick guy's third movie. Do you think you go this this thing is going to be a piece of junk?

[00:07:51] Do you think Bed of Fear is a title that would instill doubt in a cast and crew versus the killing? We're just like, I don't know. It's called the killing. Whatever. Bed of Fear, the problem with Bed of Fear is the word bed is in there.

[00:08:05] Yeah, there's that just takes away any tension and excitement like, you know, I'm sleeping. Yeah, exactly. Like, oh, bad. I should go home. Yeah. Like Sofa of Terror. Like, well, no, there's a sofa.

[00:08:19] I'm taking a nap, taking away all the tension. You can't have bed in the title. Bed of Fear also does not have much to do with this movie. It would also be somewhat misleading, more misleading than the killing. This movie does at least have murder in it.

[00:08:32] Definitely. And also the killing. There's an overall like, this is what drives all these characters. The idea of like, we're going to be killing here. This is going to be a killing. And that is like, it's a double meaning.

[00:08:44] The title is almost the motivation for all the characters right there. You're right. I'm convinced. You're right. It's a good title. I mean, also Bed of Fear is a terrible title. So that's, you know, that's fine. Clean Break is fine. Clean Break is what they want to do.

[00:08:59] Obviously, it's the one last job movie. They're all going to or at least Johnny Clay is going to, you know, he's going to make a clean break. I get it. But Killing works on a marquee.

[00:09:08] I mean, it's sort of what we talked about with The Evil Dead where you're just like, I can't believe no one thought to put those words in that order on a poster before. And the killing has been used so many times since this movie as a title.

[00:09:20] It's now just one of those titles that gets recirculated. Right. It's just nonstop. Yeah, it is striking. Just put those two words. The Killing. Tell me more. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Great move. Better the guy better than Bed of Fear.

[00:09:34] I made Bed of Fear. Don't you know who I am? I directed Bed of Fear. David, I love how much this movie comes out of Kubrick's chess life in multiple ways.

[00:09:46] You know, I was just a bit of a recurring motif for Kubrick, obviously, it's in lots of his movies. But but he he's a big chess nerd, especially in his younger years. So let me see. I'm looking at some of this sort of context here.

[00:10:01] Obviously, Kubrick worked at what Look magazine. That's what it called. He was a photographer. Right. He done Fear and Desire and Killers Kiss, which are, you know, not features he's proud of particularly. Like this is probably the first movie Kubrick respects in his filmography. Right.

[00:10:21] Yeah, I would say like he talks pretty derisively about the first two movies. I don't know what you guys think of that. Fear and Desire he kind of disowned as not a film for a while. And Killers Kiss he sort of treated as his warm up.

[00:10:37] And this is kind of the first real film. Killers Kiss is kind of cool. I like that. It's a fun time. Stuff with the mannequins and it's just great imagery. I don't know what he's, you know, worried about. It works.

[00:10:48] Also, we've covered far more amateurish first films than Fear and Desire. I think it just speaks to Kubrick sort of perfectionism that like Christopher Nolan doesn't disown following, even though that's a rough draft movie. Yeah. You know? Sure. No, 100 percent.

[00:11:04] But so this movie is produced by James B. Harris. Alexander Singer is a guy he knows who introduces him to Stanley Kubrick and they set up Harris-Kubrick Pictures on 57th Street in New York.

[00:11:19] Harris claims he's the one who went to a bookstore around the corner and bought Clean Break. Kubrick says the opposite. But I just the thing I want to tie back in here is that Harris and Kubrick apparently really bonded over doing Washington Square Park.

[00:11:35] Yes. That was the formation of their relationship. Yeah. But Kubrick, I guess, had loved The Killer Inside Me, which is another Jim Thompson, which is a Jim Thompson book. Jim Thompson writes this movie, although he's actually uncredited for the quote unquote dialogue.

[00:11:55] But so I guess like Kubrick kicks him the book and says, do you want to write a screenplay based on this? And apparently Jim Thompson had never written a screenplay before. He wrote the whole thing on legal pads, basically.

[00:12:09] And the screenplay was like, you know, you had to flip it topside rather than the usual left to right. So Kubrick, I guess, is the one who turns it into a screenplay, which is why he gets the credit. But whatever. Him and Jim Thompson are cool.

[00:12:25] Jim Thompson writes Paths of Glory like Jim Thompson's like a big early Kubrick guy. I've never read The Killer Inside Me. I saw the movie, you know, the whatever from 10 years ago. There's two versions. There's the Stacey Keach version.

[00:12:41] Yeah. And there's the one that came out with Casey Affleck. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Which was, you know, it was like one of those sort of you can't believe how intense this movie is. Movies, right. You know, like, oh, it's so horrifying and chilly.

[00:12:58] I never saw the Stacey Keach version and I've never read the book. I know the book is sort of a sort of crime classic, like because it's just so blistering. Have you guys read The Killer Inside Me?

[00:13:08] I read it in high school and I don't remember a lot of it. I just do remember it feels immediately claustrophobic. I am slammed inside of this, the shell of a person. And now I have to walk around with this psychopath basically for a whole novel.

[00:13:23] That is an incredible way of describing, I think, the magic juice of most great noir of this period. Is just like these quick and dirty, you're just immediately slammed into an incredibly claustrophobic and bleak world view.

[00:13:38] And it's just like a fucking kettle boiling of when is this going to pop and how do I stay in here? Yeah, exactly. But this book, they call up to try and get the rights. This is the one thing I forgot.

[00:13:49] And they were like, well, Frank Sinatra is like negotiating with us right now. And they were like, we'll give you $10,000 right away. So this was almost a Sinatra picture. Sinatra wanted to do this. Wow. Which would probably be pretty cool. I mean, it's sort of a...

[00:14:03] Well, Dirty Harry was almost a Sinatra picture. And wasn't Die Hard as well? Isn't that a thing? Well, no. He plays the same... It's the same character from The Detective. That's right. But they never offered Die Hard to Sinatra.

[00:14:17] They did offer Dirty Harry to Sinatra when it was called Dead Right. And it was going to be Sinatra as Harry Callahan. I just... I need to film nerd correct you. He was obviously never going to do it.

[00:14:33] But something in the deal for when Sinatra had bought the rights to The Detective gave him right of first refusal on any of the follow-ups. Wow. So even when they set up Die Hard at Fox and had McTiernan and everything,

[00:14:46] they had to go to Sinatra and go like, obviously no, right? And he was like, yeah, no. But they did have to before they could offer it to anyone else say like, you don't want to play 80 year old John McClane, do you? Let me tell you something, baby.

[00:15:00] These knees don't work like they used to. I just like imagining whoever the Fox exec was who was like, hey, Frank, I'm just calling so you can tell me to fuck off. Do you want to do a movie called Die Hard? He'll fuck off. Okay, thank you.

[00:15:13] My job's done. So Kubrick, they write the screenplay with Jim Thompson. They go to United Artists and United Artists is like, give us an actor. Jack Palance is someone they ask. And then Sterling Hayden gets into the mix. He likes the script. They bring him aboard.

[00:15:33] Apparently United Artists wanted Victor Mature. They were mad about Sterling Hayden. They were like, you know. Yeah, I agree. Oh no. Not a positive. You made an icky poo poo smell face to Victor Mature. I can think of no better way to describe it.

[00:15:53] I mean, look, I don't hate Victor Mature. He's in one of my favorite noirs of all time. I wake up screaming, but he's not the best part of it. There's just something about Victor Mature just for me as an actor. He has that weird little smile of his.

[00:16:07] He has like the widow's peak kind of thing. He looks like an entertainer, you know, right? Yeah, exactly. He looks like he should be like, who's got a birthday tonight? Who's got a wedding? Like he should be bringing on the acts.

[00:16:23] I just don't buy him as a lead actor, even though he's great. He's in Kiss of Death. He's in I Wake Up Screaming. But it just. David Thompson called him an uninhibited creature of the naive. Well, that's a pretty good line.

[00:16:42] Sterling Hayden has that sort of poetry and that pathos to him. Yeah. I mean, Sterling Hayden is a wonderful choice. But I can see him being an unsexy one, I guess. Like, I don't know that he was the kind of star that United Artists is really.

[00:16:59] I mean, he had just been in like Johnny Guitar a couple years ago. He's in Crime Wave, obviously. That's where he plays Detective Sims. Oh, hell yeah. God, he's so good at that. Apparently, he was in a movie in 1955 called Top Gun. Well, it's a Western.

[00:17:18] So they convinced United Artists, you know, let us have Sterling Hayden. United Artists puts about 200 grand. The budget went over to about 330. So Harris had to kick in some of his own money at the end of the day.

[00:17:34] Because that was the thing was like United Artists said, if you can get us a star, we'll give you the budget for this. And when they come back with Sterling Hayden, they're like, we'll give you half the budget for this. That's exactly how much we'll give you.

[00:17:45] There's a quote here. I like two quotes. James Harris said, I give Stanley a free hand to create and he leaves the money problems to me. Right. Which I think this relationship defines Kubrick's approach to filmmaking from here on out.

[00:17:58] Like Harris for this movie and the next two creates the dynamic that Kubrick then extends to the studios with every other picture he makes, which is just like you got to back the fuck off. Yeah.

[00:18:08] And Harris sort of saw in this guy the ability if he was given that sort of freedom and got him used to that. The funny quote that accompanies this is Kubrick at the time saying, we want to make good movies and make them cheap.

[00:18:21] The two are not incompatible. So Kubrick's idea at this point is, oh, I know what I do. I'm the guy who can make a movie with complete freedom as long as the budget is low.

[00:18:29] And then by the end of his relationship with Harris, he's like, but what if the budget isn't low? Right. I actually could do a lot more with more budget.

[00:18:39] I mean, yeah, this movie is compared United Artists sort of compares it to Marty, which is around the same time where they're like, we can make low budget pictures that are A pictures that have like an A picture quality. I guess that's what they're trying to say.

[00:18:53] Kubrick wanted to shoot this movie himself, but Union Rules didn't let him do that. So he brings in Lucy and Ballard. But they fought all the time. And one of the biggest things was the those racetrack images that are right at the start of the movie.

