The Ward with Drew McWeeny

[00:00:00] Blank Check with Griffin and David, Blank Check with Griffin and David, Blank Check Listen, don't let this place get to you. You stay locked up long enough and you start to believe that you're a podcast. Do you know what the line? You must know what the line is.

[00:00:31] I don't know. What are you replacing there? No, no, David, I don't know what the line is. I have no idea what the line is. Yes, the line is you start to believe that you're not. I don't know what lines are there in this movie. You know what?

[00:00:44] Yeah, no, that's fine. Here are some of the other lines in this movie. I am a little girl. Mm hmm. I'm flirty. I'm artsy and I wear glasses. I don't think you're doing lines from the movie right now. I think you're you're I think those are verbatim.

[00:01:00] I think those are verbatim. And that's that's that character's introduction. Iris, where she just kind of tells them, oh, I'm the crazy one. Oh, no, I'm sorry. That's I got Iris and Emily confused. That's that's Iris is the artsy glasses.

[00:01:13] She's the one who says you stay in here long enough. You start to become convinced that you're nuts. Yeah. So you got you got Iris's is is glasses and you've got Sarah. What's she? She's Sarah is flirty, flirty, right? Zoe is is baby.

[00:01:33] It's sort of like the Spice Girls. Right. Oh, right. Yeah, right. You're right. Now that I think about it, Kristen is scary. She's very scary. I think Sarah is ginger. Sarah is ginger. Zoe is baby. The question, I guess Emily is posh and Iris is sporty.

[00:01:52] I'm sort of following it. It's sort of we're losing the thread. We're losing it. OK, yeah, that's OK. There's still, you know, inside of us are all there are five spices. Right. That's the idea. Right.

[00:02:04] And the spice melange, I like to call it inside all five of us. David, David, you know, this is the end of our John Carpenter mini series. I should say, of course, that this is a blank check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David.

[00:02:21] It's a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want. And sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce baby.

[00:02:32] So for the last, oh, almost five months, we've been doing the films of John Carpenter. Johnny C. Wait, five months? Really? I think we started August, September, October, November. It's I mean, it's a little under five months, four and a half or something. Right. Wow. Wow.

[00:02:49] We started end of August. We're finishing beginning of December. I don't know. I mean, time is an illusion, but hey, it was a good ride. It was a great ride. It was a great ride that Ben, producer Ben, you gifted to us because, of course, John

[00:03:03] Carpenter was the winner of our March Madness series where once a year we let our listeners vote for which director we're going to cover. And we did brackets where we each picked our elite eight and Ben's pick, John Carpenter, his top pick ended up winning this whole thing.

[00:03:20] This has been a bit of a Ben's choice in a very chill and ordinary competition. Absolutely. Definitely didn't stress me out as I was on the verge of becoming a father. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:03:33] But the point is we've known that this was on the books and some public knowledge. This was on the books for a long time leading into then five months of actually doing the episodes.

[00:03:43] And I feel like the thing that's been hanging over us like the sort of Damocles this entire time is we have to end on the ward. The ward. John Carpenter's. I guess so. You know what, Griffin? I hinted at this.

[00:03:57] You know, I think I thought this movie was way worse than it is because I guess it like never really came out. And sure, the poster made it look like torture porn. Yeah. And then I watched it and I was like, oh, that wasn't so bad.

[00:04:11] Like it's not it's probably it might be his worst movie, but that doesn't that doesn't mean it's like it was it was I felt OK watching it. This is the thing. I, I, I think it's his worst movie sort of by default.

[00:04:26] I don't think it's like a horrible film. I don't think it's anywhere near the bottom of the barrel of movies we've covered on this show. But but I do think in its own way, it's like the most depressing end to a series we've had so far.

[00:04:41] That's sort of my thesis I'm working on. I don't agree with you for a bunch of reasons. I was saying this to Ben and our guest who can talk at any time if you want at any time. And I can just jump in. That's true.

[00:04:55] Yeah, you can just jump in. It's encouraged. But the Burton mini. And a couple other times, I think a little bit with the Spielberg, maybe the very long minis, they sometimes end with us being like, all right, enough of this. Right.

[00:05:14] You know, we're just kind of like, OK, we've we've had the conversation. I agree. I agree. I don't feel that way here. I could do another month of this guy. I know the saddest one. The saddest one is roadies. That is the saddest end. Well, sure.

[00:05:29] That is the saddest end. That was tough. Man, you guys watch that whole thing to remember. Like one night. It's also weird there. There have not even been like whispers, I feel like of another Cameron Crowe project since then. And it's not like he's persona non grata.

[00:05:44] Like he does interviews and he'll do retrospectives and he re-releases the almost famous soundtrack on an 18 disc set that I bought like a idiot. It feels like post Aloha. He just went, I'm good. I think I've done it. Well, but then roadies is like right after Aloha.

[00:05:59] And you're like, OK, Cameron, scale it back. Work with another writer. Get back into the sweet spot. And then roadies is you're right. Perhaps an even more depressing end. Wasn't he supposed to make Beautiful Boy?

[00:06:11] I guess that yeah, he was sort of the last time we did the miniseries. That's what he was attached to do. And there was a thing where he said he had written a script that was like his small

[00:06:19] change that he wanted to make a movie that was like all kids because he saw a lot of kids he liked when he was casting Aloha and he started writing something just for an ensemble of children.

[00:06:30] Neither of those movies I've heard anything about for so long, obviously, and Beautiful Boy got made by someone else. I think the difference here is and then I'm going to make a very smooth, clean transition

[00:06:39] into introducing our guest formally, who is talking a perfect amount for not having been introduced yet, but could talk even more if he wants. Is that. With Burton. With Pro. Even I mean, Spielberg, I'd say less of a thing because you're like Spielberg's made

[00:06:59] good movies since we, you know, finished covering him. We go back and circle around to him. Burton's going to make more stuff. I don't know how excited I am about the stuff he's going to make going forward, but he's going to make more stuff, right?

[00:07:11] Uh, two more Dumbo, Dumbo versus Trumbo. But I am trying to fly in the bathtub. There is just the question of whether this is the last thing John Carpenter does. Yes, right.

[00:07:28] The uh, is that really he doesn't want to do one last kind of obviously he works, he does music, he's out there. That's what he's right. That's the thing that makes it more depressing to me than the other directors you mentioned. I mean, the only other one.

[00:07:45] No, here's the answer. There's one that's more depressing than this that we've covered is John Singleton's career ending with abduction because it's like book formally closed. That's true. That's worse because there's no uh and you know what Griffin, the witches was a pretty bad final.

[00:08:01] We've had a lot of bad last episodes of miniseries late. Yeah, but Brooks thinks pretty hard at the end to with how did this get or how did uh yes, yes, yes. How do you remember the damn title anymore? What do you know?

[00:08:14] How do you know how did this get made? True. Are you implying that that title is nonspecific and difficult to remember? Oh, not at all. It's incredibly specific and I just can't remember it. It's my problem.

[00:08:24] I'm sure look, the tee up I'm doing here is that our guest today is uh, despite being someone who's long overdue to get on the pod, um, is someone who has uh, is something of a carpenter expert and has very close connection to carpenter in many ways.

[00:08:39] Uh, and he reached out as soon as carpenter one and said, I'd love to do anything. And we kind of like I went to you drew and I said, would you take the bullet for the ward? Like I don't want to end on a downer.

[00:08:52] I think you're such a blockbuster guest for carpenter. Would you mind juicing up a movie we might have less to talk about with more context? It feels like a great place to come in and talk carpenter because we can kind of now

[00:09:06] talk because I've listened to your whole series except what hasn't gone up yet. And I've really enjoyed the series. I find that when I listen to blank check, yours is one of the few podcasts I yell at a lot.

[00:09:17] Well, I just I want to be in the middle of the conversation frequently. I'm like, oh, I want to, I want to let me interject. But of course, you can't hear me for some reason. So yeah, so this series has been definitely full of that.

[00:09:29] And and there's like it's a perfect moment because this was the movie he made right after I had spent several years working with him. So it's a perfect moment of timing. That's the other thing.

[00:09:40] It just felt like I was like, I don't think this is the movie you'd be most excited to talk about. But I think in a way it could end up being the most interesting episode for you to come on just because of where it lands on everything.

[00:09:51] But our guest today, of course, is film critic Drew McWheeney of Voix, the Netflix series, but also writer of John Carpenter's Pro-Life and Cigarette Burns. Voix. Poe writer. Indeed. Voix. Voix. Before we begin, I told you, Griffin, that I have a very special Ben story. Oh, yes.

[00:10:14] I have something to tell Ben, to share with Ben. OK. That I've been excited to share with you. Yes. So when I first moved to Los Angeles back in 1990, I looked around for whatever film job I could get.

[00:10:26] I was managing a theater, but I was also taking whatever film side jobs I could get. And my first big gig was as an extra. And I did extra work in a couple of movies, including Clifford. I am Clifford. Shit. Wait. Oh, true. Wait. OK. When? What scene?

[00:10:44] Is it at the is it at the party? When he throws? Oh, my God. I am at the party. They shot that at a party house out in the Pacific Palisades, and it was this entire night and to do the dance to get everybody in sync for dancing.

[00:10:55] They would play the first like 25 seconds of Groove is in the Heart and then stop the music and we had to keep the beat to that. I still to this day cannot hear Groove is in the Heart without getting a twitch like it that beginning. It's burned in.

[00:11:09] But it was about four or five hours of just watching Martin Short do stick from about five feet away. So that's incredible. Believable evening. That's an unbelievable evening. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Are you visible in the movie from like here down? That's OK. OK. Yeah. OK.

[00:11:26] There's a whole there's a whole section of the party where this is all you get of anybody, basically. Yeah. But I recognize that torso. We should mention that you are currently wearing a Porkchop Express shirt. Indeed.

[00:11:37] And right over your shoulder, you're just filming and what I assume is your office. But the framing of the zoom window right now directly over your shoulder is the head of the demon from just popping in to say hi. What's it looks like? He's sneaking behind you.

[00:11:54] Do you take zoom meetings and just not acknowledge it? Exactly. Exactly. He's just back. I love that company. Drew, I want to just start out with asking you the massive, all consuming question. Sure. Can you tell us about your relationship with John Carpenter?

[00:12:10] And I mean, in all senses, as as a film fan and then also as you became someone who got to collaborate with him. I had a really weird series of encounters with Carpenter over the course of my life because I met him when I was 14.

[00:12:25] I was I lived in Chattanooga in Tennessee and had no connections to the film industry. My friend's mom did extras casting. So she'd done movies like The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia and The Dollmaker and a couple of things like that.

[00:12:39] But nothing really big had come through. And then she gets this notice that this John Carpenter film is coming to town and she reaches out to my mom and says, hey, I think I can probably get him a day on the set just to

[00:12:49] stand around in the background. Would he be interested? So I went and it ended up being a truly formative, life changing experience because I when I got to the base camp, they were shooting. Which movie was this? That was the scene for Starman.

[00:13:04] So he comes into town for Starman and they shot a ton of it in that area. They shot the big forest fire in that area. The scene that I was there for was the day the guy pulls them over on the side of the

[00:13:14] road and they get out and he blows the fire or the telephone pole up with the spheroid and then the guy gets back in his truck and drives away. So it's like an encounter on the side of the road.

[00:13:26] And when I got to base camp, they drove me out. The unit publicist drove me out. The whole way out, I was ranting and raving about. So I read in Starlog that this was going to be Brian De Palma and then that changed studios

[00:13:36] and that and halfway to the location, he's like, what are you? What kind of freaky little movie trivia machine are you? You mutant. So he got me out to the set and introduced me to Carpenter. And I have zero idea.

[00:13:51] Like hearing all the stories about Grumpy John makes no sense to me because literally he took a 14 year old, sat me next to him in Video Village, talked to me all day and then introduced me to the movie stars and really answered questions and told me what

[00:14:04] he was doing. And there was zero reason to I was nobody. It wasn't like there was some favor he was doing for somebody important. I was just some kid that came to the set and lost his mind.

[00:14:14] And yeah, he ended up giving me a copy of the scripts was the first screenplay I ever read in actual screenplay format. And it was life changing. And then years and years go by.

[00:14:25] I moved to L.A. in 1990 and I start working at Davis Video, a Laserdisc store, and he's one of our customers. And I remember the first day he came in and we had a copy. We had just gotten in a letterbox copy of the thing.

[00:14:37] And so I asked my manager, I said, do you mind if I just pull that and get John to? And he goes, no, it's fine. John, John won't care. And so I did that. And as he was signing it, I said, listen, you won't remember this.

[00:14:48] But years ago when you were shooting Starman and I didn't even finish and he started laughing because he the kid with the broken arm. And I said, yeah, that was that was me. And he goes, oh, yeah, I remember you. Wow. You were a lot.

[00:14:59] And so I ended up getting to know him a little bit there. And then when Ain't It Cool started and I started working there, I interviewed him a few times for that. And he just kind of invited open the door on the process was like, well, listen, I'm

[00:15:11] doing stuff when Ghosts of Mars was shooting or in post. He said, why don't you come down and hang out? I'm going to score the film. And so I went to the recording studio and just hung out while he was recording.

[00:15:21] For that film, his entire technique was he would have a guest in like Buckethead and then he would have a joint going and he would just stand there and play guitar while he was watching stuff and go play something. And Buckethead would play something. Oh, yeah, it's good.

[00:15:34] It was the craziest, like three weeks of watching him work. And he was so entertaining. But it was just like I kept running into him and kept having these encounters. So when Masters of Horror got off the ground, I was not connected to him.

[00:15:48] I met Mick Garris is the one that. So that was that was my more specific question. OK, interesting. Yeah, it was it was not because of John. It was Mick Garris, who I had also met at Dave's video.

[00:15:57] And Mick was the first guy in this town to really open doors for me and let me on sets. And Mick was amazing. I could tell you stories about the hook set because when Sleepwalkers was shooting, like

[00:16:08] it's Mick was connected to all sorts of stuff and let us in a lot of doors. But he was the one that called us and said, listen, we're doing this. And if you want to pitch, you can pitch a couple of things.

[00:16:17] And he bought both of them in the room the first day. He said, we'll just do these for the two seasons. We'll do back to back. So you decide which one you want to do first. And we did Cigarette Burns first.

[00:16:27] And it was only after we turned it in that John read it and committed to it. And that was kind of one of those moments. To interrupt you for a moment, to zoom out for context for people who don't know.