[00:19:10] And Kubrick was like, I want to go to the horses and I want to get some sort of verite footage. I want to get some documentary stuff. And Lucy and Ballard is like, no, I work in studio sets with lights. I don't know how that works, basically.

[00:19:28] He's trying to sort of solve a problem that the Hollywood studio system doesn't really understand. Yeah, but there is a documentary field of some of the early scenes.

[00:19:38] It reminds me of a lot of Kubrick stuff like Day of the Fight and a lot of his Look Magazine stuff where he got... I mean, it looks like he either convinced Lucien or went behind Lucien's back and went down and got stuff. He went behind his back.

[00:19:54] That is what he... He gets Alexander Singer, who's the associate producer on this movie. He's one of Harris's guys who had worked shooting documentary stuff during the Korean War when he was in the service. And he gives him a little AIMO camera. IMO camera? IMO, I think.

[00:20:10] And says just like go to the tracks and shoot me some stuff. And that stuff is in the movie, which Kubrick just kind of... So that's, you know, right? You know, that's a sign of him kind of like, you know, making something out of nothing. Yeah.

[00:20:24] It is funny to me that like, yes, he's got this background as a photojournalist, right? Fear and Desire feels very documentary-esque. And then this movie has elements of it.

[00:20:34] And you look at the variety review from the time and they almost lead with like, this movie has this striking documentary style. Like that was pretty radical at the time.

[00:20:44] And then from here on out, every successive movie, Kubrick's going to become more controlled, more creating his own ecosystem. Right. You know?

[00:20:52] Like by the time you get to Eyes Wide Shut and he has no interest in capturing reality as it exists on the street and is building his own fake New York.

[00:21:00] It is weird how, yeah, this guy that one of his early strengths was that was the documentary feel to his stuff. Even in stuff like something as big as Strange Love, it feels very documentary style. And then you're right. He just goes into artifice and never looks back.

[00:21:16] Yeah, he does. Right. You don't think of him as like a sort of verite guy. The other thing was that Kubrick wanted to use a really wide lens and Ballard was like, that's going to distort the image.

[00:21:27] It's going to give it this kind of fisheye thing, which Kubrick was like, yeah, that's what I want to do. Like, yeah, dipshit. That's a cool idea. Like, right. Sounds fucking good. This is a crime story. I want to get into that.

[00:21:39] And, you know, so much of the stuff from the set of this movie is him fighting with Lucien Ballard over lens sizes and things like that. You know, Lucien Ballard apparently at the time was married to Merle Oberon. Wow.

[00:21:54] So like, this is a, you know, a Hollywood guy. Like, this is who looks... you look him up. He's a hottie. Lucien Ballard is a good looking guy. He's got a strong brow. He worked with Joseph von Sternberg and Sam Peckinpah and all these guys.

[00:22:10] And as Singer puts it, like, Kubrick looked like a Bronx kid who was wiping his nose on his sleeve.

[00:22:17] I mean, it's sort of hard to imagine baby Kubrick because I feel like the image you have of the guy is more the sort of like bespectacled bearded older guy. Right. Well, the bearded film wizard.

[00:22:29] Right now he's a nasally kid from the Bronx that's just like, I want to make movies. The dark eyed intensity, it doesn't get there until later. He just looks like a fucking dork at this. Yeah. They're fighting about putting a camera on a dolly track for a shot.

[00:22:48] And Stanley says, Lucien, you either move that camera and put it where it has to be to use a 25 millimeter or you get off the set and you never come back. And Lucien, there's just silence.

[00:22:58] And then Lucien like goes and does, goes and puts the camera where it's supposed to be. So whatever. He wins the big battle with the big shot cameraman. All the other stories are just like that he's this weird little introvert, you know, Kubrick.

[00:23:12] Like, he does not strike you as a bossy guy in any other way. But obviously the sort of perfectionist master craftsman stuff is coming up. Right? Yeah. But Kubrick could, you know, you've seen that footage on The Shining where he's just bullying Shelley Duvall.

[00:23:29] I don't think he was a very, ultimately I don't think he was a really good guy. I don't think he's nice. No.

[00:23:35] And I think he might have been like, I don't know about misanthropic, but I just don't think he, there's an unspoken, God, I could make these movies exactly the way I want if there wasn't all these dumb people like doing stuff. Right.

[00:23:53] These actors who need to like go to the bathroom and eat food. It just gets in the way of what I'm trying to do. It makes perfect sense that like AI was the thing he was working towards in his mind. Yeah, of course.

[00:24:05] One of these days we're going to get this fucking robot. Robot actors. But it's also just so funny to consider like at a certain point, even if he does, he is still aggressive and how he gets there.

[00:24:18] At a certain point in his reputation is loomed so large that people know what they're signing up for. Right. And they understand I'm going to totally have to defer to everything Kubrick wants.

[00:24:30] And at this point it's like he's never been described as someone who is, I don't know, particularly insightful in knowing how to communicate with people to get what he wants outside of just demanding it.

[00:24:42] So if you're working with young, twerpy Kubrick, it's like, what are those conversations like where he's just like, fucking do it? Yeah. But at the same time, like, you know, there are, you're right. There was that feeling of, oh, I've signed up for a Kubrick film.

[00:24:56] A lot of times it felt like people did Kubrick films more to get the story than to be in a movie, like to go, oh, I've worked with, let me tell you my Kubrick story. And there were some actors that weren't enchanted by him at all.

[00:25:10] Harvey Keitel famously told him to go fuck himself on the set of Eyes Wide Shut when he made him a, well, some people say he got fired, some people say he just quit.

[00:25:19] But he basically, Kubrick made him walk through a door 27 times and he just went, hey, you're fucking crazy. And just like left, like, did that thing.

[00:25:28] It was almost like the weird, leave it to Harvey Keitel to like just see through all the glamour and all the legend and go, oh, you're just fucking crazy. You're just crazy. And you lucked into making people, someone money and they keep throwing money at you.

[00:25:43] But you're crazy. Well, it's like that incredible clip of Christopher Plummer talking about working with Malick on The New World. And he's like, I memorized this monologue and you're filming a fucking burr. Like, I'm never doing this ever again. I don't care. Shoot the actor saying the thing.

[00:26:00] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. Some of these guys. But I, right. I'm so, I'm just as a working actor, I'm so over two things. I'm over the method. I hate the method and I hate the auteur theory.

[00:26:15] Those are the two things that get in the way of people actually doing work and creating art. Because the method puts 10 times more attention on the actor. Whereas acting is you're supposed to just inhabit a role and not call attention to all your actually bullshit.

[00:26:31] And then auteurism is all about, I just want to be a dick. I just want to be a dick to people because I have to be a tortured artist. Someone, I forgot who pointed this out. I think it was Bronson Pinchot of all people.

[00:26:42] He's like, you ever notice that whenever someone's in a method performance, they're always, and they're acting like an asshole. Like, well, my care, I'm playing this asshole. So I got to stay in this music.

[00:26:51] Right, they're never method is like a nice man who gives people candy or whatever. Yes. What I was getting at. Yes. They never are. Sorry, but. That's quite all right. I think, you know, Kubrick and Daniel Day-Lewis loom too large as those two examples.

[00:27:06] And Daniel Day-Lewis, who is notoriously a very nice person and doesn't do that thing where he's like a fucking asshole to people on set just because he's playing an asshole. Sure. But just stays in his energy, you know? Right.

[00:27:19] And I think too many people are like, well, I'm doing the Kubrick thing or the Daniel Day-Lewis thing. And it's like, first off, you're not fucking Kubrick or Daniel Day-Lewis. And by the way, everyone who works with Daniel Day-Lewis says he's nice.

[00:27:29] And everyone who works with Kubrick says he was an asshole even if they were happy with how the movie turned out. There's a thing you said in some random interview that I always think about, Patton, that speaks to this sort of anti-method preciousness.

[00:27:44] You were on some podcast, I think, talking about movies you had seen recently and it was when Blue Valentine came out. And you talked about how good Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling were in that film.

[00:27:55] And the way you described it was you said they're just part of this great generation of young actors who just fucking crack open the script and take out their highlighter and do the work.

[00:28:05] Yeah, they just trust that the work is going to create something amazing rather than I want to create this is the Ryan Gosling show or this is the Michelle Williams biography. And like, no, I'm here to serve the script.

[00:28:19] And there's that, yeah, there is a generation of actors, the ones that are coming up now, I think, are really amazing in that they just let's do the goddamn work and make it amazing. And we don't need to be precious assholes about it, you know?

[00:28:34] Right. And that's a movie where like they fucking lived in a house together for a month improvising backstory and all this shit. But there was none of that sort of self-flagellation like look at how much we suffered for this.

[00:28:44] And then there's this self-important kind of press tour stuff afterwards, right, where it's like, you know, I forgot who I was or, you know, the whole mythos that comes around it, which is the problem with the auteur stuff that you're saying, Patton, as well.

[00:28:56] It's like it becomes this mythos that just kind of makes you like whatever gives you a license to act like a king or a god on set, I assume.

[00:29:06] Right. It's like, well, it all flows. You know, the buck stops here, right? So whatever I do is all part of the creative process or what I assume is sort of. Yeah, but a lot of times it's anti-creativity because they only want everything coming from them.

[00:29:20] The idea of a collaboration. They're so worried that after the facts, I want to go, well, that was my idea.

[00:29:27] You know, as long as the movie's good, I don't care who comes up with what idea as long as it all works. But there are so many people that are like, no, I am making a movie. The rest of you are not. All the ideas are coming from me.

[00:29:41] You know, no one contributes anything to this and they want it to be there so badly. And it's like they don't, you know, it's the William Goldman thing. Everybody gets together and everybody makes a movie.

[00:29:54] And that's sort of, again, it's kind of from the Kubrick perspective is what's interesting about The Killing is like they shot this in 20 days. He's still fairly new to Hollywood. This is not the kind of thing where obviously, yes, he wins a fight over a lens with handsome, handsome Lucian Ballard.

[00:30:10] But like he's not able to, you know, be a petty dictator here. On the flip side, Patton, and you tweeted about this, but the Timothy Carey performance is someone doing something he absolutely does not want that Kubrick was upset about and Carey was fucking right.

[00:30:27] Yeah. And it also, by the way, it shows you how great Timothy Carey is on screen that Kubrick worked with him again after all of the tension that came out of this movie.

[00:30:39] And I remember I went to a screening of Crime Wave, this is years ago, and Andre de Toth, the director was there and afterwards spoke. And people were, of course, asking about Tim Carey. You know, what was Tim Carey like?

[00:30:50] So first Andre de Toth does like a joke and he says, well, once you took his straitjacket off, he was fine. Everyone, ha ha ha ha ha.

[00:30:57] And then we, then they asked a few more questions and then in the middle of answering another question, he just stopped and went, and let me be clear, Timothy Carey was fucking crazy. Like, just in case that joke, I don't want you thinking I was being right.

[00:31:13] We weren't being cute. That guy was out of his fucking mind. American Klaus Kinski.

[00:31:19] Yes, exactly. But I feel like there was an unspoken, there was like a whisper network among directors going, yeah, look, Timothy Carey is going to want to make you jump off a fucking bridge. But the stuff that you get on film is so worth it. He's just amazing.

[00:31:31] We were talking about how obviously how Coppola uses Sterling Hayden. He wanted Timothy Carey too, right? He wanted Timothy Carey to play Luca Brasi in The Godfather, which makes sense. Like he's scary looking.

[00:31:43] Well, okay. I'll tell you another story. I was at, I hosted an editor's award show and I got to meet Martin Scorsese backstage. So all we did was trade Timothy Carey stories.

[00:31:57] And he told me, and this is what Coppola told him, they brought in Timothy Carey for The Godfather and then he didn't want to do it. And they brought him back. He didn't want to do The Godfather because he was shooting his own TV show called Tweets Ladies of Paradise.

[00:32:14] Let me look for it. Yes, yes. Tweets Ladies of Pasadena. That's what it is. Which by the way, one of the worst things I've ever seen in my life. He was playing a character called Tweet Twig apparently.

[00:32:26] And he was like making, you wanted to make clothes for animals because you didn't think animals should be. It was his idea of what a sitcom should be. It was insane.

[00:32:35] And so he's like, I got it. I got to make my show. I can't be in your dumb gangster movie. So then he turns it. So then for the sequel, they still want him for the sequel. We want this picture. Do you want to come back? Come on.

[00:32:50] They bring him in and he comes in with a like a bakery box or something like I brought cannoli for everybody.

[00:32:56] And then he opens the box and there's a gun in there that he filled with blanks and he started shooting it into the ceiling and everyone freaked out.

[00:33:04] And then he got chased off the lot by security. And he was like, I was just trying to create some tension.

[00:33:09] There was a gangster movie coming like just out of his fucking mind. And it was just that's why he didn't get to be in Godfather 2 because he was a lunatic.

[00:33:18] It's also just crazy. You look at like Tim Carey's whole filmography and you have like so many huge like, you know, and a lot of these are uncredited too.

[00:33:28] Yeah, it's like you have East of Eden and you have many in Moskowitz and Head and Shocktree and obviously this movie.

[00:33:35] And then you have like Chesty Anderson, USN. You have two Francis the Talking Mule movies, like along with his own insane vanity projects, like the birth of like the highest highs and the lowest regs of film in every genre.

[00:33:52] Just the best. I mean, he has one of the earliest post credit sequence in a movie in DC cab after the credits are done and he gets in the cab and it's Charles Barnett. Where to? He goes, I'm the angel of death. Take me to hell.

[00:34:09] He's like, any luggage? Like just it was just perfect. That's all. He just sits down, says it, done. What was his type? Was he just crazy? Like was he just the weird guy? He's huge. So he would play heavies.

[00:34:23] He is a gigantic human being and he also has this voice that is just there's nothing like it. I can't describe it. He's just such a weird presence and those weird eyes. Yeah, he's half asleep half the time.

[00:34:37] Right. Or like that he's like staring through you or whatever. It's very unsettling.

[00:34:43] Cage is a good comparison too, because even at this point in time where film acting at large is less naturalistic, he is so expressionistic. Like he's just like I have no interest in capturing literal human behavior. No.

[00:34:57] It's your tweet about it Patton that I found where his clenched jaw thing was sort of making him this like living corpse. Right. He was dead already.

[00:35:06] Exactly. He was I'm already dead. I'm going to play this with a rictus because I'm going to die. Oh, it's so good. And I could imagine a director being like, what? Don't do that. No. What? You're alive in this scene.

[00:35:21] And because Kubrick is basing so many of these scenes around like, you know, masters, deep focus masters with very limited camera movement, you know, so you're really letting the actors control the pace of these scenes.

[00:35:35] The one scene where Sterling Hayden goes to see Tim Cary for the first time and he's got the puppy in his hands. Yeah.

[00:35:42] And you're not cutting to close up so you really get to in real time watch five minutes of Tim Cary stroking a puppy. And you're constantly just like, is he about to snap this thing's neck? I know. Why does he have this dog?

[00:35:52] Oh yeah. Get that dog away from him. He just. Yeah. And also to do the cut from this brutal shotgunning these targets and then we cut to he's got the gun and the puppy. Like what the hell am I looking at right now? Yes.

[00:36:05] We'll talk about him again because he was crazy when they made Paths of Glory as well and eventually Kubrick fired him. By the way, fired him with very good reason. Yes. What a frigging nut on that movie. I know the whole story. What a frigging psycho.

[00:36:23] Sag had no cause for rejection. But apparently he's also in his image from the killing is on the Sergeant Pepper cover behind George Harrison. I'm trying to find it now. Oh really?

[00:36:33] Yes. But specifically from this movie. Yeah, it's pretty cool. You can see on outtake photos. All right. Okay. So I may not have made the final cover. But anyway, Timothy Cary, he's great. But everyone in this is great. Not just him. Everyone.

[00:36:50] It's not really a false note here.

[00:36:52] No, every performance is so fantastic. Even someone like Elijah Cook, who at that point had almost become like he was his own genre of person and he finds different levels for his character that normally is outside of the Elijah Cook kind of over that.

[00:37:16] I feel like usually like right post Maltese Falcon, he would play psychos. Right. He would play like very creepy guys most of the time. Yeah. This is him more in like sort of sad, lonely, pathetic mode.

[00:37:30] Yeah. It's sort of lateral from that. But I mean, I love him so much in the Maltese Falcon. Marie Windsor is the one who totally grabbed my attention. Those eyes and the face. I mean, it's like an early Ileana Douglas. You know, this kind of. Yes.

[00:37:49] Gorgeous. And also, you know what? This is I'm not saying this to be to be glib or dismissive, but she and Elijah Cook Jr. in this, you know what it feels like to me, though, that whole part of the movie feels like if the Softie Brothers adapted the Lockhorns comic into a movie.

[00:38:07] It's so truly trying to kill each other. Yeah, really actually. Well, there's something like she was very tall. And her career was always hamstrung.

[00:38:18] She was too tall. Sure. She was like five. Rarely having leading men her size and mostly needing to do performances where she was like crouching, you know, where her ankles and knees were pulling like triple duty and shit.

[00:38:31] And this movie allows her to kind of be tall because she needs to have such sort of dominance over him physically. He has to be this weakling. But the other thing is, right, this is like a stock type at this point in this type of movie.

[00:38:42] But all of these sort of one liners she slings over her shoulder at his expense are set with genuine disdain. Oh, yeah. They're not just sort of like sassy lady one liners. They're like, this woman is miserable and she is angry at the life she's living.

[00:38:58] And so miserable to the point where even her dying words are a jab at her husband. Like the last word she's going to leave this planet with are going to be to what one last shit on this guy's head.

[00:39:12] Right. She has to cock him with her final breath. I mean, yeah, I'm kind of I'm kind of rooting for her. Yeah. Were husbands always saying that you were going to be rich someday in those days? Was that a thing?

[00:39:26] I think it's American dream coming out of like sort of Great Depression. Yeah, it's like an aspirational time. Everyone's America's booming, right? Everyone's doing great.

[00:39:35] I mean, you were talking about that before we started recording how 50s Noir like America is in better shape in 50s Noir than it is in 40s Noir. Like, yeah, but again, that makes the darkness darker because. Right. Yes. America is in better shape and everyone's making it.

[00:39:51] So if you're not making it something really wrong. Yeah, you're an absolute scumbag.

[00:39:56] But it's this thing I like about Noirs at this time is that the people who are trying to pull off these sort of these crazy, you know, sort of moves are often just not quite smart enough to do it. Yeah.

[00:40:11] A little too unsavory to be able to win people over. It's what you're saying. There's something fundamentally broken in them that's preventing them from achieving the American dream.

[00:40:20] Well, yeah, that's what I love about this movie is that unlike a lot of crime capers, this movie is about a guy who is aspiring to pull off a multi leveled 4D chess thing. But he is just a checker player. He is a thug.

[00:40:34] He should just he should go into a liquor store, hit a guy with a sock full of quarters, take whatever's in the register and just try to live on that. This you are so out of your wheelhouse on this dude. It really is.

[00:40:46] And that's what Maurice is saying to him. He's like mediocrity is what you should be aspiring to here, buddy. You know, like. But then again, also, I do feel like so Johnny Clay, he's Sterling Hayden is the main character and he's this is his one last job.

[00:40:59] Right. He's going to steal two million dollars. This is going to be it. He is aspiring to mediocrity in that he's like, and then I can be a normal guy. Right. Like that is supposedly the brass ring he's grabbing for. Right. I'll be. Yeah.

[00:41:11] I'll be Mr. Joe Schmoe anonymous. I'll live off the money. It'll be great. He has the same dreams as like as as Walter Matthau and Charlie Varek of like, I got this money.

[00:41:21] I just want to go vanish and live on the on the low end out of sight and just live on the money quietly. That's all I want. Just the difference, though, is in a Walter Matthau movie, you genuinely believe all this guy wants is to take a nap.