[00:16:38] So this is post Ghost of Mars and Carpenters like I'm out, right? Yes. And he was very done. He was retired. Yeah. Right. He was like over it. And I think a thing that we've come to realize or at least surmise

[00:16:54] as this has been going on, David and I is that like there does seem to be this disconnect between the grumpy carpenter of poll quotes in interviews and and who the guy kind of actually is. And there was a kind of self-protective front, you know,

[00:17:15] of just kind of acting over it to sort of. Well, I think the industry let himself in the industry. Yes, exactly. Right. Yeah. He definitely felt like and I truly believe this, too. There should be a certain point at which, you know, we saw Mike Lee on Twitter

[00:17:32] last week and they were talking about how Mike Lee can't find financing. This is very depressing. Yeah, it's maddening. It's mad. It's Mike Lee. Just give him the goddamn money. Right. It's Mike Lee. There's no argument. He's 78 years old.

[00:17:44] Just that man should just make movies until he doesn't want to anymore. And it should obviously if Mike Lee walks in and is like, I need 90 million dollars. I'm making a movie about a spaceship. I might have like ten more questions.

[00:17:56] But if there's a little bit of oversight, a Mike Lee movie, it's like, great. I love those. Those are have a proven track record. Yes. Same with Carpenter. Yes. Right. It's like fucking if we're going to live in a world in which this conglomerates and tech companies

[00:18:12] eat us up, the least they can do is sort of be like patrons of the arts for like our elder statesmen, where it's like Netflix. Just give Mike Lee eight million dollars and shut up. Well, the funny thing is that is kind of what these companies do,

[00:18:25] at least for a little while, not Carpenter maybe. But like and then, you know, now maybe they're all starting to grow beyond. But like, you know, Amazon in those early days, it was like, let's have a Whit Stillman movie in a Spike Lee movie.

[00:18:35] You know, like that's that was their early strategy. Right. First five years of Amazon really seemed like let's take all the 90s auteurs of like the indie revolution who cannot get financing anymore. What's a movie you want to make? Right. And they just come on.

[00:18:50] Jarmusch is back still. Stillman's back. We're giving Spike a bigger budget than he's had in a while. Like they just kind of got everyone off the bench. And then, as always seems to happen, these people use kind of prestige to get their foot in the door.

[00:19:04] And then they increasingly sort of disregard it. Or if they want to do prestige, they want to do the Irishman version of prestige. They'd rather spend 200 million dollars on that than than making 15 movies from all the other guys who don't have the same cloud of score sazing.

[00:19:18] I think I think he had had three really difficult experiences in a row. And right. So we're talking what are we talking at this vampires? Was vampires. Escape from L.A. broke his heart. Escape. Right. Escape from L.A. Vampires, Ghosts of Mars. Right. Ghosts of Mars.

[00:19:34] All three really hard and unnecessarily hard. Like, right. I know. I know with Escape from L.A., he starts with a certain budget and they slash his budget almost in half as they start shooting and schedule. Oh, they went from 75 million to 34 million without cutting the script.

[00:19:51] He all the info we had was that it was 50. That's nuts. He lost his mind. It was they cut almost half of his budget. And it was a nightmare like it. And I love the original Escape from L.A. script.

[00:20:05] To me, the difference was in those screenplays was always that he never lived in New York. New York to me, Escape from New York feels like a movie written by a guy who's never been to New York. And this is what he imagines New York is like.

[00:20:17] And then there's gangs and the subways are on. And they do it like that's what it feels like. Whereas Escape from L.A. is a direct satire of the city he has lived in his whole life. Yeah. And that he hates very much. Right. And so there is.

[00:20:31] I think there's a real blistering wit to the script of Escape from L.A. that never really gets translated to the screen because he's just playing catch up the whole time, trying to just keep that film from falling apart. And that's it guts me.

[00:20:44] Vampires, there was a point where he left. He just quit. There was a point midway through the shoot where he was like, I'm done and got up and left the set because vampires didn't. They also cut the budget out from under that happened again.

[00:20:57] And right now, Tarot, I think it was Nicotero directed two or three days of vampires until they cast on back because he just was like, what am I doing? What am I doing? Why am I fighting you? Why do I have to fight you?

[00:21:10] I'm making a movie for you. I'm John Carpenter. I know what I'm doing. I do also feel like those three movies are the movies where he is. I don't know, like, you know, like the kind of blockbuster the Hollywood makes is changing, right?

[00:21:25] Like, yes. Oh, and there's there. Right. And then the approach effects wise and the approach story wise is changing and the notes he's getting are, you know, the corporate thinking is changing and all that. Right. We talked a lot about because it hasn't come out yet.

[00:21:38] But in the Ghosts of Mars episode, no, we talk a lot about how like the next year after that is I think the first Resident Evil and then the Transporter is the same year, the year after that.

[00:21:50] And it's like between the new wave of what Screen Gems movies are post Resident Evil, right? And then sort of what EuropaCorp formalizes with Transporter. It's like those are the styles of these types of B movies from then on out. And he now is in a different vein.

[00:22:09] He's a step in the past. You know, he's not making MTV stylized films. Which is why I think the pitch that Mick Garis made for Masters of Horror worked, which was just here's your budget. Right. I'll give you a script and then you just go shoot that script

[00:22:24] and there will be no interference and you just go do what you want. And it came out of these dinners he would organize. Right. I mean, we've referenced this a lot before, but sort of that whole generation of horror and genre filmmakers would get these dinners together,

[00:22:35] largely organized by Mick Garis, who we've referenced a bunch, not just because he comes up in all these different ways. People don't get it. But Mick is the glue that holds 80 genre together. Mick is from the very beginning when he was working in Avco

[00:22:48] and then when he was a publicist and when he was working with Universal. There's the fear on film thing we reference all the time. That's that's Landis Carpenter and Cronenberg. Right. Yeah, he was essential in kind of shaping that narrative

[00:23:00] in the early 80s of these are the guys worth paying attention to. And even though it didn't quite work, it's the reason the seeds got planted. And I think it took root with a bunch of us that were paying attention

[00:23:11] and were of a certain age and who were wide open to it. Right. You and Rebecca Swan are like two prime examples of people who grew up as children of those filmmakers. Oh, my God. And now Mick Garis is seeing this whole generation of guys

[00:23:23] who cannot get their movies made anymore. And so, right. His pitches. Let me take all these guys I invite to dinner every time essentially give them blank checks within a very limited budget. You know, shooting schedule TV, but like creative free reign.

[00:23:38] And the smart thing was he pitched it as well. It's how funded by Anchor Bay. It's how funded by Showtime. So if we do something that Showtime doesn't like, fine. We'll just dump it to DVD. Right. It'll be uncensored. Nobody will get to cut you.

[00:23:54] And that was really the big promise. And this is like the peak of DVD sales. And Anchor Bay had made like a fucking fortune reissuing. Oh, my God. Yes. Every 80s horror movie every other month. So they knew, like no matter what, if we slap a disc out

[00:24:09] that has Carpenter on it or Dante on it or whomever on it, Tobe Hooper, Don Coscarelli or whatever, it will work. It will sell. It'll move units. Yeah. And so they gave us basically they told us you have a million dollars

[00:24:22] to do an hour and whatever you want within that go. Yeah. And so that was it. And and so just to circle back here, Mick is sort of gathering together writers, having them just pitch ideas.

[00:24:38] And then he's going to the directors and saying, do any of these jump out to you? That's the process. I know he had approached some of the directors and they said, I have a story Some of the directors didn't.

[00:24:48] And John was at a place where John was in his I'm eating fried chicken and playing Xbox phase creatively. It's just not. Yeah. Yeah. And just wasn't interested. Tired of fighting, as as he said, he's just I'm tired of fucking having to fight.

[00:25:03] And so I think it was when Mick said, I have several scripts. Are you interested in at least reading a script? And John was like, if I see something I like, maybe. And so he didn't know it was me when he chose that script.

[00:25:17] It wasn't until we got in the room and then he connected all the dots and was like, oh, my God, that's on that first day. I was like, all right, fellas. And he is as terrifying as you would think.

[00:25:28] Our first first thing he said was, all right, I like it. Every single page we got work to do. I'm like, oh, OK, here we go. But he taught me. And one of the things that he really emphasized,

[00:25:40] and I think it was budget was the reason, but it when you guys talk about all of his movies, whether it's big budget or small budget. He very he has the same mindset, which is on the page, you can write stuff like there's atmosphere, there's mood,

[00:25:54] there's things like that. But that's not something you can shoot. He wants the script to be what am I pointing my camera at? What is the thing I'm looking at? Don't tell me anything else. I don't need anything else. Just tell me what I'm pointing my camera at.

[00:26:07] And I know how to make that scary. Yeah. So you can you can put gravy on it on the page. It doesn't matter. John's going to shoot. John has his own visual plant, and you should just trust him. Get out of his way.

[00:26:18] He really taught us to strip everything down. Think about what he was shooting. Think about what we were accomplishing. When you're getting notes from John Carpenter on horror and you're just having conversations with him about what scares you and why this is scary and why this isn't scary.

[00:26:34] It's awesome. Like that is the best creative experience you could hope for. And he was 100% engaged on both. He really enjoyed this process. I have a couple logistical questions. Sure. What what was the time in between the two of them being shot?

[00:26:48] They had a two season pickup from the get go. Or did make just buy both scripts. So we had stuff in the pool that it was. He bought both treatments and then had us commissioned the first script.

[00:27:00] Then after the first season, they knew they were going to do a second. We shot the first one summer of 2005 and we started shooting the day my first son was born. Wow. So that's how I remember the date is like it was the day that he was born.

[00:27:13] And then the second one was the next spring. We shot that. And and then on the second one, we kind of didn't have total freedom. We ran into the money thing. And I think one of the reasons that I was really surprised that John did the ward was

[00:27:31] we were about to start shooting. We had 10 days and a million dollars like we did on the first one. And then we got told at the end of our first day, we just lost two days because Landis went long. So we lost days to land.

[00:27:45] It's fucking Landis and watching John absorb that and go, all right. And we don't really have an ending on pro life. It's one of my it's one of the craziest things about the episode is we didn't shoot our ending. Our endings kind of not in the movie.

[00:27:59] So we just kind of ran out of time. And John had to cut an ending around something that wasn't really done. And but it was just we we literally ran out of money on that one. And to be with somebody who is this

[00:28:15] classic Titan filmmaker who has made landmark game changing genre defining movies and you're struggling to get two extra days on a one hour. It just I can see why it broke him. Like it it just got to him again.

[00:28:34] I feel like I've invoked this before, but there's this interview. I that sort of haunts me for maybe like 10 years ago with John Waters and they were asking him why he hadn't made another movie since a low down dirty shame. And they're like, you're John Waters.

[00:28:52] You're a legend. You can't get financing. And he's like, I can't get financing for the movie I would like to make, which would cost 15 to 20 million dollars. I meet with people and they say, if I have a script I could do

[00:29:07] for, you know, five million dollars in 21 days that I could get that green lit. And he's like, but I'm too old and I'm too tired. And I did that so many times. And, you know, right. When I was in my fucking 20s, I was like, oh, shut up.

[00:29:22] Take the job. What do you complain about? You get to make movies and then you work enough. And you're like, there is a point where it sort of becomes more soul crushing to feel like you're stuck in this, like, you know, like you're Sisyphus

[00:29:34] just having to fucking push this boulder up the hill over and over and over again. Not that you ever need it to be easy, but you're just like, I should be past the these specific battles. It should be creatively difficult, not financially and logistically difficult.

[00:29:51] And you shouldn't be fighting over two fucking days like shit like that. Right. Where he's just like, I'd rather be retired and fucking be John Waters and make cameos and Alvin the Chipmunks for and fucking present awards

[00:30:02] at the Independent Spirit Awards and have a ball than make another movie for no money. We pitched him so much. We tried so hard. And there was about six months where I really thought we were going to get him back into doing a feature.

[00:30:14] Really, really felt like it was close. And in the last ten years. Yeah, this was right after pro-life. We were really trying to get him to do a feature. And we had a couple of things he he liked and he was he was like, maybe, maybe.

[00:30:27] And so I could tell the energy was there. And he said in interviews, this is that's the whole thing. The only reason he made the word was he said many times that like doing the two masters of horror things kind of reinvigorated him, reminded him

[00:30:37] why he liked it. Yeah. And I think it was the fact that we had fun. And part of it was that we were so hyper about having him on set. Like it was such a big deal to us.

[00:30:47] And I think he kept being entertained by the fact that we were flipping out. And I don't think that's something he's been around. I truly think a lot of his collaborators are somewhat blase about him.

[00:30:58] And I think he has this, especially towards the later part of his career. Ghost of Mars was not a set where Ice Cube was like wigging out that he was working with John Carpenter. I don't think that was the feeling.

[00:31:09] I don't think Jason Statham came to work whistling. But, you know, I do think he he had the energy for a little while. But then I think the business ground it right back out of him. And it doesn't surprise me that having worked with Cody Carpenter

[00:31:23] on the scores for both of our films, Cody was great. And that part of the process was clearly John's favorite making the music, getting them, getting Cody to write a theme that he could listen to and play with.

[00:31:36] And it doesn't surprise me that he leaned into live music and the things that he's making more music. I think he's just trying to be happy during this last part of whatever his career is. And it is really lovely to see him enjoying himself on stage

[00:31:49] and to see kind of a mellow, happy carpenter and to see like middle of the night tweets about ABBA and stuff. That's that is it's all grateful. It's a it's a good, good look for him. And it's definitely not where he was for a little while.

[00:32:03] But he he's clearly. There's a he feels liberated by not having to take on all these burdens we're talking about, though, the glee in these interviews where he's like, I just watch Halloween kills and I write the music. I don't have to make any decisions about the movie.

[00:32:20] Like it's already been done. You know, like it's not just that he wants to like, you know, work on his side projects. He he almost seems to just want to not make movies. It's sort of weird because otherwise he would he could totally do one right now.

[00:32:38] He walked into Blumhouse tomorrow, right? Oh, they would. Well, there was there was a thing that they were talking about. Right. This is this thing. We keep on trying to get the specifics on it. Yeah, but but there was a thing that almost kind of happened, right?

[00:32:52] Yeah. And and I've heard I've heard there's reasons he won't do certain things. You know, we tried to pitch a Western at one point thinking that would be an easy sell. Yeah. And it's not. He he actually will not make a Western.

[00:33:06] He explained it finally, that he doesn't ever want to direct horses. He's like, if you could come up with a perfect Western that there were no goddamn horses, they might do it. But life's too short, man. I'm not directing horses. It's not happening. You also you have to.

[00:33:21] You have to just imagine that he must sort of feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, you know, like how many times have they told me this time it's going to be easy, you know? Yeah.

[00:33:33] Or this time we're going to respect you or let you do you want where even if you hand him a script that seems appetizing, he's just like, where are they going to fuck me? You know, he's waiting for it at this point.

[00:33:42] The horses, the horses will fuck it up for me. You know, it's like he's looking for the thing that will make it unpleasant. I mean, to be fair, directing horses seems annoying. Oh yeah. Yeah. No, horses are undirectable. Yeah. Seems like a pain in the ass. Right.