[00:41:36] Right. Is just to get even. Even young Matthau, yes. Yeah. Right. Whereas like Sterling Hayden, you imagine the movie where he pulls this off 18 months from now, he's going to be so impatient. You're right. You're right. He'll ruin it down the road.

[00:41:49] He'll ruin it. He'll absolutely ruin it. To put back to my favorite things you've ever said about movies, Patton, so many of these lines just ring in my head, whether they're bits or they're off cuff sort of things you've said in interviews.

[00:42:01] I think you were programming some series, a repertory theater or whatever, and you were presenting the original taking a Pelham one, two, three. Do you know the line I'm about to say back to you? I can't remember. No. What is it?

[00:42:15] You have quoted this line on this podcast. I'm going to misquote it. I've said it on this podcast because it's it's the fundamental encapsulation of everything I love about Walter Matthau.

[00:42:23] You said you look at the Tony Scott remake and the guy has to be Denzel Washington and they can try to schlub up Denzel Washington as much as possible. But, you know, he's Denzel Washington.

[00:42:32] And in the original film, they go, there's only one guy who can handle this case. And the camera pans over and he's hung over in an ill-fitting suit eating a stale hot dog.

[00:42:41] Yes. And the specific of Walter Matthau eating a stale hot dog has always stuck with me. Yeah, it's just and also they they introduce him being a racist idiot. That's his introduction. He's being the most racist moron on the planet.

[00:42:57] And like and now I got to save these passengers like this fucking guy. Oh, this guy looks like he can't do his own laundry. What are you talking about? He barely looks like he can dress himself in that movie.

[00:43:09] No, he does not look like he can dress himself. Let's be clear. He's matching like red check with a yellow tie. Someone else should be making the decisions. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what that movie is a masterpiece. But just the idea of like there's a hostage situation.

[00:43:24] Matthau's reaction is like, oh boy, what is it? You know, like he's on the phone with a guy. He's like, come on. What are you doing this for? People are late. It's New York in the 70s. The dispatcher, the mayor.

[00:43:36] They're all like, what? Why do they want to let him have it? I just want to. And Mayers is trying to watch Price is Right. He misses the fight. I missed it. Like, no one cares.

[00:43:51] Oh, God. But the brutal poetry of Sterling Hayden is he's he's not smart enough to pull off a con of this size, but he's too smart to ever be happy if he were to pull it off. Yeah, yeah. That's a great way to think of it.

[00:44:05] That is a great way to think of it. He will if he pulls it off, he will be miserable in some other way down the road. You're right. He's doomed.

[00:44:13] And I like that we know nothing about him, just that he is a vet, just that, you know, that he's been doing this for a while. Right. There's no real backstory on Johnny Clay.

[00:44:21] The name is perfect. He might as well have just been like, you know, smacked out of clay, you know, and has he done time? I don't know that they mention it. So, I know I feel like they say he just did a five year bid.

[00:44:37] And did he do the five year bid with Marv or is Marv an old prison buddy? It's the the older gentleman who runs the hotel, his son. They serve time together. That's how he knows, like, you know where to stay or whatever.

[00:44:55] But we're in the middle of it, which is good. Like he's already thought the heist up. You know, he's got this cop, he's got the teller, he's got the sharpshooter, right? Like he's got the the wrestler's going to do the fight.

[00:45:07] Everyone is whatever. He has laid out the chess moves in his head. But what a chess player, a chess player never considers that the pieces have lives and wants and needs of their own. In his mind, it's like the rook just does this. The knight does this.

[00:45:23] Yeah, they'll do what I want. But in real life, they're not going to do any of that stuff. It's actually fascinating to think about. I mean, from a Kubrick's chess background, but be this sort of perfectionist control he's going to exact on all his movies going forward.

[00:45:38] That it's a movie about a guy who cannot control other people's behavior, who believes that he can just if you were able to just do everything I fucking told you to do, this would work perfectly.

[00:45:49] The vision in my head is immaculate and you fucking people keep on messing it up with your variables. So tragic. He's such a dummy, he can't see it. He can't get out of his own way.

[00:45:59] I think one of the most striking elements of this movie for me is the narration, which is so bizarre. The tone of it is so odd, but it does feel like so ominous from the very beginning.

[00:46:12] The two things it reminds me of are, it reminds me a lot of the Ricky Jay narration at the beginning of Magnolia, which you of course are part of Patton.

[00:46:20] But that weird thing where you're seeing very banal slices of people's lives, but you understand like he wouldn't be telling me this if something very odd were about to happen. He almost has the tone of a cautionary tale.

[00:46:35] There's this undercurrent of like, and here's the lesson, pay attention. So at this time, he thinking that he would get, you're like, oh okay. Yeah, it has that something, you're right, something's about to go wrong.

[00:46:48] It's got that newsreel quality, which obviously Kubrick has a background in, but it's like this is this sort of like impartial narrator reporting back to you the bad thing that just happened.

[00:47:00] But when it's happening in a fictional narrative film, it's like this looming specter of these guys just working towards this like uneasy end. It's so eerie.

[00:47:11] Right, and I forget who does the narration in Network, but he has that same sort of vibe and the same as the Ricky Jay vibe where it's just there's something a little too slick, a little too removed. Lee Richardson is the narrator. Wow, such a good voice.

[00:47:27] A really good voice. Now, okay, we're going to jump around to scenes much like the movie jumps around in time. I was very intrigued and I looked this up online and there's a discussion about it, but there's no definitive.

[00:47:42] That scene right before Sterling Hayden, he's talking to Marv and Marv out of nowhere basically says you and I should run off together when we're done with this. You and I should go. You don't want to be in it.

[00:47:57] Basically, he implies like this marriage to Faye is going to be a mistake. You shouldn't do it. You should be with like is that a gay come on or is it a you shouldn't be married? Let's just go live as bachelors.

[00:48:09] You'll be like is he trying to save Clay from disaster? It's a very odd scene in the middle of the movie. Like it looks like it is it a gay pass or not? It is interesting. It is especially since Faye is supposedly the motivation for all of this.

[00:48:25] It's right. I'm getting married. I need to go straight. This is going to set us up like so you'd think that would be a positive. Right, but is it you wouldn't be happy with her truly or is it you would be a piece of shit to her?

[00:48:41] Don't fucking subject her to that. You're right in that like most of this movie is fairly clear cut. It's an economical movie like scenes like that. And then the later scene with Maurice ruminating about mediocrity.

[00:48:52] Those are scenes where you're like there's a million different readings that I can come up with off of this. Like that's it's interesting that that's you know the little sort of ambiguity that Kubrick is sprinkling in into a fairly straightforward heist gone wrong thing.

[00:49:08] Maybe he's just trying to save that poor woman from being Faye Clay. That's not a great name. I don't know. It's not as bad as Victoria Mature maybe but it's close. I am now going to rewatch this scene. It's an amazing scene. It's really weird.

[00:49:24] I mean not to jump ahead but like the moment where Johnny refers to Faye as his wife to airport security and Kubrick shows you her face reacting to that.

[00:49:35] Like you know they're not married yet but he's essentially like well this is my you know like he's he's presenting the sort of like you know the future that they want together. Like you feel for her like she's still in it at that point.

[00:49:48] Like she still wants that to be the result. That luggage scene is almost the most brutal scene in the entire film. God yeah. It's long too. It's like the manager comes in you're like oh this is going to turn this around and it doesn't.

[00:50:02] Well also because they did that great thing the manager is being so helpful he goes well that's no problem. And you think oh wait a minute she's going to let him bring it on. He's like we'll just cancel your flight. We'll get you.

[00:50:12] No wait no that's not like it's just. They're not being jerks. Yeah. No. It's such good like tonal control too because those two actors are the only two people in this entire film who don't know they're in a noir film. Right. Yeah.

[00:50:26] So their sort of friendly professionalism is so off putting and just makes you so uncomfortable. That's a moment where a slick like say Sinatra like you wouldn't buy that Sinatra wouldn't be able to talk those guys into just checking the damn bag. Right. Yeah. Exactly.

[00:50:44] And like Sterling Hayden you're like yeah this guy has hit his limit in terms of you know being able to work the system. He has no social energy left. He's got no trauma. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:50:55] You let me take this bag on or a ring a ding ding for the two years like it would have been something fun or a Jilly Jilly tell these guys to put my bag on the plane. You like this hat. I'll give you this hat.

[00:51:08] Not only that but Sterling Hayden would probably have an easier time if the guys were being aggressive with him. If they were like yeah. Yeah. You cannot. He's big. He's scary. He's got a face like a tombstone like you know he's right.

[00:51:20] But he'd give him what he's not good at. Like Jesus Christ can I talk to your manager or something. I just need to get a fucking bag on the plane like you know that's not a good Karen. No no no no.

[00:51:32] And the one thing you can't deal with right now is like eating McClure. You know what if that's in the film. If he's like all right so I got a wrestler I got a corrupt cop I got a Karen obviously a great guy.

[00:51:43] I'm going to need a Karen for the airport. I know that already. She's getting us through all the gates. It's going to be great. Ocean's 8 was like three years too early to have a Karen.

[00:51:53] But it absolutely would have been one of the Catherine Hahn would have played a Karen. Oh she would have been amazing. Three years later. Yeah. What do we need. Her phone is immediately open. She's like I'm filming all of this. What's your name. A pickpocket. A Karen.

[00:52:08] Don't hide your badge. I want to see your name. So OK. So the yeah there are other scenes we want to get into in particular like you know a lot of the early part of the story.

[00:52:19] A lot of the early part of this movie is set up and then we are just delving into the inner lives I feel like of all these characters. Yeah. Briefly.

[00:52:28] I mean this movie has one of those stories I love where like they shoot it this way they edit it this way with the sort of jumbled chronology. They test screen it or they show it to the studio. The studio's like this is too fucking confusing.

[00:52:45] Edit this in the right order. They test screen it and the audience is hated even more. Wow. When it's in the right order so they're like fuck you I guess turn it back.

[00:52:53] I mean this must have been kind of a revolutionary thing for the time I guess you know doing stuff out of order.

[00:52:59] But you know it also just shows you how not just how random life is but how the most seemingly insignificant things are what cause the biggest disasters in real life. You know the little puppy getting loose.

[00:53:16] The bad marriage that leads to you know the guy telling his wife what's going on.

[00:53:22] Like all these little elements keep going back and forth that you know I think that messing around with time really puts you in that mindset of I have no control over anything even though I'm trying to impose control. That's why I think the narrator is so ironic.

[00:53:38] He's coming back in and saying what day it is saying what time it is. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. This is all going to end in disaster you know. But that right but that's how it's in Johnny Clay's head right. He's like this is clockwork.

[00:53:49] I've done well. Every piece is arranged. And then we're just watching slowly as we're like well no he doesn't actually like you're saying he has no control over this or he doesn't have enough control over this.

[00:54:01] And he's only going to get someone like Elisha Cook on board because Elisha Cook is an unstable person. Like you know that's how you're going to convince someone to join you in a scheme like this if they have their own hardship.

[00:54:13] And jumbling it that way and having the narrator this weird impartial you know voice up in the sky being the one who explains it to us and dictates the order of it kind of like turns set up into punchline.

[00:54:28] Because you're sort of filling in the blanks in your head in a war style of like OK what's the windup of this.

[00:54:33] And when it ends up being such a kind of banal small thing it feels even more absurd that it's escalating to this point you know or how these things are ultimately undone. Yeah.

[00:54:46] I mean it's also that moment when I think even Shrung Hayden when he sees the money on the tarmac blowing away and when he goes what's the difference he's like I was never ever even close to having this thing succeed. It was all an illusion the whole time.

[00:55:01] If I could be undone by that if I could be undone by a fucking dog. It's so minor. The guy doesn't even crash. He just sort of like makes a slightly hard turn and that's it. And the suitcase is open. Yeah slightly.

[00:55:15] And like can I just say Marie Windsor's character that her boyfriend is called Val Cannon. That is the just a perfect name for you know a boyfriend who's cucking poor Elisha Hook. Vince Edwards is the actor. He's best known for The Devil's Brigade I feel like.

[00:55:34] Yeah well also very well known for Murder by Contract which was a huge influence on Taxi Driver. Which is such a good movie. Yeah but all of the scenes where he's just like alone and working out in his hotel room and exercising. That's all Travis Bickle.

[00:55:51] And like that movie I saw that because Criterion did that Columbia Noir collection a while ago. And I remember I watched all of those. Yeah. And that was one of them. And that's like it's that's even later than this like 58 or something.

[00:56:06] And that's one of those things where you're like Jesus this is like this is chilling. Like this is unsettling. Like this doesn't feel like a lot of earlier Noirs. Like this is just yeah like you know icky which is cool.

[00:56:18] Like you know there's not much attempt to win us over. Right right. This is and it's in a different way for different reasons. But this is one of the Noirs that feels the most modern to me you know.

[00:56:32] And I don't say that as you know it doesn't make it better or worse even though I think this is a phenomenal film.

[00:56:39] But like you know a lot of times when you're going to Noir what you're going for is the evocation of that very specific feel and the style of that moment.

[00:56:47] And something about the pacing of this movie the sort of briskness of it but also that this sort of sort of disorganized narrative and all of that. And there's a modernism I think to the performances in this which is probably what Kubrick was trying to push towards.

[00:57:05] Yeah but as you said Griff they they right they edited the movie as we know it. Sterling Hayden's agent sees it and is furious.

[00:57:13] Bill Shifrin says like you know what's all this back and forth business just when you get into the robbery you cut you're going to irritate the audience. I'm very disappointed in you guys. So they go back and they recut it chronologically and they were like it sucked.

[00:57:28] Like it had to be this way. Like you know it was it was no good. It's just a straightforward story because it's a very simple story. Oh it's very I mean again when you look back on it Sterling Hayden's character is not a clever man.

[00:57:42] He is a jumped up liquor store robber. It's all brutality and violence. It's point A to point B.

[00:57:49] But in his mind because I guess he made friends with a chess player he's like I want to be I want to do a like a chess move kind of thing. But he doesn't understand how this works. He doesn't get it.

[00:58:01] What's so telling that the the scene with the wrestler is all about the sort of futility of this plan and like accepting the mediocrity of life. Here's the one guy who understands the chessboard like literally and figuratively.

[00:58:16] And he's being recruited just as a physical morally just to create distraction. He can throw a punch though where three people will fall down from one. He can clear whole units essentially just by swinging his arm.

[00:58:30] It's just it's funny how overthought this plan is though that he's like I need two distractions going on. I not only need a horse to get murdered but I need a wrestler to get into a fist fight. Like yeah fucking collect.

[00:58:43] And also by the way wouldn't a horse being shot at a race make everything that happened around that horse being shot very suspect and they would double check everything about like that you're putting so much more attention on yourself.

[00:58:58] Especially the odds on favorite who's like part of his whole plan is like this horse is going to have such a commanding lead that when you shoot it all the other horses behind are going to trip over it and knock down.

[00:59:09] Yeah the fight in the bar he's drawing too much attention to it. I would not do that where I'm Maurice. I would I would I would. Yeah but also here's my other question.

[00:59:19] You're right Maurice does have a head for chess and he seems to understand that but chess doesn't translate to real life.

[00:59:25] So why does he go in on this plan and what is the letter that he wants the cashier at the chess place to deliver from not back at 630 makes. Is that to his son. Who is that to. Or is it a letter to anyone.

[00:59:40] I feel like it was I was under the assumption was like an attorney. It wasn't clear to me what he he wants a letter and then if you don't hear about from me by 630 then deliver it but if not it was very weird.

[00:59:53] He I mean that's right when he's he gives that sort of monologue about like you've heard of the Siberian goat her who stared at the sun and it made him blind. Right.

[01:00:04] Like I feel like his whole sort of poet lunkhead thing where he's like look I'm just here to clear out a bar you know as a distraction but I for he has some sort of Zen status about being a criminal right.

[01:00:19] Yes like maybe maybe this is my last day or maybe you know I'll be back tomorrow but you know he's he's he's free of any kind of anxieties about it at least.

[01:00:31] I mean he's the character I like them I love that character I love that character the fact that he's a philosopher but he's also basically the thing from the Fantastic Four like that's just the weirdest combination for a character.

[01:00:45] Especially since all of his lines are the things were to these monologues that are so interesting and then when he has to start a fight he just goes to the bar and he's like hey can I get some service the Irish big. Yeah right away.

[01:00:58] I would punch a hole through this wall for you but first may I quote from Tolstoy who once wrote that Oh God what the hell.

[01:01:06] Yeah I just also think on paper you go we got this like Eastern European wrestler and we're giving him these sort of brutal monologues like these existential monologues about like the meaningness of life and accepting it whatever you you imagine it will come off like blazing saddles with like Mongo just playing a game of where it's like you can't give this guy this much dialogue you know even Ed Wood knew not to give fucking tour Johnson soliloquies.

[01:01:34] And then this guy fucking nails it. Do you know how he died. I don't know. He was 76 years old and he was leaving his regular chess club where he played and he was jumped by five teenagers and he decided to fight back and take them on himself.

[01:01:51] Oh my God. Nick probably could have handled one or two of them but five were too many. Jesus Christ. This is what his widow said after his. Wait a minute. So hang on. Did he die from the exertion of fighting him or did the teenagers kill him.

[01:02:05] He was taken to the hospital and died in the hospital so I guess I'm guessing it was a combination of both. Yeah yeah they did some damage. And he was I'm sorry he was 77 years old born in 1903. He was from Georgia.

[01:02:19] The you know yeah in Europe not not not not Georgia. Yes yes. Yes. They bumped into each other. Words were exchanged. Nick never took any guff from anybody and soon he was engaged with a fight with all five kids at home. I would not.

[01:02:33] I personally would not jump this guy.

[01:02:36] I wouldn't look at that guy even if there are certain people that you and this is men and women even when they're older you look at them and go yeah that no I would never ever mess with that person especially because there's a certain kind of person that even if when they when they when they lose vitality physically they still have that air about them of.

[01:02:53] And I'm quoting Don or Don Marrera here saying if you fight me you better kill me. Like it's that kind of thing where it's like yeah this isn't worth it. This guy's out of his mind. Well in this era we're like the most intimidating physical.

[01:03:08] This is him playing chess with Kubrick. Holy shit David just put up a photo. A photo of Kubrick Hayden and Nick Quarani playing chess. Beautiful. And he's wearing like a short sleeve white button down shirt like he looks like an office drone. Yeah. Oh my God. It's incredible.

[01:03:27] Another thing I love about this guy. Yeah his name was Cola Quarani Quarani Quariani Quariani but his wrestling nickname was Nick the wrestler. Nick the wrestler. Does right on the tin. Wow man. Nick the wrestler. Boy the writers room on that nickname that must have gone hours.

[01:03:46] Hang on. Give me some work. What does he do. Okay. First name. Okay I'll get back to you in four hours. I'll have something amazing right now. And this is a whiteboard like Nick.

[01:03:59] No but they came in with Nicholas the wrestler and someone was like not quite right. Oh no. You know what I know exactly what happened.

[01:04:06] They wrote Nick and wrestler on a chalkboard out in the hallway and then during the night this janitor who was secretly a genius came and he put he put the word V in between Nick and wrestler and they're like oh my God who is doing this. What.

[01:04:21] This is amazing. Nickname genius walks among us. Oh boy. So okay let me tell you a little more about the post production on this. So they take that they take their cut the cut of the film the original right to United Artists.

[01:04:37] One person is there Max Youngstein head of production. He watches it. He says good job. Let's keep in touch. And they like they're like well what should we do where they say where do we go from here.

[01:04:47] This is you know Kubrick and Harris and Max said what about out the door. And Kubrick said well you have other producer filmmaker teams where would you rank us with all those people. And Max said not far from the bottom.