[00:33:57] No, they're direct. You sit on them and you write, you do this, you say nay. I mean, they say no. You got to say no. You say, well, then wait in here as an expert. Yeah, I am an expert.

[00:34:10] I have ridden on a dang horse, but no, they stink to like stink. Hey, Drew, how about this? I've been throwing this idea out. Where I think Carpenter should make another Assassin's Creed movie. See, I and his video game love.

[00:34:31] I it's so pure and it is so real. He adores big A-list video games. And yeah, we've talked about Assassin's Creed, which I'm a big fan of that series. And and it's funny because he when you get him talking about it,

[00:34:45] he is every 17 year old dude just talking about his game mechanics. He likes and the vibe he likes. And I think it's I'm surprised how many directors. Video games are their vice, they are their secret. And I think if people knew who they were playing

[00:35:03] video games with half the time online, they would lose their minds because there are a lot of really terrific world class auteurs who are just fucking around killing you in Call of Duty. And yeah, having a blast.

[00:35:15] And but he loves he loves the first person you get lost in them. You spend hours and days and months lost in a world. He loves that man. And the idea of him making a movie set in one of those worlds is super appealing

[00:35:26] if they gave him the resources and if they gave him the time to do it correctly. And I don't know that I don't know that they do that even for like the young hot shit directors they try to give these movies to.

[00:35:38] This is the whole thing like I'd like because there's always been, you know, it's in our notes and he's talked about Dead Space, right? Which like, oh, he's a game he's obsessed with. And when you play Dead Space, which is a great game, especially the first one,

[00:35:50] like you absolutely can imagine a John Carpenter version of that. Like it's it's perfect. But I just have to assume that, you know, people with something like that, it's like a property now. Right. Like it's there's there's so many suits in the room being like, well,

[00:36:06] well, well, the Dead Space movie has to be X, Y and Z because like the way this Uncharted movie has played out. I'm watching this trailer and I'm just it just it looks so artless. And like you can hear the focus. Be surprised. Right.

[00:36:21] Like I mean, it's a video game movie. Like it's not like I should be so precious about this, but I'm just like, like, just let someone you know, there's so much you can work with. And it just feels corporate. Now, Assassin's Creed is a weirder.

[00:36:35] I do love that movie. I mean, this is our whole appreciation of Assassin's Creed. It's like it sort of gets away with it. Right. Fucking knock the story all that you want. It is a movie that has like vibes and has weird directing choices.

[00:36:47] Yeah. I just wish they would turn one of these directors who loves this stuff loose, like Verbinski on Bioshock or, you know, Peter Jackson on Halo, somebody who genuinely loves and plays and lives in these worlds, who then actually translates one would be amazing.

[00:37:01] But Bioshock is another one he publicly Carpenter said he wanted to do. Right. Well, he said it would make a great movie. You know, but like with Dead Space, I imagine like Carpenter directly said I would love to make a Dead Space movie.

[00:37:13] I don't think he was ever like formally attached or anything. But but like I just imagine him walking in and him being like, this is what I think. And then being like, OK, well, you know,

[00:37:24] and then and it just his face changing as they start their side of it. Right. Like, oh, but it has to set up this and it has to include that, you know, and just him being a fuck you people like right.

[00:37:37] Like I just from what I understand of him, like that he would just immediately be turned off. I assume. I don't know. Johnny C. And instead he makes the ward guys. He made the ward. Yeah. And I can I can see

[00:37:52] I can see what he probably saw in the script, which was stripped down, worked with actors one location basically. And it's just digging in and being able to build atmosphere. Those are all of the quotes we found from him or just it was small.

[00:38:08] It was contained. It was actor base. It wasn't effects driven. He can see it in his head corners, hallways, you know, shadows. You know, like it's it's claustrophobic. But it feels like more of a strategic choice in that sense rather than a a passion choice.

[00:38:26] Like ideally, you wish he could find a script that he may be really connected to that also checked all of those boxes. I don't really feel his heart in this. Yeah. And it's part of the problem for me is post post Kundi.

[00:38:40] And my great regret is that we couldn't get Showtime to let us shoot in scope as opposed to square because to me, Carpenter, half of Carpenter is the visual aspect ratio, the look that. And without that, it doesn't feel like a Carpenter film to me.

[00:38:56] The Ward doesn't feel like a Carpenter film to me because it doesn't look like a Carpenter film. The word is the only one of his movies not to be shot in Panavision other than Dark Star, I believe, or a solemn preset.

[00:39:08] I mean, even on our set, he had the Panavision lens. He's got the lens, that same Panavision lens he's been using his whole career with every film's name engraved on it. They shot with it. That's not.

[00:39:18] And it's also it's shot by Aaron Orbach, who he only worked with on this. Like, you know, it's it's not shot by what's his name? Gary Kibbe. Yeah. Yeah. Keep, you know, like his his post Kundi guy. Like, you're right, Griffin.

[00:39:31] It does not. It's sort of washed out and it's flat. It's it's it looks flat to me. It's amazing what a difference that makes in you feeling like you're watching a Carpenter film if his aesthetic isn't there. You're automatically missing part of what you love about his work,

[00:39:47] part of what makes his work so singular and special. So he knows where to put the camera like, and that's clear here. Like, that's the thing where I did not. I was sort of like, OK, this is, you know, he's setting up shots nicely. The compositions are fine.

[00:40:02] It's never an over edited or bizarre. I was really expecting like, oh, fuck. What's that movie where the torture porny movie directed by a somewhat famous director? Oh, captivity. Captivity like this thing where it's like, oh my God, Jaffe Roland Jaffe.

[00:40:19] It's like, oh my God, here is a like, you know, a Pom to or a Pom to or winning director. It was a ridiculous Pom to win, but he has one being like, is this what I should do?

[00:40:29] Like, you know, like just kind of being like, like, you know, the generation has shifted. I guess I'll try and copy it. And the word to its credit, I don't think it's pulling any of that sort of hacky stuff, but it does. Yeah, a little lifeless.

[00:40:44] I think that is totally fair and spot on. I mean, not to just like front load opinions here, but the thing for me is this movie like is functional. There is nothing disastrous about it, but it doesn't really grab me.

[00:41:01] And I don't really feel a passion in it where even in the other corporate movies that I don't think are successful, which I, you know, at least enjoy almost all of them. I feel like there are only two that I was like a little more muted on,

[00:41:15] even the ones that I think are kind of broken objects. I find fun or engaging in some way or another. This feels like if I saw this at like a horror film festival and you told me it was a first time director, I'd be like,

[00:41:30] this person might be able to make a really great movie someday. This is a pretty decent calling card. First film, in terms of what you're saying, knows where to put the camera, keeps it focused, keeps it simple. What have you to have it be?

[00:41:43] What might end up being the final film of like the master of the genre? Arguably, it is that that's what makes it depressing for me. You know, it's just it's a very undignified final film. It's a little addictive. And it's right.

[00:41:59] It's just you feel like what you want to give this movie is props for promise, but it's not promise. It's the end, you know, part of part of the problem. And this is a it's a very real problem with a lot of movies

[00:42:11] that are built around a twist or a secret is you spend so much the movie being clever or tap dancing around the thing you're hiding that you don't get to actually just be the movie. There's so much of this movie where they are talking around the movie,

[00:42:27] and it would be so much more interesting if he had found a visual way to show us that he was that we were playing inside somebody's head. Or I wouldn't mind if you tip your hand earlier

[00:42:36] and then just make it interesting, as opposed to try to hide the secret, which doesn't pack enough of a punch to then justify never really knowing what's going on with anybody. Look, I mean, this is what made Shyamalan's entire career, right?

[00:42:50] Like this is why Shyamalan became so indestructible that he still could get financing after like five flops in a row is that the sixth sense was this fucking magic trick. Whereas you're saying, Drew, almost every twist movie,

[00:43:01] either the movie has to tangle itself into such knots to hold off on the twist that there's nothing really going on until the reveal or. You do things that are interesting enough beforehand that the twist actually derails whatever the movie had going for it

[00:43:16] and then feels like it undoes whatever was working. Yes. It's why it was unfair that M. Knight was considered like a gimmick artist. Right. Or whatever. Like, oh, the sixth sense isn't good. It just has a good twist.

[00:43:28] Well, having a good twist might be enough to get your script noticed. Right. It might even be enough to get your movie made. But that's not going to make a good movie like delivering a twist.

[00:43:39] Well, as our argument has always been that if if the sixth sense ends with Haley Jelousman and Tony Collette in the car, it is still a capital G. Great movie. I it's one of the best scripts I've ever read on the page. It's incredible. It's incredible.

[00:43:52] But it's like that's the thing that is almost impossible to pull off. Yeah. And David, you put I mean, we're going to get in a fucking spoiler territory, obviously. Oh, we're spoiling the ward. Yeah, right. Yeah. But spoiler alert. You're the worst.

[00:44:08] Your zoom background right now is from the movie Vacancy Identity. I'm sorry. It's from the movie Identity. Identity. Identity. Which is arguably a movie with ostensibly the same twist that has the opposite problem, which is I think that movie is pretty fun

[00:44:23] until the twist and then it feels like nothing fucking matters. And it's because Mangle figured out a way to put you in it, to put you in the way that would feel as opposed to this weird distancing thing where you never quite know what she's feeling.

[00:44:35] But that means that once you pull the curtain, everything feels really hollow rather than this, which feels like it's killing time for an hour and 15 minutes. That absolutely true about the ward. Right. The twist of the ward is there, you know, it's five girls

[00:44:47] in a mental asylum and they're being picked up. But really, they're all the same. It's one girl with multiple who has multiple personalities. And it's all sort of a dramatization of what's happening in her brain. Personality's right. Right.

[00:44:57] And Jared Harris is there, you know, and we love to see him. Is it also sort of the premise of a Donald Kaufman script in adaptation? Right. Is it called The Three? Yes. Right. Yeah. They say it's obviously it's a classic, you know, hacky Hollywood twist.

[00:45:14] Like it turns out like it was with the same person all along. Oh, fuck. You know, I'm just remembering I didn't finish watching it. So I missed this. It's good to know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Turns out I didn't make it to the end. OK, it's all one girl.

[00:45:32] Cool. Alice played by Mika Borum. Right. The girl that they think has gone missing. Yeah. And then they think is the killer. You know, they think it's the the corpse that's stalking them. But actually, it's just the girl that they are.

[00:45:47] And like the killer is a physical manifestation of the treatment trying to knock the personalities out one by one. I mean, it's also interesting because what this movie plays at Toronto in 2010 and then gets where I saw it very limited release seven, eight months later, whatever.

[00:46:08] It takes a while. Barely a year. Right. But this this screens in 2010, the same year as Shutter Island, which is the other movie that this is sort of combined with. Right. Where it's like malicious, scary hospital, villainous staff. No, actually, they're trying their hardest to save you.

[00:46:28] Experimental radical treatment. They've been playing along with your game, you know? And man, that is a movie that is just drenched in style, where the whole thing is about the way it looks and feels and the getting lost in the head.

[00:46:41] It's the other thing that makes this movie look bad. Yes. But but this is a movie that Shutter Island, obviously, Scorsese has one of the biggest movie stars in the world and a hundred million dollars and all that sort of shit.

[00:46:54] But like, it's such a good evocation of like the kind of Val Luton movie he's riffing on. And here, Carpenter is not able to muster that same sense of style, which a lot of it is just we're saying it's it's flat. It's cheap.

[00:47:08] It's like I I also I mean, I've ragged on her before as an actress and I don't want to be mean about her, especially because she's this like bizarre figure outside of like her acting. But I don't like Amber Heard. I don't either.

[00:47:22] With a more compelling lead, maybe I'm a little more interested in the mystery. Like never really worked for me. And she is the human equivalent of cuties and that you're not you cannot talk about her without the Internet going insane on you.

[00:47:36] If you're going to cast her, cast her in something like Scarface in the Michelle Pfeiffer role where she's. Yeah. That kind of a person where there's ways to cast her, where you can cast that energy and cast.

[00:47:47] But her as the sympathetic figure who's supposed to be pulling us through that. I think Lindsay Fonseca would have been a better choice for the central. This is my thing. I like every other. I like everyone else in this movie. I love Danielle Panna Baker.

[00:48:00] I'm a huge fan of hers. Really good. Mamie Gummer, obviously very talented, like not her best performance. But that more has to do with I think how this character is written. She must be interested in this Mr. Robot. She certainly has. Oh, yeah.

[00:48:13] This this sandbox a few times, this kind of thing. So right. Lindsay Fonseca, who I definitely like. She's, of course, on the couch in How I Met Your Mother. I grew sort of obsessed with that one shot they had of the two kids

[00:48:26] that they had to bring as a mother because Lindsay Fonseca then like grew up. And I was like, but still sometimes you see like whatever, you know, 17 year old Lindsay Fonseca, the couch or however old she's supposed to be. Is that was that, let's say,

[00:48:41] the cushiest job in the history of television where they like they have to get paid right every time it was her and David Henry. Is that who the other? Right. That's right. And they like shoot stuff proprietarily for I think seasons one and two.

[00:48:54] And then they were like, oh, this shows a hit and they're getting older. We just need to get a bunch of B-roll. We'll reuse it. And they reuse it for what? Nine seasons every episode. Yes. Well, not every episode they would. But but no, no, you're forgetting.

[00:49:07] Right. Then they they're like, OK, we're we're going to have to stop using these kids as they're growing up. Let's shoot the conversation in the finale now. Right. Let's do it now. This this show is probably going to end soon, like, you know, or God knows.

[00:49:20] And then the show runs for. And that's why the show has an ending that makes people so angry because it's the end of the year before. Yeah. Yes. Anyway, it's still I think about it all the time. It's incredible.

[00:49:31] The two of them just got a check for every single episode. I assume when when it was made, when it aired and then residuals. I mean, I did because I did my little tiny thing on on Supergirl a couple of seasons ago, whatever that was 15 years ago.

[00:49:46] And they wanted to do a different scene in the same bar without having to go there as like an establishing shot. So they reused a shot that I was like vaguely in the background of two seasons later, and I got paid like the same amount. Hell yeah.

[00:50:03] They had to reach out and go like, do we have your clearance to reuse this footage? And I looked the footage. It's like I'm out of focus in the back because they had paid me guest star money or whatever.

[00:50:12] So she just must have gotten like paid a proper episode salary for every single episode. And then they all go into syndication streaming. What a gig. I know. Unbelievable. What what what did she get paid for the word, though? I did nothing.

[00:50:26] I mean, what the budget I have to assume. I mean, what they say, the budget of this movie is 10. But I suppose that's questionable. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, 10 is not a lot. I guess you can you can spend 10 million dollars.

[00:50:41] Drew, I have to imagine you were a person who saw all the boys love Mandy Lane in that movie's weird seven years between being like a festival sensation and getting quietly released and never talked about again. Yeah, because that was to Tiffin 06 and released in 2013.

[00:51:01] And that's the thing that like puts Amber Heard on the map. And I have to imagine is the main reason she's cast in this because that sort of presented her as maybe being a new scream queen. It might that might be the longest between something doing its festival

[00:51:15] debut and coming out in theaters commercially. Like that's got to be one of the big gaps. I mean, Margaret is seven years, but it never played a festival. But there's seven years between production and release. Unreal. But, you know, which is insane.

[00:51:26] Yeah. Anyway, all the boys love Mandy Lane, I just think is an interesting counterpoint to this just because that was sort of seen as like, here's a throwback thing. You got a filmmaker who's moving away from the current trends of torture,

[00:51:38] porn and overly slick remakes and doing something more like the 80s, 70s, like genre tours. I always thought I thought all the boys love Mandy Lane was a decent little style exercise. And I think that she is visually striking in it.

[00:51:53] And they use in that movie, they pretty much use Amber as a object, as an image rather than as a performance. And I think that's that's one of the reasons that it was such a great calling card for her.

[00:52:05] I think performance wise, she is difficult to warm up to. I'll put it that way. And there's just some actors who are like that centrally, like you don't cast them as the center of something because of that.

[00:52:16] And it's it's weird in this movie to to be asked to sympathize with her. She doesn't give you much interiority. She doesn't give you access to anything inside her. She's very guarded. And so then, of course, the twist is that she's not really a person.

[00:52:30] And you're like, yeah, OK, so you can kind of get away with it. But it does make it a tough movie to care about for most of the running time. It's just really hard to figure out who you're holding on to.

[00:52:41] And yeah, and it's like when you watch the the Star Trek into darkness and they do everything they can not to say the character's name. You're like, just just say the character's name. Ten minutes into the movie, just say it and then just have a movie happen

[00:52:54] instead of all of this shoe leather that is that you ideally movies work the second time as well as the first time. And I feel like this is a movie that only works one time. There's very little rewatch value because when you go back and watch it,

[00:53:09] it's not like then that pays off and you're watching all the behavior of the girls and you go, oh, wow, look at all the cool ways he's showing us that they are all one person. There's none of that. There's no synchronicity in performances.

[00:53:19] There's nothing that ties them together. I mean, this is once again why Sixth Sense made over 300 million dollars as everyone walked out of it and went, is there any way that works? And then you watch it a second time.

[00:53:29] And the fact that it works the second time, how is he not giving it away? How is he not telegraphed? But he doesn't. And it lines up. It checks out the math. Yeah, right. It's why the usual suspects works like there are lots of good twist movies

[00:53:42] that play great on rewatch where you're like, let me now see how everyone's behaving. Exactly. We know what I know. And it'll be totally interesting. But I do think that Amber's casting is very much a reaction to her being an it girl.

[00:53:56] And and I think that that's kind of that moment where he's she's as important to the bank roll to this movie, getting financed as he was because her name and the young cast is that's what 90s or an early 2000s or looks like.

[00:54:09] And I think he is at this point kind of surrendering to, well, I guess this is what horror is. Whereas I think the majority of John's career, John would just say, I don't know what anybody else thinks. This is what a horror film is to me.

[00:54:22] Right. Big Trouble in Little China. He's not looking around and taking everybody else's temperature before he goes, all right, I guess we're all making big trouble in Little China this year. No, he's the only one on the planet making a movie like that at that point.

[00:54:34] And I really wish the ward did not feel so reactive, feel just like like I think I'm I think I'm a filmmaker again. What are people making right now? And and that's what this is. Yeah.

[00:54:46] I mean, the reason I'm bringing the all the the Boys Love Mandy Lane thing into this even is it's like it is just odd her status removing. The incredibly fucking complicated persona around her today. Right.

[00:55:00] But like in this moment, she is an it girl and I think is seen not exclusively, but perhaps even more of an it girl in the genre space, despite the fact that her calling card movie has not come out.

[00:55:16] It's not despite it's because of because then that movie became people were like, you know, there's this horror movie that fucking looks like a Malik movie and it's so slick and it's and it's not even out.

[00:55:28] It played at a fest and it becomes this kind of like cool mystery movie. And the posters and the production stills come out. You're like, oh, she looks this looks great. And look at her very blonde in the middle of it all.

[00:55:39] But it's like everyone is like taking out advance loans on her fame. 100% never cash out. It's not even like the we're going to put a fucking Sam Worthington and three other movies because James Cameron's picked him. And we know that's going to like eventually land.

[00:55:59] It's just odd that like Mandy Lane comes out three or four years after this. Three years after comes out, Radius, you know, dumped it. And yeah, made like 400 grand. And this movie, of course, was basically not released in America, which is crazy.

[00:56:17] Like I think it got a slightly bigger release overseas. But you know, it debuted on like I'm going to find it here, like 11 screens. And there's only one week of box office data for it. Like, oh, it just, you know, doesn't really exist.

[00:56:34] You can't rent this movie on iTunes. You can only rent it on YouTube. That is the only platform. It's like there's certainly not. I don't think there's a physical release of it. Right. Is there? There was it might be out of print. There was a Blu-ray.

[00:56:49] OK, that's what that's one of the real dangers of tax shelter theater. Whenever you're working in that sphere is stuff just vanishes. Like if you're not making it for a company that has some sort of foundation, it could very easily vanish into somebody's tax settlement and

[00:57:05] just you don't see it again. Absolutely. It's a weird movie that you feel like could, you know, just as soon tomorrow disappear and be like unwatchable. I mean, it's also like the Blu-ray was released by a company

[00:57:20] called Arc Entertainment that seems to have gone out of business eight years ago. Oh, my God. It's maybe not still in print, but there are still copies in circulation. Yeah. And it's like only like this might be a movie

[00:57:31] where just no one even knows where the rights are anymore. Film Nation produced it also. And this was in like the first year of Film Nation that is like not that glamorous. Let me just pull this up because this list was kind of blowing my mind.

[00:57:46] Give me one second here. Well, where did you guys see Masters? Because I'm always curious where that pops up. It it moves. It never lands anywhere for very long. I just rented it on iTunes. Oh, OK, good. Yeah, that's where I found it.

[00:58:00] Yeah. Both seasons are currently streaming on Voodoo. You can watch it. I don't fuck with Voodoo. Yeah, Tubi might have them. I watched it on Tubi. OK, there you go. Tubi. All right. I got I got a lot of car shield commercials.

[00:58:16] Ric Flair is in one and he looks bad. It's really. Oh, no. It's rough. Film Nation has now become like this major, major independent film production company. And at the beginning of the 2010s was also attempting to be a distributor,

[00:58:36] which they eventually got out of the game doing and has had like a lot of success making both big movies and a lot of big Oscar movies. But like they start in 2009. Their first two films are The Joneses with Demi Moore, David Duchovny

[00:58:53] and Amber Heard, which doesn't exist. And they do The Road, which obviously is this highly anticipated movie that kind of just disappears. So all of those are Toronto. Yep. Right. And then the following year at Toronto, they have three movies premiere.

[00:59:10] They have Adam Green's Frozen premieres that year at Sundance, which is a horror movie that unfortunately shares the title with a Disney movie that will fuck up its SEO for the rest of time. But they are Adam Green, you know, big culty power guy.

[00:59:24] Yes. But but that movie will never, ever be picked on. No, I understand. Get the joke, I'm making whatever. They do it. Australian romantic comedy called I Love You Too. And then they have three movies go to Toronto that year. One is Ceremony, the Max Winkler movie.

[00:59:40] Yeah, kind of doesn't exist with the. Well, it's the Michael and Yerano Thurman. Right. He made December. He kind of. Exactly. One of them is The Ward, which plays a Toronto. People are excited. Carpenters back kind of lands with a thud, slowly escapes into 11 theaters months later.

[00:59:58] Right. The third movie they have in Toronto is The King's Speech. Hundred million dollars. World Domestic wins Best Picture. They're set like from then on out there, like a legitimate production company. And they make other genre films.

[01:00:11] But it's like it almost feels like there's this like turn of like this is the last moment they would have made this, you know? Yes, it's yeah. I don't know. Yeah, they don't. They make mud. They make Magic Mike. They make this right. They still lingering Nebraska.

[01:00:32] Yeah. Pain and Glory. I mean, they did the last three of our movies. Right. Big Sick, you know, imitation game. Oh, well, you know, they're a big deal. It's I mean, I don't know what puzzle we're trying to solve here exactly,

[01:00:45] but it's just sort of like could Carpenter make another movie? Yes, of course he could. Like, I think there's a lot of people who would open that door for him if he wanted to, but it's a matter of want and it's a matter of project.

[01:00:57] And I don't know if there's a project he wants to do. Right. Like there's just I don't know if there's anything you can lure him back. You would it would have to be. Yeah, just undeniable for him at this point.

[01:01:08] It would have to be something that I think you'd have to have some irresistible element, either you'd have to bait it with. Cody gets to do the score or you like there'd have to be some other piece of the puzzle that would make John go. All right, fine.

[01:01:22] I'll do that so that this can happen. Like, that's the thing. Two words. Ben Hosley. There you go. There you go. Night eggs. Producer Ben. There you go. Poet laureate. Fuck. I want to get master. I want to go. I got three words for you. Not Professor Crispy.

[01:01:48] Here here's a genuine question for you, Drew. Yes, sir. Do you think Kurt could lure him back? I do. I do in a heartbeat. And like if Kurt came to him and was like, this is the elder statesman movie

[01:01:59] I want to make, I want to do it with you, buddy, please. This is like, you know, that was the that was that was what we kept trying to use the the hook for the Western.

[01:02:07] We kept saying, look, a Western with you and Kurt is pretty much the dream. And I think if Kurt had the script, if Kurt had something that he developed that he was really passionate about. But here's the thing about Kurt. And this is what unfortunately shut us down

[01:02:24] when we were trying to pitch John on that. He goes, well, that's great. I'd love to. But you better have your paycheck ready before you even talk to Kurt. Kurt's offer only. You don't even pick up the phone unless you got an offer ready to make.

[01:02:36] Yeah. So there's no development with Kurt. You don't develop things with him. He's you have a project. You have a paycheck ready. You call him. They'll say yes or no. But there's no so you can't.

[01:02:47] You can't just put both of them on the hook and then build it from there. And I think that's the only way that happens at this point. Right. Like in my in my mind's eye, it happens if like Kurt Russell finds a book that he loves, right?

[01:02:58] It goes to him, you know, like something like that. Like, I feel like it has to be hurt being the one or why it gets a script to him. Yeah, I don't know. You know, like something. Let's be in this together. Right. See, and there's that family hook.

[01:03:16] I'm sure if Wyatt Russell said, I have a thing I want to do with my dad. And would you? I bet in a heartbeat, John would jump on because it's Cody and John and why? He didn't do it. Yeah, right. Yeah. And then that sells itself.

[01:03:28] That's one of those packages where you're like, oh, my God, there's 400 pieces you can do before you even write about the movie. But at the same time, I admire carpenters being like, fuck you. You know, you don't like that. I went out of the ward. So what?

[01:03:41] Watch one of my, you know, 15 great movies, if you don't like the word. Like, whatever. Who cares? I'm going to make music. By the way, which film do you guys think is the only film that he would never discuss with us, no matter what we tried,

[01:03:54] no matter how we tried to talk to him about it, just blanket? Nope. No, fellas, fellas. No memoirs. Memoirs. Nothing. Zero of all. Right. It's a closed safe in his heart. It's the Chetan thing. Oh, it has to be right. That's the X-ray.

[01:04:13] Yeah. Yeah. There's there's no getting around it. Like he will tell stories about anybody, about anything, any film. He is an open book once you've started working with him. Except that where it was just nope. No, fellas. No, not going to do it.

[01:04:27] No, those are the two things when we were DMing about which episode you were going to do that you said to me were memoirs is the one movie he will not talk about under any circumstances. And the ward is the only one that I don't believe

[01:04:40] was really a passion project for him. You were saying like, you know, people doing him for other movies. But I truly believe he really, really deeply cared about every other thing he did. Yeah. And this is the one that he did.

[01:04:51] Right. That feels more like a strategic calculation of like this might be a movie that's easy enough to pull off. Yeah. And I and I do think it was more or less. Sure. One more time. Let's see what's like right now.

[01:05:02] And I think it was more taking the temperature. That's another reason I think he wasn't terribly invested in the screenplay and the development of it is he was just taking a temperature of filmmaking. What's it like right now? Yeah. Yeah.

[01:05:12] And I think if it had gone well, we may have gotten a couple of other John films and maybe some stuff that would have been a little bit different. Like I know his heart is it's broader than we've given him credit for.

[01:05:24] And I do think if he was going to do it again, it would have to be something that he hadn't done in the past. That wouldn't just be a repeat. So, yeah, it's I don't know. It's interesting question.

[01:05:35] I mean, we were talking about this in our Ghost of Mars episode a lot, too. But it's like on one hand, it's a bummer if this is his final film ever. On the other hand, I greatly prefer that he didn't make three more awards after this, you know?

[01:05:49] And there's certainly a filmmakers we've covered who like don't know when to sort of get out when the getting's good. I mean, it's or they're just they just keep being like, well, maybe this will be a good final one. And then it's like, well, no, not really.

[01:06:02] It's the thing that Tarantino is obsessed with trying to get ahead of. Right. Like his whole insane ten movies and I'm out thing is him just being like, I have to leave stuff on the table rather than overstaying my welcome by one movie.

[01:06:15] I think a lot of filmmakers have that that question about when to start. You know, the Coen's quit. There was a period where they quit. They were done. And it was because to the White Sea failed and fell apart. And they didn't get to make that film.

[01:06:27] And then their mom had a stroke. And it was really it was that close. It was like one week to the White Sea fell apart permanently. And then a week or two weeks later, their mom had a stroke and they just went. Yeah, life's too short. Never mind.

[01:06:40] And they were just script doctors for a few years. And it was really they got dragged back in. And I think then figured out, oh, I think we're not done. And there's gas left in the tank. But no country was the drag.

[01:06:51] That's the timeline we're talking about here. It was intolerable. And Lady Killers were the ones that, you know, where they were. They were dragged back in. They worked on the scripts. They weren't really going to direct either of those.

[01:07:01] That was the same time they wrote the Gambit script. And they were just kind of writers. They really had quit. And I it's weird how often this business will drive great filmmakers just to quit because of the business. Wait, you're saying, Drew, it's almost like there's something

[01:07:17] that actually breaks people if they work long enough in this horrible, corrupt machinery. I know it's hard to believe, Griffin, because I know you've had nothing but great experiences. I love it. I really feel loved and supported by the whole industry, physically or mentally

[01:07:31] harmed. David, what were you going to say? To the White Sea was one of my early, like when I was a little teenager reading about moviemaking, those projects where I would like I knew that was coming, like I knew that was what they wanted to do.