[01:05:02] So he basically watches the movie and he's like it appears to be a film. Good job guys. Thank you. I will release this. I have no further notes. And they're like did you like it. And he's like no not really.

[01:05:12] But so essentially they are Kubrick and Harris are like well they're not going to market this like they're just we're doomed. This thing isn't going to get any kind of backing. And so they themselves sort of tried to market themselves as like the new UA wonder team.

[01:05:28] They were in like The Hollywood Reporter and Variety and Life and things like that trying to be like you know a Wunderkind sort of thing. A Wunderkind sort of pair that Hollywood should get excited about. But they did all that themselves. UA kind of ignored them.

[01:05:46] And then didn't Kirk Douglas see this and went oh this is Paths of Glory. This is the guy I want. That's the whole thing. It's right. They were like smart about positioning themselves that way betting on a star is going to recognize us. Yeah.

[01:06:00] And like there will be a studio head who recognizes what we have going on. And it was Dory Sherry at MGM and Kirk Douglas who both were like yeah this makes.

[01:06:09] It got like the movie got perfectly good reviews like it was not like badly received or anything but it didn't make much money and UA didn't really care about it. They you know they just they put it on a double bill with Bandido the Robert Mitchum movie.

[01:06:23] But that's that's sort of it. I've never seen Bandido. It's a neither. Yeah Richard Fleischer movie. Wow. And there's there's a Time magazine review from the time where they're really amped up on it and they predict that it's quote going to make a killing at the cash.

[01:06:41] And then the next the next line in the Wikipedia is the film recorded a loss of one hundred and thirty thousand dollars. But I think you know why people hate puns. They hate puns. They do. And it was too easy a pun to make. It was too.

[01:06:57] It's right. Come on guys please. With these sterling performances this movie should make a killing. The thing that speaks to like I guess you like you say obviously Kirk Douglas and et cetera like that helps you.

[01:07:12] But I do feel like everything that Harris is saying in these recollections of them getting shat on by UA is he's saying like Kubrick knew he was good like this was not like demoralizing for him.

[01:07:23] He wasn't walking out of this movie being like I fucked it up like I should have. And I should have. You know I should have listened to them or like he was like no this movie is good. I did a good job.

[01:07:32] I made something he felt like he could totally stand behind. Right. Yeah. Like yeah. And also objectively he could look at the other movies that were out of the time and go this is so much fucking better than all this other stuff. I mean my God. Yeah exactly.

[01:07:46] Like I you know what's what's 1950. I'm trying to think like that's sort of I think that's the year around the world in 80 days wins best picture like. Yeah it's sort of the sort of heyday of those like really overblown.

[01:08:00] The Ten Commandments is a big movie that year The King and I these like gigantic scale costume drama things. Yeah I think Danny Peery talked about how like late 50s to the early 60s Hollywood was in it's like I don't fucking know. I don't know.

[01:08:18] Like just get everything. I don't know what people really like.

[01:08:23] It hits its wall with that the year that like medium cool and Bonnie and Clyde come out like the studios are putting out paint your wagon like no idea what anything is going on in culture or society just out of their fucking minds.

[01:08:37] So yeah there's that we're entering that phase of like all the great movies from this era are these little low budget you know experimental shadows little fugitive the killing stuff like that that people were just trying to do you know interesting stuff.

[01:08:53] You look at best picture this year and it's like you have friendly persuasion in there but the other four films are around the world in 80 days giant King and I Ten Commandments like it's for just humongous sort of epic mega productions.

[01:09:06] Like you know The King and I is a pretty you know Ten Commandments it's got you know but like none of those movies are good watches really like they I mean King and I is probably the closest because at least they're singing and dancing in that thing but like like around the world in 80 days is a slog.

[01:09:22] Which weird is yeah they each have moments that would become what people wanted to see later but they're stuck in the middle of these giant films so in the middle of giant you have James Dean doing really cool you know experimental acting stuff in the Ten Commandments yeah the movies goddamn ridiculous but there are some sequences that are fucking so hallucinatory and psychedelic.

[01:09:46] But before they knew what psychedelic was when the that green fog comes in to kill you know and yeah King and I has the singing and then around the world in 80 days I mean I'm sorry that I tried watching that movie a few months ago and it's all it is is just hey look at this like the scene with Sinatra in the frontier bar where he turns let's go hey that's Frank Sinatra like.

[01:10:10] He's like playing the piano or whatever. Yeah. Isn't like old Buster Keaton in that right he shows up or whatever you know is he there. There was no one of those all star cast. Hey everyone's back right we're going around the world baby.

[01:10:27] It was swinging around the world baby.

[01:10:30] I'm yeah I'm looking at sort of you know that this is the last strata wins best foreign language film like there's little things in the Oscars when you're sort of poking around like things like James Dean obviously I mean he's a piece he's already dead you know at this point but you know like there's stuff like that one of the weirdest and coolest Oscar wins ever happens this year.

[01:10:52] What's that what the red balloon winning best screenplay the red balloon really. Yeah the little 30 minute you know the red balloon the classic one best original screenplay. Yeah. Right. A short non dialogue film a 35 minute short that's mostly just a boy chasing a balloon one best original screenplay.

[01:11:11] Yeah over like beat the lady killed the bold and the brave Lestrade the lady killers it's in sense.

[01:11:18] Oh and look that's the value to me of the Oscars it's not what they get right it's the weird moments where they award something that you do not expect them to award.

[01:11:26] Or and also the huge misses they have are often so much more valuable to movies becomes that becomes part of the movie's lore.

[01:11:36] I mean you know Goodfellas is already a brilliant film and but part of its majesty it's the fact that you show that to someone today and they go and that clearly won best picture like nope.

[01:11:47] And then that's a new name what and no one remembers that it was dances with wolves which by the way is also a fine film but how many times do people watch dances with wolves like Goodfellas is like part of our vernacular now it's such it's such an amazing piece of filmmaking.

[01:12:01] Yeah and like if if that had been Scorsese's like coronation moment then hit the rest of his career is probably super different you know and that's exactly yeah yeah you know I showed it when I have a couple of friends.

[01:12:12] One of the the actress that I did this movie with I love my dad it was Claudia Slusky she and her boyfriend they're in their mid 20s made we were having dinner with him when my wife and I and we they'd let casual they'd never seen Goodfellas.

[01:12:27] I was like oh come over we'll have dinner and we'll watch my screen I'm watching two people in their mid 20s experience Goodfellas for the first time and which is a movie that was made before they were born and they're like it felt like that movie was over in 10 minutes like I couldn't believe how propulsive and there's no CGI there's no it's just performance and filmmaking and writing is keeping me glued to this screen.

[01:12:53] That movie could it was just amazing to watch them experience it.

[01:12:57] Was there any moment where they were like oh I knew that like you know like it's always fun to watch a film that has fully entered the cultural lexicon with someone who doesn't know maybe that it's coming right like some line or.

[01:13:10] The whole that the how am I funny scene you know the how am I funny the oh you broke your cherry apparently because the the guy is a musician and he's heard that amongst other musicians like oh my god I just signed this deal with Warner Brothers and they totally fucked me over oh you broke your cherry like welcome to the world now you know how shitty everything is and also just the way that they used music in that film it's all soundtrack but it tells a story at the same time.

[01:13:38] And especially one thing that I hadn't realized was at the end when Henry is driving around and he's just out of his mind on coke and seeing helicopters the way they cut the songs together is how you listen to music when you're coked out of your head.

[01:13:53] You're just zipping around the dial listen to two seconds of this song eight seconds of this song a minute of this one like it's all the the soundtrack design is a feat in itself that I don't think ever has been equaled ever ever in a film. It is.

[01:14:34] But like I don't envy you trying to make this movie but if you can pull it off it's what's the last line he says dear Marty it is a stunning script and we'll make a wonderful film and a priceless social document.

[01:14:46] And he's right and by the way one of the first I'm sure you guys already know this and this will bring us back to the killing because we're talking about that you know directors who really respect the documentary feel and the realism almost to a fault.

[01:15:00] The scene the Maurice wig shop commercial they there was a there's a version of that that score says he shot and he was like there's something wrong this doesn't work because he was basing it on an actual commercial that he saw for a wig shop growing up and that was made by the guy who ran the wig shop.

[01:15:18] So he tracked the guy down and had him shoot the commercial that you see in goodfellas that is shot that footage was shot and cut by the guy who owned that wig shop.

[01:15:30] That's that's because with me I won't be able to prevent myself it'll be cheap my right master exactly I want this guy which by the way one of those one of the standout moments of the movie it's so amazing that sequence is incredible.

[01:15:45] But like you know Kubrick getting back to Kubrick which is I will and again this is so weird how he got away from this I will sacrifice something looking good and professional if I can have something more real and immediate you know getting back to that fight with Lucien Ballard no let's do it with a wide angle lens make it look weird I know how it's going to look.

[01:16:06] It's also fascinating when you read sometimes these anecdotes that will come out about like Kubrick's favorite movies there are those stories about like him seeing what should we call it a modern romance. I've always wanted to make a movie about jealousy yeah right.

[01:16:21] Right and he was just like how did you do this like I need you Albert Brooks to give me Stanley Kubrick notes because you've captured a thing I failed to find a way to get on camera.

[01:16:31] To Albert's credit modern romance is a genuinely brilliant film that has aged so well and is so immediate about exactly how we are now there are moments in that movie that you just cringe watching they're so brilliant they're so brilliant.

[01:16:47] Incredible movies he had great taste but when you hear that Kubrick was like sending letters to Steve Martin about the jerk which is similarly classic and going like please give me notes how do you guys how did you pull this off you know.

[01:17:00] Well I will say I don't think Stanley really understood humor and a lot of his humor. He's most fascinated by that right.

[01:17:08] That and also because his idea of humor is very cruel it's very it's almost like and I love the Coen brothers but a lot of their humor even though a lot of the movies has made me laugh but when you I just rewatched Raising Arizona with our daughter and she's like wow they're really mean to these people Mike yeah like they are very cruel to their protagonists in their films.