[01:07:46] And I was like, oh, I can't wait for it. I'd I'd I'd love to make a list like that. Like, you know, the sort of the ten. Yeah. You know, Oter projects that everyone knew were sort of on the table that never came to fruition.

[01:07:58] Like, what if Joel Cohen tomorrow is like, fuck you, I'm making To the White Sea. Well, I mean, giving me one hundred and twenty million dollars. Megalopolis, Megalopolis, that was one of them. And for Coppola, it's like I got to do like a Kickstarter or sell my winery

[01:08:12] or whatever. I'm old. I might as well do it right. Like, fuck it. God bless him, man. Yeah. If he goes out swinging like that, I'm going to that that reframes Coppola for me. As much as I've always loved the Maverick spirit of him, I did feel

[01:08:27] like he had just gotten to the point where he really wasn't going to ever put that last big one together. And it feels like he realized, nope, I'm going to do it. I'm going to put it all on the table.

[01:08:38] I'm going to I don't care because I can't keep anything. The vineyard doesn't matter to me once I'm gone. But Megalopolis will exist. And man, whatever it is, I'm excited. I'm curious. I want to see it. Same here. And it's also fascinating how immediately that announcement

[01:08:54] reframed him spending the last eight years reediting like half of his movies. Sure. You're like, he's really winding up for like, I'm trying to put a bow on my career. What are the things I'd like to take one last crack at in my past?

[01:09:07] And then now with all of those settled, I'm ready for the final statement. And he's one of the few guys where where those reassessments actually matter. The Cotton Club is a significantly better movie. It's pretty fucking wild. Yeah, it's pretty crazy how different it is.

[01:09:21] I haven't watched the Godfather one yet, but the Cotton Club one is that one's a little less drastic, but it's still interesting. Yeah. That, you know, what he changed. But clearly, like he is he's still engaged in thinking and passionate. And I want that.

[01:09:35] I want I love seeing somebody manage to figure out how to keep that flame lit at that point. Yeah. I mean, there's this quote that's both touching and a little bit sad that JJ and Nick are researchers pulled up here.

[01:09:48] And it's talking about the period you were saying of when he just really was truly retired and feeling burnt out, had no stories left in him or whatever. And he said, I guess this is when they were promoting this movie finally coming out.

[01:10:01] I thought I'd come back if I fell in love. It's like when you break up with your wife or girlfriend, it's just tragedy. And I broke up with cinema for a little while, but she came back and I got back with her and it's all good now.

[01:10:11] Like he did have that attitude, I think, of just like. And I'm certainly someone who functions this way. We're like, if I feel defeated by something, it's really hard to convince me to take another crack at it.

[01:10:23] You know, in any arena, even bad slices of pizza or whatever. Dude, I get it. It's when I left Hitfix, I took several years where I just I didn't want to do anything online and I felt like I just got my ribs kicked in.

[01:10:38] Yeah. And it took me a while to figure out, like, even what I wanted to write again. I the one thing that I observed about him on set is he definitely the big picture stuff gets to him. The days being lost, the money being cut, things like that.

[01:10:55] But moment to moment, once he's actually doing it, he's one of the happiest filmmakers I've ever seen. Like when he's chugging along, shooting a scene, he is super. When we were shooting in Cigarette Burns, the scene with Udo Kier in the projection booth.

[01:11:09] Yeah. One of the wildest things I've ever seen. Best part. Should we spoil it? I mean, do people want to? I don't know. Let's just say let's just say the imagery is Udo Kier has cut open his stomach, taken out his intestines and spooled them into a projector

[01:11:25] and is going to rise projecting his guts onto a screen. Yeah, which is which is batshit crazy. And that's one of those moments that I know when I pitched it to to Rebecca in the room, she started laughing. She's like, they're not going to let us do that.

[01:11:39] Cut to us on a film set. Yeah. Udo Kier is standing at a film projector, pushing his intestines into it. And John Carpenter is standing behind us, cackling the entire time. Udo, make it grosser. And just watching Udo ham it up and watching John laugh his face off.

[01:11:57] I was like, if I get nothing else out of this, this moment is one of the craziest things that I will ever experience. And he was giddy. He was having fun. To me, that's that was the big gift of that whole thing.

[01:12:10] The same thing on the second one. There's a horrible sequence in the second one in pro life where Ron Perlman gives a man an abortion. There's really no other way to describe it. Yeah, that actually might be the single most demented thing I've ever seen.

[01:12:25] Oh, yeah. And the and my favorite conversation was the day we were going to shoot that and the actor playing the doctor. We had walked off the soundstage and we as we walk back on, we walk past him standing with John.

[01:12:36] And all I heard is, so I'm just let me be clear. You're not going to see my balls. And I fell apart laughing. I was like, oh, my God, what did we write? We're giving this poor man fits.

[01:12:48] But again, just cackling like he was having so much fun that day knowing, oh, this is I'm great. This is you guys are crazy. This is ridiculous. Let's have fun. Right. You'd love the show. Hate the business.

[01:12:59] And I mean, you know, the stories you were telling at the beginning, Drew, you know, you're it sounds like he almost was like this Lance Bangs figure to you. Right. And I think the thing I find so about that whole fucking dynamic

[01:13:14] and almost famous and a lot of it is Hoffman's performance, too. But it's like, here's this guy who presents as being so cynical, so bitter, so jaded, right? His introduction, the movie is rocks dead. It all sucks. Everyone's full of shit. Kid, you missed it.

[01:13:31] You know, there's nothing left. You're only here for the death rattle. And he sees this kid who has like the wide eyed, infectious enthusiasm for the thing that he once had before. It was like, you know, sort of weaponized against him and broke his heart.

[01:13:47] And he cannot fucking turn that down. Right. And he's trying to big time him. I don't have time to sit in the diner with a kid. I got places to be this and that. But it's like by the end of the movie, he stayed up until three o'clock

[01:13:58] in the morning talking to this kid on the phone, admitting I'm uncool. You know, that incredible scene. And it's like for how much he presents as this forward grump. I don't think Carpenter was take you under that wing,

[01:14:11] letting you sit next to him on the set of Star Man, letting you in on everything just out of some sense of, I don't know, sympathy, you know, or generosity. I do think for him it probably felt a little restorative

[01:14:26] to watch someone who had a completely pure appreciation for this process was reminding him of what he loved about it and was completely unfazed by the shit that he felt encumbered with every day, you know? Well, and the crazy thing is that experience is one of the reasons

[01:14:42] that even at 51 and even as crushed by certain experiences I've been, I find it very hard to be cynical. I find it really hard to be cynical about this business because I do. I did get to live that story.

[01:14:54] The circus came to town and I followed the circus back to where it came from and I got to actually be part of it. And, you know, it the kindness and the interest he showed was absolutely a real recognition

[01:15:07] of, oh, my God, this little mutant has the bug so deeply inside of him and cannot help himself. And yeah, and just to have somebody explain what a physical effect was or to introduce me to that and to show me how the spheroids worked

[01:15:22] and how they were going to get the hand to light up or to stand me where I could see the explosion just so that the rest of my life, like I would have that foundation of how filmmaking worked.

[01:15:31] He knew that if he never ran into me again, fine. But he given me enough basic tools to understand the nuts and bolts of filmmaking that day. That's an incredible gift, man. And not the act of somebody who is cynical or doesn't love what they do.

[01:15:45] That is somebody who clearly, deeply remembers why he loves what he does. Yeah, I think also probably wants other people in this industry who are in it for the right reasons as well, who actually give a shit. I think that's why he likes Mick so much.

[01:16:01] I think he responds to Mick's lack of sentences. Mick, Mick Garris is Mr. Rogers with long hair. He is the single nicest human being I have ever met in my life, like unrelentingly sunshiny and nice and loves horror

[01:16:16] and writes crazy dark horror, but cannot help himself is just that person. And I think it's one of the reasons that he has been that linchpin for all these guys who feel burnt out by the business, because Mick loves it so much.

[01:16:28] And when he brings them together, he reminds them and he rekindles that in them. And those dinners were designed to make sure that those guys didn't didn't only remember the bad stuff. And I think they spur each other on.

[01:16:39] I think it's a lot of fun when they get around each other, you know, and then they can all make fun of John Landis. So it's the better, the better. Yeah. Well, fuck John Landis. The better kind of cynic,

[01:16:50] you know, like it's like there's the one cynic who just wants like the other cynics around him so they can all be like, yeah, yeah, it's all bad. Right. And then there's the one who right, who who wants to bounce off,

[01:17:01] maybe be the darker, you know, darker mind or whatever. But yeah, who likes to hear the other side or I don't know, whatever. Johnny sounds like a mensch carpenter. You know what's a weird thing about this movie?

[01:17:18] Just to circle back to this thing that we're sensibly talking about today. But all of this discussion is important and relevant. Uh, so in the research here, it says that Carpenter was maybe not solely, but involved in the decision

[01:17:36] to switch it to the 60s because it was written as present day. Right. And this is a script he did not write. He did not develop that. Right. So Rasmussen brothers and they specced it and it was just there.

[01:17:47] Yeah. It's offered to him, as you said, one location. Simple. It makes more sense that she would just be locked away. That was the thing. It was the pragmatic decision of this sort of involuntary commitment. But then it also sort of, you know, it becomes

[01:18:05] brethren with a lot of sort of psych ward thrillers of the 50s and 60s and this sort of like mode that we're familiar with. Yeah, very much. That's very much a moment. I love the, you know, Fuller's film Shock Corridor is like

[01:18:20] one of the great ones of that era. I think there was asylums in general were seen as kind of a they were they had a very different place in our culture in the 50s and 60s. And we were just starting to talk about them a little bit.

[01:18:31] So they weren't quite the secret shame anymore. But it was still, I think, a very fresh, a horrifying idea. The notion of being put away and having your agency removed. I think also it's I'm surprised more horror directors

[01:18:45] don't just set everything in the 60s and 70s at this point to get around cell phones. And you got to get around all the things that rob horror films of their attention at this point. No, instead, it should be that there's an app that locks your doors.

[01:18:59] Ghostface is coming for you because he's got an app. Ghostface hacked into your Bluetooth enabled. No, it is just it places it in a weird zone, though, because he's not a filmmaker who is in any way interested in pastiche. Right.

[01:19:16] So he's not going to take this and push this into like a fuller homage and go for that sort of heightened stylization. But putting it in the 60s does make it feel more stylized. Right. But he's also not doing the modern day version of this film that is,

[01:19:34] as you said, really trying to adapt to what the trends are of the 2010s in horror. I'm just glad it's not like a Korean horror ripoff, because I think so many people, if they had made this in that year, would have done the wet.

[01:19:48] Yes. Black hair in front of the face. And that would have been the driving filter. Yeah. He's clearly at least still trying to just tell a classic ghost story his way. Like it's not him necessarily aping anybody else at the moment.

[01:20:01] No, no, it's just it's it's in it's in an odd zone. It's in a very odd zone. Yeah, I mean, and we talk it's like I think all the other actresses are compelling, but by the very design of the screenplay, they all

[01:20:15] are incredibly one note as characters like everyone's got their their one Spice Girl like that. They they are less emotionally detailed than the literal emotions and inside out who somehow have a wider range of personality despite. Oh, you know what? What did you know?

[01:20:35] Sidney Sweeney is playing young Alice. I did. Yes. And now she's like a new scream queen. Kind of, you know, kind of. She's got one movie. Yeah. Yeah. She's she's a thing now. Yeah. That's all.

[01:20:47] Jared Harris, I feel like also I mean, I I fucking love Jared Harris. Love who doesn't love him. What a guy. One of my absolute favorite guys. And I think the scene he does, he kind of nails is the reveal to her. Right. The Ben Kingsley.

[01:21:02] Let me explain to you what we've done for you. Here's the sympathy you didn't understand I had seen. But but is a little damning of this movie that up until that point, I'm not even getting excited in the Jared Harris scenes.

[01:21:16] You know, like every time he pops up, I'm like, yes, fuck it. Jared Harris scene. Yeah, they don't give much to do. That's the that's the real shame of it. Yeah. I and I'm really surprised because I do think John is

[01:21:26] while I would not use the word feminist for John, I think John has always done fairly well by the women in his films. I think he has a better sense, especially, you know, in the Deborah Hill days, I think he learned that

[01:21:40] you get a lot of value out of these characters, that it that not marginalizing the women makes his movies interesting. And I think he has, you know, he's got his manly films, certainly. But I think when he centers women, he's done a fairly decent job of it.

[01:21:52] I think this film is is disappointing on that front because this is ostensibly a very female driven movie. And if you're going to do this five faces of the five manifestations of one woman, that would seem like real meat for him.

[01:22:07] I don't even feel like that opportunity necessarily got taken. And that's that's confusing. It seems like that would be meat he'd be he'd pick up on thematically. Well, that's that's the other thing is I think watching all these movies,

[01:22:18] the thing he's so good at is making characters in his genre films, actual, believable, behavioral people who are interesting to watch before the crazy things happen to them or despite the crazy world they're placed into or whatever.

[01:22:35] And this is the one movie where like you're watching and you're like, there has to be some twist to why all these characters are uninteresting, which which at the end of the day does not serve you. It doesn't serve you if it's not compelling to watch

[01:22:47] as much as the other actresses are trying their hardest. Yeah. You know, they name Alice early on and they're like, yeah, there was another patient. You're like, OK, so the answer isn't going to be that it's her because you just gave me the answer. So what's the answer?

[01:23:01] Like, it's a lot of clock watching. Look, we don't have to talk about the ward anymore. We don't have to. We don't. I mean, you're right. It is America. We can do whatever we want. I don't think there's another thing we need to.

[01:23:12] I mean, the kills are all right. That's the you know, yeah, the the the stab to the eye, the electro shock killed like, you know, but you're not like insane. But they're they're they're well executed.

[01:23:23] I don't want to bag on this movie too hard, but I am so sensitive to I shit. I think I'm pretty fucking high tolerance for like screen violence. But whenever eyes are threatened, I lose my fucking shit. It's like my big trigger.

[01:23:38] And this movie has a direct shot of like a needle being stabbed through someone's eye and I didn't flinch. And it was that feeling of like, huh, that didn't even get to me. Like, I think there's not great. Yeah, right.

[01:23:49] There's a little like macabre fun to some of the gore in this. But I'm just like if John Carpenter can make me terrified of a car, although that's not a good example, because I'm already terrified of cars. They're the scariest things on the planet.