[01:17:30] I think if you're if you're Kubrick and you're watching someone like Steve Martin or Alper Brooks who is able to like turn that criticism on themselves make themselves the avatar of the movie. Yes. And then dissect that character that much I think he's like flummoxed by that.

[01:17:45] Right right.

[01:17:46] And that was a that was a great thing from the 70s and it kind of held over a little bit with Gary Shandling and Ricky Gervais which is when the true comedian when they see what's wrong with society they don't want to be the person pointing out what's wrong.

[01:17:59] I want to play the thing that's wrong to show you maybe how that thing got to be the way it is.

[01:18:05] And if especially if you watch Brooks Alberts Martin mall Steve Martin even early Richard Pryor was in Blue Collar was so good at playing what the problem was rather than the hero fucking good performance. God is so good.

[01:18:19] It's a really one of my favorite movies in that decade. Yeah that's that's like a heart breaking heart that performance heartbreaking.

[01:18:25] It sort of falls into like the Sandler punch drunk love territory where you watch that movie and you're like I wish he did one of these every four years.

[01:18:32] Yeah I love that he did everything else in his career but I wish he was able to find someone like Schrader to write such a perfect dramatic role for him once before five.

[01:18:41] What's so brilliant about Adam Sandler is he really I think he recognizes and it's hard to articulate it because he doesn't want to be the guy pointing it out again a true comedian like Sandler doesn't want to be the guy pointing out.

[01:18:53] He wants to personify it that a lot of male energy especially in the 21st century is based on infantilism and rage and there's a lot of that.

[01:19:03] It's kind of it's funny but it's also sad that these guys just want to stay little kids their whole lives and but at one point you have to be dragged into adulthood and the best you can hope for is to do it on your own terms.

[01:19:17] And you know there's a you know in Big Daddy there's a there's some really beautiful touching moments in that film.

[01:19:25] In the middle of a lot of goofiness there's like oh he's having to you got to be an adult now you know and so Punch Drug Love is just a more direct version of that.

[01:19:36] The scene in Big Daddy where he takes him to McDonald's to get breakfast and it's too late for breakfast and he kind of loses it in the McDonald's right is not that far from like Punch Drug Love like from his weird little freak outs where he's too embarrassed to be in public anymore or whatever you know.

[01:19:52] It's that scene I the McDonald's scene in Big Daddy is very wrenching for some reason for like I've never forgotten that scene.

[01:19:59] And in Punch Drug Love they show you kind of where he why he is the way he is because of his horrible sisters and the way he was raised.

[01:20:06] They have that scene where he throws the chair through the window because you're like oh this guy was abused by people who thought they were just like oh we're just we're just making jokes.

[01:20:18] Can't you take a joke and you know so there's a lot of that I mean he's a he is a he's a genius hiding under a lot of goofiness in my opinion.

[01:20:29] And even Big Daddy has you know it's not as deeply characterized as the sister stuff in Punch Drug Love but like oh he's got this dad looming over him who just constantly thinks he's a fucking idiot. He spent his entire life being like my son is dumb. Yeah.

[01:20:43] And his entire personality has built around I'm a dumb guy. Yeah yeah yeah which you realize he created as a defense mechanism like if I'm already if I'm already so clownish and goofy then the other person's going to feel stupid making fun of me.

[01:21:00] Like if I'm already doing it for them then it takes away their power. Going back to something you brought up Patton that this movie is coming on the threshold of like we're within five years of New Hollywood starting to read his head right.

[01:21:15] And a big part of that and also a big part of like the the Cahiers de Cinema guys in Paris and everything is this sort of reclaiming of B movies of genre movies of elevating them to high art.

[01:21:29] And this movie is in this very weird position where it's like a kind of it is like a psychologically lofty B movie. It is not trying to purport itself to be anything more serious.

[01:21:44] It's not trying to turn itself into white heat you know into like a crime epic or anything. But it just has a little more thought a little more resonance a little more sort of sadness a little more craft.

[01:21:57] And when you look at the best pictures from this year it's like all the huge epics we cited and then like melodramas or like Tennessee Williams adaptations or like you know biopics are the biggest like. Yeah like Lust for Life is this year the Van Gogh movie right.

[01:22:12] You know stuff like that. Baby doll friendly persuasion we said you know Bold and the Brave. One of Hitchcock's most bloated movies Man Who Knew Too Much is this year. Really? Yeah. Written on the wind.

[01:22:25] You know it's like you need someone like you need someone like Kirk Douglas to recognize this guy is punching above his weight class. And I need to put him into a genre that they'll support a little more. Kirk Douglas in a war movie. Yeah.

[01:22:43] Is an easy enough thing to sell. But that's that's an unending cycle I think in all of the arts. You always get the person who's young and scrappy and doing something amazing.

[01:22:52] And then they turn into the bloated one that the then young the new version of young and scrappy has to come along.

[01:22:58] And you know so for every you know I'm sure there was a time when Emerson Lake and Palmer and Yes were the scrappy young rebels you know going against the whatever the rock and roll was.

[01:23:11] But by the early 70s it was giant bloated like what the hell happened to us. And then you need the Ramones to come along to go guys three chords. Guys remember fun. Remember how this was supposed to be fun. Remember when you had fun doing this.

[01:23:25] So that has to keep that happens over and over and over again. We even just think about like Kiss being like a fucking statement of opposition. Yeah. And it was at the time it was. And then it became this massive bloated OK.

[01:23:40] And then you had to have someone come along and go no it's this actually. You know I mean again. Yeah.

[01:23:46] In that all the all the young people coming up in the 80s people like Bruce Springsteen and Prince and stuff by the late 80s you know early 90s they'd become these bloated stadium monsters. So then Nirvana has got to come along.

[01:23:59] And you know it just it just keeps happening over and over and over again. It's the circle of life and waiting for it to happen right now.

[01:24:06] But I think you see a little bit of I mean the whole sort of elevated horror conversation which can get really exhausting.

[01:24:12] But what comes out of it is like there's now become a commercial model for people to make weirder films that can get wide distribution and can actually become like a topic of discourse in the general conversation.

[01:24:29] You know we're like David you were even just saying we were like looking at the box office and you were like it's kind of crazy that men has made like eight million dollars. And it's sort of viewed as like a flop that people aren't very happy with.

[01:24:42] But you were able to release it like semi wide and have it play at fucking malls and have people arguing about it in a way that's exciting. There is fucking people who saw that movie who will think about it for 10 years. And that's true of any of us.

[01:24:56] Right. You know even if like 90 percent of people are walking out upset or indifferent you know there's even a movie like men which I like but you know I thought was flawed. Some people don't like whatever.

[01:25:06] But you know there's just enough people who are going to see and be like well there was something there that I can't stop thinking about. Right. You know maybe they want to make a movie one day. I don't know.

[01:25:15] It's also weird how like right now of all of all the streaming services and I have you know I have Criterion I have Canopy. Shutter. Shutter has become the place to go to see emerging filmmakers. It's ridiculous how amazing that channel and they're financing stuff now.

[01:25:31] They're finding stuff so some of their originals are just like oh that person is going to be a huge filmmaker. I think that's a great call. It's like the Corman model. Yes. Become an ecosystem that supports interesting developing filmmakers. Here's a little bit of money.

[01:25:46] Do whatever you want. You know no real restrictions. Yeah. Yeah there's a movie there's a movie that's on Shutter now called Anything for Jackson. One of the genuinely not just scary but brilliantly made like these guys are going to be amazing filmmakers. Here's a launch.

[01:26:02] Go to their IMDB. They have spent the last 10 years writing Canadian the Canadian equivalent of Hallmark movies. All their other movies are like a puppy for Christmas and you know Santa's. And I like. Love in Harmony Valley. Yes. Baby in a manger.

[01:26:22] Anything for Jackson is so disturbing and terrifying and I've kind of become friends with them. They're like yeah we had our script for Anything for Jackson. We took it around and everyone's like yeah it's good. I don't know we can't really make it right.

[01:26:34] This is 10 years ago but a friend of ours was like this people they're looking for quick and dirty. Can someone write? Can someone direct? Like yeah we need the money and they fell into that world very profitable.

[01:26:44] They're good movie makers and then they finally it's the same George Romero thing of I'm just an industrial filmmaker. I've got this idea for a zombie movie. If he had never made Night of the Living Dead he still would have been a successful filmmaker.

[01:26:57] He had a very successful company. Yeah. He just happened to also be an artist in the middle of being a total professional. And same with these guys are like we got to pay the bills. A puppy for Christmas pays off our bills. Well I'll do it.

[01:27:12] No one else is giving us money to make Anything for Jackson. And finally thank God they got it done. You know it's amazing. I love stories like that. If all you're looking to do is get a screenplay produced and have that experience and that credit

[01:27:27] I think strategically the smartest move you could make is writing a TV Christmas romance film. Yeah why not? It's just like 60 of these are going to get greenlit per country per year. Right. Anyway Stephen King regularly reads and recommends romance novels because he goes romance novelists

[01:27:43] know how to tell a story and keep you moving through it. Hit the beat. Here we go. And he reads them to remind himself wait a minute get rid of the bloat. Let's tell the goddamn story here.

[01:27:57] Is there anything else you want to say about The Killing before we play the box office game? The one thing I wanted to mention of course is the clown mask that he puts on which you know Nolan obviously pays homage to in The Dark Knight.

[01:28:06] It looks basically the same the clown mask but I also do love that when he's putting on the I think it's intentional like he is a bit of a fool like you know it is sort of double

[01:28:17] yeah double edged thing of him putting on this scary mask but he also kind of looks like an idiot. The only the last thing I'm going to mention before I hop off because I know this is a big controversy

[01:28:26] and I'm still not convinced I'm sure you all know the is Rodney Dangerfield in this film? There's that big question. There's a guy in the during the fight sequence. You can freeze the frame. He looks like Rodney. I don't think it's Rodney.

[01:28:41] I just don't think it's Rodney Dangerfield. You can freeze frame it and there's a guy who's got the jaw. Yes, and he's got the eyes of Rodney. I would love it to be Rodney. I don't think it's Rodney. He is currently on IMDb.

[01:28:56] I don't think it's him and I want it to be him. It does kind of look like him. I mean it's listed on IMDb which is obviously like user submitted and edited as onlooker uncredited. His first official credit isn't until 1968 which is 12 years after this.

[01:29:13] Yes, again I don't think. I mean look Groucho Marx is listed as being in the candidate and he's not in the candidate. There's a guy at a barbecue that looks like him and it's not him and they put him on IMDb and it's so not him. Right.

[01:29:28] Okay, box office game. And just one final thought. I just wanted to say I think I would have been able to pull this off. Oh yeah, of course. That's just my last thought. In and out. I think I would have been able to do it.

[01:29:40] Just a little gaffer tape on the suitcase. Yeah, you're fine. Exactly. Gotta have tape on ya.

[01:29:47] Pat, when we covered Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan on this movie, Ben texted us and he said if I had been in this movie everything would have worked out and the movie would have ended with me living on a tropical island that I own.

[01:29:58] Anytime Ben watches a heist movie in which people fuck it up, he believes I know I could have done this. I could have pulled this off. All right. I would have scored big. I'm confident. I don't know. Yeah, always. All right.

[01:30:12] So the week this came out, we're going to guess the top five Griff of the box office. This movie sort of premiered nationwide in June 1956. Premiered in New York earlier, but we're doing nation. Number one at the box office is probably the best movie in 1956. Maybe.

[01:30:28] It's probably the best movie of 19? It's kind of a masterpiece of the genre. The Searchers. It's The Searchers. Bingo. Well done. You might beat me at this one, Patton. Number two at the box office, Griff, is not a movie I've seen.

[01:30:41] It's a George Cukor movie starring Ava Gardner. Okay. Based on a novel, big movie, I think kind of a hit. There's no way you're going to know this. Stuart Granger. Is it based on anything? It's a novel. So based on a novel. The Contessa? No.

[01:31:02] Kind of the right territory. It's set in India. It's a big like Indian Anglo Indian epic. Ava Gardner looks great. No. Does it have rains in the title? No. It's a location. It's a junction, in fact. All right. The movie is called Bawani Junction.

[01:31:24] Has anyone heard of Bawani Junction? No. Absolutely not. I don't know. Ava Gardner looks good on the poster. Can I just circle back just for a moment? It's funny to think about The Searchers feels like one of those movies where you're like,

[01:31:37] oh, when it came out, critics hated it and it flopped. Right. That's sort of a thing. Later through this modern prism. But think of it playing as like this fat, titty blockbuster. Yeah. It was a big hit. And like you. It was a big.

[01:31:50] It was a big hit. And it had like a Dell Comics tie in like kids were fucking buying. Wow. The comic adaptation of The Searchers. This movie about loneliness. Yeah. The Searchers rules. OK. Number three. I mentioned it already. It's a Hitchcock movie.

[01:32:08] I really think it's one of his worst movies. It's an iconic movie. Who knew too much. Yeah. Who knew too much. It's a remake, obviously. It's got K-Sara. That whole scene at the end when they're singing the song. That's oh my God. I hate that scene so much.

[01:32:25] And like Patton, what you were saying about stripping it down. It's like he's going to do Vertigo and Psycho. And, you know, like he's I feel like at the apotheosis of a sort of like movie star Hollywood shit that he's going to stop doing right.

[01:32:38] Sometimes you have to feel the bloat a little bit to go, OK, wait a second. Strip all this shit down. It's ridiculous. Yeah. So, yeah, not an amazing movie. Number four. The most new this week is a documentary film in which a guy is filming The Seven Wonders

[01:32:53] of the World. Guess what it's called? The Seven Wonders of the World. That's right. I have never heard of it. Why would people do this? It's a two hour movie. It's just a guy like the pyramids. I don't know. He's just going around.

[01:33:08] Back then it was it was a fucking novelty. It wasn't easy to travel. So like a guy made a movie where he went and took pictures of him. I'll go look at those pictures. And people still couldn't get over movie cameras like the idea that it's like Everest.

[01:33:22] You're going to watch a movie. There was a period when they started doing the Blu-ray releases of like the Disney classics in the late 2000s or whatever. They also started restoring all these like Disney nature documentary shorts. And some of them were just like a river. Yeah.

[01:33:41] And you'd watch it and it was just 15 minutes of river photography with like dramatic underscoring. And you're like, why would anyone watch this? And then two minutes later you are captivated. Just absolutely transfixed. Number five of the box office is a musical.

[01:33:56] I would say not a great movie. Not a great movie. It's a movie that is sort of a part of what we were talking about. The sort of like very, very bloated Hollywood big budget picture of the time. Sort of the stuff that Fosse was rebelling against.

[01:34:11] I mean it's a wonderful musical. It's just it's not a particularly good movie. I don't know my musicals. What is it? It is Oklahoma. Oh, that's a great musical. It's a wonderful musical and it's one of those things where when I was a kid I loved

[01:34:26] Oklahoma the musical so I was like, can I see the movie? My mom was like, sure. And she put it on and she was like, it kind of sucks. I'm sorry. Like it's too bad.

[01:34:35] The only thing that's good is Rod Steiger plays Judd, plays the villain and he rules. He's really good. Yeah. That's good counseling. But everything else. I feel like no one ever talks about that movie. No, it's one of those very, it's a Fred Zinneman movie.

[01:34:47] It's a very staid, nice looking, you know, straightforward adaptation of Oklahoma that just doesn't have a lot of life. Gloria Graham, Eddie Albert. Yeah, Gloria Graham. James Whitmore. It's got good people. Yeah, obviously.

[01:35:01] But Gloria Graham is like Adu Annie, like the Shirley Jones and Gordon McRae are the stars. Yeah. So that's the box office in 1956. I love an old box office game. Yeah. You've also got the lady killers in there.

[01:35:17] You got, you know, the man in the gray flannel suit. You got some good movies. Well, gentlemen, this was delightful. I do have to hop off. No, Pat, thank you so much for doing this. But before you do that, tell us about your movie. It's available right now.

[01:35:31] At the time this episode comes out, yes, it'll be available digitally and hopefully also still playing in theaters in some places. Yes. My movie is called I Love My Dad, and it's written, directed and co-starring a young filmmaker, took a chance on a young filmmaker, James Morosini.

[01:35:47] Just an incredible, incredible talent. And basically it's about a real thing that happened to him in real life. He had kind of disowned his dad and blocked him on all social media.

[01:35:55] So his dad created a fake Facebook profile of a hot girl to catfish him so he could stay in touch with him. But he ended up falling in love with the girl. And it just it is a it is a hilarious, dark, cringe fest.

[01:36:10] You will absolutely love it. It's streaming now on Apple TV. It's still in some theaters. I really, really think you'll like it. I'm very excited to see it. Thanks for coming on the show, Patton. Oh, guys, thank you so much. Thanks for having me on.

[01:36:26] Down the road in the future, there's some other big movie you want to do a deep dive on. I'm happy to do it again. This was great. Oh, absolutely. You've been a dream guest for so long.

[01:36:37] If any of our listeners have not read Silver Screen Fiend, it is clear that you're the same sort of compulsive, obsessive, crazy, crazy fan. I'm a fan. But all of these movies and Watcher Addict. Yes, I mean, that movie is. Right. Don't dibble dabble.

[01:36:55] Addict. No, but that book is about you kind of finding a healthy relationship to movies. Yes. Thank you. True crippling addiction. Yeah, crippling is the right word. Oh, my God. Yes. Wow. But you've you've always been a dream guest because of exactly what happened, which is

[01:37:12] imagine what happened if you came on the show is all these sudden jags of all three of us going. That reminds me of this movie. Do you remember this thing? That person's career. That's what I love the most about this kind of stuff. I love it.

[01:37:24] I love those weird. Yeah, the weird connections. Best shit in the world. We will bug you to come on again sometime. Let me let me let me leave you guys with one more Timothy Carey story that someone told. Please. OK, please.

[01:37:34] Timothy Carey was originally cast on Laverne and Shirley as Squiggy's dad. What? He was going to play Squiggy's dad. He got fired. The first day I was talking to my I was having lunch with Michael McKean. I go, how why did you fire Timothy Carey?

[01:37:48] He's like, we didn't want to fire him. We wanted Timothy Carey so badly, but that he would not stop farting. His whole thing was. Like on command. No, no, not even.

[01:38:00] He's like his whole philosophy was the minute you have to fart, you should immediately fart like for your health. Like he was all about that. Never hold it really. And he would sit there and goes, what's the what's the policy on breaking wind here?

[01:38:14] And then like, well, we get too late. It was kind of go like this. And they're like, OK. And then after the first day, I think like Penny and David Lander went to they were like, we got to get rid of this guy.

[01:38:26] He's out of his fucking mind and they wanted him so badly. But another actor came into play. But originally he was cast to play Squiggy's dad and he got fired for farting. That is incredible. And now a new aspiration for my own career.

[01:38:40] That's the limit I want to test. Whenever, whenever, when you feel it, when you feel it, fart it. Don't don't hesitate. That's going to be my new like Brando-esque test for directors I'm working with. If you feel it, fart it. Yeah.

[01:38:55] Thank you so much again for being on the show. Everyone check out I Love My Dad and thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review and subscribe. Thank you to Marie Barty for social media, helping put the show together.

[01:39:07] Lay Montgomery, the Great American for our theme song. AJ McKeon and Alex Baron for editing. Joe Bowen, Pat Reynolds for our artwork. You can go to BlankCheckPod.com for links to some real nerdy shit, including our Patreon page, Blank Check, special features where we do franchise commentaries.

[01:39:23] And I think at this point we've finished up Batman and we're moving on to the Roger Moore Bonds. That's right. Having fun. So look for that, including what I'll just tease is, I think, a very exciting Kubrick-themed plan we have for Talking the Walk later this year.

[01:39:41] And as always, I still cannot believe that David jumped on Patton's television of the Bronson Penn Show. I'm sorry. I am. I violently refuse any apology for that. All right, fine. I'm proud of myself. I'm proud of myself.