[01:24:03] But like John Carpenter shooting someone getting stabbed directly in the eye and failing to get anything out of me. I've gotten freaked out by I shit and comedies, you know? I do know. I agree with what you're saying. Nothing in this movie,

[01:24:19] you know, made me flinch or twitch or anything like that. Definitely not like I at the best. At most, I was having fun watching it, but I was certainly not feeling very my heart race or anything like that. I was just kind of like, OK, what's next?

[01:24:36] You know, it's not a very good movie. No, it's not. It's not. It's not. It's not a catastrophe. It's not offensive, but it's not very good. Here's a lateral line of questioning, Drew. Sure. Because you you guys, you and Rebecca Swan pitched

[01:24:54] cigarette burns first and then get Carpenter interested. There's a lot of overlap for me in thematically between cigarette burns and mouth of madness. Mm hmm. How consciously were you guys sort of influenced by that? I mean, I'm sure I'm sure you and Rebecca obviously like Carpenter

[01:25:14] is going to hang over anything the two of you write in terms of him being a big influence. And I'm sure like a point of kinship between the two of you. Sure. I definitely think cursed works of art in general, like you can't

[01:25:29] you can't not know in the mouth of madness. Yeah. As as an example of that, Ninth Gate is an example of that. There's and there's older stuff that that deals with that. I had actually not read the book Flickr yet when we wrote this.

[01:25:41] And then since I've read Flickr, which if you guys have not read it, I have not. Please track that novel down. It is extraordinary. It is about the secret history of movies. Oh, it sounds cool. It's a cult that has been around since the silent days

[01:25:55] and how they have since the very beginning of film been hiding things in your movies and a young filmmaker becomes drawn in. And it's wonderful. It's but I think inevitably, if you're around film long enough, you start to hear just crazy stories about collectors.

[01:26:11] You start to and you realize that people are nutty about this stuff. So for us, it happened pretty organically just from a number of different events. Things like we were at the Fantasia Film Festival one summer and one night had a long night talking magic theory

[01:26:28] with Richard Stanley on a patio and we were drinking Le Fin du Monde beer, which is a high, high, high alcohol content beer from Montreal. And that name just cracked me up so hard. Le Fin du Monde for a beer. I'm like, yes, the end of the world.

[01:26:44] I'm drinking the end of the world tonight. And so like that ends up in there and the conversation we're having with Richard about how filmmakers are essentially magicians and every cut that you do is a magic trick. All of that stuff starts to build in.

[01:26:58] We had been talking to Joe Dante, who is a big print collector. He collects a lot of nitrate prints. Yeah. Every time they do the film noir festival here at the Egyptian, they're mostly Dante's prints or Landis's prints. And they share this film vault underneath Hollywood.

[01:27:12] Fuck John Landis. And but so talking to Dante, he told us a crazy story about some guy had a print that he'd been looking for for like 15 years. And when he went to go get the print from the guy, the guy was like, yeah, here's the address.

[01:27:27] Dante takes this cab to the middle of the outback, essentially. And there's just a shack. And he sat there for about 10 minutes and was like, I don't need to film that badly. It's OK. Let's just go back and just laugh.

[01:27:38] No, I don't. I'm not going in the shack. It's OK. It's fine. And so all that stuff is kind of bouncing around in there. And then once John came on, it became a matter of trying to not overlap on purpose,

[01:27:50] like trying to make sure that we weren't writing Bellinger as Sutter Kane, that we weren't leaning on what he'd already done because we did want it to kind of stand on its own and have its own identity.

[01:28:00] And I think that was we were more conscious of it than he was. I think he doesn't mind those thematic echoes and things. Sure. Yeah, I mean, for those who haven't watched it, you should because it's available on Tubi and Vudu and iTunes in the places we listed.

[01:28:13] And it's a real fun hour of of Carpenter. It's about a cash trap film programmer who is hired to find this legendary lost film that seems cursed, that drives people crazy, that has some inherent evil to it that has long been thought completely lost.

[01:28:37] But there is evidence perhaps that it has to exist out there somewhere. I think also part of it was just going to film festivals. And there was a movie that I saw at one of the Fantastic Fests.

[01:28:50] And before the movie, I remember Tim League came out to introduce it and brought with him. He invited several people to come up to the front of the theater. And he gave us a shot of tequila, gave us the salt, gave us the lemon wedge.

[01:29:04] And he said, what I want you to do is snort the salt, squeeze the lemon in your eye and then throw the tequila on the ground. That's a Serbian film. Buckle up. And so I think he set the stage properly.

[01:29:16] And sure, after that movie, it was I had a conversation with somebody where I was like, what is it about us as film fans? Why is it if somebody says I have the most horrifying, amoral nightmare of a movie, it will end your sanity. And you're like, great.

[01:29:34] When can I see it and where is it playing? And what is it about film fans that makes us want to take that challenge when we're told there's a movie that's so crazy, horrible and on the bleeding edge of extreme?

[01:29:46] And and people will man, people will go see anything if they're told it's crazy. Or there's a certain type of film fan who's chasing. Yes, it's like the people who eat the like, you know, insane ghost peppers that have been bred just to destroy you.

[01:30:03] And they're like, yeah, pretty good. You know, but like their palates are so like devastated that they're like, I still I want something that's really I'm going to feel like you just you know, you're going deeper and deeper. But even look at like Salo's weird stickiness as film

[01:30:19] Twitter's perpetual favorite meme. Yeah. You know, this idea of making someone watch Salo or recommending it when someone's asking for a thing to watch with their kids or like. I feel like movies. I feel like the human centipede exists simply so that when you tell somebody

[01:30:34] what human centipede is about, they've had the whole experience. They don't ever need to see the film. The movie is fucking nothing. Oh, oh, horrible. The movie is probably not going to as true with almost all these movies, not going to live up to what you've imagined. Right.

[01:30:49] Exactly. And that was part of it as well was, you know, it would be really amazing if you actually went and saw one of those. And it really did make you insane. And sure. Yes, right. And you actually had to gouge your eyes out.

[01:31:00] It was truly evil. Right. Right. Because like I was talking with Alex Ross Perry about the Exorcist, which I guys, I grew up in Britain. I don't know if you know this about me. I'm sorry. What? I've heard rumors. I've heard rumors on the Internet.

[01:31:16] I was I was an adolescent in Britain and Alex was asking me about how Exorcist, the easiest version to buy these days if you want to buy a disc, is the version you've never seen. The version with the spider walking, the director's cut,

[01:31:33] which in my opinion is not as good. I don't like that cut that much, but has sort of weirdly become the dominant. Right. The where like Freakins put in a few extra flashes of Pazuzu. And I think it's annoying, but whatever.

[01:31:46] And I was recalling when that came out in Britain, that was the first time that movie had been available in Britain for like a long, long time, because that movie been banned in Britain, basically taken out of circulation because it became a video nasty.

[01:31:59] And so when I was a kid, I thought the Exorcist was illegal. A video nasty. You have to unpack this for Ben. You must unpack this for Ben. Ben, just like cartoon hearts popped up in his eyeballs. Huh? It's a great phrase. It really is.

[01:32:16] There was a whole kind of like moral panic, Ben, and especially in the 80s in Britain when like VHS became, you know, widely available like it, like people like little old ladies in Britain were like, you could just buy a movie called The Driller Killer.

[01:32:31] Like this is, you know, children could see this. And so lots of, you know, lots of truly, you know, extreme type movies got banned. But then a lot of like not like what you consider like fairly mainstream movies kind of got sucked into that, including The Exorcist.

[01:32:47] And but when I was a kid, I didn't get that the exorcist had been like a Titanic level hit when it came out, like that was just like a mainstream film. I thought that was some like illegal film that if you watched it,

[01:32:58] like Satan would be in your house now or whatever. That's why they banned it. They were like, this is a cursed movie, not nominated for like eight Academy Awards. Right. Yeah, exactly. Like made a billion dollars just for inflation.

[01:33:11] Like it's just funny to think about how these things stick, like you say, Griffin, like beyond what's in the movie, like their reputations just become what is important about them. Right. And so I think I did the same thing to The Exorcist. Oh, go ahead.

[01:33:25] No, no. Just like Salo is actually a good film. But I think that's why it remains sticky is because it's like one of the movies like that that you can use as a buzzword that also has inherent value, unlike something like human centipede.

[01:33:40] It's not just the shock, you know? Right. No. And I do think that like I certainly I saw The Exorcist too young. I was seven when I saw it. And I saw it theatrically. A babysitter thought, oh, the re-release is out.

[01:33:54] I will take him to see it because I would like to see it. And and at seven, I thought it was a documentary. Like I didn't know what was happening in the movie theater. It really messed me up.

[01:34:03] So that has always been on the off limit shelf for my my kids. And we just watched it during Halloween. And I think because I had built up the story of how much it messed me up and what it was, we put it on.

[01:34:15] And about 30 minutes in, one of them turned to me goes, oh, it's a movie. Right. Oh, it's a movie like it's a real movie. Oh, OK. And they loved it. But they were like, we just thought we were going to turn it on.

[01:34:29] And the devil was going to beat the shit out of us for two hours. Like that is truly what I thought The Exorcist was. Right. They they thought it was the tape from the ring. Yeah. Right. Yes, exactly. Right.

[01:34:41] It's so good. It's so good when a movie works that way. I mean, it's the best. That's what the Blair Witch Project was, you know, to so many people. It's that's a hard phenomenon to like explain to people is just like

[01:34:52] you have to understand there were like three weeks where people thought maybe it was real. And it's just like that's not that's not possible today. You know? No, it can't be replicated. Yeah, I do wish speaking to this point that we had not shown the movie

[01:35:06] in cigarette burns. It is one of the few things that I think we we really only wanted to ever kind of play in the background out of focus. And I think. But you do see snippets. Yeah, we dropped we dropped it.

[01:35:19] And I kind of wish to this day that it had just stayed out of focus in the background. I think that would have been strong. I was I will admit I was surprised that we saw any footage from it. I assumed it would be one of those things

[01:35:29] where you only watch someone watching it. Essentially. Yeah, I think it was mainly just shots. So there was something playing in the theater. So there would be the the right light. And yeah, I think it was well done, though. Like the glimpses you see, it works.

[01:35:43] But I agree with you that probably there's nothing scarier than never knowing and having it live entirely in your mind. You know, it's a weird memory that just got dislodged for me. I remember being on an airplane

[01:35:56] and whenever I would fly, I would try to get Empire magazine because American airports are one of the only places you can find it regularly. And David Empire magazine is like a film magazine based out of the UK. Yeah, it's very important to me.

[01:36:14] But I remember I guess it must have been in 2009 reading an issue of Empire magazine where they had this article. It was like a two page spread that was split into like a triptych. Right. It was like three parallel column articles

[01:36:27] that was the three of the genre masters of the 80s are all coming out of retirement and have new movies next year. And it was John Carpenter, the ward, Joe Dante, the whole and John Landis, Burke and Hare.

[01:36:41] Oh, and I remember reading this with the sense of like, holy shit. That's what all three of them coming back. And it's like fucking carpenters making low budget horror again. And Landis is working with Simon Pegg and Joe Dante is doing 3D.

[01:36:56] And I wish I liked all three of those movies. I wish I liked any of those movies, man. Bizarre how all three sort of belly flop. And then Dante is the only one of the three who's done a. We almost worked with him as well.

[01:37:07] We we actually did work with him for a year on what? We had a script called Bat Out of Hell, which was its short version of the pitch. It's a red eye flight from New York to L.A.

[01:37:20] one night and not long after takeoff, a bunch of people stand up and say, sorry, we've taken the plane, we are in control of the plane. There's six people in first class. They're vampires. We're just going to kill them. And then you guys will land in L.A.

[01:37:33] and you can arrest us and do whatever you want. But if you don't let us kill them, we're taking the plane into the fucking ground. So that's the movie. And that's cool. We had Joe for about a year and just the finances were

[01:37:44] thieves and rapscallions and just a terrible experience with them. But Joe was amazing. And I truly think if anybody put Joe in the right position, Joe is good to go. Joe's ready to make another great film. Joe is on fire still. I feel that way, too.

[01:38:02] Of those three. I mean, I really dislike burying the ex, but he is a guy who I don't doubt still has his fat and still has his heart in the game. I just I have fundamental issues with that script that I don't think anyone could have fixed.

[01:38:18] And I think he does not have nearly the resources to be able to pull off any version of that film that is even presentable. He's and he's always been the guy who had five dollars less than he needed on everything, always, forever.

[01:38:33] And I feel like it's the reason that Joe isn't considered the equal of the guys he should be the equal of because he he is. He's absolutely got the chops. Anybody that made Innerspace should have been making gigantic blockbuster hit comedy action whatever's for decades.

[01:38:50] I mean, he's one of my favorite guys of all time. I talk about him all the time on this podcast. I constantly threaten that we're going to do exceptional taste. Griffey should do. Thank you. We should. We should.

[01:38:58] I might demand my hold off is I'm waiting for him to make another movie. I'd love to tie it into another. And he could and he could. Right. Whereas The Carpenter, it feels much more iffy. Right. It's going to happen.

[01:39:08] The one I really want him to do is the the whatchamacallit. Hasn't he been threatening to do the Roger Corman movie? Yes. The man with X-ray eyes. Yes. Short sort of like like his matinee, like a homage. Right. Biopic. Yeah, that's cool. Right. That would fucking be cool.

[01:39:27] Kaleidoscope eyes. I'm sorry. That's that's what it is. That's what it is. And and his his masters of horror is great to homecoming is really fucking good. I'd love another Masters of Horror type show like on one of these streamers.

[01:39:39] I get these anthologies are hard, I guess, to sort of assemble. They're hard. They're hard to put together at the financial stage. And I don't truly understand why, because I know Masters still constantly. It's always on somewhere.

[01:39:52] And so is that there was a season three sort of for NBC. Right. And for that one, I worked with Larry Fessenden at the best. I fucking love Larry. But that was a disaster because we got hired and we're told you have to

[01:40:08] if you want your script shot for the season, you have to have it turned in before the writers strike. And we had 72 hours from when we were commenced to when we had to have our final draft turned in so that they could shoot.

[01:40:20] And we did like five drafts with Larry on the phone in that that time. But it was crazy. Like, I that was not the ideal way to work. But and I think if that if the writer's strike hadn't happened,

[01:40:32] I do feel like there was a shot at fear itself becoming the next incarnation. Well, Blumhouse has their sort of what's it called? The Into the Darker. Yeah, they do for Hulu. Here. Yeah. Right. Which I feel like they use it. Right. No.

[01:40:48] And they use us like a launching pad for like newer directors. But this feels like such an obvious time to like do this again on a streaming service with deeper pockets and sort of more production comfort. And there's another generation of guys you can bring in now.

[01:41:04] Like, I would make sure you pepper in a few of the old guys still there and want to do it. But there is a whole new generation of guys who and, you know, some of them did masters.

[01:41:12] I know Lucky McKee did an episode of Masters, and I think Lucky's amazing. But I think there's a lot of guys now who would who would really do something special if you put them in that situation with their with these guys as their peers.

[01:41:25] And I think the anthology format plays better on streaming. I think it makes more sense to people. I mean, to just go like we're doing Black Mirror, but it's with horror directors. Well, it's amazing the Tales from the Crypt that they haven't worked those rights out like.

[01:41:40] Well, we've talked about this, but it's I know those rights are there. They're just a nightmare. They're truly a nightmare. Right. I mean, as as far as we've ever solved it, it's that like

[01:41:50] you can make a show called Tales from the Crypt or you can do a show with the Crypt Keeper and you can't do both. Right, right. Makes sense. Makes perfect sense. Perfect sense. We we should do two things, guys. We need to do two things.

[01:42:03] One, we need to play the box office game for the war. Excellent. We have to. Yeah. And two, we have to do our our carpenter list. What is it? Sorry. We got a shout out how hot Reedus looks. We know we know he's good looking.

[01:42:20] He looks fucking good. I mean, read us and I really love seeing the 90s vibe, too, man. I really, really enjoyed that. The cigarette burns, especially Drew fucking ruled. Oh, thanks, man. Thanks, Norman. We got Norman at the right time. He was

[01:42:35] he was still kind of young and hadn't lived the walking dead Haggard post post. Yeah. Boondock and Blade two. Right. Well, I was going to say, right. It's like Boondock has disappeared, so he doesn't understand

[01:42:49] that that movie is going to make him a mortal in fraternity dorm room walls forever. Oh, no. He was well aware. He knew it was really. Yeah. That was one of the conversations we had because I had seen overnight at that point

[01:43:01] and we had a conversation and he goes, no, listen, man. I mean, Troy, we'll be making those forever, man. And I was like, OK, have fun with that. All right, then. Well, they made another. But also like you're going to become like the fucking Bruce

[01:43:16] Campbell of your generation. You're going to be the king of cons. Yeah. Yeah. The king. Yeah. The king. Yes. Can we before we do those two things, David, I'd love to just touch on pro-life a little bit more

[01:43:29] because we get a little bit of attention to cigarette burns. And I also need some time to compile my list because I always do everything last second. Mr. Perlman. OK, the great Ron Perlman. Well, that's that's the thing I want to talk about here.

[01:43:40] And you have that effect with with Udo here as well in the first one. But it's like guys who just immediately are able to lend so much weight and gravitas and stakes to any any genre project. Yeah. He just their face and voice alone. Oh, he's a gift.

[01:43:58] You can't ask the two guys that I've worked with who I genuinely think are like that Ron Perlman for that one and then Doug Jones in. Oh, yeah. The Larry Fenton piece, because Doug is a special effect you get

[01:44:11] before you even put makeup on Doug, you get so much value. And then Doug makes everything come to life. And I think Ron is that same way. Ron's he is he's a living special effect. Just his face alone is a special effect. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:44:24] And and he's got this great character actor soul wrapped in Lon Chaney's body. So he's got the physical exterior that is startling, whether it's meant to be menacing or whether it's meant to be sympathetic. Like he it's really remarkable how much range you get out of Perlman

[01:44:40] looking the way Perlman looks, whether it's Hellboy or this. But you can you can both of them, I think, work really well with him. Yeah, he was he was terrific on this film. And when we initially wrote it, his van that he's driving around

[01:44:55] and was supposed to it's supposed to be one of those vans that the anti-abortion activists have with all the photos and stuff on the outside where they have the terrible pictures. Sure. Oh, they're horrible.

[01:45:05] And the only reason it wasn't was John was like, I don't want to look at that shit all day now. Now it's fine. I get it. Ron will sell it. So and and I think Ron's the reason that that holds together.

[01:45:17] We were really rushed and it was a really frantic shoot. But Ron. Was it an eight day shoot? Like truly like you only had eight days, eight days. And we've got complicated effects. We have a little monster baby.

[01:45:28] We have all sorts of crazy shit that had to have a floor that had to explode. It was not a it was not an eight day shoot. That was not the way that was supposed to work. But I think Ron made it work.

[01:45:38] And the last night we were in Toronto or in Vancouver for that one, you know, the Sutton Place, the hotel that's up there, there's this one hotel that is the industry hotel. And for a long time in Vancouver, if you were shooting anything up there,

[01:45:55] you were probably staying at Sutton Place and that bar. Ron, the way Ron put it was I could sit down here and just watch my whole life go by because of all the stuff that shoots in in Vancouver.

[01:46:05] And so the last night we're in the bar and it's Ron and it's John and it's myself and we're sitting around and Bob Shea walks in. Hmm. And I guess he's in town for something else. And this is post in the mouth of madness.

[01:46:21] And so Bob sees John Carpenter, he walks over, literally puts his hand on Ron Perlman to lean down and talk to John Carpenter and tell him you should come over and sit with me and have drinks with me. And then walks back over.

[01:46:36] And he's about five feet away, and Ron Perlman goes, I don't think any of us are coming over there, you cocksucker. And then which Shay kind of looks startled. And then John just starts belly laughing and Shay stays

[01:46:47] on the other side of the room, kind of drinking over the course night. All night, Ron's telling stories about terrible new line experiences and he's telling Bob Shea stories. And then John starts telling Bob Shea stories.

[01:46:57] And it was wild energy because I being who I am, I'm like, you know what? I probably shouldn't even be at this table. I shouldn't be. I should be over there. So Bob Shea takes offense. He doesn't see my face and I'm not going to be there. Fearless.

[01:47:10] Ron Perlman doesn't care and John Carpenter doesn't care. And it was the rowdiest table I've ever been at. But this shit talking across a room at somebody just throwing footballs. Well, because now Perlman's like, I want to grind my axe so hard that sparks

[01:47:23] are like hitting Bob Shea, essentially. Right. And then the very end of the night, the only real interaction I had with Ron that whole night, you know, telling stories, whatever. But at the end of the night, finally, he's going up to the elevator.

[01:47:35] He's like, I'm going to get out of here. Finally, he's going up to the elevator and he grabs us by the arm, grabs Rebecca by one, grabs me by one, just says good words, gets in the elevator and goes, wow. Like, all right, I'll take it, man.

[01:47:49] That's a good word is good enough. The final question, does it depress you to think that you made pro-life like 15 years ago? I think one of the more sort of successful films to throw a satirical bent on like abortion panic in America.

[01:48:08] And now we're facing the full repelling of Roe v. Wade rather than things haven't gotten better since then. I honestly thought we were at the we were maybe a little late with ours. Like, oh, it's right. We missed the bell. We got this locked down.

[01:48:21] No, no, no, not really not. Nightmare we live. And it's it is really shocking to think that we are less that we are less stable in those rights than we were when we made that. It's crazy. Right, right.

[01:48:34] And that's like you're making that like 10 years after Citizen Ruth, which you also want to believe is at the peak of the bell curve. Exactly. You're like, oh, we're doing it because we know we can laugh now. It's over. We can relax now. Yeah.

[01:48:48] Now that's why let's talk about the words box office weekend. So I assume this open to number one, thirty five million dollars. What are we looking at here? Number seventy seven thousand dollars. Not great. So it's not in the top five, actually. No, it's not. OK.

[01:49:08] No. Number one is the third film in a franchise. What weekend is it? Oh, it's July. I'm sorry. July 8th, 2001, the post July 4th weekend. So yeah, number one, it's the second weekend of a big three equal. You know, is it third entry? Transformers Dark of the Moon?

[01:49:29] Sure is. Yeah. The best of the Transformers, in my opinion, maybe or the first. You and I disagree on that. But yeah. Really? I think the first is the best. I think the first is the first. It's the best of the sequels. There's the only good sequel.

[01:49:44] Really? Yes, I'd agree with that. Yeah. But yeah, Dark of the Moon. I love Dark of the Moon. I saw it in 3D. It's why the jumping sequence is really cool. And yeah, I don't know. It's probably stupid. I went to Russia for that one.

[01:49:58] You went to Russia? I saw that in Moscow. Oh, like for a junket? Yeah, they did the job. That was in the real heyday of the junkets. Right. Yeah. Those in particular, the Transformers junkets were insane. The money they spent. We did the Moscow junket for that.

[01:50:13] And then the next one we did in Hong Kong. So yeah. What a bizarre reason to go somewhere. Yes, I came to I came to Moscow and I spent three days here to watch Transformers and Linkin Park. The junket for the fifth one was in medieval England, right?

[01:50:30] Yes. Yes. They actually transported everyone back in time. Inside Merlin's cave where Grimlock lives. Sorry, David. Number two at the box office. Number two of the box office is new this week. It's a comedy, a hit comedy that gets a sequel.

[01:50:44] It's a hit comedy in 2011 that gets a sequel. Is it Horrible Bosses? That's right. Is that what you're going to guess true? Yes, it was. All right. I'll let you take the next one. No, you're doing the next one. A little tougher. Also new this week.

[01:50:58] Also a comedy, a kid's comedy, more family oriented. OK, but with a comedy star of the moment. A comic star. The moment his hands are on his hip comedy. Yep. He's playing. He he has a job. Is he the Tooth Fairy? No.

[01:51:18] Is the job the title or is that just the book? Nope. Nope. The job is the title. So it's it's a classic. This guy doing that. Mm hmm. OK. Hands on hips. Comedy star of the moment. Twenty eleven more family oriented. It is a hit.

[01:51:35] It's a mild hit. Let's see, it's it's opening to 20 and it makes 80 domestic. Yeah, not a big hit. Oh, I know what it is. I know what it is. Kevin James is zookeeper. That's right. Kevin James is. Wow. Drop the it's cleaner. It's just called Zookeeper. Oh, man.

[01:52:01] A movie I saw in theaters because the character's name is Griffin. That's the reason why. Theaters. Griff's got to look out for other griffs. Huh? How do you feel he represented your name? Not well. Also, Nick Nolte voices a gorilla who's obsessed with Applebee's.

[01:52:19] The voice cast is demented. They talk. Right. I think share plays a lion. Stallone's in it. Judd Apatow plays an elephant. Yeah. Is that the tail end of Kevin James's sort of a list career? Here comes the. Does he have a couple more? Well, I know.

[01:52:36] But like, when's that? That's the next year, I want to say. Right. So it's falling off is what I'm saying here. Yeah. Like it's sort of like, yeah, here comes the boom is 2012. Yeah. The wheels are getting wobbly right about here. Right. Right. It's diminishing returns from here.

[01:52:50] And also he goes back to Blart, you know, like he said, OK, you know, anyway, number four, the box office animated film Blart two is like his escape from L.A. Packed of Blart. I'm sorry, David. Number four. It's an animated film that you have some opinions on.

[01:53:07] Oh, boy. It's Cars 2. Yeah, it's Cars 2. Cars 2 is number four at the box office. Number five is another comedy. It's just crazy. Looking back 10 years ago, too many comedies, many of them bad. You know, people say, oh, it's well, it's global box office. It's this is that.

[01:53:25] It's also that they they oversaturated with shitty comedies. I mean, you cannot deny it. It was post Hangover. Exactly. This is two years after Hangover. So we're at like the peak of everyone being all in back in on it. And Hangover was internationally successful. That's the thing.

[01:53:42] Everyone was like, can we make these movies work overseas? And this movie, I you know, it's it is not as bad as Zookeeper. I think it's actually probably better than Horrible Bosses. It's not good. Or I don't remember it being particularly good.

[01:53:54] It's another X person has a job movie. It's a, you know, a female comedy star. It's a female comedy star. Is it it's not the heat, is it? No. But is it a McCarthy? No, no. Because Bridesmaids is this year. It's 2011. Yeah, right. OK, OK.

[01:54:16] It's a female comedian with a job. You don't think it's great. Or comedian. Oh, OK. Call her a comedian. OK. She's a comedy. She's because she'll do dramas, too. But she was a consistent comedy star. She made many hit comedy films,

[01:54:31] including a couple with her co-star in this movie. Huh. OK, so this is a reteaming. No, this is their first collaboration. This is their first. But then they do more. They do one more. They do another bad comedy together. This isn't an Aniston. It's not the proposal.

[01:54:50] It's not Aniston. She's now retired from acting. Oh, it's Cameron Diaz. Oh, OK. Cameron Diaz. And she is the bad teacher. She's a bad teacher. Some teachers are good. Not not this one. No, no. Real bad. That's another. That's like if if the podcast goes for 15 more years,

[01:55:10] you'll know we're tapped out. We're doing bad blank as a Patreon series. Yeah, the bad occupations. And that's just a, you know, one of those Segal performances where he's like, I'm going to show up and give you 10 percent of my energy and it's still going to work.

[01:55:26] But you're going to you're going to know that I'm not exactly like all in on this. You know what I mean? He's barely trying in that movie. And you're like, this guy's still charming. Like even though I could tell he doesn't want to be here.

[01:55:37] It's also one of those weird things where like for years, the thing was like Apatow wants Segal to be a leading man and no studio will let it happen. They all think he's too weird. He looks like Frankenstein's monster. They're not letting it happen.

[01:55:51] Like this is how he would describe it himself in interviews. And like he's big on How I Met Your Mother, but kind of resents being on a network sitcom and even that they won't transfer the credits over to movies.

[01:56:02] And then he finally like for getting Sarah Marshall hits. I love you, man. Hits. And then immediately he's like phoning in performances, like doing favors for Jake Hasdon is like, oh, I think I don't like this either. Yep. Yep. I mean, Gulliver's travels, bad teacher,

[01:56:19] obviously the Muppets and Five-Year Engagement. Those are his passion projects. Those are passion sex tape. Sex tape is kind of the end, right? That's and then he like disappears for like five years. Well, post that he did the end of the tour, Wallace movie.

[01:56:32] And then, right. He's basically like, yeah, only doing little Indies. Yeah, I probably could have guessed that the Muppets would end up being the passion project on the forgetting Sarah Marshall set when they shot the Dracula musical. I've never seen anybody more giddy

[01:56:45] just to have puppets anywhere in a building than he was that day. He and Bill Hader both were like, we have fucking Muppets. Look at this. Oh, my God. It was amazing. Those were actual hints and puppets. They did that.

[01:56:56] And I think that may have been the moment where he was like, I should push my luck. I should see if there is no fucking Apatow, especially not. And it's all seagulls. Well, but he's like, yeah, I'm going to make a comedy

[01:57:07] about a guy who wants to Dracula musical. I'm going to get my dick out twice. And, you know, Universal's like, OK. And then they're like, wait, it's a hit. Like, wait, what? It's also just incredible how he had this machinery

[01:57:23] that worked for a long time and only stopped when it seems like machinery. Well, hey, David, wait a second. He's got machinery. All right, David. I took I took my microphone out of the stand. Oh, I remember when I saw that movie at the Regal Union Square

[01:57:38] the second time he got naked, someone in the audience said, why keep getting his dick out? Said it out loud. When you guys eventually do Apatow, please have me on for that series and give me a decent film. I want to talk about good film next time.

[01:57:53] OK, great. So we've put you down for this is 40. So what I was going to say is I know. I just think it's like Apatow was like a franchise in and of himself. He could sort of sell anything, both by the name brand recognition,

[01:58:08] but also like their machinery of knowing, like being the first comedies to go do comic conventions and have videos go viral and put deleted scenes on the Internet and like all this sort of shit. Like they just had it so figured out.

[01:58:20] It all slowed down, like partly because of the industry moving away from comedy. But he also just decides to pivot to TV at the exact moment. And then by the time he wants to come back to movies, they don't really exist anymore.

[01:58:32] But the thing that's insane that he was able to work for like six consecutive years is I make a movie with someone who isn't a movie star yet. That movie makes them an A-list movie star. Also, the person who scores laughs in the fifth or sixth

[01:58:43] lead of the movie gets to be the lead of the next. That's the next one. Exactly. I got your eye. I got my eye on you. It was just constant cycling of like you'd watch the movie. It would mint someone to the top of the list

[01:58:55] and then tell you who the next person is going to be. Yeah, it's a remarkable machine. Well, it was remarkable that it worked as long as it did. Is that the end of the top five? That's the end of the top five. Let's do our carpenter lists.

[01:59:07] I will say that I do it. We got we got to go see Licorice Pizza. Yeah, we're seeing Licorice Pizza tonight. A humble brag. Nice. Very excited. I hope I cry. I know it's not a movie that people say makes them cry.

[01:59:19] I just want to cry at the power of movies. I'm a fucking sap. So this is maybe the hardest ranking we've ever done. I feel like the top 11, I would say that the the order could change based on the way the fucking wind is blowing.

[01:59:34] Like, I you know, there's there's a clear distinction of like tier of like perfect masterpieces, movies that I think are pretty fucking great. And then movies that are dumb or wonky in some way. But I enjoy and only like two or three movies.

[01:59:50] I don't care for that much. But even so, if the words your worst movie, you're not doing that poorly. Now, Griff, are you including someone's watching me, Elvis and Body Bags in your list? I'm not. I'm leaving off TV.

[02:00:05] So, yeah, excluding those three and the two McQueeny Swan Joints. Yeah. OK, so 17 movies, then I have 18. What am I miscounting here? I think it's 18, David. What do I miss counting? You miss, you miss something. You miss something because I wait.

[02:00:24] I'll go first if you want while you figure out what you missed. OK, ready? Here's my ranking. And once again, don't at me. The fucking changes by the second. Number one, the thing. Number two, Halloween.

[02:00:35] I almost consider putting Halloween number one just because it's such a perfect object. Right. This would be a fair argument for it. Number three in the mouth of madness. Big surprise for me. This series is how much I jammed on that fucking thing. I think it's a masterpiece.

[02:00:50] Number four, they live. Number five, Escape from New York. Number six, Big Trouble in Little China. Number seven, The Fog, a movie that people thought I didn't like from our episode. I think maybe just because you love it as much as anyone loves it.

[02:01:05] I was the defender, so you became the guy in the middle on that episode. Maybe that's why. I don't know. I think. But like, I still rank it very high. I think that movie is very good. Number eight, Starman. Number nine, Christine.

[02:01:18] Number ten, this is where I think people are getting angry at me. Prince of Darkness. I think most people now put that in their top five. I owe that movie another watch. I still think it's a top shelf thing.

[02:01:27] But the top six films for me on a different level. Then I go 11, Assault on Precinct 13. OK, so then this is a delineation point, right? Yeah. Escape from L.A. 12. Dark Star 13. Ghosts of Mars 14. Memoirs of Invisible Man 15. Then there's another delineation point. David will say I'm rude.

[02:01:54] Vampire 16. Village of the Damned 17. The Ward 18. I just know you like vampires a lot more than I do. I like it more than you. I had forgotten to put Escape from L.A. in. That's what it was. Because that was the last movie I watched, basically. Yeah. OK.

[02:02:09] Our top three is the same. The Thing, Halloween, In the Mouth of Madness is my top three. Wow. Number four, Escape from New York for me. Number five, Prince of Darkness. So I do have that a lot higher than you. Number six, They Live.

[02:02:22] Number seven, Big Trouble in Little China. Number eight, The Fog. I can't believe I put The Fog higher than you. Well, I have Prince of Darkness. I don't know. That's but that's just a five star area that we were just sitting in.

[02:02:36] And then there's three more movies that I love. Assault on Precinct 13 is number nine. Starman is number 10. Christine is number 11. Then I have Vampires at 12. Dark Star at 13. Escape from L.A. at 14. Ghosts of Mars at 15. That's all. It's still all good vibes.

[02:02:53] Yeah. And then Memoirs, Damned and The Ward at the bottom there. Right. So I extend a little more kindness to memoirs. I obviously put Vampires much lower than you do. My seven, eight and nine are the ones that I think are really kind of

[02:03:08] interchangeable in terms of order. And then Prince of Darkness is still a 10 for me. Yeah. And it's just one of those things where I can't be mad at anyone saying almost, you know, any of these sort of top 10 is their favorite.

[02:03:20] What I like. That's that makes sense to me. What is your favorite? You don't have to get. Yeah, not to put you on the spot. A favorite carpenter or is that a. Yeah, I just I as you asked, I kind of went and I looked at my list

[02:03:32] and I think for me, the top five would be Big Trouble. Number one, which I just Big Trouble is unique. That's your movie. It is the thing, the thing. Halloween. They live and Prince of Darkness for me.

[02:03:48] Yeah. And yeah, the thing is, I'm amazed at how well the thing there's a lot of movies that I try to hand down to my kids that they don't necessarily love or that don't work the same way. The thing is Toshi's favorite movie.

[02:04:02] Now we just see he's 16 and for his 16th birthday this year. We rented him an Alamo screen and let him invite his friends. And they showed the thing. And none of the other kids had seen it or even knew what it was.

[02:04:15] And so that screening sitting behind a row of 15 and 16 year olds who had no idea what was coming. Yeah. And Toshi, who was delighted at the screams and the insane and they all loved it. They had the best time with it.

[02:04:32] It played like a million bucks for them. Didn't play dated, didn't play old. They weren't bored by it. It really delivered. I find that amazing. I think that movie is still just a magic trick. It is almost flawlessly suspenseful. Yeah, yeah.

[02:04:49] I mean, that's the it's like that's my thing of like. One and two being a little interchangeable for me is that like thing is operating at a much higher level, right? Of just like his mastery as a filmmaker. But just Halloween is an object

[02:05:06] is hard to even wrap your head around, especially after it gave us that whole dissertation. And I don't know, as I've now dug into the sequels and everything, it does make you realize how much of a miracle that film is.

[02:05:20] I only like a Halloween movie in this dojo. There's a Halloween movie. It is that first film. And I don't really understand any of the rest of them in terms of the appeal, because to me, that first film is so beautifully crafted and it is such a sleek

[02:05:36] simple object of fear. Yeah, I really think, you know, when he was on his game, he is the genre defining very best. And I think those top three or four films, whatever they are for you, man, they're just inarguable. They are just unbelievable craft in every single one.

[02:05:56] I mean, he's a guy where pretty much any five people would pick as their top. You'd be like, yeah, all of those are masterpieces. Yep. Yep. You know, I was surprised that you guys didn't talk more about Richard Dysart's nose ring when you did the thing episode,

[02:06:10] because that is one of the craziest details in any of the movies that he's made. And it seems like you can only see it in 4K or if you see it in a theater

[02:06:18] like at home, you never notice the Dysart's wearing a nose ring in the entire movie. I blame this on I never saw it in theaters and the 4K disc only came out after we recorded the episode. It is just one of those crazy little details. All right.

[02:06:34] Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for having me. I cannot believe I finally got to be on blank check. Thank you, John. Long overdue. Please. Sorry, this long, but it was a perfect capper on the miniseries. Yeah. Good way to say bye to this guy.

[02:06:47] Absolutely. And hey, let's say thank you to Ben. Ben, good choice, man. Good fucking. Yeah, thanks. It was so fucking great. Wow. But glad it all. Glad it all worked out. I don't know. Ben, you've been reading for your giant book. You've been reading this book,

[02:07:09] the whole miniseries and highlighting things and putting in stick it notes and whatever. Are there any sort of like final thoughts you want to leave us with a carpenter at large? Well, I just think I'll say this thing from the book, but just anything you've

[02:07:23] you've observed. Yeah, I think this is the time where this premise of our show. It's oh, it always hits me in different ways where, you know, you're sitting down, you're watching a director like body of work start to finish.

[02:07:38] And this was the one where I really was noticing like camera work. I feel like for the first time or just like it was really clicking with me in a way. And there's just like, I don't know, I got really absorbed into just visual

[02:07:51] language and just like thinking a lot about what he was doing behind the camera. So I'll just share that. That and you know, that was like something that I started to recognize, like how clean and simple the stuff he was doing was one of the great voices, man.

[02:08:07] Yeah, he's the best. I was so glad to watch all his movies and spend time with him. Yeah, we'll miss him. I mean, it both felt good and terrible. But I guess wait, shouldn't we announce? Yes, we should. David, next. Can I tee you up for that?

[02:08:23] I think you should handle this announcement because it's kind of a David's choice. This is a filmmaker that you've personally stumped for for a while. She was on my bracket. Yeah, right. And and it for a number of reasons that I'll let you get into,

[02:08:37] it felt like this was the right time to do it. Well, she's got a new movie out her first in cheese in 12 years, although she did some TV in between. She's yeah, she's sort of a fundamental filmmaker for me,

[02:08:53] I guess, in terms of me falling in love with the movies. But she rules and we talked about her and, you know, people might quibble with her as a blank check director, but we're going to get into like she really she really got Hollywood

[02:09:06] to make some some very, very wild stuff at the height of her powers. And she's got and she's got kind of a big epic blank check. I cannot sing her name. Her name is Marshall. Oh, right. We're doing campion. Sorry, I got confused for a second there.

[02:09:21] You know, power of the dog is probably the biggest canvas she's painted on, at least in a long time. You know, like she's back. She's got this sort of powerhouse movie that's going to be. It's out right now or yes, it's out right now on Netflix,

[02:09:37] but it's going to be part of awards season. And so in March and January and February, we're going to be talking camp. They're doing an amazing screening series of hers right now at the Academy Museum, their brand new giant theater that they just built,

[02:09:51] I think, in the cut plays tomorrow. Oh, so David, I imagine that Ruffalo Dick at the Academy Museum. We saw it at the quad, you and I. But I know it was a little screen and we're so, you know, this might be this might be the first miniseries.

[02:10:06] Well, there's no question that it would be the first three years if this is true. I have to do the numbers where there's a majority of movies with male nudity in them with the penis in them, to be clear. Sure. You know that.

[02:10:18] I think I think it's maybe at least like five out of nine or something like that. That that's definitely more than the Brad Bird film. Drew, I was going to make a. Exact same. I was rushing towards it. New Zealand queen chain champion.

[02:10:34] We're going to start with two friends, her, which was sort of a, you know, kind of a TV movie. We played some film festivals and we have to do a movie called Two Friends. And to be clear, it's not the two friends. That's our competitive advantage.

[02:10:46] The movie is just called Two Friends. And then, sweetie, angel at my table, the piano, porch of a lady, holy smoke in the cup, bright star power of the dog. What a run it's going to be. But just to be clear, at the time you're listening to this

[02:10:59] because there's obviously a little bit of a gap there. We have to pay off a balance of past miniseries. So the next three episodes are going to be Paul Verhoeven's Benedetta. Yeah. Steven Spielberg's West Side Story. Yeah. And Lana Wachowski's The Matrix Resurrection. Oh, my God.

[02:11:18] Those will be the next three episodes. And then Two Friends begins in January. The Jane Campion series. My big problem with almost every movie right now is that it's not The Matrix Resurrections. I get so fucking amped every time I see that trailer

[02:11:31] and then so angry when it ends and I have to watch anything else. It's coming. It's very soon. It looks ready. So talk about a director who we thought was done. We just felt like they're done. They're burnt out. People are tired, might be tired.

[02:11:44] The fucking the siblings split up. The sisters don't want to work together anymore. Neither of them is going to make a movie ever again. And then here comes those bananas looking fucking blockbuster in so long. Yeah, going to be good anyway. But so that's the plan. Goodbye, Johnny.

[02:12:01] Thank you again, Drew. Take a second. Let's go see pizza. Yeah, I can't wait to get a slice of that licorice pizza. Look, thank you all for listening. Drew, people should watch of law on Netflix. Yes. December 6th, it will be on Netflix

[02:12:19] produced by David Fincher and David Pryor. And you can find my newsletters at Drew McQueen, dot sub stack dot com or the last 80s newsletter dot sub stack dot com, where I am reviewing every single film of the 1980s chronologically. Because I'm a guy that sounds easy.

[02:12:37] And once again, people should check out Pro Life and thank you. Rep Burns, both viewable on Tubi and Voodoo and other platforms and definitely worth your time if you've been following us on this whole Carpenter journey, although neither or the squeamish. They're both pretty fucking intense. They're gnarly.

[02:12:57] They're gnarly. They're fucking gnarly. You're a dang ass freak. I don't know if I'm allowed to give you that title or fan only. No, no, no. I will happily wear it. Thank you. Yes, you are officially a dang ass freak. My friend is a dang ass freak.

[02:13:10] Thank you. And both of those folks, thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review and subscribe. Thank you to Marie Barty for our social media. AJ McKeon and Alex Barron for our editing. Nick Laureano and JJ Birch for our research.

[02:13:26] Pat Reynolds, Joe Bowen for our artwork. Lane Montgomery, Great American Novel for a theme song. Their new album, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Online is available wherever kids listen to albums. And you can go to blankcheck. No, not no, no, no, no, no, no.

[02:13:44] You can go to a tree on dot com slash blank check. Oh. Oh, there we go. To listen to, of course, watching a trilogy of films that are even more demented than Carpenters to master of horror segments. We're, of course, talking about Tim Allen's Santa Claus trilogy,

[02:14:06] watching those over on Patreon. Got it. And your soul blankies are at that conference. I'm real nerdy shit. And go to our Shopify page for some new merch. We got some new merch coming for Christmas time. Stay tuned for that. And as we said next week, Benedetta, we're

[02:14:23] we're back with a gold member himself giving us a horny nun movie. Cannot fucking wait. The movies are back. And as always, fuck John Landis. Fuck John Landis.